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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8869655" data-attributes="member: 70468">I ran PF2 for a year or so, and every so often I consider whether I want to come back to it. I wanted to reply to a few points here, and I hope my responses will help me articulate why that is.What WWN does is assume that PCs start combat at full health and provide another means of implementing attrition. Your post-combat healing is just determining what the cost in System Strain you need to pay is. My homebrew system does something similar with stress, though it also implements stress more pervasively in the system (e.g., you can gain stress to cast spells even when you are out of mp or gain stress to save versus a consequence or take the successful option when making a saving throw).Pathfinder 2e has a problem of being afraid to diverge from the traditional play loop even though it provides tools in the GMG to do so effectively. The VP subsystem should have been core. It would have made the value of these things immediately apparent. In that case, trying to make a Group Impression would be a <s>clock</s> VP subsystem, and so would the scenarios [USER=7026314]@!DWolf[/USER] outlines in his response. The benefit of the skill feat becomes immediately obvious: you skip the clock and do it in one check. I think it would have also obviated the need to specify all the degrees of success for every skill action and would have allowed for more flexibility in using skills. The normal would be clocks, and skill feats allow you to short circuit that.The exploration loop in PF2 appears to be designed to add mechanics for when the GM asks, “What were you doing?” when the encounter starts. This is again an area where PF2 would have benefited from a stronger and more prescriptive exploration loop. The hexploration rules are a start, though they’re not sufficient on their own.The way I handle this in my homebrew system is by asking what everyone is doing, and then having the navigator roll Survive. I don’t use hidden checks at all (in fact, I never roll skill checks as the referee). I found them really annoying in PF2 even though we ended up using Foundry for half the campaign, and I could ask someone to click the hidden check button. It just slows things down. Anyway, the navigation roll is just to determine if there are any consequences along the way (of which getting lost is one possibility). Otherwise, I assume you travel however many hexes your exploration MV allows, and then we transition to camp where players have a number of decisions to make that affect their journey.Dungeoneering is still a work in progress, but it intends to follow a similar principle of tracked time and event checks while you are exploring. It makes sense in that kind of structure that you only do one thing because typically one check you make takes one turn (10 minutes). However, I use conflict resolution and not task resolution in my homebrew system. You’re only rolling when you can set the stakes. In fact, there are no knowledge skills because I view them as boring play (but characters have subjects they know and can use INT as an approach by drawing on those subjects when making a skill check). Again, this is an area where I feel PF2 inadequately systematized to make exploration interesting.I will say I think some of these decisions were driven by PFS. After I got to play PF2 at Origins, and as I’ve gone about designing play loops for these activities for my homebrew system, I’ve gained more appreciation for how PFS-oriented Pathfinder 2e actually is. I don’t blame Paizo for doing that. PF1 had an extensive list of allowed and disallowed material while PF2 doesn’t. Everything is in play subject to how PFS uses rarity. I can respect that, though it does have consequences for non-PFS home games that I think holds the system back from what it can do.I’m playing in a Blades in the Dark game being run by [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]. [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] and I had both been talking up PF2, so he took a look at it as a possible next game for us and was like: nope, view not worth the climb. He said something pretty similar to us. 4e provides for dynamic and interesting encounter building from the GM’s side. PF2 seems to offer more from the player side via the action economy. I found the decision-making of how to use my actions very interesting, but how and which debuff I’m going to apply is a different sort of tactics compared to how I’m going to leverage position to our advantage.I dislike the bulk system in PF2. It’s similar to other abstract equipment systems, but it’s still too damn fiddly. Having to tally up all the light bulk items is not much better than tallying up pounds or coins! My favorite (from the player side) is Torchbearer. You have a grid of slots by type, and you have to pick which item goes where. Every round of combat has an equip phase where you (and the GM for the opposition) decide what you have equipped that turn.TB was influential on my homebrew system when I looked at what OSR games and PF2 were doing with slot-based inventories, though I’ve opted to simplify things a bit (characters have slot-based inventory that they can expand with containers rather than a specific list of slots). Equip phase is awesome though, especially for monsters. I started from B/X, which has you declare melee or spell attacks, and took the TB approach of doing that for all equipment. Last session, when I declared the monster equipped gibbering, everyone was like, “Kill it NOW!”Anyway, after Paizo simplified things in the second errata, they should have dropped the Interact action for most things and folded it into the action used to use the item. I don’t think tracking held versus worn is going to be very interesting most of the time. I would make an exception for weapons because of feats like Quickdraw. It would be different if there were a separate time to change your load outside the action economy, but there’s not (and I don’t think it would fit well with PF2). For the kind of play PF2 does, it’s just not worth the extra tracking (especially because this would let you almost entirely ignore it when running monsters, which should be a serious consideration to keep things manageable for GMs).I’ve only run PF1 APs, but the only one we really liked was Kingmaker. It’s the most exploration-oriented (or was, I don’t know how the reprint changed things to align it more with the video game and plot-oriented sensibilities), so that makes sense for us since that is what we do. I can’t imagine running any of the ones I ran (Council of Thieves through the end of book 1, Rise of the Rune Lords through the end of book 2, Shattered Star through the middle of book 3, Kingmaker completely) without making changes. However, it doesn’t sound like what those books give you was very good. The default rules assume that a good chunk of XP comes from accomplishments. Why do they pad out the APs with combat encounters instead? Really, they should just use fiat leveling when the story needs it if it’s expected that you stick to the rails and do what the AP prescribes.</blockquote>

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