CapnZapp
Legend
Hmm... another post that reminds me I haven't even started making the biggest argument why Pathfinder 2 is crazily complicated...
Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2
If they’re logical and easy to follow, then people can internalize and understand them. Organized the way I did, you can just ignore the parts you know (who needs to read the requirements every single time?) or don’t care about (the benefit to using Earn Income). When you distill them down, the rules are basically: pay a cost (time and money), make a check, get an item.
I think they could probably be pared down further if there were elements I could trust as references. If it’s a given that items without level are always treated as level 0, then there’s no reason to point that out. The same goes for other things.
As an aside, I bounced both the original and my rewrite off the crafter in my group. His feedback? He lost interest about halfway through the official one and skim/skipped to the end. Presentation is important I guess.
To be fair, so does your lazy-ass attempt at true simplification.
The goal wasn’t to change the underlying mechanics. It was just to show how it could be rewritten for clarity. With that said, if you don’t like formulas, just strike that requirement. If you don’t like the Earn Income stuff, then drop the special text. If you want people to make money off crafting, add a critical success option that gives you back 20% of the materials you spent. Because Craft is now written in the proper structure and with clarity, it’s easier to understand and modify.
With all that said, I like formulas (for verisimilitude). I do my own thing, so I can make sure they’re included in treasure and available for purchase in town. If you’re doing an AP, swapping treasure for stuff that’s useful to the PCs should be a pretty reasonable tweak. Just swap out the talismans and potions for more formulas.
That stuff is compartmentalized. Unless you’re looking at dedications, it’s just not something one has to worry about. The player is always evaluating a subset of all the options. Admittedly, this gets a bit messier when you’re looking at dedications, but that’s going to be less often than just picking feats for the new level you gained.
As for these two things: Twin Takedown only works on your hunted prey. If you Hunt Prey every turn, it has the same effective cost as Double Slice. It’s written the way it is to reinforce the theme of the ranger as someone who hunts a chosen target. The [Flourish] trait prevents it from being spammed 3× a round (which it totally would be). Double Slice doesn’t need the [Flourish] trait because its two-action cost prevents it from being used more than one per round (the action granted by the quickened condition only allows you to Strike or Stride).
However, since you didn’t, I’ll mention skill feats. They are the fly in the ointment. I like the idea of feats that improve non-combat stuff, but skill feats create the perception that you can’t do anything with skill checks that hasn’t been enumerated. I didn’t like skill unlocks in Pathfinder Unchained for the same reason.
I try to strike a balance when dealing with skill checks. “To do it you have to do it” is how I handle actions and activities, so you can’t make a check if you can’t use the action or activity to do what you want to do, but I’m also amenable to taking things outside of the regular action economy. For example, you Make an Impression then a Request of help to a group if you don’t have Group Impression, but we can do an influence event where you get the same outcome. The benefit of Group Impression is it lets you compress all that down.
PF1 has a ton of options, the rules have a lot of special cases (e.g., AoO), and crazy amounts of modifiers with little consistency between what affected the roll and what affected the DC. The options also varied in quality quite a bit, so characters could vary wildly in capability. If your group had characters of mixed power, encounter balancing was just not a thing you could do by the book. Stealth was also broken as written. Swift actions got used as a crutch to work around the limits of the PF1 action economy. It’s was clunky at first (but both familiar to and compatible with 3.5e), but it turned into a bloated mess once you started layering customization on top of it. Whatever clarity PF2 lacks doesn’t compare to the problems PF1 developed.
CapnZapp
Legend
My point is that - and please don't take this personally - you're polishing a turd.
You're focusing on presentation when the question you really should ask yourself: "why are the rules this complicated and full of clutter?"
We all know you can have too simple rules, where extra detail add real value to the experience of playing. This is not that.
That is correct. I would love to just nuke that intimidating table on CRB page 236.To be fair, so does your lazy-ass attempt at true simplification.
It has a lot of detail but none of it matter in practical play. The entire table can be summarized by "you can make a pittance relative to what adventuring on your level would net you". Downtime on the level where the difference between making 7 silver or 9 silver a day should have been relegated to a later supplement or even just to fan works. Nothing about the rest of the game makes this puny difference interesting or important. This table comes across as if it accidentally was imported blindly from "Farmers & Hogs, the Role-Playing Game". It should have nothing to do with epic heroes crafting magical swords.
Again, presenting a simpler alternative can do wonders for people opening their eyes and go "OMG - this makes me realize how shite and cluttery the core rule is". Just say
I actually can't be arsed to calculate how long you actually need, so feel free to require 8 weeks or 12 weeks instead of four weeks. Important note of sanity: nothing breaks if you make Earn Income yield twice as much money, or half as much, or... even remove access to the activity entirely!
Actually, make that part of the rule - empowering the GM:
Now someone's bound to point out that outlier level 11 item that doesn't cost more than a level 10 item and go "your rule sucks!". Know what, it's not the rule that's broken, it's the item that makes me unable to write simple rules. Just make that level 11 item into a level 10 item so we can make the rules easier! [I actually don't have a specific item in mind. I just know someone will find an outlier in the Treasure table.]
