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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7633066" data-attributes="member: 5142">I think what you are saying is true from a technical point. PF1 simply had more decision-making paths, variables, and moving parts flying around: e.g., prestige classes, archetypes, multiclassing, etc. However, this strikes me more as the illusion of greater design space, because a lot of these various components were performing the same functions with redundancy. There may have been a "detective" archetype for the bard, a different one for the fighter, one for the rogue, one for the investigator, one for the ranger, etc., alongside detective PrCs (one oriented towards bard, another fighter,...) and you could mix and match these so you were a detective bard who multiclassed with the detective investigator. But this mostly reflects the fact that Paizo was often re-creating similar ideas over and over. So I'm not sure if this truly reflects greater design space. We could even, for example, look at actual floor space. You could have a hypothetical room that is 5m x 5m (so 25 square meters) and another that has 1m x 30m (so 30 square meters). While the latter room may have greater floor space from a technical perspective, we would probably regard the former as having a more open floor space in terms of what we could do with that room. I view the changes that Paizo is making in PF2 along the lines of the former: there is more practical open floor space for design purposes than there was previously even if there is less technical floor space. So let's take the earlier Detective example. You could reinvent the wheel for a handful of classes with archetypes for each or a prestige class or two that covers the idea, or you can provide a singular Detective archetype that is available for every class to take. And if I dislike their detective archetype, and then make my own, that combination is now also open and available for every class and not just a handful.</blockquote>

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