Michael J Sayre
@MichaelJSayre1
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Tlingit/Irish, born and raised in Alaska Director of Rules & Lore at Paizo Freelance Game Designer
@animistgunslinger.bsky.social
Joined May 2020
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Jarnathan is the most "GM rolling with some player BS by whipping up an NPC on the fly" character I've ever seen and immediately signaled to me how fun that movie was going to be.
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1/ One of the more contentious periods in
#Pathfinder2e
's early history happened when a YouTuber with a very large following released a video examining PF2 that many in the PF2 community found to be inaccurate, unfair, or even malicious with how much the described experience-
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1/ Excited to announce that I have been promoted to the Director of Rules & Lore at Paizo. I'm happy to be looking forward to and plotting an amazing future with my spectacular team-
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"Most orcs don't waste their dying moments praising the divine or praying for a place in the afterlife, but spitting a blood-flecked warning at their deities, promising a new challenger through broken teeth."
#Pathfinder2e
#ORC
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1/
#Pathfinder2e
Design ramblings-
DPR or "damage per round" is often used as a metric for class comparisons, but it's often one of the clunkiest and most inaccurate measures you can actually use, missing a variety of other critical factors that are pertinent to class balance.
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Some explanations for the Gap between
#Pathfinder2e
and
#Starfinder
may be more reliable than others.
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1/ An interesting anecdote from PF1 that has some bearing on how
#Pathfinder2E
came to be what it is:
Once upon a time, PF1 introduced a class called the arcanist. The arcanist was regarded by many to be a very strong class. The thing is, it actually wasn't.
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The
#Pathfinder2e
Remaster project has been something that's just made me incredibly proud of my Rules & Lore team, as well as all the other folks on the Paizo creative staff who've made incredible efforts to make these books happen in a stunningly short time.
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I have this sneaking suspicion that one of the things in the
#Pathfinder2e
remaster that people are really going to be happy about is the expanded guidance and clarifications for the Recall Knowledge action.
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GM: "You find an ORC with a spear in a 10-foot by 10-foot room, guarding an open game license and a pie. What do you do?"
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You may not know this, but Paizo has a long history with awesome orcs, not just ones like the
#OpenRPG
#ORC
that protects gaming for everyone. My favorite is the iconic inventor, Droven.
So
#Pathfinder2e
players, tell me about YOUR favorite orc!
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Man,
#Pathfinder2e
compatible
#Starfinder
*and* an upcoming PF2 playtest with 2 completely new classes? What a GenCon.
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Just a few more hours until the
#Pathfinder2e
#Battlecry
! playtest!
Lining up with the marketing and website teams like...
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#pathfinder2e
Game Design: Before we started writing the playtest version of the kineticist class, every member of the design team built a kineticist character and we all ran them in a game GM'd by
@JasonBulmahn
to see how we all thought a kineticist should play 1/?
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1/-
#Pathfinder2e
Design ramblings-
Shields in PF2 have three basic functions.
1) Raise a Shield: This is the most function and it lets you increase your AC.
2) Shield Block: Not everyone has this by default, you can gain it through a feat, and it lets you interpose your shield-
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So,
#pathfinder2e
folks, yesterday our Director of Marketing dropped the table of contents for Treasure Vault:
I'm thinking that if at least 100 people respond to this post with the section of the book they're most excited about, maybe-
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Thursday the 31st,
@toriariaria
and I will be talking about the two new playtest classes for
#Pathfinder2e
, including their iconics and the inspirations for the concepts and design! Oughta be fun times...
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Gimme an ARPG based on
#Pathfinder2e
. Gimme a CRPG based on PF2. Gimme a 2D fighter based on PF2. Give me so many ways to engage with Pathfinder that no matter what I'm in the mood for or who else is around, I always have a way to engage with those vibes and spend more time-
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I love watching conversations happen where people are like "Wouldn't
#Pathfinder2E
be even better if....?" And knowing that we have that thing they're talking about slated for release or update already.
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1/
#Pathfinder2e
Design Musings- Balance and texture often get conflated but are two very different things. Balance speaks to a system's sustainability and quality; how well and how long can people play this game before they start running into systemic issues that affect (cont.)
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So
@donatoclassic
was promoted to creative director for the Rules and Lore team at Paizo, and I've been promoted to design manager over the same team. Lots to do, but we're already scheming up awesome new
#pathfinder2e
products with the team!
