Okay, so I'm going to make a new character for the Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest, want to come along for the ride?
Character Concept I want to do something different for me. I don't play Dwarf characters very much, so let's make a Dwarf. I'm going to start with Fighter, but I like the idea that he's going to "multiclass" (2e is not the same with that term) with Cleric later. I don't have a lot of specific details, so from that general base let's see what we can come up with.
In the predominately Lawful Dwarven society the Chaotic Good Devi never fit in like a proper Dwarf. Always curious about the outside world, after Devi spent some time in the military he then left his home to see the world.
Ancestry So step one is to start with the character's Ancestry, what was called 'race' in the previous edition. As a Dwarf Devi has a few modifiers.
Attributes: he gets a boost to Con, Wis and a free one I can choose. I already know where I want to put it, Cha. He also gets one flaw, in Cha, which is why I want to put the boost there to off-set that a little.
Random stuff: so Dwarves are Med sized, with a 20' speed (and they ignore 5' of armor penalty to that). And they have Darkvision, and start with 10 HP.
Lastly I get to pick 1 Ancestry feat, so let me look over the list and see what I like. I can't say any of them jump out at me, I'm going to go with "Hardy" -
Your blood runs hearty and strong, and you can shake off toxins that would lay others low. You gain poison resistance equal to half your level (minimum 1), and each of your successful saving throws against an ongoing poison reduces its stage by 2, or 1 for a virulent poison. Each critical success against an ongoing poison reduces its stage by 3, or 2 for a virulent poison.
And that's it.
Background Like DnD5e characters have a Background. However, in the playtest there are not any real role-playing details or tables, in fact they are very, very sparse (I hope that will be fixed later). Again nothing leaps to mind (given that I don't have much of a concept) but I this one works (I was going to say his class covered his military background, but I'll make it his background too), here's the full text:
Warrior
As a warrior in a tribe or a member of a militia or army, you waded into battle in your younger days. You might have wanted to break out from the regimented structure of these forces, or could have always been as independent a warrior as you are now.
Choose two ability boosts. One must be to Strength or Constitution, and one is a free ability boost.
You gain the Quick Repair skill feat, and you’re trained in the Warfare Lore skill. I'm putting my attribute boosts in Str and Con (w/the free). "Warfare Lore" is a new skill in 2e. Lore is a general skill that basically combines the old Knowledge and Profession skills into one. You have to pick a scope or specialization, and one thing I'm not fond of is that I can't find any guidelines on what kind of scope these skills should have. Like, "Warfare" seems strange to me. I would have expected the old "Soldier" from 1e, that I know how to be a soldier in a military. Warfare sounds like it would include that, and perhaps strategy and tactics, maybe something about logistics, possibly how to form a phalanx or use a siege engine. I think I know what this skill can be used for, but it's broad and vague enough that I'm not 100% sure what all I'd use this skill for (90-95% sure). This isn't a problem, but at least the old Knowledge skills had a few types, and Profession skills were described by the job being done, but Lore seems to be in a slightly fuzzier in-between space. Again, hopefully they will give some guidelines for defining and using these skills as the playtest develops.
This is the feat:
Quick Repair
Prerequisites- trained in Crafting
You take only 10 minutes to Repair an item, rather than 1 hour. If you’re an expert, it takes 5 minutes; if you’re a master, it takes 1 minute; and if you’re legendary, it takes 3 rounds. This is a very weird thing that happens in a couple of places. So I get this feat from my Background, but this feat requires me to be trained in the Crafting skill, but I didn't get that skill, I got the Warfare Lore skill instead? Um.... Again I hope this gets fixed, either by granting the required skill or by choosing Backgrounds after Class so you at least have to take the skill as a preq for the Background. I don't know, getting 2 skills, 1 Lore and 1 required for the feat sounds best to me.
Also, I wish they had kept the Background style of
Starfinder (one of the few things I liked from that game). There you also choose a Background, but as you level up you gain additional abilities/benefits from that Background. I like that because instead of being a footnote in your character's backstory it makes a Background something you do alongside your Class. I also think that since your Class gives you most all of your Adventuring abilities then your Background should give you most of your Downtime abilities. That would make both choices meaningful, and part of your character's development.
Anyways, aside from my ramblings, this is everything for the Background.
Class Okay, so that leaves choosing our class, and then we'll have all the pieces in place and just a few more decisions to make to finish the character. I'm going with Fighter. So what does that give me?
Key Ability: Str or Dex. Okay, so every class has a key ability score, in 1e it was usually buried in the text somewhere, here it is explicitly stated (a change I highly approve of). This is the score that's going to be used to create all the save DCs for your class abilities. I'm going with Str because I plan on being a heavy armor fighter. I like that you can choose. Also, I get a free ability boost in that attribute.
