"Some options are worse than others because the game actually tries to model that some options in life are worse than others. And by "worse" I mean "does less damage per round."" - SKR. Welp, apparently some things (like crossbows) deal less damage per round in life.
I can understand that philosophy, making options of various power levels available (ignoring for the moment why crossbows quickly overcame regular bows as the ranged weapon of choice and how PF would have to introduce an entire NEW set of subsystems to model those reasons), but what I don't understand is the insistence on not flagging them.
@BESW I've spoken to a friend about what archery was like when archers were actually used in war. It's amazing.
IIRC modern bows often have a pull weight of ~40-60 pounds, but once you reach a certain point, a mechanism takes over and you feel your pull weight suddenly reduced to ~20-30 pounds. Thus, keeping the bow fully extended whilst you take aim requires less effort.
Back when archers were used for war, though, they had a pull weight that was almost twice as much - my memory's telling me both 80-90 pounds, and 110-120 pounds, and I can't remember which one is accurate. Either way, it's a lot, and they had to hold the entire weight whilst they aimed.
A good archer had to be raised to be an archer from childhood. Archers in those times knew as much and had sayings to that effect. Archery practice for children on Sundays was common in some locations.
More recently, people have examined skeletons of archers from those times, and they're noticeably different. Archers had enlarged left arms, and bone spurs on their left wrists, and right fingers and elbows.
It's one of those train-from-childhood things to learn how to do it, but it vastly improves your speed, your accuracy at speed, and your ability to fire while doing other things like falling off a horse.
Pathfinder is a game of heroic fantasy. This is a genre that doesn't give a zebra's rancid fart about comparative realism. People use weapons that are cool, that are expressions of their personality, or Yes. I mean, scythes are martial weapons, people.
Which is part of the reason I love how Legend just went, "Pick three properties, describe the weapon however you like, move on with your life."
@BESW And yet its spread of options says something different. Pathfinder's designers have a biased view of heroic fantasy that favors some images and themes heavily over others. Look at Dervish Dance, for example. Some weapons are pushed despite their lack of realism or the lack of relaism of the option given.
And the direction they're pushed is action-movie fantasy
Which isn't bad
Just
Biased
So TL;DR Paizo and especially SKR are hypocrites that love to run off at the mouth about what is and is not 'realistic' with absolutely no knowledge of how combat or weapons shake out in real life or history while at the same time pushing action-fantasy concepts for the ones they like.
I don't know much about Pathfinder and how it's different from 3.5. I just find it staggering how he can justify a game design decision with the way real life relates to multiple game abstractions.
Given game abstractions of 3.5PF, crossbow is an inefficient weapon, fine. Don't try and justify this by blaming real-life crossbow, though.
@BESW Let us say, politely, that my personal experiences with the gentleman in question suggest to me that my statement is accurate and possibly a little too polite to fully express his status as a human being and then leave it at that.
@Lord_Gareth Fine, but you say you want rpg.se to be a "safe place" and that means not everything you can say accurately is appropriate for this place.
@BESW PF didn't invent it but they certainly took it to a brand-new level. WotC just sorta published stuff and when you saw breaks with realism you could kinda tell it's because they were flailing at it. A lot of times you'd see support happen later to sorta bring an option back up to where feedback suggested it should be, like the crossbow feats that happened later in 3.5's run.
Paizo instead chooses to justify, rather than alter, their decisions unless an overwhelming tide of fans forces their hand.
Which is really screwed up since Paizo has an active and vigorous errata policy
The power to change these things isn't just in their hands, they've created an expectation that it will be used.
@Magician D&D/PF won't really differentiate weapons by social signifiers, offensive/defensive flexibility, quality against different kinds of armor, portability, concealability (beyond the most basic level), maintainability, price (they all become trivial after chargen), ... But it's just unrealistic to have a crossbow not be a useless thing only for wizards.
@BESW They didn't, mostly. Both were in use actively for a very long period of time.
Mostly I look at that thread I linked and I see Category Error everywhere. I feel like if you're spending any serious amount of time on a forum arguing about this, your game is Made Wrong.
So, hmm, arbitrary let's-pretend-it's-New-Year's resolution: I'm not gonna bring up stupid D&D/PF stuff in chat anymore. That well is deep enough that you don't notice when you're just recycling the same complaints over and over, and there's just no point, mostly.
Now that he's said he's looking at Careful Attack (which I edited into his question), how about saying something explicit about what to do if you have two weapons and only one attack?
