D&D was never meant to be realistic imo. Yes in the real world guns did revolutionize warfare. In PF 1E all it does is make one class of ranged weapon much better than the rest.  In PF 1E Giants or large creatures have low touch AC. Both times running and playing games with a Gunslinger it was a turkey shoot with them almost never missing.

Quote from: sureshot;1053611D&D was never meant to be realistic imo. Yes in the real world guns did revolutionize warfare. In PF 1E all it does is make one class of ranged weapon much better than the rest.  In PF 1E Giants or large creatures have low touch AC. Both times running and playing games with a Gunslinger it was a turkey shoot with them almost never missing.

If guns have no advantage over a stone age weapon like bows and arrows, there is no point to introducing guns. Just make an archer and fluff them as a gunslinger.

Or play another system with rules so simple that it does not have to worry about game balance.

It's one thing to give guns a advantage it's another to make them hands down the best ranged weapon in PF 1E.
Their is no good reason to.me at least for the Paizo devs to have done so. By that logic shortbows should do better damage at close range. Longbows should have double or triple the ranges listed. Crossbow should have the ability to bypass armour. Again you will never convince me it was a good idea.

I'm sure nobody else cares, but I have a longstanding problem with Paizo's monster manuals. The writers like to claim that, when they rip monsters from myth and folklore, they are more faithful to the original roots. They are not.

Aside from some names, their monster lore is fabricated. Several of their monsters are lifted more or less directly from the Monster Girl Encyclopedia (e.g. alraune, jorogumo, thriae).

For example, they turned the mandrake into a generic man-eating demonic plant. In medieval bestiaries, the mandrake was defenseless aside from its cry, was contained by a circle of iron, was ground to make miracle cures and love potions, and sprouted from the earth where it was watered by the drippings of a hanged man. All awesome qualities, all absent from Pathfinder.

Quote from: sureshot;1053625It's one thing to give guns a advantage it's another to make them hands down the best ranged weapon in PF 1E.
Their is no good reason to.me at least for the Paizo devs to have done so. By that logic shortbows should do better damage at close range. Longbows should have double or triple the ranges listed. Crossbow should have the ability to bypass armour. Again you will never convince me it was a good idea.

The problem is PFs math and how armor deflects damage rather than reduces damage.

Paizo devs thought bypassing armor was more "realistic". All guns really needed to do was more damage to both be more useful than bows (at least for the untrained non Hercules strength people) and not break the math engine.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053589Man, if only Paizo had some conservative, hesitant of change, diverse perspectives in their meeting rooms, they might have taken a more measured approach to living with 5e rather than spending 3(?) years or so dumping talent and effort trying to reinvent the RPG wheel with 2e.

Let me just say I loved this post.

Reading over the revised rules for building monsters, I am overjoyed that Paizo finally stopped treating monster "types" as monster classes. What annoys me is that they still have monster types and did not take this opportunity to overhaul the mechanic because it is a silly mechanic. 5e's type mechanic still suffers from the types being arbitrarily and vaguely defined, but it is still better than 3e.

Why do we need a distinction between humanoids and monstrous humanoids? Animals and vermin and magical beasts? Aberrations and outsiders? Couldn't a lot of the baggage attached to types be represented in a better way? The baggage results in the types being pigeonholed and restricts creativity in monster design.

For example, the extraplanar subtype should be changed to a condition rather than treated as a subtype. Conditions are temporary things that may change, whereas you would think subtypes are integral to a statblock. Additionally, the "native outsider" type/subtype/PC race option should really be replaced with a "planetouched humanoid" subtype. The outsider type could be split into separate types for each alignment or something.

Of course, I would prefer if the type mechanic was replaced with a simple tagging system that could also be better integrated with the special qualities mechanic. For example, [mindless] could be treated as a tag and special quality. The body/soul duality thing (which is important for obscure spells like possession) could be a tag/quality applied to ghosts and demons and whatever.

Ideally, I want to be able to label genies as elementals and have animal companions from the elemental planes and similarly creative ideas which the rules arbitrarily bar.

Really??

Oh for pity's sake !

Why play the playtest scenario? - Because you might have FUN dammit!! - Thats Why.

This past Sunday I had to work a double at the store and the local Pathfinder Society has scheduled Playtest game sessions at our store. It was just quiet enough at times that I could watch and listen in while still doing retail stuff like straightening shelves and ringing up people.

Those 6 or 7 people were having fun. The GM was being very fair and would explain things that might be different. I remember humorous encounters with Goblins that they had. (ONe player was foolishly a tad loud wile walking in a tunnel - his shield scraped the walls)

They all seemed to have a good time, there even appeared to be a bit of immersion going on.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;1053754Really??

Oh for pity's sake !

Why play the playtest scenario? - Because you might have FUN dammit!! - Thats Why.

This past Sunday I had to work a double at the store and the local Pathfinder Society has scheduled Playtest game sessions at our store. It was just quiet enough at ti,es that I could watch and listen in while still doing retail stuff like straightening shelves and ringing up people.

