Pathfinder 1E Does pathfinder strike anyone as too gamey?

pemerton · Oct 1, 2013

Ahnehnois said:
the idea that a character needs supernatural powers or their equivalents is pretty degrading to that character. A fighter compared to a warblade is much like a star athlete compared with a steroid-enhanced cheater. The latter may be able to temporarily boost his performance, which may seem great, unless you understand where it came from.

Ahnehnois said:
In the context of D&D, discretized, use-limited character abilities that enable supernatural outcomes are generally restricted to a certain type of character (spellcasters) and generally come with significant mechanical and in-world restrictions and implications. Attempts to relabel those types of mechanics in the Bo9S as being products of skill rather than supernatural power violates the norms of the game.

I don't understand where you are getting these "norms of the game" from.

In AD&D the monk has daily abiliities (eg their self-healing ability) but there is no reason to think that this is magical, as opposed to autohypnosis.

In 3E the barbarian has a daily rage ability. Sword & Fist - the first 3E expansion - had a feat that conferred a daily ability (maybe a powerful charge?). I'm pretty sure one or more rogue talents in the 3E PHB confers a daily ability (defensive roll?).

In AD&D dragons had 3x/day breathing, and in 3E they are on a recharge timer, but there is nothing to suggest that breath weapons are remotely like spells (in 3E they are magical, because SU abilities; in AD&D this is left up to GM adjudication).

I've got not doubt that you prefer that rechargeable resources be equated with in-fiction spells and the like. But to say that this is a "norm of the game" is simply to project your own preferences onto a ruleset that manifestly does not conform to them.

Ahnehnois said:
IIRC you couldn't backstab with a greatsword (but can sneak attack with one).

In Moldvay Basic a thief can use any weapon, and can most definitely backstab with a two-handed sword. In AD&D a fighter/thief can fight with a two-handed sword, and my memory is that the sword can be used to backstab, but my memory is not perfect. OSRIC - which is the only AD&D rulebook I have ready-to-hand - has an odd treatment of this. The thief can backstab "with a melee weapon" whereas the assassin can backtab "with any of the melee weapons permissible to the thief class". In AD&D an assassin can use any weapon, and I would always have assumed can backstab with any of them.

Ahnehnois said:
I would think AoE falls under the same category as resurrection/teleportation/summoning/etc., i.e. things that you can't do without magic.

Achilles doesn't seem to have much trouble dropping Trojans in droves - what is that, in mechanical terms, if not AoE? (In 4e terms, a close burst.) Likwise why can an archer not do ranged AoE attacks with volleys of arrows? (In 4e terms, an area burst.) What is the functional difference between Ice Storm - dropping many small cold stones on an area - and Volley that Blocks out the Sun - dropping many small sharp shafts on an area?

Ahnehnois said:
The problem is when F-Z are things that are not part of the concept; i.e. that a knight/soldier/archer wouldn't be able to do.

According to your position, it seems that if a player wants to play a knight who can stab the sun and make it go dark, the job of the rules is to let that happen. For me at least, the job of the rules is to prevent that from happening.

Things that 3E clerics and druids do as well as or better than fighters include melee combat and wrestling. I would think that these are part of the concept of a knight or soldier.

As for stabbing the sun to make it go dark, that sounds like a cool ability for a high level martial PC, much as Heracles was able to hold up the sky on his shoulders. (And also able to outwrestle many powerful beasts.) In other words, its not as if there is no precedent in myth or literature for non-wizards to do epically powerful things. And in D&D this is a question of level. So at about the same level that a magic-user can polymorph, a fighter should be able to wrestle a river (as Achilles fought Scamander).

brvheart said:
Give a fighter a great sword with an 18 str, power attack and cleave and things start going down much faster than that 3rd level wizard can dish out.

<snip>

And he can go that every round

In my experience, a fighter's ability to "go that every round" is heavily constrained by his/her hp total - a fighter with no hp left cannot do act, and outside of 4e a fighter does not generally have the capability to restore his/her own hp in a combat-relevant time frame.

brvheart said:
Just because some players want overpowered options does not mean that the rest of us do. Bo9S was one of the worst offenders in broken sources.

