I like Starfinder, in general terms, but it definitely has its problem.  Uneven class design, starship combat (the whole thing), and retaining some annoying mechanics while leaving behind some nice ones.  It's a half-step away from Pathfinder and not always in good ways.  The fact that the magic-space setting of it is really specific and kind of weird doesn't help.

I don't recall an open playtest for Starfinder, though, and that might have gotten a lot of the issues fixed before release.

Which is why my stance on PF2 is "hopeful, but cautious".  I'm absolutely sick of 5e and anything I can use to convince my home group to change will be eagerly leapt upon.

I'm going to go ahead and compare apples to oranges.

To me, the idea of making game systems more accessible, in the way 5e does, is kind of like making the game more like an apple. You can pick up an apple and eat it immediately. Apples aren't complicated. There's a lot you can do with apples: make pies, crumbles, cakes, salads, etc... but fundamentally, applies are an easy fruit. They are an accessible fruit.

Oranges take some work. You have to peel or cut an orange. There's parts that are bitter, or even inedible. Oranges are still very tasty though, and you can do a lot with oranges, like you can for apples: make juices, baked goods, and their acids are great for a massive variety of cooking in both sweet and savory creations!

Pathfinder is like an orange. The peal is something you have to deal with. It takes time. It's a little messy, and for some, the act of peeling an orange (or digging through the vast and sometimes complicated rules of PF) is just as important an experience as actually playing the game (or eating the fruit).

One is not better than the other, but they are still different, and they have their uses and their moods.

My hope is that Paizo doesn't abandon the orange, in favor of another variety of apple. :)

What Carakav said.

I agree.  People come to RP for different things.  I should probably point out that I was expressing a personal opinion, not claiming one system to be inherently superior to another.  For me, that accessibility is important and makes the game (any game) a great deal more enjoyable to play or to run.  Others find great joy in more complex rule sets.  Hell, I'm gearing up to run Shadowrun 5e for some friends, so it's not like I shy away from complex systems.  But I do find them more of a challenge than many roleplayers might (as I have epilepsy, which impacts heavily on my memory).

People like (and/or need) different things, and whether one is 'better' than another is wholly subjective.  They'll lose some orange-lovers and win some apple-eaters.  Or maybe they'll go for pineapple, with or without pizza, and strike off in a relatively new direction.  Whichever the case, Pathfinder 1e will still exist and Pathfinder 2e will settle into its own groove.

Personally I'm not concerned about the future of Pathfinder, because so far Paizo is going about things in a distinctly intelligent way.  It's a compelling setting and having an open playtest period is an excellent way of getting a broad variety of opinions.  As most people who will be testing it are certain to be Pathfinder fans, it's likely that due to sheer mathematics they'll eventually settle on something that most (though certainly not all) Pathfinder fans will find acceptable.

One positive thing I've read about is the idea of getting rid of initiative. Replacing the initiative roll with a skill roll that depends on who you are and what you're doing at the time.

Back in AD&D 2e, initiative was rolled every round and modified by the weapon or spell each character was using, but that was gotten rid of in 3e for "slowing the game down too much", so increasing the complexity of initiative doesn't fill me with confidence.

In any case, in my view Pathfinder's strengths are its default setting and its refinement of 3.5e's rules. I expect that they won't pull a spellplague and Golarion will remain as before, so my worry is the rules modification. They've already shown that they can do a good job when they adapted D&D3.5e into PF1e, so even if Starfinder has its quirks, they do have the institutional knowledge, the experience with medieval fantasy, and are going to use playtesting and fan feedback, so I'm not that worried about that, either. Sure, there will be a change or two that will piss me off at first, but I'll eventually get used to it.

Real question,

How important is the setting to the rules?

I find it weird everyone is remarking about the impact on setting, but I just find that really weird. Why does it matter? It's not like I'm going to buy or not buy based on setting, and doing so seems rather silly to me. Is it really that important to you guys?

