Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

[kenada]

Since none ever tells me how PF2 makes GMing easy /fast/ more convinced than 5e ?

I’ve run campaigns in both 5e and PF2. I’ve run both pre-written modules and my own stuff. I find they both take about the same time to prep for a session. To 5e’s credit, the adventures are not all the same structurally, so it might have the advantage there depending on what you’re going to run (I’ve run Murder in Baldur’s Gate and Hoard of the Dragon Queen). I always found PF1 APs were a slog to prep because of how much I had to augment in my notes to make them usable at the table.

For things outside of prepping, I find PF2 easier to do homebrew monsters and other things. The creature, hazard, and item creation guidelines in the GMG are pretty solid. That’s not a slight on 5e, but the monster creation procedure in the DMG is pretty clunky to use. I really prefer building to a benchmark instead, which is how PF2 does it. However, I thought I read recently that someone had reversed-engineered the stats from the MM, so maybe a benchmark-based approach is possible now in 5e.

All I read is it is great for players because choices in building which the get to do once in a while at start or level up ( if they not plan out all 20 level at the start)

Some people think that stuff is fun (even the planning). However, you don’t have to plan. PF2 lacks the trap options and feat taxes from PF1, so players who just want to pick cool options can choose stuff as they gain a new level. If you don’t care, each class has a few build suggestions you can follow.

and the 3 action system that makes splitting up movement into a thing of the past for example and ever minor thing is a full action like handing someone a weapon is 2-3 action assuming you hold the weapon P1 Actions: move-Handover (waiting till P2s turn) P2 take

Coming from other games, this seems awkward, but keep in mind that an action is ~2s long. Instead of having an exception in the rules that you can do some things during your turn, you just resolve them with the same action economy as everything else. If someone wants to open a door and get out a potion, they still have one action left. They don’t completely mess up their turn just because they wanted to do two ‘trivial’ things this time.

Running one PC by the rules might be fine even if I have players that even struggle 5e`s bonuses and keep forgetting bless and other effects, so I dread for some of them constantly changing modifiers based on combat.

You can write this stuff down, so only the floating modifier changes during combat (e.g., a circumstance bonus from bless), but that only goes so far. If the group is bad about remember things, the GM will have to stay on top of that to remind them.

But a Dm running 5-8 monsters is quite a lot to keep in mind

If it helps, PF2 advocates rolling individual initiative for monsters. When a monster’s turn comes up, you only have to focus on one at a time. (The reason for this is having all the monsters go at once can be dangerous for the PCs because they can team up and kill someone before the party can do anything to stop it.)

and I see no way to run PF2 theater of the mind if the table space is too little with 6-8 players it seems heavily map focused

That’s a pretty fair observation. You might be able to pull it off by tracking positions behind the screen, but it’s going to be a challenge, especially with that many people.

 

[Campbell]

For what it is worth I find both playing and running PF2 to be less mentally taxing at the table than 5e. I rate it roughly on par with running Edge of the Empire, Scion Second Edition, or Legend of the Five Rings 5e.

A lot of this has to do with how I process information. The lack of clear templating and poor technical writing in 5e makes it extraordinarily hard for me to process in play. All the different resource pools, passive abilities, special exceptions to everything, frustrating mechanics like concentration, and muddled action economy (split movement, split attacks, conditional bonus actions) make running and sometimes playing 5e a very mentally draining experience for me.

PF2 is a remarkably consistent game with strong technical writing. Similar things use the exact same mechanics. Traits really help to make interactions between things more clear. The action economy is substantially less fuddled. Things proceed in a specific order. Resource pools are consistent and there is generally less limited use abilities to track particularly for Monks and Paladins/Champions. It specifically points out areas where GM judgement is required. It also has way better tooling for designing encounters, monsters, and hazards.

For me personally, it is just far easier to use. Like phenomenally so.

 

[glass]

For me personally, it is just far easier to use. Like phenomenally so.

This is mostly me also, except that I have never run 5e just played it so I cannot vouch for the GM-specific aspects. That lack of technical writing bothered me enough as a player though.

_
glass.

 

[Campbell]

I have also had this discussion with @CapnZapp a number of times. The features that drew back to wanting to run PF2 (after pretty much abandoning modern D&D for OSR games as a GM) are things he considers outmoded. Things like Exploration mode, real Vancian casting, managing your recovery, and puzzle box monster design.

We also have a fairly substantial technical disagreement. I do not believe Fifth Edition has mechanical hooks that are compelling enough to make a layered tactical game with compelling crunch. The mechanical fundamentals are well suited to its play experience, but layering things on top of it will not get you to where you want to go. I could be wrong about this. Someone might create a design that does just that, but generally is a lot of danger in just layering stuff on top without building out a modular structure first.

