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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wakedown" data-source="post: 7639680" data-attributes="member: 15901">Ah, I think this reads into the current state of Paizo too much.   Paizo's lost a ton of their talented creative personnel who helped them reach their peak - Wes Schneider, James Sutter, Sean K Reynolds, Crystal Frasier, etc.   Outside of Jacobs and Bulmahn they lost most of their folks who had over a decade of GM experience.   Even their old guard AP contributors have mostly moved on besides an occasional Pett AP chapter.  The general sentiment I've picked up is folks like Stevens and Mona are more managerial than ever so there's really a lot of the day to day being thought upon now by fairly new folks to the industry.   A lot of their own content is penned by GMs who often just have "1 GM star" in their own organized play campaign, and if I recall correctly Seifter was more of a player than a GM, and ultimately was mostly a single-system gamer so didn't have a broad background in "other games".So I suspect it's really just mostly junior personnel in the halls while the senior folks are tackling financial matters (like deciding to use GameOn for the Kingmaker campaign in order to generate immediate cash to use for covering Core 2e production costs as a management level decision).From what I understand they were at the 2e crossroads long prior to Starfinder and kind of passively aggressively kicking the can down the road to make a decision as far as they could.  Why worry today about what you could hopefully worry about tomorrow?Thus 2e is really as by-product of a fatigued Bulhman, a 4e contributing Bonner, McFarland and power-gaming build-aficionado Seifter who probably had little framework outside of "get something out in the next year" since the financials show we passed the point of criticality.   2e isn't really a by-product of a veteran team with ungodly behind-the-screen-GM experience but a lot of contributors from the post-MMO era who got their wings in the Pathfinder 1E character builds era and I honestly don't think have gone much outside of that room.PF2e really seems this way from a rules perspective.  Internally they probably don't see the 3-action system as much different than today's standard/move/swift system.   They probably feel like the Dedication system is better for curtailing the cheese from build dips that led to abusing the power curve in 1E PFS play (which thus then requires gating feats behind classes).  One point I come back to often is how they left a spell like Endure Elements in the system (whereas 5e removed it).  Or how they kept Barkskin in as an always useful get-DR spell (whereas 5e it's just get up to AC17 if you aren't already).   There's still all the fiddly bits to "win" the metagame system by ensuring you have the right scrolls or spells.   In that sense, PF2E swims close to PF1E in that folks who like to make builds get their candy, and folks who like the IWIN button in solving things that used to be real story points in 1E-2E (and returned to the realm of possibility in 5E).TLDR: I think they just postponed 2E too long, lost all their experienced people, and the folks there really don't see 2E as that much different than 1E and grudgingly it's a compromise-design-by-committee system primarily oriented at plugging some organized play abuse points.</blockquote>

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