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 23):

Golarion is a great setting, IMHO. It is fairly well developed, with many exciting places, and a variety of different regions for all play styles. Want to play warlordism? The River Kingdoms are for you. Intrigue against diabolists? Go to Cheliax. Care for some sci fi in your fantasy? Step right over to Numeria, etc. It would be terrible if it got defaced in order to justify new rules like the 4e Forgotten Realms's (relatively) wimpy magicians. As long as they're changing behind-the-scenes stuff, like what class a given character concept maps to, it's all good; but when changes in crunch break the fluff, that's when I draw the line.

Um, how can crunch changes matter to fluff? I mean certain things like not-vancian slot system might not do well for say mistborn style magic, but really, why can't 4e do the older Forgotten realms?

Fluff is core, you just pick the mechanics that best fit your fluff requirements, therefore, how can crunch break fluff?

But that is aside from my question, Pathfinder rules not equal to Golarion. Even if they took Golarion in a disliked direction, you could still use the new mechanics while playing in the old golarion. You can play in whatever setting you want, with whatever variation you want.

Yet, concerns about setting alterations are mentioned as though people see no difference between system and setting. This makes no sense to me.

Is that what people really care about when they buy into a system? Do they buy paizo books, not for pathfinder, but rather, they pay for golarion?

In regards to the setting/rules things


There are a ton of rule-sets out there that are system agnostic, system independent, and setting heavy.


I feel Pathfinder is rules agnostic. One does not really need the setting of golarion to play the game. But, the rules are slanted in the 'we (the creators) kinda expect you to play in golarion.  I mean you cannot buy a single Adventure for Pathfinder (that I know of), let alone a full adventure path without being in golarion. and most of their books are 'setting this and rules that, yo'


There are plenty of rulesets that you can go to any setting in the imagination (GURPS comes to mind) But pathfinder I feel is not one of those. TO be honest for me, anything to the contrary is one just kidding themselves. Because to mE even in the original core book published, it was like YARGH GOLARION IS COOL, BRO!

and therefore changes to fluff can affect crunch and vice versa. Or at least that is how I feel.

3rd ed did it when they changed from 2nd ed with D&D. to think that going from 1st to 2nd ed PF is not going to, you need to take a look in the mirror.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 25):

The problem with using 4e to play pre-Spellplague Forgotten Realms is that the class re-balancing severely limited wizards and boosted fighters. Linear fighters and quadratic wizards  has been a thing since the original D&D; the characters may not know what a level is, but they knew that an experienced wizard was much, much more dangerous than any fighter. This isn't true within the 4e ruleset, and it would be silly to pretend that no one noticed that the mighty DMPC Elminster can now be killed in a fair fight by, say, King Azoun the high-level fighter.

In reply to ricosuave (msg # 26):

You can play Forgotten Realms in Pathfinder; some characters will map to different classes, but the metaphysics is similar enough that the differences can be explained from an in-character perspective; however, playing Forgotten Realms in GURPS would be kind of iffy, seeing as GURPS wizards are way less flexible and powerful than in D&D. Also, no Vancian magic and no differentiation between divine and arcane magic.

I used to play AD&D2e and, while D&D3e was an improvement in many ways, it did make it impossible to play many of the games we played in the previous editions. All the rebalancing they did made it hard to port over the more unusual settings, like Birthright, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Council of Wyrms, Masque of the Red Death and Jakandor, so those were dropped like a hot potato. This caused me to keep playing second edition for years afterward, even though I recognized that third edition was better, it couldn't play the games I wanted.

In reply to ricosuave (msg # 26):

I would disagree with that. Even 3.0 and 3.5 had some setting hooks, especially when it came to clerics.

That being said it is very easy to run pathfinder outside of golarion because it is basically just 3.5 rules with some mechanical changes. I have run D&D settings using Pathfinder rules many times and the cases where there is a setting conflict (outside of cleric stuff) were very minor.

