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Siivola posted:Tl;dr: I don't think brevity is an unambiguous virtue. When I look up the effect of a spell, I want to read what it does, not its keywords. Here's 4e's blind: Blind posted:Blinded is a condition.  )Compare the PF2E version: quote:You can't see. All normal terrain is difficult terrain to you. You can't detect anything using vision. You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to Perception checks. You are immune to visual effects. Blinded overrides dazzled.
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Feb 25, 2023 17:47
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Splicer posted:It's also unclear if being unable to detect enemies actually does lead to existing enemies becoming undetected, and I've a feeling the answer is "ask your gm". The problem isn't keywords, it's that the person who wrote this condition text is an idiot. In the more detailed section on detecting creatures on page 466, it specifically points out that a creature would be hidden to you if you're blinded (and if it moved out of the space where you had last seen it, it would become undetected).
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Feb 25, 2023 18:04
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Kurieg posted:the problem is when you get poo poo like how a Monk's unarmed attack is a "Weapon attack" but is not "An attack with a weapon"
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Feb 25, 2023 18:16
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Splicer posted:Yeah, 5e's development treated their "natural language!!!" promises identically to their "No grid! No maps!! Theater of the mind!!!" promises
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Feb 25, 2023 18:24
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FMguru posted:I'm still waiting for those "modules" that you could plug-in to the 5E ruleset that would let you simulate other versions of D&D that Mearls promised. Any day now! One edition for all of dnd players to enjoy and come together lol no one even believed that at the time. There steadfast commitment to make sure the warlord will never be a thing in 5e says it all. Vire fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 18:25
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Splicer posted:The problem isn't that PF2E uses keywords and defined mechanics, it's that it uses them poorly. But I admit I had forgotten how clean a 4E power reads. Yeah y'all are right actually, there's no reason to write spells etc like this.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:44
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Narsham posted:A last example: I discovered in writing this post that PF2 has "precise" and "imprecise" senses. So far as I can tell, only sight is a "precise" sense in the system. So why make the definition at all? Why not just differentiate sight from the other senses and use the word "sight" in place of "precise sense"? It's a system decision: at some point in the future, Paizo (or someone) might introduce another "precise sense" and the rules will just transparently work. Several monsters already have precise senses other than vision. The problem is greater the other way - many regularly stated abilities (not including "blinded") use the word "vision" when they actually mean "a precise sense".
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Feb 25, 2023 19:24
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gtrmp posted:In the more detailed section on detecting creatures on page 466, it specifically points out that a creature would be hidden to you if you're blinded (and if it moved out of the space where you had last seen it, it would become undetected). Also this is what I'd call a process flow problem. To use my example from blinded, while it's not ideal that the 4e version doesn't list opportunity attacks, it's intuitive to go "I want to make an opportunity attack, I'll check if being blinded prevents that. Oh it says so right there." It won't come up unless you want to do a specific thing which itself informs you you can't do it. This doesn't work for the "missing" PF2E information; the flow from "you cannot detect via sight" to "So you have -2 AC and a 50% chance to miss unless you perform this specific action" is far less smooth. In more "PF2E doing a worse job than a game from a game from the late 00s", this is probably why flanking is explicitly listed in the 4e version. Your can't flank if you can't perform opportunity attacks, and you can't perform opportunity attacks if you can't see the target, so technically you already have that info from the "cannot see targets" clause to know you can't flank - but someone decided logicing out a chain that long mid-combat for a relatively common action would be silly and disruptive. Paizo should probably talk to that guy. Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 19:52
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Splicer posted:In more "PF2E doing a worse job than a game from a game from the late 00s", this is probably why flanking is explicitly listed in the 4e version. Your can't flank if you can't perform opportunity attacks, and you can't perform opportunity attacks if you can't see the target, so technically you already have that info from the "cannot see targets" clause to know you can't flank - but someone decided logicing out a chain that long mid-combat for a relatively common action would be silly and disruptive. I think this is more the big disappointment with PF2e, which is that it looks like a tactical 4e-style game, but in fact there are notable holes in the rules that can come up extremely easily and have to be resolved by GM fiat. Often, these are in areas where there were problems before. For example, the statement that "you can't make attacks of opportunity while blinded" from 4e would have problems with characters able to obtain blindsight. There were similar problems with being blinded making it possible to miss someone who is grappling you. So for PF2e they just kind of.. backed off and made it freer again. It still has the traditional d20 problems of identifying the start of combat, 3D combat being way too loose, and being unable to see a candle 20 foot away if there's no light where you are - all of which were quietly fiated in many previous editions, including 4e.
