Do you all just shit on Pathfinder and other RPG's because it's cool or do you have legitimate reasons for doing so?

It's a huge fucking trap, is what it is. It encourages players to learn the game and to identify winning strategies, but on the same token it makes 70% of the stuff in the books worthless garbage and the rest of it overpowered nonsense.

The entire existence of Monks and Fighters next to Clerics and Druids is a fucking joke, and breeds discontent within it's own fanbase because of what the disconnect between what the rules rules *say* it do and what the rules actually do.

It breeds specific optimum strategies, while encouraging dependent strategies by getting players invested by learning what's shit and what's good when, really, all of the options are different shades of crap. A better designed game allows more and better strategies, and encourages eccentric builds as able to do different and interesting things, it doesn't encourage min/maxing just to make a character like a Fighter work at every average level just to keep up with the runaway combat bloat.

the problem with pf is that it has rules just for the sake of rules, and not to make stuff more fun. It's more fiddly than 3.x ever was, even at its worst, and unlike other overcomplicated systems, you don't even get anything for all the cruft stuck on.

most people on the internet are kinda dumb, they don't understand complicated things, get frustrated, and want simple funtime social games because playing pretend isn't cool past 10 years of age

I'm fairly certain that arguing about editions is never going to score any cool points.

I shit on PF because I think it's a garbage game designed by garbage people who wouldn't know good game design if it walked up to them and stabbed them. Other than PF, my shitlist doesn't include that many controversial picks, unless we're considering Wraeththu and CthulhuTech good now.

Long live Tunnels & Trolls

>Do you all just shit on Pathfinder and other RPG's because it's cool or do you have legitimate reasons for doing so?
Read any analysis of D&D 3.5 written after maybe 2008, and you'll get a good idea of what people hate in Pathfinder.

The big ones: feats are horribly balanced such that certain choices are great while others are choice-wasting traps, classes are unbalanced such that classes deemed "magical" will vastly overperform in comparison to classes deemed "mundane", extremely swingy mechanics makes for a multitude of ridiculous scenarios that are only possible thanks to the mechanics (the one I remember using pesonally is the planetfall barbarian) and the vast number of books to go through makes character development a research-riddled chore.

>Do you all just shit on Pathfinder and other RPG's because it's cool or do you have legitimate reasons for doing so?

Yes

Honestly if my group didn't insist on playing pathfinder I wouldn't give a shit about the system. I imagine a lot of people bitching about it are in a similar boat.

Now when I gm we play anything but pathfinder.

Armor Class is a stupid mechanic that doesn't make any sense. Wearing heavy armor should make you easier to hit but reduce damage, but no some jerkoff running around in full plate is apparently as hard to hit as a fast guy buck-naked and metal is made of butter.

I actually don't have a problem with pathfinder. I've never played it, i probably won't, but if someone else wants to that is there business. Live and let live.

I just feel it's too similar to D&D, so I dislike it.

And after all this years people still do not know what AC means.

AC isn't what is required to touch you, that's TOUCH AC, which heavy armor makes lower (by reducing dex to AC). AC is what is required to actually damage you. For instance if a hit is higher than your touch AC but lower than your AC is hits you but doesn't do any damage.

That's why touch attacks exist, that's why flat footed exists.

I swear so many complaints are ill informed. D&D is a terrible system, but often not for the reasons people shit on it for.

There are many good arguments as to why Pathfinder is shit, but AC isn't one of them. It's an abstraction and it's explicitly called out as such. It's like idiots who can't let go of the idea of HP being meat points.

Yeah, for all the shit I dislike about 3.PF, not understanding AC abstraction is the height of autistim.

Clearly we need to make a Seeing if half of Veeky Forums actually has reasons for shitting on TTRPG's and pen and paper and not just falling into the "Yeah it sucks because I guess A B and C said it did" general or /sihotgahrfsottrpgapapanjfityisbigabacsidg/

Pathfinder lies about what it is. Back in the day it was sold as a continuation and improvement of 3.5 as an alternative to 4e. It's a continuation in a sense, but a lot of 3.5's playstyles were culled unless you mixed in actual 3.5 material.

The caster vs. mundane problem it claimed to work on has been exacerbated in PF. The feat problem was exacerbated by giving out more of them, but then needlessly splitting up already-relatively-weak martial feats into feat chains.

Designers like Buhlman and SKR are the worst of the worst 3.5 grognards, clinging to the worst aspects of 3.5 in its spiritual successor while having the gall to claim they're improving things.

Don't forget that they also lied about their playtesting data.

It's tangentially related, but Paizo also allowed the Pathfinder brand to be used as part of a blatant scam, the 'MMO' project while has failed to show any meaningful fruit years after its original delivery date and yet was still taking money from people last time I checked.