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Part of creating books for ttRPGs like
#pathfinder2e
includes doing development passes where you try to make sure your spell and item names aren't inadvertently dirty jokes or inappropriate easter eggs. This is particularly important when you're working on magical Wood options.
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Been deep in the word mines, but I thought that it's a good time for some
#Pathfinder2e
design ramblings on the value of trivial and low-threat encounters.
These relatively easy encounters often get seen as chaff or skippable when presented in published adventures, but-
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I love how people are like-
"That's obviously Asura's Wrath."
"That's obviously Primary Lotus."
"That's obviously an air combo into piledriver."
"That's actually this stand from Jojo."
Fun living in a world where a move like this could have so many different inspirations.
IT'S OVER
MONK WINS PLAYER CORE 2
THIS IS BASICALLY ALL THEY GOT THAT'S NEW, AND IT'S ENOUGH
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1/4 One of the tricks to playing a slot-based spellcaster in
#Pathfinder2e
is that you can treat each of your spells like silver bullets. You can create the circumstances to deploy them in, or you can just pull the trigger when the circumstances naturally occur.
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1- In the course of working on
#WarofImmortals
for
#Pathfinder2e
, I killed one of my favorite deities. They were relatively obscure and not particularly important to the broader canon of the game (though more important in some of my hombrews) and I never got to do all the things
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1/ One of the things that is widely known about
#Pathfinder2e
is that the math is very well balanced; the difference between the weakest option and the most powerful option is small enough that the game can easily welcome experienced and new players at the same table.
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#pathfinder2e
Design: The Long Game.
1/ With the release of
#ImpossibleLands
, I thought it'd be a good time to talk about the way a game is built over the course of an edition cycle. Impossible Lands is, IMO, a phenomenal book. It's also a book that couldn't happen-
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2/ varied from people's own experiences with the game. This led to a variety of response videos, threads across a wide variety of forums, and generally created a well of chaos from which many of the most popular PF2 YouTubers arose. I think it's interesting to look at-
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As the Rules & Lore team continues to grow the exciting world of
#Pathfinder2e
, we're looking for some more people who want to take that journey with us! We've posted openings for both a developer and a designer position on our team.
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5/ The video contained a lot of what we'll call subjective conclusions and misunderstood rules. Identifying those contentious items, examining them, and refuting them became the process that launched several of the most well-known PF2 content creators into the spotlight, but-
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6/ it also set a tone for the community. Someone with a larger platform "attacked" their game with what was seen as misinformation, they pushed back, and their community grew and flourished in the aftermath. But that community was on the defensive.
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1) It's not really that surprising when you think about it. The OGL was in many ways an armistice; very little of what was claimed as original IP to D&D actually was. Much of it was stuff "borrowed" from either real world mythology or other literary sources.
It's kinda funny that a lot of the
#pathfinder2e
Remaster stuff to move away from OGL content is to make the monsters truer to their myths of origin.
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Really kind of a cool
#Pathfinder2e
milestone day for me. Not only was yesterday my 5-year anniversary at Paizo, but I've got both
#TreasureVault
and the PFS scenario "Killer in the Golden Mask" releasing today. Days like this really make doing the thing worthwhile.
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13/ be completely straightforward and yet have gotten so much wrong about PF2 in the eyes of the people who play PF2. *He wasn't playing PF2, he was trying to play 5e using PF2 rules.* And it's an easier mistake to make than you might think.
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Went directly from wrapping up pieces of the
#Pathfinder2e
remaster to looking over some class archetypes appearing in other books we've got teed up. Really excited to have a system that's mature enough we can start cracking into this more niche space.
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This also ties into a
#Pathfinder2e
Design Musing I was percolating on, "Looking at things in context."
Everything within the game exists within the context of the game, and oftentimes when people are confused about why a mechanic works a certain way, the answer can be found-
I cannot emphasise this enough:
The best thing you can do to make encounters more interesting in d20 is to *have interesting combat spaces.*
This is true for DnD 3.5, 4e, and 5e. It's true for PF1e and 2e. For almost any miniatures-based tactics game.
#ttrpg
#dnd
#pathfinder2e
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I really love that moment when we're almost done with our passes on a
#Pathfinder2e
book and we get to start imagining what it'll be like when the players get their hands on it. So much cool stuff hitting that peak part of the pipeline!
