Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

CapnZapp

Legend
* Case in point:


In isolation, this is obviously an easily ignored rule. I am not saying it is more than a minor speedbump on the road to fun gameplay.

But I am saying it is a good example of a pattern emerging. In almost every case where the PF2 designers chose between the simple way and the complex way, they chose the complex way :(

I think making your game more complicated than it needs to be, and especially making it appear to be more complicated than it needs to be, must be a very bad business decision in the age of 5E.

And, just to show how far from me this design philosophy is... A random poster's honest attempt at helping out the OP of the linked thread:

Also, if your party is annoyed and wants to indentify a lot of things while adventuring, they could get the Quick Identification feat. It´s a skill feat lvl 1, and makes identification 1 min instead of 10 min. That should solve their problems.
No that's not the solution.

The solution is to not feature feats you need to take just to make limitations less annoying. Yes, it adds "options" but not in a good way!

The solution is to not feature annoying rules in the first place!
 
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CapnZapp

Legend
Are official adventures going just a little too heavy on the higher-threat encounters?
As far as I can understand they follow the encounter guidelines religiously. (Sometimes too religiously)

Sure there's been the odd mistake where a monster ended up being more dangerous than probably intended, but I'm not holding that against them.

What I wanted to say in regards to this is that it's probably the guidelines, not the adventures. When I made my first little sandbox (before official APs were out) I - in retrospect - almost or literally never knowingly created encounters as hard as what I later understood were meant as "business as usual".
 

CapnZapp

Legend
Just declare that everything outside of the CRB (or whatever preferred sources) is rare. You still retain the option of including something as a treasure or a reward, but character building doesn’t get out of control.
You absolutely can.

It's more controversial to do so than in 5E, however. The culture of Pathfinder 1, for instance, was outright player entitled as far as I can understand, hostile to the idea a GM should be given the right to deny a player some splat book feature.

Even now Paizo is wavering and much less clear than WotC on this issue. Let me take a stab at explaining this to the best of my ability:

1. First off, every rule is freely available at online SRD databases; you get a culture much more open to the idea of using "everything".

2. Classes are much more defined as collections of feats than a nice simple writeup where most of what you need to know to form an opinion "what is this class about" is right there, in the beginning of the book. Unless you read the physical CRB, you must go out of your way to restrict online filtering to "CRB only".

3. I know Paizo created rarity to combat this problem, but by labeling things Common in splatbooks, they have inadvertently() created something of a stamp of approval. It's hard to say no to your players when they argue "but it's common, Paizo clearly wants us to use this stuff".

†) I mean, common can be read as "the stuff that isn't uncommon or rare". But it can also be read as "common is the things we believe is safe to use in any campaign - if it could be used to surprise the GM or shortcircuit a campaign in some way, we would have made it uncommon or rare".

In our current campaign, I have gotten my players aboard the idea "no uncommon or rare content except what's specific to the campaign, since it is our first PF2 AP". Note how this means every common feat from books like the Lost Omens Character Guide and the Advanced Player's Guide becomes available to our characters just as soon as the books are out (or rather, as soon as the Pathbuilder app gets updated). Saying no to that felt overly punitive. Contrast this to 5th Edition where WotC makes it much easier to say "PHB+1 and that's it".

4) Paizo is actively undermining their own stance on restricted content, since "uncommon" is used for multiple purposes.

4a) Yes, it is used for spells and rituals like Speak with Dead and Raise Dead (since the former spell can wreck a low-powered mystery if the players can just ask the murder victim who killed her, and since the latter spell allows characters to simply undo the murder so no adventure is needed)

4b) But "uncommon" is also used for its more literal interpretation - this weapon is uncommon around these parts, so you can't expect to easily find it in the shops. That is, a rules element can be uncommon simply because it's assumed to be exotic. Only characters from far-away lands know how to use it, and so on.

4c) "Uncommon" is also used for campaign-specific items. Each AP contains a multitude of new rules elements (items, feats, archetypes...) and some of it is labeled uncommon. To the best of my knowledge, this usage does mirror the "PHB+1" idea in that a campaign should not be drowned by including everything from previous campaign. If you run Extinction Curse, players may select circus weapons. If you then run Agents of Edgewood, including those would be inappropriate. This also helps making each campaign feel special.

4d) There are even feats that let you access uncommon rules elements - and these feats are themselves not uncommon! Go figure...

(Far from every uncommon rules element can be accessed this way. These feats are always(?) specific. But still)




The end result is that the message sent is incredibly unclear. I believe it is very unfortunate how this allows player entitlement to seep over from PF1.

I realize I am not fully cognizant of Paizo's intentions and goals here, and I am absolutely open to your views on the issue.
 
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CapnZapp

Legend
I don’t know about the official PF2E adventures: I haven’t read or run them in case I get a chance to play them some day. But the encounter guidelines seem pretty spot on from what I have seen
Nothing wrong with the encounter guidelines.

Just that - if followed closely - they result in Medicine not keeping up with other expectations of the game (as I've discussed above).

You can absolutely ease off on the difficulty when you GM your own adventures.

Official APs don't, however, which is why I'm bringing up the way Medicine resulting in 40-70 minute rests as a real problem.
 

