Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 03:33:10 PM
Which in turn pretty much dictated that PF2 had to go even harder into the fiddly crunch because any other direction would essentially just be a houseruled 5e.

Indeed. I don't particularly LIKE the crunch that they did end up going with, but that was almost certainly the correct marketing move. (Ex: I like the vibe of the 3 action system - but the rest of the mechanics don't really feel like they leverage it properly to be a core pillar of the system. I really think they really should have leaned into it more with the spellcasting especially - such as having spells take between 1-6 actions, with major increases in power at the same spell level if it costs more actions. As it was - it still felt like an Unearthed Arcana style variant.)

But anyway - that was definitely the route to go from a business perspective. Accept your position as the crunchier/deeper D&D option and play a strong second fiddle. So long as Hasbro doesn't drop the ball again (4e), it's unlikely that another TTRPG will knock them off of their fantasy RPG throne. But just because D&D is #1 doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of market share to slice off.

Heh, shouting hands back on.

That never gets old.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on December 11, 2020, 04:09:09 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 03:33:10 PM
Which in turn pretty much dictated that PF2 had to go even harder into the fiddly crunch because any other direction would essentially just be a houseruled 5e.

Indeed. I don't particularly LIKE the crunch that they did end up going with. (Ex: I like the vibe of the 3 action system - but the rest of the mechanics don't really feel like they leverage it properly to be a core pillar of the system. I really think they really should have leaned into it more with the spellcasting especially - such as having spells take between 1-6 actions, with major increases in power at the same spell level if it costs more actions.)

They do have different action economy for spells.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 03:33:10 PM

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on December 11, 2020, 01:21:38 PM
Yeah - while 5e definitely took some inspiration from bits of both 4e & earlier editions as well as adding some new bits, at its core it feels most like a streamlining and flattening of 3.x. (flattening as in the power curve) While it lost some of 3.x's depth & customization, it cleaned out a lot of the cludge (though certainly not all) and made it much easier to pick up and learn etc.

Which is also why it was able to gut PF so effectively; because a cleaned up 3e is also basically a cleaned up PF.

Which in turn pretty much dictated that PF2 had to go even harder into the fiddly crunch because any other direction would essentially just be a houseruled 5e.

Basically, the only people really left out in the cold by 5e were high-crunch PF fans and those who had their favorite parts of 4E thrown under the bus (my personal peeve was Mearls' comments about how ridiculous warlords "shouting people's hands back on" was when he was perfectly aware that 4E didn't have any sort of dismemberment mechanic precisely because it relied on non-physical hit points for its mechanics; which is also why you could regain them all with a full night's rest).

Which in turn means about the only avenues outside of 5e splat production are things that specifically reject one or more elements of 5e and marketing towards that.

Eh.  5E is cleaned but vastly oversimplified and with little variation in what you can do.  Every 5E cleric I've seen has relied on a few spells - Bless, Spirit Guardians, and Spiritual Hammer, while the poor Eldritch Knight who is meant to be a magical fighter just spams shield.

There is an audience there for people who come into the hobby for 5E and want something more complex.  Look around on the internet and you can see that some new gamers are switching from 5e to 3.5 because they want the greater complexity.

Pathfinder 2 was a big gamble, and one that seemed unlikely to work.  It really looks as if they are making the 4E mistakes all over again (the amount of people who really want to mix tactical play with their gaming seems to be pretty small).  They really needed to publish a cleaned up version of Pathfinder and simplify elements of the system, but without dramatically reducing the character options.  What they really needed though were designers from outside their existing pool who could point out the ridiculousness of writing things like this as a way of simplifying iterative attacks when Trailblazer had done a much better job years earlier.

