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Pathfinder changes things, but not necessarily for the better. The "free" nature of it means there isn't really such a thing as splatbooks, third party aside, so when you make a character there are a few lumps you have to trawl through. (Oh, by the way, there are fairly fixed "builds" to make your character viable, feat-wise, and most of those feats (Which you get about ten at most) are bad/traps) It also doesn't fix the caster supremacy problem and, apparently, actually makes it worse. I can't go full sperg and say why, though. Guess you could also whine that some dudes took an old game and touched up on it in one or two places and ran off to the bank.
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Sep 27, 2015 00:39
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Raenir Salazar posted:ithilid mindflayer That sounds redundant.
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Sep 27, 2015 01:55
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Gamerofthegame posted:Pathfinder changes things, but not necessarily for the better. The "free" nature of it means there isn't really such a thing as splatbooks, third party aside, so when you make a character there are a few lumps you have to trawl through. (Oh, by the way, there are fairly fixed "builds" to make your character viable, feat-wise, and most of those feats (Which you get about ten at most) are bad/traps) It also doesn't fix the caster supremacy problem and, apparently, actually makes it worse. I can't go full sperg and say why, though. Almost all of PF's problems are problems 3.5 had too. Like, the feat thing you mentioned? In 3.5 you get a feat at level 1, one at 3, then one at every three levels after that, rather than every two, and 3.5e classes tend to be far more thrifty with bonus feats. Similarly, "effective" builds tend to be rather limited, and a lot of its feats aren't worth taking either. Especially since a lot of PF's feats are just 3.5e feats with some slight changes (like all the feats that give you a bonus to skills improving as you level, rather than just being a flat +2 forever). Basically, in general, if PF has a problem, it's a problem it got from 3.5e. (Generally; a few changes weren't improvements.) However, it fixed some of 3.5e's other problems, or at least tried to make them less bad (see, again, the skill feats, and getting more feats overall). I could see disliking both easily, and liking PF better than 3.5e, but holding PF as the worse for things 3.5e does too, and even worse than PF does, doesn't make sense to me.
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Sep 27, 2015 03:19
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Roland Jones posted:Almost all of PF's problems are problems 3.5 had too. Like, the feat thing you mentioned? In 3.5 you get a feat at level 1, one at 3, then one at every three levels after that, rather than every two, and 3.5e classes tend to be far more thrifty with bonus feats. Similarly, "effective" builds tend to be rather limited, and a lot of its feats aren't worth taking either. Especially since a lot of PF's feats are just 3.5e feats with some slight changes (like all the feats that give you a bonus to skills improving as you level, rather than just being a flat +2 forever). I think the problem is that you get both more feats, and they're in a huge giant lump on a webpage. I know my eyes just glaze over looking at that feat page every time I need a PF character. At least you can say 3.5's are thematically divided up in splatbooks, so you can look to one page or inspiration instead of a giant heavy load. That said, yeah, in most respects Pathfinder is a pretty decent 3.75.
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Sep 27, 2015 03:25
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The Bee posted:I think the problem is that you get both more feats, and they're in a huge giant lump on a webpage. I know my eyes just glaze over looking at that feat page every time I need a PF character. At least you can say 3.5's are thematically divided up in splatbooks, so you can look to one page or inspiration instead of a giant heavy load.
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Sep 27, 2015 03:28
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All of the PF content being available on a bunch of different sites for free fixes my biggest issue with 3.5, where if you wanted to make a gimmick build or use something that sounded cool you had to either buy a bunch of books or  them
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Sep 27, 2015 03:33
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Roland Jones posted:Almost all of PF's problems are problems 3.5 had too. Like, the feat thing you mentioned? In 3.5 you get a feat at level 1, one at 3, then one at every three levels after that, rather than every two, and 3.5e classes tend to be far more thrifty with bonus feats. Similarly, "effective" builds tend to be rather limited, and a lot of its feats aren't worth taking either. Especially since a lot of PF's feats are just 3.5e feats with some slight changes (like all the feats that give you a bonus to skills improving as you level, rather than just being a flat +2 forever). No they aren't. There are a ton more nitpicky spergy things I could go into, but I won't. Basically 3.5 had some great splatbooks at the end of its life that did a lot of cool poo poo (Tome of Battle, Magic of Incarnum, Dungeonscape and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head) that really learned from a lot of early 3.5 mistakes and brought in a lot of cool poo poo with regards to feats and class design that lead to things that were interesting to play. And also gave people not playing Wizards, Clerics, Sorcerers and Druids fun poo poo. Pathfinder basically jettisoned all that game design and went right back to PHB 1 style feats, managed to make some of the worst classes in the original PHB even worse and carried on their hilariously bad design ethos to their new classes. Where Summoners can create eldritch monstrosities that can attack 20+ times per turn trivially by level 7 while Cavaliers get the amazing ability to add 7 points of damage against one enemy three times a day at the same level  They also really hosed over Bards for no real reason which still completely baffles me. While simultaneously buffing the everloving poo poo out of Sorcerers. Which speaks again to the basic idea they have no idea what to 'fix' in 3.5. Zore fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Sep 27, 2015 |
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Sep 27, 2015 04:16
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Zore posted:No they aren't.
