Quote from: Rhedyn;1033825Yeah you can get some magic going in 5e and actually have fun, for me it peters out around level 4 when the systematic problems start to accumulate, but I also prefer high level play in general and 5e offers a worse experience than PF.

I guess our experiences are very different. I loathe running 3e/PF above 8th level, IME it's horrid.

Edit: 1e Pit Fiends have 13d8 hit points. They are about as threatening as 5e Pit Fiends, ie you probably want to be 8th or 9th level before taking one on. Unfortunately 5e calls them CR 20 which gives people the impression you should be eg 17th level to face one, but a large 5e party at 9th level is like a small 5e party at 18th level.

The Challenge Rating system, in Pathfinder and D&D, is a hot mess.  Not just for rating Pit Fiends, but for pretty much anything that is more, or potentially more, than a bag of hit points.  5e Pit Fiends are mere shadows of what they were in OD&D/AD&D.  No idea about 2e AD&D.

It will be interesting to see what Paizo does with the CR system, if anything.

Edit: 1e pit fiends could teleport without error.  Killing one would be near impossible.  It would just leave. Looking at them now, 2hp/round regeneration, Charm Person, Animate Dead, Gate in other demons... etc.  Much more formidable than the 5e version.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1033847Oh man it's like we found it in a dungeon and the room we found it in had a big orb that it wanted.

Oh man, it's like your DM wanted you to have a fighting chance instead of leveraging all its strengths.

QuoteThe game itself says we should win that medium encounter. Either we can't win encounters that the game says we can or we do defeat 3 Pitfiends a day with level 9 characters.

Both options are dumb.

"Either we should be able to win, or we shouldn't...both options are dumb" is dumb. There aren't a lot of other choices. First you're whining that you were able to defeat a Pit Fiend. Now you're whining that if the DM had set up an encounter to maximally leverage its strength, you wouldn't have been able to win. Friend, D&D has long been a game where a sufficiently clever DM who hates you sufficiently much can wreck your 9th-level party with kobolds just to prove a point...and where a sufficiently clever player with a neato ring, a magic cape, and a coupla potions and scrolls can sneak through the Temple of Elemental Evil and unleash a fungus demon on an unsuspecting world just for lulz.

And yes, the CR system in 5e is pretty hand-wavy, but the only edition that really had a solid difficulty rating system was 4e. Which, uh, had some problems winning over the traditional D&D crowd.

QuoteWas that AD&D Pitfiend just 13HD or 13HD plus lots of flat health from higher levels along with a slew of special abilities?

You should probably lurk more and learn about what pre-3.x D&D was like.

QuotePF wouldn't let us do that. PF2e probably won't either. Couldn't do that in 4e.

You should probably lurk more if you think this is a winning argument among this crowd.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1033868You should probably lurk more if you think this is a winning argument among this crowd

The same crowd telling me how much stronger early AD&D Pitfiends are compared to 5e?

Also it's a PF thread, so I will go out of my way to inject something PF relevant. Like "Should 2e let you kill multiple Pitfiends a day regardless of size?"

Meanwhile an RC D&D Pitfiend equivalent would be a Sphere of Entropy Greater Immortal with -10 AC, 250 HP, at will casting of any spell, can only be hurt by +5 Weapons or greater, take minimum roll damage, immune to poison, immune to mortal spells, negates magic (including weapons) within 5ft 60% of the time each round, and that is just the RC rules not a more fleshed out wrath of the Immortals version.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1033871Meanwhile an RC D&D Pitfiend equivalent would be a Sphere of Entropy Greater Immortal with -10 AC, 250 HP, at will casting of any spell, can only be hurt by +5 Weapons or greater, take minimum roll damage, immune to poison, immune to mortal spells, negates magic (including weapons) within 5ft 60% of the time each round, and that is just the RC rules not a more fleshed out wrath of the Immortals version.