QuoteThe Basics
When making a full attack, roll only one attack roll and compare your result to the target's AC. If your attack result is lower than the target's AC by 6 or more, you miss and deal no damage. If your result is lower than the target's AC by 5 or less, you deliver a glancing blow, dealing an amount of damage equal to 1/2 the minimum damage you would normally deal on a hit with the weapon you're using. Effects that trigger on a hit do not trigger on a glancing blow. If your attack result equals or exceeds the target's AC, you score a hit, plus one additional hit for every 5 by which your roll exceeds that target's AC, up to your maximum number of hits. At first level, you can score a maximum of only one hit, but at base attack bonus +6 and at every +5 to your base attack bonus thereafter, you can score another. This is shown on Table: Maximum Hits, and also matches the progression of iterative attacks you'd gain if you were using the core rules for attacks. For each hit you score, roll damage separately; damage reduction applies to each hit.

The other thing they needed was good online character building and encounter building support.  GM prep was always the bug bear of 3.5 and while it's a lot easier in 5e by desgin 5e also has the huge advantage of the availabilty of software to make it even easier.  (At least they have the SRD - this is one big reason why Pathfinder has survived and no one plays 4E anymore.  It's too hard to play 4e without all the rules elements in one place somewhere on the net).

Probably their best way forward was to clean up Pathfinder 1 while keeping it backwards compatible which releasing their adventure paths for both Pathfinder and 5e and focusing their advertising on players who wanted more character options and a deeper system.

Quote from: Shasarak on December 11, 2020, 04:38:25 PM

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on December 11, 2020, 04:09:09 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 03:33:10 PM
Which in turn pretty much dictated that PF2 had to go even harder into the fiddly crunch because any other direction would essentially just be a houseruled 5e.

Indeed. I don't particularly LIKE the crunch that they did end up going with. (Ex: I like the vibe of the 3 action system - but the rest of the mechanics don't really feel like they leverage it properly to be a core pillar of the system. I really think they really should have leaned into it more with the spellcasting especially - such as having spells take between 1-6 actions, with major increases in power at the same spell level if it costs more actions.)

They do have different action economy for spells.

A bit - but they didn't really lean into it.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on December 11, 2020, 04:49:41 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on December 11, 2020, 04:38:25 PM
They do have different action economy for spells.

A bit - but they didn't really lean into it.

They have 210 pages of spells for four main types of spell casting classes from level 1 to level 10 and the main problem is that they did not lean into having more 1 to 6 action spells?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on December 09, 2020, 12:26:11 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on December 08, 2020, 11:04:41 PMThat's not what the term "vaporware" means. There is nothing vaporware about 5e.

Fair enough. Though most of 5e was promised in development and never came out. But its success is being so insubstantive that people attach whatever they want too it.

Now 5e delivered what was promised, it's just that people have big imaginations and so they took the words Mike Mearls used to describe his goals for 5e and wrote into those words much larger concepts than what was said.

The principle complaint I have seen is that people thought Mike Mearls promised 5e would allow a 1e character and a 3e character and a 4e character all in the same game at the same time or something. Which is ridiculous and never what he promised at all. This is what he actually said:

"Modularity starts with a simple core... In terms of actual rules modules, I see them as important to allowing groups to evoke a specific feel for their campaign. That might be something like making healing less plentiful or adding more realistic injuries to evoke a grittier feel. Other groups that like miniatures play and the tactical challenges posed by combat probably want more details in the combat system. ... [we will] give people the options that they can mix and match if they choose to create the specific campaign they want."

All of those modules are in the DMG that he mentions. There are options for much slower healing. There are options for more tactical play. They made multiclassing and feats optional. There is a ton of optional stuff in the core rules, and then they added even more optional stuff in Xanathar's and now Tasha's in particular.

But people still have this imagined image of what they thought he was saying about actual support for 1e and 3e and 4e in the 5e game. I still don't know where that came from. He always said things like "evoke a feel" of an older edition, not the actual fucking edition! And he always said what he meant by "evoking a feel" of an older edition, which is these kinds of optional rules about healing or tactical play and such. People just read into it and then got pissed when the reality didn't match their imagination despite it never being the stated plan to do what they imagined it would be.

Quote from: Shasarak on December 11, 2020, 04:09:17 PM
Heh, shouting hands back on.

That never gets old.

