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

[dave2008]

The party champion will HATE this. They are hurting for reactions as it is.

Sorry, I need to clarify that I was not talking about PF2e. I was talking about my 5e14 homebrew game

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the 3-action economy is basically a good idea, for things like "Raise shield, Stride, Strike" or "Recall Knowledge, Cast spell." However, it can occasionally be overly restrictive. For example, if your hands are occupied, walking through a closed door is a 4-action process: Stride up to the door, drop your weapon as a free action, Interact to open the door, pick up the weapon, and Stride through the door. To some degree it also sometimes feels like some things are overly restrictive just because that lets them introduce feats that bypass those restrictions.

Well, that's an element of deciding some things take actions that probably don't really need to. That's a case of a process that probably takes three more actions than it should (okay, two, if you're going to charge for movement you are; at worst that's an artifact of most games where stepping one yard or your full move (or in some cases a half move) being the same cost in actions. You can complain about it, but if you do, move actions in most games have the same complaints.)

But its not intrinsic to the three action economy. They could have just rolled "open door and take a step through" as part of the Interact action and moved on.

One thing I'd like to see in PF2 is a series of classes that's the reverse of the Kineticist. The Kineticist was created for the mechanical niche of "spellcaster that doesn't use daily resources" – so their abilities are less flexible and less powerful than those of a spell-slot caster, because they can do it all day long. I'd like to see the reverse: a martial class (or several) that does use limited resources and thus gets to do Awesome Stuff that's not just bigger numbers.

You could probably do that with a Ki Master class if you wanted to, though it slipping into bigger numbers would be a risk. At least PF2e has enough tactically useful actions like Trips and the like there might be other things to play with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Id have remedied this with the 4E bloodied mechanic instead. Save or Suck only work to devastating effect on a bloodied target (NPC or PC). Giving fights a sort of two stage approach. Though I get what Paizo went for here and I prefer it over 5E legendary actions and lairs.

You see a little of this in 13th Age too, where some effects are more pronounced on targets that have dropped below a certain hit point threshold. Not that I haven't seen people get weird about that kind of mechanic, too.

 

[Koloth]

If the GM didn't give a brief description of the adventure before character selection, then bad GM. Sounds like OP was playing Sherlock Holmes in an adventure designed for Conan. Isn't going to work well for Sherlock. From my experience, most scenarios seem to assume that the players are all variations of Murder Hobos. A main dish of combat, followed by a 2nd course of combat with a couple of combat sides and finally a nice combat dessert. Very few opportunities to use social skills or stealth as a primary way to solve an obstacle. As an aid to yet another combat, sure. As a way to bypass combat, are you kidding?

 

[Staffan]

Fear/Slow/Befuddle being some low level go-tos for similar effects, and giving way to powerful debuffs like Mask of Terror at high levels, or multitasking like Agonizing Despair.

Right, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of slow and to a lesser degree fear on my primal sorcerer. But it feels wrong that when you face the Big Boss, you turn to your 1st and 3rd level spells instead of your 5th and 6th level.

Id have remedied this with the 4E bloodied mechanic instead. Save or Suck only work to devastating effect on a bloodied target (NPC or PC). Giving fights a sort of two stage approach. Though I get what Paizo went for here and I prefer it over 5E legendary actions and lairs.

I like the 13th age solution where incapacitation-type spells have hit point caps, turning them into finishers instead of initial debuffs. But that requires that you are open with possible targets – 13th age explicitly says that you should let the player know before casting if a creature is in the right hp range to be affected.

But its not intrinsic to the three action economy. They could have just rolled "open door and take a step through" as part of the Interact action and moved on.

Right, that's a problem with this particular implementation of the action economy, not of the concept as such.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Right, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of slow and to a lesser degree fear on my primal sorcerer. But it feels wrong that when you face the Big Boss, you turn to your 1st and 3rd level spells instead of your 5th and 6th level.

Hmm Primal isn't a huge debuffing list (as opposed to like damage-with-weaker-control-effects and healing) but 5th and 6th does include Grisly Growths, and Wall spells. if used well, the wall spells can, in general, be much stronger than slow (wasting multiple actions for the creature to bust through a wall). If you expand to damage though, you can just fire off big spells with secondary control effects that are great at that level, like Necrotize, Howling Blizzard, along with some decent upcast options on all counts.

 

[Staffan]

Hmm Primal isn't a huge debuffing list (as opposed to like damage-with-weaker-control-effects and healing) but 5th and 6th does include Grisly Growths, and Wall spells. if used well, the wall spells can, in general, be much stronger than slow (wasting multiple actions for the creature to bust through a wall). If you expand to damage though, you can just fire off big spells with secondary control effects that are great at that level, like Necrotize, Howling Blizzard, along with some decent upcast options on all counts.

I've had some great use of wall of stone – the best was probably when some villain tried to put a timer on us by opening a water flow that would have drowned some prisoners and I told them Nope. The damage spells, on the other hand, tend to be so-so damage but with fairly big areas, so they're much better used against multiple weaker foes than single bosses.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I've had some great use of wall of stone – the best was probably when some villain tried to put a timer on us by opening a water flow that would have drowned some prisoners and I told them Nope. The damage spells, on the other hand, tend to be so-so damage but with fairly big areas, so they're much better used against multiple weaker foes than single bosses.

A lot of the AOE spells do pretty well against single bosses too, strictly speaking single target spells are better but you can't always get them at the perfect level and perfect scaling (since Paizo doesn't grid fill spells that way)-- the line spells are generally pretty close. Chain Lightning is the sixth rank to beat (there might be a better one... but you can force chain lightning to be friendly), and it matches upcasted sudden bolt at the same level which is an outlier at the level you get it, disintegrate on the arcane list at the same rank is actually better single target values but has two rolls so is a little sussy.

If we compare, damage wise, 340 HP is high for level 15 when you get 6th ranks at 12, full average damage for a single chain lightning (counting your sorcerous potency) is 58, which is 17%, or 8.5% if on a successful save, even if it succeeds all three times, you'll have done 25% of a bulky enemy's HP casting chain lightning each turn, before factoring in third actions (like a bespell strike bowshot or an elemental toss, or the net effect of your demoralize, or whatever.) A single fail brings that up substantially (but i partially calced it this way since fail and crit success have the same odds on the moderate save, so it's a wash, but that's also before debuffs.)

Pretty good if you're a fourth of the party.