Pathfinder 2E Taking20 -"I'm Quitting Pathfinder 2e Because of This Issue"

[Justpassingthrough]

PF2 has more than forty feets, Dnd5e has 15. Each 5e feet are very different. Yes PF2 is more complex, which is good and bad, but it also has a lot of sausage filling that does not contribute with options that make differences.

In the case of unconscious , as an example. If you simply apply the version of 5e to the pathfinder game, you have a more fluid game that doesn't miss a thing.

• unconscious 5e
• An unconscious creature is incapacitated (see the condition), can’t move or speak, and is unaware of its surroundings
• The creature drops whatever it’s holding and falls prone.
• The creature automatically fails Strength and Dexterity saving throws.
• Attack rolls against the creature have advantage.
• Any attack that hits the creature is a critical hit if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature.

• unconscious PF2

You’re sleeping, or you’ve been knocked out. You can’t act. You take a –4 status penalty to AC, Perception, and Reflex saves, and you have the blinded and flat-footed conditions. When you gain this condition, you fall prone and drop items you are wielding or holding unless the effect states otherwise or the GM determines you’re in a position in which you wouldn’t.

If you’re unconscious because you’re dying, you can’t wake up while you have 0 Hit Points. If you are restored to 1 Hit Point or more via Healing, you lose the dying and unconscious conditions and can act normally on your next turn.

If you are unconscious and at 0 Hit Points, but not dying, you naturally return to 1 Hit Point and awaken after sufficient time passes. The GM determines how long you remain unconscious, from a minimum of 10 minutes to several hours. If you receive Healing during this time, you lose the unconscious condition and can act normally on your next turn.

If you’re unconscious and have more than 1 Hit Point (typically because you are asleep or unconscious due to an effect), you wake up in one of the following ways.

Each causes you to lose the unconscious condition.

• You take damage, provided the damage doesn’t reduce you to 0 Hit Points. If the damage reduces you to 0 Hit Points, you remain unconscious and gain the dying condition as normal.
• You receive Healing, other than the natural Healing you get from resting.
• Someone shakes you awake with an Interact action.
• There’s loud noise going on around you—though this isn’t automatic. At the start of your turn, you automatically attempt a Perception check against the noise’s DC (or the lowest DC if there is more than one noise), waking up if you succeed. If creatures are attempting to stay quiet around you, this Perception check uses their Stealth DCs. Some magical effects make you sleep so deeply that they don’t allow you to attempt this Perception check.
• If you are simply asleep, the GM decides you wake up either because you have had a restful night’s sleep or something disrupted that rest.

 

[Justice and Rule]

PF2 has more than forty feets, Dnd5e has 15. Each 5e feet are very different. Yes PF2 is more complex, which is good and bad, but it also has a lot of sausage filling that does not contribute with options that make differences.

The 5E feats are very different, but because they are non-essential and competing with an ability boost, their quality varies greatly. Stuff like Linguist, Charger, the Armored Proficiency Feats... it's hard to compete with the standouts like Sentinel, Alert, Great Weapon Master, and Lucky. And part of this is the streamlined nature of the system: for example, you can't just get a skill in 5E. You can't try to just learn something on the outside, you have to get a Feat because of how the skill system is simplified down.

And that's not me hating on it: I honestly love it! I love having more of those feats. I just wish they had not tried to section it off and put more time into making each feat a bit more closer in value to the others. It's a tradeoff: you gain a simpler system, but at the cost of having less ability to modify things on the fly. For example, it's easier to add skills in PF2 compared to 5E by a country mile, which is very nice for character progression.

Similarly there are certainly ribbon feats in the PF2 rules, but you are penalized less for taking them because you gain feats much more. It's a different philosophy; you can fine-tune your character more without losing much in taking feats that are less directly useful but more characterful because one feat is not a huge dealbreaker in most cases.

In the case of unconscious , as an example. If you simply apply the version of 5e to the pathfinder game, you have a more fluid game that doesn't miss a thing.

You're mistaking formatting (doing a bulleted list) for doing it in paragraph form. If you want to do it in the same format, the effects of unconsciousness reads largely the same.

• You can’t act.
• You take a –4 status penalty to AC, Perception, and Reflex saves,
• You have the blinded and flat-footed conditions
• You fall prone and drop items you are wielding or holding unless the effect states otherwise or the GM determines you’re in a position in which you wouldn’t.

The extra stuff is talking about the difference between different kinds of unconsciousness, which the 5E version doesn't give guidance on. For example, there's no guidance on the difference between "sleeping" and "dying" in 5E, so by rules as written, you might not wake up with loud noises if you are asleep because you are completely unaware of your surroundings while unconscious (which would include hearing stuff). It also contains stuff like how you lose the Unconscious condition, which is done elsewhere in the 5E rulebook.

