Thomas Shey
Legend
A perfectly legitimate stance, but pretty far afield from what most people using a D&D game are going for. Most people going for that effect I've encountered are more likely to use an RQ derivative or the like.
Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2
- Thread starter CapnZapp
- Start date
A perfectly legitimate stance, but pretty far afield from what most people using a D&D game are going for. Most people going for that effect I've encountered are more likely to use an RQ derivative or the like.
I’m picturing a ranger buying all the cats and becoming the adventurer equivalent of a cat lady. Who needs ranged weapons when you can chuck angry cats at everything?
CapnZapp
Legend
Just to note:
You wanting this is a poor argument for not providing uptime value to gold.
A better solution would have been WotC offering support which you then choose not to use.
And before someone comes with the old chestnut "but if it's in the core game I'll be compelled to use it" let me just say it isn't in the core rules.
Justice and Rule
Legend
I mean, have you ever thought that maybe you're the one being contrarian?
You've discussed how you think PF2 is overdesigned, and I think I'd be willing to buy that if your arguments didn't seem to revolve around what come off as trivial complaints. Telling me about how bad a feat is that allows someone to climb with a weapon or trying to convince me how a system is overdesigned because it has you fall prone if you take fall damage or because your crawl speed is 1 square unless it's modified is... a hard sell, to say the least.
And this isn't to say that PF2 is perfect: Again, I think the crafting is wonky and there are feats out there that would probably be better to just have as part of the class. Sometimes they went a little too far with ala carte, like having racial weapon proficiencies be a feat. But I think these are small complaints. Overall I appreciate that many of these systems are there because I find it infinitely easier to tweak something rather than create something, and PF2's dedication to fairly consistent system building (Most systems generally work off the same principles) helps me if I wanted to do something.
Like, you say that there is no choice where it matters, but keep complaining about how all these feats lock you out of things. And I think that's a hard circle to square: if the choices don't matter, then they can't lock you out of meaningful stuff, right? And you keep telling us of how limiting these feats are, but your actual play example is you as a GM telling a player that they can't use their feat in a creative way. To me, I feel like this is all just contradictory. Really, the thing here is that the feats are meaningful, but much less so than 5E... and that's by design. They are incremental, thus you don't get wild swings from certain features at different levels.
You also keep bringing up 5E's success as something while talking about how people are finally talking about how there are problems about 2E on Paizo's forums and I'm like... have you talked to people about 5E before? Because people talk about the problems of 5E all the time. naughty word, just bring up the Ranger if you want a litany of problems with that game, or its magic item system, or Saving Throws, or its wild class imbalances, or the fighter debate, or how proficiency in skills can be easily outstripped by ability bonuses, or its CR problems... people have huge complaints about 5E, and it doesn't really stop people from still enjoying it. I'm one of them. Heck, we're on a forum that's literally doing a playtest to make an advanced version of 5E!
I feel like PF2 did look at 5E and rather than imitating it, looked at where it failed. Skills and proficiency are a good example of this: 5e's idea of proficiency was interesting, but not quite there. It's certainly simple, but at the same time it lacks nuance and could lead to problems. For example, you have ability score versus proficiency problem: for certain classes it's not worth it to take certain skills because they will likely be outshone by another party member who might not even have that skill but have a much better ability modifier.
My go to examples are any Int skill for a Fighter, and Animal Handling for a Ranger. A fighter taking an Int skill in a party that has, say, a Wizard is just a waste of resources because the Wizard's natural intelligence will likely outstrip the fighter's proficiency , and as time goes on with ASIs they will only catch up at the highest levels. Same with Animal Handling for a Ranger: Charisma is a tertiary ability score for that class, and a Paladin (or any CHA-based class, which there are a lot of in 5E) will likely be naturally better by virtue of it being their primary ability score even if they don't take the skill. Part of this is to allow everyone to do just about anything, but it ends up devaluing choices because there's little reason to put resources into something that you really won't succeed in compared to a place where you will. This thing is frustrating, and one of the things I ended up doing when I made out my "Skill Uses" was to have Trained and Untrained uses. If you were trained in a skill, you were at Advantage on Untrained uses and if you didn't have a skill, you were at Disadvantage on Trained uses. I thought this worked fairly well at making skills worthwhile, but it's still something of a clumsy hack.
PF2 nails their system as a great compromise between 5E and 4E: proficiency is based on leveling, but also there are gradations beyond just your level which allows you to differentiate between what people can and can't do. The whole thing is fantastic, and I love how they use that proficiency system beyond just skills and with combat abilities (like the Fighter) and defense (Crusader and Monk). Similarly it's a great way of solving the Saving Throw complaint with 5E: you have advancement in all your saves, but some saves are still better than others. And how skills are doled out is just smarter, too! Instead of giving a class a limited list of skills and depending on background and race to fill out what other ones you might want, in PF2 you GET your important class skill (So Rangers no longer need to debate taking Survival and Nature and just get those for free) and have access to every other skill out there so you are free to build your concept. Suddenly I don't need to build a custom background so I can get the exact skill loadout I need, and instead I can just select a background for the flavor.
