Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

!DWolf · Sep 30, 2020

CapnZapp said:
I can just chime in to say that none of the Paizo scenarios I've seen for PF2 work this way. (You absolutely CAN use any game engine for these stories, including PF2... but you'd be making up your own encounter guidelines if you do)

My entire criticism is that the healing system absolutely appears written to be "coupled with exploration mode and pressure"... but that this falls apart in practice

I don’t know about the official PF2E adventures: I haven’t read or run them in case I get a chance to play them some day. But the encounter guidelines seem pretty spot on from what I have seen and I like PF2E precisely because it helps me run these scenarios by having a mechanically defined exploration mode. Specifically, the ship scenario is one of the best games I have run.

Any two encounters that does not allo w for a good rest between pretty much needs to be considered a single encounter (with a single encounter's XP budget)

Dungeons are already so difficult I am finding that I don't want to prolong the scenario by throwing in random encounters. And I certainly can't throw the regular encounters at half-healed heroes.

The game's exceedingly tight encounter balance more or less enforces that the GM allows the party to heal up fully between fights, since anything less either means a two-day dungeon could turn into a week-long slog (if you have to take a long rest after every three fights)...

Are we still talking about my list of scenerios here? Because none of this is relevant to them. And in specific (beware of pet peeve rant incoming): I don’t advocate the use of random encounters in dungeons unless you know exactly what you are doing (and most people don’t). Too many people run random encounters as X creatures burst out of the brush/darkness and attack and neglect encounter fundamentals like foreshadowing, motivation, and giving the players options to use their skills and bypass or avoid the encounter.

FrozenNorth · Sep 30, 2020

!DWolf said:
I actually find character creation quite easy. It’s more difficult than 5e but much easier than PF1E. The key I think is to start with a strong concept.

Honestly, I don’t even disagree with you. When I created my PF2 character (only CRB had been published and I didn’t use an app), I did find it a bit longer than 5e, but it was definitely doable.

My issues with character creation are as follows:

High pace of new material means that players will end up drowning in small choices that take up time and add little (like what happened at the end of 4e);
Many Ancestral feats were extremely small bonuses in limited circumstances (Elves can get a +1 against emotional effects);
I didn’t like Ability penalties on Ancestries;
Skill feats that were required to do things that as a DM, I would have allowed otherwise (like trying to intimidate someone simply by staring at them).

Philip Benz · Sep 30, 2020

!DWolf said:
Too many people run random encounters as X creatures burst out of the brush/darkness and attack and neglect encounter fundamentals like foreshadowing, motivation, and giving the players options to use their skills and bypass or avoid the encounter.

Great stuff! It's these sorts of considerations that can help any RPG escape the murderhobo grind of constant combat and looting. These are some of the places where canny players can avoid combat that risks wearing down their characters unnecessarily, and avoid having to spend 10-60 minutes after each fight healing.

glass · Sep 30, 2020

FrozenNorth said:
If you are at a level where you get a General Feat, you could pick one of the roughly 35 General Feats. Or, since Skill feats are a subset of General feats, you could choose one of the 170 skill feats. Or you could choose the Ancestral Paragon General feat, which allows you to choose an additional Ancestry feat.

Ancestral Paragon only lets you take first-level ancestry feats, not all or even most of them (while there are a couple of ways to braoden it, for most characters it opens up around eight feats). You are only picking from 170 skill feats if you are somehow Legendary in all the skills, which is obviously impossible.

Making a PF2 character involves picking a lot of feats, and some of them are not particularly significant in their effects. Personally, I would have preferred slightly fewer and chunkier feats. But there are ways to express that without misrepresenting what is actually in the book.

_
glass.

Blue · Sep 30, 2020

glass said:
It is rather disingenuous to say that there are 2126 feats with "all filters off" when feats are heavily siloed. You are never picking feats with "all filter off".

_
glass.

A player learning the system absolutely will be looking through all of the feats. A DM will need to have a gist of where the players are going, and at many tables are the de facto rules expert so need to be able to help all of the players build and advance their characters.

FrozenNorth · Sep 30, 2020

kenada said:
Are official adventures going just a little too heavy on the higher-threat encounters?

SPOILERS FOR PLAGUESTONE

The final dungeon in Plaguestone had 12 encounters by my count. Of these, I would describe maybe 4 as “fairly easy”.
Naturally, our group ended up aggroing multiple encounters so the DM ended up playing extremely sub-optimally to avoid killing us.

The game was a bit vague about how much time pressure there was, but there were definitely too many encounters to take care of without regular resting, and leaving, taking a long rest and returning wreaked havoc with verisimilitude.

jmartkdr2 · Sep 30, 2020

Blue said:
A player learning the system absolutely will be looking through all of the feats. A DM will need to have a gist of where the players are going, and at many tables are the de facto rules expert so need to be able to help all of the players build and advance their characters.

I find this hard to believe - I've built several characters and I still haven't read all the feats. I tend to only read the ones I'm able to pick for my class and level.

Ancalagon · Sep 30, 2020

A question.

So apparently this is a game where there are several "high intensity" combats (the need to re-heal after each fight).

How... wide... is the gap between characters in power level? In 3.X and PF1, system mastery could make your PC a lot more potent than a poorly designed one, the difference was almost staggering.

Is this still true in PF2? Is there a need to "plan" your character build several levels in advance?

FrozenNorth · Sep 30, 2020

Ancalagon said:
A question.

So apparently this is a game where there are several "high intensity" combats (the need to re-heal after each fight).

How... wide... is the gap between characters in power level? In 3.X and PF1, system mastery could make your PC a lot more potent than a poorly designed one, the difference was almost staggering.

Is this still true in PF2? Is there a need to "plan" your character build several levels in advance?

To give PF2 its due, the team put a lot of effort into this and it shows.

The difference between a highly optimized character and a basic workman-like character (highest score in the right place, takes feats they intend to use) is not that large. The optimized character will not overshadow the other character.

Blue · Sep 30, 2020

jmartkdr2 said:
I find this hard to believe - I've built several characters and I still haven't read all the feats. I tend to only read the ones I'm able to pick for my class and level.

So, you haven't read ahead to plan for later levels? It's a common thing.

So, you've DMed for a group of newbies where you needed to help them conceptualize, build and advance their characters and you've done that without reading their feats?

So, you've never browsed the feats to see what's possible? Or what's intereting to make a character around?

If the answer to any of these is "no", then this is just anecdotal evidence that doesn't address the points I put out so should be discarded.

Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

!DWolf

Adventurer

FrozenNorth

Hero

Philip Benz

A Dragontooth Grognard

glass

(he, him)

Blue

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

FrozenNorth

Hero

jmartkdr2

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Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon

FrozenNorth

Hero

Blue

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

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