Rogues aren’t really designed to be good at everything, they are designed to be very good at a few skills (in 5e). Bards are the ‘generalists’ (which, imo. is blatantly OP considering they are also good spell-casters).

PF2e is where they just kinda get all the skills (along with investigators).

I mean, if we’re talking DnD 5e, rogues are one of the weaker classes.

In part, its cause they’re only okay at combat. Pretty good damage (but not amazing), only moderate control options, and little defense, while relying on modes of attack that require work to function (sneak attack, stealth)

And, they do work as a skill monkey, but Bards are just kinda… better, at almost everything, on that front. Magic is just generally overtuned in its effectiveness, so really, a Wizard can be a better skill monkey, if they prep utility spells that day.

Big disagree, though still upvoted you cause that is a hell of a hot take.

Sneaky stabbers are cool, and I like skill monkies. Not just ‘the theivery havers’, but also the bag of tricks, the preppers. Batman is basically a rogue.

And, sure, it can be interesting to have the party be bad at Stealth on purpose. To have to bumble their way through everything. I don’t think Rogues are strictly necessary. But I like that they’re an option.

Its cause you really only need one person good at a skill in the party. Once you have one person with high thievery (or, any other skill, really), each addition of another character with that skill is worth less and less.

While, combat focused classes are kind of the opposite. Hard to have too many combat classes in most dnd-likes, and the more classes you have narrowly focused on combat, the better the party is at that task.

Nah, you probably did it right. WFRP is a deadly system, which cuts both ways. PCs will win fights hard and fast, much of the time. Its just that, when the fight turns, when they get bad luck on rolls or are outnumbered/outmatched, they die hard and fast.

Eh, apples to oranges.

A 60$ game today is so unlike a 60$ two or three decades ago.

No physical medium. Much larger market and (potential at least) sales volume.

Proliferation of game engines; games don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time, or write machine code anymore.

On top of that, there’s many other revenue streams. Not that I think this model is ‘fair and good’, but look at the mobile market, where a sale cost of $0 is king.

Something to be said about ‘lower cost incentivizing bad practices’ (as the article discusses), and yeah, some games could raise their price. But it’s far fron 1-1, as ‘sales volume’ trumps ‘sale price’ in importance.

I’m talking about the stuttering, caused primarily not recalculating shaders. Something I just dealt with the entirety of my first playthrough of ER. But the fact that it still isn’t fixed really makes me not want to play, or to pay them money.

Yeah, I’m holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn’t fixed.

Mmm, psionics, Shadow Weave Magic, Initiate of Mystra.

A min-maxed character is one with dumpstates and weaknesses. A powergamed character is one with fewer weaknesses than a ‘normal’ character. Anything that can challange an OP build will wipe the floor with a party of ‘standard’ characters.

If they’re actually powergaming, the likely answer is: “No, I’m immune.” Or: “okay, with my buffs, I get to add +200 to this.”

It really depends.

I’m thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they’re built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.

There’s no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer “no”, or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.

If we’re talking 5e, that’s all out the window then. If 3.5’s power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.

And, of course, there’s lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5’s power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.

Eh, disagree. Unless everyone is power gaming to the same degree (which can be fun!), an OP character being adequately challenged will probably result in all the other players feeling irrelevant.

Why is it “schizo edition”? Is that like, a real thing, or is sseth doing that abelist ‘schizoposting’ stuff?

Edit: man, y’all really hate people with schizophrenia, huh?

Overall, a good video. I’m definitely opinionated about rpgs and editions of DnD, and don’t share his blanket love for each edition, but he’s right that the vitriol over edition wars are silly.

I don’t really agree with his WoW take; of just, being able to hop from DnD to WoW for a few months to have fun. I hate WoW, from a personal enjoyment level. I don’t knock anyone for enjoying it, but I’d rather do just about anything else. My friends jumped onto it on launch in highschool, and I joined them for a week or so, and I genuinely do not see the appeal. I’m not trying to be bitter or anything, so much as saying I am not able to just, go and have fun with WoW, or frankly any MMO I’ve tried.