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Sep 27, 2015 04:21
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Rygar201 posted:4E was lame. If I wanted to play Diablo, I'd play Diablo.  
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Sep 27, 2015 04:30
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While he's right about Paizo not doing anything with the actually good 3.5 material, a 3rd party - Dreamscarred Press - has been porting over the cool poo poo, and doing a pretty good job of it. Tome of Battle and Magic of Incarnum in particular were really cool, but needed some more passes at the editors desk and more support after the initial release, so it's cool to see them get more love. They've also done Psionics, and iirc one of the guys working on it also worked on the Expanded Psionics Handbook in 3.5. They were also doing the Truenamer but it seems like the guy writing it disappeared. 
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Sep 27, 2015 04:37
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Nihilarian posted:
Some tasks are simply not meant for mortals.
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Sep 27, 2015 05:02
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It was really neat too, he was basing it on Nahuatl. I really hope Dreamscarred pulls a Paizo when pathfinder goes the way of the dinosaur, they've got a good head for game design.
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Sep 27, 2015 06:39
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Its pretty cool Dreamscarred Press is still around and successful. I remember when it was just guys spit-balling on the DnD Psionics sub-forum.
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Sep 27, 2015 06:50
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Classtoise posted:Some tasks are simply not meant for mortals. As someone whose only experience with DnD is Neverwinter Nights and Order of the Stick, what's the deal with truenamers?
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Sep 27, 2015 08:52
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Zore posted:No they aren't. Oh, yeah, I agree with some of these things; I think part of the issue here is that, if I'm not mistaken, PF is based on OGL/SRD/whatever (I don't know the precise legal stuff) 3.5e material, which doesn't include things like ToB, and partially because, from what I hear, they wanted to court people who wanted more 3.5e when 4e was becoming a thing. Also SKR was involved with them early and he's awful at game design; one of the feats he wrote did literally nothing. But, yeah, while I still think PF is a general improvement (this is a relatively minor example of multiple but the changes to the skill system are nice; gently caress cross-class skills), I admittedly overlooked some of the class issues (I mentally lumped it into the "caster supremacy's still a problem, just like in 3.5e", which is still true even if the exact differences between the casters versus martials in the systems is different), and have plenty of complaints of my own, like how much Paizo seems to despise the Gunslinger for some reason. As I said before, I'm not a PF fan, really, I'm just stuck with it because with the group of people I play with off of SA it's about the only system that gets played if I don't run something myself. Thankfully PoW and PoW:E are awesome and help mitigate the badness of PF, and the usual GM tries to give everyone stuff to do and keep everyone engaged at least. Classtoise posted:Some tasks are simply not meant for mortals. There's a goon-written Truenamer for PF that's pretty cool, at least. I haven't played with it much so I'm not sure how great it is in practice, but it has a lot of cool abilities and at the least doesn't seem to be fundamentally broken the way the 3.5e one is. Eox posted:It was really neat too, he was basing it on Nahuatl. I really hope Dreamscarred pulls a Paizo when pathfinder goes the way of the dinosaur, they've got a good head for game design. Yeah, they're great. Though watching the development of PoW:E, they seem to be taking some of the feedback from the grognardy crowd seriously (what happened to the Aurora Soul archetype for Mystics makes me sad), which is unfortunate. Still, I'd love to see an RPG written from the ground up by them, rather than their attempts to make a bad system good. Not that I don't appreciate those; as I said, they're a major reason I'm alright with my group playing mainly PF. mmkay posted:As someone whose only experience with DnD is Neverwinter Nights and Order of the Stick, what's the deal with truenamers? I could go into detail, but to sum up, the difficulty of doing anything goes up for them as they level, rather than down, and they have some other nasty limitations on their abilities that basically keep them nigh-useless without ridiculous optimization (or starting at 20, because a certain ability they can get then is broken in the "good" way, rather than the way the rest of the class is). It's unfortunate, because the base idea (caster who uses skills rather than spell slots) and the fluff (altering reality by speaking the true names of creation) are both interesting. Or, at least, the latter is really cool, while the former was at least worth a shot, and deserves a better execution than the 3.5e version. Roland Jones fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Sep 27, 2015 |
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Sep 27, 2015 09:17
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mmkay posted:As someone whose only experience with DnD is Neverwinter Nights and Order of the Stick, what's the deal with truenamers? The gimmick of Truenamers was their special class-specific skill, Truespeak. Anytime a Truenamer wanted to do something they needed to make a Truespeak check (which is really dumb design already). Truespeak checks were typically 15 + 2 * Enemy Challenge Rating. This means that the Truespeak check increases by 2 every level, but you can only increase the ranking of your Truespeak skill by one every level up. Eventually, things get to the point where it's nearly impossible for a Truenamer to do anything because they can't make the required skill checks.