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Feb 25, 2023 20:15
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Splicer posted:The biggest and most important actual combat effects are hidden behind what almost looks like flavour text. It's also unclear if being unable to detect enemies actually does lead to existing enemies becoming undetected, and I've a feeling the answer is "ask your gm". The problem isn't keywords, it's that the person who wrote this condition text is an idiot. Isn't that a claim you can make about any system? It's a good system, the problem is that some of the authors are idiots and so all the bad parts of the systems are just the parts the idiots wrote? The problem is that if you're going to construct everything in your system upon a foundation of keywords, you need someone carefully examining all of the keywords and managing them so that they function properly, integrate with each other, and don't generate unnecessary complexity, and you probably need someone making sure that you don't end up with too many. Those considerations matter at least as much as careful word usage in "natural language" systems. Take the problem of weapon attacks in 5E. There's a set of clear definitions for melee spell attacks, melee weapon attacks, ranged spell attacks, and ranged weapon attacks. But then there's "unarmed attacks," and because the system didn't employ "natural attacks" versus "weapon attacks," that's a floating category with a distinction that operates oddly. A giant ape punching you with a fist is making a "melee weapon attack" but if you swing back with your fist, you're making an "unarmed attack" which is in fact a "weapon attack" but not an attack with a weapon. The real problem here is that there are two distinctions to make: spell attack or not, and ranged attack or not. If it isn't ranged, it must be a melee attack. But if it isn't a spell attack, "weapon attack" as a category breaks down. Treating an unarmed attack as a melee weapon attack makes sense in terms of keywords but not in natural language. But keywords can plunge you into trouble as well, especially if poorly defined. Imagine the weapon situation in a keyword system that's all about adding keywords. A fighter might make a "Flyswatter" attack against a flying foe (which extends the reach of a melee attack and can try to knock the enemy to the ground), which has built-in keywords but then adds the keywords of the weapon being used to make the attack. Here's a possible set of keywords for the attack if it is made with a silver-plated Lucerne Hammer: Bludgeoning, Extended, Fighter, Heavy, Maneuver, Martial, Melee, Piercing, Polearm, Precise, Prone, Reach, Silver, Strength-based, Two-handed, Weapon. How many of the keywords actually matter in play? Do some matter in specific instances but never otherwise, and how important are they to include? Is it better to have a system that registers all the potential complexities or a system that tries to avoid complexity (say, by having the Lucerne Hammer deal only bludgeoning damage instead of a choice between blunt and piercing, or by not differentiating between polearm types, or by not differentiating between polearms and other weapons, or fighters and other martials, etc, etc)? Do you need to include all possible keywords in case some future writer/rules supplement makes their presence important? "This monster takes only half damage from attacks which have the Martial keyword." If your fighter is a dwarf fighter, should "Dwarf" be added as a keyword to all your attacks? hyphz posted:Several monsters already have precise senses other than vision. The problem is greater the other way - many regularly stated abilities (not including "blinded") use the word "vision" when they actually mean "a precise sense". You could avoid the whole problem by simplifying: just define other "precise senses" as behaving like vision for the purposes of the perception rules. A lot of them intuitively should, I expect: Truesight is sight, after all. Something like Blindsense or Echolocation or Tremorsense can just be written as "treat this sense as a type of vision for purposes of other rules" and you're finished. That covers both perception/blinding and anything else that requires sight (spell targeting, say). And if the "blinded" condition means "loss of sight or any sense that is treated as sight," then blinding effects work perfectly well on creatures with alternate forms of vision. For Echolocation, say "immune to the blinded condition, but treat the deafened condition as if the creature were blinded"; for Tremorsense, just "immune to the blinded condition." If you only increase the cognitive load in exceptional cases, instead of building a more complex system that differentiates when such differentiation rarely matters, then the system works just as well and you reduce the chances of imprecision elsewhere. If almost everyone uses vision as a sense, introducing "precise sense" applying to something everyone has but that also applies to these few exceptions means everyone has to track the keyword, instead of forcing such tracking only in the few exceptions that can sense precisely with a non-vision sense.
