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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7375690" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I’m not interested in designing games around “bad DM proofing” them. I’d much rather the designers assume DM competence, and then the community teach DMs to do it well than for the designers to restrict themselves because someone somewhere might handle it less than ideally.It’s not. The Rogue’s Sneak Attack feature is codified as “do more damage when you attack someone’s weak points from a hidden position.” This is an example of a really well designed maneuver because rather than allowing the character to do something specific (and in some DMs minds, disallowing other characters from doing it), it gives them a unique benefit when they do something that anyone can do. Ideally, this is how all maneuvers, feats, etc. should be designed. This is why 4e’s Hammer Hands (an at-will stance that lets you shove an enemy 5 feet and then move into the space you shoved them out of whenever you hit with a melee attack while in the stance) is a better-designed Power than Tide of Iron (an at-will Attack that does the sake shove-and-shift effect on a hit), despite having nearly identical effects.This problem doesn’t go away in a streamlined system. If you let a player’s described action in combat do something other than the system-prescribed effects of an attack, and the result is better than a normal attack, you trivialize normal attacks. If the result is worse than an attack, the game mechanics “persuade” other players not to try. This was part of the reason for the shift towards “front loaded” maneuvers in the first place - players wanted to be able to do cool things without having to rely on DM adjudication either invalidating normal attacks or making cool improvised options not worthwhile. This is just something you kind of have to accept as part of roleplaying games. DM-adjudicated results are always going to run the risk of not being perfectly numerically balanced witn the rest of the system. The inclusion or exclusion of codified maneuvers doesn’t change this fact either way.Sure, but my point was they should have known that from the word “Pathfinder” in the title. Anyone who came into PF2 hoping it would be anything short of a crunchy, “front-loaded” system was setting themselves up for disappointment. Paizo knows their niche, and while they may be trying to streamline the complexity of the new system, they know that any significant loss of mechanical depth, particularly in terms of character building options, is going to lose their core audience’s interest.</blockquote>

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