Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

[kenada]

Recall Knowledge, on the other hand, I would argue is under-engineered. There's an awful lot of hand-waving going on there. Say you want to make a recall knowledge check to figure out a Clay Golem's abilities and weaknesses. What should the DM tell you if you roll a success? how about a critical success? Ask different DMs and you'll probably completely different answers. The "official" result should be success will give you their most prominent feature- which one is that? The spells that slow them? The ones that harm them? The ones that heal them? How about their cursed wounds? How about their saves? It's very vague and can make a major difference in a combat.

I think Recall Knowledge is okay when used as part of the Investigate activity, but the way it works in combat is horrible. Players expect to know how they can hurt the monster or be hurt by it. People say casters should target the weakest saves, but how do you do that when there’s no way to find that out short of experimentation? I can accept that maybe players just aren’t supposed to have access to that information easily, but it feels at odds with the tactical element of the game.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think if you take every class and subclass and race feature or ability in all of 5E and call them “feats” you’ll probably get way more than 2000.

Pathfinder 2 calls everything feats. All that means is that PF2 has 2000 things in it.

Thanks for chiming in, Morrus.

However, if I were to take the implied conclusion "both games have 2000+ things in them so they must be of similar complexity" all that means is:

If both games are of comparable complexity... that must mean WotC succeeded far better at making their game come across as friendly, easy and accessible!

In this context I can't help but think of your project. I wish Level Up! the best of success - in fact I dream that LU becomes what Pathfinder 2 isn't for me, namely "5E D&D but more". Most importantly, to reach that success, I hope and trust you and your team are studying what 5E gets right, because unfortunately I cannot find any evidence that the designers of Pathfinder 2 took even a single lesson from that game, and what made it such a success. Also, you're welcome to point your designers to this thread for examples of what sort of design not to include in your game.

best regards and well wishes,
Zapp

 

[CapnZapp]

I do agree that several of the sub-systems are over-engineered. The general philosophy working here is that most actions require a die roll, which is complicating things a ton. Using medicine to treat wounds out of combat should require no die rolling, at all. Something like "10 minutes to heal 5+your level in hitpoints, 10+level for expert, 15+level for master, 20 + level for legendary" would probably be the way to go. Battlefield medicine or stabilizing a character could require rolls, since those are time-sensitive actions performed under stressful conditions. Crafting should function similarly.

Recall Knowledge, on the other hand, I would argue is under-engineered. There's an awful lot of hand-waving going on there. Say you want to make a recall knowledge check to figure out a Clay Golem's abilities and weaknesses. What should the DM tell you if you roll a success? how about a critical success? Ask different DMs and you'll probably completely different answers. The "official" result should be success will give you their most prominent feature- which one is that? The spells that slow them? The ones that harm them? The ones that heal them? How about their cursed wounds? How about their saves? It's very vague and can make a major difference in a combat.

I absolutely agree.

Do allow me to point out re: Medicine that I did calculate what the proficiency levels boils down to if you skip all the clutter:

Treat Wounds makes the target regain a number of hit points equal to your skill bonus in Medicine plus double your Proficiency Rank:​

Trained +4​

Expert +8​

Master +12​

Legendary +16​

...but this doesn't address or solve the greater issue. It still makes healing too slow for other parts of the rules framework to function as I understand them.

When you boil everything down to the core issue, the game expects you to be fully healed before each encounter, and that this healing should take no longer than 10-30 minutes.

A 5E approach to fixing all this would be:

You automatically heal one third of your maximum hp for every 10 minutes of downtime or exploration activity.​

Sure it nerfs Medicine and a few feats, but it considerably simplifies things, and most importantly: it gets to the point.

A less simplistic approach that still mitigates the issues to a large extent (as far as I can analyse things anyway) is introducing a Stamina variant.

Btw - you don't need the Gamemastery Guide for that, because where Paizo needs a two-page spread, I can explain it in four simple sentences:

Half your hit points is Stamina Points, the other half is regular hit points.​

After any 10-minute rest or exploration activity you regain all lost Stamina (unless the GM says otherwise, of course)​

You take damage to Stamina before hit points.​

You heal hit points before Stamina​

​

This lets you keep all the trappings of Medicine and still accelerate healing, since half your maximum comes back "for free" - you only need to use Treat Wounds, Healing Potions and the like on the other half.

