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11 [Music] and we're back welcome to no direction the Pathfinder news reviews and interviews podcast I'm Ryan Costello and I'm Jefferson J factor Olsen in this pair I'm Alexander akunis the everyman gamer today is an unusual episode for us we are recording on a Thursday live because we just couldn't wait we couldn't wait until next Wednesday to talk about the major announcement that came out from Paizo on Tuesday pretty much out of the blue that Pathfinder 2nd edition is a thing so joining us for the Pathfinder 2nd edition special edition no direction is the chief creative officer and publisher of Paizo mr. Eric Bona hi everybody welcome back Eric thank you so much I'm glad we had you on a couple of weeks ago to get all that not Pathfinder second edition stuff yeah and joining us is designer for Pathfinder and one of the main designers for the Pathfinder 2nd edition mr. Logan Bonner everybody how you doing Logan not bad intensive playtesting and answering editor questions a lot to I'd like to do right now well thank you both for taking the time to talk to us because I know that people are just super excited and even though you've been extremely forthcoming with information about how the play test is going to go and what to expect in the Pathfinder play test book that will eventually lead to Pathfinder 2nd edition there's still so many questions let's hope we have answers indeed actually as piano man said he's barely been doing any work in the last couple of days just trying to keep up with all the message boards yeah yeah now that's actually one thing I kind of went actually since I mentioned piano man we are live yes we are live on twitch.tv slash no direction if you want to join in the chat or if you're hearing this and you're not in the chat that means that you're listening to the recording but next time we air you can join us in the chat and get your questions answered by the way we have some pre submitted questions we also going to be taking questions from the chat throughout the episode so if you want to know anything speak up and we'll introduce it into the show now that actually leads me to a question for those of you this is the easy one that may not know what a pathfinder 2.0 is can you give the elevator pitch sure yeah I'll talk a little yeah Pathfinder second edition is an evolution of the Pathfinder role-playing game which is we launched in with a play test in 2008 and the final version in 2009 as we approach 2019 which would be the 10 year anniversary of Pathfinder we wanted to update the rules and kind of add some of the innovations like archetypes and other elements of the game we've added over the last decade back into the game and I've always been of the opinion sort of as the publisher and as the guy who ultimately I guess is my decision of when we did this I always wanted to make sure that if we were gonna as I often say sort of open the patient and perform surgery on one thing that we might as well take care of a whole bunch of stuff so we could have you know a couple years after the advanced players guide we could have just kind of reopened the files for the core rulebook added the little section on it archetypes and then we're off to the races but I didn't want to do that that that'd be really disruptive so we wanted to get to the point where we had a big enough corpus of new rules and enough experience with the base system for Pathfinder then we had ideas for ourselves of how we would change the system how we would improve it make it easier to learn faster to play but still and offer the depth of complexity and sort of character options and customization that makes Pathfinder so popular we wanted to know what we wanted so that we could create another play test so that you guys could tell us what you want Pathfinder was really born out of a big open play test so we always knew that when we would do a second edition of the game we want to follow a similar pattern and that's exactly what we'll be doing so for in August of this year 2019 we will be releasing a play test version of the Pathfinder RPG second edition which is something Logan and the other designers Jason Bowman Stephen Randy McFarland and marks after and indeed the entire PI's of staff have been working on for a couple of years sorry Eric did you say this year 2019 yeah of course I'm very confused sleep-deprivation this year 2018 is when we're be putting out the play test version with the final actual slate of second edition products to be released in August of 2019 now when we have big announcements like this for a new game usually we're kind of used to this dance by name not just from from your company but from other companies where there's the announcement of the product and then the slow tease and then we get the bigger announcement and then the more details and then the blog post you guys turned on the fire hose what was the decision to just hit us all at once with a mountain of info um well it's it's uh well first of all we know people would have a lot of questions so you know if we had just sort of put on a Twitter post like a UH Sacro Edition pathfinders come in then the entire internet would catch on fire and that fire would soon come to our office and since none of us really want to burn we thought it would be a good idea to reveal a whole bunch of information about a lot of different topics of course over the next several months we'll be going into greater detail on a lot of those individual topics and in fact even later in this podcast I think we'll get into some of it I think there's also a lot of stuff that because of the glass cannon actual play podcast there's a lot of things that we haven't revealed in full and right through the blog but there's a lot of like tidbits that people have latched on I think like a surprisingly large number actually you know and so there's already been some I saw YouTube video the other night I've seen posts on Reddit and things like that where people try to call a lot of that information out of the live play which is great I mean really the the the technical reason of why now is that last time we did this we were gonna release the play test of the beta rules for free online and that's exactly what we're doing this time but back then we thought you know if you take the files to a print shop you know at the time it goes Kinkos you know we priced out how much it would cost and it turned out to actually be cheaper just to buy a professionally printed version of the book than to print it yourself so we made several thousands sort of thinking you probably no one's gonna want this but we might as well do it and they sold out in like three days and so which I like to think started a grand tradition of us under printing important products but but one of the things that's really important to us is to bring in our hobby Tail partners to make sure that they have the opportunity to participate in the play test and in the selling of the the various formats of the the three products that we're putting out for the play test which is a play test rulebook the play test adventure and the flip mat multi pack that goes with the play test adventure since we knew we were going to sell those in retail stores coming up next week is a trade show called the Gama trade show where all the retailers and distributors in the Hobby game industry will be gathering together for conferences and discussions about the next year's products and stuff so really we wanted to make sure that we were going to go into that event ready to bring retailers in on this project and I should say although we don't start selling the the play test products on PI SOCOM until the 20th when we get back from the trade show you can download an order pre-order form right now on PI so calm and take it to your local retailer and they already have the ability to place pre-orders with all their distributors as well so they're we're giving them a little bit of a head start just kind of because there's such important partners for us so really it comes down as it often does to kind of insight baseball business stuff but that sort of answers the why now as opposed to just like a day before Gen Con or something like that I like inside baseball more than regular baseball yeah me too so here's how I should when somebody came up to you and said hey what would you do for a Pathfinder 2nd edition what was on that list this is one of the things that like even before we started in earnest on the edition there were already like compilations of various things that had been annoying fans about the previous edition styles that we've been using for years that the editors were sick of and that kind of thing so there's a lot of stuff that was just kind of already in the hopper because any time you're working on a game particularly one this big you're always finding things that you wish were a little bit different and eventually you kind of just hit critical mass on all that stuff and realize okay here's how we fix it here's how we fix this I think for me the biggest thing is just kind of streamlining some of the math so that instead of having something that looks really good which the progressions of like it's one third of your level or it's one half of your level a lot of those things look really good on paper they sound really good but they don't really hold up very well once you're hitting higher levels and then it's just like oh this means you're totally amazing at this and you are there's absolutely no point of this other person trying at all and we wanted it to be a little bit closer to the lower level experience where it's like oh yes you're way better at this but you can at least try it it's not a complete waste of your time especially when you look at stuff like attack bonuses and the disparity between the classes for me I think that's part of it is making the experience feel a little more cohesive across the levels and to make it so that things that feel like you should be able to do it are things you actually can attempt because I really don't like when you get in a situation where there is a reasonable expectation that if this character attempts to sneak past a guard there's some chance because they know what they're doing that they might succeed but if the player actually decides to do that everybody else at the table says whoa don't do that that's a really bad idea so I think that was a big one of the biggest things for me early on um I think many of us at Paizo had little files on our computers of like when we get a chance to change this let's get rid of this thing and so you can kind of ask that question pretty much everybody at the company and they would probably all answer with a very specific you know different thing that's always stuck in their craw or whatnot I have a little bit of a unique perspective because I've been at Paizo since the very first day of Pi so back in 2002 and when we started we've been working on dragon and dungeon magazines under license from Wizards of the coast some of us had even working you know at wattsy on those those projects and so by the time you know 2009 rolled around many of us in the office Jason Bowman our lead designer myself James Jacobs all of whom are still here we'd already had like basically a decade of professional experience working with the game and trying to adapt adventures to it writing monsters for it developing characters playing campaigns running campaigns doing opie all that kind of stuff and so when it came time to kind of make Pathfinder we were able to take those ten years of experience and things love things that we were frustrated by and channel that into some of the changes that went into the first edition of Pathfinder and basically now we're in a similar position with Pathfinder itself we've been working on it for a decade we have a pretty good idea of what its strengths and weaknesses are we have a pretty good idea of innovations that we've done over the years that have really hit with people and that people really like and things that we've done that maybe people would have preferred that we did a different route and stuff like that so for me we're just kind of at that point where we've got a similar mass of ideas and thoughts and criticisms that we did the first time around and it was really time to update the core rulebook I mean I think it's past time to update the core rulebook to be totally honest the the fact of the matter is that piezos sold more copies of the corporal book than any other book that we've done and yet it's the hardcover book that we did that we spent the least amount of time on the least amount of art budget I mean it's our first book in many ways and it's a lot different making our 35th book or our 40th book we know a lot more just about how to make books so for example you can see that difference really started with just the Starfighter exactly exactly so if you if you if you look at how information is presented in the courtroom book all of the chapters are pretty much in the same order that they were in in 3.5 you know all of the information is presented similarly to how it was presented in 3.5 and that might not be the best way you know with 20 years of experience with the 3.0 system that might not be the best way to convey how to advance a character but we're stuck with that template you know that we went with in 2009 that was the same template that was invented in 1999 so there is a point where it's like we can't necessarily just change how we present information in the middle of the edition this gives us the opportunity to kind of go back to the beginning and say how what's the optimal way to bring somebody into the game we did that a little bit by the way with the beginner box you know - great excitement that product we've done a that's sold a lot of copies with a lot of different print runs but you'll notice that like between the may be the second and they're the first and the second print run of the beginner box we added a third book in there which is like the transition guide and that's because to make the game accessible to new players we had to cut so much you know no attacks of opportunity no combat manoeuvres no bla bla bla bla bla and so if you if the idea is if you're gonna transition into the core rulebook you then had to read another book and then you go into the core rulebook and you got a book that the visual design and the information design is 6-7 years older it's just we wanted to ease that transition and then when you add into it some of the things that kind of in my opinion made Pathfinder Pathfinder which are things like archetypes and to some degree traits we're doing a different implementation of that in the second edition but those things are not even in the core rulebook so you know we've been sending people to our best-selling book that in many ways is our I don't want to say our worst produce book but certainly like we were first level when we made that book you know this publisher and now you know where I hope for at least third in 10 years yeah yeah it's a slow we're on the slow progression track right ooh I feel like my campaigns I'm fifth level at the end of the weekend yeah well my home game they just hit six we've been playing since path under launched oh really yeah how often do you play about once a month with that group okay well very good chat right now is really obsessed with The Alchemist so why don't we start there there's going to be twelve classes in the core rulebook it's going to be the eleven classes from the core rulebook first edition plus the alchemists so if you told me that there were just gonna be twelve classes I think the alchemists would have been when the ones I expected but if you told me it was gonna be the base 11 plus one I'm