Pathfinder RPG: sqrt(13)th Edition

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Gort: Aug 18, 2003; Good day what ho cup of tea

Nihilarian posted:

is that supposed to be 2e?

Nope, that's 3e.

# ? Sep 12, 2018 17:43

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# ? May 25, 2024 05:54

Gharbad the Weak: Feb 23, 2008; This too good for you.

The first time I saw harm I was certain it was a misprint.

# ? Sep 12, 2018 17:52

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Olesh posted:

Talking about Save or Suck spells getting better is disingenuous; Save vs Suck spells are better by comparison because damage spells got a whole lot worse and in the transition from 2E to 3E many spells had saving throws added to them. Save or suck spells weren't super common at all in 2E because there were a wealth of spell options that simply didn't allow a saving throw to begin with, and there were plenty of useful spells that offered substantial penalties to enemy saves. This isn't factoring in utility and buff spells, which as a general rule were often significantly better in 2E and typically had (sometimes significantly) longer durations.

Spell effects that require saving throws are weaker in general in 3E. There are spells that were previously save or die have been converted to save or suck, spells which previously inflicted a penalty on saving throws largely no longer do so, and there are plenty of spells that offer saving throws in 3E that previously had no save at all. This is on top of the fact that high-threat monsters typically have grossly inflated saving throws in 3E (read: evil outsiders and dragons), and the higher HP numbers in 3E onward relative to 2E mean that spell damage is simply less effective across the board - spell damage numbers which have generally been reduced relative to their 2E numbers - although there are a few examples of increases, they are the exception. Save or X spells are less likely to matter in 3E over a character's lifespan, and even at higher levels, where the declining success rate of saving throws in 2E should make things more favorable to 3E, the fact that high-threat monsters typically have inflated save values means Save or X spells are still less likely to land in practice in any situation that matters.

If you think they got stronger, then by all means, make your case - I'm all ears.

One of the many huge things you miss is how the saving throws changed and how much it is easier for a wizard with even half a brain to land a save or suck spell on just about any target.

In AD&D there were five spell categories and the easiest saves were in the top category and hardest in the bottom two..
1) Paralyzation, Poison, or Death Magic
2) Rod, Staff, or Wand
3) Petrification or Polymorph
4) Breath Weapon
5) Spell

Let's rename that to something more functional:
1) Save or Die (Paralysis got moved here because it got followed with coup de grace too often)
2) Save vs Spell-in-a-can
3) Save or lose (but survive; polymorphed creatures can run and petrified ones are stone)
4) Save vs physical
5) Save vs magical

If we look at a debilitating spell in AD&D like Stinking Cloud it was Save vs Poison. That made it a powerful spell but not terribly likely to succeed (most monsters, using the warrior saving throws, had +3 to save vs poison as against vs spells). The only real exception was PC wizards (who were very good at saving vs magic). Spell-in-a-can for what it's worth was always one point easier to save against than save vs spell in a can. Also this was particularly important at higher levels because you got better at saving against spells as you levelled up. Fireball was a good game at higher levels at least in part because it would always get damage through, and also because

Then we hit 3.0 and it put the saving throws through a shredder. Spell saves became Fort/Ref/Will, and what that meant was that any sensible wizard got to pick the opponent's low defence. If you are facing goblins and wizards you know they have a low Fort so you break out Stinking Cloud, whereas for ogres it's Glitterdust because they have a low will. So a wizard should always be attacking the lowest magical defence of the target if they've prepared and have a clue about the situation. Working out which is lowest of Fort, Ref, and Will isn't generally hard - and there are save or suck spells in all three categories (although it's rarest in Ref)

On that note in AD&D spell saving throws get better with level. In 3.0 spells get harder to save against as you level up - and do so at the same rate the best saves increase while low saves get left behind, and casters get to increase their casting stat to make the spells harder to save against.

