Is Pathfinder in decline? Feels like there are fewer and fewer pf players in Roll20

No way dude. Pathfinder Online will save it

>shitty MMO cash grab will save ttrpg

wew lad

>5E is shit because it has class balance!

>Implying 5E classes are balanced

Oh look, a bitch.

Have you actually played and read through 5E? Because typically all of the classes are pretty equal, with casters being a bit higher, but not to the extent that PF has where they can solve every encounter with one spell.
It's not 100% balanced but it's a hell of a lot closer than 3.PF.

I would argue it's a little worse than this (buff champion plz) but still yeah, concentration alone did a lot to reign in the stupidity of 3.5/pf casters. The lower number of high level spell slots is also a plus.

Caster are slightly better IF youre minmaxing. If youre not super into optimization, everything is pretty equal. I can only think of 3 archtypes that are flat out better than everything else in 5e, but its not by a lot.

From a sales perspective, yes (setting aside any other issues with PF/Paizo that people might have, and which would almost certainly have an impact, large or small).

Any system will eventually encounter the same after roughly a decade or so. After long enough, the time will come for a new system to be devised. PF had a pretty good run, but from a business point of view I will be surprised if I don't see a "PF 2.0" in the next year or two years, because if I don't I suspect it will die.

Pretty much this. There aren't any more books Paizo can put out to support such a large team. They need to either expand into a universal system (witness Starfinder) or go PF 2.0. The latter will split their fanbasr and draw howls of outrage, but without it they're dead meat.

PF is down a little, but 3.5 in general is actually on the rise.

The two games most new players end up playing are D&D 5e and 3.5, and those games also tend to be the two that people end up returning to after trying out different games.

Most other games are either too generic or too specific/niche, so they're good for one-shots and short campaigns, but the big D&D's are almost always going to be the most played.
Even if Pathfinder and 3.5 lost 90% of their players, that's still more than most games have ever had, and with people never, ever going to be able to stop talking about it (with even bad press being good press and keeping its fame alive, especially if people just try to exaggerate how bad it is and get other people to comment about how it's actually not that bad), I don't think it's really going to be going anywhere for at least a decade.

What if it's a 5.pathfinder?

I think that would actually be even worse for Paizo than just a PF2.0, mostly because they rode on the back of 3.5e already and drew its audience that way. If they try and ride a hypothetical 5.PF using the same tactic then they'll doom themselves to being known as parasites from an industry perspective. They got away with it once, and did so solidly enough. A second time would stretch their credibility regarding what they call the longevity or reliability of the 3e system.

>the longevity or reliability of the 3e system.

3e only persisted this long because the D&D alternatives were objectively worse.
5e is a nice system with a parent company that's extremely reluctant to publish much beyond hardcover adventure books. The people currently putting out 3rd party splat are laughably bad.

3e will fade, and will only be played by aging grognards who've invested too much money in the books to do anything else.

As I said: what they call the longevity or reliability of the 3e system.

I doubt it would sell.
Pathfinder did so well because 4E was largely disliked, but 3.5 was no longer supported. 3.5 also had a million splat books so most players had invested a lot of money in the game, and suddenly all that was useless unless they stuck with 3.5. Then along comes PF, which is supported by some pretty big names, is backwards compatible with all your 3.5 stuff, and for the most part improved upon 3.5 in a lot of minor ways. Also it had less room for shit like Pun-Pun.
5E is currently being supported, draws a lot of inspiration from PF without having any of it's flaws (that's not to say it doesn't have any of it's own), and hasn't done anything to piss off it's user base.

God willing

I can't help but feel you think you only point of D&D is combat....

Outside of combat, a fighter is still just a mostly useless muscle man, while any kind of caster can do exponentially more things than they can. Sure, it 'wastes' a spell slot to do it (maybe), but the action economy is still fucked. Simply having the choice of something stupid like prestidigitation gives a caster way more options than a Fighter/Rogue/Ranger or whatever else.

In combat, and even without high level spells, most casters can deal more damage than your average martial.

>concentration alone did a lot to reign in the stupidity of 3.5/pf casters

So are we pretending that things like the 'War Caster' feat don't exist? There are plenty of ways to make concentration not matter. Like, I dunno, having a meat shield between you and the bad guys. Man, good thing it's hard to concentrate while that (Insert level appropriate creature here) you summoned is getting wailed on. Yup. Real hard to cast that spell while your summon is in pain.

