Pathfinder 2E I played my first PF2e game this week. Here's why I'm less inclined to play again.

Justice and Rule said:

Lot of tags, but basically obvious.

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I want to note how hilarious this is because most of these tags do not, actually, mean obvious things in the standard word sense or in the “carried from D&D” sense.

Like, Gestural would be obvious for what you said Manipulate means here. I still have no idea what your Incapacitate tags means with how you defined it.

Much like Draw Steel! (Which does some weird stuff with how it terms out areas and shapes especially that are unintuitive and just sound bad), this feels more like a case of “referential” design as opposed to intuitive.

zakael19 said:

I want to note how hilarious this is because most of these tags do not, actually, mean obvious things in the standard word sense or in the “carried from D&D” sense.

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They absolutely do? Like, "Subtle", "Mental", "Emotion", and yes, "Manipulate" all do or involve what they say on the tin. But more than that, it's not that the tags make it immediately identifiable to someone who doesn't know the rules, but allows someone who has a passing knowledge of them to immediately identify the common rules riders instead of having to read two paragraphs of text on every bespoke spell effect.

zakael19 said:

Like, Gestural would be obvious for what you said Manipulate means here.

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"Manipulate" doesn't just mean "Gestural", it means you are doing things with your hands. That can be anything from opening a door, pressing a button, or casting a spell. I'd say it's very obvious.

zakael19 said:

I still have no idea what your Incapacitate tags means with how you defined it.

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That's because it was a brief explanation, not the full rules? If you want, I can give it to you, but the basic idea is this:

Incapacitate spells are generally spells with harsh effects, and thus they've limited their effectiveness against creatures that are higher CR than the spell itself i.e. their CR is higher than the twice the spell slot of the spell cast. If their CR is higher, then their save is counted as being one step up from what it was (Failure becomes success, success becomes critical success), thus making it harder to nuke bosses with simple spells with low rank spell slots.

zakael19 said:

Much like Draw Steel! (Which does some weird stuff with how it terms out areas and shapes especially that are unintuitive and just sound bad), this feels more like a case of “referential” design as opposed to intuitive.

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I mean, it's "referential" in that tagging is an indexing technique: it's a flag to say "This rule applies" without having to rewrite the rule over and over, in the same way that you can see the rules say a "Basic" save, which has specific implications for effects across the CF/F/S/CS save spectrum (No Damage/Half Damage/Full Damage/Double Damage). Compared to something like 5E, where every spell is basically treated as a unique entity, it's really helpful.

Justice and Rule said:

They absolutely do? Like, "Subtle", "Mental", "Emotion", and yes, "Manipulate" all do or involve what they say on the tin. But more than that, it's not that the tags make it immediately identifiable to someone who doesn't know the rules, but allows someone who has a passing knowledge of them to immediately identify the common rules riders instead of having to read two paragraphs of text on every bespoke spell effect.



"Manipulate" doesn't just mean "Gestural", it means you are doing things with your hands. That can be anything from opening a door, pressing a button, or casting a spell. I'd say it's very obvious.



That's because it was a brief explanation, not the full rules? If you want, I can give it to you, but the basic idea is this:

Incapacitate spells are generally spells with harsh effects, and thus they've limited their effectiveness against creatures that are higher CR than the spell itself i.e. their CR is higher than the twice the spell slot of the spell cast. If their CR is higher, then their save is counted as being one step up from what it was (Failure becomes success, success becomes critical success), thus making it harder to nuke bosses with simple spells with low rank spell slots.



I mean, it's "referential" in that tagging is an indexing technique: it's a flag to say "This rule applies" without having to rewrite the rule over and over, in the same way that you can see the rules say a "Basic" save, which has specific implications for effects across the CF/F/S/CS save spectrum (No Damage/Half Damage/Full Damage/Double Damage). Compared to something like 5E, where every spell is basically treated as a unique entity, it's really helpful.

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Right, this is the response of somebody who likes and gets the design ethos.

But you have to have a broad understanding of the design space of PF2’s unique choices to make them be “obvious;” and it’s rooted in a deliberate design choice to be complex for its own sake to make people who enjoy a high degree of system mastery and a certain style of very idiosyncratic decision making happy.

