How will Paizo recover from the overwhelmingly negative response to their announcement of Pathfinder 2e?

Edition wars aside, this is an incredibly stupid move from Paizo. Their fans and players are people who liked 3.5e and didn't like 4e or 5e. They'd never move to another game because change is exactly what they didn't want, so all Paizo had to do was keep releasing more supplements and adventures. That is their only fanbase, because they'll never be able to compete with 5e.

It's understandable on their part. Their playerbase had been shrinking since the launch of 5e, and although they might have ended up with a smaller but stable playerbase, that's basically a dead end and a slow death for their company. Pathfinder 2e is a big risk, but it's the only thing they could really do to try and stay relevant.

i hope so. if the pathfinder playerbase is THIS mad then the coming game might be pretty good.

DESU, as someone who played 5e and ditched the Pathfinder ship... I'm getting pretty sick of 5e and would be willing to give PF2.0 a try at least, if they fix some of the worst parts of the system like 5-long feat-chains to be able disarm a guy or needing to play a caster to have ANY options besides FULL-ROUND ATTACK EVERY SINGLE TURN!

That's what makes it great.

i liked 4e.... it was some smooth ass combat and only retards need rules to roleplay. heck my DM did away with skills for the most part, if it made sense for your character, you got a roll.

I think a lot of it was that they tried really hard to give wizards a mechanical role other than 'Does everything'. They are really good at crowd control and negative effects (Even if they don't kill that great).

Paizo forumite here.

Brother Fen is one of those idiots who thinks there are no bad options in Pathfinder.

Nathanael Love is a shitter who cites tradition and screams "DON'T TAKE AWAY MY WIZARD REEE" at the suggestion they should be reined in in future editions.

It's shrinking, but the RPG popularity gap is still 5e>>>>>>>PF>>>>>>everything else. They couldn't tried to restore their populatiry instead, because there's no way I see PF2 succeeding. There's very few reasons someone would jump ship, I think.

5e fan here, 5e's fanbase isn't nearly as strong as it appears. Alot of us are sick of 5e stagnation and lack of options. While the simplicity won us over at first, it's old and boring now. Alot of us want something a bit more mechanically substantial... but not as autistic or caster-wank centric as PF1.

There's a huge number of 5e players just waiting for ANYTHING better to come out though.

How would they recover? pretty well considering they're going to make a whole buncha money.

I mean, 4e might be worth a look. Despite the memes, it's pretty good as long as you don't mind the narrative, abstract powers system.

What exactly is this terror these people have of playing an "obsolete" game? Is an endless tide of supplements and adventure modules really the only thing that keeps things fun?

The "invalidating my shelf" argument seems to be based in part on the idea that you can't keep playing a game without the promise of new publications, but I still don't get it.

OP is acting like a major RPG brand has never gone through an edition change and survived.

>Pathfinder and D&D are the only games that exist

How fucking brainwashed can you get? I'll never understand how can you invest so much in the hobby and yet never look past the very first game you encounter.

I can't recall another RPG whose fanbase is almost entirely formed from people who rejected another games edition change.

Sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug

I think that's literally no one's problem with 4e.

See

blog.roll20.net/post/171142507420/the-orr-group-industry-report-q4-2017

I'm mostly going by roll20's numbers and from my experience. I play non popular systems with my group and that's it, but every time I go to a LGS they always have PF, 5e and maybe their pet system (the two closest ones to me like shadow of the demon lord and warhammer, for instance). Anything else has zero support and at best you can get them to order a rulebook by mail.

So I'm not sure how 5e players feel, but I never felt they wanted anything else and didn't hear many complains when going to the stores. Is that a thing around your area?

The Pathfinder audience long ago switched from 3.5 grogs to being the Pepsi to D&D's Coke via their adventure paths and good marketing for a tabletop dog. It's likely that for many of these people they have no idea 3.5 was a thing, and this is likely their first edition change which is why it's setting them off so fiercely.

Eh, we did get Xanathar's, and the UA updates have been mostly regular.

The main thing that 5e needs but currently lacks is options for characters after level 1 - that is to say, more feats. We got a few with Xanathar's, although tied to race. Hopefully we'll get more.

They're the only games that matter on any kind of serious scale, especially in the English-language market.

So their RPG odyssey is reaching its final chapter: they need a new edition to revile and despise and an old edition to cling to like a drowning man to flotsam. God speed young grognards.