I didn't actually know that. I only paid attention to PF between 2010 and 2013, and I was still actually running 3.5 while allowing some PF material into the game here and there since the pool of available players knew PF.

Funny enough, CMB and CMD calculations actually work well on 3.5's monster stats better than they do with PF's.

Any evidence of this?
Because if that is true they can't recover from that.

Pathfinder's biggest problem is that it is designed by card-game designers, using card game design principles.
>Game is made up of tons and tons of one-off abilities, a good deal of them being redundant.
>Each one has differing synergies and accessibility.
>Primary source of enjoyment for most players comes more from developing strategy rather than deploying it.
>Older content is basic and fairly broken by a few outstanding options.
>Newer content is more balanced but suffers from power creep. Without separation of old and new content, legacy balance is a joke.
>Approximately 20% of all content is useless or "trap" filler meant to elevate the prestige of correctly assembling a strategy. Half of such content may be flavorful or interesting, but it is fundamentally useless.

I can give examples of each of these problems if you'd like.

Roll up a fighter and try to trip someone in 3.5. That's why I don't like it.

I don't know if I would call it legitimate, but I do have reasons for shitting on Pathfinder: I ran it for two years and it nearly burned me out on tabletop RPGs altogether. I got to see first-hand by running the game just how fucking broken and unbalanced it is, and how little the devs actually care about making a balanced game.

I also got to see how immature and petty the devs are and how stuck they are on their shitty ideas. They're so goddamn egotistical that they would rather die than ever admit they were wrong about anything. They're fucking ridiculous.

Primary problems with pathfinder:

>Magic is a bullshit app store that never, ever stops getting bigger; every book they release, even books about combat tactics and options, has to have a section of spells, and most of the RPG line books, the spine of the game, have pathetic, phoned-in feats but at least one ridiculously overpowered spell to make it that much harder to wizard-proof a plotline
>Class design from core rulebook indicates it is OK for one class to be able to walk through walls, disappear, fly, teleport, step through reality to his idyllic retirement DIMENSION, stop time, and open doors into heaven when it suits him at max level and another class, presented as the equal an opposite of the first, has...a really good critical hit, +5 attack and damage, -5 damage taken (but only from weapon attacks), and the ability to move normally in heavy armor at max level.
>Melee combat is ass, requiring you to be standing right next to the thing you're fighting or sacrifice 50-75% of your damage output for that turn; you can't move and make all your attacks in the same turn, while the guy conjuring meteors can move as much as he wants
>Touch AC appears to exist for no other reason than to allow certain classes to completely ignore the heavily-invested defenses of armor-based classes and large monsters
>Errata is used as a retroactive balancing tool, and by this I mean a year or two after a book comes out most of the most popular options in that book will be carpet-bombed into uselessness unless they were spells.
>The core rulebook, despite being the worst-balanced book in the series by a very wide margin, is treated as the sacrosanct book against which all others must be measured
>Feats are an over-complicated nightmare of unnecessary chains and taxes; basically nothing feat-based scales except Power Attack, and you need to be paying at least three and usually more like five feats for basic competence with your character's fighting style.

So my Pathfinder gm wants to switch back to 3.5
How do I convince him this is a terrible idea?

I'm playing a wizard by the way.

You don't, wizards are much better in 3.5, and though individual martial classes suck, you can at least cobble something together that's far more functional than PF.

Have you considered instead playing anything that isn't a direct derivative of 3.5 or 3.5 itself?
Hell, you can get better Sword and Sorcery from M&M 3e.

No, you can use one of five whole builds for martials that can do enough damage to kill something.

Otherwise you have to use the book of nine swords to get a functional martial.

At least in PF all martials can actually kill shit. In 3.5 they couldn't even do that.

...

massively unbalanced gameplay and incredible swinginess, mostly.

Simple numbers. They claim that their playtest involved 50,00 players. Their writing and editing team was around two dozen people at the time. There's no way that group could collate the sheer amount of playtest reports that would have flooded in.

There's also numerous cases of people being banned from the forums for negative feedback. Destructive playtests were not only discouraged, but outright ignored.

It was a marketing ploy, plain and simple. The playtest was never meant to point out problems or fix anything. It was intended to sell more copies of the game, plain and simple.

Indeed.

giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?279503-D-amp-D-in-M-amp-M-a-new-approach-to-rebalancing-3-5-PF

Call me a shill or whatever but Fantasy Craft is literally 3.PF but better in every way.

HP being meat points is the only way to reconcile the rules. The rules for poisoned blades, falling damage, healing potions, and a host of other things make no sense otherwise. You and the book can say it's an abstraction all you want but the rules demonstrate otherwise.

Except for the many examples that don't make sense if you assume HP are meat points.

HP are an abstract measure of a number of different factors. Physical injuries are part of that, but arguing it's the only thing it measures is stupid.