surprised the alchemist is the one that made the cut so what's up with the alchemist so so one of the things about the alchemist is that its design is kind of its original path under one design it's kind of making a lot of compromises to work within the system and we knew that if we put it in the core book I mean first of all it's popular so that was part of it it's one of the popular classes that we knew people were going to want really and the other part is that if we put it in the core rulebook we can really look at what does alchemy mean and how should it work and build that into a game from the get-go so there's a big section on how chemical that anybody can take the alchemist uses them more but we don't kind of have to rely on spells to be the alchemist bread and butter instead we can say what is alchemy you will do what are some alchemical items that we want to incorporate into the game how does crafting alchemical stuff work and bake that all into the system from the get-go as kind of a core part of how how the system structured and just make it a lot cleaner and a lot easier to figure out for the player I think also for me just from a sort of managing pathfinder as a brand perspective it was really important that we get some stuff into the corpus of core rules that is a honestly uniquely Pathfinder you know I'm not really satisfied you know just sort of making another version of D&D I want to make the best version of Pathfinder that we possibly can and so that's part of the reason why the alchemist goes in there it's part of the reason why we're incorporating the Goblin which is obviously a creature that's become really associated with our brand we're gonna throw that in there as well just give give the whole thing a little bit more of a Pathfinder spin instead of just like here's our take on somebody else's ideas we have a lot of questions about the goblins so I am but so the arguments were including the alchemists could also be applied for including the gunslinger and and like some version of psychic magic so why did science make it but psychic magic and guns didn't answer why guns didn't can't goes the other one I don't think we can answer that yet I think one of the reasons that guns didn't make it is just because it's just a little far outside of kind of the general conception of fantasy and just in the world they're pretty rare yeah the number of gunslingers compared to the number of alchemists is just smaller so we kind of knew that their footprint just wouldn't be quite as big yeah gunslingers are I think a really interesting class especially in the context of a new addition and what we can do with the class and things but it's it's like Logan said it's one step removed from most people's concept of fantasy even within the concept the the context of gallery' in' it's mostly limited you know to Alcon star and some other places as well but we know that whereas I think we can say hey guys an alchemist is now kind of part of the core concept there's not really a lot of people are gonna be like well I don't use potions in my game so that doesn't make sense but there are a lot of people who would prefer that gunslinger be an option rather than something that's included right in and so I think for example if we were to do gunslinger Ian let's say the second or the third or the fourth you know book that will release in in second edition which i think is quite plausible I think we by putting it in the secondary book we give some GM's the opportunity to kind of say it's okay if I don't want to use guns in my campaign and we definitely think that's okay and it's also like you said the extend ability of how come you to other characters is really high so putting alchemy stuff in the Korra book it's very easy to see how all the other characters are using that but since we know this is going to be kind of the most used book we don't know if we really want every fighter to have a backup pistol yeah exactly one other thing I would say as a semi frequent path miner Society GM is I really want to put the gun rules and particularly the gunslinger rules do a really robust public play test and I would like the camera to be focused on that a little bit more than on the entire rule set because it is an outlier and I and from my perspective and this is just me as a player and not necessarily speaking for Paizo we're speaking for the design team certainly but I find that when I'm most frustrated with the Pathfinder rules or with how some encounter has gone gunslingers are very frequently near the center of the bullseye of what and and I don't know if other people necessarily feel that way I mean I think the I think there's many things about the class that are just awesome but that is a question I think could use some really careful fine-tuning and balancing and frankly some of the additions to the system I think will make gunslingers even more interesting to play in the new addition but some of that I guess what I would call like I put the kinetise astac chili in a similar role of like a clot in the Summoner frankly you know classes that are just a little bit more techy a little bit more advanced than say the fighter or even the cleric and I think I want to make sure that the audience but just as importantly the designer and us and our editing team and all that have a better sense of what the ecosystem of the game the base game gets is like before we start getting into some of the really crazy stuff but that's it we know we can't put off those really popular things forever and we also know incidentally that that this journey on second edition can't just be ream in ting every first edition thing you know it's like okay here's exactly the same monsters who's exactly the same classes we're gonna do some new stuff that people have never seen before but we also know that you know there's a lot of people out there who I think when they heard Oh second edition Pathfinder maybe even particularly within the framework of Pathfinder society who are like whoa what am I gonna do with my sort of you know the my Arcanist or my investigator or my fill in the blank essentially you know and we want to give people answers to that as soon as we can I'm really glad to hear you say that Eric I have a friend in Pathfinder Society who mostly plays witches so she's been like am I not going to be able to play any more witches for three or four years yeah well and here's the thing I mean without getting into decisions we frankly haven't even made around here though which is a very very popular class you know and so I can't even it's impossible for me to imagine a world of which your friends gonna have to wait well that's also what the class is like cuz which was kind of on the wind yeah it almost but it's also one where it's like if you want to make a character who functions a lot like a witch you can do that fairly easily with what some core woman Alchemist nope right you just if we didn't give you all the rules for it it'd be really hard to make an upright character so if you don't want to just remit what's out there why have the same eleven core classes because people will totally freak out if we don't and you know I mean honestly part of this is uh I've been watching Edition changes since 1989 and taking things away from people is never a good idea it's never gone over well it's great to be able to say here's everything you had plus right exactly it's good to say this isn't being moved to the best Erie yeah I mean look without somebody picking on anybody like yeah that was a good example of people freaking out is when the gnome sort of disappeared from 4th edition D&D and we're just not interested in taking away core bits and we're not really interested in taking away much of anything honestly unless it's coming that we've got a better idea for but we can't do forty some classes in one book you know and so again it's like it plays into that like we need to make sure that the foundations of the core system are sound and the play test is a huge part of that the out the external play test but we're also doing internal play tests like crazy you know and that's letting Logan and Steven and Mark and Jason and everybody else who gets pulled into the play test to give their input and to get a better understanding of this thing and I think that quite frankly I think those classes will be better off with more fine-tuning of the core before we really delve deep into their design Hey but go to break your heart to know that you've been observing edition changes as long as I've been alive no it just means I'm that much wiser Alex yeah no I like you you were talking about a third level I'm pretty sure that's more than third level Eric why I don't like to I'm really 26 what happened this kind of ties into something that Logan was we have a question from chat this kind of ties into something Logan was talking about he's earlier actually it doesn't I just goofed on that they're asking how easy would it be to stimulate the hybrid classes with the core 12 in second edition fairly easy I mean there are some of them that because we're kind of doing it a little more customizable than some of them were initially I think we've talked a little bit about it you get class feeds and every other level you get a class feed and that's a pretty broad pool they're going to be options that resemble some of those some of those classes a fair amount if it's going to depend a lot on the individual class if you want to do do like a war briefs I think you could do a pretty good war priest investigator might be a little more of a challenge yeah it varies quite a bit we've also got you've got archetypes being built into the core now so are any of the classes to be rebranded as as archetypes unknown we we've looked at it but we also I want to be mindful of like taking something that was a core class and kind of demoting it because that's the kind of thing that can make people be like well I used to play an investigator and that was just an archetype that kind of feels like a downgrade and I think there are some classes that can work really well as just archetypes and others that just don't so that's something we've been a little to focus on the core game to really get too deep into so we're going back and forth a lot on how we want to to deal with those individual individual archetypes and I'll also say for the for the play test role book we have some archetypes in there but we've gone with a pretty small selection of them partially just for space and partially because we want to test out some of those concepts before we flush them out Foley yeah the space thing is worth talking about you know like we've been saying that the the play test Rule books gonna be 400 pages 416 pages somewhere in there I suspect it'll be maybe a little smidgen longer than that but the actual rulebook in 2019 the only sort of guideline I've given the team is that it can't be bigger than the current bath finder book so I'm holding the line at 576 pages and that gives these guys a little bit more leeway to create new stuff to address issues that come up during the play tests and more archetypes will definitely I assume be part of that and is the idea that what's in this play tests hardcover is the template for what's going to be in the second edition core rulebook we don't really know yeah I mean if you use a loose interpretation of the word template I would say never do know okay well you know it's gonna have ancestries it's gonna have backgrounds it's gonna have classes it's gonna have equipment it's gonna have magic items it's gonna have spells you know and the ones that we're putting in there are ones that at least as of today we think belong in the core rules now that said if we if we have an item in there and everyone's like this item is preposterous well it might go away you know if we have cut a spell for example because we don't think it's that meaningful and then in the play test everyone's like we miss that spell sham blur where's right where sham you know it might come back so it's hard to say but I think that you know looking at the section breakdowns once you get a hold of the book it's very very similar to what the final book will look like but we hope to implement as much play test feedback and new material as we possibly come and we've talked about this some on the message boards and stuff but there are a fair number of things where we weren't sure if we wanted to make a big leap on something yeah and like the design team could decide Eric couldn't decide and so we said all right this is the play test let's do the more extreme thing and then if it doesn't work we know it doesn't work we get to find out whether the extreme thing works or whether we want to walk it back yeah I think that that's there's gonna be some envelope-pushing you know in this book and that's because if we do it now we do have a chance to pull back if we have to I think that one of the things that surprised us about the first approach was the sense of like some members of the community wanted us to push things even further and at the time we were really really wanted to focus on you know improving the 3.5 engine but really retaining sort of backwards compatibility like as and in as explicit a sense of that term as possible and now with another 10 years under our belt there are definitely some places where I think we feel like the flow of play the game balance stuff like that is probably more important than having it match exactly with you know magic of incarnate or something like that is the intention to still have a game mastering section in I'm calling it the core rulebook I don't know if that's gonna change but what will be the second edition yeah there'll be a little bit master section in the Bears in fact there's a game mastering section in the play test book yeah and one of the things we're kind of looking at is because we're planning ahead a little bit for the game mastery guide and one of the things we're looking at for the core rulebook is to kind of say here's the basic stuff you need to run a game which is not particularly different from the first edition corporal book this is the basic stuff you need to run the game if you really want to design a whole bunch of stuff from scratch that's when you want the game master yeah that's probably another book yeah a chat was asking a lot about how archetypes are going to work they're asking if it's gonna be like its star finder or something totally different or similar to what it was in first edition it's not that much like star finder and it's not that much like like first edition it's kind of one of the more experimental parts of the rules I don't think we want to say a whole I think we're gonna let the blog and some examples and stuff speak for that I will say that we've taken a few different concepts that were kind of all pointing at the same type of character customization and kind of said that's that's all under the archetype umbrella so we're interested to see how people react to that for sure and just one follow-up is it going to be class specific or is it gonna be a broad concept that multiple classes can qualify for it's going to be a broad concept but we can also do whatever prerequisites we need we're sticking with pretty broad ones in the in the play test book just because we only have a small number of them but if we wanted to do a wizard specific one there's nothing stopping it and I think you know while we're talking about archetypes I think it's worth pointing out that a good example of an opportunity that's presented by a second edition that we've been essentially denied for the last eight years or so is when we did the first core rulebook we didn't even have archetypes as an idea archetypes came out of the advanced players guide again