MichaelSomething
Legend
If there aren't skill feats for legendary level shop keeps, I'll be sorely disappointed...
Is Pathfinder 2 Paizo's 4E?
If there aren't skill feats for legendary level shop keeps, I'll be sorely disappointed...
The issue is framing it, in advance, as a scenario with win conditions. That can very easily butt up against the notion of establishing a story through play as opposed to playing through a pre-established story.
I can't ask you to prove a negative, so what would you consider "support?"[/quote]A serious account of someone who turned up to play Burning Wheel, played through something like DL or similar, and didn't notice.
That is, an actual account of someone playing a game which expects and is built around narrative practices, and who used that system to (i) deliver their pre-packaged plot and (ii) didn't have the players notice that their engagement with the game's expected systems and approach made no difference to (i).
I've never seen it done in real life. The GM's exercise of control over story elements and story developments is almost always (and almost always painfully) obvious.
No.
If you look at the THAC0 chart, it's essentially +1 per level, though. If 5e took it from 4e then 4e took it from 3e, 2e, 1e, etc.
Maybe 4e changed the rate at which bonuses grew, but it also expanded the level count. I'd say 5e's contribution was the notion that if it constrained the numbers then content remained viable longer. In contrast, PF2 seems more like 4e in that the numbers are allowed to range higher, though 4e and PF2 realized it was desirable to keep PCs numbers closer together.
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No - that's not what I'm saying. The THAC0 chart for fighters and other "fighting man" types was +1 per level. Not for everyone else though.
Every edition prior to 4e had combat bonus progressions that varied by class. Prior to 2e "To Hit AC" tables varied by class - different classes used different tables. In 2e these tables were codified such that the "Warrior" types improved their THAC0 by 1 every level, rogue types every 2 levels, priest types every 3 levels and wizard types every 4 levels. 3e changed these to Base Attack Bonus progressions and were warrior types at +1 per level, spellcaster types at +1/2 levels, and cleric and rogue progressions as +3/4 levels. But embedded in all of these editions was the idea that mathematically the different classes should have their hit progression with weapons change at different rates as they leveled up.
4e threw that out the window and said "everyone levels up their hit bonuses as +1/2 levels period the end" and then relied on other things to make fighter types better at using weapons than spellcasters. Because the innovation in 4e was to realize that these bonuses actually didn't matter - what mattered was finding a way to make it so that the wizard didn't want to pick up a sword and to give the fighter something else that made them better with a weapon and armor than everyone else.
5e kept 4e's version of attack progression, it didn't revert back to prior editions' vision of how progression scales. It changed it to roughly "everyone levels up their hit bonus at +1/4 levels" instead of "+1/2 levels" so the spread of levels 1-20 in 5e has similar attack bonuses to the spread of levels 1-10 in 4e, but other than scaling progression is the same. The bonus isn't what makes a fighter type better at fighting with weapons than a caster type in 5e. If my wizard picks up a weapon she's proficient with and stabs someone with it, she's using the same "proficiency bonus" that a fighter of the same level uses. And yet nobody has a problem with that anymore because that bonus is almost unimportant when it comes to why the fighter is better with weapons than a non-fighter. The proficiency bonus has gone from the single thing that leveling up a fighter was important for to almost an afterthought - a thing that's in the game because people expect it to be there, but the progression on it is so slow that it's almost meaningless over the course of a campaign. Just like it was for 4e for the most part, except via a different mechanism - in 4e the "+1/2 level" bonus increase was unimportant because the game was supposed to be scaled to the capabilities of the PCs through direct DM intervention - the monsters were increasing in a very precise mathematical measure of difficulty as the proficiency bonus increased, so it all washed out. In 5e, the bonus increases over such a narrow band and AC scales across the same narrow band that it achieves pretty much the same effect - the bonus is nearly meaningless so long as the DM is dishing out "appropriate" threats to the party. Where "appropriate" is scaled much more according to how many hit points a monster has and how much damage it dishes out than the attack or defense bonuses.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Win conditions have to be in advance?
So, only substituting a /system/ would count? That seems extreme.
That seems doable via clever "illusionism" (though maybe not quite the Forge sense thereof).
Crap, double-negatives. No, it's not supposed to be about that, or no, it's not not supposed to be about that so it actually is about that, or yes, it's not supposed to be about that... ?
All very true.
Is PF going the same way as 5e, or is it keeping anything like BAB, Ranks, &c?
Ah, I get you now. Thanks for the clarification.
I didn't play 4e beyond the first year and remember very little about it. I've only played 5e now for 3 sessions, about 10 hours, so I wasn't able to see the pattern you were identifying.
I would say that the appeal of the 5e +1/4 approach, to me, isn't so much that the characters differentiate themselves in different ways. The value to me is that the compressed math keeps the monsters I like viable. A fast-moving mathematical "level treadmill" is actually unappealing to me as both a player and a DM, so I'd probably like a 4e +1/2 over PF2's +1/1.
I don't mind characters progressing at slightly different rates -- that actually still works when the overall mathematical range remains compressed. This is partly why 1e/2e worked -- the exponential XP scale meant characters rarely got above 11th -- and why DMs who capped D&D 3x and PF1 games at levels like 9.
Manbearcat
Legend
This is where these conversations get so unwieldy.
I mean...how is this question even conceived?
OF COURSE THEY DO.
If the point of play is (a) competitive integrity and (b) autonomy and expression of agency in decision points (and it is in this case; Gamism)...well, in any_activity where these things are the apex play priority, the legitimacy of (a) and (b) utterly depends upon win/loss condition being overt/player-facing/telegraphed.
Otherwise, you either outright have Calvinball...or the looming specter of Calvinball (which, in action, is basically the same in terms of participant skepticism about a and b above).
Calvinball is the antithesis of (a) and (b)...they cannot coexist.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I can see how that could've been clearer. Scenarios of the kind I'm talking about, in the kind of game pemerton's talking about, might have their 'framing' done in play, rather than in advance (by the DM, between sessions), so the win condition might be defined in play.
I can see how it could read as the win condition going undefined /until met/, which'd make it hard (but not impossible, assuming there's any way to influence what said win condition becomes) to "play to win."
Oh, we totally get Calvinball from some systems, at some tables. ;P
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When I looked at the playtest last summer an attack was attribute modifier + level + proficiency bonus. Looking at the example of character creation that they posted on their blog last week it looks like this is still the case (except that I thought proficiency bonus was -1/+0/+1/+2/+3 for untrained/trained/expert/master/legendary and now it looks like its +0/+2/+4/+6/+8). So kind of both?
Honestly I'm surprised they kept the big numbers that scale with raw level when they are also keeping in proficiency bonuses. It would seem like you could get by with one or the other.
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