Pathfinder 1e was pretty much just straight-up continuing D&D 3.5e, but with some tweaks. Pathfinder 2e overhauled a lot of stuff, often simplifying things, but still pretty complex.
Compared to D&D 5e, Pathfinder has more rules, but those rules often make things easier, or (IMO) get you more return for the effort. So, for example: The feat list is bigger and more complicated, but in practice, it means you only need to look at a handful of them when you level up, which is easier (and the rules give you guidelines for swapping things out if you don’t like them). The monk has more decisions to make with stances and attack types, but that’s… kind of what you want with a monk to make combat interesting. There are rules for boats, and holy shit how does 5e not have rules for boats.
The last example might sound silly, but it’s part of what convinced me to switch. It’s an annoying omission in and of itself, but also speaks to a broader pattern of 5e just not supporting Dungeon Masters, letting them fix the either broken or incomplete rules, or else take the blame for them. Pathfinder actually supports Dungeon Game Masters, as though their time, effort, and fun were just as valuable as anyone else’s. /rant
Pathfinder 2e is what I’d play if I wanted something like 5e, but runs differently. If I wanted something similar, I’d pick something else, but that’s a longer, even more off topic discussion to go into unprompted. :P
Exactly. It’s just goosing the numbers. The company made this much in profit, and the cost-cutting from firing people will save money immediately, so it looks great… on paper… for a little while. It doesn’t matter if the company is gutted, because the CEO and most of the investors will dip before things get too bad, and go onto the next thing. The employees will suffer and the customers will be upset, but CEOs don’t answer to them, they answer to shareholders, and shareholders just want the line to go up this quarter.
Yeah, it’s definitely in the same wheelhouse as modern D&D, so if you like that general experience but want to try something new, it’s worth checking out. It’s my pick when I want high adventure, superheroic fantasy, with engaging set piece encounters, which is the vibe both games are going for.
@machinaeZERO is also right on the money. There’s going to be a revision coming up, but the old stuff is still compatible and in Humble Bundle right now. (Pathfinder does that periodically, and they’re pretty sweet deals!) One more thing is that all the rules are free, legitimately. There’s a wiki called The Archives of Nethys, which has ALL the rules content from ALL the books. Paizo allows it, and explicitly gave the site the green light to do that. The books are still nice to have, and you still need them if you want adventures or lore, but you never have to buy a book just to get some rules in it, like a class or feat or whatever.
Also, can we appreciate how desperate and nonsensical that entire argument was?
Okay, lots of them are Japanese. So… what about the ones that aren’t? Why isn’t that person concerned about the one who absolutely understand what it means?
And secondly… it’s still a huge red flag that Japanese customers were going so far out of their way to buy extremely obscure music from racist bands from an overtly Nazi music seller. If an American specifically imported music from a Japanese shop only racists know or care about, covered in Axis power imagery, that’d still point towards being a huge racist.
That user is seriously turning themselves in knots to defend people who buy Nazi music from the Nazi store.
Also, just to see if they have even the tiniest bit of plausible deniability, I checked out Midgard’s shop. There’s overtly white supremacist shit ALL OVER the place.
It’s not like these people accidentally supported a band with reprehensible beliefs behind the scenes. It’s not like a totally normal music shop turned out to be a front for white supremacists. There’s note even any serious argument about “separating art from the artist.” The leak includes what people bought, and you can tell when someone bought overtly white supremacist music. And even if they didn’t, and the band or album name doesn’t give anything away, what’s it doing at the Nazi store? Why isn’t it streaming, or on Bandcamp, or self-distributed? These customers still had to know there’s an obscure Nazis music store, what it’s called and where to find it, confirm that it’s a Nazi store the moment they went there, and still give them money and their address to place a mail order. Oh, some of them aren’t native English speakers? Then that just makes it even more damning that they did all this with a language barrier in place!
Plus, just look at the apologists in this thread. They’re fucking cowards. They can’t just come out with their beliefs, so they’re just asking questions, deflecting from the topic. One is concern trolling for the fundamental humanity of literal Nazis, despite the fact that the main fucking problem with Nazis is that they considered marginalized groups subhuman. Where’s the concern there? Why the focus on the people who oppose Nazis rather than the Nazis themselves? Another one could barely resist giving the game away by saying they’ve been called a Nazi before because of their anti-immigrant positions.
