Pathfinder 1E So what do you think is wrong with Pathfinder? Post your problems and we will fix it.

[Wicht]

magic items, especially weapons, don't feel magic. a slight bonus to your hit and maybe a minor damage effect doesn't really make it feel "magic" then again, i grew up with the mythological stories of Excalibur, Mjölnir & Caladbolg.

I don't have time tonight to address everything you said, but this one is fairly easy. Give your magical weapons each a story and some ability beyond the normal array. Here is a small PDF to give you some ideas.

 

[Ahnehnois]

1. Complexity. Game requires to much effort to run. I will play it, not very keen on DMing it.

I remember when Monte Cook was still on 5e and they were talking about some systematized way by which low-level character abilities would be "forgotten" or replaced as part of advancement so they didn't just keep getting more and more complex with level. Seems like that idea kind of disappeared, but I think it would be nice to take the same concept to 3.X, particular in PF given the higher rate of feat accrual and lower rate of dead levels.

 

[Campbell]

I don't think there is anything particular wrong with Pathfinder. Much like 3e before it, it is a game that does not gel very well with my play preferences. It does a very good job at doing what it means to and is pretty consistent with its underlying design ethos.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

...You know that before the advent of refrigeration, salt was used as a preservative as well as a flavor-enhancer, right? I mean, salt was a lot rarer before the industrial world started manufacturing it, so it might still fall under your 'difficult to find' category, but...well, just wondering at your choice of 'doesn't have everyday uses.'

I just worded that badly. I meant that salt has everyday uses, and would be one of the more easily obtainable ones (versus some of the rarer components). Salt isn't usually that rare in fantasy campaigns, at least the ones I have run or played in (since they aren't a real reflection of medieval or ancient Europe).

Anyhow, making material components difficult to find might create a hassle for casters, but any caster is just one feat away from solving 99% of that problem. Heck, sorcerers get it for free!

That's true...if you allow that particular feat.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

Now, I'm also presuming that the PC Wealth by Level entries

That table is part of what's broken in Pathfinder. In any given game my players have as much wealth as they have earned, found, begged, borrowed, or stolen since the campaign began, minus whatever they have spent. Some are broke, some are wealthy, most fall somewhere in-between. I have never consulted a table for anything related to that, nor will I ever do so.

 

[Wicht]

That table is part of what's broken in Pathfinder. In any given game my players have as much wealth as they have earned, found, begged, borrowed, or stolen since the campaign began, minus whatever they have spent. Some are broke, some are wealthy, most fall somewhere in-between. I have never consulted a table for anything related to that, nor will I ever do so.

That's not anything broken. The table is a guideline only. I rarely pay attention to it during a campaign, but its very useful for designing an adventure, or creating a group of PCs who are not 1st level.

It also allows you to have a certain gauge to compare to how well your characters are above or below average in material assets so as to better predict the toughness of given situations re: CR.

But the fact that any given campaign will be above or below it merely speaks to the variety of choices and consequences available in an RPG, which is, I think, one of the appeals of RPGs as compared to other gaming endeavors.

Anyway, consider it an average only, useful for comparison and analysis, rather than a straight-jacket when DMing, and don't worry if your characters are too poor or too rich, but recognize the effect this will have on their ability to perform against certain challenges.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I am yet to hear an answer to may of the "problems" brought up here...

1) unbalanced progression. This is a big catch all of problems, weather you believe in lfqw or not, there is something here you must admit. It is possible to have 2 groups of PCs that are the same level going into the same dungeon, and be vastly different power levels. If group 1 is a power gamed wizard a pretty powered druid, a decent made gunslinger, and a multi classed power gamed twink, and group 2 is a fighter a rogue, a ranger and a paliden you could watch group 1 take less damage in the entire dungeon then group 2 takes in the first fight.... not so bad in different tables, but very bad when mixed.

1a) I still want to hear an argument for why wizards and clerics, a commonly held high powered set of classes needed to be given MORE class features, I'm pretty sure you could have cut there power and still left them 2 of the best classes in the game, but they chose to up them instead...

2) Legacy issues. Now you can argue that he unbalanced progression is a legacy issue in and of it self, but this goes a bit deeper then that, and it really needed it's own bullet point. Trying to keep pathfinder backwards compatible enough, left it full of issues that people had there own house rules for, that now need readdressing. It is the most surprising flaw I found back in 2010... It is so close to being 3e that it has a lot of the flaws, but different enough that my fixes needed to be reworked...

