Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder BETA - Some Sizzle, Not Much Steak

[Darrin Drader]

On an unrelated note, is there a concise statement anywhere from Paizo about what they were looking to achieve with PF? Especially at the start of the playtest process?

Yes, and I quote:

When work first began on the Pathfinder RPG, I set down
a number of principles to guide me. Since this game is based
on the 3.5 rules set, I wanted to make sure that it stayed true to
the original vision of the game. When taking a look at these
rules, please keep the following guidelines in mind as they
might help you understand the changes that were made.

Improve the Game: The 3.5 rules set is excellent, but it
has its f laws. Over the past few years, a number of common
problems have seemed to crop up again and again, problems
that delay the game or cause no end of arguments (grapple
and polymorph, for example). I wanted the Pathfinder RPG to
clean up these rules by streamlining in places and adding
options in others. You can still grapple in the Pathfinder
RPG, but it is no longer the huge headache that it was. I
also worked to even out some of the choices. A number of
3.5 skills are far less valuable than others, making them
suboptimal choices. In my experience, few rogues took
Forgery, but Spot was an incredibly common choice. These
rules work to balance some of these options. So while you
might still take Perception over Linguistics, the latter is
now a far more useful choice than it was before.

Add Options: Just before design began, a friend of mine
asked me why no one ever seemed to take rogue beyond 2nd
level or fighter beyond 4th level. This got me thinking. Far
too many of the basic classes lose their luster after just a few
levels, leading most players to take a host of other classes
or a number of prestige classes. While this option is still
available, I wanted to give every class a reason to be followed
up through 20th level. To this end, I have tried to add options
to the game whenever possible. This principle goes beyond
class powers, as well. From sundering to magic items, there
are now more options and choices to make than ever before,
each one opening up whole new avenues of character and
adventure design.

Compatibility: Of all the goals I set out with when
designing this game, compatibility ranked near the top.
I wanted to make sure that any rules we changed were
adaptable to the extensive body of work that exists for the
3.5 rules set. In addition to being compatible, I wanted to
ensure that any conversion work would be minimal. In
most cases, this meant adding to existing rules, instead
of subtracting from them. So, while we changed the
way turning undead works, we did not remove turning
undead from the game. We added options to the fighter
without removing any of them. This design philosophy
doesn’t always hold true, however. Some skills were
combined and a few disappeared altogether (goodbye,
Use Rope). Whenever I broke this rule, it was because the
other guidelines took precedence.

What’s Next?
That’s simple. Play. Incorporate these rules into your existing
campaign or start up a whole new campaign using these rules
to inf luence your decisions. We want to know what works
and what needs more work, and we can’t think of a better way
to do that than getting thousands of gamers to help.
Your feedback and playtest reports will be used to help
tune these rules. Your experiences will help guide the design
from this point forward. Over the next year, we will
be running a host of focused playtest periods, looking at
individual parts of the rules. You will be able to find information
on these playtest periods on our website (paizo.
com), where you will also be able to download a free pdf
of these rules, and occasional rules updates. With your
help, we will release the finished version of the Pathfinder
RPG in August 2009. At that point, all Pathfinder products,
including Pathfinder, the Pathfinder Companion, the
Pathfinder Modules, and Pathfinder Chronicles supplements
will convert to these rules. For more information on this
process, including how to get involved and where to submit
feedback, see the Playtesting chapter at the end of
this document.

Once again, thank you for your continued interest in the
Pathfinder RPG.

We look forward to hearing from you.
Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

 

[blindrage]

Just hope all the folks how have vaild issues with the beta will post some their points to Pazio one way or another. This is a beta and they are going to hard at work on this baby for the next 8+ months. And to one person's issues how the game falls apart after lvl six for skilll or for gming after 10, they are looking at that and going to try to address that issues. It was pointed at the the Q&A on Friday evening.

 

[Sunderstone]

Rage and Ki points: thumbs down, we need LESS bookkeeping, not more.

Failure to fix multiclassing progression for casters. Failure to address wizard, cleric and druid superiority vs. other base classes.

Failure to address skill scaling, as others have detailed.

Changes to working subsystems (cleave, etc.) for the sake of change, invalidating existing 3.5 material and requiring new rote memorization of rules. Again, this slows down play.

My group likes Rage and Ki points, as do I. I dont consider it any more bookkeeping than a wizard or other spellcaster with a spell list, or a psionicist with Psi points. If a player is a caster/manifester and can keep track just fine, why not another player with a Barbarian or Monk?

Multiclassing also works just fine for us, and caster superiority was never unbalanced to us to begin with. Casters are weak at low levels while martial classes could do more. Then the situation changes later on as casters command stronger magic. It makes sense to us, as these much stronger magics can only be used X/times per day. This has been debated to death, so Ill stop here with this.

Skills work just fine for us, and folding some skills quite frankly was needed imho (ymmv).

Change for the sake of change? Isnt that the basis of 4E? Debateable, no?


btw, Im not a charter PF subscriber, I have 2 subscriptions and will be adding a third soon. I also, like you, now own everything pathfinder/gamemastery that was published.

