How bad is 2e outside of culture war shit (which, really, if you know Paizo's rep you kind of have to expect a certain amount of left-wing shibboleths out of them)? Did they somehow fuck the class balance even worse?
Yes. Magic is useless now.
This is the dumbest thing I have heard all month.
It's a laughably pointless gimmick to appeal to people that don't even play the game. It serves no purpose, will see barely any use (if even at all) by any of the old and dedicated fans and if you ever intended to play anything that's neither male nor female, you could have always done it without such a useless waste of space on the character sheet if it's all that important to you.
i'll give you laughably pointless, but if you don't think this doesn't appeal to a ton of people that play the game you're super wrong
So what kind of other things have they done to the game besides screw up the magic system?
As I said, I've never played the game, but never, in my 20 years of playing RPGs, have I come across a group where someone went "Ah geez. I really wish I had a box to write my pronouns into! Now, if a game offered that, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!"
furries have a lot of money, and they fucking love both pandering and pathfinder
HOW?
As a middlefag raised on the material by oldfags and grognards (I mean "started with Chainmail and thinks everything past AD&D is heresy" grognards here), there have been people who care about pronouns and shit as a sizable minority in the hobby for a long while. Pathfinder's just the biggest name that bothers throwing them a bone, and they love them enough that they've formed a core leg of their player stool for 5+ years now.
Who cares about Mr. Ivory Tower sucking his own cock? Numenera and The Strange were interesting book ideas that MC autistically tried to gamify, and their system (the "Cypher System) is their worst part. Meanwhile, Invisible Sun is possibly the most indulgent and pretentious thing he's ever put out, and that's saying something. Look up some of his early interviews about it and it sounds like he's talking about a cult. "It isn't a game, it's a lifestyle" and shit like that.I mean it's a fantasy setting where you can be a shapeshifting tree demon, a pronoun box on the character sheet probably isn't the worst idea
people are super exaggerating about the Paizo culture war stuff. start worrying when they put in trigger warnings (though I'm probably setting myself up for someone to bring up a splatbook written by some hack)
if you want to see some culture war garbage, look no further than what Monte Cook has been up to (it's hard to see, but he's the Creative Director here, and of course this is a product of Monte Cook Games™)
I honstely didn't consider them, are they that much into pronoun shenanigans? Still, I doubt that being able to write "foxself" into a box on the character sheet represents sufficient pandering to these carpet-sample-suit wearing degenerates to pick up such a game. Now, if Pathfinder 2e features artwork of anthros wearing soggy diapers being whipped or something, that might actually increase the game's sales in that market.
Never said my groups are the cosmos, merely pointing out that I've never seen anyone voicing interest in such a thing.
casters are still better than hittymans so it boggles my mind that someone could say magic is useless in PF 2e, so I just didn't bother saying anything
tbh the amount of Paizo is pandering to progressives is minimal at best when you compare it to shit like (as was just mentioned) Numenera, but those systems are unplayable garbage. It's just a little something-something as part of a greater list of little something-somethings to get them to choose Pathfinder 2e over D&D 5e.
Monte Cook is a hack with a wizard fetish, who was behind martials getting gimped so hard in 3.5.
Fighters were pretty boss in the AD&D days, especially 2nd ed, where they could fight in melee and at range and just use their strength stat.
I actually suspect it might have been a Fighter/Ranger duo given how hard he nerfed bows and arrows too.
Aw, man, I have a soft spot for Deadlands. It's easy enough to ignore any new stuff, of course, but it's still a shame.
It'd be one thing if you have the CSA struggle with a revived slave revolt powered by magic so they have to emancipate or face getting wrecked by the North. It's another to be a bitch and avoid the historical evil while still allowing evil to exist.
It's been a very long time, but I believe it was something like that - emancipate or lose, while also downplaying the role slavery played in the war just to stop it being clear-cut 'good vs evil'. Or maybe they just wanted people to be able to play a Texas Ranger without feeling guilty and having to round up any black folks as missing property. Either way, I thought it was a perfectly decent way to have the setting involve the Civil War without a lot of the baggage that would come with it, a quick finesse to keep the game focussed on the Weird part of Weird West.