It's also most likely a matter of us talking past each other. The last thing I want in a crunchier game is the layering of passive effects on top of each other particularly if it comes from a general pool or stacking class levels. When you layer systems on top of each other like that tuning becomes damn near impossible because power differences have multiplicative effects. It also tends to move the skill of play away from play to prep (spell prep or character creation).

The way PF2 feats generally represent more active abilities or grant narrative permissions rather than scaling numbers up keeps things more focused on the choices you make in play.

 

[Aldarc]

But could PF2 have been just as good with far less clutter? Again, I absolutely think so. The game is curiously overengineered in far too many areas.

Or perhaps under-engineered if one believes that it could have used some additional polish and less clutter. Admittedly though, D&D and its kin are fairly notorious when it comes to removing unnecessary clutter. Even 5e, IMHO, is plagued with a lot of extra clutter. But I have also learned that for some people the conservative nature of removing unnecessary clutter in D&D is considered a feature and not a bug.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well I already agreed with you the post-combat medicine usage could be streamlined, and admitted that I had not really looked at talismans. Conversely, I disagreed that the relatively small number of bonuses and penalties is a problem - rather I consider the relative lack of such to be a problem for me with 5e.

But this is a long pair of threads - remind what the other were (if any)?

_
glass.

I hope I don't have to. There's enough interesting aspects to discuss already.

Please keep in mind: I'm not arguing Pathfinder 2 is unusuably complex. I'm arguing that it is clearly and obviously too complex for its own good. To me Paizo looks to have ignored every sign and trend set by 5th edition.

 

[CapnZapp]

Complaining that PF2 is more complex than 5e DnD is like complaining that a Lexus costs more than a Toyota.

I disagree.

I'm not complaining about all the subsystems where I feel PF2's level of complexity is useful and/or earned.

I'm saying that in too many cases, PF2 is unjustifiably complicated and cluttered. The game also has far too much of "negative choice space", meaning you're meant to take options not to suck, instead of taking options to be extra awesome.

 

[CapnZapp]

Recall Knowledge isn’t complex. It just doesn’t do what people want it to do in combat (monster identification with specifics).

No, now you're discussing only the Recall Knowledge activity in isolation. Please don't do that.

I am discussing Recall Knowledge in full context, including every related bit and bob of rules minutae. (If you aren't content to wait until the problem comes to you, you can do what I did, a text search in the CRB PDF). This includes feats like Automatic Knowledge and spells like Hypercognition and even whole classes like the Investigator. I don't know what to make of it, or how to use it in actual play, despite considering my level of GM experience as "very". That's a problem in my book.

For more, I've participated in a thread where I constructively offer solutions:

Fixing/Improving Recall Knowledge

CapnZapp made a post about the issues with Recall Knowledge in the GM experience thread and suggested there be a separate discussion. While he can speak for himself, I agree with his points that the Recall Knowledge action and use is pretty light on the rules where as most other parts of the...

www.enworld.org

The issue you cite with Crafting is almost certainly working as intended. Crafting in PF1 could be used to break the wealth by level guidelines. Now it can’t.

"working as intended" is not a good defense unless my criticism was "it tried to make it hard to break WBL and it fails".

I'm not criticizing the end result as much as the process.

Let me quote myself from the thread where I constructively suggest a replacement rule:

Well, my impetus wasn't over concern about that.

I mostly just looked over the Crafting rules... then read more closely, and once again... and I still couldn't figure out what the benefits were.

I had to ask (over at Paizo forums) to understand.

The RAW rules are incredibly cluttery and byzantine in that the benefit depends on so many factors outside the player's control, and if I (the GM) run an official campaign, even partially outside my control as well!

There's just so many questions: will we always have a settlement of our level available? how much downtime will there be? what sort of formulas will I find? how much of the loot will be in cash (either in gold or in vendor loot)?
(Your ability to make money out of crafting depends greatly on the settlement where your party spends its downtime. The lower the settlement vs your own level the better - for you (it sucks for your mates). The longer the downtime the better - for you (it sucks for your mates). You need formulas of your own level, and you obviously need a lot of free cash, so you can take advantage of all that downtime) In short, the system sucks, since it basically rewards you relative to your mates, not in absolute terms.

As a player, what I want out of any Crafting rule is a simple straight answer to the question "what kind of discount can I expect if I become a crafter?" You just can't gain that information from the rulebook, you just can't.

That is my impetus for creating a simpler faster and much more straight-forward framework.