I feel like the advanced players guide we don't introduce traits and archetypes and six classes that were not in the core that's to me kind of when as a rule set Pathfinder kind of became Pathfinder but because of this sort of reading the you know the archetypes coming after the core classes the idea of swapping out you know powers and things like that there's nothing for the cleric to swap out so clerics and cleric players have been denied a fundamental part of the Pathfinder court rules pretty much since the beginning for no reason other than there's really just no reason you know and so that's one of the things that we wanted to look at as well just to make sure that that archetype access was something that no class was denied out of a mistake of its origin essentially now when you mentioned that on the thread us before you said it was one of your top five pet peeves of Pathfinder yeah okay I don't know if I can rattle them off off the top my head and and I also I'm not saying that these things are things that have been specifically addressed by the new edition of the game I hate identifying magic items I think that is a stupidest waste of time in the entire game I don't like that kind of mother mae-eye secret holding from players it doesn't make it it doesn't help at all just tell them it's a plus-one sword and move on with it now I know how we are addressing that in second edition and I think it's pretty awesome so that's one thing that I really don't like let me think a little bit about some of the other ones but that I hate that with a burning passion and then I hate a bunch of stupid stuff like how all of our heads are alphabetized by their first letter and not gathered in Hanks and a lot of it's just stupid editorial pet peeves you know that really doesn't affect the choir it's a different format from spells but they're all step yes yeah the stuff that makes me mad is not necessarily the stuff that makes every gamer mad robes comma monk yeah some stuff like that image so speaking about stuff that makes you mad how easy is it to build a stag the unsane in the play test you know um that is a good question and one that I actually haven't I think one thing that's right might have put together an oo stock s character I think was like a stag or something I think one of the things that I would probably change with us dog the unsign who for those of you don't know is the the barbarian character that I played all through our office campaign since like the year before Pathfinder came out just to like last year and got him up to like 17th level with three mythic tiers and it was a big epic campaign that James ran for the staff and I the whole idea behind him was I wanted to have like the the classic yeah okay so there you go you can see him that is the toy that I brazenly had made of my own character but basically I wanted to have a sort of shirtless barbarian character that's on the cover of all the books but then has never really been a viable character concept in the game and even Jason was like that's not viable and I'm like oh I'm doing it anyway and and then forced him to put an archetype and the flares guide to make it work and I highly recommend it and but one big difference I think that I would do if I was playing him and this is as much for fun as it is mechanically oriented is I would probably instead of having Austin use a two-handed sword I would probably give him a shield I really like how shields work in the new game and in particular the way that when you raise your shield as one of your three actions and around you can sort of absorb the damage of a hit with using the hardness of the shield and that is just badass and I would probably be a lost dog a shield at the very least but just some kind of thick forearm rule so you just can still be a fairly naked I mean you could do an archetype or something like that where you you know you don't even need a shield or whatever that's Popeye arms no I'm pretty rad it's just like I block it with my fuse this is pretty sure you just blew up Twitch with that reveal with you turn the shield reveal the entire internets on flames nice job Eric oh you just need to listen last cannon product I know this is one of your pet peeves would you ever give us dog two shields no but you know that I think there's a viable build in the new addition like if you're really good your first shield is gonna get wrecked and if you yeah if you can use a shield you also can attack with it right yeah we kind of mixed that up a little bit so it's a little clearer how the weapon part of it yeah yeah so you basically attach a shield boss or shield spikes to it and the shield bosses if you want to just straight up so I do kind of like the idea guy who just charges in with two she beat the crap out of his enemies like I actually don't know if that's viable but it'll be fun to try remember these right he heard it remember the Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton he does that twice he takes like a tank rips it into uses as a shield and to hit people so there is pop-culture justification for it really was the best of all the Marvel MCU movies it was an incredible PlayStation 2 game it wasn't even the best movie with Hulk in it yeah Oh some was asking about buckler's since we're talking about shields buckler's are the weird shield in first edition what our buckler is gonna be in second edition we haven't tried them yet so we don't know all right screw buckler's I don't know much are you putting the tracks in front of a cart right now could you be more specific you mentioned you don't have buckler's I mean how often are you going into a play test and being like oh we need a role for this now Oh at this point not very often yeah for the early the very first play test we did were everybody make a character with all the things it needs we don't know where any of those things came from we just had a fighter and a wizard and we wrote up whatever spells we felt like they should have and however the hell we felt they should work and is this from a feat nobody knows and just play test it that way so since then we have incrementally added actual rules to how all those work I think we're also engaged now in in real plate I think we're play testing the Doomsday dawn adventure that's gonna be released with the rules and so I think that a difference between say play test now and play tests five months ago is we have a much more robust list of designed monsters as well and we had most of those five months ago okay well I wasn't messing with them too much but but I was just looking at them right before I came to to meet here and there's what I'm looking through the the classes the magic the spells stuff like that those have had a lot of work done on them and I can kind of make little suggestions and things but in you know I'm not like oh we could add this or change this the monsters you know I think there's still some room to mess around with so it's very exciting to be able to kind of get into the basics of the game and and make suggestions and see what these guys have come up with it's really amazing from for having play tested for the last couple years the difference now is instead of saying do we have this rule we're at the point where we could say where is this right hook right so it feels a little more like having the the finished game because it's just we know it's there we just have to remember where I mean to be clear there's a finished version of the game's design it's in what we call development now it's making its way into editing and graphic design so major major parts of the rulebook are pretty unlikely to change we're not gonna add for the class for the play test for the play test yeah so we're we're play testing with a fairly reasonably final version of the rules but of course it's not too late to make a change and and since I've been watching Edition changes since alex has been alive and have been professionally involved with them since Alex was 9 I have seen how I'm not gonna be able to keep these guys hands out of the manuscript until the minute it goes to the printer anyway so if we come up with everybody else I know exactly if we come up with the change or you know Lisa Stevens our CEO plays and she's got an idea like we're gonna make changes up until the very last second but we're not operating off of drafts really anymore like they were a year ago and it's exciting so things are just kind of going nuts in chat they just everyone suddenly has questions and all over the place can we do a little bit of a lightning round to cover some of these sure all right Gary all my armed wants to know will second edition to have a starter box close to launch [Music] TBD you know we haven't really discussed post play test products I think it's in our best interest to have a star box out as close to launch as we can but that's also true of a monster book and new character sheets and you know there's just a lot of stuff and as much as I would love to produce two different versions of the same rule set at the same time one of the things that we learned from the first time we did the beginner box is we did some market research we watched people playing the game through like a one-way mirror which was both the hair most harrowing and most useful game design experience probably of my life I had to physically restrain Jason from koolaid Manning through the window just to tell these 50 kids how initiative worked and was pretty amazing he's much bigger than me so that that took a lot of effort on my behalf but I did it and so I think that there's a difference between how to rebuild this this these rule set and how do we implement the play test feedback of really involved gamers and how do we create a version of these rules that are gonna work with a ten year old or a 15 year old or someone who's not a hobby gamer and that's gonna take testing and careful consideration and one of the things we're really trying to accomplish with this rule set is to have the beginner set beginner box whatever it's called to have it operate on the same rules so rather than saying here are some rules if you want to play the full game you need to use this conversion guide and study all these other rules we say here are the rules we're going to remove the most complex options that you can choose from and just kind of give you something that's a little easier to just write down on your character shape without making as many decisions or as complex of decisions and have it so you could just go into a full path under game and just yeah you're still fundamentally playing the same game instead of sort of a dumbed down version of the game right that's the idea Netto or neato d20 wants to know if there will be meta magic yes next thing yes speed round magic items people want to know how magic items are going to work steel wind ask that here we go magic items are so dope let me give you my base impression and then I think Logan can speak to with much more expertise but like I'm loving the Mashburn's work in the game and by that I mean I'm loving a lot of the brand new magic items that are in the rulebook I really kind of challenged these guys not just to sort of you know convert the same old items but to come up with some brand new really interesting really exciting items many of which operate with new elements of the rule system in a way that I find really really exciting so as someone who's been through you know multiple editions and has seen six different versions of marvelous pigments and crap like that there's a lot in there that I haven't seen before and then I'm just like so excited about and cackling about I think that in some ways what's most exciting to me I mean oh my god plus one swords are so much more exciting to me now than they ever were before and particularly plus four swords and stuff like that are really exciting but they've done a great job in my opinion of kind of getting rid of some of the the items that you sort of need to have just to keep up with the Joneses so you know there's not the same approach to like you know cloaks of deflection and rings of protection and you know it's like Oh everybody needs that old dusty rose I don't you know like there's just this sort of that that required quest to keep getting those little plus ones is almost if not completely gone it's minimize a lot there's still a few there are a few core items like basically three or two at lower levels and three at higher levels but yeah we wanted to reduce that a little bit and we wanted to reduce we kind of went with a different system rather than kind of the body slot system mmm because we wanted to and it's it's still kind of an experiment so we really so awesome people how people respond to it but we wanted it where it wasn't just like okay I want something in every spot I can fill even if it sucks it's better to have something than nothing here we wanted to kind of get something where it's like you're really looking at how do i best spend my resources in order to get this small a small number of really cool items rather than a whole bunch of clutter and we're gonna see how that works well and also without going into too much detail you might have eight items but you might be facing a specific series of challenges in a given day where you want to focus on three or four of them over some of the other ones I think that's a really interesting there's a lot more sort of interesting decision-making about stuff like that and not just magic bands but kind of across the board you'll also get to the point where it's like do I want to use this wand or save up for something else say save my resources for a different thing Logan I could hug you because you just reminded me of one of my other pet peeves I hate the idea of just like oh well we're all hurt well let's just like you know suck down this this wand of cure light wounds like it's a big gulp you know I'm getting better you give me five minutes you know like I've never read a fantasy story in my life where someone is just like let me hit you with forty-nine charges from this cheap one that is so like gamey and it's crap and it's in its and again I would say it's not really part of the long tradition of the game in so much as its sort of an artifact of a very specific approach you know in 1999 that has just stuck with us and so I hate that yeah I mean the PFS they even quit calling you the one that care lot wounds they just call it the happy stick yeah and it's just stupid yeah so we're not doing that but we can heal right you can heal but you're going to want to maximize you're gonna want a small number of strong heals rather than a million tiny heals and there is a cost associated yeah and I'm not saying that just using the cheapest one possible and you can do that too it's just there are other choices that are gonna be wiser but we can't really get into too much more details on that but it's gonna be really interesting to see how people react to that aspect particularly of the magic round system next question from chat is from you chew gin 51 and is just asking if first level characters will be as fragile no yeah no in fact if you listen to the podcasts a playthrough of crypt of the ever flame that we did Jason and I did the other day you'll see that I think the first level paladin had like 17 or 19 hit points or something like that so you know they'll be so they're gonna get like you might have seen a star finder that they're gonna be a race head points and they're gonna get more than their class that isn't to say that that there's no change from level to level like they're going to have more but it's still going to be your life as a little more precarious at first level just not as precarious as it wasn't first edition yeah so one of the other problems I have