Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

[Lefi2017]

You say that, but I don't know anybody who runs any system 100% by raw, even 5e

Joking aside, I don't really see big deal with grips and door opening? I mean, yeah, one of my players started to troll me about two handed weapon casting fiend until we noticed that you can actually cast somatic spells while having two handed weapon. Its kinda weird, but it seems to be mostly to give reason for "one hand free" character types to exist(such as saving hand free for shoving or tripping while having rapier)

But yeah, I... Don't really get what you mean with the middle sentence besides that its your personal opinions and I personally disagree with it and I've felt much more freedom playing and running 2e than running 1e?

Isn't 5e a system to be easy made to be easily moded and subject to rulings by design after all ruling over rules is a core component

Can you say the same about pathfinder 2e ? that house rule do not invalidate feats or mechanics?

 

[MaskedGuy]

Isn't 5e a system to be easy made to be easily moded and subject to rulings by design after all ruling over rules is a core component

Can you say the same about pathfinder 2e ? that house rule do not invalidate feats or mechanics?

Thing is though, I disagree with all examples of "2e feats that allow you to do things that gm used to allow me to do!" I've seen so far and with most examples in 1e actually.

Like, I'd never have allowed someone to automatically(as in make it permanent feature of the skill itself) make creature friendly with deception, you'd still need diplomacy for that. At most I'd give you bonuses on diplomacy or lower dc due to creature believing that you truly do believe yourself to be their long lost relative (at least in case of random npcs, of course if character is searching for their long lost relative and you convincingly give them good story that fits the facts, that is the different case. Like completely depends context of the situation. Gang member to whom you successfully lie about being member to replace them on guard shift wouldn't have reason to assume you are random delusional person and if they knew shift roster by heart you couldn't roll it in first place since no lie would convince them )

Oh wait got sidetracked there, you are asking why I don't feel free in 5e?

That is mostly because 5e is weird mix of freeform without explicitly telling you it is freeform like cypher system does, 5e also has weird inconsistency of having exact rules for some things while not having rules for other similar things making it really annoying as gm who runs things by the book figure out which things have rules and which don't. I also feel as gm often as if I'm being arbitrary like "Uh, I guess I allow any roll that is above 20 or 17 to be success in this situation since I don't have idea what dc this would be or how hard it should be but I guess it should be pretty hard." As player I feel like I don't have enough customization options and that all my pcs of different classes feel similar, as gm I feel like I don't have interesting mechanics or monsters to play with. Like cypher system's freeform? The monsters don't basically have "list" of what they can do, they have EXAMPLES of what they can do. They have amount of damage they do, but you can pretty much describe the damage as part of any kind of scene you imagine. Meanwhile in 5e's freeform? Well lot of monsters have... Basically just multiattack and nothing else. I guess they could shove someone out of the way like pcs could but uh yeah.

...Anyway, I got side on side rant I guess better way to say it "5e is too boring for me and I don't like idea of system requiring house rules to be interesting". Like sure I have lot of house rules for 1e, but that is because 1e is broken system, its not boring one ;P

 

[FrozenNorth]

These last few posts got me thinking more about why I view simplicity the way I do. Well, I have a computer science background and work as a software engineer. Taking small things and building bigger things out of them is just what I do.

So traits and stuff like that appeals to me because they are like little boxes that I can combine into bigger effects. With free-style rules, you’ve got to infer intent and hope that your overall understanding of the system is enough that you don’t accidentally break things. With a trait, you should just need to reason about the effect it will have on things with that trait (which are all conveniently identified because that’s how traits work).

Interesting. I have developed in the opposite manner. IRL (and in the game-o-sphere), I have to deal with enough people who act like the letter of the law must prevail over both the spirit of the law and common sense. As such, I am happy when the system demonstrates that it trusts GMs to make the judgment calls that they will make anyway.

I do think that GM-facing material could do a better job of teaching people how to GM in a fun and exciting way.

