Pathfinder 1E Does pathfinder strike anyone as too gamey?

[Argyle King]

I think the general idea is that you use a bag of holding, or Heward's Haversack, or some other self-crafted item that enables you to easily call desired objects to hand while making sure those objects don't count against your encumbrance.

(Also, encumbrance is a tedious rule to have to bring to bear to rein a character in.)

I don't mind that sort of game but would never use D&D for it.

This is why 3E has never really appealed to me. It's a mixture of gonzo (eg hit points) and gritty (eg skill rules) that strikes me as inherently unstable for a wide range of approaches. And recurring threads like these don't dissuade me from that impression!

Encumbrance may very well be tedious, but ignoring it is still a factor in giving a class which is already viewed as being too powerful (wizard) an advantage over a class which is already viewed as not good enough. There are a lot of other issues which often get ignored in 3rd too. That doesn't change that many of more mundane classes don't keep pace, but it does make the problem worse than it already is.

At this point in time, I don't believe I'd use D&D for a gritty game either. However, I wasn't aware of what other options had to offer during times when I was trying to do so and became frustrated. I think there are times when D&D presents itself as something it isn't. As a matter of fact, I've said in a few threads elsewhere that I believe one of the biggest problems 4E faced was that what the game actually was in play didn't match up very well with how it was advertised and marketed.

To the last point, I can only say that I agree. I think 3rd does a great job of showcasing a wide variety of playstyles, but it doesn't always do a good job of supporting them. Sometimes it can fake it well enough that you don't notice if you're not familiar with what other options are available. Still, I do believe 3rd introduced a lot of concepts which were good for the brand overall, and I do still believe it help to push a lot of design ideals forward. At the time, I loved it, but I don't believe I could ever go back to it more than to just dabble in it. Now days, I mostly use my 3rd Edition library as source material from which to convert things to the games I play now. The fluff is still useful.

 

[Starfox]

Personally, I prefer a more gritty and grounded fantasy experience. [...] I do believe there are people who want a style that is closer to what I like, but are trying to use editions of D&D (or possibly other games) which are closer to the other end of the spectrum.

It is a bit fun that I could quote this almost word for word, but with the directly opposed meaning - that people can use DnD for a wuxia game but that I'd recommend a game that is more over-the-top as I find DnD too gritty for that. ^^

Perhaps this goes to show that DnD is both in the middle and pretty flexible, after all.

 

[Argyle King]

It is a bit fun that I could quote this almost word for word, but with the directly opposed meaning - that people can use DnD for a wuxia game but that I'd recommend one that is more over-the-top as I find DnD too gritty for that. ^^

Perhaps this goes to show that DnD is both in the middle and pretty flexible, after all.

It may just be that we have different expectations for what those terms mean to us.

For me, I find 4th Edition in particular to be great for a style of fantasy which is pretty over the top; "mythic fantasy" if you will. I've also said in the past that I feel 4E would be a really good frame to build a supers game around.

Even though I view some aspects of 3rd being more grounded, I'd still find some of the basic ideas behind D&D (such as level, HP, magic items being all over the place, and etc) to be opposed to what I'd want out of a more 'gritty' experience. In the case of 3rd, I'd also argue that it tries to do both styles at the same time, but ends up contradicting itself too much to do either really all that well. That's not to say I feel it's a poor game. If it wasn't for 3rd, I'd have probably never played D&D. That being said, I don't think it's ever something I could go back to after seeing what is available from other systems.

For me, if I want gritty, I can break out my GURPS books and have all of the flexibility of D&D 3rd (and Pathfinder) without any of the problems I have with 3rd or things like the d20 or D&D style HP. As a bonus, since it's a toolkit game, I can still do all those other things (supers, mythic fantasy, sci-fi) too if I'd really like to.

For all of the faults I find with 4th (and there are many,) one thing I can't fault the game for is for having what I feel is a more coherent mechanical vision. I might not always like that vision, and I might even believe it's vision from a mechanical stance contradicts the fluff of the game, but it has one. After spending time with it, it's pretty clear what to expect from playing the game.