with first edition sorry not first edition with first level is that it feels like players can have the right idea but just not have access to enough options to properly employ it and it's very frustrated promising players like wait until 2nd level if you're a new player it does get better and you will be able to do the cool things you have in mind so on top of not being fragile how our first level character is gonna be cool however a self of character is going to be cool so they are going to have their number of options is probably comparable to path under 1 and a number of things that they're choosing maybe maybe a little more yeah I think with ancestor 4 like feets yeah yeah it's about the same but we kind of made those a little stronger there's there's a little more going on with them with your first level choices so like sudden charge for the fighter basically lets you move double your speed and make one attack with two actions and there's also a lot less kind of featuring where you're going to take something that is kind of okay in order to get something better later they're trying to do less wait for the cool thing but you can pick up like sudden charge or double slice or all kinds of cool cool stuff at first level Logan boy have I been reading a lot of posts the last few days and one of the questions that I've been seeing people ask that that I actually weirdly don't know the answer to off the top of my head but I bet you do is okay so if there is a fighter power called sudden charge that you can do and it costs to actions can mine on Fighter just not charge anymore or is their normal called charm there's not a normal action called charge okay but you've got three actions on your turn right and if you want to move twice and attack you can do that so essentially because things are kind of more granular and that you have three actions instead of a standard action I move action and etc etc instead of combining these things into a full action that lets me do this we just say yeah you can do this and it's pretty clear that you do a stride a stripe a strike right and that is I don't get like a plus two and you don't get a plus two you don't take an AC penalty a lot of the stuff that is like kind of a little more complex option with some bonuses and penalties we kind of hold back on those because we want you to be doing less of that kind of little math in the middle of the game and focusing more on what am I trying to achieve this round and how do I achieve also speaking to that a lot of times where in first addition it would be like oh this power changes your dexterity or changes your strength or whatever then you have to do a lot of recalculating of your characters sort of on the fly and all the derive values based off of those stats that's quite different in the game right usually it's like if this is something that so for example the the enfeebled condition hmm is kind of like having strength damage but instead of saying its strength damage change all this stuff that relates to strength it says here are the things that changes every low as your damage it loads your attack bonus so I kind of speak more directly to the final numbers rather than having the change this I then change all the things that cascade down from that just so it's a little more direct it's a little easier and less math at the table but without removing the complexity or even a narrative thing of what's happening when you're able deckle and chat points out that you basically get spring attack at first level which are new action system okay man we wants me a long time to get spring tech we want to make combat more more mobile and and give kind of more flexibility to your to your turns and I think that's really working really that's been one of the sound really good successes of the play desk people are really enjoying that yeah it's it's very interesting you know I wasn't a hundred percent sure how I would feel about the new action economy and then I played a couple of sessions with it and I I adore it I really really liked it a lot uh Randy we we have do want to get to the pre-submitted questions I'm worried we won't yeah that's fair we actually have a lot of variations of this same question so I'm just gonna creep it into one so we don't keep asking it again and again yes they're wanting to know about the magic system specifically people are asking about is there still prepared spontaneous spell casters or how or basically I think they're worried about the wizard and the sorcerer being the same thing they're really really different in ways that I think you'll find really interesting comparing it to first edition the they're still prepared casting and spontaneous casting there's two separate categories in addition to like innate spells which are kind of like spell like abilities were in first edition and some special powers that you can cast in another in other ways but yeah there's definitely still prepared cassie and spontaneous casting we wanted to maintain that kind of different feel of those classes and that's still coming through I don't think anybody has changed the type of spell casting they used for the full for the fall casters there are some people who have more spell casting overall than they used to and some we have less overall than they used to but like the cleric the Wizards are still prepared the source are still spontaneous the parts still spontaneous my coming isn't safe to say that it still uses the I pick a specific spell with specific parameters and memorize it like the fancy n system yeah okay yeah but there's also some other cool things too like for example you know if you're casting magic missle and you want to put more components into it which is to say spend more actions casting it you can fire off more more missiles and there so there's a little bit more that is really interesting yeah because you can do a touch for an action being somebody over there for two actions or do a verse for three actions that people they're really been enjoying that one as well we're gonna see a lot more of that throughout the whole spell list um we're using it very judiciously because if you have too much of that then nobody knows what you're doing ever so we're really keeping it to a small number of kind of iconic spells that we really know we want to we want to make extra special it's one of those things that it also spells that take three acts and that's just three actions to cast instead of two we're using those very rarely and very judiciously so that everybody kind of has a general idea of a spell casters turn is going to be a spell and one other action right in but that action interestingly enough could be another spell so there are other spells that have just one verbal component for a shield yeah so I cast acid splash which was two actions and shield which was one in the same round in the play through that we did on the the podcast and and it was it was kind of mind-boggling you have to do that and you see something like shield because it works kind of like a shield costs one action so if it's something that really compares very closely to something else in the game those get a little more leeway to to have come a different number of casting actions of that kind thing I like feather fall you can cast as a reaction I would hope ya know think of rock is asking how many actions will it take to summon I believe that's three and it shows up right away we are in the middle of doing some revisions that I think but I think after some play testing what we're settling on is three actions shows up right away acts right away with two actions on its turn mm-hmm that's interesting I like that okay the other question we got that's kind of related this I just kind of want to tack it on while we're talking about the subject is on one of your preview post you said that you were going to make spells useful when they come but become less useful in utility as as levels gain what does that mean are we gonna actually have our spells just appear from my brain so if you're if you're used to pathfinder one it's very easy to describe it it is just the caster level based scaling and the individual spells goes away okay so if I want to do more damage with a fireball I prepare it as a fourth level fifth level sixth level spell for some of those spells you're they're gonna scale really well the whole person type spell still says really good even if you're preparing a little level slot so you're going to especially if you're prepared caster you're going to be able to prepare things in those lower slots that hold their utility while preparing something like you're damaging spells and some of that kind of stuff spells that have better effects at higher levels you're gonna prepare those in your higher level slots and if you're spontaneous caster you don't get left behind because we're very generous about how often you can swap out your spell's that you know as you level up and we're also including retraining rules in the course so that if you've made a decision you don't like you can go back and redo it yet another example of something we added in later books that really belongs in the first button what you just said a lot of people comparing the new addition to 5th edition of Dungeons Dragons something that I've seen posted a lot and I've seen refuted by positive staff a lot so just to calm the people in chat down how is that not like fifth edition why do people keep making that comparison I think there are a lot of comparisons to addition that are off base but this is one where it is kind of similar I mean the concept of heightening spells was there in in 3/5 and in Pathfinder 1 and we knew that we didn't really want spells to like all your first level spells to just be way better and that's kind of you know the quadrilateral wizard linear fighter thing quadrilateral Helen quadratic wizard yeah wizards are squares they fit in a 5 foot square and they are square on every dimension but that is what I play hexes the funny thing is Mark's after came up with that system and kind of implemented it and been where Allah and he and red 5th edition really mark did you know they did this in 5th edition there's like nope yeah but it is it's it's a really interesting idea and has a lot of utility so well and it's you know I mean the fact of the matter is it's like they're branches of the same tree to some degree right I mean the design goals that they had with D and E 5th edition were like how do we okay so forth didn't really work how do we take kind of the basic 3.5 rules or really going all the way back to 1st edition how do we evolve those in to today and they had their own set I assume of design goals we're kind of doing the same thing in a sense of like we had Pathfinder which was an off route or an off branch of 3.5 and now we want to make pathway or the best version of Pathfinder it can be and so it's there's going to be some things that are similar but there's a no way like an intent to like make this five point one or something like that quite frankly we're not or I don't know if I will speak to everybody certainly not the guys on the design team but like we're so busy playing Pathfinder which we enjoy that like we're not experts at fifth edition D&D you know we wouldn't dream of making a even better version of 5e that's not the goal the goal is to make a better version of Pathfinder and it may be that that some of the solutions that we come up with are somewhat similar to some of the solutions that they came up with some of the solutions that they came up with a very similar Pathfinder in the first place so yeah and we a lot of people kind of on the message boards have been asking like it's just like a different version of 40 or is this like a different version of 5e and really it's based on Pathfinder so it's not really like a different version of either of those yeah it is kind of trying to streamline some of the stuff of Pathfinder but still keep it really pretty crunchy and really expansion heavy like the things that we know a lot of our fans really love about it that there's going to be more options and all kinds of stuff that can really dig deep into yeah whereas i5e is kind of a little simpler system a little more loose it kind of a different play style than path Yahoo's and we wanted to maintain a similar play style while smoothing down some of the rough end yeah I think that you know in particular the way that we talked about streamlining the rules and the announcement the way that we talked about proficiency and the announcement and the way we talked about background in the announced but those are three words I think that people have associated with 5th edition D&D and the implementation of that stuff's actually significantly different as will become clear with the next few blogs that we'll post because we're doing one on proficiency and we're you know and so on but if someone in the listening audience is concerned that like oh they're dumbing down the game or they're making it too simple and all of that really that is not the case you know we want the game to be easier to teach we want to smooth over some of the the kind of stuff we've been talking about this whole podcast or just things that didn't make sense or whatever but at the end of the day the core value of pathfinders design philosophy is we want you to be able to create with our rules the hero that you have in your head not one of three heroes or not one of you know a couple of different options and whereas the options presented in one 576 page book are by necessity gonna be a little bit more limited than the options over 35 hardcover books we're building the foundation with the core rules that we can expand upon in ways that offering in many sense I think more choices and more customization options than in the current Pathfinder you know just because there are more things that have not been a part of at least the core version of Pathfinder from the beginning things like ancestries which are not just a decision you make at first level but something that you come back to again and again throughout your career so that no two dwarves are really gonna be exactly the same let alone no two dwarf fighters and things and there's class feats that you get to pick their skill feats I mean there's all kinds of different stuff that is not currently in the version of the Pathfinder core rules or perhaps this but you need three different books to kind of make it work this is this is a way to kind of holistically do that all in one and so I guess if there's I have you know a lot of people seem very excited about the new edition of the game which is great and as we reveal more I think people will find more and more things that they're excited about but the one kind of fear that I've seen more than any other is like oh my god they're just gonna make the game too simple they're gonna make the game too easy and they're gonna strip out all of the fun sort of complexity that is absolutely not what you know is in the design remit of this game this game we want to have tons of depth of character options and you know like I said there some people I think who want to play there investigator or want to play there you know there if ripped character or whatever not all of those things are gonna be in the the first thing of the rule so you know if you compare the first edition core rulebook to the eventual second edition core rulebook you're gonna have a lot more options a lot us out of that a lot more and I think you'll have not nothing come close to an entire ten years of Pathfinder you know and so we'll get to a lot of that stuff we'll do new stuff as well we're you know we're coming for you if Rick players like we'll get you you know but we got to make sure that elves work before we get into