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<blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8409675" data-attributes="member: 6778210">I don't think that characterization quite works: rather, what PF2 does well is that it creates a recognizable baseline so that I have a rough judge of how difficult something is. I can toss in spice as I need to, create terrain or room features to switch things up, etc. Creating variability isn't hard, but it's important to know where your baseline is so that you can accurately judge your range. For me, a guy who likes sandboxes and large dungeons, it's useful because I can get an accurate judge of different situations, like what happens if I combine units from these two rooms. But at the end, it's still a dice game and it still depends on what my players attempt to do. That's really where I want my variability.Instead, 5E is just... ill-conceived in this regard. CR varies wildly, making it difficult to create satisfying encounters based on just using the book. Can I eyeball a good encounter? Yeah. Takes a little time, but eventually you get an instinct for it. But I can do that for just about any RPG I play. The bigger point is that this is terrible for beginners: they are told that these are the guidelines for creating encounters and they flat out do not work.And I feel like this is a consistent thing with 5E: it's a nice system if you are a lapsed RPG player, someone who has a sense of systems and can see how the relative simplicity of 5E's systems are going to play out. I got into it quick for that reason. But if you are new to RPGs, it's not great: its simplicity isn't consistent, and being &quot;simple&quot; isn't always an advantage; sometimes it is simply a lack of guidance. And not knowing what to do and having no way of actually finding out is generally what I've found slows things down the most.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Justice and Rule, post: 8409675, member: 6778210"] I don't think that characterization quite works: rather, what PF2 does well is that it creates a recognizable baseline so that I have a rough judge of how difficult something is. I can toss in spice as I need to, create terrain or room features to switch things up, etc. Creating variability isn't hard, but it's important to know where your baseline is so that you can accurately judge your range. For me, a guy who likes sandboxes and large dungeons, it's useful because I can get an accurate judge of different situations, like what happens if I combine units from these two rooms. But at the end, it's still a dice game and it still depends on what my players attempt to do. That's [I]really [/I]where I want my variability. Instead, 5E is just... ill-conceived in this regard. CR varies wildly, making it difficult to create satisfying encounters based on just using the book. Can I eyeball a good encounter? Yeah. Takes a little time, but eventually you get an instinct for it. But I can do that for just about [I]any[/I] RPG I play. The bigger point is that this is terrible for beginners: they are told that these are the guidelines for creating encounters and they flat out [I]do not work[/I]. And I feel like this is a consistent thing with 5E: it's a nice system if you are a lapsed RPG player, someone who has a sense of systems and can see how the relative simplicity of 5E's systems are going to play out. I got into it quick for that reason. But if you are new to RPGs, it's not great: its simplicity isn't consistent, and being "simple" isn't always an advantage; sometimes it is simply a lack of guidance. And not knowing what to do and having no way of actually finding out is generally what I've found slows things down the most. [/QUOTE]

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