I think one of the most ironic things about D&D to me is that it is influenced by Tolkien, yet I can't imagine myself ever using D&D to try to run something similar to Lord of The Rings and feeling satisfied with the outcome. Likewise, it seems to me that R. Howard had some amount of influence on the game, and I don't think I could ever see myself running something in the world of either Conan or Kull with the stock D&D rules. Other people might, and I in no way disparage their ability or desire to do so. All I can say is that I don't believe it would work for me well enough to feel satisfied with the results. I think D&D has evolved into something that is a genre of its own, and there are a lot of D&Disms which don't make sense anywhere outside of the context of D&D.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

Unless you're trying to tell me that Paizo removed all of the much ballyhooed disparity between casters and fighters... and somehow, I don't think that's really what you're trying to say.

Actually, that's precisely what I'm saying. Paizo at least made a serious attempt at removing the disparity.

It's nice to see someone actually admit that the disparity exists.

 

[Bluenose]

Hey, I'd go for that. But any rational approach to this topic requires eliminating/replacing hit points, and introducing a so-called "death spiral" for the victim. Some people really dislike that stuff. I'm not one of those people. If you want to ask why D&D doesn't let you decapitate someone with a sword or parry or stun, etc., you'll have to ask someone other than me.

All of that stuff falls under general combat mechanics rather than specific class abilities, but there's every reason to make a martial character very good at doing those things if the system describes those things in the first place.

Except of course D&D does have those effects. And they're explicitly magical, either through spells or items, and the people who you want to be best at them quite obviously aren't.

I think the highest level druid I played was around level 8 or so. He had a respectable animal companion, but it certainly was no substitute for whatever martial characters we had. Nor were his wild shape forms good enough to use for combat purposes. I spent a lot of spells buffing my crocodile.

Buff yourself, your companion automatically gets the same buff.

But not a fair analogy. If any mortal man could cast spells, they wouldn't be very magical. Any player can choose a spellcaster, but the classes are always written with in-game barriers to access (training, bloodlines, divine patrons, etc.).

That depends on how you're defining magic. Consider Glorantha, where magic is far more common than any D&D setting (and also typically quite minor), but which still manages to make magic seem remarkable. Compared to the ultra-formulaic magic of D&D, I'd suggest it's actually more like magic rather than a form of reliable technology.

DnD is a hp game. There are some abilities that bypasses hp as a defense (save or die, some combat maneuvers, sneak attack to a degree) and these have always been problematic. The fighter is the class built most around the hp mechanic - both dealing and taking hp very well. Other classes have to "cheat" and use workarounds because they don't have the fighters very good base numbers. If we give fighters ways to cheat too, we have to reduce those base numbers, and all classes become more or less the same.

Does the explicit appeal to balance that you're making work both ways, so that the Fighter gets to "cheat" when it comes to their involvement in things that the Wizard is better at? As for "Some" abilities that bypass hit points, then you're defining as problematic a pretty high percentage of spells and magic items. But not people, because apparently they're forced into playing the hit point game without their magic SFX. Despite the rather obvious ways they could be allowed to play with it, without having to have "magical powers" or do things that the game doesn't support.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Except of course D&D does have those effects. And they're explicitly magical, either through spells or items, and the people who you want to be best at them quite obviously aren't.

True. And adding in a warblade or some other fighter with spells does not address that at all. The actual fighter still doesn't have that. Again, truly addressing that issue requires implementing the effects in the basic combat rules, not buried in the ability text of some class.

Buff yourself, your companion automatically gets the same buff.

Yes, but assuming you're spending actual rounds of combat casting those spells (or subsequent healing spells, or any other spells), you don't have much time to do anything else. Also, wild shape forms generally don't have enough combat ability to be worth the risk of wading into melee, buffs or no.

 

[Argyle King]

True. And adding in a warblade or some other fighter with spells does not address that at all. The actual fighter still doesn't have that. Again, truly addressing that issue requires implementing the effects in the basic combat rules, not buried in the ability text of some class.

Yes, but assuming you're spending actual rounds of combat casting those spells (or subsequent healing spells, or any other spells), you don't have much time to do anything else. Also, wild shape forms generally don't have enough combat ability to be worth the risk of wading into melee, buffs or no.

I may be mistaken, but I remember many of the elemental forms being pretty awesome during melee.

 

[Starfox]

Startling to think this discussion s going in circles, repeating the same things, so I try and restrict my replies to instances when I feel I can say new things. Still, this was a pretty good post, so I'll try and reply, even if I do feel I am repeating myself here.