But, there’s no RPG I’ve ever touched that I feel that way about. I don’t really like 4e for several reasons, but overall, if my group otherwise really wanted to play more of it, I know I could have fun playing or running it. Outside of truly dogshit ‘games’ like FATAL, I’m sure I could have fun playing just about any RPG, and even a FATAL one-shot could be fun, despite the rules (though, it’d veer awfully close to just laughing at a live-reading of the rules than really ‘playing the game’)

Still, I have no real interest in 5.5. Frankly, I currently have no real interest in 5e at the moment, though that’s more from ‘edition fatigue’. Like, I have many complaints about 5e (I’m not sure if you could play a lot of 5e and not notice it’s mechanical flaws), but I played it enough to get tired of it, which is a compliment in a lot of ways.

But I love playing new games. I’ve fallen in love with PF2e recently (though with 2 campaigns hitting level 14-ish, some fatigue is creeping in), and we’ve giving ICON a run. I’m looking forward to trying Exalted Essence and the new WoD stuff when a rpg slot opens up (running 3 games right now as it is). And I’ll probably return to DnD at some point, but nothing from 5.5 feels like it really ‘fixes’ the issues I have with 5e, or otherwise ‘sparks excitement’ in me. But also, it looks fine.

Though, if the really do centralize it to an official platform, I definitely won’t be touching it; I hate DnD beyond as it is, and how there are no PDFs for the 5e books (officially), which is a bummer but able to be worked around. And, even if they try to centralize 5.5 digitally, there will definitely still be books, and probably still be PDFs able to be found, though I’ll probably want to avoid the edition on principle anyway if that is the case.

Yeah. It was worse in 3.5 ironically; despite casters having more downsides than 5e, spells were overall stronger. It did leave this narrow window at levels 1 and 2 where martials were basically strictly better, but caster quickly skyrocketted in power, especially if you were playing with prestige classes.

Spell power was reigned in for 5e, and pretty sharply at that (most notably from adding Concentration). But, they also washed away caster downsides, by making cantrips at will, casters not quite so fragile, and by softening Vancian casting. 5e is still absolutely more balanced than 3.5, but that’s not saying a lot; 3.5’s power level was all over the place.

Still, I feel like 5e’s levels 1-5 are pretty balanced, and the martial/caster imbalance doesn’t really become painful until like, level 12.

I think the more important balancing is just ‘making battlemaster maneuvers resourceless and available to all classes’.

But I’m not against ‘limit break’ as a short rest ‘charge’ available to most martials.

TBH, the above is basically the way PF2e handles martials; at least half of their class feats are more or less ‘resourceless maneuvers’, and many martials have access to ‘focus spells’, which are basically just short rest charges for exclusive class features, that just happen to mechanically be considered spells (though, notably, PF2e doesn’t give fighter focus spells, making them nearly 100% at-will).

Personally, I think the most important fix to the martial-caster imbalance is to nerf casters, who just are too strong, but A) that’s basically what PF2e already did, and its largely complained about (though I love it). And B) Its not strictly necessary, if you buff Martials by a large margin (though, imo, that starts to get into like, demigod territory that I don’t love).

In the older editions, like the ones you’re talking about, casters had serious downsides. Between being very fragile, spells being interrupteable, and sometimes having different XP amounts, casters were kinda ‘glass cannons’, and needed a martial frontline.

In 3.5 and 5e, casters have had these harsh downsides decreased or removed, while not otherwise losing power. They are more or less strictly better than martials, in the sense they can do 90%+ of what martials can do better than they can do it, while also doing several other things. And the few things martials do do better, it’s by slight degrees.

It’s not just that casters are powerful, it’s that they’re powerful and flexible, able to be top tier in several different roles at the same time, and can change what roles they cover by resting and swapping spells.