Really, not much is added there, they just cover things differently: in this case, PF2 has all their stuff on the Unconscious condition in one place (which definitely is not the standard in the CRB), while 5E has it split up differently, only listing the effects rather than what could potentially end it (and how those might be different situations).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Personally, I try to avoid treating anyone's views as sacrosanct, I have no power to compel anyone to change their mind about anything, but I live by the principle "all debate seeks the truth" so I'll happily debate anyone where I find something worth challenging or discussing. The assertion that 'no one's going to change their mind' is a thought-terminating cliche that typically seeks control. As a rule, people are welcome to make their own choices and disengage when they're ready-- I'll do the same when I am, and I certainly don't feel a moral obligation to never challenge others on their views, its not like anyone's being forced to respond.

I think you need to assess things in at least three buckets when doing this. Its useful to debate the facts. It is sometimes useful to debate opinion. It is almost always useless to debate taste.

(Though I do agree with the side point that there's a simple answer for people who don't want to engage with a response.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’m like you, and frankly, I don’t understand the posters that seem to think it is an unusual way to build a character.

Looking over the relevant feats doesn't strike me as unusual; but spending enough time looking at ones that are irrelevant (i.e. once you've decided basic things that make them nonstarters either by prerequisite or by the fact they'll never be useful) does. As I said, if you're playing a PF2e sword and board fighter and you spend a bunch of time looking at either two weapon or two handed weapon specific feats, and then feel put off because you did so, its hard not to see that as a self-inflicted wound. Its like going out shopping for a pickup truck and then spending a bunch of time looking at subcompact cars and resenting the time and attention it took.

I generally have an idea about the character, but at the ancestry phase, this is more likely to mean that I exclude one or two ancestries, not that I already know which ancestry I want to play.

Same thing for classes. If I want to play a spellcaster, I’ll probably be considering three or four classes, not one. And generally, I build a character with the intention of playing it long term, so of course I won’t just read the level 1 class feats.

This is even more pronounced with skills. The options for skill feats are going to guide my choices for which skills I choose, not vice-versa.

Well, everyone's got their own gig, but no, I can't say this seems like a typical approach to me. It might be in cases where I've gotten into a game completely cold, but normally by the time I'm actually looking at anything in detail, I've already excluded a large number of options right out the gate. I might consider whether I'm going to play a wizard or a sorcerer, but I'm not going to be considering the whole body of spellcasting classes.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Looking over the relevant feats doesn't strike me as unusual; but spending enough time looking at ones that are irrelevant (i.e. once you've decided basic things that make them nonstarters either by prerequisite or by the fact they'll never be useful) does. As I said, if you're playing a PF2e sword and board fighter and you spend a bunch of time looking at either two weapon or two handed weapon specific feats, and then feel put off because you did so, its hard not to see that as a self-inflicted wound.

If you want to be a one-handed weapon fighter, you could go Fighter, Ranger, Barbarian or Champion (and that’s excluding multiclass).

If you have already chosen your class, your ancestry and your fighting style, than of course you will have fewer choices to make than if you hadn’t chosen those things.

Perhaps it comes down to how each of us approaches character creation. I often have some idea of the character I want to build, but I’m pretty open every step of the way to modify elements to something that works better.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you want to be a one-handed weapon fighter, you could go Fighter, Ranger, Barbarian or Champion (and that’s excluding multiclass).

If you have already chosen your class, your ancestry and your fighting style, than of course you will have fewer choices to make than if you hadn’t chosen those things.

Perhaps it comes down to how each of us approaches character creation. I often have some idea of the character I want to build, but I’m pretty open every step of the way to modify elements to something that works better.

Sometimes I am too. But again, if I just go out to buy a vehicle, I'm not surprised that I'm looking at an awful lot of things until I narrow it down some.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I think you need to assess things in at least three buckets when doing this. Its useful to debate the facts. It is sometimes useful to debate opinion. It is almost always useless to debate taste.

(Though I do agree with the side point that there's a simple answer for people who don't want to engage with a response.)

That's not something I really believe, some things are acquired tastes, and enjoying them requires some infrastructure (experience, learning curve, readjustment of expectations, social components, etc) I've had plenty of experiences with that, and witnessed others do so as well. Taking for granted that people can always just drop the conversation with me, and I'm still enjoying myself, why worry about it?

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you think you can usefully argue taste, then I'll be honest and say nothing in my life has suggested you're doing anything but wasting your time, but you be you.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

If you think you can usefully argue taste, then I'll be honest and say nothing in my life has suggested you're doing anything but wasting your time, but you be you.

I love that in your eyes debating taste is a waste of time, but posts like this aren't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I love that in your eyes debating taste is a waste of time, but posts like this aren't.

Yes? If you think I find that any kind of critique, afraid to disappoint.