And before you say something about the changes to spell resistance, the conjuration school basically ignores spell resistance and has a lot of save or lose spells (as well as some direct damage). In 3.5 this also lets you basically ignore spell immunity while not having to change your spell loadout.

# ? Sep 12, 2018 20:28

Azhais: Feb 5, 2007; Switchblade Switcharoo

Gort posted:

Nope, that's 3e.

Also 3e: Hasted priest casts harm then clubs you with a +3 mace for the combo

# ? Sep 12, 2018 21:23

Gort: Aug 18, 2003; Good day what ho cup of tea

harm then quickened cause light wounds so you don't ever have to hit their real AC

# ? Sep 12, 2018 21:56

Olesh: Aug 4, 2008; Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

Gort posted:

Nope, that's 3e.

Bringing up Harm as if it's somehow new to 3E is my new favorite part of this conversation.

Concentration - Your standard concentration bonus is your level + CON + 3, assuming you put points into it every level. There are a lot of concentration DCs for interfering with spellcasting (riding a horse, being in inclement weather) that are fixed, don't go up, and as such are or become trivial to make. However, there's two DCs we're really talking about here - the DC to cast defensively (and avoid provoking an attack of opportunity), and the DC to avoid your spell being interrupted from damage (such as when you take an attack of opportunity because you didn't cast defensively).
Casting defensively is mostly a flat check - 15 + (2x spell level). It gets a little easier to cast your highest-level spells as your stats go up, but you need magic item assistance, Combat Casting, or both to negate the risk entirely.
Interruption from damage is a variable check - 10 + spell level + damage taken. Early on, this is usually an "exceptionally easy" DC to make. Once you get to mid or high levels, when a single hit can do 20 or more damage? You aren't making a DC 40 or 50 check, you're dropping the spell. Sure, this was a change from 2E where any damage interrupted the spell. 2E had a bunch of ways to negate/avoid incoming attacks, though, so this was less of a deal than people make it out to be.

Dangerous Spells: You're half wrong about polymorph spells; involuntary polymorph (i.e, Polymorph Other or Polymorph Any Object) is what had the system shock roll. A wizard using Polymorph Self or Shapechange was perfectly safe, no roll required. You bring up Wish aging the caster in 2E as if that restriction discouraged people from casting it more than the 25,000 XP cost in 3E. People used Wish all the time in second edition. In 3E? Players almost never cast it.

Time restraints: Consider that a spell that lasts 1 round/caster level in either system lasts for, uh, 1 round per caster level. It's not as if suddenly buff spells get functionally shorter because 2E has a strange concept of how long one combat round is. 3E as well has spell durations measured in minutes (10 rounds per minute), 2E has durations measured in turns (10 rounds per turn), meaning that within the scope of combat, short duration spells are equivalent at best. Outside combat, well, your shortest duration spells in 3E are measured in seconds, and your shortest spells in 2E are measured in minutes. Consider what that means for buff durations.

Personal Safety: Yes, wizards have substantially less HP in 2E. Actually, everyone had substantially less HP in 2E; wizards are most notable because having the lowest average hit die, they saw the biggest gains from a high constitution, especially as 3E meant that everyone could benefit from very high constitution and provided for magic items to boost said constitution values, increasing player HP further. You're also not mentioning that wizards, like everyone else, stopped rolling dice for HP and instead got fixed HP after a certain level (10th level for wizards), meaning that at best, your average HP for your swole wizard was 65hp at 20th level. You mention later on that HP values were lower across the board, but neglect to mention that damage and attacks are down in 2E, too. Wizards are squishy in 2E, and 3E, and don't stand up to a big bad carving them to pieces, except in 2E they're rather better at avoiding it - enemies are worse at hitting them, and there are a variety of means 2E wizards can use to negate damage or simply prevent enemies from having the opportunity to attack them in the first place.

