Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

[CapnZapp]

IMNSO, Organised Play is like a stress test for a ruleset. Any flaws that could show up in a home game will show up more often and/or with greater magnitude in Organised Play. As such, thinking about what will or will not fly in Organised Play has utility for developers beyond the obvious.

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glass.

Sure.

We're not discussing that aspect though. We're thinking about a lot of individual restrictions and limitations we suspect are in place to stop PFS games from careening out of control where a home game would simply trust its GM.

 

[BryonD]

The irony is that Paizo, while clearly aware of player entitlement culture, made a distinctly worse job of combating it than WotC did with 5th Edition.

Well, PF was, by their own marketing "3.5 Thrives". I think it is much more appropriate to compare PF2E to 4E on this front. And that is specifically "As a reaction (or over reaction) to the complaints against 3X". I would put them in the same ballpark, but IMO, WotC did a much worse job there. 5E showed a lot of learning from the missteps of 4E. (Granted, the success of 5E goes far, far beyond just course correcting 4E.)

Anyway, I 100% agree that, substantial and important differences between 4E and PF2E not withstanding, the 3E squeaky wheel response is fundamental to both games' math.

I don't really think that player entitlement is a big concern with 3E or PF2E. Yes, 3E codified a lot and thus was a lot less DM whim dependent than 2E. No arguing that. But I think it was more a case of 3E had no "controls". There were lots of ways bad players and/or bad DMs could ruin a 3E game and the system took no pains to save you from yourself.

 

[glass]

Sure.

We're not discussing that aspect though. We're thinking about a lot of individual restrictions and limitations we suspect are in place to stop PFS games from careening out of control where a home game would simply trust its GM.

No, that is exactly the kind of thing I am thinking of. As an experienced GM I would hope to head off any problems. But the more I can rely on the system to do that so I do not have to, the happy I will be. As a GM, I have plenty of other things to be doing.

_
glass.

 

[BryonD]

No, that is exactly the kind of thing I am thinking of. As an experienced GM I would hope to head off any problems. But the more I can rely on the system to do that so I do not have to, the happy I will be. As a GM, I have plenty of other things to be doing.

_
glass.

IME the completely open ended narrative nature of RPGs is such that mechanical controls which replace DM judgement virtually always end up doing more harm than good.

In the abstract I 100% agree that a seemless support for the DM is good. And less rules are way better than more rules, as long as you maintain the integrity of the experience.

Heavy handed rules may make a better experience for people who are simply going to self destruct without them. But the best of the best games always result from the contributions of the people at the table working to make it awesome.

 

[kenada]

Well, how the game is presented is how it's written, so...

But I'm assuming what you really meant was the end results. The actual result of the mechanics. Then yes, I can accept that.

When I talk about mechanics, I generally mean the model of the rules that results from internalizing the text rather than the text itself. I think I’ve mentioned a few times the poor job the text does helping players form those models. For example, I had to diagram perception and afflictions for myself and my group. They’re actually pretty simple, but the text spends too many pages trying to convey that (and failing for my group since we didn’t even come away with fully understanding them).

But when I suggested my 2-sentence replacement, I wasn't entirely kidding.

Yes, if you were to look at it closer, you'd probably need a couple more sentences to fully replicate the byzantine tangle that is the actual CRB rules.

But my point is that that I am completely serious about the overarching point.

RAW Crafting gets a clear D if not an actual F as a design grade from me simply because I'm convinced the exact same rules could have been written as a single paragraph (even if a 6-sentence one and not my 2-sentence attempt). And that this would have not only been simpler and faster, it would have fooled far less players into thinking Crafting actually makes you money, which it quite assuredly does not do.

I refuse to just say "okay so the rules could have been written better but the actual results aren't too bad". The rules are written catastrophically bad compared to alternatives, and I consider myself as having proven that. The fact the actual results aren't "too bad" does not let Paizo off this hook.

I have no argument with you here. The rules as written do not communicate the game clearly. I want to be hopeful they just messed up and released the reference first (though as a reference the CRB is not great either), and the Beginner’s Box will actually be written in a way that helps people learn the game, but I’m not particularly confident in that hope.

 

[kenada]

But that's my entire complaint against PF2. Having thousands of feats is only done in the interests of being able to offer supplement bloat. The game could have run functionally identically with only a quarter as many feats, and it would have been unquestionably better for it.