Hit Point: 10 + Con. So I'm going to add these to the ones from my Ancestry to get my starting. I like how it's a fixed number instead of a die, I honestly hate rolling hit points (they do determine weather you live or die, so trusting them to the Dice Gods seems crazy).
Proficiencies: so instead of spending points individually in skills, now you are either trained in the skill or not. There are different levels of training from least to greatest: Trained, Expert, Master, Legendary. I'm okay with this, in Pathfinder 1e if you didn't increase a skill every level then by the time you got to the higher levels you had little to no chance of hitting the DCs needed. So this should help keep skills relevant. So, there are a coupe of things Fighters get trained in.
Perception: I've got Expert training in perception. Cool.
Saving Throws: Expert in Fortitude and Reflex, Trained in Will. Being "trained" in a saving throw feels weird, but okay.
Skills: Trained in 3 + Int that can be chosen by the player. So I can pick a few skills. I'll go over those near the end.
Weapons: Expert in all simple and martial weapons, Trained in all exotic weapons. Like 1e fighters I know how to use everything. The "Expert" means I get another +1, so it's kind of like getting Weapon Focus in a bunch of weapons for free.
Armor: Trained in all armor and shields.
Signature Skills: Acrobatics, Athletics and Crafting. Okay, so a "signature skill" can be maxed out to Legendary over time, but all others skills are usually capped at Expert. I get Acrobatics for Dex fighters, but that feels a little weird given that I choose to be a Str fighter. Oh well, not a big. Crafting also seems a little weird, just how many soldiers or warriors have you read in stories that made their own weapons? Again, not a big deal, but I kind of wish they had the old 'class skills' list, but that this time I could choose the ones I wanted to be signature.
There are some sections on playing and role-playing a fighter that I like. I think they're a bit better than the 1e class descriptions.
So lastly, what abilities do I get as a new fighter? Well, there are 2. One is that I get a bonus fighter feat at 1st level, and then every even level after that (which is the default for most classes). The other is that I get the ability to make opportunity attacks.
Attack of Opportunity (reaction)
Trigger- A creature within your reach uses a manipulate action or a move action, makes a ranged attack, or leaves a square during a move action it’s using.
Make a melee Strike against the triggering creature at a –2 penalty. If the attack hits and the trigger was a manipulate action, you disrupt that action. This Strike doesn’t count toward your multiple attack penalty, and your multiple attack penalty doesn’t apply to it. I like this a lot. I like that Fighters are the only ones who do AOOs, because quite frankly keeping track of that stuff for everybody was a pain in the neck. Not to mention that getting a free attack on someone is a big deal at low levels where you might die from a hit or two, but at higher levels it isn't going to kill you and doesn't disrupt what you intended to do unless the attacker had some special ability. So I am a big fan of getting rid of it and making it a cool thing that fighters can do. Now, everyone gets 3 Actions they can take during their turn, and 1 Reaction they can take on their turn or another character's turn. So you can only do this once. I will say that I wished this levels up, like at 5th level if the AOO hits and the target was moving you stop their movement, and at 10th level if the target was casting you stop their casting. I've mentioned elsewhere how I think that if you're going to give everyone fewer abilities then those abilities should be broadly useful or flexible somehow and grow over time. This is pretty flexible since it has several triggering conditions, but the only way to enhance it is to take a feat, and you only get 10 of those over your entire career (and many of them are things that used to be free/core abilities in 1e). So I hope they will look at how they define these abilities as the playtest unfolds.
Alright, so the last thing to finish my class is to choose my bonus class feat. Let me look over the list and see what we've got. There are 7 total available at 1st level, a decently-sized list. They all seem to create a fighting style (like 1h and shield, ranged, 2h) and at level 2 on you can take feats that will expand on that style. But some of the abilities are a little confusing. Take this one...
Reactive Shield (reaction)
Trigger- An enemy succeeds or critically succeeds against you with a melee Strike.
You use the Raise a Shield action and gain your shield’s bonuses to AC immediately. The circumstance bonus from the shield applies to your AC when you’re determining the outcome of the triggering attack. WOAH!!!! Wait, what, hang on a minute...? Okay, the last few days of reading over the playtest rules have been giving me migraines and this is a great example of why. I do not understand what this game is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be a simpler version of the 1e rules for people who liked that edition but thought it was too big/complicated? Is it supposed to be the new Pathfinder for the Dungeons and Dragons 5e crowd? Because if the goal at all involved simplifying the game, they sure made a super complicated "simple" game!