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Sep 27, 2015 09:31
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Zore posted:There are a ton more nitpicky spergy things I could go into, but I won't. "I have a strong, contrary opinion about this but I refuse to justify it!"
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Sep 27, 2015 13:18
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Funny story, True Namers are the only primary casting class (afair) that actually go up a tier in Epic 6, since they cap out at "hard but not impossible with decent optimization".
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Sep 27, 2015 13:47
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I've read that Truenamers were designed with custom magic items in mind: it's possible to make magic items that grant up to +20 to a skill, which would cover the difference on a 20th level character. If they had actually just included Truespeaking Amulet +5, +10, +15, and +20, the class would at least have been functional, if a weird design.
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Sep 27, 2015 15:42
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Colonial Air Force posted:"I have a strong, contrary opinion about this but I refuse to justify it!" Nah, it's pretty well known that Pathfinder has even worse design than 3rd edition, e.g. Prone Shooter feat.
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Sep 27, 2015 17:57
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Don't bother with custom magic items, or Item Familiars or the Paragnostic Assembly (the two other significant boosts to Truename checks). If your DM is cool enough to let you have them (none of them are guaranteed to be available), he's probably cool enough to just rework the DCs so that it's possible to use your basic class features without mild optimization. The Truenamer has really cool flavor but in practice it's a middling caster with more fiddly bits and caveats, and that requires you to spend resources in order to reach base competency. EDIT: I should probably say "two of the other three significant boosts to Truename checks", as Tome of Magic had a magic item that gives you a +10 enhancement bonus to Truename checks. Don't remember how much the cost compares to the custom competence item, but you probably want it anyway since the DM is more likely to allow it. Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Sep 27, 2015 |
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Sep 27, 2015 18:49
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Gee, I sure hope Rich is a Tier 1. 
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Sep 28, 2015 04:21
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Nihilarian posted:The Truenamer has really cool flavor but in practice it's a middling caster with more fiddly bits and caveats, and that requires you to spend resources in order to reach base competency. The fluff from Tome of Magic for Truenamer was alright but I fell absolutely in love with the fluff for the Binder (despite the uninspired name). Making pacts and sharing your body with eldritch horrors or powerful souls torn from time, hell yea. The power balance was just right too, as versatile as bards but more useful without going overboard into wizard/cleric type fuckery. It was really easy to come up with and design your own Vestiges too. Sigh, now i gotta crack open Tome of Magic and take a lil trip down nostalgia lane...
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Sep 28, 2015 05:30
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Why do I want to run a 3.5e game with the caveat of "play unusual base classes"?
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Sep 28, 2015 05:32
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Poison Mushroom posted:Why do I want to run a 3.5e game with the caveat of "play unusual base classes"? Because having a ton of oddly specific and surprisingly fluffy base classes is what 3.5 excels at.
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Sep 28, 2015 05:39
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Poison Mushroom posted:Why do I want to run a 3.5e game with the caveat of "play unusual base classes"? Because a lot of the non-core base classes are cool and have neat ideas and mechanics and you forget they're still attached to 3.5e. The same thing happens to me with PF whenever I read PoW/SoP things.