Preparing Spells: Whether this matters is really up to the DM. Maybe if you're in a game where significant time constraints upon your adventuring exist, then only spending an hour to memorize all your spells might matter, but spending a couple extra hours in camp whenever you need to replenish spells or a whole day if you've expended all your resources is unlikely to have any real effect.

Learning Spells: Sure, this is more campaign dependent. 3E just gives you a couple spells of your choice every level and guarantees you'll eventually be able to buy scrolls to transcribe (they won't always be available when you look, but if you look enough times you'll find one). 2E explicitly gives the option to the DM whether or not you get new spells as you level up, have access to guilds or libraries where you can find and study spells, can return to your mentor periodically to obtain new spells, or have to get them as treasure. The worst case scenario has you forced to rely on random scrolls as treasure to transcribe into your spellbook, but this was by no means standard or mandatory. The standard response of "make your players go on an adventure to get <THING> that they want" is one that you'll see a lot in 2E, actually.

Scrolls: Speaking of which, a 2E wizard can write scrolls and brew potions. It's explicitly a class feature! What are the rules? Well, the player must obtain ingredients (certain things they gather themselves increase the success chance) and then pass a percentile roll. What ingredients? Well, the DM determines the exact recipe - DMs who don't want to encourage magical item creation can simply make the recipes bizarre and fantastical, referencing mythical labours and ingredients. Alternatively, they can simply make recipes that are roughly appropriate to the desired item and leave the fantastical out of it, or reserve it only for rare and powerful items. The real difference between 2E and 3E is that 3E removes busywork from the DM - rather than 2E saying "okay, your players want to make a magic item? Sit down and design a recipe and maybe an adventure and figure out costs", 3E just turns around and says "okay, your players want to make a magic item? You need to approve it and they need to spend a certain amount of XP, GP, and meet the requirements listed on each item". Rulebook-wise, both systems are saying "Yes, this is a thing that you can freely do in the game unless your DM decides to not let you", but 3E just kind of goes "eh, whatever, they spend some resources to make this". For 2E? Consider making your players go on an adventure to get <THING> that they want instead.

For your two real big ones, well...

HP DAMAGE: Yes, HP values were substantially lower across the board. Non-caster damage values were also substantially lower. Not having adopted 3E's dumb "let's make monsters use the same stat line as PCs", 2E monsters have some interesting variety to them - hit chance, AC, and hit points don't have the huge swings between low-level and high-level monsters. 5E attempted to replicate and update this general feel of monsters not being tied to specific target metrics, where monsters aren't simply phased out due to becoming ineffectual. A monster that's dangerous at 10th level is generally still dangerous several levels later, and doesn't get or need increased hit chances, damage, or saving throws to do its job, unlike in 3E.

Saving throws: Like with 2E, in 3E, ALL your saving throws go up as you level, but with 3E, saving throws are heavily modified by other things. What this means is that in practice, highly threatening monsters (who tend to have much more in the way of hit dice compared to the party) will tend to have saving throws that well outstrip the party's ability to increase their own DCs because they have good stats. From low levels, enemy saves start with a rough expected baseline of 50% (with good saves being more likely to succeed, and with bad saves being less likely) and then enemy hit dice and stats advance, on average, faster than the party. Even if you're targeting a "weak" save (like a dragon with its poor Dexterity), what this means in practice is that you're "only" dealing with a 60-70% chance of an at-level opponent making the saving throw, and wouldn't you know it, the "weak save" is Reflex, famously lacking in Save or Suck/Save or Die spells. This problem is only exacerbated when you're using anything other than your absolute highest level spells, as lower level spells have lower DCs. Sure, you might be able to more reliably disintegrate trolls or paralyze other chaff as you go up in level, but your chance of taking out the BBEG is abysmal.

