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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8429297" data-attributes="member: 12731">No exception based design does NOT mean this. You can (and should) create your game in such a way that there aren't wonky artificial limits that only specific feats get past.If your rules say a certain activity is possible but hard, and then offer a feat that grants +5 or advantage or whatever, then you have a much better, friendlier ruleset.And it is still exception based!Only there is nothing for the GM to risk invalidating, since the rules already give permission for everybody to try the activity!So no, there's nothing "gaming as usual" going on here. Pathfinder 2 is significantly more controlling the GM than any other game I can remember. Just about every little thing you can think of in terms of allowing "grease" to make the game flow better with fewer niggly limitations... are already "taken" by Paizo, since "there's a feat for that".The end result is that players need a complicated and ever-changing checklist of feats that each individual GM is likely to invalidate or value-reduce simply by being generous, wanting to speed up play, to encourage cinematic sequences rather than getting bogged down, or for some other worthy reason.This is a seriously controlling design philosophy, folks. It could easily been avoided, but for some reason Paizo decided it wanted to drown players in the absolute highest number of feats imaginable!Every possible +1 or -1 gets its own feat in this game (sometimes more!) It is not needed. It drives up the apparent complexity of the game while not substantially increasing the number of meaningful decision points. It makes the experience for newcomers as hostile as possible.In short, it is baffling Paizo went this way. I could have predicted dozens of ways the successor to Pathfinder 1 might turn out, and I would never have guessed they would go for "let's take the worst aspects of 4E and double down on those! Let's flood our game with thousands of feats, spells and items, the vast majority of each category being either interchangeable or downright suboptimal!"I realize Paizo is creating the illusion of choice, where you're given hundreds of decision points... but once you realize almost none of it has any meaningful impact on your character's capacity, while almost all of the actually significant choices from PF1 were taken away...Then you realize PF2 is a seriously flawed game.Far underneath the absolutely massive chunks of overcomplication is a polished gem of a game. But it is awfully hard to appreciate given the sea of dross you need to swim in to access it.</blockquote>

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