I don’t want to start another digression about the volume of feats, so I’ll just add I think they should have been called different things. If the feats were valued equivalently, and I could MacGyver a class out of e.g., ancestry feats and skill feats, that would almost be okay, but that’s not possible (AFAIK) without its being worse than the others feat-for-feat.

 

[kenada]

Designing a game primarily for tournament play... yes, you could summarize my complaints against PF2 that way.

No way that's a good marketing idea. I am absolutely certain this limits your market. Gobs and gobs of potential customers are lost - in way higher numbers than complaining PFS players that actually make good on their threats and quit giving Paizo money.

The PFS player that complains but keeps playing is not a use case Paizo should have prioritized. But I'm convinced that is what having a public play test exposes your design project to: if you are an enthusiastic Paizo customer, you are more likely to participate in PFS and have that use case front and center for your feedback. And enthusiastic playtesters are vocal playtesters.

Making the game broadly compatible reduces the administrative burden of running PFS. PF1 had a pretty big list of compatible material, and some of it had to be more granular than just by the book. I can understand not wanting to do that again. I can also understand not wanting to deal with broken characters in PFS play.

I was in one game at a con where a guy showed up with a first level character that had something like +16 to his Diplomacy at 1st level. Of course, I played a 1st level inquisitor in that game who could do something like 20+ DPR one encounter per day and was designed to exploit the tendency of GMs to AoO the first thing that walks by, so it’s not like I wasn’t part of the problem too.

Anyway, I agree and disagree. I agree that accommodating PFS had an affect on the rules, and depending on how you feel about e.g., crafting, it was negative in some ways. I don’t think that’s why the rules are written the way they are. I think that happened as a result of trying to write them precisely in the small and failing to paint a complete picture in the large (see: other points regarding crafting, vision, etc).

Edit: And to be clear, I’m not trying to excuse the way things turned out. I’d certainly prefer more clarity. I don’t even think they’d have to sacrifice the mechanics to do that, and people would be able to see from the text that the system is less complicated than it seems now.

 

[kenada]

The irony is that Paizo, while clearly aware of player entitlement culture, made a distinctly worse job of combating it than WotC did with 5th Edition.

WotC embraced the OSR and left most supplemental material to the 3PP. 5e avoids weird supplement interaction in organized play by allowing players to use material from only one book other than the PHB. I don’t think think any of that was a realistic option for Paizo.

 

[nevin]

possibly but that depends on whether or not they felt that PFS was driving most of thier sales. If that's the case then they most likely felt they couldn't do it. If that is not the case they would have been far better off doing what every version of organized D&D has done since the RPGA and limit the ruleset and allow home players to use anything they want. Then you get to sell supplements and control organized play. If your entire ruleset is written around organized play that's a very limiting business model.

 

[kenada]

That's far too simplistic and dismissive IMHO. The Alexandrian puts far too much weight behind individual paragraphs, and he's not alone.

In reality we have "show, don't tell".

Early adventures for a game line have a FAR higher impact on people's perception of how to run that game, than anything written in the rulebook. He puts far too high faith in a DM guideline shaping the game. Many DMs don't change their games just because one sentence out of a thousand seems to indicate they should.

Your argument has a problem in that early adventures did follow the guidelines. The Forge of Fury had an encounter with a roper, which was an overwhelming encounter. People got upset. Adventures then stopped doing that. Like you say, people do what adventures do, so the norm became having encounters that were appropriately challenging (meaning not too easy and definitely not overwhelming).

What Alexandrian does is tantamount to cherry picking. I'm sure I could find a rules passage that counteracts his arguments. Plus, he reads a lot more out of that passage that what's necessarily there. (Hint: That the advice is telling you that heroes can take on more low-level encounters than high-level encounters is NOT a clear mandate to include lots of trivial encounters!)

The overall point of the article is advice to GMs on taking full advantage of the rules (note that Pathfinder 1e hadn’t even been released at the time of its writing), but it’s really just the historical elements that are relevant to this discussion. What I’m trying to show is a progression from an old-school style (where encounters are what they are, and sometimes they’re just too hard) to what I’m calling “3e-style” where they are appropriately challenging for the party.

If you think there’s a passage in the DMG that contradicts his claims, please cite it. I’ve reproduced the part he’s discussing below.

