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The key elements of this relaunch:
People will buy an unfinished playtest version in droves. It will "sell out". Calling it now.
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Mar 6, 2018 23:56
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| # ? May 25, 2024 22:41 |
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Looking at the blog it's basically "5e with houserules" Because it's Paizo and of loving course it is.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:02
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lol.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:08
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 lol
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Mar 7, 2018 00:11
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Order your Rough Draft Deluxe Edition of Pathfinder 2E and get a free subscription to Pathfinder Online.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:14
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this is seriously some antonio banderas meme poo poo right here
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Mar 7, 2018 00:19
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: Paizo are in the business of selling RPGs above all, and what we're seeing now with Starfinger and Pathfinder 2 is the logical culmination of that. No-one there gives a flying gently caress about game design, because it turns out godawful design doesn't stop you selling a billion copies. (See the Starfinger vehicle rules for a stark example.) Instead they're going to hammer on every Skinner button their fanbase has until that stops being a guaranteed source of income, which will be never.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:20
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There's a lot that makes me laugh out loud on their bullet point list of things to reveal about the new edition, like "Support" or "Heroic Storytelling", but my favorite bullet point is:
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Mar 7, 2018 00:24
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I appreciate "Innovative Initiative" because I had to read it 3 times.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:31
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Starfinder: "And this... is to go... even further beyond...!!"
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Mar 7, 2018 00:33
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Pathfinder will return... In Pathfinder 2!
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Mar 7, 2018 00:41
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Profitfinder!! Haha paizo is a business that likes money!!!
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Mar 7, 2018 00:42
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this industry needs less pathfinder and more bathfinder amirite
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Mar 7, 2018 00:46
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dwarf74 posted:Oh you had better believe it. "Fixing" in this case will be "changing everything just enough that it's less of a cluttered, overstuffed mess for at least a few months." Can't wait to make my Prone Shooter 2.0 - Prone Shootier!
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Mar 7, 2018 01:54
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Erik Mona chimes in! http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?622598-Paizo-Announces-Pathfinder-2nd-Edition!&p=7360220&viewfull=1#post7360220quote:Just wanted to chime in here to say that the depth of options in character creation and advancement is a core principle of Pathfinder's design philosophy, and that has not changed with the new edition. If anything, there are even MORE ways to customize your character with the new rules, but we hope that they are better explained and work together a bit more seamlessly than all of that type of stuff does in the current version of the game.
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Mar 7, 2018 02:22
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Pathfinder 2: The Search for More Money
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Mar 7, 2018 03:04
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Leraika posted:Pathfinder 2: The Search for More Money
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Mar 7, 2018 03:11
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The Legend of Groggy's Gold
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Mar 7, 2018 03:13
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inklesspen posted:Can you go into more detail about this? I'm very interested in the notion of a RPG that works great for XCOM. Fragged Empire uses 2 action-per-turn well-defined tactical grid combat, with all your equipment decided by Resources that you can then allocate to individual modular gear - to replicate XCOM’s military flavor, it would be pretty easy for the GM to make up a bunch of stock “Laser Rifle, Plasma Rifle, Body Armor, Carapace Armor, Skeleton Suit” combinations and then allow your individual soldiers to just spend Spare Time Points on a particular list of modifications. The other major stat is Influence, which is pooled from all PCs to make a budget for your starship and/or base outpost (that involves getting and using some rules from Fragged Kingdom). Neither your Research nor Influence increase automatically when you level - only your maximums for each. You then have to sell Trade Goods you’ve collected (this includes scavenged enemy gear, which can be picked up and used in the same session it’s found, but requires Resources to be allocated to its maintenance afterwards or it’s just good for selling) to increase Resources, and have to publish Research you’ve conducted to increase Influence - you can obtain a little Research from defeated enemies as well (specifically robotic or bio-tech enemies in FE proper, but any weird-rear end alien you haven’t thoroughly researched yet should qualify in Fragged-Com), but you will mostly buy Trade Goods and conduct research by spending Spare Time Points, a resource you get each session and can sometimes get as a lesser reward (with the in-game explanation of “small funds or luxuries that give you more time to work on your real concerns”). Really, it’d just be a small hack by the GM - come up with some Origins/Training Packages/whatever to replace the Races, premake the gear available to players, and figure out how you’ll deal with base staff and the X-Com fatality level - combat in FE is, per the book, “intended to have players be hard to kill but easy to cripple,” which could work just fine with a unit roster and a cost (in Spare Time rolls maybe) for new recruits. I think Fragged Kingdom might give your Outpost stats that could represent the competence of your base staff and be used for R&D and trade goods, but I’m not as familiar with that one (yet).