3) Abstract meta features. Love it or Hate it, pathfinder classes are just as full of gamest parts as 4e was. I laugh when people tell me that the 4e fighter come and get it is worse then an alchemist that can only use potions on himself, or a gunslinger that would fit right next to any class in 4e. One of the strong points of 3e (or so I was told) was how simiulationist it was, but it seams half of the new classes they made where gamest... witch confuses the whole system.

4) Splat book compatibility (AKA the money grab) remember how in bullet 2 I said they had changed enough to remove house rules, they also made changes to everyclass... and most feats. So any class race or feat from a non open source from wotc needs to be reworked to fit pathfinder... now to some that means it is just a new edition, but since it was sold atleast at first as a continuation, it annoys me that I have a few $100 worth of books that dont' work out of the box... Example: Warlock is one of my favorite classes but I have never met a PF GM that will let me play one. Bo9S was my favorite book from 3.5, followed closely by the second complete arcane, but both need to be tossed out in PF...

 

[Wicht]

Okay, since oxybe asked nicely, lets look at some of his problems...

the disparity of scope between full casters and everyone else is highly jarring. for the most part you're either a sword-swinger (or slightly glorified version thereof) or you're telling reality to sit down while the adults are talking.

magic doesn't really have a limit or any real concept beyond some superficial elements and how it's cast. stuff is often either extremely mundane or magic and magic seems to be capable of doing anything and everything with a little tinkering.

I'm going to combine these two together because they seem part and parcel of the same complaint... magic is magical...



yes...

Okay...

Alright, I confess I'm not really sure what the complaint is here. Of course magic is magical and able to accomplish non-mundane things.

Now, if the question is whether or not non-magic users can perform on-par with magic users, I would postulate (and have often in the past) that they can. In their own way, the fighter and rogue (two of my favorite classes) shine brightly. While granted that the high-fantasy tropes expect that the rogue is going to eventually get some sort of nifty magical gear that allows them to shadow-walk, and the fighter is going to get Exbladius Magnificus, the sword above all other swords, these classes rely on not using spells to accomplish their goals and the satisfaction in playing them should come from their cleverness and strength. If the wizards are outshining these classes, I would suspect there is a DM problem somewhere that needs addressed. (and if this is the case, and if you are willing to be open-minded, then we can address some of the things that might be causing this)

Now, if the complaint is that you want a world in which there is not a lot of magic, then you need to make some serious changes to the class options you give to your players, change the setting, and learn how to run a grittier style game (which can be done).

classes on a conceptual level. some, like the wizard, are supposed to encompass a wide variety of character archetypes while others, like the barbarian and monk, are pretty obvious in what they're going for.

Again... yeah... I'm not sure I see the problem. The monk and the barbarian encompass less stereotypes (they are in fact stereotypes in and of themselves) than the more generic classes. Why does this bother you? The classes are tools which you use to build the character you want and if a certain class does not work for what you want, use another one. If a certain class works for someone else, more power to them. They are just options and, generally speaking, more options doesn't seem a bad thing to me.

feats are a mess, conceptually and in practice. they cover a wide array of things from simple skill ups, making certain assumed normal techniques useable or opening entire new uses of existing resources.

As with classes, use the ones that appeal to the need you have at the moment. Ignore the others. If you have feats that work for you, then those are the ones you need at the moment. Why should every feat be exactly on par with every other feat when their purpose is to serve as a set of options with which to focus and customize characters? The feat that focuses on skills is useful if you are a skill monkey and a feat that focuses on combat is useful to optimizing fighters. This seems more of a feature than a bug.

Now if you have a complaint about a specific feat, that might be more useful. But understanding the purpose of feats, it makes sense that they would cover a wide variety of options.

skills are too granular and most characters don't get enough points to be seen as skillful. it also takes a while before you get your skills up high enough to be successful with a good consistency.

This is not a problem in my games. But, if you are finding your characters to be skill deficient there are some things you can do to alleviate this. Firstly, don't use intelligence as a dump stat. Never play a character with a lower than 14 intelligence if you want more skills. (You can also consider playing more humans of course). Also talk with your DM about exchanging a class feature for 2 more skill points per level at character creation. Generally speaking, you can get rid of any one feat like class feature for 2 skill points/level. So for a fighter, for instance, you could offer to lose your heavy armor proficiency, or with a wizard, drop Scribe Scroll.

As for skills getting high faster, there's a feat for that. I must admit that if I have a character I want to be good at something, even at 1st level, its generally not a problem to have a +10 bonus to that one skill right out of the gate (4 from class, 3-4 from Ability, 2-3 from Feat, and even another +1 from traits if you want).

