Pathfinder 2E I think I am giving up on PF2ER

[thullgrim]

Cypher is what came to my mind too. Just about whole Cypher experience is player side. GM sets a difficulty of 1-10 and then multiplies by three. Players abilities do most of the rest. Leaves the GM free to handle intrusion and narrative stuff without managing the every detail. I’d miss rolling dice though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, you CAN do that, but you have to be extremely comfortable with fast and VERY loose NPC improv while maintaining a veneer of officialness.

That's how I ran high level 3.5 and PF1 with virtually no prep.

I do have to point out at least with potentially hostile NPCs, part of the reason you could do that there is that the encounter system was progressively more loose and sloppy as you got up in level; CR worked worse and worse, and generally tended to favor PCs, so you were having to learn to eyeball it anyway, and it was likely to fail in favor of the PCs.

Neither of these is true with PF2e.

 

[Reynard]

Like not fast and loose combined with probably not fast and loose will get you fast and loose?

I mean more cutting into bits and discarding the things that are a problem, then pasting back together with bubblegum and audacity.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Low to no prep; encounters and other nonsense on the fly; making up creature abilities or spells or magic items on the fly; eyeballing DCs for tasks and eyeballing difficulty for encounters; generally relying on improv and table temperature to guide rulings; lots of randomness, both in results and in generating forward momentum.

Some of those could work, but I honestly can't see how, without extensive experience with the system, ad-hoc encounter generation is going to go well for long.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yea, but then that violates the constraint that @Reynard has placed on giving the players a solid amount of character design crunch, and a fair amount of in-game mechanical options.

It's an actual difficult constraint to overcome; almost every game routinely pushes more rule weight onto the DM first and the players second. There simply aren't a lot of games with relatively heavy player optionality combined with fairly simple DM processes, certainly within the "sorta like D&D fantasy" space.

At best, you get situations where NPC/monsters are simpler than PCs, but that doesn't mean the system won't still have fairly strong need to engage with its rules in general. Both PF2e and 13A have significantly simpler monsters than PCs, far as that goes.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Cypher is what came to my mind too. Just about whole Cyoher experience is player side. GM sets a difficulty of 1-10 and then multiplies by three. Players abilities to most of the rest. Leaves the GM free to handle intrusion and narrative without managing the very detail. I’d miss rolling dice though.

Not rolling dice is really the worst part of it for me.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I'll be real: the big reason why I had to make up monsters in 5E was because most of them really sucked, and making them interesting was not something I typically did on the fly. You can make up NPCs on the fly without problem in PF2; you just need to know what you want out of them and the DCs/Bonuses needed for the level, which is basically in a table already.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Exactly. PF2E does not work that way and will not work for the playstyle you have. You have a razors edge to work with since the balance is so good.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say "razor edge", but its absolutely less forgiving than a lot of other D&D-adjacents.

No, you don't need system mastery to build encounters. You just need to be able to read a chart and do basic addition, or use a tool like Yet another Pathfinder 2nd edition encounter calculator . It's significantly easier than 5e's XP based encounter budget.

As someone else mentioned, I believe Reynard was thinking in terms of doing it on the fly. I think that does, indeed need a solid understanding of the system to be able to do it regularly without catastrophic failure states (I'm not sure doing it constantly might not lead to those even with solid experience if you're in too big a hurry).

 

[Thomas Shey]

It occurs to me there is another option: hack up PF2ER and SF2E and glue the pieces back together to get what I want.

I suspect that's not going to work well, or at least any better than using something like a PF1e SF derivative.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Cypher is what came to my mind too. Just about whole Cyoher experience is player side. GM sets a difficulty of 1-10 and then multiplies by three. Players abilities to most of the rest. Leaves the GM free to handle intrusion and narrative without managing the very detail. I’d miss rolling dice though.

Just a note that you have to like other elements of Cypher too, though. That's far from a given since it tends to be a polarizing system.