The only real reason that 5E casters FEEL (and it is only a feeling) less powerful than their 3.5/PF counter parts is that they simply have less spell choice, this is not a balance feature. It is a side effect of 3.5/PF being a much older (though not necessarily more mature) system, Pathfinder has been out longer, so it has more spells from all 5 million splat books. Sure, a 5E caster can't cast Fly and rain down fiery death upon his enemies at level 10, but he can summon an elemental and polymorph your enemies into rabbits.

I like both systems, but claiming that either of them is 'balanced' is a bit of a long stretch.

As expected from a game that is almost a decade old.

This

>Outside of combat, a fighter is still just a mostly useless muscle man, while any kind of caster can do exponentially more things than they can.
All classes get the same amount of skill proficiencies, and the bulk of your proficiencies come from your race and background anyway.
Of course having spells like fly or telepathy make you much more useful outside of combat than martials could ever be, but that's an issue in every version of D&D. Pathfinder is no exception.
inb4 have you tried playing something other than D&D

>There are plenty of ways to make concentration not matter. Like, I dunno, having a meat shield between you and the bad guys.
That only stops your spells from being disrupted because you where dumb enough to cast them whilst standing next to the enemy. The real reason that concentration makes the game a lot more balanced is because you can only have 1 concentration spell active at a time. This means that you can't just fire off all of your best spells at the same time.

>The only real reason that 5E casters FEEL (and it is only a feeling) less powerful than their 3.5/PF counter parts is that they simply have less spell choice, this is not a balance feature. It is a side effect of 3.5/PF being a much older (though not necessarily more mature) system
WotC has stated that they are intentionally holding back splat books, making sure to not make the game as unbalanced, keeping people from getting too invested (monetarily) by the time 6E comes out, and making it much less unwieldy when compared to 3.5. The fact that there are less spells to choose from is a deliberate balance choice. And casters sure as hell don't just 'feel' less powerful. Any minmaxer will show you that the gap between martials and casters is a hell of a lot smaller in 5E compared to 3.PF.

"Balancing" casters and martials isn't something you can ever expect from D&D, I think. 4e tried to do just that, succeeded in some ways but overall it didn't went very well. To achieve some form of "balance" you'll need to nerf casters so much that it would imply very low magic setting, something D&D just doesn't do and never did. And giving every martial access to roughly the same amount of utility skills is going to blur the lines between archetypes. And that’s what classes are, archetypes. For ultimate freedom people just have to use point-buy based skill systems.

I think 5e gave us enough. Actually using skills like Insight and History is now viable for a fighter due to the way proficiency and backgrounds work. He's never going to be a skill monkey but that isn't his thing anyway.

And the main thing is not really the damage amount or anything. It's that you can actually pick corebook fucking Fighter straight out of the box without investing in feat trees you need to carefully research before picking the simplest (in theory) class in the game.

Giving the amount of various sacred cows, I think it's all we can ask and hope for from D&D.

Dunno globaly, but in my town less and less people are playing PF because it isn't worth it the amount of fixes to keep everybody balanced.

Though imo is kinda easy, ban core, allow 3pp

>allow 3pp
How could this possibly make the game more balanced?

Becase 3pp, specially DSP, is billion lightyears better at balance than Paizo at their own game.

In fact, I think 3pp only would be a better Pathfinder than anything Paizo released.

there's basically 2 players per game of pathfinder on roll20 atm, but there's a bazillion games because each player is in 15 campaigns at once.

I mean maybe if you restricted it to certain 3rd party publishers, then sure. Any 3PP in general would be a nightmare though.

I can assure you that even the shittiest stuff from 3pp has nothing on the shittiest stuff from Paizo

>WotC has stated that they are intentionally holding back splat books, making sure to not make the game as unbalanced, keeping people from getting too invested (monetarily) by the time 6E comes out, and making it much less unwieldy when compared to 3.5. The fact that there are less spells to choose from is a deliberate balance choice. And casters sure as hell don't just 'feel' less powerful. Any minmaxer will show you that the gap between martials and casters is a hell of a lot smaller in 5E compared to 3.PF.

The fact that WotC is holding back mechanical add-ons was Marketed as a balance choice. The real reason is because they over produced 4E, no one bought it, people got laid off, and now they just don't fucking want to. High level 5E is boring as fuck, there are no real choices to make because of that choice. That's why all the 3rd party shit and the DM's guild exist, because once you pass level 10 your character is pretty much made for you.

And even if you chose to believe WotC on the matter, the fact that the company who makes the game isn't willing to put out a type of content for the game that many people want so that they'll buy the next version of the game should be sending off red flags.

>ban core
I'm sorry, you w0t? So remove all the base classes that the 3pp is based on, also ban the book with the fucking rules it... are you even playing PF at that point?