Point here is - all that complication and confusion regarding Crafting could just vanish and be replaced with a rule that is crystal clear, easy and fast:
Earn Income. The GM and settlement level determines how high a task level you can find for the particular skill you attempt to earn income from. Each week spent in downtime normally allows you to earn 1/8th of the purchase price of a permanent item of the task's level in gold.
Crafting. This skill lets you make Earn Income tasks at your own level, regardless of the settlement's nature. You can spend these savings on crafting items, and once you've reached half the purchase price of the item, you can spend the other half of the purchase price in gold, and have your item.
no it's just a statement of what I believe the design goals of the games were. And con games are generally so limited they barely qualify as role playing. they are generally just figure puzzle out and award the prizes. You can't get rid of bad GMs you can try to give them advice and help them get better if they want that. 3rd edition mindset was throw it all out there and let the GM pick the pieces he likes. Pathfinder at some point just gave up and started Making arbitrary rules to force everything to be Equal. Thus we got 2e. Thing is everyone likes equal till they realize that includes them. Equal isn't
necessarily fun it's generally boring in my experience.
definitely better and easy for Dm to adjust to their games. Just adjust fraction to what fits your games availability of magic.
When I look at the mechanics of the Craft activity, it’s just paying a cost and making a roll. The only thing I have to look up every time is the cost of the item to determine the price. I don’t consider that complex or complicated or full of clutter.
The point of the exercise was to show that Craft is actually pretty simple. You pay a cost (varies with item), you spend some time (always 4 days), you roll, and then you get your item if you succeed.
Yeah, the requirements list is gross. Most of it is obvious, but I don’t think it’s something people will need to reference more than once or twice. Because of the way I have structured the activity, you can just skip past that part if you want to look up something else (like the special benefit or the results of making the check).
Is the issue the structure? Having requirements, procedure, outcomes, and special cases almost always enumerated? Making a check? Is multiple degrees of success necessarily complex (or complicated or intrinsically clutter or whatever)?
It’s easy in this case to write something short, but that style doesn’t scale. One might point to 5e as an exemplar of this style, but I don’t particularly like the way it moved away from having clear stat blocks. It forces you to dig through text (sometimes paragraphs) every time you just want to look something up or figure out how to resolve a mechanic.
That’s not saying I think the PF2 style is great. If you take advantage of it well, it can really get right to the point and explain things more clearly than a whole bunch of text. It’s also compartmentalized, so if you remember 90% of the action or activity, it’s easy to look up the part you need. Admittedly, and Craft is an example of this, some of the stuff in the CRB isn’t as good as it could be.
As for degrees of success, ehh. They were one of the things that pushed me away from the system in the beginning. They’re specifically crunchy enough that it’s hard to remember the spread of effects for every single different thing. I still look things up pretty regularly. That’s probably not something I should be doing 20+ session into a campaign.
There are ways you can hide the lag of looking up. With a good GM screen (i.e., a custom one not the official one), you can have all the common activities at your fingertips. I’m pretty quick about hitting my PDFs while using roll20. It’s still not great, and we can bog down at times.
I do appreciate what the extra spread of outcomes can do. It’s obviously a very important part of making encounter scaling work. I appreciate some of the affects its had on how I organize information in my notes (e.g., to make adjudicating Investigate, I’ve expanded my use of information hierarchies to knowledge). Was the view worth the climb? Not sure.
Aldarc
Legend
I suspect that the "obvious" lesson to be learned from 5e is that the game should not be unnecessarily complex in regards to its subsystems. However, I'm not sure why 5e should be the primary teacher of this idea when - much as you say here - there are so many other games out there, before and after 5e, that do a FAR BETTER job than 5e at designing more streamlined, less complex, and more robust systems than 5e. 5e arguably preserves a lot of needless complexity itself while also handwaving its complexity with its "rulings not rules" mumbo jumbo.
I tend to agree with your sentiment too that the system and mechanics of 5e do not exactly do a good job at cultivating a particularly meaningful playstyle or game experience.
I wanted to respond to this separately. This is another artifact from PFS. PF1 had one way of earning income, and PFS had another. PF2 takes the table from PFS and makes it more complicated. No, it’s not particularly great or even good. Failure is almost always 20% of the Trained result. Why does it need to be on the table? Does every level of proficiency need its own result?
You try to simplify it by tying the result to the price of a permanent item of your level, but I think that also has some issues. It removes the affect of skill on the result. There are economic consequences to tying the result to the price of a permanent item. Conceivably, Smith (treated as a 6th level character for crafting stuff) can earn up to 36 gp in a week if they can find a 6th level task to perform. And why not? That’s really good money.
If I wanted to improve Earn Income, I’d look at putting together a simplified table. It might be possible to derive the result, but I don’t want to involve a bunch of math for that. Having players try to do math at the table just slows things down. I’d just have Failure give you 20% of the table’s result. Being trained at a higher level of proficiency would give you a modifier (125% for expert performing tasks ≥4th level, 250% for master performing tasks ≥8th level, 500% for legendary performing tasks ≥16th level).
MichaelSomething
Legend
I thought NOT cultivating a particularly meaningful playstyle or game experience was the point of 5E. Trying to cultivating one would just "disempower" the GM somehow...
