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You could have something like the kineticist from PF2, or the psychic from PF2. They both rely on a small set of powers and feel like casters.

Nah. In most other systems magic tends to be much more restricted. Either there's a real cost involved, there's some risk involved, or it's in some way much more difficult to use liberally like magic is in D&D. Try Call of Cthulhu, Dragonbane, Mörk Borg, etc etc I admit I haven't played any...

Nah it's a real problem, and we know it's a real problem because 1: Not only is it a recurring subject in every D&D-related forum I've ever been to, but... 2: It's also interestingly not a recurring subject in several discussion forums where D&D isn't the main system being discussed, and...

A reference pear.

I think that's because spells are part of a unified subsystem. Classes without access to spells tend to have their abilities here and there with no rhyme or reason to their placement. Some abilities might be feats, some might be class abilities etc. etc. This is, I think, why all classes...

Right! The laughing smiley is hard to read. lowers his guns My nickname might be a tad too confrontational. Perhaps I should get it changed.

Soo ehh... My point isn't really that PF2 is super fast for character generation or anything. I made the comment more to say that it really surprised me how fast it works in practice. I was expecting more of a slog a'la 3.5 or PF1. It's not as fast as, say, 5E.

What's with your confrontational use of the laughing smiley?

Gonna have to agree with payn on this. The leveling in PF2 is pretty smooth. It really benefits from planning things out in advance, but you don't have the crazy levels of complexity you had in PF1 or 3.5 etc.

I agree that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity in pre-4E dnd, but I play systems simpler than those that still use asymmetric design. Lancer, for example, has build complexity below anything in 3.5 and the likes and uses an NPC-construction system that works something like this: You...

I mean in this case whether it is good or bad is fairly obvious, yeah? The more complex PC-generation is, the less you want the NPC and PC systems to be symmetrical. I don't think there actually is any benefit to having the two character generation procedures be the same where it takes this...

This isn't an indicator of system complexity, but of bad design aesthetics. The system should be asymmetric. There's no reason why an NPC should be designed using the same rules as a PC.

I think where THAC0 gets weird isn't just subtraction, it's that the whole thing is counterintuitive with how you subtract the AC from the roll and the modifier can get negative above a certain threshold. For example: Ascending AC goes from, let's say, 10 to 20 or whatever. Very...

WAR is clearly and obviously the best D&D artist and anyone who disagrees is wrong! (His cover artwork is always fantastic imo)

And a -2 Penalty to AC is in fact added to the AC. And things like thief skills are in fact ascending so the system isn't even consistent with itself.

There's a balance between being so abstract that it becomes nonsensical and trying to blend the whole thing smooth like some Gygaxian hell cocktail. I think Lancer handles this very well. In the cases where it might not be clear, the rules text tends to incorporate flavour elements to make...

A properly written manual is easy to read. That means no fluff text mixed into rules text, and clear rules with concise terminology. This benefits everyone. People who don't want rules text get less of it, and it is separated from the other text and thus easier to avoid, and people who like...

The system needs to distinguish between text intended to provide description and flavour vs text intended to be clear, because doing so makes it more readable. We don't need the rules of some particular spell or ability to be nice to read because the rules are the mechanics. GEO 1 action, range...

Keywords are great. One great flaw in 5E is that it is very rules-hesitant. It feels like the designers are ashamed of actual mechanics. I agree that capitalising them is a bit excessive though. I prefer bolded (or none at all).

But 4e had a major problem! It didn't have a true good alignment. It had a flimsy "lawful good" and "good". What about "chaotic good"? The alignment specifically opposite of "lawful evil". The latter being the obviously most evil alignment! :mad: