Pathfinder 2E Never give up on PF2

[ironchains]

I'm in a group that's looking at moving away from D&D 5e, and PF2r is one of our leading possibilities. But when one side consistently misinterprets what the other is saying, or assigns demeaning intent, it really feels like they are attacking people personally because their points don't hold up on their own.

Someone with a different opinion on a game system isn't your enemy. If PF2 is all you are claiming, then it should be able to rebuff the naysayers on it's own strengths. Let's keep this a clean discussion, without petty attacks or twists of what they are saying on others.

Thanks.

I wouldn't judge pf2 by people on the internet.

As to the arguments here, I would consider that someone came into a post a positive post about pf2 and said all the things they don't like about pf2. He is inviting an argument on purpose.

 

[Justice and Rule]

This is a thing I find particularly ridiculous. Generally speaking, the more dangerous and/or exciting something is, the more people would know about it (unless it's a thing they deal with every single day). I mean, ask people what they know about, say, elephants. Then ask them what they know about wolverines. I bet more people would have knowledge of elephants, despite the DC to know things about an elephant being 23 and a wolverine being 16.

You're not wrong on that one. I understand the problem of skills going up might make things easier to identify things, but I generally do them it based on their rarity and adjust difficulty from there. I find there is some fun in not knowing a monster's capabilities, but that isn't necessarily for every combat and allowing players some easy recall checks to develop strategy is fine because it's already got a decent cost (Using an Action).

This is precisely the assumption I'm talking about. The design idea I'm discussing is that "challenges" are defined by a PC making a skill roll to overcome an obstacle. The idea that a DC can indicate a challenge's appropriateness for a PC of any level is the design idea that PF2 carried forward from 4e I don't like.

Some things need that, like spell difficulties, which are not necessarily based on the PCs themselves but on leveled things. What you talk about is not a wide-scaled thing in the base system: most things have intrinsic DCs (locks and manacles are a good example). That certain things have them doesn't suddenly mean they all have them, and for the things that do, sometimes it is a choice (the Earn Income one, for example).

I mean, hell, even those leveled checks are sort of a diegetic thing, with higher-level spells being naturally more difficult to actually identify.

Right. I've consistently called out DCs arriving from direct opposition as reasonably scaling with that opposition. I don't really see a need to use a level scaling table to get these numbers vs. jst writing them down by skill, developing formulas and referencing NPC traits and so on, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it....except that it has never not been accompanied by a full scale shift away from objective skills, and I don't trust a design to set up the necessary firewalls at this point.

With PF2, it is a select few things that assume this, which are either things that are based on adjustable things (Choosing your Earn Income check) or correlate to things that actually have level. If you don't want to use them, then you really don't. Even with things like Recall Knowledge, which @Staffan mentioned and I do actually agree with. But there's nothing in the system that is balanced around having to make these checks leveled.

You can't back into an objective skill system from a general one, it requires more active design to get there. The necessary step is listing the relevant ability hitting each individual DC gets you.

To be clear, in the kind of system I'm taking about, the DM is not empowered to set, say a DC 17 Athletics challenge. That isn't parsable, and isn't a thing a GM can do. Instead DC 17 Athletics check might grant the a player the ability to climb at their base movement speed over rough or worked stone walls.

GMing advice on challenge design might account for what the PCs can do at an expected range of levels, but a skill check isn't a challenge, it's a PC tool for overcoming challenges.

I find that system to be kind of backwards, to be honest. Like, I understand the idea of not having everything be a leveled check and I agree with that, but the idea that the GM doesn't have control over what a task might be seems to just put a block on the ability to world build and control things for rather minimal returns on player empowerment. I am not sure of what systems use that, but it didn't start with 4E: I mean, off the top of my head even 2E had adjustments to checks that Thieves had to make which the GM would be applying.

What are the natural DCs you're talking about? At best we've got some specific skill usages, and a generic difficulty table. An objective skill system requires the game write them down, to a reasonable level of abstraction, and put them in front of the players before the game begins. I'm saying the GM shouldn't be expected to set the DCs for anything.

You can just check various skills in the book or look at certain pieces of equipment that would require a check to break (locks and manacles are my go-to). In the book they give examples of what an Untrained (DC15 check) looks like versus a Trained (DC20 check) or Expert (DC25). You just have to look at the Skill section to actually see them.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong like, intrinsically with PF2's approach, but it's a different design paradigm that broke with an objective skill system and isn't compatible with it. It's standing with basically every other modern D&Dlike since 4e in doing so, and seemingly this is fine with nearly all players. I'm merely annoyed at the choice, because it's the only fundamental problem I have with PF2, and it's frankly too big a design problem to rework myself.