I don't disagree, I'm just sick of the (insert system here) shills claiming that their special snowflake system, is somehow superior in balance to all others, and ALL of them love to shit on PF specifically. The only people who are worse are the ones who say their system is best, but only when you use only the splat books they like, homebrew 50% of all the content, and make way too many changes to bother keeping track of, much less to call it the same system. In essence, my main issue is people pulling the wrongbadfun card here. CONT

>he doesn't understand what ban core means
New in Veeky Forums? welcome.

Ah, so you don't have this problem the next time ban core means ban core classes, why? because casters are broken and martials are underpowered.

Here is class list for 5e
Cleric
Bard
Wizard
.
.
.
.
Rogues
.
.
Everyone else
.
.
.
Fighters

Yeah because WotC constantly saying Dex to everything right off the bat is over powered, then just does it.

Give me 1 reason to use strength for anything mechanically.
You have Acrobatics instead of Athletics
Carry weights dont matter with magic or even a 5cp donkey cart
No one uses Str saves

Sacred Geometry, anyone?

CONT

All the systems I've ever played have had various balance issues. PF/D&D have god-mode casters, Shadowrun has it's issue with Hackers and Magical folk warping the game around them. Dark Heresy allows Tech Priests to do basically any job if they munchkin hard enough.

Really, if you have some asshole who Min/Maxes every character, that isn't the systems fault, the system can never prevent that guy from doing his thing. It can try to give him less, until suddenly he figures out that some random combination of things allows utter bullshit to happen.

Calling out for the death of a system you don't like is stupid, just don't play that system. A crazy idea, I know, but try it. I don't like GURPS, the sheer amount of shit in it seems back breaking, and I don't want to be bothered, but you wont find me starting threads to shit on GURPs, because I've got better things to do, like rant in threads shitting on PF...

Shit, why am I not just working on stuff for the game I GM?

Gonna be honest, I'm not really new, but hardly an old fag either, first time I've seen someone suggest it. Banning the core classes seems terribad if you have new players though, would love to know more. Also, thanks famalam-pai

Grapple?

No support for it in 5e.
Combat maneuvers have no point to exist in the system. At least in previous systems you could benefit from it without feat investment but not anymore, on top of that its still more effecient to be dex and not have to worry about it.

It's not always about efficiency. Sometimes you just gotta grapple everything.

Taking feats isn't a bad thing. Most of them suck anyway so you aren't missing out on anything if you take it. There are other ability score improvements to be had user

Why would making a new version make outrage? Is that a TTRPG thing?

But the problem is the system does nothing to support it. It basically requires a feat just to not get punched in the face the first time and even then it is a X/day thing, which is retarded. The game may be more balanced in that Number inflation is gone but that in no way means its balanced. Melee classes still come up short in almost every regard.
Unless you can also do magic.

Except thats a huge issue.
The debate is
>Do i want marginally higher numbers
Or
>Do something slightly different X/day

>PF 2.0
Making a second iteration of Pathfinder means the Paizo team would have to admit it's time to move on and that their game is not a flawless and perfect universal game. If there's one thing that the past 5ish years have taught me, it's that the Paizo team never, ever admits they're wrong about anything. The thought that any of them could be wrong or have made a mistake never enters any of their minds.

>and even then it is a X/day thing

Is that so?

Hamers, bitch and moan about EVERY change to a system. A nerf love tap here and suddenly the game is dying, players flocking away in droves and many cries of, im going to make my own system.

Well, they did build their empire on people who were playing 3.5 D&D and hated the change to the next edition.

Except you can do both because there are multiple ability score increases

Not Grapple

user, banning core classes in 3.pf has been a fairly common thing, because almost all the most problem causing classes in the game, with spare exception, are in the core book.
The only ones that get a pass are bard and sometimes rogue/barbarian.

>Combat maneuvers have no point to exist in the system
The standard combat maneuvers don't exist in the rules, or are ruled against?
Because every game has a reason to to use the basic combat maneuvers.

Good bait. Nice and sublte. Should get a lot of (you)s out of this one.

The point is to keep squishies from running away. Grappler just greatly expands the definition of squishy.

Grapple isn't x/day

Yeah like owlbears

Fighters below monks
Sensible chuckle

>Give me 1 reason to use strength for anything mechanically.
Deal more damage as a martial

>Combat maneuvers have no point to exist in the system
>Tfw Barbarian
>Tfw rage, trip and then grapple
>Tfw when enemy can't stand up because he has no movement, advantage to all my attacks, disadvantage to all his attacks forever
It's a nice way of battlefield control

How big is Paizo?