way Ang's and stuff like that now that's sort of been like the identity that in the post fifth edition postmodern role-playing games you know the last three or four years pet founders at the entity has sort of claimed the we are the super customizable game we're the game where there you can think of a character and we've got a rule for that is that a crown you still intend to keep hell yeah I mean of course that to me that's what Pathfinder is you know what I mean it's like yes it's heroic sword & Sworcery yes its delving dungeons and all that but for me it's making the character that you see in your head that you want or perhaps being inspired by some option that's in a book that you didn't even know you wanted until you read it that there's that that's really key tactical complexity and interest I love the grid I love miniatures I love the fact that it's a game and not sort of just a exercise in and role-playing or acting I'm down for that too but you know Pathfinder is a tactical role-playing game and we're not changing that we'd be fools to change that in my opinion yeah Alex you had the question about post release oh no I thought Eric sum that up good word okay that we want to wait to the other side of the play test originally I had I had a question about what Paizo was gonna do after second edition came out because one thing that I've seen a lot of is a lot of people seem to be kind of like oh no are they going to move to the the slower steadier rate of star finder products or are they gonna keep up like the path engine but when you had said earlier that it was something that you had to talk about after the play test I thought that was fine yeah you know the truth is we have not locked in every part of our 2019 and 2020 schedule yeah you know and part of that is we're almost there and part of its just the timeline that it takes to do that stuff but you know I will say one thing and I think that a lot of people have very reasonable concern which is okay so is it am I just now starting over again does it go core rulebook and then I buy the best area and then I buy the you know the advanced players guide and then ultimate magic and then ultimate combat and then yadi got it right down the line you know and the answer there again is no you know I mean yes there's going to be a core monster book yes I assume there'll be a book that introduces another passel of character classes and stuff like that but we are not just gonna recruit products that people have already bought we're not just gonna convert everything we're taking a holistic look at the whole thing we're taking the opportunity buy some of the new subsystems that are being introduced here to to create truly new stuff that nobody's seen before we've got all kinds of interesting things in play with the campaign setting that we are gonna do so like I said when we started Pathfinder you know we sat down and we're like okay what books are we gonna do well obviously you have to do the core rulebook obviously we got to do the you know the monster book but like pretty much immediately of some of those original meetings people are like okay and then we got to do oriental adventures and then we got to do you know the dungeon ears Survival Guide and we got to do unearth Arkana and I was like no we're not doing that we're not just gonna create exactly the same content that people have bought two times three times four times so we're not going to do that with cat finder either now that said I mean obviously we've been talking about well when are we gonna get my weighing and when are we gonna get my investigator and when are we gonna get all that a lot of that stuff we will present because people will will be murdered if we don't essentially but we're not just gonna we're just not gonna just I refuse to just regurgitate the same products we've never done it we didn't do it the first time with Dean D books we're not gonna do it the second time with pepper and as someone on the design team some of those books that are more concept based are really some of the most interesting ones to work on and you can really have a lot more fun with them right kind of my least favorite types of books to work on are the ones where it's like well we're gonna do some classes and we're gonna do some feats and we're gonna do some spells and we're gonna do some magic items and that's the book yeah which there's certainly a place for that certainly especially early in an addition cycle were you trying to get people back up to speed a little bit closer to where they where they left off but in the long run those kind of books it's really hard to say it's inspired it's really hard to still have fun writing them and to give people I want to be able to surprise people with stuff they really didn't expect and part of that is having a cool concept for the book at its inception and I think we're working on a process to kind of get more kind of fresh ideas for how we how we set up each book for the record I will totally buy an advanced ancestry guide if you guys need now that's another thing that kind of what's this ancestry thing what's this ancestry thing well in a basic sense ancestry is just a new word for race but it goes much much deeper than that it's a decision that you make at your characters creation and then periodically there are a series of decisions you get to make to make yourself even more if you're a dwarf to make yourself even more Dorf if you will and that is something that we continue to expand upon down the road and so that's it basically what I do semantic lis it gives us the opportunity if we so wish to put human ethnicities and half elves and half Forks and whatever the heck else we want we could do those things as ancestries without getting into like well this is a technically a sub race of that you know like we don't need to go there I'm not saying that's the direction we're gonna go but it opens up more opportunities for additional because we've been pretty focused on kind of the the core rulebook esque you know load out of ancestries yeah we haven't really gotten super deep into you know how do see elves work or whatever right but that's something that we're gonna explore later on yeah and I think it's also something that because there are significantly new elements of it it's one of the areas of the play test we're gonna be watching pretty closely and I suspect that by the end of the play test the the the play testers will give us even more ideas and we've already had on that front I'm super stoked about that change so building off of ancestry one of the topics that you guys put out as being in the core rulebook or play test guide that you've even mentioned before that's been I don't know if controversial is the right word for it because I think it makes perfect sense but not everyone seems sold on it is the fact that like goblins are a player ancestry in the book and to a lot of people goblin is you know they're they're cute and they're fun and they're like piezos image but they're also kind of synonymous with things that I stick my sword into you know how are they gonna be presented in a way that like they don't turn into Pathfinder Society kender Pathfinder Society kender are you talking within the context of Katherine or society specifically or just more generally across all I think I think more generally but like I'm thinking of me playing Pathfinder society and like going to draw my sword and the Goblin has stolen it right well here's the deal you can't be an evil character in Pathfinder society so you cannot be an old goblin period okay I don't know we're gonna find out you know I mean we the the write-up of the Goblin ancestry is lighter on you know you like to eat babies and stuff like that and a little more on you know how a goblin might work within the context of an adventuring party we are it's also kind of a precedent in that Anna Jacobs talks about this a lot that the PCs are extraordinary people and right if you're a goblin PC there's something special about you that kind of sets you apart from the typical conception of a goblin and so how how you actually playoff that character can and I think that goblins in safar's the way that we've portrayed them in Pathfinder to date yes they've certainly been largely portrayed as monsters and evil monsters at that but they you know as opposed to say if we're gonna take the orc and make the orc a main race goblins have been sort of presented as being just outside the periphery of a lot of our cities and a lot of our culture's and things like that and so you've got goblins who routinely go and raid the junk pile in you know Sand Point you've got it's it's not that big of a departure if you if you look at say a city like Absalom where you might have a cyclops walking down the street or you might have an Ifrit or you might have a weighing you know a goblin isn't really that crazy now a goblin it goes lights on a bunch of things on fire and slits the jugular of horses you know that guy's gonna have problems you know but it's not gonna be illegal to be a goblin and Absalom and that is a little bit of a shift you know to be totally honest you know when you've been publishing the the Wiebe goblins adventures for free RPG day those are some of the most popular Pathfinder adventures that there are and so we're not just jamming these guys in there because they're a mascot for the company we're jamming in them in there because people genuinely seem to enjoy playing goblins and to the degree that some people use it as an excuse to just be as disruptive as humanly possible they can do that just as easily with a gnome and that is something that we're gonna ask Pathfinder society players and GM's to be cool about and hope that it works and eventually we trust our community to kind of self police odious player behavior and we're also I want to make two points on the goblins and and on kind of the player behavior at the tables we are putting some more words into the document talking about kind of the social contract yeah and how to play well with others I'm not entirely sure those are going to be in the play desk because it is limited on space we have some words written that we know we're probably going to have to hold off till the actual second edition core rulebook but we are kind of talking a little more about that explicitly in the text and the other thing with goblins is while we're making goblins a playable option not saying all goblins organize our arc or cool people yeah they're still gonna be in the best area there are going to be the minor minor reveal chaotic evil goblins and they're going to be those injuries are mostly going to be talking about them as adversaries yeah oh god spoilers no no obviously you've mentioned alignment a couple of times now is the alignment system standard same pretty much yeah some of the class restrictions are going away on alignment some and we're also I don't want to talk too much about this but there are some of like the detecting alignment and those kind of Young's that can disrupt games we're both kind of introducing a little more fuzziness into those so it's not just like you've got evil intentions you're a bad guy but kind of trying to keep it so that GM has a little more kind of say and how they present this information to the player into individual spells and we also have a tool for kind of saying if this is something we know might be contentious in a game if you don't want to include it you don't have to include it and I'm not going to talk exactly about what that system is but it's something that kind of goes throughout the rule side I remember the other thing I hate about okay so I hate I hate this spell detect manager and the way that it works at the table because first of all it takes several rounds to get through which is annoying and then second of all it's a song I'm all the stuff I hate it I hate as a GM so like Logan near my player and you're like I detect magic and I'm like you detect the presence of magic and then everyone else has fun and then the next round I go you detect three magical auras and then you go yeah let me make a check of what what are the what kind of auras are they and then I'm like what's the difference between transmutation and oh oh uh it's conjuration magic and what is the sign of transportation what does that tell you it all and so you've just wasted like five minutes of your life getting information that is at best you can like deduce like I think here it's gonna hurt me cuz it's necromantic a some necromancy is helpful but like the other ones you're not really you know and so there's been changes to that so that's all about that I I really like the shift to detect magic which was not even something I ever talked to these guys about but oh boy do I hate the way that works in the game but I want to be clear to like I'm I'm talking just at me as a GM about the stuff that I don't like I love Pathfinder first edition I've been playing Pathfinder for 10 years I will play stuff for a first edition Pathfinder probably forever I don't want you know the idea isn't we're gonna sell second edition Pathfinder by talking about how much first edition Pathfinder sucks first edition Tavener does not suck first edition Pathfinder is in some ways our life's work you know so I'm not just gonna sit here and like run down the game and like any GM there are parts of the game that I don't love but like I want to make it clear there's a lot of people out there in the wake of this news who are like I'm going to stick my first edition Pathfinder and my response is like fine you know play what you want to play we're gonna keep all of the first edition rule books in print in the pocket edition size we're gonna get to the ones that we haven't done yet and as long as people keep buying them we will keep reprinting them we're not retiring first edition Pathfinder Society scenarios we know that there's a lot of people who want to play through their whole story arc or get to a certain level with their character and all that and where we want to make it possible for you to be able to do that so there is also a lot of people that I've seen who are like not interested until I get my Wang scold character I'm out you know and it's like fine give us a little bit of time you know we'll get there and then at that point when the game has the robust if what you're looking for is that kind of endless options we'll get there you know and if you're not ready to jump in and kind of start with a smaller group just give us a couple of years you know like we published like 30 adventure paths the adventure paths take a year or two to play you'll be fine and we'll be fine too so you know I'm cool if people don't like second edition Pathfinder would prefer to play first that said we're gonna try and make second as awesome as exciting to existing players so that they're gonna want to come over and we certainly want play test feedback from people who are excited about it as well as people who are skeptical about it so I just you know I just don't want there to be this like um the first edition I'm a second edition guy everyone's playing path iron we're cool with that if I see four runs like Ferg hey go ahead outs I kinda wanna see you do that like with figures I'm a first edition guy I'm a second edition guy oh gosh know what's like Alerian I hope some of what you said your issues with tech magic seem like there are also some issues with the schools of magic having a lot of crossover is there gonna be any simplification of the schools of magic yes oh wow let's make that and we'll go into this any more than what I'm about to say but lots of interesting things in the way that magic is categorized and or last yeah yeah a lot of it is kind of taking some of those ones like transmutation and