<snip>

 

[CapnZapp]

As much as I loved PF2 early on, I think its balance is an illusion. Much like 4E, if you stray from the design assumptions, it's gonna be bad.
While I may be "running it wrong," I feel that I don't have a choice as GM. I am running an AP "by the book" for a group of players who want the authentic experience from a playtesting mindset.
We do full HP recharges with Medicine after every combat, full shield repair after every combat. Every character has a "get out of dead free card" in the form of a Hero Point - making it impossible to kill a character without a TPK. So the only balance it can claim is in the encounter, like 4e before it. This makes all pillars of the game with the exception of combat feel like a mini-game that just isn't a part of the primary function - combat. Roleplaying and exploration do not overly matter because they do not impact combat. We've done downtime days to earn extra gold while playing the stronghold mini-game. They can buy magic items to influence their combats.
They have a full reset after each encounter, with the exception of a couple spell slots. But they have plenty to do probably 6-8 encounters in a day. There is no danger for any of the characters because they can be insta-healed like 50+ hp within a turn. And even if things go south, there's that "get out of dead free card."

Well, I understand and agree to much of what you say... except the "there's no danger" part.

But my comment here and now is "Everything is interconnected."

The reason you (and I) do "full HP recharges" is because we run APs as written, where every encounter can be very hard and where not being fully recharged would have been a significant disadvantage.

But if you run PF2 at a different pace that is no longer the case as much. To achieve this you must make sure that every "routine" encounter is of Low difficulty at most. (This in stark contrast to our 5E experience, where any decently min/maxed party can handle even a Deadly ambush encounter. In other words, the experience of playing official PF2 adventures is comparable to playing a game of 5th Edition where Deadly was the lowest regular encounter difficulty, and you'd face double- or triple-deadly encounters every day.

And now I mean Deadly as it comes across in practical play - i.e. not very deadly at all - and not its official definition. If you just read the definitions, you'd be forgiven to think 5E and PF2 are roughly equally difficult games. In practice, the difference is like night and day.)

Players need to gain the confidence of a 5E player - "unless we do something stupid, we can be confident of handling any surprise even when half out of gas". There can be no Severe encounters that aren't hinted at or otherwise telegraphed beforehand.

Do that and players will slowly start choosing other choices that "we huddle together and try to stay very quiet, hoping our hp meters reach full before anything bad finds us".

The healing rules is connected to the resting minigame and these are both connected to the encounter budgets which in turn is connected to the overall lethality of monsters...

When I run an AP I'm getting the feeling that Paizo aims for something a bit too extreme for my taste. There's something off - the various subsystems isn't gelling as well as I'd hoped. If the overall system weren't stressed as much, weren't run at full throttle as it were, individual blemishes wouldn't be as noticeable.

 

[CapnZapp]

That is not the impression I got at all. Since I am missing it, please paraphrase what he saying (in your own opinion of course!). I know that it is awkward to do so, I personally worry that I am misrepresenting someone, but by doing so we can see where miscommunications are, especially since CapnZapp will be by shortly and can see what both of us think his arguments are and clarify what he is actually saying.

Edit: I am sorry if this post comes off as angry, one of the things that frustrates me is people telling me I am doing something wrong but not in enough detail to do anything about it, and I think it sort of leaked into the tone of this post. I am genuinely interested in what you thing CapnZapp is saying vs. what I think he’s saying vs. what he thinks he is saying.

As far as I can understand this revolves around the difference between

If you simplify PF2 you end up with 5E.

If you simplify PF2 you end up with... a better PF2 with fewer unnecessary fiddly bits. (

First, I do think Level Up has the better general idea, before we even start discussing the specifics of Pathfinder 2.

That said, I think PF2 could have scared away fewer potential customers without sacrificing its "essence" or "soul" or otherwise be reduced to 5E with better control at the overall design level.

What's good about PF2 is the three-action system and monster stat blocks. (There's lot of minor stuff that's good too, such as lots of hero archetype support or a functional magic item pricing system, but at its core, the 3-action system and the Bestiary is what's clearly superior to 5E) Classes are weirdly locked down. There are too many feats, like ridiculously so. Spells are mostly mediocre or utilitarian. Too many game options only exist to ameliorate limitations and restrictions that needn't be there in the first place. And there are lots of subsystems that can't justify their complexity. The presentation isn't helping.

All in all, the game comes across as far less streamlined and polished than its chief competitor. Its added level of crunch could have been a much larger draw if Paizo didn't go overboard so many damn times.

I clearly see what Paizo aimed for. But I also see where they went wrong and where they should have axed content.

In the context of this post, I will have to ask @dave2008 if this is in any way on-topic...? But I really want to keep the focus of the discussion on Pathfinder 2.