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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7489059" data-attributes="member: 907">The big problem I see with PF2 is that they've gone about it the wrong way if they intend to seek the input of players. Perhaps that's a consequence of a shorter public development cycle than Wizards, but the problem is there nonetheless.I mean, look at the way Wizards handled 5e's playtest. They started fairly small, with a retread of Caves of Chaos with pregenerated characters. Simple, low-level dungeon with simple characters, in order to see how people reacted to it. Then they gradually iterated on that - extending the classes a bit and adding more customization, adding other classes and seeing how people reacted to those (and occasionally scrapping ideas that didn't pan out, like the sorcerer who morphed from a caster to a warrior the more spells they cast). I believe I've seen one of the designers mention advantage/disadvantage as one of the things that they put into a playtest document seemingly at random, and were surprised at the positive feedback so they kept it.By comparison, Paizo has given us an almost complete system, and told us "See how this works. Test these particular things via the free adventure." Sure, I can see how the designers can walk back aspects of the system, and fix details ("fireball should do 1d6 more base damage"), but I doubt there's any room for change in the core math of the system (+level to everything, proficiency levels, +/-10 for crit success/failure), or the way classes are built around class feats, and such.This is a shame, because that seems to be where the majority of the complaints are. Personally, I haven't played it yet, but it does seem like they've painted themselves into a corner regarding calibration of success chances. I looked at the level 8 monsters for a lark, and it seems they mostly have AC 24 to 26 (somewhat weighted toward 26 - my impression was about half had 26, a third had 24, and a sixth had 25). But let's call it 25. And let's say you're an 8th level paladin fighting this monster. You likely have an attack bonus of +15 (level +8, Strength +4, weapon potency +2, proficiency +1), so you hit on a 10 (55% chance). If you make a second attack with a non-agile weapon, that attack hits on a 15 (30% chance). Those chances are pretty low. A fighter is slightly better off, because they are probably Masters of their chosen weapon so they have an additional +1, but that's still only 60% (35% on the second attack).I would argue that those chances are about 2-3 points too low. 65-70% seems right for the paladin, which would give a fair chance of hitting with the second and possibly even third attack. But if you increase the chance for the paladin to hit to 7+ (70%), the paladin will also crit on a 17+ or 20% chance, and that's pretty darn high. I think it would be hard for Paizo to fix this issue without going deep into the guts of the game.By chance, this was also one of the key complaints my players had about 4e - the success chances were too low. Monster defenses were set so that an equal-level PC would hit just over 50% of the time (less at higher level because you lost about 3 points of relative attack bonus over the course of 20 levels), and that sucks when using limited-resource attacks.</blockquote>

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