To this day I'm torn on whether that statement was a cynical marketing ploy to play to the anti-4E crowd or if Mearls legitimately just didn't know the system he was in charge of.

While it's tempting to think the former, I also remember that brief point when Monte Cook was brought onboard for 5e and his opening article was on this great new idea they'd come up with called "passive perception"... legitimately NOT knowing that this had been part of 4E from the beginning.

Basically, it seems like no one outside of Rob Heinsoo at WotC fully grokked what 4E was supposed to be (ex. when 4E doesn't have a detailed non-combat resolution system and gives guidelines for improvising its bad design... when 5e says "rulings not rules" its good design).

Mearls definitely didn't grok it as his 'Keep on the Shadowfell' intro module is regarded as a travesty by 4E fans and a complete mismatch with the actual game's mechanics and ethos (i.e. it had a lot of trash fights in boring locations instead of glossing over minor encounters to focus on set piece battles with interesting environmental mechanics).

So after Heinsoo was laid off in the annual WotC downsizing, Mearls and co spent the rest of 4E's life trying to shove a square peg into a round hole (culminating in Essentials which broke more than it fixed).

In that respect, 5e was the right business move since Mearls and Co. couldn't leverage what they didn't care to understand. 5e is theirs from the ground up which helps immensely in being able to promote it.

Still, like the OSR and it's appeal to those who prefer the pre-WotC style of play, there's a potential market for a 4E spiritual successor there. It's not a D&D-sized market (nothing else is), but for any non-WotC RPG company it would have been seen as an absolute smash hit.

Quote from: TJS on December 11, 2020, 04:44:03 PMIt really looks as if they are making the 4E mistakes all over again (the amount of people who really want to mix tactical play with their gaming seems to be pretty small).

To be fair, that's one of the things a lot of people misread about 4E, speaking as someone who games with a lot of 4E fans and whose game system began as a spiritual successor to it.

4E isn't all that much more tactical than when 3.5e (or 5e) is played on a grid instead of theatre of the mind. This gets especially obvious when you stop playing 4E on a grid (which was probably 2/3 of my experience with it).

I know, I know... "spaces" is inherently gamist sounding, but it's just a unit of measurement... one of the first and easiest changes made to my own system was to replace it with "paces" (specifically the Roman pace, which was two steps or about 5 feet) and suddenly people had no more issue visualizing 6 paces than they did 30 feet.

Anyway, the main draw for 4E among the fans I interacted with was never really the tactical side... once your party worked out a couple tricks it was just variations on that theme. The draws from my experience were;

-Big Damn Heroes. While there's nothing wrong with zero-to-hero, in my experience three quarters of all campaigns that start at level 1 peter out before you get out of the "zero" stage due to real life (changing work schedules, a kid has started a new extracurricular that happens to be at game time, etc.).

So when the vast majority of your play experience is with the zero-end, sometimes you just want to start out a campaign as Conan or Aragorn so you get a chance to actually experience the hero-end for once. 4E starts you out at end of the zero-stage (about equal to a level 4-5 in 3e) and does a good job of keeping you in that sweet spot for all of heroic (level 1-10) and about half of Paragon (11-20) tier (level 16 is generally regarded among those I know as the sweet spot between interesting options and too much complexity... one of the main reasons I capped my game at 15 levels).

- Relative parity between the martials and casters; particularly after the wild imbalance of 3e. Not just in raw power, but in giving the fighters more interesting things to do than just "I hit it with my sword" without being penalized for it (one of the biggest problems with the feat system was that it relegated many options downright dangerous to employ normally in order to make the feats worth taking... then really limited the number of feats you could have at a reasonable level).

- Niche protection via clear roles. This connects with the previous one a bit in that 3e spellcasters could basically become better than non-casters at basically whatever they determined to be better at, but the roles of defender, leader, controller and striker gave each class a particular way to shine at the same time by prioritizing different things for them (defenders shined every time they kept their allies from getting hit, controllers every time their powers forced the enemy into catch-22s, leaders every time their buffs enabled an ally to pull off something cool and strikers with the big damage numbers).