The people defending this shop and its customers aren’t serious people. They’re dishonest, cowardly, and stupid.
There’s a ghastly number of people who are aggressively ignorant assholes.
The point is that we don’t have people sleeping on the street for a lack of… anything, really. Including beds. The point is that, when nearly everything is run for-profit, and it’s even slightly more profitable to let people suffer and even die, then people will suffer and die. We do a better job selling beds than we do making sure everyone has a bed to sleep in. We could make sure everyone has access to a warm bed, shelter, food, medicine, etc., but we don’t, and it’s less and less acceptable to just accept the status quo just because it’s the status quo. If someone thinks the status quo is defensible, it’s on them to defend it.
That doesn’t mean the mattress seller is evil, or (and I can’t understand the logic in one of the other comments) that wanting people to be housed makes you a hypocrite if you have your own housing. And the absolutely shameless comments that openly admit they won’t (really can’t) explain their position, but are going to condescend anyway.
Yeah. I’m usually not one to accept “The DM can fix it” as an excuse for bad rules, but it absolutely applies here. It’s an extremely specific set of circumstances that can only happen if the players are trying to break the game and the DM lets them. It’s not a broken rule in practice so much as it is a fun thought experiment for people to talk about.
I think there are much better examples of broken rules out there.
Hoo boy. Against my better judgment, I’ll wade into this pool.
If voting for either party gets you the same result, fascists wouldn’t be so focused on elections and trying so hard to take the vote away.
Withholding your vote doesn’t do anything. When has losing an election pushed either party left?
Voting doesn’t prevent you from engaging in other forms of direct action.
Both parties suck. People will needlessly suffer and die no matter who wins. But there are also people who will suffer and die under one party but not the other, and the same can’t be said the other way around. Our democracy is fundamentally flawed, but voting is a tool at our disposal, and we’re in no position to turn anything down.
Also, to be blunt… we’ve seen this before. We know from recent history what happens when the DNC nominates the safe, centrist, establishment candidate, who fails to appeal to voters and loses to a Republican. That was 2016. Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. And who did the DNC rally behind right before Super Tuesday? That’s right… Joe Biden.
I went hiking recently. State park, at least a mile from the campground, peaceful and quiet.
Then I noticed something scrawled on one of the trail markers. Some dipshit wrote “Fuck Joe Biden” on it.
Holy shit, how miserable do you have to be to do that? To carry a marker and tag a tree just to express how you can’t stop thinking about the guy, and make it other people’s problem, even in the middle of nowhere when you’re not even around.
I kind of did the same with The Heritage Foundation.
They have a page cataloging every single instance of voter fraud they could find, and they’re up to… 1,474. Total. Since 1982. Regardless of party. In the same span of time, just looking at presidential elections, over 1.1 billion ballots were cast.
This is an abjectly evil “think tank” behind Project 2025, which actively pushes the big voter fraud lie to push mass disenfranchisement, and even they could only find an astronomically small rate of voter fraud.
If someone knows how to disable this fuckery, please tell me or i have to install adobe acrobat, it makes me crazy as it floats on all the open PDFs, covering text/content
Yeah, I used to use it to fix my RPG PDFs. (Seriously, it’s astounding how many publishers either omit or completely fuck up bookmarks.) I found out it went to shit when trying to help someone else do the same, and the newer free version was significantly cut down.
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust, and it takes resurrection magic into account with the world building. Part of assassination involves hiding the body until the resurrection window passes. IIRC, the legal penalties for murder are also much less severe if you just kill someone, rather than make sure they’re permanently dead.
There are also “Morganti” weapons. They’re pretty much the Black Blade from Elric, so they eat souls. So not only do they make resurrection impossible, but the victim is extra dead, not even existing in an afterlife. As a result, using one is a high crime, punishable by death… by Morganti blade.
That would also lead to some interesting questions if you give it a divine aspect.
If it’s all arcane magic, obviously sure, that all works.
But what if they need a cleric? That means there’s a god out there who condones this sort of thing. And that god can do this with the souls of unbelievers… unless they prepare the condemned by making them believers, possibly through gruesome means.