Rhedyn, I'm really glad you've discovered a version of D&D that you like, and that your arguments here aren't trivially disproved by opening the rulebook. But there is no way that throwing an immortal set monster at non-immortal level BECMI characters is the same situation as AD&D or 5e characters taking on a pit fiend. Pit fiends are monsters designed to be fought at some level by PCs. The immortal and non-immortal BECMI rules, while theoretically part of the same edition, just really aren't.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1033853"flat health from higher levels?"  What in the name of Crom's hairy nutsack does that even MEAN?

In older editions, but newer to you, after level 10, instead of rolling a die, classes got a set number of HP, like +1 or 2.  I think the Fighter class got to add their Con bonus (if any) to it.  I don't have my 1e (reprints) or my old 2e books on hand anymore, so I can't be more specific.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1033871The same crowd telling me how much stronger early AD&D Pitfiends are compared to 5e?

AD&D is generally regarded as having a bit more weight than 4e & PF around here when it comes to how D&D is "supposed" to work.

You're being almost intentionally obtuse. You have this idea of how D&D is "supposed" to work based mainly on your experience with prior WotC editions, where putting "20" next to a monster means it has bonuses so high that nothing with a "9" next to it can successfully roll against it, ergo such encounters should be automatic TPKs. You also seem to assume that the 3.PF version of a monster you know is the authoritative one. Neither of those are true.

There are some ways 5e is more like AD&D or even OD&D than 3.5 or 4e. There are some ways it's like 3.5. There are things it cribs from 4e. Overall, there is very little that 5e does that is completely unprecedented in D&D history, including both a 9th-level fighter being able to stab a pit fiend and the difficulty rating of a monster not being an ironclad rule you can plug into a calculator and get the expected number of rounds it will take N characters of Mth level to kill it.

QuoteAlso it's a PF thread

Every thread on this forum is actually an OD&D thread if you wait long enough.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1033873Rhedyn, I'm really glad you've discovered a version of D&D that you like, and that your arguments here aren't trivially disproved by opening the rulebook. But there is no way that throwing an immortal set monster at non-immortal level BECMI characters is the same situation as AD&D or 5e characters taking on a pit fiend. Pit fiends are monsters designed to be fought at some level by PCs. The immortal and non-immortal BECMI rules, while theoretically part of the same edition, just really aren't.

Hmmmm a party of max level characters might have a shot at it if part of their path to Immortality was to slay one on its home plane.
A grandmaster of the two handed sword level 36 paladin could hit on a 2 and thus gets all 4 attacks. With 16 strength, he would do 16 damage a hit.
If the wizard or cleric could find a way to counter cure-all (either with a well timed anto magic field or something else) then the potential to win becomes a doable.
Overwise you would need 4 max level fighters to win and all get lucky (60% anti magic) in the same round before the Immortal kills them.

I could see a party of legendary near Immortals defeating one greater Immortal.
You are right that the comparison would be unfair if the fight wasn't doable and I didn't crunch numbers until this post. But this satisfies what I want even more than PF (Pitfiend should be doable at lvl15 in a 7 man party, which is oddly when that game starts to break down)

I still maintain - if you're going to do Pathfinder, why not go all the way and go Fantasycraft? I'm saying this strictly from the perspective that Pathfinder made no serious attempts at balancing the massive amount of mechanics it used. I have zero belief that PF2e will either.

So why not just use something that does, if you're looking for a ruleset in that taxonomical region of the Crunchosphere?

The race/ancestry thing is impossible to talk about without getting into politics, because it's completely a political motivation inserted into gaming.

Race, obviously, is "problematic" and the fact that everyone uses it when they really should be using species, just makes it even more so.
Moving to species for Elf, Dwarf, Lizardman, whatever, would be correct, but also doesn't allow Half-elf, Quarter Demon, one-sixteenth Yuan-Ti type characters that charop builders and snowflakes both crave.

Ancestry does the following:

• It's more correct than race, not as limiting as species as a game design term.
• It fulfills the political checkbox of eliminating the conflating of race and species.
• It fulfills the political checkbox of moving people to think that no one is 100% pure anything, we're all a mixture of ancestries.

Aside from a little bit of cynical eyerolling, I don't really have a problem with it.  It's a better term, really, for all those reasons.