Whether or not one want to use Bo9S, I don't see how it can be categorised as "broken". How are PCs built from Bo9S more broken than druids with druid cohorts, each with a Wolf or Bear companion, and Summon Nature's Ally on tap?

billd91 said:
Then why are you complaining about the fighter if that's not what you want to play?

billd91 said:
If you don't like playing the fighter (or rogue, or monk, or bard, or whatever) as he is the options really should be obvious. Play something else.

You may be missing (some of) the point - that people want to play a warrior PC (whether inspired by Conan, or Lancelot, or Achilles, or Aragorn, or any of the dozens of other literary or mythological warrior heroes) but want that PC to be more mechanically effective within the game than they find the 3E (or even PF) fighter to be.

In [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s case, he is pegging that mechanical effectiveness to AD&D levels, where fighters, above low levels, have average to good saves and some of the best ability to take down enemies in combat. Compared to 3E, where they tend to have the worst saves and have only a mediocre ability to take down enemies in combat (given that monster hit points - which fighters target - get better whereas their saves - which MUs target - get worse).

In [MENTION=82746]HardcoreDandDGirl[/MENTION]'s case, she is nominating the Warblade as a class that occupies the same functional and archetyical niche as a fighter, but has more adequate mechancial effectiveness assuming that some other classes - like non-Persistent Metagamic clerics - are treated as a baseline for the system.

pemerton · Oct 1, 2013

Starfox said:
DnD is basically a pretty gritty game with fantastic elements pasted on in the form of magic.

I guess I've never found D&D very gritty. People don't get badly hurt. They heal their injuries rather quickly. Magic and prayer are pretty much on tap. Fighters can stand toe-to-toe with giants and dragons and not get crushed by the superior weight of their enemies. Being swallowed whole doesn't kill you. Etc.

billd91 · Oct 1, 2013

pemerton said:
Achilles doesn't seem to have much trouble dropping Trojans in droves - what is that, in mechanical terms, if not AoE? (In 4e terms, a close burst.)

Multiple attacks. Whirlwind attack. Cleave/great cleave. It doesn't have to be an area of effect at all.

pemerton said:
Likwise why can an archer not do ranged AoE attacks with volleys of arrows? (In 4e terms, an area burst.) What is the functional difference between Ice Storm - dropping many small cold stones on an area - and Volley that Blocks out the Sun - dropping many small sharp shafts on an area?

Do we really see or read about single archers doing this? Usually I see it as multiple archers...

pemerton said:
As for stabbing the sun to make it go dark, that sounds like a cool ability for a high level martial PC, much as Heracles was able to hold up the sky on his shoulders. (And also able to outwrestle many powerful beasts.) In other words, its not as if there is no precedent in myth or literature for non-wizards to do epically powerful things. And in D&D this is a question of level. So at about the same level that a magic-user can polymorph, a fighter should be able to wrestle a river (as Achilles fought Scamander).

Is there anything a bonafide god can't do? Because Heracles can do the things he does because that's what he is, not because he's a fighter. If he were a rogue or even an enchanter like Circe, you can bet he'd probably be doing the same things.
And I don't think I'd use Achilles fighting Scamander as a positive example here. My copy of the Iliad has him running from the river like a little school girl crying out for the gods to save his misbegotten hiney. And it appears to be only their intervention that saves him.

pemerton said:
You may be missing (some of) the point - that people want to play a warrior PC (whether inspired by Conan, or Lancelot, or Achilles, or Aragorn, or any of the dozens of other literary or mythological warrior heroes) but want that PC to be more mechanically effective within the game than they find the 3E (or even PF) fighter to be.

In [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s case, he is pegging that mechanical effectiveness to AD&D levels, where fighters, above low levels, have average to good saves and some of the best ability to take down enemies in combat. Compared to 3E, where they tend to have the worst saves and have only a mediocre ability to take down enemies in combat (given that monster hit points - which fighters target - get better whereas their saves - which MUs target - get worse).

In [MENTION=82746]HardcoreDandDGirl[/MENTION]'s case, she is nominating the Warblade as a class that occupies the same functional and archetyical niche as a fighter, but has more adequate mechancial effectiveness assuming that some other classes - like non-Persistent Metagamic clerics - are treated as a baseline for the system.

