General Playtest comments

I thought it might helpful to set up a thread specifically for discussing the playtest/playtest materials.

For my part, I went through the entire rule book last night. Not reading it in it's entirety, rather just looking over the organization, contents, and presentation.

I feel like this new edition really kind of looks like the cumulative result of 10 years of publishing Pathfinder products. I was surprised to see how much of Golarion actually made it into the core book. Goblin as a playable class is fun, as is the addition of alchemist as a class.

I have to say I'm torn on how large the section on classes looks. On one hand, I like that there is a lot of information localized where a person might want to look. On the other hand, it left me with kind of a D&D 4e feeling after seeing all the class-specific abilities. Will have to see how this impacts the game before I pass judgement.

Adding "Primal" as a third category for spells was also a surprise. (I'd been deliberately avoiding the drip-feed of information Paizo had been releasing.) I think I like this idea.

Any other thoughts so far?

I have to say, initially when I was scanning through the book and saw that seemingly everything is broken down into feats I was put off on this edition. One of my biggest complaints about 1e is how many feats to go through and needing to plan your character out from the beginning to not miss the feats you need to be effective. But as I was working on my character, the way they broke them up into smaller lists of feats felt much better. It feels like each character is much more customizable even at 1st level.

One thing I'm not sure about is the skills. The difference between trained and legendary is 3 or 4 points right?

I'm not sure if this is the same thing you were referring to, but I went back and looked at the skills. It looks like you're correct, but the skill increases are pre-determined by levels, and that you don't reach "Legendary" until level 15. I saw this on page 43 in the Rule Book. If this is the case, then the small difference between the skill increases makes more sense. Otherwise, I'm not sure. I'll have to keep looking.

I will say, if they've changed the skills this much that could be interesting. One of frustrations with 1e is that there are so many bonuses. If they've found a good way to curtail that I'd be happy.

Your proficiency level goes up (From Trained to Expert to Master to Legendary for your "Signature" skills). However, your actual proficiency modifier goes up with every level. So if you are Trained, you add your level to the skill. if you are Legendary, you add Level + 3. If you are untrained, it's Level - 2. Meaning at level 20, a Legendary Survival person will have Ability + 23 while an untrained Survival person would have Ability + 18.

It's a bit of a weird feeling, like they went part-way towards the 5e bounded accuracy type feeling, but still with the HUGE numbers that Pathfinder loves so much.

I'll likely put some more thought around a full on assessment in the coming days. I'm also going to have to read a lot more of the options.

I love the character creation, but I also hate the overabundance of feats. Everything else seems pretty good, they improved on a lot of first edition stuff. I especially like the systems for actions and ability score generation.

My one exception to the feat complaint is ancestry feats, I find them pretty interesting and useful. If they ever release a setting book for Second Edition it would be great to see setting specific ancestry feats!