Compare this to second edition, though, and for the majority of a spellcaster's career, they're facing things with bad saving throws. Instead of a baseline 50% chance of success (modified by good/bad saves and stats), low-level monsters, low level monsters start with a 10% chance to make a saving throw and scale up from there. Many enemies that are still dangerous at high levels have lower hit dice and commensurately worse saving throws, and while high hit-dice enemies have great saves across the board in 2E, this is mitigated by the fact that a great many spells either apply a penalty to saving throws or simply don't allow a saving throw to begin with. These things exist in 3E as well, but, well, they exist now.

There's been a few posts while I've been putting this effortpost together, people are clearly getting sick of this conversation, and I only have so much time I can spend writing posts and I have to draw the line somewhere... The long and short of it is, these issues didn't become magically more prevalent or worse in the transition to 3.X. They existed en masse in previous editions. The bevy of options to simply ignore saving throws, ignore spell resistance, kill/incapacitate one or more monsters by targeting a poor save (perhaps with a penalty to the saving throw), et cetera, were substantial, and were dramatically reduced with the release of 3E. 3.5 further attempted to rebalance and limit caster power, with some minor success. Over time, though, 3.X received a staggering amount of supplemental material, which added a great deal of additional options and power to casters, where many of these options opened back up with any sort of equivalence. Second edition had some amount of supplemental material which, don't get me wrong, did a whole lot to make casters more ridiculous than they already were, but in its lifespan had nothing like the explosive supplemental publishing and inevitable power creep that 3.X did.

I've been discussing the systemic changes between 2E and 3E - things that were true on release and conversion to the new system, while the incoming arguments make quite liberal reference to things that only existed after the very expanded 3.X library of supplements. We're not really talking about the same thing here. Maybe it's pointless, since the relative limitations of spells and options I'm talking about were only true for a period of time until enough supplements were released, but that's a consequence of power creep. Regardless, I'm clearly making a clearly unpopular argument that people disagree with and people are tired of hearing it so I'll shut up now.

# ? Sep 12, 2018 22:47

sugar free jazz: Mar 5, 2008

sick million words about a decades old argument between two non Pathfinder systems

# ? Sep 12, 2018 23:08

ProfessorCirno: Feb 17, 2011; The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

I'm not gonna go through and dissect how you're wrong about literally almost everything, because 90% of your answers are "ok but what if the DM steps in?!" and yep, once again, this belongs in the Pathfinder thread.

# ? Sep 13, 2018 03:29

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

This is what Harm does in AD&D 2e:

This is what Harm does in D&D 3.0:

As you can see, it copies the AD&D 2e spell as close as it can, which actually speaks to the way that 3.0 was, in a sense, still trying to be an iterative, rather than evolutionary, change to D&D.

Now, one of the things that doesn't really get a mention in the 3.0-to-3.5 transition is that the designers actually did learn a lesson about save-or-dies, to the extent that this is now what Harm looks like in D&D 3.5:

At the time, people did notice, so much so that Jonathan Tweet ended up writing this 2005 essay on hit-points and why it was necessary to try and steer the game back towards killing monsters by dealing damage through their HP (and allowing players to similarly not be instantly killed or neutered by monsters wielding similar spells).

We know in practice that they weren't entirely successful at this, but they did take some steps towards it.

EDIT: For what it's worth, the PF1e version of Harm is just a straight copy of 3.5's

gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Sep 13, 2018

# ? Sep 13, 2018 03:57

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

ProfessorCirno posted:

I'm not gonna go through and dissect how you're wrong about literally almost everything, because 90% of your answers are "ok but what if the DM steps in?!" and yep, once again, this belongs in the Pathfinder thread.

That�s not what Olesh is saying at all. They�re pointing out in this last response that many things 3e has explicit frameworks for (like item creation) were instead constructed by DMs to taste using guidelines in 2e. It�s a fundamentally different thing about the two editions, and is worth bringing up when comparisons of the editions talk about related topics (like spell selection.)

I don�t necessarily agree with everything Olesh is saying but it�s much better thought through and more comprehensive than you all are thinking. You seem to have this idea that 3e HAS to be the damned, broken child and showing where it wasn�t quite that is a war crime or something. The point isn�t that 2e or 3e don�t have supreme wizards, it�s that they both do, just in slightly different ways and 3e was following in 2e�s footsteps when it constructed the systems it did.