I'm assuming a core conceit of PF2 is avoiding exception based / ability distinct design? So you've got a much higher up-front cognitive cost, but you don't have to worry about unique monsters or abilities have their own sub-rules?

Eg: from Draw Steel! (another tactical game which has a fair bit of complexity but streamlines the core tags quite a bit), some ability unique text (nothing else in the game turns you green) but core Attribute & "edge" Effects.

Turn Green 2d10 + 3 Villain Action 1
Area, Magic
(measure icon) 3 burst (target icon) Each enemy in the area
{<11 P<1 the target turns green (save ends)
12-16 P<2 the target turns green (save ends)
17+} P<3 the target turns green until the end of the encounter

Effect: Green shadows crawl out from under the bredbeddle’s feet and turn each target green. The bredbeddle has a double edge on power rolls against any target turned green this way.

zakael19 said:

Right, this is the response of somebody who likes and gets the design ethos.

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No, I'm just willing to engage with the design ethos. Like, tags aren't meant to explain something; they are "tags" because they are quick rules references for GMs. For the most part they mean what they say, and if you have a passing familiarity with the rules, they make it easy to understand what common rules it does or doesn't follow before you read the spell block.

Like, any player who has a passing familiarity with PF2 is going to know that any Incapacitation spell is going to have limited use on boss monsters before even reading what the spell does because the rule is called out immediately. Again, it's an organizational aid, not an explainer.

zakael19 said:

But you have to have a broad understanding of the design space of PF2’s unique choices to make them be “obvious;” and it’s rooted in a deliberate design choice to be complex for its own sake to make people who enjoy a high degree of system mastery and a certain style of very idiosyncratic decision making happy.

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Is it even a unique choice? Bunches of games use tags. Calling it "idiosyncratic" is feels like a reach.

zakael19 said:

I'm assuming a core conceit of PF2 is avoiding exception based / ability distinct design? So you've got a much higher up-front cognitive cost, but you don't have to worry about unique monsters or abilities have their own sub-rules?

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Generally? The tags reference a lot of specific rules and conditions, and while you can have individualized attacks, the tags make it so you can easily take care of edge cases. Let me use this one as an example:





So this is from the off-brand Aboleth stat block: an attack with a "unique" rider. So the attack has "Agile", which means that instead of having a -5/-10 for second and third attacks, it's -4/-8. Basically, the attack is closer to a light weapon. "Magical" means it's, well, magical. And "Reach 20" is also pretty obvious.

The second part is where the tags are particularly useful. "Curse" means that it can only be removed by techniques or spells that target curses, which is incredibly useful because you can have a bunch of different sorts of attacks and long-term effects and I can immediately say "Yes, Cleanse Affliction will/will not work on this". "Occult" means it's using Occult magic power to do it. And "Manipulate" tells me you need the hand to do it, which is obvious but who knows what some enterprising rules lawyer might try to say.

Similarly, the effects are mostly standardized conditions: Clumsy is basically a -1 per level to Dexterity, Enfeebled is a -1 per level to Strength. -10 to speed is fairly obvious, but I will say it's not completely standardized.

zakael19 said:

Eg: from Draw Steel! (another tactical game which has a fair bit of complexity but streamlines the core tags quite a bit), some ability unique text (nothing else in the game turns you green) but core Attribute & "edge" Effects.

Turn Green 2d10 + 3 Villain Action 1
Area, Magic
(measure icon) 3 burst (target icon) Each enemy in the area
{<11 P<1 the target turns green (save ends)
12-16 P<2 the target turns green (save ends)
17+} P<3 the target turns green until the end of the encounter

Effect: Green shadows crawl out from under the bredbeddle’s feet and turn each target green. The bredbeddle has a double edge on power rolls against any target turned green this way.

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Having read Draw Steel I actually know what is going on here (lol). But that's part of the thing: the rules shorthand is because its assumed you read through the section which explains it. For example, I know what they mean by the P (Presence) and that if you are below that number, the extra effect applies. If you are vaguely familiar with the system (And I am quite vague with the system), you can still glean a bunch of knowledge from just the basics.