The irony that I don't think Paizo will see coming is, "Ancestry" is essentially Genetics, which opens up a whole nother can of worms if Ancestries affect Intelligence, Pathfinder 2.0 will become the game of choice for the "genetics is destiny" crowd.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1033886The irony that I don't think Paizo will see coming is, "Ancestry" is essentially Genetics, which opens up a whole nother can of worms if Ancestries affect Intelligence, Pathfinder 2.0 will become the game of choice for the "genetics is destiny" crowd.

The Left keeps getting co-opted by the Right, and they keep on not getting why.

From the Paizo site, reviewing the new Elves: http://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lkoy?Big-Beards-and-Pointy-Ears

QuoteElves can see in dim light, and have the highest speed of all the ancestries at 30 feet. (Going to three actions per round brought the other ancestries that were as fast as elves in Pathfinder First Edition down to 25 feet from 30.)

Most D&D iterations have basic movement as 30 feet/6 5-foot squares.  I'm not sure if this is warranted given the extra action (or if it doesn't compensate for the potential extra move enough), or if this is just more fiddliness for fiddliness' sake.

JG

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1033137Actually, "Ancestry" was a term I was considering to replace "race" for design purposes several months before this. Part of it is that race is an unnecessarily hot-button term, part of it that ancestry's a broader term that enables more design space for 'human, but one of my ancestors was a fairy/wood spirit/water nymph/demon/Creature from Beyond' stuff for a more fairy-tale/folklore/legendary kind of game, part of it is that it enables a nice 'ABC' mnemonic--Ancestry, Background, Class.

For me I find it interesting because the game I am working on (when I am not being A lazy fuck) I have A Bunch of races I added like that Sylph / Vilas / Undine ect ect. That are sprites that gave up being sprites and have A fragment of there spirit powers yet and there descendants for A number of generations along with the occasional throw back to it. I called them races with out 2nd thought.

Quote from: S'mon;1033145I like 'partly outbred extended family' - but 'ancestry' means the same as traditional uses of 'race' - the Scots race, the English race, the Dwarven race - a member of that race has ancestors of that race.

Edit: But of course the word 'race' is not offensive to non-whites, that seems to be a trope recently invented by the Baizuo/White Left.

Re Political Correctness and player diversity, there are some traditional pulp fantasy tropes I would avoid now in case of offence to my black player(s). Thinking in particular of some 'savage native' tropes. Maybe my player(s) wouldn't care, but I don't fancy risking it.

I think the savage natives thing would have A lot more to do with how you handled it then any thing because so much of savage vs civilized is perspective take the klingon for example the klingons seem like savages but then as we find out about there culture we find out it's all about having proper manners and edicate .

Post Script edit: Another reaL life example would be the native American Indian the English called them savages but the had A very developed culture and edicate for there peoples.

I guess my players and I are more simplistic than the average bear. We don't transpose the real world into our elf games. We are far more concerned with achieving the next thing than how games reflect modern social and political dynamics.

After reading this thread and what seems to be Political correctness as part of the reasoning for these changes, PF2 sounds god awful and I'll almost certainly not bother with it.
Still, I'll take a look at it when it's released and decide for sure then.

Tolkien 'races' are arguably more like subspecies than species, given that most of them can interbreed.

The traditional meaning of 'race' can cover any ethnic group defined by ancestry, so Ancestry = Race; however D&D has "sub-races" for types of elf dwarf halfling etc, so getting rid of the r-word will cause some linguistic difficulties.

Pit Fiends - what the 1e MM Pit Fiend stats 'mean' depends a lot more on which rules the PCs are using - OD&D, 1e, or 1e+UA all have very different implications. When I ran 1e+UA a single high level Fighter with Weapon Spec could carve through a squadron of pit fiends, though there was an interesting escalating tension as their Wall of Fire damage kept increasing each round as they kept casting it & the earlier Walls stayed. 2e version with at will Fireball got rid of that dynamic.

I think Immortals Set Pit Fiends very rarely saw any play and aren't really part of mainstream D&D experience - do they even officially exist? I recall Demons in the Immortals Set, no Devils.