- No one has to play the cleric. Because each role had a specific set of things it was designed to be good at (albeit in different ways; clerics and warlords could both buff and heal, but clerics were the best at healing and warlords the best at in-combat buffing) you didn't so much need specific classes and because each power source (martial, arcane, divine, primal, etc.) had a class with each role you could fill a role without sacrificing a particular theme.

As an aside on this one; the cleric as healer is such a D&D-ism that appears nowhere else in fantasy (except fantasy derived from D&D) that it actually makes it quite difficult to emulate more common bands of heroes you'd see in fiction. 4E solves that because of the roles and even allows completely non-magical settings like Robin Hood to be run out of the box without any need for house rules beyond "only human, only martial classes."

- Easy to run. XP budgets for combat so the DM knows what to expect out of a fight (i.e. will it be a cakewalk, will it be a TPK or somewhere in between), the "Monster Manual on a Business Card" and a very "rulings not rules" approach to anything outside of combat made it a breeze to prep and improvise with from thr DM side.

It also encouraged resolving trash mobs with a few simple rolls or even hand waving them entirely so instead of needing to prep for every last fight in an attritional dungeon, you just needed to prep a few big fights (this was where Mearls went most wrong in KotSF, he included way too many tedious trash mob fights instead of focusing on a comparative handful of interesting set pieces... the Kobold Hall in the back of the DMG is a much better guide for the combat portions of a 4E adventure).

Tactics generally came in dead last in terms of actual interest. Generally much more important was combats that had something more interesting than just two sides facing off in a mostly featureless room. Pits you could knock people into, traps you also had to avoid or disarm in the middle of a fight, even just stairs you need to climb to reach the archers firing down on you that's guarded by some brutes or soldiers... that was always far more important than just a tactical encounter.

Quote from: Shasarak on December 11, 2020, 05:17:36 PM

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on December 11, 2020, 04:49:41 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on December 11, 2020, 04:38:25 PM
They do have different action economy for spells.

A bit - but they didn't really lean into it.

They have 210 pages of spells for four main types of spell casting classes from level 1 to level 10 and the main problem is that they did not lean into having more 1 to 6 action spells?

I'm saying that they didn't lean into making the 3 action economy and how it could really change gameplay. It felt like it was slapped onto the system rather than being a major building block of the system from the ground up. The spells were largely just an easy example of what they could have done with it.

Quote from: Mistwell on December 11, 2020, 06:04:40 PMThe principle complaint I have seen is that people thought Mike Mearls promised 5e would allow a 1e character and a 3e character and a 4e character all in the same game at the same time or something. Which is ridiculous and never what he promised at all.

While I doubted he would ever reach something like that, I'm pretty sure he did exactly that (Just the D&D website keeps getting purged).

Yes those side rules all exist-but they are flabby as shit. A paragraph written on a cocktail napkin is technically a 'module' but it's not cleverly integrated or executed. Even PF with side rules I don't consider all that great would dedicate a few pages, maybe some character options to the side rule 'modules'.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 06:20:40 PM
Tactics generally came in dead last in terms of actual interest. Generally much more important was combats that had something more interesting than just two sides facing off in a mostly featureless room. Pits you could knock people into, traps you also had to avoid or disarm in the middle of a fight, even just stairs you need to climb to reach the archers firing down on you that's guarded by some brutes or soldiers... that was always far more important than just a tactical encounter.

I feel it just ended up straitjacketing everything into a combat minigame. Which it was best at. It was best at the Combat minigame over any other edition. But it came at the expense of creativity outside of it.
In 1e-2e you could make more organic worlds with creatures that didn't match up hit dice to the PCs. It was still possible in 3e but harder. In 4e this makes the maths utterly implode.

Often enough my PCs would bypass scenarios with creativity & cleverness (We make a pit trap using X and then throw a bomb in there and flood it with water), but 4e channels it all back into the minigame (you need a level 5 bomb for a level 5 enemy, and you need level 5 water-otherwise the damage isn't up to snuff). The worldbuilding was just inorganic.

But it was truly the champion of the combat minigame.