Except of course D&D does have those effects. And they're explicitly magical, either through spells or items, and the people who you want to be best at them quite obviously aren't. [...] (Does) the Fighter gets to "cheat" when it comes to their involvement in things that the Wizard is better at? As for "Some" abilities that bypass hit points, then you're defining as problematic a pretty high percentage of spells and magic items. But not people, because apparently they're forced into playing the hit point game without their magic SFX. Despite the rather obvious ways they could be allowed to play with it, without having to have "magical powers" or do things that the game doesn't support.

Gary Gygax and the tabletop generation he comes from saw fighters as using the regular combat system, and the other classes as having other means of doing similar (but still different) things. This is like having the knight and the rook do different things in chess - gamey, yes, but this is how they saw things. The result is known as Dungeons & Dragons. In a way the whole class system in Dungeons & Dragons is gamey - but it also mimics a large swath of fantasy fiction, so gamey and emulationist* merges here.

As I tried to explain, "cheating" and "using the regular hp damage system" are two different solutions to the same problem. So the whole point of being a fighter is to not "cheat". But as I said earlier, I am not adverse to an alternate fighting class that "cheats" instead of does damage. But that is not a DnD fighter. If it is a Bo9S character is a matter of taste. It can be a 1E assassin, with it's assassination table, which was never adequately described but which could be read to be something like the RQ resistance table, and success means the target dies. You may also want to look at a rogue AT I made for pathfinder which does this kind of thing the Daredevil. But note that a daredevil is significantly worse than a rogue at doing hp damage.

Also as I noted earlier, the Pathfinder fighter really does have a much bigger bag of tricks. The changes to combat maneuvers in Pathfinder is not obvious just reading the rules, you have to try them, but they really add a LOT of versatility to combat feats, and thus to fighters, who are the kings of combat feats.

Edit: Also note that the share spells animal companion ability has changed in pathfinder. As has the polymorph abilities. Read close, and the druid has been hit quite hard by the nerf bat - in a good way. The "best" druid no longer dumps Str and Dex, ups Con and Wis, and goes to town as a bear.

* Consciously avoiding Forge terms here, as people confuse common English and Forge terms. So, gamey is not gamist, and emulationist is not simulationist, tough there are certain similarities. In fact I feel "gamey" is a brilliant term to describe boardgame-isms and tabletop-isms in ROPGs without nessecarily using the challenge or "step on up" of Forge gamism. Becasue what I meant with "gamism" before I read Forge is very close to what I feel "gamey" means here. This was one of the reasons I joined this thread.

 

[Ahnehnois]

They are natural to the dragon. They certainly don't resemble spell-casting. In AD&D, and in 3E, the game draws a marked distinction between a dragon's breath weapon and a dragon's spellcasting.

Not as big as the distinction between its breath weapon and its physical attacks.

I don't see any reason why this should be so. Exclusivity and magic have no particular connection - for instance, most mortals can't run 4 minute miles, nor run 10s 100m, but the ability to do so isn't magical.

Yes, but almost any mortal can run a mile. The basic task is hardly exclusive. Just like any mortal can pick a lock, or bash someone over the head. I'm not aware of any mortal task equivalent in scope to casting a spell that has any meaningful exclusivity.

In Runequest all PCs can use magic, but one thing I've never seen said about RQ is that it's magic is non-magical.

So it's possible to design a world with different expectations? Okay.

My understanding is the same as that of [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] - that a druid, by polymorphing into a bear or something similar and getting stat and grapple buffs, is a better wrestler than a fighter.

That understanding, however, is inaccurate with regards to most fighters and druids. If you, for example, customize the druid for this purpose and compare it with a generic NPC fighter in the DMG, it might be true. Two characters equally well designed with equal resources? Not true.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I may be mistaken, but I remember many of the elemental forms being pretty awesome during melee.

They've got some advantages (crit immunity for one), but they aren't that great really. Also, this was 3e I'm talking about, and the 3e druid doesn't get elemental forms until level 16, at which time his BAB and hp and feats and equipment are enough behind a fighter that using the elemental forms for melee is not a great tactic.

I don't know if it plays out differently in PF, where modestly sized elemental forms are available much earlier and polymorph rules work differently.