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Feb 25, 2023 20:27
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Siivola posted:I sincerely think it's not great for a new or casual player sitting at a table with a physical book, because they effectively need to learn this completely new language (with symbols) and that's going to take a lot of flipping back and forth. I think it's a particularly bad fit for the "system doesn't matter, ask you GM" kind of play culture WotC's cultivated where sitting with your nose in the book trying to find a rule is a particular drag and everything is probably an advantage or a disadvantage. I'm willing to accept that my group was an exception somehow, but this just never happened when I ran 20 levels of 4E Scales of War for people who'd never played D&D before (and I hadn't played since high school). I was the only person who owned any books at all. I taught the rules they needed for level 1 characters and as they levelled up and took new abilities we had a one page keyword reference that gathered dust after three or four sessions
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Feb 25, 2023 20:41
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Tarnop posted:I'm willing to accept that my group was an exception somehow, but this just never happened when I ran 20 levels of 4E Scales of War for people who'd never played D&D before (and I hadn't played since high school). I was the only person who owned any books at all. I taught the rules they needed for level 1 characters and as they levelled up and took new abilities we had a one page keyword reference that gathered dust after three or four sessions For us we all owned the books but never used them because of the character builder and the power cards it auto generated. We had our own decks and everything we needed was literally printed on each card there was no flipping you just read the card at the table. Like there is a lot I can complain about with 4e like the fights dragging on too many rounds before the fixed math. Expertise feats that where mandatory to fix math and huge choice paralysis when building characters between all the power options and multiclass feats and magic items. But clarity of rules and ease of running the game wasn't ever an issue for us either. New players maybe struggled when to use dailies but that was never any different then playing a wizard in 3rd so it just wasn't a huge deal. I will preface that most of us played magic the gathering so the cards explaining the rules may have been very natural to us so maybe we aren't a good example either. Vire fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 20:52
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I play Magic now but didn't at the time. I think we had played Pandemic a couple of times beforehand? We had also all played WoW so were pretty used to powers with consistent effects between them like stun and daze
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Feb 25, 2023 21:02
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Narsham posted:You could avoid the whole problem by simplifying: just define other "precise senses" as behaving like vision for the purposes of the perception rules. A lot of them intuitively should, I expect: Truesight is sight, after all. Something like Blindsense or Echolocation or Tremorsense can just be written as "treat this sense as a type of vision for purposes of other rules" and you're finished. That covers both perception/blinding and anything else that requires sight (spell targeting, say). And if the "blinded" condition means "loss of sight or any sense that is treated as sight," then blinding effects work perfectly well on creatures with alternate forms of vision. For Echolocation, say "immune to the blinded condition, but treat the deafened condition as if the creature were blinded"; for Tremorsense, just "immune to the blinded condition." This is pretty much what's in the rulebook already: quote:DETECTING WITH OTHER SENSES
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Feb 25, 2023 21:17
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gtrmp posted:DETECTING WITH OTHER SENSES Thing is, that isn't so much rules as a heads-up that GM fiat may be required at that point. It's certainly very badly worded. "If a monster uses a sense other than vision" - does that mean exclusively so, or not? A human can use hearing or scent, after all, it just won't be very effective. Likewise, "a creature that has echolocation might use hearing as a primary sense" - there's no definition of a "primary" sense in the book. The odd thing is that there is a defined term for this in the system - a precise sense - which this paragraph carefully avoids using. Naturally, that makes the reader wonder why? What's the exception that means that term can't be used? What's the difference between "a noisy chamber" and a "great enough din"? It gives the conditions for being hidden, concealed, and invisible, but what about the other two conditions in the detection system, undetected and unnoticed? There's also a Dazzled status which is given by certain effects. But nothing at all about what Dazzled might mean for creatures with other precise senses. You can guess that a loud noise might "dazzle" a creature with echolocation, but how loud does it have to be? The game explicity states which effects Dazzle vision, but nothing about anything else, so do you need a Thunderwave spell? Or can you just shout or play really loud? When you hide, you can abstractly "take precautions against special senses", and there's a Feat that does this automatically. But can you really just do that? What if you don't know what senses the enemy has? What if there are multiple enemy with different senses - is it really no harder to hide yourself from hearing and scent than from hearing alone? Now, it might seem unnecessarily nitpicky to try to say that these should all be addressed, but that's not really my issue. My issue is that it's papering over the fact that the involved, 4e-style tactical resolution that PF2e looks like it has suddenly collapses when you get creatures with precise non-vision senses. It doesn't collapse in the sense that the game becomes unplayable, but it stops being the same tactical game and becomes a GM-may-I game. And this would be OK if it was rare, but it's not among certain creatures, and many of whom have senses like "lifesense" which has a very vague definition to hide the fact that it's basically "FU rogue you can't hide". Again, this tends to also happen with flight and abruptly started battles, in both 4e and PF2e.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:16
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Why can't a GM make those decisions and lay them out at the beginning of the encounter?