The problem is that 90% of the feats in the game never get used over the required ones like Pole Arm Master, Crossbow Expertise, Sharpshooter, ect.

Adding more feats doesn't matter if the character progression system gives you so few of them that you can't afford to take them over the "required" options.

From what I gather, they're worried they won't be able to find players for a "dead" edition.

What these people haven't realized is that if Paizo goes under, PF support will end anyways.

I've been hearing the "invalidating my shelf" argument since 2000 and since 2007. It's the same fucking thing every time. They act like jackbooted thugs are going to come stomping into their parents' basement with flamethrowers to burn their old books.

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SPBP

this is so retarded
many people will gladly play a system or even an homebrew if they trust their GMs, which just so happen to be the ones hoarding the books and materials

The reality is, of course, that you're right and good players who trust their GMs are willing to try new things and experiment.

But they don't know that. These are people who only play Pathfinder. You've read all the stories of groups that refuse to play anything but 3e, then 3.5, then Pathfinder, haven't you? These are the same people. It was their first RPG and if they have anything to say about it it will also be their last RPG. They assume that people who play non-PF games have exactly the same attitude, they assume the same blind stupid brand loyalty as Paizodrones.

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I mean, I'm probably gonna try it. Why not? PF is an acceptable high fantasy RPG, and was more than acceptable than 4E back in the day.

Though honestly, I would rather my shitty group of players would do Earthdawn.

>what is WoD
>what is Shadowrun
>what is some of the Warhammer stuff
>what is FFG Star Wars

/pfg/er here, the details released on PF2 and those that could be gleaned from the recorded session of combat suggests the game is a weird fusion of Pathfinder, 5e and Starfinder, where combat has been both simplified and expanded with multiple options available to martials and casters alike. For example, everything has been consolidated into three actions, and different things can take a different amount of actions (moving is one, opening a door is one, raising your shield is one.) And some classes get special reactions (actions that are immediate regardless of turn) that include AoO’s and shield defense, which is a unique reaction for people wielding a shield where all damage is diverted from the player to their shield’s hardness and item HP (meaning an Adamantine Shield is a legitimate investment.)

They have also done away with Race, replacing it with Ancestry and Background; Ancestry often means race, but can now include stats based on nationality or heritage, and Background is the same as it is in 5e. BAB has also been removed, BAB is now tied to level+strength.

They have also promised to do away with +X boosting items, finding them tedious and boring. We can expect this to mean the Starfinder approach to leveling up has been taken, where you can add +2 to up to 4 stats every 5th level. It also suggests they have embraced the scaling equipment rules, which were in Starfinder and essentially say, “this longsword does 1d8, this Dwarven forged longsword you should expect by level 4 does 2d8.” Weapons now almost always have unique properties inherent to the type of weapon itself, rather than a special enhancement; a scimitar wielded by one of the players in their test podcast does extra damage to targets it already hit, and can strike a second, adjacent target if the first hits.

Finally, and most nebulously, they are going in the opposite direction of 5e and declaring the game has a “hero system.”

Stupid argument. AD&D, 3.5 and 4e, for instance, haven't been supported in fucking ages officially and people still play them. All they are going to see is fewer people play their knockoff game and they are wanting to try and start up another edition war which, in this case, they are probably going to fail at. OP's pic is fairly cherrypicked and if people actually read the forums a much larger number of the players are excited for PF2E than not and a number of youtube videos are even showing the vast majority of people are at least cautiously optimistic and willing to give the system a try.

What exactly was the problem with 4e? I only played it a few times and it seemed okay but then we shelved it and I never looked at it again.

>they are going in the opposite direction of 5e and declaring the game has a “hero system.”
What is a "hero system" in this context?

Honestly, when I read some of those posts on OPs image, I'm thinking "Good riddance"
I don't play PF but these types of players are generally pure cancer

I thought the fan reaction to the shift from AD&D to 3e was the most retarded thing ever. I mean sure 3.x was (and is) garbage, but nothing's stopping anyone from playing AD&D even though we're now 3 editions further down the line.

Little did I know back then that the exact same thing would happen with every new edition. And since Pathfinder is just D&D (after all, 90% of the Pathfinder fanbase is just D&D players who got shittershattered over 4e and wanted nothing other than more 3e) it inherited the same retarded fanbase.

I don't understand the pushback. Pathfinder has a hobillion supplements and homebrews and such already. What else is there to dev for? Why not let 2e fly and see what happens?