55 full-time people in the RPG dept, last they said.

Compare that to the 13 in RPGs at WOTC.

And not a single one of them has even the slightest clue how to balance their shitty fucking game.

Pathfinder killed my systemfu, I hope it dies a painful death.

You clearly have not played 5e, but you tried so here's your (you)

Oh, user, but they know how to balance it, they refuse to.

If it dies, what will replace it?

4e killed itself, and the fanbase shat on itself even further.

I've never played 4e, I'm talking about Fantasy Craft. It was released at pretty much the same time as PF to do pretty much the same thing, but good.

Concentration matters, you can't have more than one power that requires Concentration active

Getting 5 people to agree on how to balance something is damn near impossible - hell , we have arguments between three people on Veeky Forums on how balanced anything is, and DSP has 5 people who can make things that still aren't balanced even with Veeky Forums help. 55 people can't possibly balance anything.

>I don't really think it is healthy for the game system to wait until book 5 or 10 to go in and try to right all the wrongs of the system
So you'd rather not right them at all? Just leave those pieces on the floor, where they fell? You lazy cunt.

>nor do I think errata is the right way to go about it
You dense motherfucker errata is the best way to go about it. Just fucking release a PDF that says "Hey, we fucked up, we're fixing it, these are the new fighter, ranger, monk, paladin, and barbarian" IT'S THAT EASY

>we are stuck with them
Oh my god are you for real

>suddenly the new book becomes a must have
Or the PDF you released on the internet for free that everyone can get. For free. Easily.

>we are bound to get it wrong now and again
You've been getting it wrong right from the start.

>we are trying
WELL YOU'RE NOT TRYING VERY FUCKING HARD, ARE YOU

Well it's probably true. I mean, the first attempt at tampering with the core rules is Unchained and it took them forever. Paizo could really benefit from some fresh ideas right now but they're still clinging to fan-base that values familiar stuff over improvement. For almost what, 7 years now? Yeah, it's a problem.

What's also a problem are the dev team's gigantic fucking egos. None of them could ever admit they fucked up.

Games don't need balance to be good, in fact its the imbalances that make a game good.

>they fucked up
Thats the problem, for them it wasn't a fuck up, they wanted magic>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>martials and they went into that direction every step of the way. It was only till people complained more than bans were sent when they decided to do something.
Because yeah, they had a extrict policy of "or you suck my dick or I ban you, our system is perfect and magic is the best".

>It's a feature, not a bug

Perfect balance is unattainable, obviously. But really huge issues need to be adressed.

This.

This. Every character, whether in a classless system or otherwise, should have a role and specialty, something they're good at, something they can contribute to the group. When one character invalidates the existence of all the others, that's something that needs fixing.

BS
No one should be able to do everything, and no one should be feel useless.

Shit, I'm an amateur with minimal experience and I've made better classes than these alleged professionals. Sure, they're not perfect (and I admit they can be very powerful) but you look at it and immediately know everything it's capable of.

Meanwhile, knowing what a spellcaster is capable of requires half the damn book.

I still beat 15 years from now, 3.5e will STILL have the popularity it has now while people will be saying why people are playing it when DnD 6e is better.

Face it, 3.PF isn't going anywhere.

Except for the part where it's not very much like 3.5 at all.

I've seen better class design than Paizo on the business side of my toilet paper.

You've responded to the wrong post, mate.

well then I guess 5e is perfect, then

But 5e exists which is basically just a worse watered down 3.5 without bloat issues because they gave up on even trying to make books that weren't incongruent pieces of shit. At least you can have fun with 3.5 if you avoid core classes or limit tiers. 5e is a snooze fest made for only the most inane nerds who lap at the pussy teet of d&d.

-not virt

Yeah, I erased my other post due weird wording and now I can't erase this. Fuck me.

Meant to reply to this

If you think that, you haven't looked at much 3pp stuff beyond DSP and couple other decent publishers. Just the SRD has shit that even paizo wouldn't print.

Ban core, allow psionics and tome of battle. That's the best way to avoid 3e's problems.

Hard mode: Ban core spell items like potions and wands too

Dante Must Die: And core Wondrous Items

D&D 5e is like Pathfinder without having to roll in shit and tie your mouse cord to your wrist.

So yes, it's dead.

Sounds good to me. Always had the most fun playing psionics. It's too bad theres a weird stigma against the two best books.

Champ's fine, chart user ran the numbers.

For raw damage potential simplicity, they are the king. Raw, simple numbers is their nitch.

Yeah, they never would.