Those 6 or 7 people were having fun. The GM was being very fair and would explain things that might be different. I remember humorous encounters with Goblins that they had. (ONe player was foolishly a tad loud wile walking in a tunnel - his shield scraped the walls)

They all seemed to have a good time, there even appeared to be a bit of immersion going on.


- Ed C.

Far be it for me to criticize people having fun. I like some of the design concepts. But I freely admit to being a 4E fan and they do utilize some 4E elements. What I find hilarious is that quite a few "h4ters" are some of the out spoken voices over at Paizo cheering on change and the new direction. I'm finding Immense enjoyment at their fans basically at each others throats

Quote from: S'mon;1053576They're a D&D publisher. They do D&D. 5e D&D has an SRD. 5e is very popular. If they want to stay in business long term they should be publishing for 5e, just as they published for 3e.

Paizo's strength is pumping out glossing looking adventures at a fast rate and getting people to buy them. Their strength has certainly never been at rules-fu. They correctly decided not to support 4e because there was no OGL or SRD for 4e, just a terrible licence. 5e reversed course and is hugely successful, but WoTC's 5e adventures are still not very good. That's where the gap in the market is - back where they started.

I was under the impression that 5ed's OGL is a lot more restrictive than 3ed's which would make it harder for them to go back to their 3ed role. Think that would be good for both camps, it'd let PF do what they're good at and help lead PF players back to D&D.

Maybe I'm wrong about the legalities, I haven't followed 5ed that closely mostly thinknig "eh, it's fine, I guess."

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1053610That is a bad example. In real life guns revolutionized warfare. They are vastly superior to bows and arrows. If people did not want them to break a fantasy setting, they should not have introduced guns at all.

Anyhow, Paizo could easily make money by converting their bestiaries, classes, adventure paths, etc to 5e. Unless you plan to fight an edition war, 5e and PF are not all that different since they are both built on the d20 mechanic. 5e just has way simpler rules to accomplish the same thing.

Onyx Path released Scarred Lands for both PF and 5e in order to hedge their bets. I looked at the 5e book and I was fairly impressed by the creativity. I might even run it someday once I can find a decent Tome of Battle substitute.

Well for a long time guns were used not because they were better than longbows but because it was a hell of a lot easier to teach a bunch of peasants how to use guns half-way decently than it was to teach them to use bows half-way decently. It took a long time for a well-trained guy with a gun to be more effective than a well-trained guy with a bow (mostly because of rate of fire).

But of course gameplay trumps historical accuracy anyway.

Quote from: Daztur;1053761I was under the impression that 5ed's OGL is a lot more restrictive than 3ed's which would make it harder for them to go back to their 3ed role. Think that would be good for both camps, it'd let PF do what they're good at and help lead PF players back to D&D.

Maybe I'm wrong about the legalities, I haven't followed 5ed that closely mostly thinknig "eh, it's fine, I guess."

It's the exact same OGL from 2000 - look at page 1 of the 5e SRD - http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/SRD-OGL_V5.1.pdf

Paizo could perfectly well produce a 5e based game called Trackfinder off this SRD if they wanted.

Quote from: Daztur;1053761Well for a long time guns were used not because they were better than longbows but because it was a hell of a lot easier to teach a bunch of peasants how to use guns half-way decently than it was to teach them to use bows half-way decently. It took a long time for a well-trained guy with a gun to be more effective than a well-trained guy with a bow (mostly because of rate of fire).

Hmm. A long bow can shoot several times faster than an early hand gun can load and fire, and likely more accurate too. But the gun will penetrate almost any armour, while the bow definitely will not.

Hand guns really occupied more the crossbow niche, being both slow loading and requiring relatively little practice, but the gun is vastly superior at armour penetration.

We have the tale of the early United States debating adopting the longbow, because on the late 18th century battlefield with almost no armour the long bow in trained hands certainly would have been generally superior. But apart from the months of practice (muscle development) needed to effectively use a war bow, the result of an army adopting the bow would have been for their enemies to simply put on armour again, negating the advantage.

The armor penetration of early crossbows and gun compared to an English longbow is overplayed.

The issue was feeding longbowmen to be strong enough to pull the bow plus all the training they needed to do. It was a full time job. Musketeers much less so.

Bows could punch through armor too, but when the poor man also switched to range weapons, armor stopped being worth the weight due to a severe lack of melee threats.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053778The armor penetration of early crossbows and gun compared to an English longbow is overplayed.

Crossbow bolts don't go through plate armour. Same as longbow arrows.
Bullets & musket balls do go through plate armour, as a general rule. 'Bullet proofing' really wasn't (they'd use an under-charged pistol for demonstration purposes). Youtube channels Scholagladiatoria & Metatron I recall have good stuff on this, Shadiversity might also.

Quote from: Batman;1053760Far be it for me to criticize people having fun. I like some of the design concepts. But I freely admit to being a 4E fan and they do utilize some 4E elements. What I find hilarious is that quite a few "h4ters" are some of the out spoken voices over at Paizo cheering on change and the new direction. I'm finding Immense enjoyment at their fans basically at each others throats

If Paizo really cared about fixing the rules they would take cues from d20 derivatives like True20, FantasyCraft, Trailblazer, Fantasy Concepts by Jason Kemp, easydamus.com's Basic d20, and so forth.