Paizo went WOKE & found themselves abandoned. The Paizo boards were dumpster-fires easily seen from space.

They failed.

It's why WOTC has been super-cautious about embracing WOKE. Tasha's book should've been woke, but look at how WOTC wasn't so woke. Look how so.

Look at the hobby.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on December 11, 2020, 08:54:32 PM
I feel it just ended up straitjacketing everything into a combat minigame. Which it was best at. It was best at the Combat minigame over any other edition. But it came at the expense of creativity outside of it.
In 1e-2e you could make more organic worlds with creatures that didn't match up hit dice to the PCs. It was still possible in 3e but harder. In 4e this makes the maths utterly implode.

Often enough my PCs would bypass scenarios with creativity & cleverness (We make a pit trap using X and then throw a bomb in there and flood it with water), but 4e channels it all back into the minigame (you need a level 5 bomb for a level 5 enemy, and you need level 5 water-otherwise the damage isn't up to snuff). The worldbuilding was just inorganic.

Only if you let it straightjacket you.

We had just as many, if not more, creatively bypassed scenarios in 4E as in any other edition. We had grossly mismatched fights where the only option to survive was to run (the only difference from previous editions being you were generally tough enough that you wouldn't be dropped before realizing you were outmatched and actually have the capability of fleeing) and others where we utterly curb-stomped the opposition.

Mileages may vary obviously, but a lot depended on how you chose to engage with the material. We had a preponderance of DMs more interested in clues, puzzles and social interaction than combat, so combat just wasn't the central thing. For a while we averaged one combat every other session and currently its more like one combat every 3-4 sessions. Lots more skill use, lots more non-combat feats, lots more non-combat utility powers.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 11, 2020, 09:07:37 PM
Only if you let it straightjacket you.

That's an intellectual copout. If I can't criticize a system for something (because I can 'bypass it'), then I can't criticize or compliment anything at all.

Eh.

What 4E does (and 13th Age which to my mind is a manifest improvement) is a long way from 3.5 and Pathfinder 1 does and that's the issue I think.

A lot of the things that 3.5 was criticised for were also it's strengths.  Preparation is far too involved but the system does help make a solidity to the game world.  What you get for that complexity is ways to represent all kinds of things.  In Pathfinder you can be a tiefling descended from a range of different outisders.  Sorcerers have a large number of bloodlines.  If you want to play a Barbarian with a sorcerer bloodline that rages and draws on his magical blood while raging there's even a class for that (Bloodrager).  These things are not just mechanically different but feel different in a way that actually meshes with the concept.  The price for this of course is endless options and complexity.

4E is slightly less complex in character building (but not really that much, especially by the end) - and better balanced, but the rules are aimed more at providing gameplay rather then realising a concept.  As the edition that followed on from 3E it sort of gestured at the same sort of thing but at a certain point you realised that your paragon path which made your barbarian a scion of the volcano gods just offered you a few slightly different combat powers.  You can of course bring your own flavour and play the concept without mechanical support - but if that's the kind of thing you want the complexity to actually do, then you'll be disappointed and you may end up feeling that if you're going to bring your own flavour you might as well move on to a simpler system.

That said, it's not that bad at what it's trying to, and the combat game can be fun if you've got enough time to actually play through it.  The main reason it is pretty much dead is that it doesn't have an SRD and the character generator is defunct, which means it's too much effort to use it with new players.  But ultimately, I don't think the kind of complexity it offers is what players introduced to 5E, and want more, are likely to be looking for.

The main problem with 4e was that it revolved around having a certain number of combats per adventuring day and that each of those combats was never truly threatening only serving to drain the party of resources and powers so that the very final boss fight would maybe be challenging.

What that meant in practice was very long drawn out fights where the outcome was never in doubt but you had to finish otherwise the party would not suffer the requisite resource drain.  In fact fights used to take so very long that often the choice was to finish the game early or to take photos of the game board so that we could continue the following week.

Pathfinder 2e at least managed to solve that problem, fights are much more dynamic and deadly.