So, being confused about taking an action to use a shield, something very different from 1e, in fact very different from any RPG I can think of, I naturally tried to find the rules. The playtest has a chapter on "Playing the Game" and a section for "Actions and Activities" starting on page 296, which says noting about specific actions, just talks abut them in general. Okay, so next logical place is in the equipment tables, and there on page 177 it says...
Shields
A shield requires the use of one of your hands. It grants its bonuses to AC and TAC only if you use an action to Raise a Shield. This grants the shield’s bonuses to AC and TAC as a circumstance bonus until your next turn starts. The shield’s check penalty applies whenever you’re wielding the shield, regardless of whether the shield is raised.
While you have a shield raised, you can use the Shield Block reaction to reduce damage you take by the shield’s Hardness (3 for wooden shields or 5 for steel). Umm.... so let me see if I have this right. I have a shield. I get no bonus to my AC for holding it. I have to take an action to "raise" it and get the AC bonus. But only until the start of my next turn. So out of the 3 actions I get, I have to spend one of them every turn just keeping my shield up. So I really only have 2 actions. And I have to do that as a Fighter as well, same as a Wizard, unless I spend one of my Fighter Feats to get the "free shield raise" ability above. But, if I take the feat to rise my shield using my reaction, then I cannot use my reaction to use my fighter ability to make an Attack of Opportunity or get the DR against one attack that a shield also provides (and so shields are now both sources of AC and DR, thank god they simplified the game :)
This baffles me. So many parts of 2e have this same kind of deep precision and mechanical complexity (sure, having 3 actions and 1 reactions sounds simple, until you start reading about all the conditions apply to each type of action and have to juggle that one react against all the possible reactions you might end up with) that I did not expect at all. I mean, I know that Pathfinder 1e is pretty darn complicated, but these 2e rules do not feel as if the designers wanted to simplify the game, it feels like they took some scissors and cut out parts of the game then duct taped the remaining bits into a new kind of Frankenstein's monster.
Alright, so enough of this. I have to pick a fighter feat. I'm going to go with Furious Focus that sounds like it lets me make multiple attacks without taking a big penalty to hit. I'm not even going to read the rules on multiple attacks right now because I suddenly find I have a headache, I'm going to hope this does what I think it does. I kind of see Devi as an "the best defense is a good offense" kind of guy, so I think this will fit my character.
With that I've finished all the core decisions of Ancestry, Background and Class. Now there just remain some bits and pieces to make a final character.
Attributes Okay, so I'm using the default system of building my attributes through the boosts I've taken. That means all my attributes will start at 10 as default and get a +2 for every boost. Now, there is an optional rule to roll attributes, but I don't like that. I kind of said it in an a-hole way in my last post, which a commenter rightly called me out on, so let me give the rational reason instead of "I'm feeling very grumpy right now" reason. The thing with attributes is, either everyone picks or spends points somehow to keep each character balanced against each other (in general), or everyone rolls and balance is not an issue. But those are two mutually exclusive things. Way back in the days of DnD 1e it was roll 3d6 in order and play that character. Which a lot of people started to house rule into roll 3d6 but put them where you want them. And that eventually got house ruled into what most similar games made the default rule to roll 4d6, drop the lowest, and put them in order. Alongside that, the idea of having points to distribute or a point buy chart (with higher scores costing more points proportionally). So over the years that I've been a player attributes have had a ridiculous number of systems applied to them. Why? What benefit do we really get by having 99 ways to find our attribute scores?
And, if one group is balanced with points/picks they will never be balanced (except by the intervention of the Dice Gods) with people who roll, by whatever method, so the end result is being not balanced in which case why make a rule designed to bring balance that doesn't? It's just become way more words spent defining the rules than the benefit we get. So I would love to see a game that just has one way, and only one way. My personal preference is to do a point/pick method, I like balance (in general) even admitting it's quite the chimera to chase, but if the rule was roll that would be fine too. I just think trying to do both is silly, you cannot be both balanced and unbalanced at the same time, you have to commit to being one or the other. So either the game designers, IMHO, should say 'we value balance so pick,' or they should say 'we value randomness and discovery so roll,' but both is trying to have your fork-full of cake and let someone else eat it too.
Anyways, so I'm going to use the boost system. I also have not seen anywhere that needs to know my score, so I'm only going to list my modifier (and it's easier to find a score form a modifier than it is to find a modifier from a score). So I start with a 0 in everything. I have one penalty, -1 Cha from my ancestry. I have +1 Str, Con, Cha from the same leaving me at +1 Str/Con. Next my background gives me a +1 Str/Con, for a +2 in each. Lastly as a Str-based Fighter I get another +1 Str. And that ends my general choices. Now, I have a +4 to distribute across all my attributes. I think I'm going to spend them so I end with...
