Corefinder - Legendary Games Spin On Pathfinder 1

[TheAuldGrump]

Looking at the public posts on the Legendary Games Patreon - they open up posts about Corefinder to the public a week later - Patreons get them earlier, but everyone can see them. (No link - it's a commerce site.)

 

Just read the changes they are considering for damage.

 

Part of me thinks it is overpowered, but most of me thinks that it goes a long way to balancing the Wizard/Fighter situation, in sessions with short adventuring days*.

 

The change is simple - adding the Base Attack Bonus to the damage roll.

 

So a tenth level fighter with an 18 Strength using a longsword would do 1d8+4+10, while a tenth level elf wizard with a 10 Strength using  a longsword would be doing 1d8+0+3....

 

I will be asking my group if they want to adopt this, immediately - the cops game generally does not have a lot of combats, and this will make the combats that they do have faster.

 

The Auld Grump

 

* In my experience, the short adventuring day allows wizards to drop all their high damage spells quickly, rather than conserving them. For games where they need to conserve their spells, things balance out better. The 15 Minute Adventuring Day is just a bad idea.

Edited December 12, 2020 by TheAuldGrump

[terminalmancer]

Hmmmm. They have a lot of ideas there! And I have... not enough time to read them all, not tonight. I can't find the post in question, so just to talk about adding damage in the way you've described:

 

Pathfinder is... interesting in how the spellcasters and the martials compare. Spellcasters tend to be powerful not because they do bucketloads of damage (although they can, it tends to be one of the weaker approaches) but because they have answers, particularly at high levels, and martials don't get many answers--they just get increasingly more damage, without too much ability to affect problems that their damage can't fix. An archer, for example, can take feats that increase the damage they do--rapid shot, deadly aim, manyshot, and so on. A high-level spellcaster, on the other hand, gets fickle winds. Fickle winds is a 6th-level spell that surrounds a spellcaster with wind that essentially makes them immune to arrows and other projectiles that aren't made of magic. It's an answer for the archer's entire approach. Looking at another class comparison, fly lets a spellcaster hang in the air and rain destruction or irritation down on the barbarian from above, and frankly throwing a javelin is not the best use of a barbarian's time. The barbarian needs to rely on someone else to solve the problem for them--there's not a lot they can do.

 

You can dig into the list of spells and see how many different solutions there are in the spell list--a hard thing for a martial to compete with. And seeing as spell lists are known to expand over time (and with publications), the problem usually gets worse later in a game's lifecycle. It's a hard thing to deal with. Damage, by itself, doesn't do it (although it might reduce the reliance on power attack, removing power attack also has other implications) but this is only one part of their approach, it seems. They have a lot of promising ideas that I can see, like the rebuild of full attacking--so there's a lot of promise--but I don't think this part of it is the important bit for solving the overall problem.

 

Of course, the dedicated spellcaster players can argue that the wizards deserve to be better late because they're terrible early, and most of the game is played at the levels where they just can't compete. And they're not entirely wrong--the vast majority of the game is played before level 5, and unless your spellcaster has really gotten the hang of their color sprays and glitterdusts and sleep spells, they're just not going to be very good. So it may not be something you want to overfix, which is one of the concerns that's been brought up with respect to second edition.

 

Oh! And my wife brings up a good point--Starfinder is already testing this out, and it does have a small effect, but the big balancing factor in Starfinder was limiting all of the casters to six levels of spells. Which... means that you don't have any full casters, which does solve the problem, in a way. It also, partially by virtue of the setting, mean that technology can provide a lot of the answers for a martial character that a spellcaster would provide in a more fantasy setting.

 

More to chew on, I suppose.

Edited December 13, 2020 by terminalmancer
late Starfinder addition...

[PaganMegan]

We tried out the BAB damage Saturday.

 

LOVE IT!

 

My meat shields I mean the squad's close combat specialists, stepped in and had a good time thumping and being thumped.

 

They weren't just keeping their opponents in placw.

[Balgin Stondraeg]

On 12/12/2020 at 8:08 PM, TheAuldGrump said:

I will be asking my group if they want to adopt this, immediately - the cops game generally does not have a lot of combats, and this will make the combats that they do have faster.

 

This looks like a simple & elegant attempt to address the caster/martial damage disparity. I'm honestly considering trying it out for myself.

 

Quote

* In my experience, the short adventuring day allows wizards to drop all their high damage spells quickly, rather than conserving them. For games where they need to conserve their spells, things balance out better. The 15 Minute Adventuring Day is just a bad idea.

 

 I played a lot of 1st edition & 2nd edition where we had to conserve our energy and pace ourselves. The 15 minute adventuring day was always a bad idea.

[TheAuldGrump]

One experimental rules change that I am pretty sure that I don't like is increasing an ability score at each level - with a cap of 18+1/2 Character Level.

May just be a knee jerk reaction, but I happen t like PCs having at least one bad stat.

 

In a long ago game where everyone took Cha as a dump, I had a lot of fun having everybody in town give them a hard time - because they didn't like the look of 'em. (Like the bad guys in an old time western rolling into town.)

