Chebucto Regional Softball Club

That's awesome. I haven't gotten my head around a swashbuckler myself, but the ones I've seen play definitely feel like they're "of a kind" with gunslingers. It's worth noting, too, that the gunslinger "way" that you choose will define a lot of how the class plays. My pistolero's quick, seemingly careless gunplay will feel very different from someone who builds a sniper and is much more methodical and sneaky.

It's more formalized than Fate, but absolutely. There are feat trees, even entire *classes* that make that their whole deal. Buffs, special moves and tactics, AOE debuffs, heal spells that target a different number or area of creatures depending on how many actions you use to cast them, the whole thing. Paizo just released "Battlecry" last month, and the new classes in the book would be terrible for a solo game: the Guardian (literally a big sack of hit points with high AC, but with special powers to force enemies to attack them and only them) and the Commander (a class that the RPGBot guys called "Dual-Wield your friends!" because they have, among many other support actions, an ability that lets them give one teammate the ability to shove an enemy toward another teammate, who can then hit it. On the *commander's* turn.) But *every character* can use the Aid action, which is very powerful, and often worth sacrificing an attack for; especially if your multiple attack penalty is at -10.

PF2e tries to have it both ways: - If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit. - If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss. - Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit). - Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail). In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D. But when you're out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe *not,* and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it's time to run. Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger *is* a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got *really* bad. Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it's a pretty elegant system.

And as we all know, Nintendo suffered for their terrible decision. /s I mean, yeah, it wasn't the most consumer-friendly choice. I'm just saying I get why they made it.

I have never seen that happen in PF2e printed adventures. A lot of the time they use monsters straight out of the Bestiary without modification, and when they don't they usually put the statblocks in the back of the AP so that they can all be referenced from wherever they need to be. I just pulled down my copy of "The Enmity Cycle" (the closest Paizo adventure I have at hand). It's a level 4-6 adventure published in 2023. I haven't read it since shortly after I bought it, but the encounters go like this: - The first encounter is with 4 bandits, and it references the Gamemastery Guide directly for their statblocks ([though you can also get them on AoN](https://2e.aonprd.com/NPCs.aspx?ID=3425)). There is a note about a change to their favored terrain and what skill they roll for initiative (in PF2e, you can roll different stats for initiative depending on what you're doing; usually it's perception, but in this case, the bandits roll their stealth for initiative). It also notes their tactics (they try to threaten the party before attacking, and if you kill or capture two of them, the other two flee). This is standard for any encounter. - The second encounter is with two sand wolves, the stat block for which is printed in the back of the module. - The third encounter is with four gnoll hunters, taken straight from the Bestiary, page 178. If this were a more recent, post-OGL book, it would've referenced the Monster Core instead (page 208). Then the party enters a temple (read: dungeon). Here the encounters are themed, but they don't pull any shenanigans like you mentioned. There are encounters... - with two Scorching Sun Cultists (stat block inline with the adventure, mechanically and visually distinct from previous enemies) and a Filth Fire (Bestiary 2, page 110); - with three cultists (this refers GMs back to the statblock printed above); - with two cultists (again, reference back to the previous page) and a named priest of the cult (who is similar to the cultists, but also has some unique features befitting his position); - with an atajma (an undead cleric monster who honestly looks super cool; reference to *Book of the Dead* p112, though I can't find it on AoN for some reason), and two more cultists; - and an elite poltergeist (reference Bestiary, page 264). "Elite" is a template you can use to make a regular poltergeist more scary, so in fairness that is a way that they *could* do what you're saying, but they don't here. That's the end of chapter one. Characters are supposed to level up around this time. In chapter 2, you fight: - four elite nuglubs; - a named jinkin boss; - elite jinkin mooks; - Usij cultists; - sand wolves; - several Scrapborn; - two Scrapborn with the "weak" template; - a named Ceustodaemon; - a clockwork soldier; - and a named gnoll priestess ...in various configurations, both before and in the dungeon. All of the enemies here refer to the same statblocks each time they appear, with the exception of the ones that have the "weak" template (which is like the "elite" template above, but in reverse). The sand wolves are the only repeated monster from chapter one, and they seem to be used as a power level indicator to show how much stronger you are, so they also appear with the same stats. In chapter three there are more sand wolves and more cultists, some new creatures, some creatures that have been seen before, but none of them are reskinned soldiers dealing suspiciously different damage. That was fun, incidentally. Makes me want to run this adventure I bought two years ago.