>many people will gladly play a system
Not Pathfinder players.

It's an endless cycle, my dude

No one knows.

There are games published before anyone under 30 was even born that are still fun and find players. Some of them younger than the games themselves.

The duopoly of D&D and PF, combined with the refusal to try other games, is what makes it harder to play "dead" rpgs. These people are causing the very problem they fear will befall them, if you are right.

Depends on who you ask.

Some people are just turned off by the clear, mechanical presentation or the narrative, abstracted powers structure, which is fair enough.

Other people were turned off by the unfortunate launch state of the game where combat dragged on too much and wasn't very interesting, which is entirely fair even if it was later fixed.

And then there are the people who complain it's too different to 3.5 or call it WoW. Those complaints are almost universally stupid.

I don't dislike 4e, but some complaints I read include "feels like a MMO", since they codified positions such as healers or controllers, "power system is bland", since it is applied to every class (I think)
Can't remember anymore, since most of the criticism is trolling and bullshit nitpicking

As a 5e DnDrone, all those sound amazing honestly.

It means the system isn't claiming to be "realistic" or claiming that player-characters are "normal" characters. 5e never stated this either, but the way they described alot of backgrounds heavily implied it.

I'm just wondering if they're going to manage to pull it off. Most of the best content for Pathfinder is third party, so I have my doubts.

>What exactly was the problem with 4e?
It's not 3.5.

You'll hear a lot of things stemming from people not understanding the system (like "4e is only about combat and has nothing to do outside of combat!" or "every class is exactly the same why aren't wizards different than fighters anymore!") or just blatantly making shit up ("4e is just like an MMO they only wanted the WoW audience!"), but in the end it all boils down to "I don't want to play this because it's different from what I know."

I'm not saying 4e is great (it really isn't), but there's nothing that wrong with it that warrants any of the hate it got, other than upsetting 3.5 fanboys by not being more of the same.

>Other people were turned off by the unfortunate launch state of the game
As someone who was/is in this camp, I also wasn't a fan of the marketing and the push for subscription/always updating with new books. I wished I just waited for Essentials. I'm more willing to give it a try these days but back then it was so weird and unsatisfying for a while that it was easy to slip back into 3e.

If you cherry pick comments you'll find any amount of people that hate anything. The responses have been overwhelmingly positive.

youtube.com/watch?v=YgHNtzxO0y8

I wish this was really James Jacobs so I could tell him what a faggot he is.

>every class is exactly the same

I think it would be more accurate to say that every class plays the same - that is, okay, your rogue is trying to do different things in combat from your wizard or your fighter, but all three of them have powers and abilities set up along the exact same lines. It would take no effort at all to take a rogue exploit and give it to a wizard as a spell, without changing a single thing about the exploit.

The way they described it in the context given was saying PCs will become important, powerful figures by the end of the campaign, each a mover and shaker in their own right.

Hopefully this means they'll be dropping the ridiculous simulationist aspects of the game. It wasn't fun looking up the hardness and HP-per-inch of a substance when trying to figure out if someone could bust down a door.

But the response from their fans isn't overwhelmingly negative. Cherrypicked replies don't mean shit beyond a few salty grogs.

...Except that's absolutely wrong, and giving a wizard a rogue exploit wouldn't work, and could either be useless or break the game?

All classes use the same powers system, sure. But what powers they get, and how their class features interact with those powers, are all unique, giving each class an extremely distinct playstyle within the powers system. If you really think you can just effortlessly copy powers between classes, you have never played 4e.

God, this would be nice. I'm tired of the mundane martial and the assumption that non-casters are just Joe Average the Town Guard, Guy What Swings Swords Good.

>Paying for free content

But why?

Besides the starship rules (which were fucked due to math, rather than anything inherent to the rules themselves) Starfinder was and is a legitimately fun system that strikes that perfect balance between casters and martials. Paizo might be really stupid sometimes, but PF2 is looking really good right now.