Like, I could go on about how I feel some design choices were reactions to 5E problems, but I don't want to filibuster any more than I already have at this point. I think asking why PF2 didn't imitate 5E is obvious: there's no point in being an iteration on an incredibly successful formula. If people want that, they'll go with the original. Instead, PF2 found its own voice as an interesting mix of 3.75E, 4E, and 5E. As a guy who has played 5E since the beginning, I wouldn't have been interested in looking at it otherwise.
It's not just a tough choice, it's a bad choice. You are basically being given a choice between creating uniqueness in your character or actually advancing your stats in a game that does not give you many options for that. 5E doesn't give you many options to actually make a class/subclass your own: most of your options are fixed once you choose it. So feats stand as a great way to individualize your character beyond what you currently have. However, you are sacrificing one of your few chances to actually advance your stats in a game where you have precious few chances to actually do that, and even with small numbers that can really suck.
Like, it's just not good design, and it's largely because they didn't want to have Feats as RAW because... reasons? I dunno. There's so much I really love about Feats conceptually that doesn't work in actuality with 5E. You can see the basic idea and it's a great idea, but the implementation is just unideal, to say the least.
The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
I also kind of want to note that a significant portion of the 2e playerbase (the subreddit has done polling) is specifically people who feel like 5e wasn't cutting it for their needs, and have plenty of experience in it to make that assessment, which really puts a wrench in the idea that 5e's success should be repressing other designs.
As far as I can tell, while still very successful, 5e is going through a midlife crisis in it's community where the designers are really starting to strain the limits of the system they created, and the community of newbies, which has a few years of experience under their belt now, are starting to grapple with the idea that they want more from their rule-set.
That's probably not a shock, even for Zapp (who of course, evangelizes for his own theoretical advanced 5e-esque heartbreaker system) so the primary point of disagreement is more like how close that system should be to 5e. Personally, I'm very happy with most of the things they complain about, and I literally spent the few years prior to 2e's release GMing and playing 5e, there was literally a moment where I was in anxiety over whether the 2e system would make me convert because I was so invested in 5e-- in summary, I didn't want to like 2e, it converted me by sheer force of it's design and appeal.
It's also weird to me that my disagreement is being reframed as not understanding the points being made, I understand them, they've just done nothing to convince me that they're good points, and since I keep running into Zapp here, on the paizo forums, and I believe on reddit as well, and I read more or less all of it, they've had ample opportunity to do so.
As far as I can tell, while still very successful, 5e is going through a midlife crisis in it's community where the designers are really starting to strain the limits of the system they created, and the community of newbies, which has a few years of experience under their belt now, are starting to grapple with the idea that they want more from their rule-set.
That's probably not a shock, even for Zapp (who of course, evangelizes for his own theoretical advanced 5e-esque heartbreaker system) so the primary point of disagreement is more like how close that system should be to 5e. Personally, I'm very happy with most of the things they complain about, and I literally spent the few years prior to 2e's release GMing and playing 5e, there was literally a moment where I was in anxiety over whether the 2e system would make me convert because I was so invested in 5e-- in summary, I didn't want to like 2e, it converted me by sheer force of it's design and appeal.
It's also weird to me that my disagreement is being reframed as not understanding the points being made, I understand them, they've just done nothing to convince me that they're good points, and since I keep running into Zapp here, on the paizo forums, and I believe on reddit as well, and I read more or less all of it, they've had ample opportunity to do so.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Same. Truth to tell, the more I read their arguments, the less convincing they become.
Like others have said, and I mentioned earlier in this thread, PF2e is not unflawed--but a lot of what Zapp presents either don't seem problems to me, or seem like they've been problems because of specific assumptions they're working under which I don't share.
Honestly, the biggest complaint I have about PF2e is that porting it over to an original setting would require some heavy lifting to do properly (and I'm not talking here about the usual system-embedded assumptions but the fact that a lot of their material is pretty Golarion-centric).
The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
ooh, i can comment on this since I've been doing a lot of making pf2e work with my setting (worldbuilding is one of my GM strengths, so I work hard on setting stuff.) Its interesting because you have a lot of very flavorful options baked into the game, at one point I was having exactly that problem with Goblins-- where I realized I wasn't crazy about Paizo's hyperactive jerks and was trying to figure out how to make crazy stuff like 'torch goblins' 'goblin song' and 'irongut goblins' make sense with something that wasn't that.
I ended up following through with an idea I'd originally had to make Goblins ninjutsu centric, the abilities then mapped nicely onto a Ninja Scrolls esque take on Ninjas-- they have all kinds of crazy weird techniques, in a Chambara vein, so fire resistant torch goblins? Def the fighting style of a clan of ninjas that condition themselves to be resistant to burning. Irongut? They condition themselves to be able to resist poison and disease, so they can use them safely and survive them.