All the rules make sense with MeatPoints™. In the D&D universe beings become more physically resilient as they gain life experience. It's the only explanation that works.

Or, alternatively, experience gives them a mix of greater resilience, willpower and skill to avoid severe damage, which also makes perfect sense?

>willpower and skill to avoid severe damage
This is already represented by AC and Saves. There's nothing in the rules to demonstrate HP is anything more than physical resilience. (even if a sidebar mentions abstraction)

Just adding to this. If HP involved willpower and skill to avoid damage then it would be lower when a character sleeps or is helpless. This isn't the case.

d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/combat#coup-de-grace

That is a special rule. It doesn't lower hit points. Say there is machine hooked up to precisely throw rocks at unconscious, helpless PCs. The higher level fighter will be able to withstand more rocks before dying than the lower level fighter even if their physical ability scores are the exact same. MeatPoints are the only answer.

The only way I can understand HP is literally as a way of saying whether something lives or dies at any given point.
It's not will to live, or otherwise CHA or WIS would get added to HP, and people take retarded amounts of damage that don't make sense to be shrugged off by 'willpower'. It's not meatpoints because people take retarded amounts of damage that can't be resolved simply by saying they're just that tough.
It's literally plot armor. Take enough damage, and the plausibility of your survival dives until it's just plain undeniable.

>It's not meatpoints because people take retarded amounts of damage that can't be resolved simply by saying they're just that tough.
Yes. In the D&D universe people are regardless tough. A 20th level fighter with 14 Constitution and absolutely no magic who rolled at least average on HP will survive a fall from the upper atmosphere 19/20 times. Beings in the D&D universe follow different rules than ours.

Yeah, because he's too important to kill off.
If HP were meatpoints, where's all the lost meat?
I'd think that I'd lose an arm or at least a good amount of my blood before I died. There's no other way to explain how he can be totally functioning one second and dead the next.

It grows back after rest or healing.

>If HP were meatpoints, where's all the lost meat?
HP damage is cuts and bruises that can heal. Only a few specific attacks actually sever limbs or deal irreparable harm under the rules.

I remember reading an interview with someone who worked on D&D... 3.5 I think, where he mentioned that they looked to MtG for design philosophy in the game. Namely that certain abilities and feats were objectively bad choices. Think the example he used was the Toughness feat, which while it looks useful, it's not.
I always thought that was a fucked up way to design a tabletop game.

Not even the main problem.
The fact that he can full attack at 1 HP but has to wait on a cleric if he drops below that means that there's some sort of magical distinction between 1 HP and 0 HP.
Treating HP as a conceit of the game explains everything about it.
>Wizards have less HP than Fighters because Wizards SHOULD be easier to kill than Fighters
>People with a hardier constitution are harder to kill
>Leveling up gives you more HP because the character's stuck along longer and is more important to the game
>Damaging a character doesn't prevent them from fighting unimpeded
>20th level wizard, age 89, with 8 CON and a limp, is harder to kill than 1st level 20 CON, 21-year old fighter.
>All that 'bloodloss' suddenly goes away after a long nap, no matter if you were boiled alive by a dragon or turned into a pincushion by arrows

physics works different in D&D land, user.
You can survive things that are entirely impossible to survive just because of meat points.

>I've got a stick, you've got a dead horse. Let's do this!

Yeah, physics magically change to however the game rules say they work now.
As far as I'm concerned, that's distinction without a difference.

You are correct. In the D&D universe people get absurdly physically durable as they gain life experiences. It's just a part of the setting like elves and dragons.

Ultimately there's not any real difference between most rpgs. The major differences are how comprehensible the rules are. Pathfinder isn't bad (bland like all D&D but not bad) but there's so much bloat to the game and the people who prefer it, from my experience, are cancerous.

3.5/PF is one of the worst, most overrated RPG systems out there. It recycles so much content and has so few original ideas while simultaneously bulking up and overwhelmingly bloating the game's content to the point of pointlessness.

I like this user's interpretation
HP should be relabeled Luck in every instance. All attacks are 100% fatal. When they connect. But Steve the Barbarian still had 57 points of Luck left when the ogre's club came smashing down, so he dodges out of the way, shedding 9 Luck points in the process. He's now that much closer to the near miss that wasn't.
I have no clue how to refluff AC to fit with this explanation, though.

Or you could give up with the realism snobbery, you fucking autists.

HP bloat

shitposting
same as every other general

It's not snobbery. Some people just prefer a more simulationist game. Some people do not. The people who do not should think the whole HP/meat point discussion irrelevant and keep on truckin

But how would they ever perpetuate their own snobbery if they couldnt call others out on theirs?

Some anons like to flavor their disdain with statements like "This game is so bad it could alienate potential new players from the hobby forever!" aka think of the children. It's just as disingenuous and self-serving here as it has been elsewhere.

It's autism.