Now, as for the complaint that not every character is skillful. Why should they be?

If every character can cast spells, and every character has the exact same feats doing the exact same things, and every character is equally good at skills, it seems to me that the variety of meaningful character choices is going to be pretty small.

weapons as a whole are pretty boring, with them basically just being a venue for dX worth of damage. the weapons are, for the most part, a slight variation of damage dice, damage type and weight in any given category.

magic items, especially weapons, don't feel magic. a slight bonus to your hit and maybe a minor damage effect doesn't really make it feel "magic" then again, i grew up with the mythological stories of Excalibur, Mjölnir & Caladbolg.

The complaint that weapons are boring is a strange one to me. A weapon is a weapon like a hammer is a hammer and a 50 foot length of rope is a 50 ft length of rope. If you want less boring weapons, there is nothing for it, but for the DM to do more work to make each weapon unique visually, story-wise, and in impact in-game. Personally, this seems like a lot of unnecessary work for me, at least to do it for every weapon; I think it should be done for some weapons.

If you want your character to have a weapon with more personality right from the beginning, take an exotic weapon.

Or, if you want characters to possess weapons with story, then the DM has to give it a story. There is no shortcut here. The weapon should be written up with a description, a certain amount of history should be given to it, and it should have a name. The name is really what makes a weapon special. A soldiers gun is just a gun until he names it. And then its a companion. The same is true of swords, knifes, etc.

 

[Ahnehnois]

1) unbalanced progression. This is a big catch all of problems, weather you believe in lfqw or not, there is something here you must admit. It is possible to have 2 groups of PCs that are the same level going into the same dungeon, and be vastly different power levels.

Of course it is. If that were not possible the game would be a pretty fundamental failure. Level isn't a measure of how powerful a character is relative to other characters or external challenges, it's a measure of how good he is within his field of expertise.

Of course, there are problems relating to the unbalanced progression of various spine numbers (it's a problem that saves and skills and attacks advance at different rates, it's a problem that AC doesn't increase with level, sometimes the actual numbers being dispensed are not good enough or two good).

1a) I still want to hear an argument for why wizards and clerics, a commonly held high powered set of classes needed to be given MORE class features, I'm pretty sure you could have cut there power and still left them 2 of the best classes in the game, but they chose to up them instead...

To encourage people to stick with the base class for 20 levels, rather than going to a (sometimes more powerful) prestige class. Of course, given the changes to some of the more abusable spells, one could argue their overall power was reduced. There are a variety of perfectly good ways of altering the magic system as a whole if one wants to do that.

2) Legacy issues. Now you can argue that he unbalanced progression is a legacy issue in and of it self, but this goes a bit deeper then that, and it really needed it's own bullet point. Trying to keep pathfinder backwards compatible enough, left it full of issues that people had there own house rules for, that now need readdressing. It is the most surprising flaw I found back in 2010... It is so close to being 3e that it has a lot of the flaws, but different enough that my fixes needed to be reworked...

Well, that's true. That's not really fixable as long as backwards compatibility is a goal. For example, changing those spine issues by adding in a level-based defense or a medium saves or standardizing the rate of advancement of all d20-based checks or making them all optional skills...okay, those things are great but the compatibility is gone.

3) Abstract meta features. Love it or Hate it, pathfinder classes are just as full of gamest parts as 4e was. I laugh when people tell me that the 4e fighter come and get it is worse then an alchemist that can only use potions on himself, or a gunslinger that would fit right next to any class in 4e. One of the strong points of 3e (or so I was told) was how simiulationist it was, but it seams half of the new classes they made where gamest... witch confuses the whole system.

I don't understand what the problem is with the witch, but it's true that a lot of PF's additions have taken the wrong direction. To me, the alchemist sounds cool but will never really work, and the gunslinger doesn't even sound cool. In terms of fixes for those, I don't know that there is any fix other than getting rid of them. With the barbarian, it's a question of how to rewrite it so the only resource involved is genuine fatigue and so the player of a berserk rager is not paging through the books for use-activated powers. That's doable.

4) Splat book compatibility (AKA the money grab) remember how in bullet 2 I said they had changed enough to remove house rules, they also made changes to everyclass... and most feats. So any class race or feat from a non open source from wotc needs to be reworked to fit pathfinder... now to some that means it is just a new edition, but since it was sold atleast at first as a continuation, it annoys me that I have a few $100 worth of books that dont' work out of the box... Example: Warlock is one of my favorite classes but I have never met a PF GM that will let me play one. Bo9S was my favorite book from 3.5, followed closely by the second complete arcane, but both need to be tossed out in PF...