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Mar 7, 2018 03:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:this industry needs less pathfinder and more bathfinder amirite And it's sci-fi spin off Showerfinger
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Mar 7, 2018 04:42
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kingcom posted:And it's sci-fi spin off Showerfinger That's what my uncle tried to convince me of playing when I was ten. No punchline. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 7, 2018 04:51
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Plutonis posted:The Legend of Groggy's Gold
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Mar 7, 2018 05:31
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Hell I might play it if they give fighters and rogues daily powers.
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Mar 7, 2018 05:49
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potatocubed posted:I've said it before and I'll say it again: Paizo are in the business of selling RPGs above all, and what we're seeing now with Starfinger and Pathfinder 2 is the logical culmination of that. No-one there gives a flying gently caress about game design, because it turns out godawful design doesn't stop you selling a billion copies. (See the Starfinger vehicle rules for a stark example.) Instead they're going to hammer on every Skinner button their fanbase has until that stops being a guaranteed source of income, which will be never. They sell the idea of the RPG as a social experience and a brand that signifies distinction and superior taste. Gotta buy everything to keep this going and minmax my character. Hope I also trigger the babies clinging to their inferior RPG's when I ring these bad boys up. I honestly chuckled when I saw Wayne Reynolds was a bullet point. Was Pathfinder the result of monkey's paw wish for him that prevents him from making it into more lucrative genres? His costume designs are terrible but he at least seems like he's getting a little better.
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Mar 7, 2018 05:52
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inklesspen posted:Can you go into more detail about this? I'm very interested in the notion of a RPG that works great for XCOM. I'll cover the combat part of this! Fragged Empire uses grid based combat with a focus on cover and shooting. You get two actions on your turn, which can be spend on a pretty wide variety of moves that do different things; Sighted Shot has you making one shot with a significant bonus to your range, whereas Spray Fire lets you move (at penalty) and add all your extra rate of fire die, for example. All characters have two types of HP, defense, and offense. For defense, you have your...well, Defense, and that's how hard you are to hit - getting in cover can boost it big time - and your Armour (  aussie spelling) that protects you from crits. For your HP, you have your Endurance, and your actual stats. For offense, all weapons have Endurance damage and Crit damage. There's more to it then that, but those are the basics.When you roll a crit, you deal your crit damage (minus Armour) to one of their stats directly. If a stat hits below 0, you start bleeding out, meaning you take another point of random stat damage every round. If a stat hits -5, you die. If your endurance hits 0, every attack against you is automatically a crit. This means you can specialize your duders' offense and defense in a LOT of different ways. Aiming for high Defenses and high Armour means prioritizing different stats and weapons; maybe you make a bog standard FPS shootamans with an assault rifle, good at most things, or a sniper with super high crit chance but who suffers against heavily armored enemies, or a screaming lunatic with two SMGs who focuses on burning endurance hard to kill bosses, or someone who does almost no endurance or crit damage, but instead Impairs enemies so your other teammates can just wipe them out, or maybe you don't do anything to enemies, because the weapons list includes drones and red shirts. You get the idea. This also means your characters can be very fragile. Crits aren't particularly hard to get; you're gonna see a bunch every combat. The book straight up advises the GM not to overly worry about making "balanced" combats, and likewise tells players to 100% absolutely ambush, surprise attack, distract, and whatever else you have to do to get the upper hand. So, in the end, you have grid and cover based ranged combat where movement and placement matters, highly customizable shootamans (because all characters have combat skills) with highly customizable gear loadouts that effectively set their "class," and a combat system that can get real hairy real fast. All it really lacks is a simplified turn initiative.
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Mar 7, 2018 06:04
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One of my favorite guys in my current Fragged group is the party Corp face who is 100% the 'disables/debuffs guys with his loving sweet pistol' guy who fights with drones...and sometimes living faceless security team members... All our fights revolve around this smug Gordon Gekko rear end in a top hat and his blinged out pistol enraging our enemies by making them helpless so our sniper or me as the big weapons motherfucker can just tear them apart. Fragged combat is very fun. Like already said, everyone has combat skills, and everything is customization focused. Mix that with drones (both literal robots and faceless mooks you can command) and other poo poo being just as valid weapons as a tricked out assault rifle and you've got a game with a painfully rare balance of 'tactical combat' and 'loving fun poo poo going down'.
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Mar 7, 2018 06:24
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Fragged Empire's systems interest me, but grid-based combat is a big red flag to me as a GM, because it requires me to either, 1) devise compelling tactical battlefields on the fly, 2) add to my prep-work substantially by making compelling tactical battlefields ahead of time. Am I wrong here, or is FE just not the game for me?