Overall I can see why someone might find it frustrating, but I've been having fun using the mechanics as a prompt to rewrite Golarion's fiction into the fiction for my setting. Some light mechanical changes, clever placement, and rewriting are all serving me well-- one of the things I'm wrapping my head around now, is actually writing Tieflings, Geniekin, Duskwalkers, and such for a game system in which they are explicitly made to be any base ancestry-- it makes a 'Tiefling Society' and social history weirder to write... but also more thought provoking, because its making me draw on actual ideas about migration and the formation of societies and such, to explain the movements and integration.
Justice and Rule
Legend
I'm trying to hash out a Dragonborn ancestry and the modularity of how species are built is rather nice. I have seen the one from the Reddit, which is nice... but man, my dragonborn have to have some sort of dragon's breath. Looking at giving them a free cantrip of their element that can be cast from their mouth as a sort of "lesser dragon's breath" that can be upgraded to be similar to the Kobolds.
I’m also running in a homebrew setting, but I completely replaced all of the core ancestries with my own. It started out as a non-D&D fantasy setting, and I wasn’t going to change that for PF2. Doing my own thing with ancestries has let me avoid the Golarion-isms in the default ones. My biggest source of pain is clerics. If you’re not using or reskinning the Golarion pantheon, you have your work cut out for you.
While we did eventually switch to 5e, we’re more of a PF1 group. I ran Kingmaker when it came out as well as several of the other APs. Looking at it through that lens, it’s easy to see where they tried to keep the character of PF1 while sanding down the warts. Having done a little bit of PFS, it’s also easy to see where they tried to make a system that works with organized play by default. For PF1, they had to prohibit stuff (like crafting), but that’s all PFS legal now.
I’m sympathetic to some of the issues. I’ve said before that skill feats could be presented better, though I personally dislike skill actions much more. To run PF1, I had a custom GM screen with everything nicely organized on it. Paizo took all those modifiers and turned them into actions, and then built customization on top of it. I see myself adopting some of the things I did to manage PF1, and it doesn’t make me happy.
What does make me happy is the balance and general consistency of the system. When I think of running other things for my group, I realize I’ll miss that (and the good integration with Foundry). That’s how I ended up deciding to do the one shot of Winter’s Daughter in PF2 instead of OSE and 5e (and we’ll see how that goes next week …).
The consistency is also a source of trouble. I’ve also complained about that before. When the system doesn’t follow the rules it established for presenting and conveying information, it suffers badly for it. Weapon traits could use another editing pass or two. If things that added effects were written like e.g., fighter feats that added effects, they would be much easier to understand. I can’t see that’s happening, but Paizo did change how storage works in an update, so who knows.
And of course, I love how exploration mode meshes with how I like to run. I don’t like how surprise works, and rolling different skills for initiative ended up less interesting than one might expect, but neither are severe problems. Well, I guess I wish surprise was a bit less narratively janky.
While we did eventually switch to 5e, we’re more of a PF1 group. I ran Kingmaker when it came out as well as several of the other APs. Looking at it through that lens, it’s easy to see where they tried to keep the character of PF1 while sanding down the warts. Having done a little bit of PFS, it’s also easy to see where they tried to make a system that works with organized play by default. For PF1, they had to prohibit stuff (like crafting), but that’s all PFS legal now.
I’m sympathetic to some of the issues. I’ve said before that skill feats could be presented better, though I personally dislike skill actions much more. To run PF1, I had a custom GM screen with everything nicely organized on it. Paizo took all those modifiers and turned them into actions, and then built customization on top of it. I see myself adopting some of the things I did to manage PF1, and it doesn’t make me happy.
What does make me happy is the balance and general consistency of the system. When I think of running other things for my group, I realize I’ll miss that (and the good integration with Foundry). That’s how I ended up deciding to do the one shot of Winter’s Daughter in PF2 instead of OSE and 5e (and we’ll see how that goes next week …).
The consistency is also a source of trouble. I’ve also complained about that before. When the system doesn’t follow the rules it established for presenting and conveying information, it suffers badly for it. Weapon traits could use another editing pass or two. If things that added effects were written like e.g., fighter feats that added effects, they would be much easier to understand. I can’t see that’s happening, but Paizo did change how storage works in an update, so who knows.
And of course, I love how exploration mode meshes with how I like to run. I don’t like how surprise works, and rolling different skills for initiative ended up less interesting than one might expect, but neither are severe problems. Well, I guess I wish surprise was a bit less narratively janky.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Yeah, if I was motivated I'm sure I could do the things I needed to (though trying to get all the ancestry and archetype setups right kind of makes me shudder); I've run incarnations of RuneQuest with cults and things in the Hero System where you need to construct anything of any structure. I'm just lazy in my old age.