3e DMG, page 102​

Table 4-2: Encounter Difficulty

% of Total	Encounter	Description
10%	Easy	EL lower than party level
20%	Easy if handled properly	Special (see below)
50%	Challenging	EL equals that of party
15%	Very difficult	EL 1 to 4 higher than party level
5%	Overpowering	EL 5+ higher than party level

Easy: The PCs win handily with little threat to themselves. The Encounter Level for the encounter is lower than the party level. The group should be able to handle an almost limitless number of these encounters.
Easy if Handled Properly: There’s a trick to this type of encounter — a trick the PCs must discover to have a good chance of fictory. Find and eliminate the cleric with improved invisibility first so she stops healing the ogres, and everything else about the encounter becomes much easier. If not handled properly, this type of encounter becomes challenging or even very difficult.
Challenging: Most encounters seriesly threaten at least one member of the group in some way. These are challenging encounters, about equal in Encounter Level to the party level. The average adventuring group should be able to handle four or more challenging encounters before they run low on spells, hit points, and other resources. If an encounter doesn’t cost the PCs some significant portion of their resources, it’s not challenging.
Very Difficult: One PC might very well die. The Encounter Level is higher than the average party level. This sort of encounter may be more dangerous than an overpowering one, because it’s not immediately obvious to the players that the PCs should flee.
Overpowering: The PCs should run. If they don’t, they will probably lose. The Encounter Level is five or more levels higher than the party level.

You’ve focused in on the trivial encounters, but that’s a red herring. What people got upset about were the “impossible” encounters. 3e introduces that table by saying that “a well-constructed adventure has a variety of encounters at several different levels of difficulty.” I thought this might just be old-school stuff that snuck into 3e (like the accidental facing rules), but 3.5e’s DMG says the same thing (pp. 49–50).

What I think really helps underscore the evolution in adventure design is PF1’s CRB. It discuss things in terms of a “well-constructed adventure”, but the building an adventure tells you what CRs are appropriate. Given that PF1 is (more or less) compatible with 3e and 3.5e, that tables effectively constrains you to challenging and very difficult encounters. PF1 basically dropped the easy and overpowering categories.

Having seen that PF1 dialed in on appropriately challenging encounters, I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that PF2 set out to fix the problem with challenging encounters not actually being challenging. If you play badly, a moderate-threat encounter will kick your butt.

If we look at the breakdown of encounters that have been posted for Cult of Cinders, most of them are moderate-threat or higher. People got what they said they wanted, but is that what they actually wanted? I suspect not. I think some people said they wanted challenging encounters without understanding the implications, but I think other people wanted them as something to trivialize with their character-building prowess.

It’s something you’ve pointed out here before several times. There’s just no way to get an edge in PF2. In PF1, you could build your way past a difficult encounter. If players knew the system, and built good characters, they could beat those challenging encounters without a problem. In PF2, they can’t. Your only option is to work together well as a team. That shift in system mastery from out-of-game (character building) to in-game (teamwork and tactics) is probably better for the game in the abstract, but it’s certainly causing issues with people picking up adventures and then getting destroyed.

I say that this shift is better in the abstract because I was once convinced it was the better approach, but I’m currently questioning it. 5e doesn’t approach balance so meticulously. A group that doesn’t use feats and just plays their classes is obviously weaker than one with e.g., a paladin/blade-pact-warlock multiclass and all the right feat synergies, but it people have figured out how to work around it because the system in general tries not to make too many assumptions about power level. I mean, the system claims not to consider magic items, but magic items make a pretty big difference too.

Anyway, I’ll say it again. For old-school play, PF2 works really well. I love having tools that work because I can just not blow up my party all the time with nonstop moderate-threat encounters. It kind of sucks for people getting destroyed in official adventures, and that’s ultimately going to be bad for adoption. It’s actually kind of ironic that PF2 might need its own OSR moment given its heritage and overall design.

The bigger point is that: if the rules were so unequivocal and clear, how did the adventures become so different? The obvious answer, of course, is that it isn't hard at all to understand how adventures did not "respect" his quoted passage.

Well, yes. That’s the point. Adventures responded to what the market wanted. That’s not a flaw or a criticism of what happened. It’s just what it is. If Paizo is sensible, they’ll respond likewise by continuing to refine how they design their adventures, and we’ll see future ones designed to be less difficult overall.

Challenging combats is more fun than trivial ones.
Being forced to trudge onward while vulnerable and exposed is far less fun than striding proudly forth, whole of mind and body.

This is where we that discussion on play style goes.