Core Golarion is indistinguishable from any other tolkein based fantasy setting. elves are aloof and eternal, dwarves are grumpy, halflings are children etc.


To put it another way, Golarion itself was designed to be a patchwork of other settings and the pathfinder rules work fine whether you're in viking land or conan the barbarian land or Numenera land or Dark Tower land or steam punk land.

In fact if you know the history of Paizo you'd know that Rise of the Runelords was originally developed for D&D 3.5 and that the game mechanics came first and then they built the setting around that.

Is it not normal to have your own gaming world and just use the rules from a game to play in them.  I see a bunch of people making the claim that you have to play PF in golarion but my PF GM has had his own world since 2nd ed, we just continued through 3.0, 3.5, and then to pathfinder.

Honestly, I'd argue that Forgotten Realms named characters are a terrible metric because they almost always ignore the rules.  Drizzt, for instance, annoys me because half the stuff he does was not possible in the rules of the time (and would be largely inefficient even in later rules).  Elminster is even worse.  Heck, I don't think there was ever a system where Cadderly worked without some extensive gymnastics to make him work.

That said... I like it when the rules support the setting.  I don't need rules that heavily weave together with the setting, but certainly want rules that don't get in the way of it.

Pathfinder 2e is almost certainly going to try to narrow the gap between full casters and non-casters.  It's a legitimate complaint about the system and one that, from a game standpoint, is not great design.  Whether that will come by buffing non-casters, weakening full casters, both, or something else is yet to be seen.

My biggest initial reservation with 2e was the changes to the skill system.  I've since heard more information about it that makes me willing to reserve judgement on the matter until I've seen the actual rules (skill ranks aren't entirely going away, but they're being reduced in number while increased in significance).

When it comes to skills I hope they differentiate "active" and "passive" skills. Things like Crafting and Profession are great flavor skills but they are almost always background skills unless your GM jumps through some hoops.

I understand not everyone has to be optimized to the gills but it does suck that if you want to give your character more depth beyond "I've been solely studying to fight/cast spells/sneak for my entire life" you have to basically penalize him.

Skill feats have great flavor behind them but are almost never picked beyond NPCs because of how underwhelming they are.


I also hope they take a new look at "feat taxes". I think it is REALLY terrible that if I want to be a hit & run fighter I have to slog through level after level of garbage feats to finally get to the one I want.

I'm fine with skill trees but I would much rather they work along the lines of TWF where you can choose to continually get better and better at it as opposed to things like the Mobility trees where you have to take several underwhelming choices before FINALLY unlocking the ability you're using.

For example instead of burying Spring Attack under Dodge and Mobility, allow people to just take Spring Attack as a feat but apply some penalties and then they can take Improved Spring Attack to reduce those penalties.

Also some feat taxes don't even make sense. Why is whirlwind attack requiring Spring Attack when Cleave does almost the same thing and requires half the feats?

Have you listened to the Playtest Podcast that Erik Mona and Jason Bulmahn ran with the Glass Cannon Podcast? It was either there or during the Know Direction Playtest interview that they addressed Spring Attack in particular. No more feat tax for that. Nor for Precise Shot/Point-Blank Shot for Archers.

The Know Direction one in particular was funny because one person being interviewed continually griped about his least favorite Pathfinder rules (Wands of Cure Light Wounds, Feat Taxes, and a few others).

Here's the link: http://knowdirectionpodcast.co...on-playtest-special/

Worth checking out for sure.

I have the 3.5 edition of Rise of the Runelords. The setting came first then they were like 'so.. 4th edition was not popular and people still want 3.5 stuffs.. BUT... we have these cool houserules we play with lets pubish that and you know hat setting we did with the adventure paths... yeah lets make that the setting of our game'


GOlarion is not a patchwork of settings, if that was the case the game would feel patchwork-y and not put together right.