I also find that technical writing obscures this ideal in a couple of ways. First, the standard of technical writing means more specificity and more detail than “natural language” writing. Paradoxically, this also means that that it is easier to honestly misinterpret the text (because you are trying to absorb more information) and also, because no one is perfect, also introduces loopholes. Second, I find that technical writing tends to obscure the DM’s role in adjudication.

But I can respect that in other people technical writing can aid in information processing and retention.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Thing is though, I disagree with all examples of "2e feats that allow you to do things that gm used to allow me to do!" I've seen so far and with most examples in 1e actually.

Can’t speak for you personally, but here are some examples that bother me:

• as a DM, I would probably allow an Athletics check to climb faster or swim further;
• as a DM, I would probably let a climbing character try to hold on with 1 hand and fight creatures off with the other (probably at a penalty ) and let them make an Athletics check at the end of their turn to avoid falling;
• I would probably allow a character to impress multiple characters at the same time;
• I would allow a character a roll (with a penalty) to impress a person in a short period of time;
• In certain circumstances, I would allow a character to play an instrument to impress an NPC. In others, I wouldn’t allow a character to do this even if the character were a famous musician.

 

[kenada]

I think one of the reasons why PF2 might feel more smooth (and possibly you @kenada ) to me personally is that one of the lead designers is actually a very well trained Computer Scientist. Before joining Paizo Mark Seifter was working on his PhD at MIT. I think that's way there is such a strong like modular and object oriented approach to systems design. Also probably why it sometimes shows too much of its guts.

I got those same vibes too. The system strikes me as very SOLID. I’ve had to restrain myself from making an analogy to Progressive Disclosure (but that’s sort of where I was going in my discussion of simplicity and traits).

 

[MaskedGuy]

Can’t speak for you personally, but here are some examples that bother me:

• as a DM, I would probably allow an Athletics check to climb faster or swim further;
• as a DM, I would probably let a climbing character try to hold on with 1 hand and fight creatures off with the other (probably at a penalty ) and let them make an Athletics check at the end of their turn to avoid falling;
• I would probably allow a character to impress multiple characters at the same time;
• I would allow a character a roll (with a penalty) to impress a person in a short period of time;
• In certain circumstances, I would allow a character to play an instrument to impress an NPC. In others, I wouldn’t allow a character to do this even if the character were a famous musician.

I'm mostly responding this to demonstrate how I think:

• That first one is kinda like saying "with good athletics roll I allow you to run faster without needing feat feat to increase movement speech." And even if you do something like "okay, you can try to climb faster but dc is uh... Let's say higher by five or ten" the feat would still be useful for climbing at faster speed with regular dc or EVEN faster with house ruled higher dc.
• Second one is one of those "I don't see how feat's existence makes that impossible since feat just removes flat penalty and says you can hold on with one arm". Heck you can actually hold on the thing you are climbing with one hand already, the combat climber more permisses you to continue climbing with only one hand.
• Third is one of those grey situations. I'm willing to consider "crowd" a single target when doing oratory speech, but when you are trying to convince something like four council representatives, you usually would have to convince them separately yeah.
• Fourth is one of those "well gm tells you to roll first impression check" situations where you can't assume as player you can always do so, unless you have the said feat.
• Fifth is again one of those "well this isn't feature of the skill but something gm allows me to do in this scene" things.

Like, I'm not opposed of gm allowing stuff like "Well in this situation you can make impression on character using arcana to impress them with your knowledge!" I'm against someone saying "This feat allows me to do something I was already allowed to do!" when in fact most examples I've seen are kinda like versatile performance for bards in 1e: aka using skill in way you wouldn't use them normally I can say that I'm not normally more friendly to skilled musicians. Like, if you can always for free use performance to make impression and request actions without feat, why would you ever take diplomacy profiency? You wouldn't, just like how I never had skill ranks in skills I had versatile performance for

 

[Campbell]

Isn't 5e a system to be easy made to be easily moded and subject to rulings by design after all ruling over rules is a core component

Can you say the same about pathfinder 2e ? that house rule do not invalidate feats or mechanics?