I dont think Pathfinder is "clunky or incorrectly fixing anything". I will be implementing alot of the changes into my game as they are improvements to me. When the final is released Ill be using most if not all of it. I dont see it as a deviation from 3.5 like some others claim it to be. ymmv.

 

[jensun]

If a player is a caster/manifester and can keep track just fine, why not another player with a Barbarian or Monk?

Perhaps because one of the reasons people will often play those classes is so that they dont have to do a load of book keeping.

 

[Sunderstone]

Perhaps because one of the reasons people will often play those classes is so that they dont have to do a load of book keeping.

So people play these classes because they might be lazy? I was under the impression that people played these types because they found them interesting.

A pool of points is not a "load of bookkeeping". Its about the same as subtracting arrows from a quiver during play. If this is a load of bookkeeping , maybe those people are better off at boardgames like Risk, or Sorry! etc.

 

[Stormtower]

<partial snip>

Skills work just fine for us, and folding some skills quite frankly was needed imho (ymmv).

Change for the sake of change? Isnt that the basis of 4E? Debateable, no?

btw, Im not a charter PF subscriber, I have 2 subscriptions and will be adding a third soon. I also, like you, now own everything pathfinder/gamemastery that was published.

I dont think Pathfinder is "clunky or incorrectly fixing anything". I will be implementing alot of the changes into my game as they are improvements to me. When the final is released Ill be using most if not all of it. I dont see it as a deviation from 3.5 like some others claim it to be. ymmv.

Agree with your assessment of skill folding; that was a much needed change and makes skill points matter more. However, skills vs. magic can still be problematic at some tables (table culture matters here; caster players who want to hog the spotlight will typically outshine and outstrip skill monkeys in my experience).

Regarding "change for the sake of change:" Let's not make this an edition war. 4E is a new edition of the game with a completely revised approach to resource management and many other core mechanical assumptions. I am not talking in detail about 4E in this thread; it's for Pathfinder-related discussion and I will attempt to stay on topic. I don't mean this to sound jerkish, but that one comment of yours was just edition war baiting.

Specifically, my previous post was addressing the changes to functional subsystems such as particular feats within the same edition (my example was Cleave, which has functioned as intended throughout my experiences running and playing 3.X). My point was, if we are to maintain maximum backwards compatibility with PFRPG (which was, for me, the main draw of PF... my huge 3.X library does not get mothballed, but instead gets a new lease on life), then the devs should IMO be concentrating on fixing the truly broken stuff and not the functional stuff. Cleave, IMO, was perfectly functional. As you said in your post, YMMV. If you like the new Cleave and other changes to non-broken 3.X stuff, and don't mind making space in your brain to memorize and utilize the new rules, then more power to you... you're off to the races.

Incidentally, I'm glad you are such a strong supporter of Paizo and I hope that disagreements about the direction of the PFRPG rules set does not fragment the community that has sprung up around their products.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Perhaps because one of the reasons people will often play those classes is so that they dont have to do a load of book keeping.

When a barbarian rages, his Con and Strength temporarily go up by 4, his Will save goes up by 2 and his AC goes down by 2. The systems affected by the temporary change in Strength and Con are not insignificant and require a bunch of book keeping. The only thing rage points do is allow the player greater control over the number of times the barbarian rages and it gives him some new actions he can take during a rage. How is this adding a load of book keeping to a class that already required a load of book keeping?

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Many of the complaints I'm seeing here are coming from those that dislike 3e and, in essence, complain that "Pathfinder is going to fail because it's not what I want!"

...Uh, you aren't the target audience.

Could someone clue me in why it's horrifying and taboo to criticize 4e, yet Pathfinder is being beaten with rods and stones here?

 

[Darrin Drader]

Could someone clue me in why it's horrifying and taboo to criticize 4e, yet Pathfinder is being beaten with rods and stones here?

Regional bias.

 

[Vael]

Improve the Game: The 3.5 rules set is excellent, but it has its flaws. Over the past few years, a number of common problems have seemed to crop up again and again, problems that delay the game or cause no end of arguments (grapple and polymorph, for example). I wanted the Pathfinder RPG to clean up these rules by streamlining in places and adding options in others. You can still grapple in the Pathfinder RPG, but it is no longer the huge headache that it was. I
also worked to even out some of the choices. A number of 3.5 skills are far less valuable than others, making them suboptimal choices. In my experience, few rogues took Forgery, but Spot was an incredibly common choice. These rules work to balance some of these options. So while you
might still take Perception over Linguistics, the latter is now a far more useful choice than it was before.

This is what I'd like to see expanded. Because it's clear that my problems with 3.5 have not really been touched by Pathfinder. Problems like:

- Slow high level play, math breakdown
- Caster Dominance / Class balance in general
- High DM Prep time
- Multiclassing (specifically spellcasters, but this is an unknown as there are no multiclassing rules yet)

So, yes I noticed the three examples given, grapple, Polymorph and skills have been changed, but I'd like to see how big issues like these were overlooked in favour of "fixing" cleave. Were they not considered issues or did they get trumped in the name of "Backwards compatibility"?

I'm just curious what were the priorities, because a lot of Pathfinder seems like Paizo is more concerned with the colour of the car than fixing the transmission.