And I was going to bring it up but people already did - arguing about a generic 3e on this topic doesn�t work great. 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder all have their own individual tweaks to make various spells and tactics better or worse.

# ? Sep 13, 2018 05:08

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Arivia posted:

That�s not what Olesh is saying at all. They�re pointing out in this last response that many things 3e has explicit frameworks for (like item creation) were instead constructed by DMs to taste using guidelines in 2e. It�s a fundamentally different thing about the two editions, and is worth bringing up when comparisons of the editions talk about related topics (like spell selection.)

I don�t necessarily agree with everything Olesh is saying but it�s much better thought through and more comprehensive than you all are thinking. You seem to have this idea that 3e HAS to be the damned, broken child and showing where it wasn�t quite that is a war crime or something. The point isn�t that 2e or 3e don�t have supreme wizards, it�s that they both do, just in slightly different ways and 3e was following in 2e�s footsteps when it constructed the systems it did.

And I was going to bring it up but people already did - arguing about a generic 3e on this topic doesn�t work great. 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder all have their own individual tweaks to make various spells and tactics better or worse.

It's just factually untrue that 3E casters got stronger in few ways or have weaker options at their disposal. That's all there is to it. And we again step into non-situations like "What if their spells run out?" If the caster's spells run out, the adventuring day is over, or everyone dies because they don't have caster support. Real basic stuff.

Most of us played a lot of 3E at one time and most of us are sick of it, but it just won't go away. Game design advanced a long way and D&D ultimately did not. Now I see stuff coming out of Paizo that I would compare unfavorably to 3E, because their design framework is just frozen in time and they spend oodles of design space solving for problems that better games have already solved. 3E had some big advancements over 2E and now we're just endlessly cycling on 3E, watching as Paizo struggles to "improve" the framework mainly by making it needlessly complicated, with manuals that are indistinguishable in structure and visual design from stuff written almost 20 years ago. It's stagnant.

# ? Sep 13, 2018 08:55

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

I would ask if you have the same experience in either play or criticism with 2e that you do with 3e. It�s pretty obvious that Olesh knows 2e very well and is speaking from their experience with that system to make a comparison. I�m not sure if you have the same grounding. 3e wizard supremacy is such a common generally assumed truth in Internet discussion that I�m not sure you�re responding to him critically. I think there�s a lot of knee jerk automatic dismissal going on because someone critiquing the supremacy of wizards in 3e is taken as uninformed.

Also I�d give Paizo more credit than you�re giving them. They�ve discussed how Pathfinder�s design was intentionally conservative in the past, and their design in general tends more to the standard because that�s what they enjoy creating. 3.5 was more out there because Wizards intentionally was designing more out there things in a way Paizo doesn�t. (And also check out Pathfinder 2e of course.)

# ? Sep 13, 2018 09:33

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

"Olesh's argument is clearly based on actual experience while everyone else in the thread clearly gets all their opinions from the internet and doesn't play the game"

Is that the gist of your statement Arivia?

# ? Sep 13, 2018 09:44

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Terrible Opinions posted:

"Olesh's argument is clearly based on actual experience while everyone else in the thread clearly gets all their opinions from the internet and doesn't play the game"

Is that the gist of your statement Arivia?

With regards to 2e in particular? Yes. Obviously people in here play 3e/PF, but only playing part of the comparison doesn�t make you well equipped to consider all of it.

# ? Sep 13, 2018 09:51

ProfessorCirno: Feb 17, 2011; The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

Oh my bad, I didn't know my own time spent playing 2e never happened, I should've checked with you first those decades ago to make sure they were legit.

# ? Sep 13, 2018 10:14

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

I'm going to be honest having played quite a bit of 2nd edition myself he's still wrong.