I don't really think I'm missing anything from most of the current discussion. HardcoreDandDGirl seems to want a character who encroaches on the wizard mojo rather than a mundane martialist no matter how effective he is. And there are a lot of people who are still fans of the fighter who think the spell casters have been dealt a better deal in the 3e family of rules than they deserved - probably in an effort to weed out "unfun" elements of the rules like easy spell interruption and too many wasted actions casting save or die spells that aren't effective - an effort that ended up going too far.

pemerton · Oct 1, 2013

billd91 said:
Multiple attacks. Whirlwind attack. Cleave/great cleave. It doesn't have to be an area of effect at all.

Whirlwind attack is an AoE: "make one melee attack at your full base attack bonus against each opponent within reach." It defines an area of effect - a circle with a radius equal to the character's reach - and then permits an attack against each opponent in that area.

billd91 said:
Is there anything a bonafide god can't do? Because Heracles can do the things he does because that's what he is, not because he's a fighter. If he were a rogue or even an enchanter like Circe, you can bet he'd probably be doing the same things.
And I don't think I'd use Achilles fighting Scamander as a positive example here. My copy of the Iliad has him running from the river like a little school girl crying out for the gods to save his misbegotten hiney. And it appears to be only their intervention that saves him.

My point is that Achilles thought it made sense to try. In other circumstances, or with a bit more mojo, he could have won. How does a 3E fighter even go about trying to wrestle a river?

As for whether or not Hercules is a fighter - on that I defer to Tom Moldvay, who instances Hercules as the prototypical fighter, and Merlin as the prototypical magic-user, in his version of Basic D&D. I have a vague memory that the 2nd ed AD&D PHB followed him on this.

billd91 said:
I don't really think I'm missing anything from most of the current discussion. HardcoreDandDGirl seems to want a character who encroaches on the wizard mojo rather than a mundane martialist no matter how effective he is.

I don't see how you get that, given that [MENTION=82746]HardcoreDandDGirl[/MENTION] is happy to play a warblade.

billd91 · Oct 1, 2013

I suppose you could interpret whirlwind attack as an area effect, but I think it's interpretable in other ways as well since it's also a multiple attack.

pemerton said:
My point is that Achilles thought it made sense to try. In other circumstances, or with a bit more mojo, he could have won. How does a 3E fighter even go about trying to wrestle a river?

Again, in my edition of the Iliad, he didn't. He was slaughtering Trojans in the river when the river chased him out. He didn't try to wrestle with it as I see it. He tried to avoid being killed by it.

pemerton said:
As for whether or not Hercules is a fighter - on that I defer to Tom Moldvay, who instances Hercules as the prototypical fighter, and Merlin as the prototypical magic-user, in his version of Basic D&D. I have a vague memory that the 2nd ed AD&D PHB followed him on this.

Of course Heracles was a fighter. But he's considerably more than that. You don't see too many of the non-divine bloodline Greek heroes matching his feats even though most of them are probably fighters as well.

pemerton said:
I don't see how you get that, given that [MENTION=82746]HardcoreDandDGirl[/MENTION] is happy to play a warblade.

Because she's also talking about playing a character who is modifying the battlefield and not wanting to play just a fighter back in post #172.

Bluenose · Oct 1, 2013

pemerton said:
I guess I've never found D&D very gritty. People don't get badly hurt. They heal their injuries rather quickly. Magic and prayer are pretty much on tap. Fighters can stand toe-to-toe with giants and dragons and not get crushed by the superior weight of their enemies. Being swallowed whole doesn't kill you. Etc.

Can't XP you, but D&D has never seemed like a "gritty" game to me. But then I was playing Traveller and Runequest in the 1970s, so I may have different criteria for gritty than other people.

billd91 said:
Do we really see or read about single archers doing this? Usually I see it as multiple archers...

Yes, though you may find it's more common in literature that isn't strictly European-influenced.

Starfox · Oct 1, 2013

Tequila Sunrise said:
This thread has been such a bizarre reading experience. Not to pick on Starfox, but I can't resist commenting:

There is practically nothing in this post that fits my experience, or that I relate to. I respect your opinion, but it's just driven home to me how fundamentally different I am from some of my fellow gamers.

It is funny how much I agree with this, when we seem to disagree so much on the details. Seems these experiences are very personal.

Hussar said:
In 2e, sure, the fighter was whacking baddies right, left and center, but the casters were getting things done outside of combat. In 3e, you can pretty easily make a caster par with the fighter in combat, while the fighter is still lagging WAY behind outside of combat.