Most importantly, characters should always reach at least half health, even when for some reason no other means of healing is available. This should help considerably in matching what the game expects a short rest to accomplish to what it actually does accomplish!

 

[CapnZapp]

Recall Knowledge, on the other hand, I would argue is under-engineered. There's an awful lot of hand-waving going on there. Say you want to make a recall knowledge check to figure out a Clay Golem's abilities and weaknesses. What should the DM tell you if you roll a success? how about a critical success? Ask different DMs and you'll probably completely different answers. The "official" result should be success will give you their most prominent feature- which one is that? The spells that slow them? The ones that harm them? The ones that heal them? How about their cursed wounds? How about their saves? It's very vague and can make a major difference in a combat.

Again, spot on, Puggins!

Also note the three-trunked elephant in the room:

a) against any monster dangerous enough that Recalling Knowledge feels critical, you have less than a 50% chance of getting something out of a Recall Knowledge action. And I hope everybody agrees that for many monsters, a single "prominent fact" isn't enough to "solve" the puzzle that is said monster.

b) personally, I feel monsters are so dangerous in this game that even when I hand out a free monster knowledge check at the start of each combat, and hand out most pertinent info already on a single success, the monsters are still very dangerous and very challenging.

and last but not least...

c) The opportunity cost. Each action spent on Recall Knowledge is 100% guaranteed an action that does not deal any damage, it hands out exactly zero buffs, and it is sure to debuff absolutely no enemy! The opportunity cost here is that just attacking is often sufficient to learn what you need to know. Even if you deal 15 damage less because of a vulnerability... you learnt that fact automatically for free while still (hopefully) dealing at least some damage.

---

Running Recall Knowledge as I think I understand the RAW wants it to be run feels... overwhelming, unnecessary and like a hard difficulty upgrade.

No hero has time to spend more than maybe a single action on recalling knowledge when they're busy saving their own life. Even with five players, five such actions feels entirely insufficient to actually learn what you need to know.

---

My point with c) is that in isolation an action spent on Recall Knowledge might seem like a fair deal. But when you factor in that this is not an action spent on actual combat, the total cost becomes overwhelmingly high in our opinion. Most combats are decided within three rounds. Spending even 1/9th on possibly failing to learn even a single thing is severely overcosted in my analysis. (It actually is worse, since you really need that information in the first round - and ideally before your melee bruisers act too! - for it to really matter)

Since the average cost of learning even a single thing is (more than) two actions, the result is that optimizing players simply learn about their foes the hard way, completely ignoring Recall Knowledge (until you get feats and spells that hand out checks for free).

Faced with that reality (and agreeing with the cost analysis) I started playing exactly the same way I'm playing 5th Edition: at the start of each encounter every player gets a free monster knowledge check, and even one success tells the party what they need to know. Much simpler for me, much more satisfying fun for the players - and combats are still plenty difficult, so noone feels anything of value is lost!

---

If I have to constructively offer up a variant rule that retains as much of the Recall Knowledge structure as possible, I probably would go for:

You can make a Recall Knowledge check for free if and only if you take the basic Strike action. MAP applies to this RK check.​

That is, the cost is now that you can't do your class-specific cool special attacks. But you still get to accomplish something even when attempting a RK check. There is a cost (the difference between a "cool" attack and a "boring" one), but it is much more in line with the benefits. The MAP penalty ensures that spamming these checks is a losing proposition. (If you take something like the Quick Draw action, you get a Strike as part of that action, but since you aren't taking the basic Strike action, no free RK check for you)

For spellcasters this becomes

You can make a Recall Knowledge check for free with every cantrip you cast to attack the creature you're attempting to recall info about.​

That is, as long as you coast along with your cantrips (instead of letting loose with a slotted spell) you too get to contribute to the recall knowledge game.

 

[CapnZapp]

In summary, I think many gamers see lots of options as making the game complex. This is misleading. The game is no more or less complex than other RPGs in its category. You likely won't have the same system mastery when you begin, but that is hardly necessary to enjoy the game if you want to take it one level at a time. Just my two cents...

Try gamesmastering

The first time you are about to let a character crawl or swim a bit faster, or jump over a low wall, maybe just asking for an Athletics or Acrobatics check just like you're used to from most of those other games... just being generous and speeding along gameplay, you think...