It is a single setting that has many different areas of various influence.


want an example?

Earth.. earth is a single setting in it. But you can find literally millions of different areas of different influences. GO back a thousand years and in the Yucatan peninsula. Go to northern Africa the same time and the Berbers are doing their Jihad, completely different than what was previously found and just as different as Song China where education becomes government supported and gunpowder is introduced.


All 3 are the same setting, jus different places within that setting.

That strikes me as more of an indictment of using "fair fights" as an indicator of relative power between classes, than of how different two D&D-like rulesets are.

In reply to engine (msg # 34):

You got that completely backwards. It doesn't matter what the rulesets look like, it matters that the world they are describing remains internally consistent. Much like with real life science, the world doesn't have to conform to the theory, the theory has to describe the world. If, for example, the new rules have no Fireball spell, how do you explain all of the characters who knew and used that spell in the previous edition? If how the skills work were to change, it's fine, but if it suddenly becomes impossible to craft, then it's bogus; etc.

You should be able to adapt the previously published material such as adventure paths and still keep their plot viable in the new rules.

Not completely. The "fair fight" approach to balance or comparison is highly flawed. But that's a digression.


Except that the world in this case is entirely fictional, and can bend as much as we're willing to bend it.


I'm not sure why I would have to, but I could. That isn't to say that I could do it in a way that would satisfy anyone but myself, or anyone who was determined to be dissatisfied, but I could explain it.

It would be one thing to try to use the rules for, say, Call of Cthulhu to play a D&D-like game, but a game that understands the overall trappings of D&D - different races, divine and arcane magic, swords and armor, dragons, treasure, action and adventure - won't be hard for someone to assimilate, if they want to, regardless of existing fiction.

I'm someone who has an advanced degree in physics and can watch Star Trek with a grin on his face. I don't rationalize the ridiculous science on that show, I choose not to let the ridiculous science detract from the fun of the story.


I don't see why. Earlier versions of D&D have contained subsystems and rules that aren't a significant aspect of it anymore. The rules for owning and running a keep, for instance, are pretty firmly relegated to highly optional in any version to come out in the past 20 years or so. Yet those versions are quite playable.

I would hope one would consider overall playability of the game, but I suppose that what happened to 4th Edition makes that a vain hope. Still, if some aspect of the game doesn't work particularly well, causes a lot of confusion or otherwise doesn't enhance the game as much as it could, then however much its removal makes the game "bogus," doing so should be recognized as an improvement. I know it won't be by everyone, or even most people, but it should be.


Well, a lack of fireballs and crafting, to use your example, probably isn't going to prevent that. "Adapt" can mean a lot of different things. And anyway, this kind of concern is unwarranted as Pathfinder is notorious for putting backwards compatibility above any other game design considerations.

I'm not willing to bend the world. The world shouldn't change because the edition changed, and that's the problem.

The problem isn't realism, it's consistency. When Star Trek breaks rewrites canon like the most recent Star Trek: Discovery Klingon retcon, people rightly complain about it. TV Tropes calls it "Magic A is Magic A".

I hope they have learned from their recent Starfinder development, which wasn't as open as it could have been.

In reply to Mr_Qwerty (msg # 37):

Right. You're not willing. That's the only problem.

No one has a "right" to be upset about inconsistency in a fictional world, but they have every right to rationalize things for themselves in a creative, productive manner. Edit: No one said anything about rights, really. I guess I just wish people would exercise their right not to watch or pay for something, rather than feel like they deserve it to be their way. Edit, the second: As I guess I have the right to simply ignore the complaints, which I shall exercise forthwith.

I have great respect for fans of Trek or anything else who work to rationalize their favorite show so they can keep enjoying it. I have none for people who can only demand that the way they think something should be is the way it must be.
This message was last edited by the user at 00:23, Sun 25 Mar 2018.

