Pathfinder 2E Pathfinder 2 and support for other playing styles/subgenres

[dave2008]

Since you never offer any solutions,

I guess you really haven't read many of Cap's post then. They often offer suggestions on how to fix things and they vehemently don't like 4e. They also have a similar (to PF2) love/hate relationship with 5e in that they are mostly critical of the things they like or see the potential in.

To be clear, I am not saying that Cap is correct, just that your characterization of them seems off to me.

 

[CapnZapp]

I was just about to address that.

No problem, TreChiron and Dave - have a look at threads started by me in this forum; you will easily see that I have tried many attempts at actually fixing troublesome subsystems. Just to take three examples off the top of my head: recall knowledge, medicine and earn income/crafting.

Why do I do that? It's not that I expect Paizo to just add my solutions to the next printing of the CRB.

Instead i do it to conclusively prove my points: that Paizo's dev team is producing much more wordy and complex rules text than what is good for the game.

And also to show you how devilishly hard it is to meaningfully mod the game; which is the current topic.

PS I'm a he/him.

 

[CapnZapp]

I mean, you could say the same thing with nearly any other edition of the game.

Relativizing does not help. That is, the fact other issues exist does not excuse this issue.

 

[CapnZapp]

There are systems built for a specific type of experience. I'm not sure I love the types of experiences I've had so far in PF2, but don't frustrate yourself trying to fit a circle into a square hole.

You say "yourself" presumably addressing me, but you should really have addressed Paizo. The point here is: what were they thinking when they used a murder simulator (which basically is what nearly every fantasy rpg is, when you boil things down to essentials, in particular the D&D strain) to emulate police work?

 

[CapnZapp]

This ties into a greater frustration I have, and now I'm obviously no longer addressing Retreater, which is the present current in gamer discourse where it's almost as if people are surprised by what fantasy role-playing games really is about.

It's about killing others* and taking their loot. Yep you heard that right, and in your heart you know it's true.

Somehow this upsets people as if it's something new. It's as if current gamers want to have the cake (everybody is equal) and eat it (still have exciting fights to the death). I really can't understand this so-called logic, where games scramble to "fix" issues of otherism* while still remaining the same murder simulator at the core! Yes, rape and plunder, discrimination and inequality is bad. But I refuse to get upset about, say, gender issues as long as every successful max-level hero will have ended the lives of hundreds of creatures, likely including dozens of intelligent human(oids).

*) Apparently, and yes, I was surprised by this, the definition of "otherism" is a positive one: "Regard for the rights, welfare, and point of view of others." I'm of course using the term in its contemporary meaning, which AFAIK essentially is the exact opposite. Just telling you this so you know I know what the term means, and yes, I find it entirely good and refreshing that we clean out our own society of prejudice. I just can't understand why you would want to play in the fantasy genre if you cannot accept prejudice in a made-up world, since that is essentially the entire reason for having it. At least I play in the fantasy genre because I want to revel in the fantasy of my character being better, richer, stronger and more successful than everybody else, even though this basically proves every stupid idea from phrenology onwards to be literally correct and physically provable within the game world.

tl;dr: Yes, in fantasy gaming some people are just straight-up better than others. Deal with it.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Thinking about it a bit, while it wouldn’t directly create a sense of danger, dividing XP rewards for killing monsters by 20 might change the risk-reward calculus. I’d also eliminate XP for hazards, but that’s a separate issue. Most of your XP in this approach would come from accomplishments. Murderhoboing things is not an accomplishment.

If that is the case, I would recommend multiplying the rewards for accomplishments by 20 instead (or simply divide by 5/multiply by 5). Levelling up is slow enough, especially for low levels!

 

[CapnZapp]

If that is the case, I would recommend multiplying the rewards for accomplishments by 20 instead (or simply divide by 5/multiply by 5). Levelling up is slow enough, especially for low levels!

My spontaneous observation is:

Why bother dividing by 20? Any number divided by 20 is a non-significant number. Why not simply say "no XP for killing things". Much simpler, pretty much the exact same result.

Especially if this leads you to take the logical next step: ditching XP entirely, and just have heroes level up when the adventure predicates it, which is what every XP system ends up with eventually anyway!

 

[CapnZapp]

For some reason I ended up quoting Frozen even though I was responding to Kenada...?

 

[kenada]

If that is the case, I would recommend multiplying the rewards for accomplishments by 20 instead (or simply divide by 5/multiply by 5). Levelling up is slow enough, especially for low levels!

I wanted to shift the balance of XP closer to what old-school D&D does, but I was too lazy to do the math to pick the “right” divisor. The goal would be at least 75% of the XP from non-combat sources.

The CRB discusses which types of accomplishments you should expect to reward and how frequently. Based on that and the expected frequency of advancement, you should get a bit less that half of your XP per level from accomplishments.

If we wanted to tilt the balance, tripling or quadrupling accomplishment XP should do the trick. Even quintupling might not be a bad idea. However, that would speed things up too much. It might be better to double accomplishment XP and halve combat XP (still eliminating hazard XP).

I still haven’t dug too deeply into the math, but I at least poked at it this time on my phone’s calculator. Hopefully doubling and halving feel a bit better.

 

[kenada]

Why bother dividing by 20? Any number divided by 20 is a non-significant number. Why not simply say "no XP for killing things". Much simpler, pretty much the exact same result.

Like I said in my response to @FrozenNorth, it was basically a number pulled out of a hat. I picked something big because I wanted it to be clearly lower. The double and halving approach is probably more reasonable.

Especially if this leads you to take the logical next step: ditching XP entirely, and just have heroes level up when the adventure predicates it, which is what every XP system ends up with eventually anyway!

Note that I’m making this suggestion this in the context of old-school sandbox play. How you get your XP is what defines the default action. If it’s treasure combat, and combat is a comparatively poor and dangerous way to get XP, then PCs will take steps to avoid combat while getting as much treasure as possible.

I also want to note that PCs aren’t presumably heroes in old-school sandbox play. The Principia Apocrypha (as mentioned by @Aldarc) touches on this. A Quick Primer to Old School Gaming is another good document. If PCs want to become heroes, they have to do things to earn it. The GM isn’t necessarily going to put those there since the GM’s role is to be a neutral arbiter.

While it gets into a bit of a rut, the thread here on the point of GM notes has several good descriptions of how people go about running their sandboxes and what that means for them. If you want to see a comparison of the old-school sandbox to anthocentric play, I posted a comparison of my OSE game to our Scum & Villainy game on page 13. Anthrocentric play is not what people mean when they talk about story-driven play in D&D, but it’s close enough for this comparison.

Getting back to the original topic of XP, having XP as a reward is meant to reinforce the intended gameplay loop. In sandbox play, it’s that the PCs have agency, and the rewards reinforce the default actions of the sandbox. In old-school play, that’s retrieving treasure (by going out and finding it). If you wanted to run a different kind of sandbox (e.g., about life in a royal court), then the reward mechanics would be based on that. PbtA and FitD games are good examples of this (though I would not put them in the sandbox category).

Additionally, milestone XP are a violation of my principles (as enumerated in @the-Magic-Sword’s thread on his PF2 West Marches game). They need revision (thanks to the GM notes thread), but that wouldn’t change things as far as adventures go. Anyway, the story is emergent in old-school sandbox play. For me to decide something is a milestone, I have to know where things are going, and I don’t. The players have the agency to walk away from “the adventure” or go in a completely different direction. In essence, I don’t prep plots.