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Feb 25, 2023 23:21
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Boba Pearl posted:Why can't a GM make those decisions and lay them out at the beginning of the encounter? they might not know that it's going to come up. Or might not want the party to know it's going to come up.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:23
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Wait a GM won't know what encounters are in the game they're running? And isn't there explicit rules about recall lore checks that let the party know these things about the monster? What would the GM do if someone does a recall knowledge check on a monster in an encounter that they didn't plan?
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Feb 25, 2023 23:27
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Boba Pearl posted:Why can't a GM make those decisions and lay them out at the beginning of the encounter? Oh, they can. But then the game isn't making them, which is the impression that it gives. And if you're doing an adventure path, then the shared experience is no longer as certain to be shared (other GMs may have made the same decisions differently).
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Feb 25, 2023 23:37
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Tarnop posted:I'm willing to accept that my group was an exception somehow, but this just never happened when I ran 20 levels of 4E Scales of War for people who'd never played D&D before (and I hadn't played since high school). I was the only person who owned any books at all. I taught the rules they needed for level 1 characters and as they levelled up and took new abilities we had a one page keyword reference that gathered dust after three or four sessions Meanwhile being attacked by an invisible enemy in Pathfinder 2E means you're "flat footed" - a term that probably hasn't seen mainstream print this millennium and the first immediate association most zoomers will have with is "that thing rich people say they have when poor people ask them why they didn't fight in those wars they love so much".
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Feb 25, 2023 23:43
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hyphz posted:Oh, they can. But then the game isn't making them, which is the impression that it gives. And if you're doing an adventure path, then the shared experience is no longer as certain to be shared (other GMs may have made the same decisions differently). I've never known a single person who gives a poo poo about having an identical experience to someone else playing the same module in a different group. In fact, quite the opposite
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Feb 25, 2023 23:45
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Boba Pearl posted:Wait a GM won't know what encounters are in the game they're running? And isn't there explicit rules about recall lore checks that let the party know these things about the monster? What would the GM do if someone does a recall knowledge check on a monster in an encounter that they didn't plan? not what I was saying. The "might not know it's going to come up" was if they don't know that a member of the party is going to cast something that messes with senses in a certain way. Also I was probably misinterpreting "lay them out" as something you didn't mean. I was imagining a GM saying "Everyone roll for initiative, and so we have the rules set out correctly we're counting 'see' as being 'precisely sense' for spells like magic missile'."
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Feb 25, 2023 23:45
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Splicer posted:This is, again, because 4E was good at it. All its keywords were very intuitive Yeah, the point I was trying to make is that PF2E's reported failure (I haven't played it) to handle keywords well should not be used as a condemnation of the idea of keywords in an RPG. Paizo just aren't very good at writing rules
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Feb 25, 2023 23:49
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That's super fair, I could not begin to understand the appeal of an adventurer's path, so if that's a requirement, than I could definitely see where that's an issue.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:53
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Lamuella posted:not what I was saying. The "might not know it's going to come up" was if they don't know that a member of the party is going to cast something that messes with senses in a certain way. Ah yeah, my fault for being unclear, I meant something along the lines of, "As part of your lore: Knowledge, you know this creature uses TREMOR SENSE, and so could be effected by the following things: but is immune to the following: Keep that in mind."
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Feb 25, 2023 23:55
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Boba Pearl posted:Ah yeah, my fault for being unclear, I meant something along the lines of, "As part of your lore: Knowledge, you know this creature uses TREMOR SENSE, and so could be effected by the following things: but is immune to the following: Keep that in mind." OK, then a GM should definitely have that in mind.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:57
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Narsham posted:Isn't that a claim you can make about any system? It's a good system, the problem is that some of the authors are idiots and so all the bad parts of the systems are just the parts the idiots wrote? Narsham posted:The problem is that if you're going to construct everything in your system upon a foundation of keywords, you need someone carefully examining all of the keywords and managing them so that they function properly, integrate with each other, and don't generate unnecessary complexity, and you probably need someone making sure that you don't end up with too many. Those considerations matter at least as much as careful word usage in "natural language" systems. A bad workman will do a bad job with good tools but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as good tools.
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Feb 26, 2023 00:16
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Pathfinder 2e's vision and stealth rules in particular are particularly badly written and badly organized, which is why I did an editorial rewrite of them. Most of the other conditions are at least a little better, though (like a lot of things in PF 2e) they have that whole "recursive mechanical references" thing going on a lot.
