Paizo announces Pathfinder Unchained

[LeStryfe79]

I've been using the advantage/disadvantage system for over 5 years in my homebrew except I call it favorable/unfavorable. Don't know where I picked it up from.

Now my old DM is saying he suggested it for 5ed during 20+ playtests with WotC, lol. He is a well respected attorney who has written mechanics for other games, but I still don't believe him. Also, he says it was his idea but I thought I took it from something else for our games. This was probably 7 or 8 years ago, but it's a simple enough mechanic that I imagine many people were already using it. Hmmm...

 

[nikolokolus]

Sounds like bullshit, but it's one of those things people could independently develop. No matter where it comes, I like it; makes my life easier when I don't have to pause and look up situational modifiers in the middle of a fight.

 

[pakoito]

5E is shovelware

I'm curious why you consider 5E to be shovelware. Care to elaborate?

I'm not the hardcorest of the roleplayers, maybe do one or two sessions a year. For the past 2 years we were doing the D&D Next betas. At the beginning they had new ideas: OP barbarians, ranged clerics, cantrips galore, better use of dice...

By release time they sacrificed all of it and reverted to D&D3.6, with the same principles, spells and classes.

 

[Night Goat]

Ranged clerics can be very good in 3.5. The Zen Archery feat lets them use wisdom for ranged attack rolls, letting them participate in armed combat without Multiple Attribute Dependency.

 

[Servo]

Sooo Unchained was released a couple of months ago, right? What do you think of it?

The bard in my group recommended it to me since I'm playing a rogue. He said I would basically get weapon finesse for free AND get to add DEX to my damage rolls. The only other way I know of to get that is dervish dancing or an agile weapon, neither of which I can afford.

 

[Night Goat]

It's shit. It nerfs the Summoner like it's an MMO and is mostly full of badly thought-out house rules that no one will ever use. Maybe it does improve rogues and barbarians, but they still aren't viable choices in Caster Edition. This was yet another opportunity to fix some of the issues that have been plaguing 3.x for 15 fucking years, and once again Paizo showed that they have no interest in doing that.

If you are interested in the new rogue, everything you need is here. There's no need to give Paizo money for a bad product.

 

[Servo]

It nerfs the Summoner like it's an MMO

how so?

rogues and barbarians still aren't viable choices in Caster Edition

wut is caster edition?

some of the issues that have been plaguing 3.x for 15 fucking years

like wut?

(member you're talking to a nub)

 

[Alex]

What should they replace it with?

 

[Night Goat]

It nerfs the Summoner like it's an MMO

how so?

People on the forums were complaining about the Summoner being overpowered. The summoner is a powerful class, but it's not the only one or the most powerful one. The problem is that the summoner's eidolon was better than the party's fighter, and rather than doing something about the fighter being shit, everyone decided to kill the messenger. So, the new version of the summoner is much weaker than the old one, which is now banned in PFS.

rogues and barbarians still aren't viable choices in Caster Edition

wut is caster edition?

The biggest problem with Pathfinder, and 3e before it, is that casters are so much better than everyone else that they're the only real options. Casters can take out multiple opponents with a single action from level 1, and become exponentially more powerful as they level up. Fighters slowly whittle down the HP of a single enemy at a time, from level 1 to level 20.

some of the issues that have been plaguing 3.x for 15 fucking years

like wut?

(member you're talking to a nub)

Fixing Pathfinder's biggest issues would take a new edition, but there are smaller things they could have done. They could have made noncasters slightly less terrible by at least giving them some better feats and fixing combat maneuvers - one of the reasons fighters are even worse in Pathfinder than they were in 3.5 is that you're much less likely to make a combat maneuver work. But that would require them to admit there's a problem, and that's never going to happen - the developers are mostly assholes with nothing but contempt for the players, and the most vocal players are willfully delusional.

 

[Servo]

which is now banned in PFS

I don't see anything about eidolons being banned either in the PFS Guide to Organized Play or the PFS FAQ. Did I misunderstand you?

Edit: this guy says the summoner has been balanced but the eidolon has not been removed:

The Unchainedsummoner has had its eidolon changed quite significantly by providing a number of eidolon subtypes that determine many of the abilities of the eidolon. The summoner spell list has also been changed quite a bit. The fact that the Unchained summoner is replacing the original summoner in Pathfinder Society suggests that the new version of the class is a bit more balanced, but only time will tell as people try out various builds.

It sounds like the fighter has been improved as well:

The next system is stamina and combat tricks, which is intended to boost martial characters, with a particular focus on fighters... The Combat Stamina feat gives a character a stamina pool, which can be used to boost attack rolls, or to access special combat tricks associated with combat feats. Just about every existing combat feat has been given an associated combat trick. These tricks let you spend stamina points to do all sorts of things, ranging from gaining a second attack of opportunity for the same provoking action (albeit at a -5 penalty) with the Combat Reflexes feat, to being able to declare your use of Stunning Fist after you’ve hit with the attack, to temporarily reducing the two-weapon fighting penalty. This seems like a great way to make martial characters feel like they’re still relevant, even in a party with a spellcaster tossing out huge fireballs every turn.

Also casters may be less OP in Unchained:

The spell alterations section includes limited magic, which seems to be intended, as the name suggests, to limit spell power, to wild magic, which gives a table of strange effects that could happen when casting spells in unusual situations or locations. The standout in this section for me is the active spellcasting, which puts the dice back into the hands of the players, so the caster would roll an ‘attack’ for a spell that normally gives a save. The chance of ‘hitting’ works out about the same, but I think it’s a nice way to involve players a little bit more. There are also options for spell critical hits and fumbles, which could certainly make spellcasting more interesting (and dangerous).

Sounds pretty good to me. I especially like the bit about combat tricks, wound thresholds and variant multiclassing