Is Pathfinder 2 Paizo's 4E?

Aldarc · Jul 1, 2019

CapnZapp said:
Let me reassure you I'm playing 5E because it resembles d20 without the annoying crud, and also because none of fundamental flaws of 4E aren't there.

All I wish is for deeper crunch on the player side.

Paizo does not exist as a company to give you that 5e dream product you want nor will they have necessarily failed, should they fail, because of the reasons you say. (Seriously, if Paizo fails, it will not be because the market cares about LFQW. That's laughably absurd as a hypothesis.)

So why not work on your 5e crunch product yourself? You are the only person who seems to know what you are looking for. So who could know better than you? Who could design this better than you? For a number of people, I have seen them look at PF2 as a product that exists in a similar design space, though you have seemingly already written it off because you don't like how they did it. It doesn't seem to matter if it fits the niche you have called for or not, because you you don't like its "feat soup" approach. (That's more player-side crunch by the way.) So why not make a thread where you outline what you want in your dream RPG product and how you would go about doing it? Then you could also see get a tentative sense, albeit from a small population size, about how popular those choices would be.

Tony Vargas · Jul 2, 2019

Aldarc said:
As either [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] or [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has said - I can't remember which off the top of my head - the greatest trick that WotC did for 5E was in convincing people to play 4E in a game that looks more like 3E and Pathfinder.

Doesn't sound too much like the winged one, but it certainly wasn't me. Yes, 5e kept a lot of little mechanical details of 4e that were straight-line evolutions or simplifications of 3e, and bowdlerized a few 4e innovations, but, it's mostly true to the classic game in how it actually plays: it's the DMs game, through & through.

No, if you've heard me go on about 5es great accomplishment, it's this: it threaded the needle between being acceptable to the most nerdrage-prone segments of its fan base, and accessible to a sufficient fraction of the mainstream to sustain real volume.

Even in an era of nerd chic, with a dramatic TT gaming renaissance underway, that's a huge, and rare, accomplishment.

Hussar · Jul 2, 2019

Nope, that would be me. The greatest trick WotC pulled off was reskinning 4e and selling it as 5e. Because, frankly, there's so much of 4e in 5e mechanically. 4e was just as much the DM's game as 5e was since so much of 4e was about reskinning, refluffing and page 42. I mean, good grief, I never even opened the 4e monster manual because writing up my own monsters was faster and easier. Something I wish they had kept in 5e.

But, yeah, I'm watching it right now - a long time 4e player stepping into a 5e table for the first time and being able to pick it up almost instantly. So much of it is immediately familiar. They just worded things differently.

lowkey13 · Jul 2, 2019

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Hussar · Jul 2, 2019

lowkey13 said:
Citation needed.

Well, it's good that you're back to the fold!

But, honestly, as someone who skipped 2e, 3e, AND 4e as being "not D&D enough" and came back to 5e ... I have to say that this is in the eye of the beholder.

If it's close enough for you to 4e, AWESOME! It's close enough to 1e for me.

....I think that might have been the point.

Now, when I say it's close to 4e, I'm talking about the mechanics. 2 step resource recovery, a multitude of preroll mechanics, virtually all classes being built around a suite of special abilities (typically spells for most of the classes). Very little niche protection. Overnight HP recovery and virtually unkillable PC's. And that's just off the top of my head.

When you say it's close to 1e, what are you looking at? Mechanically, it's a completely different game. So, what is the 1e DNA you're identifying with in 5e?

lowkey13 · Jul 2, 2019

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billd91 · Jul 2, 2019

Hussar said:
When you say it's close to 1e, what are you looking at? Mechanically, it's a completely different game. So, what is the 1e DNA you're identifying with in 5e?

I don't know what does it for lowkey13, but there's quite a bit to give it a play feel much closer to 1e/2e than either 3e or 4e.

Magic items mathematics not being baked into the system of character power-ups.
Least tied to grid since 2e (which, while not technically 1e, was pretty much 99% compatible with 1e)
Very flexible combat movement rules that match how many people played 1e (even if the formal rules weren't as flexible then)
Fewer distracting and nitpicky advancement options
Bonuses don't go stratospheric thanks to bounded accuracy, which keeps it feeling more like 1e/2e than 3e or 4e
Encounter design isn't so based on the CR du jour of the monster when it comes to making level-appropriate(ish) encounters

Like lowkey13, we too are playing with pre-3e materials in our current 5e campaign. And with the exception of the DM substituting monsters with newer stats, it feels seamless.

Aldarc · Jul 2, 2019

Maybe that's the success of D&D? Everyone thinks that their edition receives enough love that they can play their old games. (Though 4e's presence in 5e must be masked with hushed tones.)

Jer · Jul 2, 2019

Hussar said:
Now, when I say it's close to 4e, I'm talking about the mechanics. 2 step resource recovery, a multitude of preroll mechanics, virtually all classes being built around a suite of special abilities (typically spells for most of the classes). Very little niche protection. Overnight HP recovery and virtually unkillable PC's. And that's just off the top of my head.

When you say it's close to 1e, what are you looking at? Mechanically, it's a completely different game. So, what is the 1e DNA you're identifying with in 5e?

I would add to that the fact that everyone has a single proficiency bonus that scales with level at the same rate, rather than different Base Attack Bonuses/THAC0/To-hit charts by class. 5e took the "add 1/2 your level" mechanic from 4e, changed it to (roughly) "add 1/4 your level +1" and nobody blinks at it.

The "if you're not proficient in it, you don't get to add the bonus" instead of either the traditional "flat penalty for lack of proficiency" or 4e's "you don't get to add the weapon proficiency bonus" rules is probably why, because it puts a fairly high restriction on classes stepping out of their lane while keeping the fiddly math to a minimum. But it still surprises me that a mechanic that was so contentious in 4e has come over to 5e with few complaints at all. The skill bonuses work the same way - you're still adding a scaling bonus based on level, but people seem much more fine with it than they were for 4e - maybe because the math is just less obvious? I remember laughing when I realized that in some ways, 5e just stretches out the math for what would have been levels 1-5 in 4e across 20 levels for 5e. There's a whole lot of 4e DNA in 5e, it's just very well hidden.

DEFCON 1 · Jul 2, 2019

Heh heh... and then there's me... who has never felt the that ANY edition of D&D was some massive outlier from any other edition. 5E feels like a lot of 4E, just like a lot of 4E felt like 3E, just like 3E felt a lot like 2E, just like 5E feels like 2E, and 4E felt like 1E etc. etc. etc.

And why is that? Because I'm one within the branch of the D&D populace for whom the game mechanics are and always have seen secondary to the play experience. The story, the fluff, the roleplaying of Dungeons & Dragons and the worlds they inhabit have been exceedingly similar in EVERY edition that has been released. Which is exactly why I keep playing it. I love what D&D is away from the math.

And this is also why I have moved without issue from my start with the Red & Blue Boxes to AD&D, 2E, 3E, 3,5, 4E and now 5E and have never once felt like I had to stick with one over the other or like I was being betrayed by the people making it. Because quite frankly... specific game mechanics don't really matter and when I play them enough can grow quite stale. Which is why I'm perfectly happy with game mechanics evolving and changing with every new edition because it means I can work with new and different ways to roll dice and do math while the baseline foundation and essence of the Dungeons & Dragons game remains virtually unchanged even after 40 years.