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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7932905" data-attributes="member: 12731">Thank you for asking - it's always the case you could use more words. On the other hand, you would never post anything if you polish your sentences endlessly, so it's sometimes better to be brief and then answers questions as they come up.I'm having two "attack vectors" in mind.First off, any game that obsesses with balance to the degree that it meticulously shuts down any avenue to gain that extra +1 or +2 bonus is a game I consider inherently distrustful of the GM. The contrast is 3E or 5E: games that happily will supply you with a magic item that gives large, almost game-breaking effects. A game like that trusts the GM to have a will of their own to know which bonuses are appropriate for their campaign. Both 4E and PF2 come across as incredibly cautious, defensive and controlling in this regard. Most magic items in these editions are incredibly bland and boring because the devs don't dare give out any really impactful bonuses and effects.The other one is admittedly not one I've spent a lot of time explaining, at least not in this thread. The way I find PF2 actively hostile to good gamesmastering, defined as saying "yes" or at least "yes, but" instead of "no". Whenever a player asks to do something that his character's abilities does not quite allow, my tendency is to allow it, but perhaps asking for a check, or mandating a drawback for failure (the "but" part).However, to my dismay I've found that Paizo has reserved almost the entire space for flexibility for their own use. In other words, I find over and over again that the thing I allow for free turns out to be allowed by a feat down the line (possibly for a totally different character class). I find this very unfriendly to gamesmasters, who apparently are expected to load the entirety of the thousands of feats into their brain and account for each and every single of them before making an off the cuff decision. It comes across as the game not trusting the GM: every little interaction (including all variants) are locked down by the game, telling the GM "this particular shortcut or flexibility is appropriate for a level 16 Bard" (or whatever) "but certainly not your level 3 Fighter, or the feat would have been made available that much earlier".Compare that to a game design like 5E where this issue simply doesn't exist.To me, Paizo needs to explain what the benefit of their design is that warrants such a (for me) huge drawback. Especially since just about the only benefit I can see myself is "it lets us spam character crunch over our dozens of splatbooks" - replacing really different crunch with a deluge of a thousand feats, nearly all of which just rearrange the existing numbers: very easy and safe to design, very cheap to publish, but empty calories compared to a real meal (where new supplements actually add new subsystems to the game).Tl;dr:Pathfinder 2 is a game that asks you to care for <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=249" target="_blank">Talismans</a>.Pathfinder 2 is a game that asks you to care about literally hundreds (and soon thousands) of little niggly feats.Not sure I can explain it more clearly than that.</blockquote>

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