I can see why they added level to everything.

I'm working on tables for moderately optimized character progression for 3.5. Basically what I held myself too when making characters. And man, the math is pretty flat.

Like I would always hold myself to the "don't murder the party" standard by at least having a will save equal to my level. And AC increases after armor is basically +1 per level (optimal wbl would maximise that sooner rather than later).

My goal is too make a simpler rules set to play with existing 3.X material (with Pathfinder as the benchmark) so I'm not making it flat increases everywhere. But I see why 4e and PF2e went that route.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053815My goal is too make a simpler rules set to play with existing 3.X material (with Pathfinder as the benchmark) so I'm not making it flat increases everywhere. But I see why 4e and PF2e went that route.

Despite the advertising, Pathfinder was never perfectly compatible with other 3.x material. Every 3pp needs some conversions between different implementations of the d20 rules.

Quote from: Daztur;1053569Well there's a middle ground between standant an edition treadmill. You want a situation in which the bulk of the playerbase is ready for a new edition and relatively unified about what they want fixed otherwise you'll lose too may people.



I'm just not sure what I'd do in their shoes. They got a big influx of new players who were pissed at 4ed and 3.5ed with some bells and whistles was enough for them. But that's not a constant source of new customers and I don't see PF well-positioned to bring in people who started with 5ed and are ready for something new without pissing off the 3.5ed diehards. If they don't make a new edition they'll slowly wither away, if they do make a new edition they at least get and influx of cash before withering away so I'm not sure that doing a new edition of PF is a bad idea as their raison de etre is going away in either case as 4ed becomes just a memory.

Of coures "make their design not suck so much" would help but from a business perspective I'm not sure what course they have going forward to avoid bleeding marketshare.

This is an oft repeated fallacy thats used to justify the edition treadmill and the damn 5 year plan.

The reality is it doesnt work unless the new edition is about say 90% the same. Maybee better organization, new art or such. But aside from TSR and Palladium hardly anyone does this. The marketing idiots keep convincing companies that you have to make huge changes so the older customer base must buy the new book. Except they wont. You lose a huge chunk of customers instead.

And all you had to do was just keep printing the current book and draw in new players and maintain your established customer base rather than telling them to either buy the game all over again or fuck off and die and then wonder why their market keeps shrinking.

"But but we NEEEEEEED a new edition with new rules to draw in new customers!" is a lie.

Pazio is likely about to find this out the hard way.

Yeah Savage Worlds books made during its 2e work just fine now (in its 3e or 4e depending on how you are counting)

Sometimes setting crunch will 'graduate" into the core rules, but new editions tend to be pretty similar. The only drastic changes I've seen were to the chase rules.

But Pinnacle Entertainment is a decentralized company of mainly Southerners. They don't have to pay Seattle office space rent so the amount of money they need to make is probably far lower.

I don't mind new editions as long as *recognized* problems get cleaned up. Most of these issues in D&D and it's later-edition derivatives are emergent issues that people don't notice on a casual examination of the rules. Some are so deep that only by referencing the original design concepts of the earlier editions that you realize *why* the original editions didn't go that route either by intent or "uncommon sense".

Pathfinder is a luxury-liner, dragster, capital-scale fighter, tugboat, hosting a beauty-pageant on the Lido-deck, with Hogwarts below-deck, while doing the trench-run on the Death Star, as Captained by Judge Dredd and co-piloted by Vegetarian Cookie Monster, who is running his election to become an Ombudsmen for Sesame Street against Ben Grimm of Yancy Street... all at the same time.

Pathfinder 2e appears to be wallowing in the same 3.x issues that bogged that system down unnecessarily. In fact the entire premise of *why* Pathfinder 1e was created has been rendered moot for the fact that 5e exists. The costs of going a different route should have been mitigated by a proper creation of a new game that should have been Starfinder, using a new ruleset as a testbed. Instead they just regurgitated some tweaks to an already bloated behemoth and re-skinned it.

@Rhedyn - Good points. Savage Worlds editions are updates to rules that inherently didn't work well, or broke other conditions of the core rules (see: Staggered rules, Chase, etc). Plus the literal hundreds of rules questions and clarifications made to Clint over the years in the intervals of the editions. Top that off with the fact you can easily ignore any of these changes and all the editions are 98% perfectly compatible. And they only cost $8<--- see that? That.

