Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1098894I'm late to party. Did PF2 slaughter any sacred cows in need of slaughtering or did it just tweak some parts of the experience while leaving a bunch of the other big underlying issues untouched? From where I'm standing, we still have sacred cows like separate armor class and reflex saves, martial caster disparity, the Christmas tree effect, min-maxing, and nonsensical alignment. 4e fixed problems like that over a decade ago to great success until Wizards reversed every good decision they made for reasons I can never hope to understand. Fantasy Craft, Trailblazer, 13th Age and countless other retroclones and 3pp introduce amazing helpful innovations that Wizards and Paizo completely ignore.

Why are Wizards and Paizo so resistant to improving their rules? Why does the community not demand better?

I am sorry man, but Paizo doubled down on all of those things and you dont even want to know how many different types of Dragons they have now.

Quote from: Mistwell;1098952First review I've read from someone not gifted the rules, from Jester David (who I tend to like on a variety of forums, though we certainly don't always agree).

I read his review and it seems pretty balanced and non-biased as can be. The one statement that stood out was that in PF2E "Over the course of a level 1 to 20 campaign, each character will find thirty-six permanent magical items." Any system that guarantees that to the players is one I have no interest in playing.

Quote from: Mistwell;1098952First review I've read from someone not gifted the rules, from Jester David (who I tend to like on a variety of forums, though we certainly don't always agree).

His review seems to be as fair and non-biased as can be. The one statement that stood out to me was "Over the course of a level 1 to 20 campaign, each character will find thirty-six permanent magical items." Any game that is balanced around magic items and hands it out to the players just for participating is one I have no interest in playing.

Quote from: Ninneveh;1098976His review seems to be as fair and non-biased as can be. The one statement that stood out to me was "Over the course of a level 1 to 20 campaign, each character will find thirty-six permanent magical items." Any game that is balanced around magic items and hands it out to the players just for participating is one I have no interest in playing.

For me it was:

QuoteThis is not an easy game to learn. While arguably simpler (or at least more streamlined) than Pathfinder 1, it's still one of the more complicated RPG rulesets currently being published. If not the most complicated in-print RPG.

:eek:

Dungeon Musings Review of Pathfinder 2

[video=youtube_share;HeL2kATm0Gc]https://youtu.be/HeL2kATm0Gc[/youtube]

Quote from: Aglondir;1098992For me it was:

:eek:

Thats right, put on your big boy pants, we are not playing a story game now Toto.

Quote from: Shasarak;1098958I am sorry man, but Paizo doubled down on all of those things and you dont even want to know how many different types of Dragons they have now.

I don't care for PF 1ed but you have to give them credit. They took all of the most distinctive things about 3ed and doubled down on them. It was purely a game for people who loved 3.5ed and wanted MOAR not people who wanted to fix it. Which makes good business sense, the squeaky wheel often gets the grease but it's generally better business sense to focus on keeping the people who love what you're selling happy. That's certainly been a good course of action in my own small business which just passed 5 years as a brick and mortar operation despite fate doing its best to try to fuck us.

Quote from: Jaeger;1098930If WOTC starts slaughtering sacred cows they are in for another 4e backlash.

Don't bother.

Box actually likes 4E, and the guys that wrote those objections also love 4E.

I've learned not to talk to crazy people.

Diamond Announces Top Products for July 2019

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Quote from: Daztur;1099005I don't care for PF 1ed but you have to give them credit. They took all of the most distinctive things about 3ed and doubled down on them. It was purely a game for people who loved 3.5ed and wanted MOAR not people who wanted to fix it. Which makes good business sense, the squeaky wheel often gets the grease but it's generally better business sense to focus on keeping the people who love what you're selling happy. That's certainly been a good course of action in my own small business which just passed 5 years as a brick and mortar operation despite fate doing its best to try to fuck us.

The whole irony imo is that even though as you say Paizo doubled down with PF 1E all the flaws of 3.5. Some of the same players who praised PF 1E were then complaining about Paizo have doing the same thing. As the wanted both access to the 3.5 ruleset. Yet also expected and assumed that Paizo would fix the same flaws. When they received the first and Paizo stubbornly took forever to fix the second Wotc released 5E. Then some of them who despised 4E suddenly become hypocrites and bought massively into 5E. Even though 5E borrows heavily from 4E D&D.

People will say what they want to get more product yet not really purchase the product. Fans said they would buy more Gurps 4E books andHero System books. With them also saying not to change the complexity. When no one is looking switch over to Fate and Savage Worlds instead. Many gamers don't know what they truly want.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;10988944e fixed problems like that over a decade ago to great success until Wizards reversed every good decision they made for reasons I can never hope to understand. Fantasy Craft, Trailblazer, 13th Age and countless other retroclones and 3pp introduce amazing helpful innovations that Wizards and Paizo completely ignore.

Very simple answer for myself at least. I had to sell of much of my rpg collection for fast cash yet mostly for space reasons. Out of all my collection I kept D&D. In an emergency if I needed to sell more of my rpgs for whatever reasons I can always find buyers. More importantly I can also always find new players/DMs  to run and play D&D with. The others not so much at least in my area. D&D unlike the others even with all the progress they made with their rules does not have the name and brand recognition that D&D has. The days of buying at least in print rpgs that I cannot find gamers to play or run for for myself is over.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1098894Why are Wizards and Paizo so resistant to improving their rules? Why does the community not demand better?