...and another player opens one of the rulebooks and points to a feat that lets you do exactly that specific little thing...

..you will likely never say the game is no more or less complex ever again!

I'll always remember that feeling of hopeless helplessness and frustration when I realized the game is actively working against me.

 

[CapnZapp]

I’m dubious of this assumption. The system doesn’t prescribe any particular adventuring day. The only time it even mentions being fully rested is for extreme encounters, which are meant to be infrequent. Severe-threat encounters actually acknowledge that PCs might not be at full resources as a complicating factor (along with bad luck and poor tactics). If the game were predicated on PCs always being rested, then why not just say that?

I should clarify: I'm talking out of the assumption that the adventure is an official Adventure Path written by Paizo. (I said so in the other thread but forgot to clarify this here. My bad.)

I have run the game in a sandbox of my creation and you can easily tune the difficulty level there yourself.

But any encounter, even a Moderate one, can easily take a Fighter from full health down to zero, so I have to insist: I rely more on my practical play experience than what the book tells me (Just reading a rulebook sometimes tells you what the designers wish their game does, rather than what it actually does do... right?)

Cheers

 

[CapnZapp]

If the PCs get into something that’s too dangerous for them, they should flee. The CRB mentions it when discussing severe-threat encounters, but the GMG also calls this out. In the Hexploration subsystem, it discusses one approach that includes having encounters so powerful that the correct tactic is to flee. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether PCs are at full hp. They can’t win regardless. If we accept that as a valid encounter, then it’s not too much of a stretch to consider ones where they’re too depleted as valid too. And if those are valid, they become useful tools for applying pressure to PCs in a dungeon.

Not sure I find this theoretical approach very helpful.

If my heroes are in the middle of healing up from low health, and I spring a wandering monster on them, they will most likely defeat it. What they will then do is get back to healing up hp. The only practical result is that story progress is delayed (assuming the wandering monsters doesn't come at such a rapid rate they deplete hp quicker than Medicine can replenish it, which I take we agree is a very safe assumption - the dungeon where the wandering monsters are deadlier than the actual dungeon doesn't seem like a fun experience, and I have never seen one in any official Paizo product anyway)

Sure I can force the players to retreat, but it should not hide the fact that PF2 encounters work differently than in most other games I've played or gamesmastered.

PF2 is predicated on the balance of the single encounter to a very high degree. Official adventures are never about attrition. The overwhelming majority of monsters are appropriate for your level, with the goal of challenging you right there and then. Not to cause attrition that makes the next encounter more difficult. (That next encounter is likely plenty difficult all by itself).

Sure there are exceptions but not nearly enough that I will refrain from calling out the rule.

Wandering monsters work much better in a game where free healing is scarce and slow. If healing doesn't cost you anything, damage can't cause attrition. In Pathfinder 2, my impression is that attrition is caused through conditions, not hp loss.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think Recall Knowledge is okay when used as part of the Investigate activity, but the way it works in combat is horrible. Players expect to know how they can hurt the monster or be hurt by it. People say casters should target the weakest saves, but how do you do that when there’s no way to find that out short of experimentation? I can accept that maybe players just aren’t supposed to have access to that information easily, but it feels at odds with the tactical element of the game.

Thank you.

When it is part of non-combat activities, the cost of the recall knowledge action (=one action) makes no sense. You really need rules on how retries work, how often you can accomplish them, with a time expenditure that maybe starts at 10 minutes but then grows into hours, days or even weeks of research. But alas, Pathfinder 2 is a system deeply focused on the encounter, and the balance of the encounter.

And that's my bigger point: had "gather information" worked more like how it works in other games, with the combat subsystem scrapped entirely, Pathfinder 2 would have been a better game.

 

[Morrus]

Thanks for chiming in, Morrus.

However, if I were to take the implied conclusion "both games have 2000+ things in them so they must be of similar complexity" all that means is:

You've read far more into my statement than I said. You can infer what you wish, of course, but I didn't imply that both games were of similar complexity. I merely pointed out the different feat naming conventions and that comparing feat numbers wasn't the metric to use.

 

[CapnZapp]

I didn't imply that both games were of similar complexity

Absolutely. I sincerely hope I managed not to put those words in your mouth.

Cheers