This is far from my experience. 3E fighter always did good single-target damage, and outside of combat skills rule. Spells are so-so both in and out of combat - powerful if you got the right one, but specialized and limited in number.

HardcoreDandDGirl said:
in 2e fighters have the highest hit points, the best AC and the best damage... I used to joke that wizards were nice enough to ask you to save vs death magic, meanwhile fighters just death you.

a weapon spec fighter could hit an AC 0 on a 16 and deal 1d8+5 damage and attack 3 times in 2 rounds (we always allowed the 2 attacks in the first round but I heard some people forced 1 attack the first round)

yea and everything got worse at saving... so SOD or SOS spells got better... and wizards got more spells per day (both chart and from high int bonus) and lots of the spells that had drawbacks had those taken away...

We actually felt a need to boost 3E casters around here. 2E introduced damage caps for spells, making all but your highest spell slots utility only. 3E crippled many powerful spells .- stoneskin is perhaps the prime example. Pathfinder cut down buff/utility durations. The best edition to be a wizard (actually magic-user) was 1E.

Johnny3D3D said:
In the last 3rd Edition game in which I was a player, I was a druid and a friend of mine was playing a wizard. There were times when the other 6 players (we had a large group at the time) at the table would request that he (the wizard player) and I forgo our first turn in an encounter so they'd actually get a chance to do something.

I've had similar experiences - with a fighter in 4E.

What all this shows is that each of us have a VERY different take on all of this.

Starfox · Oct 1, 2013

pemerton said:
I guess I've never found D&D very gritty. People don't get badly hurt. They heal their injuries rather quickly. Magic and prayer are pretty much on tap. Fighters can stand toe-to-toe with giants and dragons and not get crushed by the superior weight of their enemies. Being swallowed whole doesn't kill you. Etc.

Which perhaps goes to show that you havn't played an over-the-top anime/wuxia game.

But I didn't mean gritty as in realistic, I meant gritty as in bothering with minor details. I find it a bit hard to combine a fighter being able to wrestle a river (per an example above) and still having to keep track of arrows.

Ahnehnois · Oct 1, 2013

pemerton said:
I don't understand where you are getting these "norms of the game" from.

The game.

In AD&D the monk has daily abiliities (eg their self-healing ability) but there is no reason to think that this is magical, as opposed to autohypnosis.

I don't think the monk has ever been non-magical. Vague? Sure. But always mystical.

In 3E the barbarian has a daily rage ability. Sword & Fist - the first 3E expansion - had a feat that conferred a daily ability (maybe a powerful charge?). I'm pretty sure one or more rogue talents in the 3E PHB confers a daily ability (defensive roll?).

That would be an example of the exception proving the rule. "Normal" does not mean "universal". The fact that you are only able to cite a few examples that most characters will never see in play is proof that they are somewhat abnormal.

In AD&D dragons had 3x/day breathing, and in 3E they are on a recharge timer, but there is nothing to suggest that breath weapons are remotely like spells (in 3E they are magical, because SU abilities; in AD&D this is left up to GM adjudication).

So you're suggesting that breath weapons are as natural as bashing someone over the head? I don't think so.

In Moldvay Basic a thief can use any weapon, and can most definitely backstab with a two-handed sword. In AD&D a fighter/thief can fight with a two-handed sword, and my memory is that the sword can be used to backstab, but my memory is not perfect. OSRIC - which is the only AD&D rulebook I have ready-to-hand - has an odd treatment of this. The thief can backstab "with a melee weapon" whereas the assassin can backtab "with any of the melee weapons permissible to the thief class". In AD&D an assassin can use any weapon, and I would always have assumed can backstab with any of them.

I never played a thief in 2e; my only recollection here is that Baldur's Gate wouldn't let you do it, which is not necessarily what the rulebooks for the actual game said. As I stated, I can't recall for sure.

Achilles doesn't seem to have much trouble dropping Trojans in droves - what is that, in mechanical terms, if not AoE?

Really fast attacks.

Things that 3E clerics and druids do as well as or better than fighters include melee combat and wrestling. I would think that these are part of the concept of a knight or soldier.

AFAIK, fighters are better at melee combat and wrestling. If they weren't it would be a problem.