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Feb 26, 2023 02:25
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hyphz posted:Thing is, that isn't so much rules as a heads-up that GM fiat may be required at that point. It's certainly very badly worded. I think part of the issue here is that RPGs are a mix of hard "the game is balanced around these concepts, please respect them even when it makes less narrative sense" core mechanics and more loose "anything can happen" universal resolution mechanics. Keyword precision and design is really important for the first type, but is not worth the added rules complexity most of the time for the second--GM fiat is probably just fine for those situations. Like, specifying that you can't flank or do an AoO while blind is good and should be clearly spelled out--an Attack of Opportunity is a somewhat gamey mechanic that probably should be consistently applied from table to table. The question of if you can toss a wand to a friend while blind is way more narrative and rare, so I'd say it makes way more sense to let the GM make a ruling on how to handle that situation than to try to have it be explicitly covered by the game's ruleset. Making the optimal way to toss a wand to a friend be a matter of rules mastery rather than lateral thinking just sounds way less fun on both a "how long does it take to resolve this" and a "how fun is it for the player" level. Of course, this assumes some baseline of good practices in how GMs handle rulings--the ruling should definitely be clear to the player before they commit to any action. Guidelines on how to make fair and good rulings should just 100% be part of the rulebook.
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Feb 26, 2023 03:14
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 turns out the video that starts with the HR guy telling the CEO not to do this didn't stay up long
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Feb 26, 2023 09:12
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edit: nvm i lost context and a friend reached out, also hi rachel
Ominous Jazz fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 18:59
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For what its worth, PF2Es sense and condition rules work well in play when dealing with things like invisible opponents. I've run several combat scenes with them on Foundry and they handle it well.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:45
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hyphz posted:
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Feb 26, 2023 21:00
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MadScientistWorking posted:No. Not really. You can still hide from lifesense. Why? I can't find anything in both directions. YggdrasilTM fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 21:27
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The feat Eclipsed Vitality gives a character the ability to foil lifesense when avoiding notice, hiding, or sneaking. Feels like this wouldn't be necessary if you could hide from lifesense without it https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=3613 quote:Source Knights of Lastwall pg. 80
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Feb 26, 2023 22:53
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Lamuella posted:The feat Eclipsed Vitality gives a character the ability to foil lifesense when avoiding notice, hiding, or sneaking. Feels like this wouldn't be necessary if you could hide from lifesense without it No, it explicitly doesn't. It says you always count as taking precautions. What this means is you don't ever have to do anything special to do it, as seen here: https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=785 This directs us to the Special Senses rules, which say: quote:The Stealth skill is designed to use Hide for avoiding visual detection and Avoid Notice and Sneak to avoid being both seen and heard. For many special senses, a player can describe how they're avoiding detection by that special sense and use the most applicable Stealth action. For instance, a creature stepping lightly to avoid being detected via tremorsense would be using Sneak. You have to describe how you're doing something special to avoid lifesense if sneaking around someone with it. You do not require a feat to do so, the feat just means you don't have to explain how you're doing it.
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Feb 26, 2023 22:57
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And how do you hide from lifesense?
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Feb 26, 2023 23:05
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Lamuella posted:The feat Eclipsed Vitality gives a character the ability to foil lifesense when avoiding notice, hiding, or sneaking. Feels like this wouldn't be necessary if you could hide from lifesense without it
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Feb 26, 2023 23:06
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YggdrasilTM posted:And how do you hide from lifesense? Apparently, you paint yourself in ashes, but I would imagine that there's any number of weird magic rituals you could come up with to make yourself appear to not be alive to magic senses. Is this less than writing an explicit how-to guide for how to defeat a magical sense that doesn't exist in reality? Yes, sure, but you're clearly intended to be able to do so.
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Feb 26, 2023 23:10
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Mors Rattus posted:You have to describe how you're doing something special to avoid lifesense if sneaking around someone with it. You do not require a feat to do so, the feat just means you don't have to explain how you're doing it. Which makes it essential, because with the only description of lifesense being "Lifesense allows a monster to sense the vital essence of living and undead creatures within the listed range", there's no way to describe anything non-magical that would somehow avoid it (I'm reminded of the old Murphy's Rules comic - "Think Dead. Think Dead. Think Dead."). And you can't describe something magical because that would have to be a spell/item, as if you could just do magical things by describing them then you could do anything. We had an amusing one today.. the Thaumaturge class has an "exploit vulnerability" action that lets you work out a weakness of a creature "that you can see". We were fighting wisps that turned invisible most of the time and then become visible for a fleeting moment when attacking. The Thaumaturge had to ready an action to wait until the wisp turned visible and then quickly think about how to fight them before they disappeared again..
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Feb 26, 2023 23:11
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