CapnZapp

Legend
My issues with character creation are as follows:
  • High pace of new material means that players will end up drowning in small choices that take up time and add little (like what happened at the end of 4e);
  • Many Ancestral feats were extremely small bonuses in limited circumstances (Elves can get a +1 against emotional effects);
  • I didn’t like Ability penalties on Ancestries;
  • Skill feats that were required to do things that as a DM, I would have allowed otherwise (like trying to intimidate someone simply by staring at them).
You would have thought Paizo had learned from WotC that the gamer base is much more tolerant to a slower crunch rollout than previously thought. But nope. Pathfinder 2 is happily turning on the hose, partying like it's 2002...

"extremely small bonuses in limited circumstances"... My advice, don't read the section on Talismans...

"Skill feats that were required to do things that as a DM, I would have allowed otherwise" Yes, one of my biggest beefs with the game is that Paizo is actively obliterating the "yes, but" gamesmastering style. Paizo is reserving every little corner of the design space for themselves. Either there is already a feat to "let you do that" or it is reserved for future publication.

You are absolutely meant to face crippling restrictions on nearly every non-standard action (mainly swashbuckling stuff), so that you will want to take a feat that removes the limitation. You want to jump fences faster? Crawl through gutters faster? Climb without becoming defenseless? You can't. But you can if you take this feat (sometimes with a ridiculously high level requirement).

That's a negative way to build a ruleset. I strongly dislike that design philosophy. More importantly, I believe it compares unfavorably with 5E's design philosophy which seems to say "you can absolutely do that, and if you take this feat, you'll become awesome doing it".
 

CapnZapp

Legend
Great stuff! It's these sorts of considerations that can help any RPG escape the murderhobo grind of constant combat and looting. These are some of the places where canny players can avoid combat that risks wearing down their characters unnecessarily, and avoid having to spend 10-60 minutes after each fight healing.
Sure, but that's a different adventure paradigm than official APs.

I happen to believe that the rules as written should support official adventures as written.
 

CapnZapp

Legend
Ancestral Paragon only lets you take first-level ancestry feats, not all or even most of them (while there are a couple of ways to braoden it, for most characters it opens up around eight feats). You are only picking from 170 skill feats if you are somehow Legendary in all the skills, which is obviously impossible.

Making a PF2 character involves picking a lot of feats, and some of them are not particularly significant in their effects. Personally, I would have preferred slightly fewer and chunkier feats. But there are ways to express that without misrepresenting what is actually in the book.

_
glass.
Have you ever considered how you arrive at which feats you can select?

That is, you absolutely must look at the feats that require you to be Legendary in a skill you don't have - how else to know you can't take it?

Again, all this boils down to "use the app", but I'm saying it to point out that it is you who choose to interpret "choose" narrowly - to mean only choosing among the feats you are allowed to choose between.

While correct, that too can be considered to be misrepresenting what is actually in the book... ;)
 

CapnZapp

Legend
SPOILERS FOR PLAGUESTONE
I don't consider the following to be a spoiler. Since it's endemic to the entire game, I consider it useful consumer advice:

Almost every single level of every single Paizo adventure features ~13 encounters. Since that is what the guidelines for encounters and XP amount to. So, yes, characterizing each and every level of a hero's journey as a "hard slog" is not something I personally could fault you for.

In my estimate, you could absolutely run a scenario (any scenario) using milestone leveling and remove fully half the combat encounters without losing any "story power" whatsoever.
 

glass

(he, him)
Have you ever considered how you arrive at which feats you can select? That is, you absolutely must look at the feats that require you to be Legendary in a skill you don't have - how else to know you can't take it?
If the name of the feat does not give it away, you have to read four words ("Prerequisites: Legendary in -whatever-"). Either in the feat descriptions themselves, or the tables at the start of the feat chapter (grouped by skill and then level/required proficiency).

_
glass.
 

CapnZapp

Legend
Naturally, our group ended up aggroing multiple encounters so the DM ended up playing extremely sub-optimally to avoid killing us.
It should be stated that the encounter building is

a) very balanced and good
b) very fragile

I'm talking about one and the same thing - the positive quality that is "PF2 fights are considerably tighter and more reliably exciting" also have a drawback: the odds quickly become impossible if these encounter guidelines are not adhered to.

Something as simple as "the monsters in the outer room hear of the slaughter elsewhere in the dungeon and retreat into the inner room" is just not what this game is about.

Even two individually "moderate" encounters become, if combined, an "extreme" encounter. Yes, really. A moderate encounter is rated at 80 xp, and an extreme encounter is rated at 160 xp.

You pretty much never want to have monsters react by regrouping or reinforcing. Every encounter is difficult enough as written. This is distinctly different from most other versions of D&D I have ever played.

And believe me when I say that when Paizo rates an encounter as "extreme" they aren't kidding. We have played 11 levels of Extinction Curse and so far not even a single encounter have been rated extreme. Expressed in WotC's language I would call such an encounter "quadruple deadly with extra sauce on top".

PS. If you liked the "set piece" philosophy of 4th Edition scenario design you will like this. Trivial encounters are for the most party assumed to be won behind the scenes. Nearly every written encounter is expected to provide a significant challenge, allowing players to test their mettle in playing the game well.

If you prefer to be be able to have monsters react more realistically (or at least more intelligently) or you're interested in running an open-ended sandbox where heroes might come across severely over-leveled monsters, I heartily encourage you to click this link:

 
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