conjuration where it's just like it's all this stuff and kind of splitting some of those off where they feel a little more natural places where people been like why is this I think in the the play test you had acid splash or acid era or something that's fun why is this conjuration instead of location that's like as it feels like a vocation and people have been saying that for years exact some of those things that move so it's Eve acacia now they're contrary she especially has gotten a little more refined and some of its stuff has gone to other places and there's something like five times more transmutation spells than any other schools magic in the core rulebook is that gonna be equalized a little bit a little bit yeah it's still got quite a few there's still a couple schools that we're probably going to want to add more spells to between the play tests and the final but because of kind of limited space and time some of them are a little a little lighter still like necromancy I think that is a real value of a big open topic play test you know we've done play testing here for months and months but you've got to ER then probably 50 people you know all told let's say fewer than 100 people all tolled playing this game August 2nd we dropped the free PDF and the the books come out we're gonna have tens of thousands of people playing this thing all at once oh you took their own idea of what character they want to play and all that and so someone says hey this is the character I really wanted to play and I found through play testing that I didn't quite have enough versatility or spells or options that's gonna be extremely useful feedback for us because of course we've done that for all of our favorite types of characters or marks made fun of my old character and tried to make him or whatever but we haven't necessarily played your favorite type of character and so that's feedback we're really looking forward to and it's really the only kind of feedback that can get this game where it needs to go I often say 10,000 brains are better than 20 you know I work with some of the smartest people I've ever met in my whole life and every single day I'm sort of astounded by how brilliant people are at Paizo but that there's only 40 of us you know or 30 of us there's thousands and thousands of brainiacs out there who are gonna come at us with stuff we never even thought about so it's that's part of why we're doing this no matter how good we are at anticipating things the minute it meets thousands of gamers it's just a totally different deal well speaking we are coming up on surge a second BAM we're coming up on an hour and a half now everything's still good yeah okay so this I'm sure this is a concern cuz we actually have about five different people that asked us a similar question in the pre-show is they mentioned that in the glass cannon podcast which I totally recommend that any of our listeners go check out the special where that you guys ran through crypted they ever flame or the first part of kripp they ever flame how that was seemed to be very easy for Jason to convert on the fly so how how easy is it going to be to use our previous APs our previous campaign setting books things like that in this while you guys are waiting to get your way hangs to us well yeah so one of the things I've mentioned to a couple people is that to convert an adventurer usually not going to be too hard to go from first to second you're gonna have to do some monkeying with the treasure because the treasure is kind of on a different scale but most of the encounter groupings are going to be transferable fairly easily obviously if there were any new monsters to that adventure you'd have to do a conversion of those that's going to take a little while we're doing a new monster system so it would probably take like 15 minutes for a mid-level ish monster to convert one but most of the encounters that are using stock monsters you can just convert over fairly easily yeah I think most of the spells are still going to be there I think the reason why cryptid the other flame in particular was a relatively easy adventure to convert is it was the first Pathfinder adventure that we ever did and so it uses the kind of basic monsters it uses the basic classes and stuff it's gonna be frankly easier to go oh it's a it's a giant spider Oh giant spider snap-loc I'm good to go for some of the stuff that we put out in the first few years of Pathfinder then maybe it is to convert something that's pulling monsters from bestir 6 and the back matter of Pathfinder 92 words will be easier than iron gods exactly exactly you know we'll get there we'll get there but I think that for people for whom ease of on the flight conversion is a goal focusing a little bit more on the beginning of the Pathfinder catalog is gonna make your life a little bit easier until we can catch up and know you're probably gives us some of the other ones that are that are using kind of more classic monsters yeah like dragons demand and stuff shouldn't be too much trouble I'm in you know again probably yeah you played you okay you mentioned something there that made me very very happy and probably run very very angry it's one that we're fighting points so we'll go 15-minute mid-level monsters so that's the the monster system we have in place now this is one that's been very contentious on our message boards to is rather than going through the full kind of character building process in order to make a monster we kind of start you out with the benchmarks and you give the monster the abilities you want it to have so it's a little more of a design area approach and you're kind of designing them toward their purpose rather than designing them based on a structure that then defines how they're supposed to work and you kind of hope that it gets close to the numbers that said if you want to do an NPC and you want to make a fifth level fighter enemy and you design a fifth level fighter it might have more stuff than it is really going to need but it'll work fine in an in a in an encounter at least we think we have we need to do some burgers by testing on that to make sure that's the case but generally they're going to be about the same power level a monster and a PC of the same level will be about on par so one of the things that that I think we're trying to do and again the play test I think will help determine to what degree we've been successful is we don't want to take the fun out of designing say an original adventure but we do want to try and take some of the tedium out of it and so one of the things that we've been hearing from our GM's for ever is that you know it takes two three hours to prep for a game session that's gonna go for hours if we can get that down a little bit and have more of the time that people are engaged with Pathfinder being at the table and playing that seems to us to be ideal I on the other hand I know that there's a lot of gamers who look at the core rules of a game as the physics engine for the entire universe and that it just that they want to make sense of the world by sort of saying everything works according to exactly the same rules and I would even at times put myself into that category that was one of the big promises of third edition in the first place right but I have also spent an excruciating amount of time prepping for an adventure by fiddling with every skill point bonus that this monster might have and it's 8th feet and then it lives for three rounds and I'm like well that sort of sucked and so you we're experimenting with is there a way to make it quicker is there a way where you can more speedily generate a creature that does what you needed to do for that given encounter and it's gonna be interesting to see people's reactions yeah and and part of that is we're trying the we're trying to get the numbers of monsters and PCs to be relatively close so that if you do make that death level fighter for example their numbers will be pretty close yeah a piece in your generators to fall the fighter what we also want to make it so you don't have to go through the entire character creation process to do that and that there we don't go with the assumption that every PC has gone through the same path or that every NPC has gone through the same path as a PC that there are different ways to grow as a character and that the rules for PCs represent just kind of one path to becoming a hero or villain yeah now part of the system that was presented in some a similar system was presented in ultimate are sorry path under and chained and ian's the star finder system will there be an omni reason a this is that they were very popular will there be the class templates to help make a gelatinous cube ninja or so what so we're not specifically ninja but you get that we don't really know yet because we're focusing just on the play test best theory which has a different set of demands than the final best theory and it's really kind of a collection of monsters instead of the entire system for creating them which we expect will come in another book so we're not aren't present around that yeah right now we're just kind of going to do a selection of monsters for people to use and you know that you can build a wizard if you need a wizard so one thing that I hear you guys mention a lot is you talk about different kinds of feats like oh this is my ancestory feet this is my class feet and at least to me when i hear you talk about it it sounds almost like you took like the categories for things like oh these are our canis exploits and these are rogue towns and just kind of streamlined them is is that accurate and are we gonna see more like streamlining of terminology in pathfinder second edition I don't know about the terminology question but I would say that stuff like rogue exploits typically will be moving into rogue feats we wanted it to be a little more that knowledge of how you build a character to be a little more easily transferable from class to class and to give some of those classes like clearing more customized ability from the outset so yeah part of it is just so that the the characters are kind of more built in the same way and you don't have to learn what a rogue exploit is versus a fighter's combat fee because they are kind of occupying the same space I would say especially because the book in part parts of the book are now in editing and I've been having a lot of conversation with the editors codifying the terminology and making sure that things that should be named to the same thing are named the same thing is a task that was started by the design team and continues all the way through editing and we're paying a lot of attention to how things are said and how similar things need to be said kind of the same way another thing that I would say that is significantly different I mean not really significantly different but maybe there's just a different focus on it is with like certain things we'll have tags you know and that's like maybe you'd have the dwarf tag or something and so we can have things that affect dwarves very easily and that that kind of goes through a lot of different aspects of the rules and so there is more of a sense of like how can we say something once instead of having to say it a hundred times or five different ways so similar thing is with spells one of my big Crusades is getting rid of things that say this counts as or functions as I kind of want it to be very clear whether it is the thing or isn't the thing so for example something that says this functions as invisibility well if I have an item that triggers when someone casts invisibility does this work or does this not work I'm trying to I really want to remove some of that ambiguity so for example like spell like abilities are very are more explicitly these are spells that you access in a certain way rather than kind of having their own set of rules that are not really super evident to how they work so a lot of things that are kind of like spells are just spells and appear in the spells so that things are a little more cut-and-dried yeah now we got a question here and I think it's pretty fair I'm trying to find who asked it because the the chat we're not used to it scrolling past so fast this is a very good okay apologies for not getting the name because it scrolled by faster than I could catch it but since the hip point generation is very similar to star founder is the stamina and resolve system gonna be in path under - no it's not no just two points you know one of the things about star finder that was really exciting to me especially after having worked eight years I think at that point on Pathfinder is it it gave us the opportunity to really take a different approach just some stuff not just within the rule set but also just in terms of like we're about to do a series of three volume adventure paths you know for star finder we couldn't really do that with Pathfinder I think without some people kind of freaking out and so so we knew we had the opportunity to really do some uniquely star finder stuff first star finder and I think that the idea of the stamina and all that kind of came out of like well there's gonna be a lot of laser guns in this game and how does the how does kind of the the mechanics of how science fiction works on how science fiction Arsenal's and stuff like that where how can we make this game seem more science fictiony because that's the remit of starfighters design that's an innovating a different show exactly and that's not the goal for Pathfinder so while there are definitely some innovations in some ways of thing doing things that we did with star finder that we have applied to Pathfinder and in fact that were designed originally for Pathfinder because we've been working on Pathfinder 2nd edition that predating the beginning of star finder star finder is not really like a stealth half edition on the way to Pathfinder second edition there are two different branches off at the same tree there's a lot of stuff that was like where we think we can solve this problem in star finder with some technology we developed for path 5 exactly there have been a few things that have made way back in for real there definitely are but but anyone who is expecting to open up paths on your second edition and see a fantasy version of star finder that is just not gonna happen yeah there will be either pleased or disappointed depending on whether they narrowed down our questions to seven that I absolutely want to ask before it gets too late right can we try and muscle through some of these yeah yeah all right that's it will there be a more robust spell creation mechanic in the core rulebook spell creation yeah so similar to the monster creation but for spells okay tom ganz how will the new rule set make high level play easier especially for GM's so it's because I've just been play testing part of the play test that is at 17th level of the play test adventure that is so it's a lot less rocket taggi so you know that if you put a monster into the game it has a it will do something not to say there aren't ways to remove things entirely I got some of my monsters mazed which is it and still a challenge but it's there's a lot better balance on the higher level spells and things that just ending counters are not happening as often and we there's still like pretty serious stuff there's still you know a disintegration that successful is still going to take something out but there's a lot less just kind of that that overlying stress of having to remember all these things that a monster can do but also knowing you're only going to remember for six seconds of game time so that's been reduced a lot we're also the the simplified monster creation helps a lot with that because if you need to generate a monster you