I feel like a lot of PF2e fans took his video the wrong way. Ive seen so many "response" videos. I never once got the feeling he was attacking PF2e but simply giving his own criticisms. His critics are fair in my opinion. Some people like complicated systems and some don't and that's okay.
I mean, when he made his diplomacy shot, I feel like that came across as rather untrue. But that's just me.
The second video is worth watching. He addresses the points you make regarding the kinds of encounters he’s doing, and clarifies what he means by “optimal”. He says he’s not talking about maximizing DPR or min-maxing in general. He’s talking about how classes are designed to encourage you to take a certain sequence of actions, and how those tend to be the right thing to do in most situations.
The example he gives is the ranger. A ranger at the start of almost any combat wants to Hunt Prey. It sets up all your other ranger-y things. After that, you attack. A flurry ranger will make tons of Strikes because that is what a flurry ranger is designed to do. A bow ranger will Hunt Prey and do bow stuff. If you took the gravity weapon focus spell in the APG, you’ll do that but then you’ll Hunt Prey. Other classes are the same way. A swashbuckler wants to generate panache before buckling swashes. Investigators will Devise a Stratagem. It’s just their idiom.
He also includes a 5e example. Your ranger in 5e is basically going to do the same thing. Though it has a few more options due to the way PF2 combat is designed generally, he doesn’t really hold that against PF2. You could probably construct a similar example between PF2 and 3e. I don’t know, but you might even be able to get AD&D into the mix. It’s just a natural issue with systems that give classes obvious things to do, which is that players will tend to do the obvious thing (because it’s obvious).
Ah God, you got me to watch this, or at least move through it quickly. And I'm going to disagree hard here, because his example really isn't that great
First off, the grapple/trip stuff is egregious. In PF2, you don't need to grapple the dude on the second one because it's unnecessary for the situation: he's already flat-footed and at a penalty to attack. Trip him and hit him: you'll have a MAP, but if you have an agile weapon it'll be only a -2 to hit with being flatfooted. Grappling isn't necessary.
"But he'll get up and make all that hard work useless compared to a regular attack!"
Then let him. No matter the turn order, the Fighter will get his attacks in, because in getting up
he'll trigger an Attack of Opportunity. That means the fighter will get to whap him at least once, and he's way more likely to hit than the Ranger. If the order of initiative is for the Fighter next, you've also increased his critical range, which is even better! Dude probably has Runes of Striking on his sword and will completely annihilate that thing with more of a critical chance.
Meanwhile the 5E play isn't bad, but it's way more situational: you don't
have to grapple necessarily (if you can get in an attack in 5E, you
take the attack), but it's much more likely to need to because (unless the fighter has the Sentinel feat) if the wight is up next he doesn't trigger an AoO on standing. And that's the thing: it's got a lot more risk with less upside than PF2: while you are less likely to get hit, advantage on attacks means less because, well, Wights only have an AC of 14. You're not getting a huge expanded critical range, you're just getting a second chance at a possible critical. That's fine... but it's kind of lame.
Also worth noting, you have to be at 5th level to do that with the 5E character because otherwise they could only do one of those
anyways, and grapple is basically close to useless on its own (and I say this as a guy who plays a 5E 6 Shadow Monk/1 Rogue Dragonborn submission artist).
But the problem here is that it's just very... bland whiteboxing. The Ranger is optimized for archery... well, okay, what are his skill feats? Does he have
anything else to look at? Like, you can actually do things with other skills in combat for, and ignoring that part of PF2 kind of misses the point: there's a whole bunch of extra stuff you can do (stuff which adds crunch, but it's
there). With the 5E ranger, well... there's just not much more there. There's just not much more off the page for that character.
So if everything is basically the same between systems, why the issue? Skill actions. Skill actions impose a lot of cognitive load on the GM. There’s a lot to internalize. I’ve complained about them quite a bit here lately in our complexity thread. Cody’s point is he doesn’t want to run that way. He doesn’t want skills broken down into little actions with various degrees of success. He says he could just not use them, but then he can also just use a system that doesn’t work that way in the first place, which is apparently what he’s inclined to do.
To be honest, that’s more or less my reasoning for pitching my group on OSE. Looking at how we actually play, and what I want out of a GMing experience, I could run PF2 and make it work, or I could run a system that better matches our style and what I want out of a system. I just need to convince them it’s not as lethal as they think it is (and if that fails, we’ll likely switch to 5e instead of sticking with PF2).
Cody isn't wrong. (It's his opinion, after all. How could he be?) My experience with PF2 was sort of a straw breaking the camel's back moment for me. For the time being, I'm moving to OSR games (or stripped down 5e for those who must play that).
I just don't have the mental bandwidth for the discussions that arise from PF. The game focuses so much on the system that the mechanics are always in the way of the action. Those mechanics, to me, do not offer a better experience or more enjoyable game, though it requires significantly more prep time, fiddling with math, and slower resolution in and out of combat.
I'm not saying any PF2 fans are wrong - it's just not for me right now.
If this were the argument he made from the beginning (and in less of a kind of dickish comment from the first one), I'd honestly care less. I didn't really care about the Puffin one (except maybe for the "calculating your to-hit thing", which was kind of eye-rolly), but if was just "I want a more freeform game and I honestly don't get much out of it", I wouldn't have anything to say about it. But that's not how he made it out to be.