It wouldn't have been just an NES chip. It would've had to also include a separate PPU (in addition to the two already in the SNES), a NES cartridge I/O slot, a whole different video out architecture (the NES didn't support composite out), and maybe more. Those are just the ones I know for sure. Besides, the SNES was already going to cost significantly more than the Genesis. They were wary of widening that price gap still further when the owners of the older system *still owned the older system* and could easily plug it back in. Further, they were launching the SNES in North America with five launch titles and eight more on deck over the following month, with a total of *thirty* games coming out before that Christmas. I don't think they were worried about having enough content for people to play on that new system.

They ripped it out because their "backwards compatibility" was literally just grafting an NES to the SNES. I think it even had a toggle switch you had to flip between the two. It was going to make the thing cost tons of money and nobody was ever going to use it, and anyone who cared could just plug their old NES back in whenever they wanted to use it. But the people who didn't upgrade never got to play Star Fox. Man, I love Star Fox.

>The companies that produce these games have increasingly co-mingled their staff with video game studios Like who? I mean, in the case of D&D, maybe. But PF2e was written by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Mark Seifter; they have a combined *zero years* of video game studio experience between them. In fact, most of them have been making tabletop RPGs for *literally their entire professional careers,* including stints at Wizards of the Coast. For fun, I went to the Pathfinder wiki, which has brief profiles of all of the authors and contributors to Pathfinder; and I can't find a single person on any of the game's recent sourcebooks that has worked for a video game company before working for Paizo. In fact, most of them have worked for Paizo in some capacity for 5+ years, or are freelancers who have worked for big tabletop RPG publishers for ages.

Great list. Totally agreed across the board, and I'd add that they just folded Starfinder into the PF2e engine, which means that it now has a ton more content for it (including some stuff that isn't sci-fi exclusive).

To me it feels meaningful in a way that the ludicrous numbers never did. The expanded crit system makes degrees of success matter, and they do a great job of making you feel heroic; especially when you go back and fight underleveled enemies and crit on every attack. (Or, alternatively, when you roll a natural 20 and it just upgrades your crit fail to a regular fail. That's when you know it's time to run.)