Quote from: Daztur;1053761I was under the impression that 5ed's OGL is a lot more restrictive than 3ed's

It's literally the same OGL as 3e's OGL. There is no "new 5e OGL" it's just the same OGL as before that they dumped their IP into.

Quote from: tenbones;1053908I don't mind new editions as long as *recognized* problems get cleaned up. Most of these issues in D&D and it's later-edition derivatives are emergent issues that people don't notice on a casual examination of the rules. Some are so deep that only by referencing the original design concepts of the earlier editions that you realize *why* the original editions didn't go that route either by intent or "uncommon sense".

Pathfinder is a luxury-liner, dragster, capital-scale fighter, tugboat, hosting a beauty-pageant on the Lido-deck, with Hogwarts below-deck, while doing the trench-run on the Death Star, as Captained by Judge Dredd and co-piloted by Vegetarian Cookie Monster, who is running his election to become an Ombudsmen for Sesame Street against Ben Grimm of Yancy Street... all at the same time.

Pathfinder 2e appears to be wallowing in the same 3.x issues that bogged that system down unnecessarily. In fact the entire premise of *why* Pathfinder 1e was created has been rendered moot for the fact that 5e exists. The costs of going a different route should have been mitigated by a proper creation of a new game that should have been Starfinder, using a new ruleset as a testbed. Instead they just regurgitated some tweaks to an already bloated behemoth and re-skinned it.

@Rhedyn - Good points. Savage Worlds editions are updates to rules that inherently didn't work well, or broke other conditions of the core rules (see: Staggered rules, Chase, etc). Plus the literal hundreds of rules questions and clarifications made to Clint over the years in the intervals of the editions. Top that off with the fact you can easily ignore any of these changes and all the editions are 98% perfectly compatible. And they only cost $8<--- see that? That.

Does anybody have a convenient list of the outstanding issues with 3.x? I have heard so many that I cannot keep track of them all.

Agreed and seconded on Tenbones lengthy post. I don't mind a new edition as long as it fixes major and or minor issues thst the core rpg has. You can keep your recycled, redundant, rehashes with better production values. Decking and Righing for Shadowrun was for our group at least a problem. Almost no one except myself and a handful of players wanted to run tjem. Along came 4e where they fixed them and thst number doubled. Slowly af first but it did.

The other issue about keeping the rpg the same is that everyone likes the setting but hste the rules like Palladium. Or their is no incentive to buy anything new imo. I only need one maybe two core boojs and one of each desired sourcebook.

Quote from: joewolz;1053316Does anyone know why there haven't been any good copycats of this model? Even with lesser production values, the model should work.

Because they aren't profitable.  There's a reason Paizo is a storefront as well as as a gaming company.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1053928Does anybody have a convenient list of the outstanding issues with 3.x? I have heard so many that I cannot keep track of them all.

All of the outstanding issues and grievances for 3.X are subjective and may not be felt or seen by other people who play the system. That said, here's mine which might or not not coincide with others (and I still play and fiddle with 3.5 so in the end its a system I enjoy playing)...

- class design and balance. Its a mess frankly. From the linear fighter, quadratic wizard to Druids and their (I can do it all) to clerics and turn undead shenanigans....it really shows a disparity compared to your basic Fighter or Monk.

All spellcasters get spell bumps at higher levels but also lower level spells get better. The Fighter's entire shtick is basically meh feats that don't progress with level (save a few) and exception based design. Not only do the special attacks (trip, disarm, etc) lose potency due to sizing issues, they require significant investment for minimal gains.

- wealth by level and the assumptions this has on the system. Basically you're not only expected to have certain amount of magical bonuses but the challenges often require them. This, to me, diminished magical items uniqueness and flavor. Not to mention destroy in-game currency.

- Poor adventures. Lets face it, aside from The Sunless Citadel and maybe Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil most of the modules are poop compared to TSR-days.

- monster and NPC design. Why do they *HAVE* to function the same?? This is a concept that only exists in 3.5 as TSR-era, 4E, and 5E all take more liberal routes to making them. And giving all of them class levels at higher levels....please...