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Mar 7, 2018 08:38
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It does have Theater of the Mind alternate combat rules - you lose a lot of the game, though, it has completely different (fewer) combat traits, and doesn't use the entire equipment customization ruleset. That's available as a sometimes alternative (for shorter/less important combats), a partial alternative (if you just want to abstract personal or spacecraft combat), or a full on replacement (not recommended, personally, the tactical aspect is just so polished). I don't really think the game really needs good terrain, though. Throw down a couple of chest-high walls and maybe some concealment or lighting to stir things up once in a while - what it really boils down to is "have cover, have ways to flank cover," and the player/enemy variety should do it from there. Positioning is important, but not as vital as it was in 4e, since guys go down a lot faster. That said, meh. If the tactical grid combat isn't a big draw for you, I think there are cleaner systems, but Fragged is really filling my 4e-shaped void.
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Mar 7, 2018 09:17
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Kestral posted:Fragged Empire's systems interest me, but grid-based combat is a big red flag to me as a GM, because it requires me to either, 1) devise compelling tactical battlefields on the fly, 2) add to my prep-work substantially by making compelling tactical battlefields ahead of time. Am I wrong here, or is FE just not the game for me? This is sparking an idea for a procedural terrain generator for grid-based roleplaying games. I just need to understand what makes a compelling tactical battlefield first. Also, the FE book is loving impenetrable. I get that it's laid out as a reference manual and not a learning manual, but it is really not a learning manual.
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Mar 7, 2018 12:01
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Two weeks ago we had to cancel a D&D session because one guy caught the flu, I barely pulled through another session last week and was properly laid out the very next day, and now I'm better but my girlfriend's caught something and we had to cancel this Saturday's 13th Age game and it's starting to piss me off! We all caught different things as well. Of course now I'm liable to catch what she's got so there's something to look forward to.
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Mar 7, 2018 12:19
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Pieces of Peace posted:Fragged Empire uses 2 action-per-turn well-defined tactical grid combat, with all your equipment decided by Resources that you can then allocate to individual modular gear - to replicate XCOM’s military flavor, it would be pretty easy for the GM to make up a bunch of stock “Laser Rifle, Plasma Rifle, Body Armor, Carapace Armor, Skeleton Suit” combinations and then allow your individual soldiers to just spend Spare Time Points on a particular list of modifications. This seems like the opposite of what was said earlier. This started with "do you like new XCOM? Fragged Empires lets you run it out of the box with absolutely 0 changes necessary..." And now it's "as long as you completely change/homebrew all the races and gear and gear mods and enemies and research topics, and maybe you can hack in this other system and modify it to handle base management..." Like, you can run XCOM in about a dozen systems if you are willing to homebrew up a whole bunch of poo poo. None really run it out of the box.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:19
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The fiction in Fragged Empire seems bad to me, although perhaps it is I who is actually bad.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:24
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Jimbozig posted:This seems like the opposite of what was said earlier. This started with "do you like new XCOM? Fragged Empires lets you run it out of the box with absolutely 0 changes necessary..." The game doesn't literally call its energy weapons "laser rifles", and neither are the enemies called "sectoids", so ...
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Mar 7, 2018 16:29
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Jimbozig posted:This seems like the opposite of what was said earlier. This started with "do you like new XCOM? Fragged Empires lets you run it out of the box with absolutely 0 changes necessary..." You're misreading what PoP said or being intentionally obtuse. You can reskin the base races and have solid options out of the box (Legions and Nephilims are very solid Heavies and Supports/Specialists, for instance), and the same goes for weaponry. Research topics use a system that grants you benefits that don't need to be meticulously planned out ahead of time (specifically, you get Secret Knowledge, which represents actually understanding how poo poo works, thus enabling you to take certain abilities or items you couldn't otherwise, or a minor Perk, which are Language, Access [AKA 'a place'], Rank and so on). Nor do you need to add specific gear mods because that is an option that already exists. What PoP is saying is pretty much that almost everything you'd need to do as a GM is just change the flavor so something like a Gauss Rifle becomes a ballistic assault rifle or the like, which is what I would do if I was running Fragged XCOM. I think the only change I'd go for is replacing Races for Backgrounds and making sure they match up exactly to what you want out of them. For reference, a Race and Background look like this, respectively: quote:Kaltoran Trait, pg: 340 quote:Cultured Background As you can see, it's not exactly a huge undertaking. So I stand by 'it's very easy to run XCOM out of the box in Fragged Empires'.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:The game doesn't literally call its energy weapons "laser rifles", and neither are the enemies called "sectoids", so ... Are there enemies in the book that are physically weak aliens with no armor that have psychic abilities to buff one another's shooting and HP and debuff yours? And then stronger versions who can do those same things plus mind control? If so, then yeah, call those sectoids and you're good. Reskinning is great! If not, then you have to build them. How hard is building them in a balanced way? Apparently you can accidentally build yourself a weapon that won't hurt anyone, so maybe hard? I don't know. I read the whole thing and I still don't know how it works and couldn't begin to build enemies. How strong various abilities are alone and in combination is completely opaque. You know "security through obscurity? Some games do "game balance through obscurity" - if the rules are opaque enough, people won't be able to find the imbalances. Fragged is certainly impenetrable enough for that. I am not qualified to say how balanced it is, but the reports of trap options in this thread are worrying.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:52
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:They sell the idea of the RPG as a social experience and a brand that signifies distinction and superior taste. Is this true? I always assumed that (us) storygamers were considered the snobs of RPGs. I’m dangerously close to making a beer metaphor here.