No, no, no. People did not hate 4e because it knocked wizards down a peg. People hated 4e because of its shitty dissociated mechanics and drearily long combat, hit point bloat, and contrived bullshit mechanics. Not a single 4e player has ever given an explanation for why fighters should have powers besides "muh narrative convenience." And if the problem is that fighters are underpowered, why are they too limited to using them once per day? Why shouldn't fighters be able to do everything at will? What is being "spent" when a fighter uses his Brute Strike or Villain's Menace? People spout all sorts of bullshit like "he's tired" well then why can my 8 Con fighter do it just as much as my 16 Con fighter? The simple fact is, it's bullshit. The HP bloat is also insane, you start out with 15 to 20 times the hit points of an average orc warrior. As opposed to 3.5 where you start out with around the same amount, or 5e where you start out with less. Also, the combat is full of bloat spouted by martialcucks to make combat "interesting".... and "interesting" here means "loaded down with floating modifiers, ongoing damage, and similar shit." No one wants this crap. Except 4e players who convince themselves that fighters-as-spellcasters are interesting, then bitch at 5e for having an actually-interesting fighter because it's not the spellcasting shit that 4e had, even though the 5e battlemaster is actually set up in a coherent way, despite suffering from the same meta-game bullshit. Explain to me: how does your fighter character know that he is out of daily powers, and thus how does he make decisions based on that? No no, not you, your character. And don't give me that "lol the character doesn't actually exist stop thinking roleplaying matters" horsecrap. Fucking neck yourself. If you throw that out then you are saying 4e does not give two shits about creating a believable narrative, in which case the entire point of your "narrative mechanic" is invalid.

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I've seen some math analysis of Starfinder that seemed kinda fucked up. Damage values between classes were all over the place, and the power attack equivalent actually had lower average damage in most cases, which seems odd.

>it was some smooth ass combat
hahahahaha
>and only retards need rules to roleplay
Agreed. Nothing stops you from freeforming in other editions though.
>if it made sense for your character, you got a roll
People could run 3.5 the same way as 4e in that respect. There is literally no difference, except for how your GM chose to run the system.

Hardness is still in the game, user. A fighter using a shield can use the shield to absorb blows coming their way, using the shield’s hardness as effective DR (meaning an Adamantine Shield will give you DR 30.)

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Okay, true, you need to make a few minor edits.

Wizard Leap
Wizard Utility 2
You use magic to leap a great distance
At-will Arcane
Move Action; Personal
Prerequisite: You must be trained in Arcana
Effect: Make a high jump or a long jump. Determine the DC of the Arcana check as though you had a running start. The distance you jump can exceed your speed.

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Picking a non-combat utility power that lets you sidestep the actual point? Classy.

Although no, that power would still be bullshit. Arcana was already able to make enough other skills obsolete, it doesn't need any more ways to do so.

Speaking of PF2 classes, they appear to be going for customizable classes built around “Talents,” similar to Rogue Talents or Slayer Talents in Pathfinder. This means that every X number of levels, a player is given a pool of class-specific abilities to pick from at that level, with the pool growing progressively more powerful the higher level you are.

So it'll be more like Star Wars RPG Saga Edition? That game had a lot of problems, but I really liked the talents-as-class-features system, so I'm looking forward to that part.

>clear, mechanical presentation
It was presented retardedly.
>narrative, abstracted powers structure
Yeah because they do not make sense and have zero connection to anything in the game world.
>combat dragged on too much and wasn't very interesting, which is entirely fair even if it was later fixed.
It was never fixed. It was a band-aid that did almost nothing. The MM3 on an index card pic also shows how mind-numbingly flavorless 4e is, and this showed up in 5e. Challenge is entirely based on hit points and DPR. Nothing else. What a sad state of affairs.
>Can't remember anymore, since most of the criticism is trolling and bullshit nitpicking
No, that's not true, you stupid nigger. Do you just dismiss any argument you cannot counter as "trolling" or "nitpicking" because how DARE someone insult the game that Made Martials Great Again™. And yes the powers were bland as fuck, most of them were "muh damage" and most of the conditions were just bloat and meant nothing really, ongoing damage was just a headache to track.

Smoke Bomb
Rogue Utility 6
You throw down a bomb that explodes into smoke!
Daily Martial
Standard Action
Area wall 8 within 10
Effect: You create a wall that consists of contiguous squares filled with alchemical smoke. The wall lasts until the end of your next turn. It can be up to 8 squares long and up to 4 squares hgih. The smoke's area is heavily obscured and blocks line of sight.
Sustain Minor: The wall persists

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He's right though.

>tripcode
Are you fucking stupid?

...

Deflecting Strike
Fighter Attack 17
You hit your foe like, really hard, and everyone else is weirded out so you're harder to hit or something.
Encounter Martial, Weapon
Standard action; Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC
Hit: 3[W] + Strength modifier damage. Until the end of your next turn, you gain a power bonus to AC equal to your Constitution modifier.