Str +3 Con +2 Wis +2 Cha +2
The Wis and Cha might seem a little strange for a dwarf fighter, but I have an idea that I might want to later take on some Cleric abilities. There is no multiclassing as in 1e. I am a Fighter only, ever. But, what I can do is use one of my class feats (and/or general feats, I have to double-check) to take a "Cleric Foundation" feat that will let me cast spells like a cleric. Then I can take more feats to gain more cleric abilities, at the expense of course of losing the fighter feats I could have chosen. But I kind of like the idea of him following the god/goddess of honesty and/or order, and so he becomes a cleric after seeing the lies and chaos of most other races. That sounds like it might be an interesting way to develop the character, and let me see how the new multiclassing/archetype system works.
So those are my attributes.
Skills The next big thing is to pick my skills. Since they are effected by your attributes I've waited until those were finished. So my 0 mod in Int means I get only the default 3 skills, but Acrobatics, Athletics and Crafting can all be increased the highest, and my Background did give me the feat that applies to Crafting, so that's going to be my first choice. I have no Dex for Acrobatics, and I don't really feel a lot of love for Athletics, so what other skills are there? Well, the list is about half the size of 1e, the new skills are...
Acrobatics
Arcana
Athletics
Crafting
Deception
Diplomacy
Intimidation
Lore
Medicine
Nature
Occultism
Performance
Religion
Society
Stealth
Survival
Thievery
Hmmm.... since I want to go cleric later, I guess Religion might work. Athletics does let you disarm people, there is no CMB/CMD like in 1e, it appears to be tied to skills now. Intimidation seems like a good fit for a dwarf with charisma. I never read the Occult Adventures book from 1e so I'm not sure how that's different from divine or arcane magic. Weirdly, Performance kind of sounds like fun, if I liked to tell stories from the old days or something.
Okay, bear with me as I drag out the soapbox. Again, what is the purpose of this edition? If it is meant in any way to be simpler than the 1st, this sidebar about Performance used in downtime (pg 157) doesn't seem like it...
Lem is a 16th-level bard and legendary with his flute. He has a Performance bonus of +30 with his enchanted flute. With 30 days of downtime ahead of him, Lem wonders if he can find something that might excite him more than performing in front of a bunch of stuffy nobles. He decides to spend 7 days of downtime researching to see if he can find a more prestigious audience, and the GM decides that he finds a momentous offer indeed—a performance in a celestial realm, and Lem’s patron goddess Shelyn might even be in attendance! This is a 20th-level task, requiring Lem to spend 8 of his remaining 23 days for preparation and setup (since the task is 4 levels higher than him), but Lem accepts it in a heartbeat. The GM secretly sets the DC at 38.
Lem rolls an 11 on his Performance check for a result of 41. Success! Performances continue for 7 more days, and at the end, the grateful celestials present Lem with a beautiful living diamond rose in constant bloom worth 16,000 silver pieces (2,000 silver pieces per day for 8 days).
With 8 days of downtime left, Lem also accepts a 14th-level task performing at a prestigious bardic college for members of a royal court, which requires only 2 days of setup (since it’s 2 levels below Lem’s level). The GM secretly sets the DC at 30, and Lem critically succeeds, earning 350 silver pieces per day for 7 days, for a total of 2,450 silver pieces. Between the two performances, Lem earned nearly 20,000 silver pieces during his downtime, though he’s not sure if he’ll ever sell that rose. Wow. So during downtime I have to count every single day of everything I do and total each day's earnings. Yeah, the 1e crafting system had a thing about each individual day's progress - but that's my point. If the first edition is just as complicated as the second edition, then what exactly is the purpose of the second edition? If they wanted to make 2e simpler, more for the DnD 5e crown, then why not at least consolidate actions into weeks? Something? Again I wonder at what they edition wants to do. Sure, the above makes for a cute little story, but it's the same kind of story that could be told in 1e.
Oh hell, after that I think I am going to take Performance as my last skill, maybe I'll play for the gods too someday :) In which case I might need that Religion. So my 3 skills are going to be Crafting, Performance and Religion along with the Warfare Lore.
Okay, I literally started this post 6 hours ago. Now, I have been talking to a friend and there were some fun unexpected surprises this morning, but I've been at this for way too long. I am going to stop here, and there will be a follow-up post that finished making the character tomorrow.