 

The Auld Grump

[Auberon]

Having played a system with a lot of ability score increases, you have to ask yourself a question.  Did the game designers assume that players will keep their primary stat maxed out? 

• If they did then half of all the stat increases the PCs get will need to go into their primary stat just to keep up. If the PCs do not increase said stat, it will become harder to hit as they gain levels.
• If they did not and the PCs keep pumping up their primary stat it will become easier to hit at high levels. I find always hitting gets kind of boring, but to each their own.

Then ask, do the PCs have a secondary stat they need to keep up with?  As long as the answer is yes (such as STR for attack and DEX for AC) then a lot of players will tie their other ability score increase to their secondary ability. 

 

My experience was that some players were willing to sacrifice a bit of their secondary stat to make their dump stat not suck, but the PCs still had something they were not good in.

 

Where I found the increasing ability scores had a weird effect was actually in the skill system.  Since the skills were tied to an ability score, any skill tied to a primary or secondary ability gains bonuses faster than the others.  At low levels it wasn't really noticeable, but at high levels the disparity was obvious.  OTOH I've always heard that the majority of groups tend to end their campaigns around mid-level so it will not be an issue for them.

[Balgin Stondraeg]

So some thoughts.

 

More damage means quicker fights.

 

This house rule is intended to replace damage dice scaling with by size with a size based damage modifier. We don't have all the details of that yet.

 

The optional rule for nonlethal damage on a missed attack (battle fatigue) would be so open to abuse. It would encourage things like rapid shot, two weapon fighting, monk flurry of misses etc because you'd be guaranteed some damage anyway and each attack would just wear the defender down. It might be fun to use that rule for single combat (like a showdown with a personal nemesis) and it would go both ways. I can imagine it for swashbucklers dueling or for a fight against a berserker who fights in a very exhausting manner to tire out his opponents. It would also make being tough important. More Constitution, Toughness, Diehard etc. This might help to counter the fact that the rules blatantly encourage paper tiger/glass cannon builds at the moment.

 

This would actually make mobs, gangs, and groups of unskilled foes fairly dangerous to mighty warriors. We might actually see heroes run away from swarms of low CR foes because "I just don't have the hit points to tackle 20 goblins right now!" This then goes into the problem of heroes hiring gangs of children or beggars to mob and overwhelm their opponents with nonlethal damage.

 

Speaking of which, with all this nonlethal damage people will get taken down more often and quicker too but they'll also go into negative hit points a lot less often because it would be the nonlethal damage that put them so low that one more hit pushed them over the brink and into unconsciousness. So quicker beat downs but a much higher survival rate. That starts to feel a bit like a cartoon.

 

One more thing. Adding BAB to damage means that equipment could get broken much quicker. Combat Manoeuvres like Sunder could become really powerful unless the hardness and hit points of all items were drastically overhauled.

[PaganMegan]

13 hours ago, Balgin Stondraeg said:

So some thoughts.

 

More damage means quicker fights.

 

This house rule is intended to replace damage dice scaling with by size with a size based damage modifier. We don't have all the details of that yet.

 

The optional rule for nonlethal damage on a missed attack (battle fatigue) would be so open to abuse. It would encourage things like rapid shot, two weapon fighting, monk flurry of misses etc because you'd be guaranteed some damage anyway and each attack would just wear the defender down. It might be fun to use that rule for single combat (like a showdown with a personal nemesis) and it would go both ways. I can imagine it for swashbucklers dueling or for a fight against a berserker who fights in a very exhausting manner to tire out his opponents. It would also make being tough important. More Constitution, Toughness, Diehard etc. This might help to counter the fact that the rules blatantly encourage paper tiger/glass cannon builds at the moment.

 

This would actually make mobs, gangs, and groups of unskilled foes fairly dangerous to mighty warriors. We might actually see heroes run away from swarms of low CR foes because "I just don't have the hit points to tackle 20 goblins right now!" This then goes into the problem of heroes hiring gangs of children or beggars to mob and overwhelm their opponents with nonlethal damage.

 

Speaking of which, with all this nonlethal damage people will get taken down more often and quicker too but they'll also go into negative hit points a lot less often because it would be the nonlethal damage that put them so low that one more hit pushed them over the brink and into unconsciousness. So quicker beat downs but a much higher survival rate. That starts to feel a bit like a cartoon.

 

One more thing. Adding BAB to damage means that equipment could get broken much quicker. Combat Manoeuvres like Sunder could become really powerful unless the hardness and hit points of all items were drastically overhauled.

The cops game is wicked low on magic items, the BAB damage is making it a whole lot better.

 

There ARE magic items, but we need to requisition them.

 

We get pay, not treasures. And mostly limited to thumpy weapons, not sharp and pointy.

 

The laughing devils have DR, the BAB damage made all the difference in the WORLD!

[lowlylowlycook]

This doesn't sound a million miles away from the Escalation Die in 13th age.  There the PCs get a bonus to hit that goes up every round.  Since it's a central mechanic it can, say modify or limit, character abilities and also unusual monsters might manipulate the die.