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>Ancestry is not tied to race
>I can make a strength-focused Elf with not so smarts and great wisdom

FUCK YES

>I take everything at ABSOLUTE FACE VALUE
Are you fucking retarded?

Another utility power, another sidestep of the actual point.

That one actually works though, I'll grant you that. Although I would question why a smokebomb is making a wall. That makes sense for a magically controlled fog, but for just dropping a bomb I'd expect it to make a blast instead.

How is this different from 3.pf?

I mean the system itself is obviously different, but it's not like you can't just give Power Attack to a Wizard or let a Rogue cast Magic Missile or whatever.

The 4e power cards are more uniform in terms of presentation than when you're comparing Power Attack to Magic Missile in 3.pf, but that's not a negative as long as the powers themselves are still different. Despite the homogeneous presentation they don't all play the same because all classes have their own mechanics and interactions, as well as different roles to play. Saying all classes play the same just because all power cards look the same is the kind of mental gymnastics that make me look down on the 4e haters so much.

I'm not saying you can't dislike 4e, but 99% of the people who claim to hate it are just mindlessly repeating things they once heard which weren't true to begin with, or in the best case scenario basing their opinions on idiotic conclusions they drew 10 years ago after leafing through the PHB for 20 seconds. If you're going to hate something, at least try it out first and bring some actual criticism rather than bullshit and memes.

>It's okay if I'm autistic, but you can't be.

That actually sounds interesting and fun. But considering that they couldn't even balance a handful of classes I can't wait to see how badly they fuck up the math on this.

I picked it literally at random from among Rogue exploits. As you can see from and , I can do this with any power from any class.

And now you're picking two powers from quite similar classes in the same role, Paladin and Fighter. Again, not actually a good way of supporting your point.

Although you're also missing the context there. Given how Fighter and Paladin marks differ, the two powers would actually function quite differently in practice.

I'm obviously the autistic one.

What was retarded about it? To play a single monster in 3e you have to cross-reference multiple books. God help you if it's using splatbook content. 4e doesn't have you look anywhere outside its statblock, which is just common sense.

You sound mad. Maybe you shouldn't invest emotionally on an industrial product from a pop culture franchise

You cherrypicked three examples it was easy to do with. Two utilities, one attack power from between two of the more similar classes. None of it actually strongly supports your point, and you never actually took a wizard or fighter attack and ported it across with zero effort.

Probably because you can't. Because each classes powers are built for a distinct playstyle.

Don't feed the troll. He's spouting the same long debunked shit and meaningless buzzwords like 'Disassociative mechanics' (aka an abstraction I'm not familiar with). He's not worth replying to.

>the internet, famous for being full of people bitching about shit that they buy anyway, doesn't like something that they haven't even seen yet
>How will the company that owns it ever recover?

Lel.

You need to understand the mindset of a Pathfinder player, and the strange masochistic dance they have with the system.

Deep down, they know it's an unplayable mess. Deep down, they know it's wrong, esoteric at best, unusable at worst, but they developed a sunk-cost fallacy with the product. It is good because I bought so many books, they say to themselves, and that is how they can sleep at night.

This was willfully developed by Paizo who cashed on the autism of its fanbase. Now they're reaping the result of manipulating the worst of their people to like an inferior product: namely, the autism is out of control. They will never buy Pathfinder 2e. After all, Pathfinder 1e is already the best RPG ever created, is it?

I'm excited for it too. I'm fully anticipating that things will be more or less like this:

>Fighter Talents
>Hard Strike: +1 to damage
>Accurate Strike: +1 to hit
>Prerequisite for Bleeding Strike: This talent doesn't do anything but you need to take it to get Bleeding Strike
>Bleeding Strike: If [extremely specific circumstances that you need to set up several rounds in advance] occur, enemy takes 1 bleed damage per round until it receives magical healing

>Wizard Talents
>Shape Narrative: When the GM presents a scenario, you alter it to suit your desires
>Teleport Enemy Into Space: You can use one action to teleport an enemy into space. No save.
>Cosmic Thunderbolt: You call down a lightning bolt from the heavens to kill your enemies. No save. If you are inside or underground, the lightning bolt smashes through the ceiling and ground to a distant of 1 mile per wizard level until it strikes the area you designate.

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