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Mar 7, 2018 17:00
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Jimbozig posted:Are there enemies in the book that are physically weak aliens with no armor that have psychic abilities to buff one another's shooting and HP and debuff yours? Mind control in particular no (because that poo poo is kinda hard to balance), the other things absolutely yes. There's example psionic enemies in the Antagonist Archive who do all those things. I'll get back to you on game balance, but the system just...really, really obviously points towards running XCOM because it emphasizes cover, tactical combat, and has simple yet appropriate mechanics for 'we research poo poo, we build poo poo', which most games just plain don't. The fact it also includes psi, hacking, support builds and so on just builds upon that.
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Mar 7, 2018 17:05
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But it doesn’t say “XCOM” on the cover, so how could it fill that niche?
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Mar 7, 2018 17:12
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Subjunctive posted:But it doesn’t say “XCOM” on the cover, so how could it fill that niche? https://www.staples.ca/en/DYMO-LabelManager-160-Label-Maker/product_331509_1-CA_1_20001
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Mar 7, 2018 17:26
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| # ? May 25, 2024 22:41 |
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Jimbozig posted:Are there enemies in the book that are physically weak aliens with no armor that have psychic abilities to buff one another's shooting and HP and debuff yours? I brought up “you can make a gun with 2 crit damage and fight enemies with 4 armor” as an area of mild concern, not a Toughness or Prone Shooter equivalent. Even in that scenario, you can be very useful whittling down an enemy’s Endurance to 0 to get auto-crits that you might be able to boost past the armor, or to put them in position for your buddy with a 4 crit gun to finish them much easier. You’re probably heavily armored or making area attacks or something else useful, because the only way to have a weak gun is to take some of the cheapening modifiers, giving you more Resources to spend elsewhere. And if worse comes to worse, “we’re outgunned, abandon mission! Oh god, Jensen’s dead, his body’s everywhere!” is pretty X-COM. The enemies would need to be built, sure, but only as much as enemies in the standard FE setting. Whether you call your Henchmen mob of low-Strength gunmen a “Sectoid Squad” or “Nephilim Runts” is just a matter of flavor. Enemy creation is “snap together these legos” just as much as item customization, with a given budget, and has a reasonable spread of stats. It’s not that you’d need to rebuild the entire system to make it X-COM, you’d just want to sand off the edges and put on a new coat of paint. I’d absolutely run an X-COM game in Strike! first, but I’d prefer to run an X-COM campaign in Fragged Empire, at least unless that book I remember you were working on has a full research and headquarters subsection - there would be more work to set up the tactical fights in FE, and the enemies would be a bit more the same as opposed to the 4e-inspired powers (being psychic just tends to give one or two new crit replacement options, which could mimic X-COM abilities but wouldn’t feel quite as dramatic in play), but Fragged Empire as an entire game is just very, very close to the whole of X-COM. It’s a little dense, and I can understand the problems people are having getting it to explain itself, but it’s a very well-balanced game and I think it’s a little unfair to assume it’s unbalanced under complexity. The actual statistics aren’t too tricky, it’s more of the gameplay pace that’s fiddly. Transient People posted:Mind control in particular no (because that poo poo is kinda hard to balance), the other things absolutely yes. There's example psionic enemies in the Antagonist Archive who do all those things. I'll get back to you on game balance, but the system just...really, really obviously points towards running XCOM because it emphasizes cover, tactical combat, and has simple yet appropriate mechanics for 'we research poo poo, we build poo poo', which most games just plain don't. The fact it also includes psi, hacking, support builds and so on just builds upon that. There is the Domination Strong Hit, that lets you “decide the target’s next action.” I’d use that for Sectoid Commanders/Ethereals, there’s a “swirling vortex of doom” psychic area blast trait too, and a couple other reasonable ones (neurotoxin for Thin Man spit, etc). Definitely easier to mimic the relatively rarer/more minor psychic powers from X-COM than the wild stuff in X-COM 2, though. Pieces of Peace fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 17:44
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