Honestly it’s more grimdark than I’d usually run a game, but it’s entertaining to think about. :P
Fair, I guess it depends on what the afterlife looks like in the fictional world. :P I actually didn’t get that far in the series, what with real life getting in the way, but I enjoyed it and mean to return to it.
If course! That’s always the number one choice, when possible. Sadly, it’s just not an option as frequently as I (and plenty of others) would like.
Those minis and terrain look rad, too! I also like that part of the hobby in and of itself. I could spend hours just painting minis and making terrain while watching or listening to something.
My experience with FitD games is the same. I appreciate them, I’m glad they’re there, but after trying them out a bunch, realized it just wasn’t the experience I wanted, nor what my group wanted.
Obviously for a lot of people that isn’t the case, and if they’re having a fantastic time, great! It’s just a personal preference.
Yes, as long as people are having fun, that’s all that matters.
But it’s also fair to point out that hacking D&D to do something fundamentally outside of what it’s designed to do is going to be a lot of work for little pay off. Take it from people who are familiar with other games, it would honestly be easier to learn something new. (And most games aren’t as hard to pick up as 5e!) That’s not gatekeeping, that’s just advice based on experience. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, so unless you like the squeeze for its own sake, maybe try something else.
Also, to speak on the system not mattering if you have a good DM: sure, that’s technically correct. That also doesn’t invalidate criticism of a set of rules. Yeah, a skilled and experienced DM can fix things, even on the fly, but maybe the entire system shouldn’t rely on that. 5e has notoriously bad DM-facing material, and after years of running it, I got burnt out. The DM is playing the game, too, and their time, effort, and fun matter just as much as anyone else’s. I’m sick of 5e’s approach that the DM will either figure it out or take the blame. The fact that it’s so hard to be a new DM is, in my opinion, the likely reason there’s a DM shortage. You don’t get the same problem with other games!
So yeah, like you said. System matters. Even if you don’t use a system per se and go FKR, that’s a choice you made on the structure of the game.
I’m just afraid that Hollywood execs will take exactly the wrong lessons from it, as they usually do. They won’t see it as a successful fantasy adventure movie that underperformed because it came out between Mario and John Wick, but as a failure because it wasn’t mostly a carbon-copy of modern Marvel movies, and trusted its audience even a little bit.
The conversation around this topic always seems directly or indirectly framed around a zero-sum framing: what’s better and what’s worse? Which side wins? Even if you disagree with the premise, that’s what’s shaping the conversation. I don’t think the article suggested there’s a “correct” answer, but it was clearly inspired by people who think the author was doing things wrong.
It can simultaneously be true that there are successful long-term campaigns with and without high character turnover due to death. It’s a mater of personal preference and successful execution. The only thing categorically false is the idea that character deaths, in and of themselves, are inherently bad for long-term play.
GOP senator says Biden ‘may not be’ impeachable since he wasn’t in office during accused actions (www.washingtontimes.com)
'There's almost nobody left': CEO of Baldur's Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs (www.pcgamer.com)
Suffering and success.
The Names of Thousands of Neo-Nazi Music Fans Just Got Leaked (www.vice.com)
Thousands of purveyors of neo-Nazi tunes just had their day ruined by a crew of enterprising Scandinavian anti-fascists.
A perfect visualisation of a wasteful system (lemmy.world)
#SorryNotSorry (startrek.website)
George Takei's Based Voting Take [Rule} (files.catbox.moe)
Image Transcription:...
Local pop radio station is using its metadata to spread anti Biden propaganda (i.imgur.com)
Texas Has the Fewest Personal Freedoms (www.newsweek.com)
Texas was found to be the state with the fewest personal freedoms, according to the Cato Institute’s new Freedom Index.
My PDF reader REALLY HAD to add a permanent "AI assistant" button that floats on every single file i open (feddit.it)
If someone knows how to disable this fuckery, please tell me or i have to install adobe acrobat, it makes me crazy as it floats on all the open PDFs, covering text/content
Legal loophole (startrek.website)
The best ways to play online (lemmy.world)
What is PbtA? (by Vincent Baker) (lumpley.games)
PbtA means “Powered by the Apocalypse” — games inspired by Apocalypse World, as self-identified by their creators.
And like D&D sessions, rooting for it to happen (ttrpg.network)
On Character Death and Long-Term Play (attronarch.com)