don't have to build 34 hit dice into it and do all the calculations derived from that you can kind of figure out the the specs that you needed to meet and then and then have it meet those is the math tighter to like because you mentioned earlier that at the beginning of the podcast about how the báb and all that sort of because there's different fractions as eventual opponent things become impossible so you've tightened the math up at the high level i we have yeah so what you'll see is like a fighter is still going to hit more often as their guardian level like their their chance to hit is going to be really high the paladins defense is going to be really high and i can i can speak from my poor room giants that the paladins AC is really high but the gap between them and the wizard is not going to be so great that everybody just says well this is pointless squash the wizard because that's the only way to do it and then the wizard says all my spells invalidate everything you've done there there are there it is a little it's an expanding gap as you go up in levels but it is not as drastic and we usually tried to set things so that rather than saying the fighters is the only one who has a chance to hit we've said that the fighter hits even more often than he was before but we're setting kind of the monster baseline numbers so that the other classes are not falling all the way behind anymore mhm tom ganz asked will there be similar stacking bonus rules those have been so it depends on which part you're looking at we've kind of tried to minimize the number of different bonuses that you're having to track and how many different things stack so the number is much smaller and we've also tried to do away with here's a bonus that stacks and here's one that doesn't so like the dodge bonus circumstance bonus we've tried to say the types don't stack and there's still going to be a fair number of bonuses that people are throwing out there but we want it to be a little easier to figure out like should I cast this or not and having to compare like three different things is just a little too much trouble so we want to kind of say I'm going to try to get the highest conditional bonus I can get rather than saying well this one's morale and this one is circumstance and this one is I don't remember the types anymore because I've been working a completely different little set for two years but you get the luck yeah luck so we've compressed it some many role-playing games use systems like fate points or Benny's to let players control how the story goes or how the game is turning out I use hero points from the advanced players guide in my games is that something that we can expect to see in second edition you can expect to see hero points in the play test that's pretty not functioning exactly the same way but it is kind of a it's not exactly a an influence the story as in I'm going to introduce this NPC kind of thing because we want to keep it a little more as simple and mechanical for this and we want to see how people react to it but it is kind of a currency that the players have and not their characters and they get to decide how to spend it hmm interesting I didn't expect an answer and and I'm really curious how people respond to it because they really device it yeah we'll see yeah I am sure that Shane had a cannon who asked that question we'll be very happy to hear that response and true L Birdwell wants know about prestige classes you will see a concept that would have at one point been a prestige class in the core robot for in the play test robot rather can't speak for the core book that's differently Robert Evans will there be any additional material released for first edition before the release of second edition yeah oh my gosh tons you know I mean literally the release schedule doesn't change between now and August 2019 well that's not true there are a couple of things so we've got planar adventures which is upcoming and is the next hardcover in the Pathfinder RPG line that is relatively little rules light but it's a it's got some cool rules in it as well and it's a big overview of the multiverse and so that is coming on like a freight train we've got three more Adventure Pass so we've got war for the crown we have returned to the rune Lords which is going to be in first edition we have fr Bravo mark that I can't say that's gonna be kind of the last first edition adventurer past so there's you know 18 more adventures right there we've got you know bimonthly player companions and campaign setting books from now until July of 2019 Pathfinder society's got an entire season in between yeah I mean literally dozens and dozens of products pretty much as normal the only thing that's not normal is that ordinarily obviously the slot that the play test is gonna occupy in August would have been a first edition hardcover book and then we would have a winter first edition hardcover book as well we're actually not gonna put anything out in that slot because we want everybody focused on the play test and we certainly want to focus our efforts on the play test as well during that period so in that regard there's there won't be something but everything else is pretty much staying the same follow it what about us bring 2019 hardcover currently we do not have a spring 2019 hardcover on the schedule because we're gonna be prepping all the we're gonna be that's the time on again the sort of inside baseball but that's the time when we will be taking the feedback from the play tests incorporating and it's the final version of the core robic and also finishing up whatever we're gonna call the monster book and the other fun stuff that we'll be releasing in august of 2019 so I guess in that regard there are two fewer hardcover Pathfinder first edition little books than there would've been follow-up question to that have you guys decided whether Pathfinder second edition is gonna mark the adventure path line resetting to Pathfinder to e1 or is it gonna keep going off with the numbers from there um we haven't actually decided that that came up and I sort of feel like I've personally decided that but some feedback from some other people it appears as though not everyone's on the same page as me and so I'm not really sure as if it what do you guys think we should do reset I think you should read it but the lecturing me doesn't want it but I think it's the better option for new players to not be intimidated by oh this is Pathfinder 206 and maybe I don't want to start here yeah well we haven't made the decision yet so hard to say like literally we are very focused on the play test and so I'm have a draft of the 2019 schedule but it still got a lot of blanks on it I've got a pretty good idea of what the launch products are gonna be you know for the August 2019 what the winter trimester is gonna hold but there's still a lot of big questions and actually it's been really fun around the office sort of saying okay well what if we don't do this thing what do we do instead and what you know what what type of format of a product if we always wanted to do but but precedence has prevented us from doing that there's there's a lot of opportunities for us to do things a little bit differently and it's very exciting to have those conversations with my colleagues there's a really quick question in chat that I normally wouldn't answer but I see I think this is a easy one for you guys really this Shin Kikaider not probably got that name wrong so I'm sorry well we have to do if you're a sub right now well you have to change your subs when tui rolls out or will your sub carry over again I think that that kind of remains to be seen I feel like for the adventure path and for the role playing game line in particular I don't anticipate much change will very likely alert people and say hey the things are gonna change you know let us know if you want to change your subscription status but I think it you know it'd be quite a I think it's a hassle to have to go in and re mess with your subs and stuff so my preference would be when we're taking something from a like to another like then it's more like hey heads up with a lot of warning this is what's coming down the road be sure this is what you want but not have to have people go through the whole process of resetting up their subs now that said not it's not I don't know yet you know is the player companion gonna be exactly the same pace in the same size as the campaign setting gonna be the same pace in the same size I don't know you now in cemetary my specific note the play test is not part of it and yes and thank you Logan the play tests stuff is not part of a subscription so these three products the the play test rulebook the play test adventure doomsday dawn and the play test flip map multi pack though you will have to order those separately and you will if you want print copies of those you will have to preorder and again that's not me trying to gin up extra sales that's me looking at the audience with my own two eyes and saying I promise you we will not be printing enough of this we're terrible at that and we will run out so if you want a print copy of this stuff particularly the the adventure in the rule book we are not reprinting those it's not outside the realm of possibility down the road that we might go hey that's a really cool flip mat let's repackage out as a classic or something because it'd be useful down the road but there is no use for a play test adventure after we've locked in the rules there you know we are not going to reprint so we get one bite at the Apple if you want a print copy of this I implore you to preorder from your local game store or ordered on PI SOCOM starting on the 20th of March because we're not gonna make enough I promise so I don't know how badly will mess it up but we've messed it up every time so far we're going to mess it up again so if you want it you really do want a pre-order now I have two final questions once for learnin and one's for Eric can you guys have time for them absolutely okay one of the things on the play test site Logan mentioned that there are ten levels of spells does that mean that there are zero level and then going to nine for a total of 10 or does that mean first level second level third fourth fifth blah blah blah up to tenth I will say the spells go from first level to tenth level there are no zero level spells cantrip still exists we are gonna get much more into what we mean by temporal spells okay Eric question yes the cover of the play test document going to be the cover of the final book because that cover with the color scheme and the logo is so dope time is so much I'm in love with it but I don't think so I write now like we commissioned that piece from Wayne and first of all this book's gonna have more Wayne Reynolds art in it than anything we've ever published I'm staggered by the piles of sketches and character illustrations that are on my desk right now it is so awesome we had Wayne come to the pi's alast year and he sat down with our creative staff when we ripped off of each other and he'd be like how about this for the orc and then we're like yeah I don't know about that then the next day how about this and how about this so he's doing multiple iterations of stuff he's done you know characters of every ethnicity he's done a redo of all of the iconic characters sometimes with new gear and stuff like that it's amazing to see it come together and that's gonna be in both the the the play test version and in the final version what I think we're gonna do in the play test version is some of its gonna be kind of in process stuff so we're gonna do some of his black and whites the whole book will be color there'll be a lot of color illustrations in there but you're gonna see some of the process because again this is a book that is very much about the process of making the the final book but when we get to the final book it's gonna just have so much Wayne Reynolds art and it's gonna be sick I can't wait the cover we commissioned to harken back to the beta play test cover that we did in 2008 so we wanted to have the characters fighting a white dragon and we wanted to throw in the new Goblin iconic on there we wanted to show a little bit of some of the new outfits and the new gear loadouts of some of the more familiar iconic characters but it was mostly just like let's have Wayne do this cover and of course I should have known oh I'd fall in love with Wayne's cover you know it's beautiful okay so there was a moment I will admit and I think it was even last night when I was looking at that cover and I'm like man you know it's gonna be tough to top this for the actual core role book cover but it's Wayne so I'm not worried about it at all he's gonna come up with something even more amazing or just as amazing for that look like the colors on the cover and make the colors of the logo and like the spine in it all good as well our art director she's been here you know she was on her staff when we did Pathfinder once she took over as the the senior art director on our staff literally in the process of making Pathfinder number one and so she's been instrumental throughout this whole process and she just as guys like Jason and Logan have been working on game design you know they're there much of their careers and and are that good because of it Sarah is that good you know at the art stuff and it's been really awesome to work with her on the art side of this and I have every expectation that the final logo for a second edition and the final cover is just gonna blow everybody away I really like that logo well we'll see what ends up happening you know moving away from the the existing Pathfinder logo is kind of a necessity just so people can kind of differentiate between the two but you know I will say the the playtests logo is not the second edition logo it may be very similar in some ways I don't know yet because we haven't even started designing the second edition logo yet that comes down the road now no shade to our next question here Josh Ross because I can understand that there was some confusion here but I even went on their epic rant on Facebook that I'm sure both of you saw on this subject the question is and I know that this isn't true so this is your chance to address it I was curious about how they're thinking about doing a to II when the original concept was to never do another edition I think it's certainly new but want to know how they discussed it internally well I think it's interesting because as far as I remember and I've been here the whole time we never ever explicitly said we would never do a new edition of Pathfinder we did say when we kept doing path or when we started doing Pathfinder role-playing game in the beginning that we wanted to use a system that allowed us to tell the same kind of stories that we really wanted to tell and we felt as did a lot of our players at the time that what they were seeing of the then-current fourth edition of D&D didn't allow them to do that now putting aside for a second whether that's true or not that's a matter of you know taste but we certainly felt that way those of us who were on the staff at that time so it was very important for us to do to do a version of the game that was true not just a 3.5 but to what we saw is sort of the whole tradition of fantasy tabletop gaming going back to the very beginning and so we felt legitimately as the Pathfinder was an evolution of 3.5 and so what this new addition is it's an evolution of Pathfinder and I yeah I mean so that's basically the long and short of it I had hoped even at the beginning that one day we might be so lucky as to survive to have a second edition of the game but at that time again it was like well we're all very into 3.5 and we want to have