In reply to engine (msg # 38):

People have expectations. Both of fiction and of real life. If those expectations aren't met, they will be naturally upset. Some people prefer consistency, and should voice their opinions if they dislike it. Completely tuning a show or a game system out because you don't like various changes risks harming any chance for that product to right its course. As an example: if enough people simply didn't watch the next Star Wars movie because they didn't like The Last Jedi, then you risk new Star Wars movies being delayed, or their run ended for an undefined amount of time. Voicing dissatisfaction, however, is a perfectly viable means of trying to make changes to something you love as a whole, without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. You want to right the course, not crash the boat.

Instead of making broad negative arguments against "people who can only demand that the way they think something should be is the way it must be", which makes your counter-arguments unnecessarily personal, you could instead try to understand and engage directly with the arguments being presented.

In this case: the question is not whether it is okay for people to desire consistency in a setting. The questions are, should Paizo change the setting to reflect the rules? Can you preserve the old narrative in the face of changing mechanics? And, how do the answers to those questions make people feel?
This message was last edited by the user at 00:34, Sun 25 Mar 2018.

This is not really a valid arguement.

How strong the king is compared to Elminster is a narrative thing. When statting him out in the "new" mechanics, you simply take it into account. If the new rules have altered the balance between fighters and wizards, then you simply adjust the levels of Elminster and the king to compensate so they remain about where they are supposed to be in terms of power.

To say that the King can do more powerful things because the system changed is not a system problem, it is a problem with whoever is statting the characters up, not doing the job right.

In fact this often happens with d20, not because of any problem with the rules, but because the players fail to understand a very important thing, what the numbers mean. Many players completely miss the fact that anything above lvl 5 is beyond natural humans. Since they misunderstand this, they just assume that a hero is lvl 20 because the lvls "stop" at lvl 20, but that is a very, very incorrect notion. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, a lvl 5. Even Gandalf's level would be in the single digits, at 5-7, at most 9 after the balrog.

Likewise, Elminster and King Azoun are not both automagically "max" lvl because they are powerful characters.

You are not required to bend it, and the game rules being altered does not require the story to bend. You can if you want, but you are not required to do so.

Consistency is very important for some people to maintain their immersion, because inconsistencies break immersion for them. Others can glaze over inconsistencies without even noticing.

In the end, consistency is helpful, especially in a game, as it sets player's expectations.




This is just like I said above, you take the mechanics that best represent what you need.

If the rules lack an explicit representation of something, you use the mechanics to cobble up something that fits. Take the Iceball spell and change it's elemental damage to fire. Done.

The system is like a language, some concepts require a single word in one language but require a phrase or a whole sentence in other languages.

Likewise, when using a system, sometimes you can just use an ability presented, sometimes you need to reflavor, other times you take and mix mechanics from three different abilities. A good system is not one that doesn't require you to adapt, but rather a good system is one that is easy enough to adapt that it takes little enough effort and time to do so that it can be done on the fly by a knowledgeable gm.



Playability is definitely important, but having the tools available to easily run things and adapt on the fly to the situational requirements are equally important.

A bunch of rules on running a keep seem quite reasonable, but it'd be far better to just have rules that can be easily applied to running a keep in addition to a bunch of other stuff.




If I can take a fantasy module and adapt it to run in star wars, then what exactly could a change in editions possibly do to make running prior edition modules difficult?

===================================

Nevermind. I just realized the problem. The real problem.

GMs who don't want to be GMs, or want to be GMs without putting the effort. Folks who want to just read from the book instead of actually thinking and applying a even a smidge of reason.

There really isn't any other reason I can think of for how it can be so easy to use modules not just across systems, but across genres, and yet have folks think a simple edition change will invalid them.

I can forgive a GM wanting to just read if they are new (in which case they need to be taught how to think), or are being a gm even though they don't want to be, like if no one wants to be the gm.

But honestly, in my opinion, such a gm isn't worth playing with if there is any other gm available.