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1/
#Pathfinder2E
design ramblings-
When updating an existing rules system, it's important to know *why* the rules were constructed they were originally before changing them to something new. Oftentimes, when it seems like there's an easy alternative, you're overlooking a problem
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3/ how that event affected the player base, and what kind of design lessons there are to learn from the event itself.
First, let's talk about the environment it created and how that's affected the community in the time since. When the video I'm referring to released, the creator-
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4/ had a subscriber base that was more than twice the size of the Pathfinder 1st edition consumer base at its height. That meant that his video instantly became the top hit when Googling for PF2 and was many people's first experience with learning what PF2 was.
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1/
#Pathfinder2E
design rambling: "perfect knowledge, effective preparation, and available design space"
Following up my thread from the other week, I've seen a lot of people talking about issues with assuming "perfect knowledge" or 'Schroedinger's wizard", with the idea that-
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1/ And last night we shipped
#Pathfinder2e
's
#WarofImmortals
off to the printer! A journey that started almost three years is finally reaching its final stages and I'm thrilled with what me and the WoI team created.
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7/ And it was a position they had felt pushed into since the very beginning. Despite the fact that PF2 has been blowing past pre-existing performance benchmarks since the day of its release, the online discourse hasn't always reflected its reception among consumers.
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9/ This hostile environment created a rapidly growing community of PF2 gamers who often felt attacked simply for liking th game, giving rise to a feisty spirit among PF2's community champions who had found the lifestyle game they'd been looking for.
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11/ is, so when they encounter that misinformation, they push back. But sometimes I worry that that passion can end up misdirected when it comes not from a place of malice, but just from misunderstanding or a lack of compatibility between the type of game that PF2 provides and-
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There is a very high chance that if you think you can't make or play a fantasy concept in
#Pathfinder2e
, one of two things is true:
1) You haven't looked hard enough and it's already available.
2) We're working on it and it just hasn't made it to you.
@bingsoojung
You mean like in a "healing bullet" type sense? We just added these in Treasure Vault if they help!
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Following up on yesterday's
#Pathfinder2e
design ramblings-
Something I said was that DPR is "one of the clunkiest and most inaccurate measures" for class/character performance. It might be even more accurate to say that DPR is barely even a metric at all, it's a data point.
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8/ As always happens with a new edition, some of Pathfinder's biggest fans became it's most vocal opponents when the new edition released, and a non-zero number of those opponents had positions of authority over prominent communities dedicated to the game.
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10/ But it can occasionally lead to people being too ardent in their defense of the system when they encounter people with large platforms with negative things to say about PF2. They're used to a fight and know what a lot of the most widely spread misinformation about the game-
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One thing I think is really exciting about
#Pathfinder2e
is that the modular design space allows us to do things we just couldn't do effectively before. I think from the very beginning there has been more new ground to explore available than old material awaiting conversion.
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31/end
Try new ways to innovate your game and create play experiences that you and your friends enjoy. Share those experiences and how you achieved them with others. Be kind, don't assume malice where there is none, and watch for the common ground to build on.
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21/ One of the statements made in that video was to the general effect of "We were playing optimally [...] by making third attacks, because getting an enemy's HP to zero is the most optimal debuff."
That is, generally speaking, true. But the way in which it is true varies greatly
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1/2
#Pathfinder2e
Quick Hack: So your group is already adopting the preview remaster updates but a player isn't sure how to keep playing their champion? Fix that in two easy steps-
1) Replace any class or feat prerequisite referencing "good or evil" with "sanctified holy/unholy".
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Forges are like, really hot, that's all.
I would like to let y'all know that the
#pathfinder2e
iconic Magus Seltyiel canonically enchants items while shirtless.
That is all.
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#pathfinder2e
Design "Creating A Book": So, when we start working on a new PF2 hardcover book, the process is *about* a 2-year cycle from concept to release. Some books go a bit faster and some take a bit longer, but that's kind of the average spin on one of these. 1/
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1/ I've had enough people reach out and tell me that this is their preferred venue for design information that, at least for the time being, I'm going to continue posting here. So for today's
#Pathfinder2e
design ramblings...
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Some of the most talented freelancers I've hired for
#Pathfinder2e
were people I met or observed online who just displayed a good attitude and a strong knowledge of games in general, and the PF2 rules system in particular.
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I remember, back when I was doing freelance work on the orc ancestry for the APG, how exciting it was that the designers and editors I was working with were in full support of my feelings that it was important we push orcs beyond "dumb brute" or racially-coded stereotypes.
