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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shisumo" data-source="post: 5638623" data-attributes="member: 85314">In a lot of ways, 4E and PF are both built on an exceptions-based system - i.e., the rules work like *this* unless you have *that* special trait that changes it, at which point it works however *that* works.  In 4E, the "special traits" are pretty much all powers of one flavor or another - which is why power cards are so beloved in that system - and anything that can't readily be encoded into the powers system just doesn't really have a lot of exceptions.  (There's really nothing in 4E that really changes how saves work, for instance.  Slight tweaks, yes, but nothing that really rewrites the system on a fundamental level.)  in PF, though, there "special traits" are spells, feats, innate class abilities, racial bonuses, and more - and in a very real sense, nothing is off-limits for modification. One basic trait of exceptions-based systems is that overall the "baseline" rules tend to be somewhat punishing to PCs, so that the characters with the ability to overcome those baselines are much cooler.  4E's focus on the power system means that the baseline is more forgiving, though, because there are fewer ways to tweak the baseline to begin with; this is coupled to a design goal that explicitly wanted PCs to be more heroic and capable from the very beginning of their careers than they were in 3.X (a goal that, incidentally, PF shares, albeit to a lesser extent) and a design philosophy that completely divorced NPCs and monsters from PC mechanics (meaning that it's no longer necessary to show how much cooler the PCs are than the NPCs by showing how the NPCs still have to labor under the restrictions the PCs have outgrown).  The end result is a game that is far friendlier and with fewer "you can't"s for low-level PCs than PF is. It doesn't take very long for the balance to redress itself, however.  By level 3 or so, most PCs have already managed to shed the worst of the obstacles in the way of whatever their primary focus might be, and from there on out it's just "how can I do this even better?"</blockquote>

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