Fifth Edition is not really modular in any kind of meaningful way. Subsystems are intertwined. There are exceptions all over the place including a massive number of passive effects layered on top. From a technical standpoint there is no real modularity. Like the call feats and multiclassing modular, but they have massive implications that have far reaching implications for the rest of the game. If 5e were an application it would be spaghetti code with instructions to write new code and not worry about it.

PF2 is modular in like a technical sense. Every element of the game is written to be as isolated and modular as possible. Interactions between elements are managed with consistent interfaces that are extendable. It is extremely easy to see dependencies.

In the Game Mastery Guide they pretty much lay out all their design tech for you and it's pretty much what designers actually use to design content.

 

[MaskedGuy]

Fifth Edition is not really modular in any kind of meaningful way. Subsystems are intertwined. There are exceptions all over the place including a massive number of passive effects layered on top. From a technical standpoint there is no real modularity. Like the call feats and multiclassing modular, but they have massive implications that have far reaching implications for the rest of the game. If 5e were an application it would be spaghetti code with instructions to write new code and not worry about it.

PF2 is modular in like a technical sense. Every element of the game is written to be as isolated and modular as possible. Interactions between elements are managed with consistent interfaces that are extendable. It is extremely easy to see dependencies.

In the Game Mastery Guide they pretty much lay out all their design tech for you and it's pretty much what designers actually use to design content.

Yeah I got too distracted with ranting on freedom aspect to actually comment on that fact. In 5e its only modular in sense of "its easy homebrew new subclasses and races because mechanically they follow simple but strict formula", but that doesn't help with balancing it at all.

 

[MaskedGuy]

Oops double post, is there way to delete accidental post...

 

[kenada]

Interesting. I have developed in the opposite manner. IRL (and in the game-o-sphere), I have to deal with enough people who act like the letter of the law must prevail over both the spirit of the law and common sense. As such, I am happy when the system demonstrates that it trusts GMs to make the judgment calls that they will make anyway.

I do think that GM-facing material could do a better job of teaching people how to GM in a fun and exciting way.

This is going to be an “out-there” analogy, so just roll with me for a moment.

I practice GTD. When I first met my wife, she commented about how I was capturing everything I might want to do. She saw that as my constraining myself. How could I live in the moment if I had a list of all my to-dos? I told her I do it for exactly the opposite reason.

By having that list, I can make an intentioned decision about what I am doing. Many times, what I do isn’t even on that list, but because I have it there, I can trust that it will surface important things when they are important. I can e.g., go visit someone for a week and never be worried that I forgot something at work.

That’s how I view having a good framework in a game. That’s why I call it empowering rather than constraining. Because of that framework, I can fit improvised actions into the game’s action economy and have things key off of them where it makes sense. Because I can reason about the game, I can tweak things with an understanding of the implications.

For example, if you want to let people use a skill action in a way that’s not written, just let them do it at a −2 penalty. A skill feat at best (or worst, depending on one’s perspective) will let you just do it, so you haven’t stepped on any of the game’s niche-protection toes. If it seems extra hard, allow it at a −4 penalty instead. No, that’s not RAW, but the game’s framework allows me to conclude that should be a pretty fair approach.

I also find that technical writing obscures this ideal in a couple of ways. First, the standard of technical writing means more specificity and more detail than “natural language” writing. Paradoxically, this also means that that it is easier to honestly misinterpret the text (because you are trying to absorb more information) and also, because no one is perfect, also introduces loopholes. Second, I find that technical writing tends to obscure the DM’s role in adjudication.

Writing is hard, and technical writing is extra hard. Well-written technical writing should make it clear what the GM’s role is and how the GM should use the tools in the game to adjudicate it. I would actually offer Apocalypse World as an example of strong technical writing. The tone is very casual, but it’s very exact in what you should be doing and how you use the system.