- Save or Suck really is just Save vs Boredom. When my players tune out, leave to get pizza, or go on their phones at the table because their character got paralyzed for 5 minutes (whole battles) and battles take 45+ minutes to finish, it sucks and isn't fun. A DM can change this (rolling every round to save or reducing the time to say 1d4 rounds) but that's a "fix".

- magic wins in later levels, putting a stringent hold over specific game plays. When your spellcasters can in whole encounters from say 2-3 spells and they get dozens per day....it loses a certain something. And it puts those who can't cast magic further away from the action.

Those are my biggest peeves. Some are easil fixed. Some tske time. But it also shows what PF 2e could've avoided.

Quote from: Batman;1054002- monster and NPC design. Why do they *HAVE[\I]* to function the same?? This is a concept that only exists in 3.5 as TSR-era, 4E, and 5E all take more liberal routes to making them. And giving all of them class levels at higher levels....please...

This is compounded by 3.5 also trying to give classes something new at every single level. I can kind of see having monsters working likd PC work okay in something like B/X, where you can whip up a PC in a few minutes and special abilities are limited, but it is nightmare in 3.5.

I feel this is one of the strongest signs of how the game was driven by marketing research. Dancey loved to brag about all the polling they did for 3E, and what a bunch of dummies everyone else was for not doing this. There is some value in this kind of research, but you still need to have the designers make tough choice at the end of the day and design a solid game. With 3E, they just took every single thing that everyone said they wanted and put it all in the game, even when it was clearly a terrible combination, like making NPCs work like PCs at the same time you greatly complicate the complexity of PCs.

I'd say this one thing did more to ruin the game for me than anything else. It was a chore to prep, and a headache to run past anything but the lowest levels.

That also raises another issue. I hate 3E more because none of the problems are really all the apparent at first level on either the GM or player side. It's a game where everyone plays a session and decides they really like. Only once everyone is invested in the campaign do the problems all manifest, leading you into a sunk cost fallacy where you keep running the thing even after you realized what a mess it is.

NPC and PC parity is very important to me. It's important for immersion.

I see no reason to create two subsystems when one should suffice.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1054020NPC and PC parity is very important to me. It's important for immersion.

I see no reason to create two subsystems when one should suffice.

I like it too, but it can only work if the system is concise enough to stay manageable. If the stats for a PC or NPC require me to reference the book (or set of books) over and over again because I can't remember what a talent/feat/perk does, then make sure characters don't have dozens of them.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1054020NPC and PC parity is very important to me. It's important for immersion.

I see no reason to create two subsystems when one should suffice.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1054054I like it too, but it can only work if the system is concise enough to stay manageable. If the stats for a PC or NPC require me to reference the book (or set of books) over and over again because I can't remember what a talent/feat/perk does, then make sure characters don't have dozens of them.

I like it as well, but I do think that the NPC classes should be simpler - with only bosses (or whatever) actually using the PC classes.

Even using weaker/simpler NPC classes they would still be made with the same rules.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1054020NPC and PC parity is very important to me. It's important for immersion.

I see no reason to create two subsystems when one should suffice.

Parity is.....flexible. The problem arises when the conceptual design is significantly different, and a lot of that is derived from the limitations of the Action Economy. Having only one enemy in a battle is almost certainly going to result in a quick death because the adventure party takes 4-5 actions to just one of their own.

How would I, for example, make an Orc Chieftain/Warrior that wields two battle axes, has some sort of menacing aura, gets a bite attack, and make it hard for enemies to flee him when he's within striking range AND do all of this for a group of level 5 player characters? Because in 4th and 5th edition I could whip this up in about 25 minutes using just one book. In 3.5, it'd be a damn nightmare. From class levels to figuring out how he gets a "Bite" attack without significant attack penalties and wielding two one-handed weapons, what feats and skills to the aura part, etc AND keeping him in the CR 5-7 Range that doesn't fall into either Camp A: dead in one turn OR Camp B: instant TPK. Not to mention that even were I to pull this off, this BBEG is still bound to 1 attack per turn after moving 5-feet unless I just randomly give him pounce (just cause....).

I get that for some reason having them "build" by the same means puts everyone on equal footing and that might lend it self to feeling "realistic", however I don't think it makes the game better.