Something I love about
#Pathfinder2e
: DIVERSITY
In Pathfinder your ancestry is more than just an aesthetic. Take the
#ORC
, for example. In most versions of D&D there has only every been one monolithic example of orcs—big, dumb, evil, brutes. Even as a playable option they tend 🧵
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1) Something I think is real interesting about the commander discourse for the
#Pathfinder2e
#Battlecry
playtest is how much a class looking to emulate the best teamwork feats from the PF1 cavalier in PF2 is being interpreted to look like the 4E warlord.
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@JasonBulmahn
@loganbonner
6/6 Every class in
#pathfinder2e
is this very unique thing that only exists because of the combination of an entire design team, supported by an entire production staff, and customized to hit the needs of the community as expressed through expansive playtests. Pretty cool, IMO
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1) I'm thinking of that meme right now where the guy talks about how Twitter is the only place where you can make a fully articulated sentence like "I like pancakes" and get the response "So you hate waffles?" Nah, that's a whole other sentence.
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16/ rework them into a new, modern system that keeps much, much more depth than the other dragon game, while retooling the mechanics to be more approachable and promote a teamwork-oriented playstyle that is very different than the "party of Supermen" effect that often happens-
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12/ the type of game a person is willing to play. Having watched the video I referenced at the beginning of this thread, and having a lot of experience with a wide variety of TTRPGs and other games, there's actually a really simple explanation for why the reviewer's takes could-
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So, you may not know this about
#Pathfinder2e
playtests, but we *always* add improvements, refinements, and new content to the final releases of every product. I'm already putting a little thought into what new animist apparitions we might be able to add...
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29/ There's also a key lesson here for TTRPG designers- be clear about what your game is! The more it looks like another game at a cursory glance, the more important it can be to make sure it's clear to the reader and players how it's different. That can be a tough task when-
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24/ So doing what was optimal in 5E or PF1 can very much be doing the opposite of the optimal thing in PF2.
A lot of people are going to like that. Based on the wild success of PF2 so far, clearly *a lot* of people like that. But some people aren't looking to change their game.
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20/ push the party into cooperating together. The quicker a party learns to set each other up for success, the faster the hard fights become easy and the more likely it is that the player will come to love and adopt the system. So back to that video I mentioned, one last time.
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15/ fundamentals to let people play the most approachable version of the game they were already playing. PF2 goes a different route; while the coat of paint on top looks very familiar, the system is designed to drag the best feelings and concepts from fantasy TTRPG history, and-
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14/ On the surface, the games both roll d20s, both have some kind of proficiency system, both have shared terminology, etc. And 5E was built with the idea that it would be the essential distillation of D&D, taking the best parts of the games that came before and capturing their-
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17/ in TTRPGs where the ceiling of a class (the absolute best it can possibly be performance-wise) is vastly different from its floor when system mastery is applied.
In the dragon game, you've mostly only got one reliable way to modify a character's performance-
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I like to imagine that even most gnomes don't use a flickmace, because the vast majority of them have traumatic childhood memories of giving themselves black eyes. The ones who still use a flickmace are the ones who don't have those memories because they got a concussion instead.
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My Rules & Lore hardcover team of
@toriariaria
,
@Izsisu
,
@loganbonner
,
@donatoclassic
, and Landon Winkler are rockstars working on some badass books of both the announced and unannounced varieties. The stuff we're processing atm is *so cool*.
#Pathfinder2e
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18/ in the form of advantage/disadvantage. Combat is intended to be quick, snappy, and not particularly tactical. PF1 goes the opposite route; there are so many bonus types and ways to customize a character that most of your optimization has happened before you even sit down to-
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1/4 One of the tricky things about social engagement is getting your words in front of an audience. I answer
#Pathfinder2e
questions all the time, but I still see regular "Why aren't Paizo designers talking to us" type posts or comments on a regular basis.
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23/ damage with a little blast and smash. But in PF2, the math means that the damage of your third attack ticks down with every other attack action you take, while the damage inflicted by your allies goes up with every stacking buff or debuff action you succeed with.
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1/ One of the things I do when designing a new
#Pathfinder2e
class is to take a "classic" adventuring party (fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue) and look at which team roles the new class is able to step in for. If I'm GMing for 4 of my friends and one of them wants to play this-
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19/ play. What you did during downtime and character creation will affect the game much more than what happens on the battle map, beyond executing the character routine you already built.
