Recent content by Thomas Shey

A lot of the things that help is that for all people losing their minds about the total number of feats in the game, they're mostly binned by class, and the ones that aren't are general or skill feats, which you don't get a new one of all the time. So you're fishing around in a limited bucket...

I can't say that's generally been my experience; I played two 1-20 campaign, and by the time I hit the upper quarter of those I was regularly having to remind myself what some of the less frequently used feats, focus spells and character subtyping abilities do, especially the ones I got late in...

I think people long settled in the D&D-adjacent sphere have no idea how much more one-off the spell system usually included is to even most fantasy games outside of it, between the combination of every-spell-a-special-case and the fact that if you get to even moderate levels you can end up...

"Grasp", sure; D&D style spells are, in some ways, stupidly simple in that they act like having a bag full of grenades. But the fact there's very little common shape to spells doesn't make keeping track of them exactly the simplest element in the system.

This is a really weird critique. I've seen plenty of people learn relatively complex system by doing, just like any number of other skills; I fail to see why it'd be less true of PF2e. The biggest problem with PF2e is one common in the D&D-sphere; any time you get outside of the simplest...

You can run into one problem I saw with D&D4e, 13th Age or Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard; characters over time can end up accumulating enough options its hard to keep track of them. That tends to be a high-ish level problem though.

Most of the people I've played PF2e learned-by-doing. They aren't experts in the system by any means. Heck, I'm not.

I'd argue its the opposite problem; its more robust. But people, especially in the D&D-sphere, are used to a fair bit of loosey-goosey elements in mechanics that will tolerate them being sloppy and not punish them for it. Which is why when there's problems there its more often because of a GM...

Uhm. Maybe. But I've seen people make far-reaching mistakes in much simpler systems Just because they missed how something goes, and at the least, the fine-tuning of the fights is just about as likely to go in favor of PCs as against them if an error is made. Honestly, the most likely way for...

It can still matter considerably whether it involves other people's money (Kickstarter) or just your own, however.

I still stand by the opinion nothing about either process makes it more one or the other though; prior to that moment there was no indication the character knew this particular piece of information, so the only question is the source of and process of deciding if the information was there. The...

Came in to suggest DunDraCon, read the first post, noticed what day it is, turned around and went out the way I came in...

My own feeling is that both are, effectively, "information spontaneously appearing in your head" if you did not already know the character knew this information previously for some reason, so it strikes me as this just being different people being irritable about different, but still flawed...

Today I learned that pistol shrimp exist. I don't think I want anyone to ever tell me an alien animal I come up with is outlandish again. (Reference: Alpheidae - Wikipedia)

I think there's a difference between "Nothing exists" and "nothing exists that's going to be interesting to adventurers". The expectation that the world is going to be stuffed full of different things of the weirdness that demands adventurers is, honestly, kind of contrived. The fact that...