I don't think what you are talking about started with 4E. Like, conceptually, these are not that different from what came before unless you have to have incredibly rigid and inflexible ideas that certain things must be these DCs, regardless of circumstance or context. I just... don't really find this sort of differentiation within how something is set to be particularly meaningful or rewarding. I speak as someone who likes to set up natural, intrinsic ideas of what things are and aren't so that the players have the freedom to do different things when they come back to an area at higher levels.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is a thing I find particularly ridiculous. Generally speaking, the more dangerous and/or exciting something is, the more people would know about it (unless it's a thing they deal with every single day). I mean, ask people what they know about, say, elephants. Then ask them what they know about wolverines. I bet more people would have knowledge of elephants, despite the DC to know things about an elephant being 23 and a wolverine being 16.

The problem is, even though its not applied consistently, its also assumed higher level and more dangerous monsters are rarer (because if they aren't the problem is obvious), and as such there's less people who know about them or have a reason to learn about them.

 

[Eric V]

I wouldn't judge pf2 by people on the internet.

As to the arguments here, I would consider that someone came into a post a positive post about pf2 and said all the things they don't like about pf2. He is inviting an argument on purpose.

To be fair, @Philip Benz probably should have officially made this a (+) thread, even though it was obvious to anyone reading the room.

So, when someone writes "Oh, you mean the thing I've grown to despise the most about the system? Gosh, the the fact that this keeps getting touted as a good thing is almost as infuriating at this point. I've never been more stifled in a game then with this crap"...well, that really wasn't an invitation to discussion, was it?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

To be fair, @Philip Benz probably should have officially made this a (+) thread, even though it was obvious to anyone reading the room.

So, when someone writes "Oh, you mean the thing I've grown to despise the most about the system? Gosh, the the fact that this keeps getting touted as a good thing is almost as infuriating at this point. I've never been more stifled in a game then with this crap"...well, that really wasn't an invitation to discussion, was it?

At what point does the need for something like this to be a "+ thread" veer into acknowledgement of a bog standard edition war, do you think?

 

[Thomas Shey]

At what point does the need for something like this to be a "+ thread" veer into acknowledgement of a bog standard edition war, do you think?

I think that's a little unfair. There are a small handful of people who hate PF2e and will tell you so at any opportunity, but there's more people who just are trying to engage with why some people don't find it their gig. I could name people in both camps, and I've seen most of the people in the former catch red text on more than one occasion.

 

[Pedantic]

I don't think what you are talking about started with 4E. Like, conceptually, these are not that different from what came before unless you have to have incredibly rigid and inflexible ideas that certain things must be these DCs, regardless of circumstance or context. I just... don't really find this sort of differentiation within how something is set to be particularly meaningful or rewarding. I speak as someone who likes to set up natural, intrinsic ideas of what things are and aren't so that the players have the freedom to do different things when they come back to an area at higher levels.

I don't know how to be clearer about this, but bolded line is exactly the kind of thing that points out this change in design. Skills aren't related to challenges and don't scale in the paradigm I'm taking about. An iteration in the design direction I'm suggesting is more likely to remove say, rolling, and write up skills entirely as feat like statements of absolute ability, with opposite rolls and knowledge reworked into different universal systems. I'm tempted to say you can't have a set of generic difficulties outside of design advice in an objective skill system, because they always seem to lead to skill scaling, but it's theoretically possible.

An objective skill system is not something you can backport into a design with a generic difficulty or scaling system. You have to start, from the outset, with an understanding that players will be using skills to overcome challenges, design those challenges, and then design your abilities.

Figuring out a level appropriate challenge for a character to resolve using skills should be in the same ballpark of complexity as trying to account for the utility spells a character can being to bear, not a math problem. It shouldn't be concerned with a character's +15 bonus, but instead their ability to cling to ceilings with 1 hand while moving at 40 feet, or ability to balance on clouds, or ability to quickly change their appearance and voice to match someone they met within the last 5 minutes or whatever it is skills allow for.