I almost always spend careful time composing my answer and structuring it before I hit submit but a fair percent of the time someone else snipes me on it
I know that when I downvote a question with a situation like yours (I didn't this time, by the way) where it's likely to become upvote-worthy, I'll keep an eye on it.
yes ive been more liberal with downvotes in the last 2 months because I got enough rep regularly enough that I can take the loss of rep and keep going
and commented giving him the WOTC build guide
funny fact that I have never ever mentioned in here because I doubt anyone would believe me up till now, but LordDuskBlade regularly plays warhammer 40k at my local gameshop.
AoS, by the way, is feeling more and more like an RPG campaign that faffed around doing unrelated stuff for the first few months until the GM had enough material to invent an actual plot.
And now he's rolling all the random prior stuff into it to make it look connected and planned.
Like, everything from the disjointed early parts of the season is coming back, but it doesn't feel like that was always the plan. Not a bad way to run a campaign, but not a great way to write season of TV.
Arrow, on the other hand, continues to give the impression it's startled to be a TV show at all.
I am presently a 4e player, and I love the game. But I am also interested in the other editions of the game, and would like to be able to get a good overview of them. By overview I mean a good look at their rules and mechanics, not just short summaries like the ones presented in the otherwise gr...
hmm. I need lists of Spanish names, and I prefer to draw them from novels instead of babyname websites. Any suggestions for Spanish novels with lots of characters?
This question is inspired by discussion here, about how Heighten Spell works with Reserve Feats. The question that I am asking here deals with whether or not players can cast spells using spell slots for spell levels that they don't have access to yet.
I feel like an example would explain thi...
The last edit for this question removes the RAW tag on the basis that the system FAQ doesn't count in that context. However, from comments on one of the answers it appears the FAQ in question was written by the designers of the system.
Is the question of whether the FAQ counts as RAW a contentious one?
Whoever asks, say something like "Since this seems to be contentious, please provide answers which are as definitive as possible with officious-looking citations."
Personally, I think the original querent rolling back an edit which was justified by claiming the accepted answer necessarily re-defined the question... is pretty self-explanatory.
I'm more thinking about how I never really knew that the PAthfinder FAQ wasn't considered RAW, and that accepting an FAQ answer on a RAW question would get me pushback.
I feel like I remember there being some discussion on meta about how some members wanted to keep the pre-graduated site design, because it looked like graph paper?
@DuckTapeal that's actually an even older discussion. The original beta theme had a graph paper feel to it, it was even called sketchy. It was common to all SE betas. Then the cleaned it up and made the beta theme look more polished, less like a work in progress. I wrote a slightly flippant proposal to keep the old beta theme just for us since it fit our theme pretty well.
When Jin did our actual site design he decided after talking to us that hte graph paper should come back subtly in the completed design
I still maintain that this is the best SE site design I've seen.
There are others which are shinier, but this is the best blend of form and function. The others which are presented as good designs often get in the way of the site in various ways.
(SF.SE's design has some pretty major visual-flow problems.)
@BESW So, if a question is about whether a particular thing is RAW or not, should it be tagged with rules-as-written? I'm not great when it comes to tagging things correctly.
@DuckTapeal I think it depends. If you genuinely think that none of the provided answers are useful enough for you then I personally see no problem with it and have the same thing in my question list
Don't feel pressured to accept answers that weren't useful.
If you'd like to offer bounties to encourage better answers, that can be a good thing--or ask someone like myself or waxeagle to do it, we have plenty of rep to spare.
I don't think I'll ever get an answer to this, and the answers on this one are all so similar and overlapping it's really hard to get a handle on which is most useful.
Yeah. My problem with the question I posted is that one answer is basically "No, and it would be crazy to think otherwise" and "Yeah, that looks legit", and neither do anything but point at the same section of rules text.
Post comments on both answers asking for them to explain how the rules they quote support their stance. If you like, say it's because both answers are using the same rules to justify opposite conclusions, but that shouldn't be necessary.
Just pointing at rules and saying "See, I'm right!" is never a good answer.
You can also offer a bounty as incentive for them to do the edits.
(Or for someone else to come and steal their thunder with a better answer.)
The problem with that is that I feel like the real answer is "It depends entirely on your GM, because the rules aren't terribly clear", and my experience with non-clear rules and this site has been less than stellar.
An answer can say exactly that, and demonstrate how the rules are unclear.
It's been done before.
And honestly, you can just ignore most of the arguing. It's only a handful of people and if we don't engage with them there isn't an argument, just a rant.