Eh? It absolutely did not do that thing. So first of all, if you like D&D 3.x or Pathfinder 1e, I'm glad! It's a fun system. I have many great memories of amazing campaigns in that system, and I think it's most important that you play the game you like. But I've been hearing this "video game" thing for half a decade now, which means I've got a whole big rant prepared. I'm...I'm sorry. Ok. So. Yes, 5e filed off all of the stuff that was interesting, the big numbers that make people feel powerful, the stuff that made characters unique, etc. in its pursuit of making D&D like a video game. But Pathfinder went the opposite direction. - You can make 238,140 mechanically distinct level two characters based on ancestry, class, and archetype alone (that's not a random guess, I did the math); and while they won't all have the same power level, they will all likely be able to contribute meaningfully. And that's not even counting all the class-specific choices and options, or the other feats you could take. Paizo is six years into PF2e right now, and even though they had to waste a bunch of time dealing with WotC's OGL nonsense, they're up to nearly a quarter million different combinations; but 3.x didn't get anywhere near that level of meaningful customization until Pathfinder debuted archetypes in the APG in 2010---a *full decade* after 3.0 came out. - The 3-action economy is so much easier to play and explain than "wait, what's a 'swift' action again?" (I've taught a seven-year-old how to play successfully), but it doesn't feel like a video game like 5e does because there are actual, meaningful choices you can make with each of your three actions. While 5e (and 3.x before it) often devolves into "conga line of death" (surround the bad guy for flanking, whomp him with your biggest weapon twice per turn, don't move because he'll AOO you into powder), you can do essentially whatever you want with each of your three actions and make a difference. - Plus, where 5e aimed at making things even more same-y with "bounded accuracy," PF2e leaned into crits so hard that they had to lean into crit *fails,* too, in order to balance them. You can crit succeed and fail at skill checks, and the APs have rules for what happens when you do. Some weapons are built around crits, and they're not a 1-in-20 chance anymore. You can do them quite often with the right build. - As far as setting, the Forgotten Realms were probably interesting back when Greenwood came up with them, but putting a billion authors into the world has made it into the same bland, boring, Wal-Mart-Brand-Middle-Earth that Greyhawk was; but Golarion has something like three different continents for every possible type of fantasy setting you might want (that is a random guess, and probably an exaggeration). And with the addition of Starfinder to the system a few weeks ago, all of that gets doubled or more. Plus, it's so much easier to run as a GM than the 3.x games were. I remember the first time I put a "hard" encounter together for PF2e. I looked at it and was like, "whoa, that can't be right, I'm gonna have a TPK!" So I nerfed the encounter, and the players *stomped* it in two rounds. When I built an encounter the next week using the rules as written, it was a fun and dynamic encounter that lasted the entire session. One character went down. Everyone used their consumables and resources. It worked perfectly. Ever since, I trust that the encounter math knows what it's talking about. When was the last time you were able to say that in 3.x? > Doesn't help that we've got metric tons of content in the old system. A lot of the really good stuff has been updated for the new system, either officially or by the community. > Why retrofit what didn't really need fixing? I mean...3.x was kind of janky. Yeah, it was better than AD&D, and yeah, it was awesome in its time, but it's based on a *25-year-old* system. People know a lot more about game design now, and it shows. Pathfinder 1e did noble work trying to make everything fit together, but they deployed a *lot* of duct tape over the nine years they were essentially "in charge of" the d20 system. When the "Pathfinder Unchained" classes came out, and you could see the difference between a modern approach and an original approach at the same table, it was like night and day. Some tables even banned Unchained classes because they would outshine the PHB/CRB classes, even though their damage output was still balanced. I don't think Pathfinder 2e is a perfect system. But it's definitely better than the 3.x rules. That thing *did*, in fact, need fixing. >Just give me more APs. They have! And they're great! You just have to play PF2e, or convert them to your system, in order to play them. Or you can play third-party adventures, [which are still coming out for PF1e/3.x as recently as *yesterday.*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?ruleSystem=44235&keyword=adventure+path&page=1&sortBy=newest) Like I said, if you still like 3.x, I'm *glad!* Enjoy what you enjoy. I think it's most important that people play the game they like at their tables. But 2e didn't make it "video game-y."

3.x was not some perfect, untouchable version of the game rules. PF2e isn't either, but acting like 3.x is this finely-tuned specimen of the game is ludicrous. That game was *janky.* If you like the game (and I did!), that's fine! If you like the jank (and I did not), that's also fine. But don't act like 2e isn't worth your consideration just because it's a different game. It sounds just as ridiculous as refusing to consider a SNES because you poured "all this money" into an NES. Just say "eh, I like what I've got, it's enough for me" and move on.

I'm a gunslinger in one of the games I play in, and yeah, I don't do barbarian numbers, but I hold my own, and it is a FUN class to play. I built a dual-wielder with the hopes that it would play like Han Solo running down the hallway shooting back at stormtroopers, and it delivers. Plus, being 60 feet away means that I can help everyone do damage at once. It makes the party happy, too.

Yeah, I think the goal is to eventually make it irrespective of seniority, but right now he's the only one with 15+ years of institutional knowledge on the application, so he's trying to pass on as much as he can to reduce our bus factor.

Oh neat, our team does this but we call it "WTF Wednesday." Usually the most senior engineer digs back into our incident log and tries to reproduce it in our dev environment, and we live-solve with him playing the role of the customer.