PF2 varies from both of those games significantly in that the math is tailored to-
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26/ works best for a given person or community, and what games fall flat for them. It's one of those areas where things like the ORC license, Project Black Flag, the continuing growth of itchio games and communities, etc., are really exciting for me, personally.
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27/ The more that any one game dominates the TTRPG sphere, the more the games within that sphere are going to be judged by how well they create an experience that's similar to the experience created by the game that dominates the zeitgeist.
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22/ depending on the game you're playing. In PF1, the fastest way to get an enemy to zero might be to teleport them somewhere very lethal and very far away from you. In 5E, it might be a tricked out fighter attacking with everything they've got or a hexadin build laying out big-
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1/
#pathfinder2e
Design Musings: Environment of the Game.
Everything in a game exists within the environment of the game. The monsters, the classes, the feats, the items, the spells, all of these form the totality of the game, and the better you understand how they all fit-
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30/ human psychology often causes people to reflexively reject change, but an innovation isn't *really* an innovation if it's hidden where people can't use it. I point to the Pathfinder Society motto "Explore! Report! Cooperate!"
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28/ The more successful games you have exploring different structures and expressions of TTRPGs, the more likely that TTRPGs will have the opportunity to be objectively judged based on what they are rather than what they aren't.
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#pathfinder2e
Design: Combination weapons were this design space I really wanted us to fill in Guns & Gears, and they probably went through more iterations than anything that wasn't a class. Stephen Radney-McFarland did the initial design work on them- 1/
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2/ Two of the measurements that I use for class evaluation are TAE (total action efficiency) and TTK (time to kill).
TAE is a measurement of a character's performance in a variety of different situations while functioning as part of a 4-person party. It asks questions like-
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1/
#Pathfinder2e
musings-
Lately I've been playing some of the original Baldur's Gate for PC, and that plus a recent conversation about Eberron got me thinking about the roles NPCs play in the world, and which ones make the world alive vs. which make it feel crowded.
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25/ Some people have already found their ideal game, and they're just looking for the system that best enables the style of game they've already identified as being the game they want to play. And that's one of those areas where you can have a lot of divergence in what game-
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2/
Creative Director Luis Loza
Lead Designer Logan Bonner
Lead Developer James Case
Senior Developer Eleanor Ferron
Senior Designer Jason Keeley
Developer Landon Winkler
Designer Josh Birdsong
Designer Ivis Flanagan
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Legitimately one of the most annoying things about online discourse is people taking out-of-context and incomplete screenshots of your posts and using them to karma farm with lies and speculation in a completely different forum.
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I've been waiting for this reveal 😁
We've said before that the War of Immortals meta-event has nothing to do with OGL scrubbing or "sanitizing" the game, but people just don't seem to want to believe it...
Devil seen leaving courthouse! It's Valentine's Day, are YOUR contracts safe? Better check the fine print!
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So,
#Pathfinder2e
folks. I'm building a character. The idea is that they're building towards a "King Arthur" vibe with the other party members as their knights. Fighter with the farmer background is an obvious way to lean into the trope, but what other classes and backgrounds-
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1)
#Pathfinder2e
design musings-
Having a stat system that uses 6 ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, Intelligence, Wisdom) or some close approximation thereof has been a staple of d20 TTRPGs for a long time. I think, in part, because it just works.
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I'm hoping that by this time next week, some of you will already be sitting down to your first
#Pathfinder2e
game with our upcoming playtest classes! We've been doing some of our own playtesting getting these ready, and I think both classes are a ton of fun. Hopefully you do to!
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@toriariaria
How does one "hype"? Uh... How about this-
The names for each of the new
#Pathfinder2e
playtest classes are 3 syllables long with three vowels each.
You hyped?
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One of the best pieces of advice I ever received on game design was from
@lyzmaytweet
, and it was very simple. "When you've got a complete story and something that does what it's supposed to do well, and then you feel like maybe you should add just one more thing, don't."
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5/ in advance. The class's ability to elevate the player rather than requiring the player to elevate the class made it quite popular and created the general impression that it was very strong.
It was also just more fun to play, with bespoke abilities and little design flourishes
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22/ want, but it does require drawing lines in places where some people will just never want to see the line, and that's difficult to do anything about without revisiting your core assumptions regarding balance, depth, and customization.
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