As for stabbing the sun to make it go dark, that sounds like a cool ability for a high level martial PC, much as Heracles was able to hold up the sky on his shoulders. (And also able to outwrestle many powerful beasts.) In other words, its not as if there is no precedent in myth or literature for non-wizards to do epically powerful things. And in D&D this is a question of level. So at about the same level that a magic-user can polymorph, a fighter should be able to wrestle a river (as Achilles fought Scamander).

The Hercules example is misleading; the reason that he can do these things is that he has divine blood, as is quite clear in all the mythology. I would expect a D&D character with god status to be able to do them as well. In D&D terms, Heracles might have a few fighter levels (or might be solely represented by advancing as a monster), but that is hardly the source of his power.

Speaking more broadly, I see no reason to equate polymorphing and wrestling a river. I'm not aware of any particular ability that a martial character is 'owed' in response to polymorph. And for someone who seems so interested in citing fringe examples as precedent, I don't see you coming up with any examples through the editions of how martial characters ever had epic powers of this nature (particularly not at the levels we're talking about; Polymorph is a 4th level spell).

GMforPowergamers · Oct 1, 2013

Ahnehnois said:
AFAIK, fighters are better at melee combat and wrestling. If they weren't it would be a problem.

Ding ding ding we have a winner... THAT IS ONE OF THE MAIN, and maybe the BIGGEST problems. if you want to play the best melee class play a druid...

The Hercules example is misleading; the reason that he can do these things is that he has divine blood, as is quite clear in all the mythology. I would expect a D&D character with god status to be able to do them as well. In D&D terms, Heracles might have a few fighter levels (or might be solely represented by advancing as a monster), but that is hardly the source of his power.

A divine rank 0 fighter at 24th level can not do half of what he is famus for...

Speaking more broadly, I see no reason to equate polymorphing and wrestling a river. I'm not aware of any particular ability that a martial character is 'owed' in response to polymorph. And for someone who seems so interested in citing fringe examples as precedent, I don't see you coming up with any examples through the editions of how martial characters ever had epic powers of this nature (particularly not at the levels we're talking about; Polymorph is a 4th level spell).

Fighters have never in the history of the game had even at 19th level an ability with as much versatility or power as a 4th level wizard spell that the wizard got at 7th level...

Starfox said:
This is far from my experience. 3E fighter always did good single-target damage, and outside of combat skills rule. Spells are so-so both in and out of combat - powerful if you got the right one, but specialized and limited in number.

that is a great example of the first 6 levels of the game... Fighters are tough, and casters have burst effectiveness... but by level 7 you don't run out of spells, and fighters have 2 crumbey saves....

We actually felt a need to boost 3E casters around here. 2E introduced damage caps for spells, making all but your highest spell slots utility only. 3E crippled many powerful spells

maybe... but it went way too far...

.- stoneskin is perhaps the prime example.

yea...no more ping that's one off my stone skin...

Pathfinder cut down buff/utility durations.

and left save or dies, and powerful multi versitle spells intact... I even said it was an ok start

I've had similar experiences - with a fighter in 4E.

me and you have similar experience (although to be fair it was a multi attacking ranger not a fighter) in 4e martial characters were brought up to the same level as casters... that is a good thing. I could make any class (ok like 9 out of 10 classes) and make a character that ranged from ok, through good to overpowered all the way to broken.

billd91 said:
Because she's also talking about playing a character who is modifying the battlefield and not wanting to play just a fighter back in post #172.

yea and she also said the 2e fighter and the warblade where what she was looking for. Don't you dare say she wants a wizard of all of us she has been the most clair in wanting to play a weapon based martial character that can do amazing things... if you don't want that class to be fighter she is even willing to play a class with a different name as long as she gets to be a weapon using martial class that can do cool and amazing things...

billd91 said:
I don't really think I'm missing anything from most of the current discussion. HardcoreDandDGirl seems to want a character who encroaches on the wizard mojo rather than a mundane martialist no matter how effective he is. And there are a lot of people who are still fans of the fighter who think the spell casters have been dealt a better deal in the 3e family of rules than they deserved - probably in an effort to weed out "unfun" elements of the rules like easy spell interruption and too many wasted actions casting save or die spells that aren't effective - an effort that ended up going too far.

isn't that part of her argument right there??? Again She has even in other threads claimed 2e was the best edtion... so please tell me what part of WANTS TO PLAY A MARTIAL WEAPON BASED CLASS THAT DOES AMAZING THINGS is wrong?