Whereas martials can sometimes build to be top tier in one role, but they’re largely locked into that one role, or can build to be okay in several roles (and be outclassed by casters in all of them).

Personally, I like Monastic Archer stance the best. Not that its the most powerful (probably ranger or fighter is ‘best archer’, in terms of pure archery skill and feats).

But I like monks. They’ll be tankier than a ranger, and have some extra utility and lots of movement. And Stunning fist is great, if not likely to proc all that often. Ki Strike strike on bows is also cool.

And just, having ‘flurry of blows’ leaves you with usually having two actions to do other stuff with on your turn, letting you actually have actions to use other bits and bobs you may get from skill feats, gear, or other archetypes. So you have a lot more flexibility.

So, yeah, fighter will be most accurate, ranger will make the most attacks, but I still like the monk’s ability to dish out decent damage, while keeping the ability to do other stuff in the same turn.

Yeah. In my experience (as a GM with a summoner player, going through Strength of Thousands, currently at level 12), Summoners spend the majority of their time in combat acting as a ‘fighter’, with the summoner spending their ‘at least 1 of the 4 actions’ casting Boost Eidolon. Which, on that front, makes them a ‘worse fighter’.

But, of course, they can throw out big spells when needed, since while they only have 4 spell slots, they don’t lag behind a full caster at all in ‘highest level spellslot’ (aside from 10th level spells). They get fireball at the same time the Wizard does. So the real ‘breaking point’ between them an a full caster isn’t ‘burst power’, but being able to lay out a constant barrage of lower level spells, meaning they lose out a lot on utility.

But, staffs on them are very important, as that is huge in giving them those ‘lower level utility spells’.

And, unlike a fighter, they do have access to damage cantrips, for both when ranged combat is needed, and if elemental damage is needed. Sure, those damage cantrips are worse DPS in a white-room scenario most of the time, but they are nice to have when needed.

So while they are spending 90% of their time in combat mostly being a ‘worse fighter’, 10% of the time they’re throwing out spells as strong as a Wizard, and just generally bringing less DPS but more flexibility than a fighter would. In that regard, they’re maybe more analogous to an Inventor.

Which, on the proficiency front, the Eidolon shares martial proficiency progression with most martials, so they’ll lag behind fighter and gunslinger on attacks, and monks/champions on defense, but keep pace with rangers and rogues and swashbucklers etc.

Summoners as a caster though lag behind full casters a bit, getting expert and master spellcasting 2 level later (so, more levels than not, they’ll actually have the same proficiency as a full caster). More painful though is they never get Legendary casting, since full casters get that at level 19. While I’ve not yet seen summoners at that level, having your DC/spell attack be 2 lower is painful, but able to be mitigated by focusing more on ‘party buffs’.

I don’t think so, not sure what general concensus is though.

They are something of a ‘generalist’ class though, so I can see them lacking in raw power.

Magic in PF2e is lackluster in damage output, leading some to call casters weak. I don’t think that’s true, but casters do face challenges related to damage, and to needing to work around enemy saves types, and needing to deal with the fact that controlling the battlefield, and managing buffs/debuffs requires more thought than just dps.

And, since they are casters, the eidolon can’t be as strong as a pure martial.

But since they’re a bounded caster, the can struggle to actually have enough spells available to be able to bring ideal spells to bear each fight.

Add to that splitting their gold between martial items and caster items, and they’ll be lagging a level or two behind on one or the other.

And just, their core class feature of getting 4 actions semi-split across 2 bodies that share a health pool, is complicated to manage.

All of that adds up to a class that is high-complexity across multiple fronts, in a system that’s well balanced if classes are played well. So you, the player, needs to spend more time and energy planning, shopping, making decisions, to end up being as powerful as the fighter. I can see that not sitting well with some people.

For me, that’s what I like about PF2e; the complicated classes aren’t just OP if played to their fullest, so I, as the most invested player at the table, can go HAM without ruining other, less invested player’s fun.