Honest answer imo most gamers do not know what the fuck they want. They want to complain about martial caster disparity. Then whine even louder that one took away the power of their caster and that they are now "nerfed". Let me put some glycerin tears in my eyes while I pretend to care. They want to be able to complain about the flaws of any rpg yet don't you damn dare change a thing about it. It is why I ban that kind of talk at my games non-negotiable no exceptions . One does not complain about the flaws of an rpg continually then turn around and say not to change anything so those flaws can be improved. I can respect not liking changes in an rpg. Not the weird dichotomy of point out flaws and being resistant to fixing the same flaws.

Quote from: Shasarak;1099017Diamond Announces Top Products for July 2019

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Do they distribute D&D books?  I see they have Magic Cards.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1099027Do they distribute D&D books?  I see they have Magic Cards.

At least they did in 2017... There's an old catalog to be found here: http://www.alliance-games.com/Home/11/1/79/1162?articleID=127270

Edit: Diamond and Alliance are affiliates, in case anyone was wondering: https://www.diamondcomics.com/Home/1/1/3/305?articleID=36047

Quote from: sureshot;1099025The whole irony imo is that even though as you say Paizo doubled down with PF 1E all the flaws of 3.5.

Yup, very much so. I remember making a list of all of the flaws of 3.5ed (from my point of view at the time) and PF1 made just about all of them worse.

I remember the specific moment that I noped out of PF1. During the playtest I noticed they were giving new bells and whistles to all the classes including giving powerups to fucking core casters. I asked a dev about why they were doing that. He said that they needed to boost the core classes in order to help them compete with overpowered splat options. That just showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how powercreep worked in 5ed. It wasn't that core options were weaker than splat options, if anything at least half of the most powerful classes were right there in core along with a lot of the most powerful feats and spells (natural spell, etc.). The powercreep happened because:

1. People could go through scores of splat options and cherry pick out the most powerful ones. This didn't mean that the individual options were more powerful than in core.

2. One failing of 3.5ed is that they looked for interactions between each individual splatbook and core they didn't really pay attention to what happened if you combined different splatbooks with each other. So in a lot of cases there would be mechanical widgets that were basically fine by themselves but got overpowered really quickly if you combined them because of the synergies. For example there were a whole bunch of slightly different feats that basically said "I'm good at running at a guy and hitting them hard" because there was a lot of duplicated effort/left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing in 3.5ed, they were basically all fine by themselves but if you combined them all in one character you got something that could dish out crazy damage.

Giving boost to core casters doesn't do anything to address those problems and made me realize that the PF devs weren't going to do fuck-all to address what I didn't like about 3.5ed. And, hey, they didn't. Still good business decisions since they got the people who wanted more 3.5ed instead of fixed 3.5 and a lot of people liked the extra bells and whistles.

If you make a really crunchy game you have to be good at  the ins and outs of the rules and have a really good grasp of how crunchy mechanical systems work. And PF devs just really don't... I mean they hired SK Reynolds for fuck's sake and he wrote the second dumbest thing ever written about D&D mechanics by a dev: https://web.archive.org/web/20140202043441/www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html that shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of how the rules work. The other devs just seem to have a much worse grasp of the ins and outs of d20 rules than a lot of CharOp board nerds and it really shows.

Still pretty leery about PF2 being able to do well beyond initial sales (even 4ed had good initial sales). In retrospect what they should've probably done is partnered with 5ed right from the get-go when they had more bargaining power before 5ed was a proven success, put out a lot of 5ed adventure paths, etc. etc. Too late now though, don't think any amount of business smarts can prevent Paizo from losing market share in the long run, but they have enough to keep on coasting and making an OK profit for a good long time.

QuoteThen some of them who despised 4E suddenly become hypocrites and bought massively into 5E. Even though 5E borrows heavily from 4E D&D.

While 5ed does borrow a lot from 4ed under the hood in actual play it feels a lot more like a cleaned up 3.5ed. There's nothing hypocritical about disliking 4ed and liking 5ed. I find 5ed a bit bland but it's basically fine and I'd rather play it than 4ed.

4ed does have some good aspects though. It was a lot of fun reskinned for a mecha vs. kaiju game I played with CaveBear a while back. My PC was a shardmind grapple fighter reskinned as a Tremors worm/shai halud (got to use a gummiworm as my mini) and it was good for long epic smashy battles. Just not too good for standard D&D attrition-based dungeon crawling.

QuoteOne does not complain about the flaws of an rpg continually then turn around and say not to change anything so those flaws can be improved. I can respect not liking changes in an rpg. Not the weird dichotomy of point out flaws and being resistant to fixing the same flaws.

Right, but on the other hand just because you think a flaw sucks and that flaw got fixed doesn't mean you can't complain about HOW that flaw got fixed. For example I complained a lot about 3.5 martial/caster disparity and 4ed fixed that (while for some bizarre reason retaining the idiotic 3.5ed decision to give fighters hardly any skills) however I didn't much like HOW 4ed fixed that so instead of playing 4ed I went and played OSR games instead which tend not to have 3.5ed's martial/caster disparity, at least in the single digit levels. 5ed has that disparity but not as bad as 3.5ed so I can deal with it and get my martial casters up to par with the party's casters by doing some charop.

Quote from: Daztur;1099054he wrote the second dumbest thing ever written about D&D mechanics by a dev:

1st?

Quote from: BronzeDragon;10991291st?

Ryan Dancey?