Edit: Whoops, I brushed through the Effect sentence and didn't notice Double Edge, but that just means any roll basically goes up one level, so an <11 roll becomes a 12-16 and so on. A regular edge is just... a +2, if I remember correctly? But I might not.

4E was the same way, where I kind of brushed off it because it wasn't written the way I was used to... but that was on me for not engaging with the design because it was unfamiliar to me. Once you have the bare basics, a lot of the powers and monsters suddenly make sense. Same with a game like PF2: it doesn't take much to really understand those tags, but it does take something.

zakael19 said:

Oh absolutely. This holds true for many acculturation things! I had this driven home to me by playing Destiny 2 (the online 3rd person shooter) with my wife, who'd wanted to try it for ages but never played a shooter in her life. The tutorial area was immediately using HUD shorthands and video game terminology and assumptions that are second nature to anybody who'd grown up with such things; completely alien and confusing to her. She would've never gotten through the tutorial bit without me guiding her.

Like, in turn, I've played a decent amount of TTRPGs. I started with 3.0/3.5 as a teen, took a break for a long time, came back with early 5e. I've played 4e recently, and worked with a group to try and learn DS!.

Pathfinder 2e's specific way of using tags like Justice and Rule posted above just bounces off me, and the "lots of tags but basically obvious" is kind of hilarious.

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While I can kind of see that, I think his second point was important: a lot of the tags are there to tell you how to resolve special situations. Note that out of the examples he lists, only two apply regularly; the rest are to tell you what happens when certain kinds of specific situations apply, without having the spell or special ability go into in detail in every single case. You get pretty used to those common ones after a bit; there isn't that much cognitive overhead.

This is true of things like weapon or armor tags too; some are things you want to know about so you note them in your head, some are things that only matter occasionally so you ignore them most of the time. Thee are usually more of the latter than the former (for example, the "Noisy" tag that applies to chainmail only is relevant to Stealth attempts; it largely just warns you off using chainmail as your medium armor choice if you think you're going to be prone to using Stealth right away, so it rarely actually comes up in play),

nods The tags are there to efficiently and explicitly indicate where certain rules interactions are intended, in an extensible fashion that doesn't need errata propagating across many books when another thing is added that triggers off the same category of whatever. Ensuring that rules text is referred to rather than duplicated many times also prevents inconsistencies -- it's hard for the one explanation to get out of sync with itself -- and to limit the need to repeat errata.

There's some fiddly bits in PF2e, but... well, the tag system isn't really on the list. Perhaps the most impactful problem is the whole concept of "instance of damage", which was not entirely explicit to a complete degree and which was commonly interpreted in a different way than a recently published, unusually controversial errata that still didn't entirely make clear how one would be expected to rule in the most complicated cases.

Honestly, the most common case of people seeming to have real problems here usually involves tracking conditions. I personally feel that's less about the number of conditions (there's nothing there that wasn't represented in one way or another in PF1e or D&D 3 and 4e, just with less regularizing) than the fact they're perhaps used more commonly to give attacks texture than in some other versions, and thus its more likely you'll need to potentially realize what they all are (and possibly track more than one of them at a time) than in most D&D-adjacents.

Yeah, when I think of the fiddly bits of PF2, I think Poisons/Afflictions and the Counteract system, though I think the latter would be solved by creating a clearer table (in trying to put all the info they could, they made it incredibly difficult to read). Maybe also the Crafting system, but I think that's also an artifact of the mechanical need for everything to be balanced for Society play.

Yeah, Crafting could be clearer (for random reasons I've had a lot of characters that use Crafting for one reason or another, and I always have to remind myself how the hell it works for a while every time).

Thomas Shey said:

Yeah, Crafting could be clearer (for random reasons I've had a lot of characters that use Crafting for one reason or another, and I always have to remind myself how the hell it works for a while every time).

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I mean, it's changed like 3 times. Again, trying to balance for people who play at home as well as something for Society play isn't easy and is almost certainly the problem.