If you feel like that's a problem which is affecting your being comfortable posting, that's worth taking to meta.
I had a stint where every Fate question I posted got one of three people saying "You just don't understand Fate," and quoting a pithy catch-phrase about what I didn't understand which only made sense to people who already understood it.
That question (and answer) are interesting. It occurs to me that with non-rpgs, e.g. board games, it is automatically assumed that when an FAQ written by the designer of a game gets released, any rules corrections/clarifications are automatically assumed to trump the original rules. I wonder why that assumption is not made where the precedence of an FAQ is not explicitly stated for rpgs
I'm pretty sure it's because of how wizards handled the 3.5 FAQ.
They put out a list that talked about exactly how to adjudicate rules disputes between different sources of rules, and 'the FAQ' was at teh bottom of the list.
but you could view that as an exception to the rule. Just because one company does it in a certain way, why should you then assume that approach means you have to question all the other companies
(I appreciate I am playing devils advocate a little here, but this does interest me, as I feel an implicit assumption is being made)
This is something that part of me would really like to add as a comment to the existing answer, but a) it feel it would kick off a comment discussion of epic proportions, and b) I'm not even sure comments are the best way of broaching the subject
I once told a local gamer who is used to D&D 3.5 about Fate Core, saying "Fate is a drastically different system from D&D 3.5, with very different rules." Her response? "Oh, you mean like Pathfinder!"
I've gotten in long arguments with people about how AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4, and Pathfinder are all systems that are pretty similar, compared to say, GURPS or Shadowrun.
And then you get responses like mxy's to your question, where he assumes that anyone asking about RAW is defaulting to only using RAW.
I've had long convoluted conversations with him about the difference between wanting to know what RAW is, and feeling beholden to following it, but we never really get anywhere.
It uses a character-building system where your character has phrases describing his possessions, abilities, attitudes, and relationships. Each phrase has a dice expression tied to it.
In conflicts, you roll the dice for each phrase that's relephant to the situation, and you use the resulting numbers to "raise and call," poker-like, to get control of the narrative of the conflict.
I like a lot of the mechanics of DitV, partly because of the themes they're designed to force to the fore of the play, but its setting has major problems for me.
So I prefer The Princes' Kingdom, which is a simplified version of the mechanics with a setting that still forces the same themes but in a less problematic context.
is there an idiot guide explanation of why I should care about the MSO/MSE split? I've read through the associated meta questions but still don't really get why it is so important and what it actually means
The mechanics of both Dogs and Princes' are designed so that escalating the conflict--words to fists to swords, for example--lets you add more dice to your pool, so you can last longer in the conflict and potentially have more control over the scene.
But escalating also increases the severity of the "fallout," the consequences of your actions.
If you're just using words, nobody's likely to die. But draw a sword and suddenly injury or death is on the table--for someone, and you may not be able to control who.
@DuckTapeal with the two answers you've gotten on your RAW question its clear that some parts of the question and certainly huge chunks of that answer need to find their way to meta. Any thoughts on how to get there?
If narrowed to meta scope, the answer is "people can answer questions using whatever evidence they want, stop being a busybody and vote your conscience"
@mxyzplk The original cause of this, I think, was an edit to the question removing the RAW tag because "a question that accepts the FAQ cannot be tagged RAW."
And so being curious and unfamiliar with the system's community, naturally the FAQ/RAW question came to mind. He brought it to chat, and we encouraged him to take it back to the site.
Sure, you're not telling me anything I don't know...
I understand the situation, what transpired, the previous questions, the new question. I think tryign to "break it across" meta and main is pointless busywork
Mmm. I think part of the kerfuffle is that having a "this is a silly question" section on the answer strongly implies you think the question itself is inappropriate, which could be fodder for a meta question.
If the reason for the question relates to correct use of a particular tag, shouldn't it be meta? Part of the reason for the request is the way questions, comments and answers are treated as more 'discussiony' on meta
so we can actually discuss it and come to consensus
@DuckTapeal That is a good question. Sneak preview: No, the tags are supposed to describe the question not the answer(s),w hich is why we don't system-tag game-recs with the winning system (I think there's a preexisting meta where we discussed that)
@DuckTapeal I think the value in your existing question is that it addresses a specific issue with a specific system and the way it is addressed on the site. In my opinion, broadening the question would lose that value
This question is inspired by discussion here, about how Heighten Spell works with Reserve Feats. The question that I am asking here deals with whether or not players can cast spells using spell slots for spell levels that they don't have access to yet.
I feel like an example would explain thi...