this be as compatible as humanly possible but again by the time you get to the advanced players guide Pathfinder really starts becoming kind of its own thing and so so it has continued to evolve as its own thing all along and I can certainly sympathize with people who sort of are like I came to Pathfinder because I didn't want to ever have to do another addition change but at least in terms of where we're coming from the hey you'll never ever have to change for the rest of your life was not part of the value proposition that we were offering people were offering people as the ability to continue to play in a way that was a continuation of their experience rather than a complete fresh start and although I think the play test will tell us whether this is the case or not with the current version of the Pathfinder second edition I still feel very clearly that this is along that same evolutionary path and so I don't know I mean I think that some people interpreted what we were saying then as some kind of assurance that we would never do a second edition of the game but quite frankly we don't really use the never terminology at Paizo ever you know even when we were talking about launching the the Pathfinder RPG you know people would say are you guys never gonna do fourth edition compatible product and I would never even say that you know even though I knew in my head it was very very unlikely and in particular because the OGL didn't really allow us the flexibility that we felt we needed I was pretty sure that that wasn't going to happen but I things change and in business and in publishing you'd be nuts to say never never will we do this never will we do that so you know we certainly didn't want to rush into a new edition you know I think that if you look at the timeline between second edition D&D well let's go back to first edition the first edition D&D a D&D basically goes from about 78 to 89 so you've got 10 11 years there second edition dandy goes from 89 to 99 you've got 10 years there third edition D&D goes from 99 to like 2003 or 4 does a relaunch of 3.5 at that point that goes on till god only knows but not tremendously long and so what we wanted to make sure is that even though it became inevitable at one point that we would do a new edition we wanted that to be more like the sort of geologic addition changes that we saw when we were kids and not like the hyper insane you know sort of market driven oh my god sales are drying up let's that's you know like in the comic book world like no number one no number one you know we didn't want to do that simply for some artificial way of boosting sales we wanted to give the addition as long as possible and there were definitely times you know two years ago four years ago where people on the staff were like hey maybe it's time and others on our staff particularly those of us have been through this a number of times and who have lived at least two Alexes you know in our lives we wanted to you know we wanted to make this thing we wanted to go as long as we could you know and and I think also from my perspective there were definitely things as a publisher that I wanted to make sure that we were able to do before we kind of went back and said okay now let's kind of go back and open the patient one of those things just speaking personally was occult adventures I really wanted you know I knew again it's like okay back in 2008-2009 okay we or Roebuck we got the monster but what's next well let's do oriental adventures no let's not let's do plane or you know manual the planes well we're finally kind of doing that ten years later but but not right away and let's do let's do psionics well no I don't I didn't like psionics and at the same token Dreamz guard was doing a good job with the people who really wanted the the psyonix rules as they'd been in 3.0 but I always felt like psyonix I mean we did this podcast two years ago but I always felt like psyonix was to science fiction how can we get something that felt legitimately more like fantasy in there with those same kind of concepts of mental magic and stuff like that so I wanted to make sure we did that you know I'm sure Jason and Logan and everybody had different design challenges that they wanted to make sure that we addressed and so part of it was just like let's not start things over until we've legitimately done a full edition and I feel very comfortable saying that I feel like in terms of the mechanics Pathfinder first edition is a full edition I think it's more of a full edition than perhaps any edition of an RPG ever you know just in terms of the amount of content out there so we're very careful not to do it too soon but if from my perspective we were also careful not to say that we would never do it I don't know in retrospect that we were careful enough since a lot of people sort of like you prom I mean I was called a traitor or the other day online which I thought was spectacular and so you know we never said we'd never do a second edition so here we are I can I can testify for that because I've been following that question extremely closely we have been saying we have been saying to you guys and others you know when asked and you guys have asked us over the years are you working on a new edition or is there a second edition and we would always say stuff like we're not working on a second edition because that's true you know I mean I it's very important to me and I think to everyone it paese to be honest with fans and so we're not you know we're if we're not working on a new edition we're not gonna say that we are and if we whatever I'm getting a double negative territory but the point is you know about two years ago when people would ask us that question we didn't give that same man so we didn't say oh we're not working on Pathfinder second edition we found different ways to answer that question and so so there you have it do you expect to see someone to do two Pathfinder first edition what you did to dungeon dragons three point five I don't know it'll be interesting to see what happens I think that people's reaction to the play decimal probably have a lot to do with that and if we can come up with something that Pathfinder fans feel comfortable with I think there's less of a chance of that happening I think that the fact that we're not sort of doing a scorched-earth marketing campaign where we're like yeah first but the game you play right now is absolutely terrible you're something new you know maybe that will help for that not to happen and then I think the fact that we're playing to keep all of the rule books in print means that people who want to stay in that first edition ecosystem still will be able to go out and buy books and still be able to get you know new players into that they won't of course be able to get next month's book but we've given them 30 plus versions of books and I suspect most people don't have every single one in the PDFs are all still available don't stuff like that so will someone come along and kind of repackage that stuff and give it their own spin it could happen you know we'll see why didn't realize you were keeping the books in print yeah if like people are playing Pathfinder I'm excited by that and if you know if they want to stick with the first edition version of the game we're gonna be doing interesting things with our campaign setting you know we're gonna be doing interesting adventure paths and I strongly suspect that there will be at least fans who are gonna say well here's the first edition stats for this new second edition adventure path and that's okay there's gonna be people who don't want to come over - second edition period there's gonna be people who don't want to come over - second edition until there's more stuff more options because maybe that's what attracts them - first edition well then if they want to stick around with first edition for a while then you know that's then I'm proud of that frankly because we worked really hard on for a submission Pathfinder we like it lone dwarf points out a clever moment from last from last time you were here just a couple of weeks ago he says I asked on that podcast how Pathfinder 2.0 was going to be and you said great totally honest absolutely it's gonna be fantastic I'm really really proud of what the teens put together I think Logan and Jason and Mark and Steven and everybody on the PI's of staff has been working really really hard on this and in a way honestly that I feel is like even more sort of a team effort especially in recent months then then a lot of other projects we've done at the company and I'm having creative meetings with my friends that people are as buzzed as I've seen them in years and years and years so it's very exciting it's a great time to be at Paizo and I think in very short order it's gonna be a really great time to be even better time than it is now to be a Pathfinder player well I was hoping to get one more Eric Mona pet-peeve rant but that was such a positive note to end on I thank you switch gears like that so this has been an amazing two hours I think it's been extremely informative it's an exciting time to be a pathfinder fan I'm sure it's even more exciting on your side there must be like ashran in Eric's office where he just has all the art lined up and he just stares at it know there's a there's a there's a three-ring binder where I put them in in plastic sleeves so I can just look at them longingly you know with each turn of page oh my god I will give one little kind of mini spoiler I guess actually one of the things that is so great about having Lane do the art is that Wayne is also a gamer himself and a player himself and so he really understands the lore and understands kind of how gamers game and what what makes a gnome different from a halfling and all that and some of the stuff he's done so for each race he's done like here's male and female of like a warrior and are in a mystic and a rogue and a you know whatever and and here's here's a whole page of gear created by that culture and so there's this awesome bit where it's like a bunch of halfling equipment and part of the things with halflings in pathfinder is that they kind of go and notice they're following along in the footsteps of humans they're really acta ball and so Wayne pulled that into the equipment and so for example you've got an a halfling shield you know that's like a circle with a little you know like a handle and you can unscrew the handle turn it around and it doubles as a frying pan you know and you've got a helmet taken off and then the where the ears go you run a stick through it and it hangs down and it's like a pot for cooking soup and stuff like that so it's just like even just little ideas like that halfling racial weapon that's a fork yeah yeah that's that's great when you can work with an artist like Wayne you can sort of say here's what we're doing design wise maybe you can reflect that in the art and then he does the art we go let's pull something from that art and put it back into the game so it's this like circle of life you know it's amazing it's just great so I can stab enemies with a halfling fork yeah it's old I'm bad ten copies and then eat that same fork I don't know you've already sold me ten copies I'm sticking to nomes halflings are weird anything you guys want a shout out to before we wrap things up any convention appearances or something that's not getting enough attention right now well Jason Bowman and Steve and Randy McFarlane drag Eric on right now they're literally playing well actually now given the time they're probably drunk in the bar but they were literally playing for a second edition Pathfinder with people at Gary Cohn right now and we'll be continuing to do that through the week then we're off to the Gama trade show which is an industry only event but we'll be playing with retailers and distributors there some news will probably leak out of that as well and then from there we're sending people out all over the place we've got will be at piezocone of course Memorial Day weekend here in Seattle will be at UK games Expo shortly after that we're sending people the origins game fair in Columbus Ohio we're sending people to piezocone UK all leading up to the big release at Gen Con where we'll be able to talk about everything because you'll be able to look through the book and ask us specific questions we will be playing demos with the general public at all of those events so swing by some of those and we'd love to see you the the the court rulebook I'm sorry the play test rulebook the play test adventure and the flip mat to pack are available order for pre-order at retail stores now will be available for pre-order and Paizo calm on the 20th of March will be closing orders around May 1st so that's the kind of window if you want print versions of these books this is the time to preorder them if you're cool with the free download those of course will go up on August 2nd when the products released worldwide at Gen Con and a game stores in bookstores on a PI SOCOM all at the same time nice in 78 days FYI positron countdown correspondent Aaron call de Meyer Thank You Darren yeah I'm looking forward to playing with people at PI Zakaat I'm not going to allow these other shows but really looking forward to having all the folks there get to experience this game yeah it's really really really fun so we can't wait for you guys to try it out I guess it's safe to assume most of Paizo cons gonna be dedicated second edition well no I mean we've got a ton of first edition Pathfinder Society we've got every every gamer who's an employee at Paizo is gonna bring their own games to play some of those will be second ition some of them won't will have the delves set up with the second edition pretty much the whole weekend on there starfighter plenty of star finder of course still a lot of exciting things happening a star finder while we're doing all this and so we'll have that there I'm gonna be running a game of the 90s VCR game dragon strike as the GM from dragon strikes yo I will be in character for four hours I will never break the character the whole time you know drinking bourbon like it is water that whole time and people can come and watch us play if they're feeling brave tonight and it will be great somebody get that and otherwise but it will be the the really the sort of debutante ball where we really put the second edition on a pedestal and get everybody the opportunity to plan throughout the weekend so hope to see you guys will I see you guys there are you coming hi Zack I'm coming yeah I'm a maybe nerim maybe I can't afford both usually but this has been the year I really wanna go you guys have a patreon for no Direction soon topic everybody helps harem get the prize akan for God's sake get them they're everybody's anyway we'll see all three of you guys there and everybody who's watching thank you so much for your attention and and your support of Pathfinder over the years your great questions just I just can't wait to throw it ice with you guys and and we can all play this thing together excellent thank you both for joining us [Laughter] we'll play with you for sure that sounds like I'm gonna get murdered horribly this is an emotion that needs feeling from time to time but we're gonna get up there and it's gonna be like a special event and it's just going to be Mona destroys and no direction for charity for charity to get param2 to soup isaac on will kill you guys in front of everybody let's wrap this thing up guys well yeah I'm looking forward to that Ben until next time I'm Ryan Costello I'm Davison jpg or else in this pair Alexander Kunis the every man gamer oh I usually don't end with that but surely every man gamer and if you want to find the path you need no direction bye guys