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Sep 28, 2015 05:44
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Yadoppsi posted:The fluff from Tome of Magic for Truenamer was alright but I fell absolutely in love with the fluff for the Binder (despite the uninspired name). Making pacts and sharing your body with eldritch horrors or powerful souls torn from time, hell yea. The power balance was just right too, as versatile as bards but more useful without going overboard into wizard/cleric type fuckery. It was really easy to come up with and design your own Vestiges too. Star pact warlocks in 4e. Basically all the warlock pacts were awesome, but star pact was really flavorful.
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Sep 28, 2015 07:17
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Yadoppsi posted:The fluff from Tome of Magic for Truenamer was alright but I fell absolutely in love with the fluff for the Binder (despite the uninspired name). Making pacts and sharing your body with eldritch horrors or powerful souls torn from time, hell yea. The power balance was just right too, as versatile as bards but more useful without going overboard into wizard/cleric type fuckery. It was really easy to come up with and design your own Vestiges too. If anyone hasn't read them already, the Silverclawshift archives are a great AAR of a couple of completely, brilliantly berzerk 3.5e campaigns, one of which is essentially 'Binder: the Binding' iirc.
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Sep 28, 2015 10:00
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Rygar201 posted:4E was lame. If I wanted to play Diablo, I'd play Diablo. Get your trolling incorrect comparisons to video games right. 4e is WoW.
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Sep 28, 2015 10:46
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3e was Diablo for the Too Video Gamey thing, wasn't it?
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Sep 28, 2015 13:05
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A while back somebody dug up a bunch of Usenet posts from people complaining about AD&D2 being too much like a video game, but I can't find those posts now.
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Sep 28, 2015 13:24
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Pope Guilty posted:A while back somebody dug up a bunch of Usenet posts from people complaining about AD&D2 being too much like a video game, but I can't find those posts now. Maybe not the same thing, but I do have a guy complaining that 3e makes PCs immortal thanks to the fact that they heal 1 HP per level per day of rest instead of 1 HP per day of rest.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:13
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Change is bad.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:20
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Does his average fighter have a negative constitution or something? Because assuming a 5 on a d10 alone a level 15 fighter should have at least 75. Add +2 con per level and 15 HP for day isn't poo poo. Why are grogs so bad at math and reading?
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Sep 28, 2015 19:52
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They would love hackmaster wound system. Every hit you take is an individual wound you keep track of. They all break simultaneously but super slowly. A 7 hp wound takes seven days to heal at which point it becomes a six hp wound, after six more days it becomes a 5 hp wound, after five days it becomes a 4 hp around and so on. So if someone hit you with a mace for ten damage it would take 55 days to heal naturally. Resting doubles the rate of healing(with a nine point wound taking a full five of course) so it would "only" take 5 + 5 + 4 + 4 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1, a total of 30 days full rest. People can do medical checks to accelerate this a bit. The best clerical magic only cures like one or two hp per wound only if you worship the same god. IT'S SO REALISTIC YOU GUYS! Is what I think the game designers were going for.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:31
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Well in FATAL, most hits with weapons will kill you outright, so maybe that is the game they want.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:37
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The Bee posted:Does his average fighter have a negative constitution or something? Because assuming a 5 on a d10 alone a level 15 fighter should have at least 75. Add +2 con per level and 15 HP for day isn't poo poo. Coming from 2e, that's nine levels of 5 hp/level plus six levels of 3 hp/level, for 63 health. You see things like this a lot with early responses to new editions--a lot of mixing old rules into new ones. That said--c'mon, guys. G.txt was closed. Let's stick to talking about our own bad wrong opinions on RPGs.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:39
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To be honest I love both approaches. Hackmasters "you take a hit your out a month) and 5e's one long rest recovers all hp. I enjoy both a great deal just depending on what I'm in the mood for. 3.5 and Pathfinder in the middle where taking damage isn't trivial and isn't super serious either, but is just kind of a hassle is my least favorite. I like either extreme better.
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Sep 28, 2015 20:43
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greatn posted:They would love hackmaster wound system. Every hit you take is an individual wound you keep track of. They all break simultaneously but super slowly. At first I misread you for "Rolemaster". Which confused me as I had played a little bit of it in high school, and I still knew the wound system couldn't possibly be that simple. So of course I looked it up, and it's everything I thought it would be:   
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Sep 28, 2015 23:42
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Mystic Mongol posted:That said--c'mon, guys. G.txt was closed. Let's stick to talking about our own bad wrong opinions on RPGs. It lives, it dies, it lives again
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Sep 29, 2015 00:21
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