I don't think a PF warlock is out of the question. Someone just needs to rewrite it. Of course, there's copyright issues, but if you can't copyright mechanics, I don't see why someone couldn't legally write and disseminate a new character based on all at-will magic with fiendish connections.

Me, when I rewrote the warlock, I added in a bunch of new drawbacks, and a lot more level-based progression of eldritch blast and invocations to bring it up to the PF power level.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Of course it is. If that were not possible the game would be a pretty fundamental failure. Level isn't a measure of how powerful a character is relative to other characters or external challenges, it's a measure of how good he is within his field of expertise.

Of course, there are problems relating to the unbalanced progression of various spine numbers (it's a problem that saves and skills and attacks advance at different rates, it's a problem that AC doesn't increase with level, sometimes the actual numbers being dispensed are not good enough or two good).

I disagree, the game is a failure (maybe a bit too hard a term but one you used) if level isn't a measure of power. Yes I want Character A and Character B to play different, but when that difference is Monster A of the same level is a cake walk for CHaracter A and a life or death struggle for character B, and Character C can't even hope to hurt it... well that makes the game hard. not even in game but out of game.

[sblock=3.5 example] I was playing in a 3.5 game years ago and there where 9 PCs, three of us had leadership and we had 3 regular NPCs with us most of the time (although 2 of them were non combatants in every meaning of the word) so we were traveling 15 people at a time... one character was a rogue X/dagger master Y he could throw so much damage it wasn't even funny, including a hombrew variant on psy strike (expend focus to add Xd6 damage) from his 'elemental monk' training. But his AC was Dex only... so like 15 or 16 we also had a wizard with a similar AC (I think 16 or 17 with mage armor) but we had a paliden with a thirty something and most of us were in the mid to high 20's... if a monster missed the knife fighter on anything but a 1 they could not hit the paliden, if they had a chance to hit the paliden then the knife fighter was auto hit... this drove the DM nuts [/sblock]

To encourage people to stick with the base class for 20 levels, rather than going to a (sometimes more powerful) prestige class. Of course, given the changes to some of the more abusable spells, one could argue their overall power was reduced. There are a variety of perfectly good ways of altering the magic system as a whole if one wants to do that.

I will not argue small points spell by spell, but yes some abusive onse where fixed and others left (I can not find a ryme or reason) but the problem with giving the wizards more features meant that now anything that uped a less powerful or versatile (or like the figher both) was trying to hit a moving target. if they wanted to stop prestige class shanagans then address that don't just boost the most powerful class...

Well, that's true. That's not really fixable as long as backwards compatibility is a goal. For example, changing those spine issues by adding in a level-based defense or a medium saves or standardizing the rate of advancement of all d20-based checks or making them all optional skills...okay, those things are great but the compatibility is gone.

yea again serving two masters didn't go well for them... backwards compatable and fix major issues... but (IMO) wotc did it right, you have to start from scratch and fix the issues (now WotC did introduce whole new issues, but they fixed those old ones)

I don't understand what the problem is with the witch, but it's true that a lot of PF's additions have taken the wrong direction. To me, the alchemist sounds cool but will never really work, and the gunslinger doesn't even sound cool. In terms of fixes for those, I don't know that there is any fix other than getting rid of them. With the barbarian, it's a question of how to rewrite it so the only resource involved is genuine fatigue and so the player of a berserk rager is not paging through the books for use-activated powers. That's doable.

Honestly the Alchomist should be my favorite class, but it is full of BS non explanations... like I make a cure extract and hand it to my friend, but he can't drink it... or I;m in a dungeon and have enough stuff to make X bombs but no more... unless I sleep for the night then my magic bomb fairy brings me more supplies...

I don't think a PF warlock is out of the question. Someone just needs to rewrite it. Of course, there's copyright issues, but if you can't copyright mechanics, I don't see why someone couldn't legally write and disseminate a new character based on all at-will magic with fiendish connections.

the first 2 pathfinder DMs I had just out right said no to making new classes or converting, after that I found some that would let me but they always annoyed me... one told me that to make warlock 'pathfinder' he would only give it X number of eldritch blasts per day...

Me, when I rewrote the warlock, I added in a bunch of new drawbacks, and a lot more level-based progression of eldritch blast and invocations to bring it up to the PF power level.

that sounds cool