To be clear, this is a design preference that has clearly lost. The preferred approach is "player makes proposition, GM determines appropriate skill, assigns difficulty (possibly with system guidance), a roll is made, success is evaluated immediately or after a few more loops (again possible with system advice)" is so thoroughly the default in every system that my position is usually presented as an unrealistic design impossibility or outside the bounds of what a skill system is in the first place.

I'm sad that PF2, a system that I think otherwise has much to recommend it, has opted for this, because PF1 was the last time a major D&Dlike system was going the other way, and I sincerely hoped it would iterate further in that direction.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know how to be clearer about this, but bolded line is exactly the kind of thing that points out this change in design.

The problem is some of us don't really think it is a change to the degree you think it is. There might have been core uses that were standardized, but there have been examples of subjective modifiers since pretty much the origin of skill systems. And pretty much discussion of applying the things that would produce those modifiers for purposes of making things harder or easier from just as far back. So a number of us are just kind of not buying the premise.

 

[Blue]

To be fair, @Philip Benz probably should have officially made this a (+) thread, even though it was obvious to anyone reading the room.

So, when someone writes "Oh, you mean the thing I've grown to despise the most about the system? Gosh, the the fact that this keeps getting touted as a good thing is almost as infuriating at this point. I've never been more stifled in a game then with this crap"...well, that really wasn't an invitation to discussion, was it?

As I said above, we're considering switching to PF2r from 5e so I welcome the discussion. The OP didn't make this a (+) thread and ending with "What do y'all think?" seems to invite people's thoughts. Please stop trying to stifle conversation - if you only want to post in a PF2 Cheerleader-Only (+) thread anyone can make one.

What do you like most about PF2? What draws you to it that you don't see elsewhere or is just done superior?

 

[Thomas Shey]

What do you like most about PF2? What draws you to it that you don't see elsewhere or is just done superior?

To the degree I'm attracted to D&D-sphere games at all (I put in that qualifier because even though I'm running one right now (13th Age 1e), D&D-sphere games are not my first choice, and most of them I'm pretty uninterested in), the benefits of PF2e are a few-fold.

1. Engagement: This is probably the opposite of some people, but PF2e not only permits a great degree of engagement, it almost demands it. Almost every class and build has a lot of meaningful choices to make in combat, some of them very situational and dependent on the other PCs nature and actions. I really am uninterested in a game I can go through just rolling my hit and moving on.

2. Functional simplification. I know some people will make the exact opposite argument to this, but this is mine. I think PF2e simplified a number of features of D&D3e/PF1e in a way that makes it much more manageable than those two. There's some legitimate complaints to be had about the number of conditions, but that's mostly an artifact of reducing the number of one-off effects various monsters and spells in prior version. They reduced the number of modifier types to keep the mod hunting down to a dull roar, while not going to the (to me) really silly 5e approach. They simplified some elements of monster/opponent construction and operation such that I have some faith I could run an upper level encounter without losing my mind. And for all the hand-wringing about the total number of feats in the game, they're siloed so that most of them never matter to, and can be ignored by, most players while generating and advancing their characters.

3. They have done the nearly miraculous trick of pushing the classes together, specifically the casters and non-casters and make both actually serve a purpose. I know there's a considerable negative reaction from some people coming from some other related games about how spellcasters play, but to be blunt, a lot of that is them being used to being the big dogs in most situations, so when that isn't as reliably true makes them feel bad. Since the price of that was frequently to make martials only there to buy casters time to solve the problem, I just can't work up any sympathy.
(This does not mean that, at least prior to revised there may not have been some problems with specific ones there, but--I watched someone play a sorcerer through three campaigns, two of them 1-20 runs, and a cleric through two of those, so an attempt to tell me that, generically,. spellcasters are ineffective is going to be a hard sell).

4. It also, for the most part, still manages to give characters a pretty fair range of options (even more if the common free Archetype is in use). You can make an argument there's not quite as many as there were in PF1e/D&D3e, but the price of that was that you had bunches of really overtuned combos and, at the same time, a lot of trap options (some not immediately obvious) and at the other end over tuned combos. While you can't give options without some issues there, it actually requires effort to build a PF2e character that isn't at least functional, there's only a small number of dead ends (and often you can steer out of them) and at the other end, even the tightly built characters won't make anyone else likely wonder why they're there.

Most any complaints with the system I have (though I can understand some other people's complaints) are things I have generically with D&D-sphere games (I'm just never going to be a massive fan of heavy exception based design, and D&D and its kin have been stuffed with that from day one).

Hope that's useful.