Pathfinder 2E Regarding the complexity of Pathfinder 2

[CapnZapp]

I suspect that the "obvious" lesson to be learned from 5e is that the game should not be unnecessarily complex in regards to its subsystems.

Ayep.

However, I'm not sure why 5e should be the primary teacher of this idea when - much as you say here - there are so many other games out there, before and after 5e, that do a FAR BETTER job than 5e at designing more streamlined, less complex, and more robust systems than 5e.

Like it or not, far too many D&D gamers just aren't interested in how other games solve issues.

Being able to say "but AD&D fixed it" or "it works without a hitch in 4E" or "just look at Pathfinder for a much better solution" carries much more weight than pointing to OSR or Apocalypse Now or Call of Cthulhu. While this is partly unwarranted, it actually is partially warranted. D&D needs to solve a particular set of questions that other games can just drop.

I might not like everything about 5E, but i consider it undeniable that its designers managed to truly get rid of the 3E crud and many darlings were killed. 5E really represents a very impressive effort in pleasing your customers while actually not listening the the demands that existing detail and structure "must" be retained.

Sure, the game erred on the side of simplicity too much, but still: PF2 would have been a vastly better game had Paizo bothered to check up on the competitition... and made that show in its own rulebook.

5e arguably preserves a lot of needless complexity itself while also handwaving its complexity with its "rulings not rules" mumbo jumbo.

Absolutely. And when it does I'm there to point it out. (For instance with its legacy crud about hand usage, spell components and object interaction. When you read those rules you get the distinct impression you're no longer reading the easygoing game 5E is elsewhere)

 

[CapnZapp]

You try to simplify it by tying the result to the price of a permanent item of your level, but I think that also has some issues. It removes the affect of skill on the result.

Absolutely. In the interests of making a good clean argument I'm ignoring the fact that a die roll is entirely justifiable here. There should definitely be a die roll. Ideally not one that adds new rules subsystems though.

After spending the necessary number of weeks for your Earn Income to reach half the purchase price of the item you're crafting (a long-winded way of saying "After spending four weeks"), roll a Crafting check with the item level setting the DC.
Critical Success = if you're prepared to pay the full purchase price of the item you're crafting, you get two identical items out of the time spent. Counts as a Success in every other aspect.
Success = as described
Failure = your rate of progress is halved (meaning you must spend as much time as you've already spent to get a Success). If you break off the crafting, your spent time is wasted.
Critical Failure = your rate of progress is completely lost. Your spent time is wasted. You can begin anew from scratch if you like.

Note every idea to lose ingredients or to have to pay extra is regulated simply by devaluating the time spent. Relative to other party members losing time spent is equal to having to pay money, and much easier to enforce in far fewer words.

There are economic consequences to tying the result to the price of a permanent item. Conceivably, Smith (treated as a 6th level character for crafting stuff) can earn up to 36 gp in a week if they can find a 6th level task to perform. And why not? That’s really good money.

Crafting IS tied to the price of permanent items! How do I know that? Because permanent items is what Crafting is for!
Note how it takes you exactly one week to craft a single Consumable of your level. I'm proud to say that's not a coincidence...

Puttering around with ideas to connect crafting prices to the going rate on hogs, or the wages of a serving girl, is delusional in the context of Pathfinder. Being surprised when your table results in you needing eight months to craft an item is unacceptable.

The dev focus should be on the game, and playability. How long should it take to craft an item of my level?

In order to create an item in four weeks (which is entirely reasonable from a game POV in my opinion) you either need to make Crafting vastly more profitable than Earn Income, or make Earn Income as profitable as Crafting (duh). I honor the overarching design intention for crafting to not be inherently better than top-notch earn incom:ing, so the reason that Smith can earn "good money" is so Crafting doesn't require months and months of downtime!

If you don't like the rate of crafting my easiest suggestion is to replace gold with silver pieces. Mr Smith in your example would then gain 36 sp in a week.

Why you would require heroes to spend much more than a couple of weeks in downtime is beyond me, though... In any campaign where downtime longer than the occasional week is rare to non-existent, the CRB speed only has a single result = making Crafting completely worthless. But again, if you really like that, the rulebook could just have said "so use the exact same simple rules just with silver instead of gold".

 

[kenada]

Absolutely. In the interests of making a good clean argument I'm ignoring the fact that a die roll is entirely justifiable here. There should definitely be a die roll. Ideally not one that adds new rules subsystems though.

After spending the necessary number of weeks for your Earn Income to reach half the purchase price of the item you're crafting (a long-winded way of saying "After spending four weeks"), roll a Crafting check with the item level setting the DC.
Critical Success = if you're prepared to pay the full purchase price of the item you're crafting, you get two identical items out of the time spent. Counts as a Success in every other aspect.
Success = as described
Failure = your rate of progress is halved (meaning you must spend as much time as you've already spent to get a Success). If you break off the crafting, your spent time is wasted.
Critical Failure = your rate of progress is completely lost. Your spent time is wasted. You can begin anew from scratch if you like.

Note every idea to lose ingredients or to have to pay extra is regulated simply by devaluating the time spent. Relative to other party members losing time spent is equal to having to pay money, and much easier to enforce in far fewer words.


Crafting IS tied to the price of permanent items! How do I know that? Because permanent items is what Crafting is for!
Note how it takes you exactly one week to craft a single Consumable of your level. I'm proud to say that's not a coincidence...

Puttering around with ideas to connect crafting prices to the going rate on hogs, or the wages of a serving girl, is delusional in the context of Pathfinder. Being surprised when your table results in you needing eight months to craft an item is unacceptable.

The dev focus should be on the game, and playability. How long should it take to craft an item of my level?

In order to create an item in four weeks (which is entirely reasonable from a game POV in my opinion) you either need to make Crafting vastly more profitable than Earn Income, or make Earn Income as profitable as Crafting (duh). I honor the overarching design intention for crafting to not be inherently better than top-notch earn incom:ing, so the reason that Smith can earn "good money" is so Crafting doesn't require months and months of downtime!

If you don't like the rate of crafting my easiest suggestion is to replace gold with silver pieces. Mr Smith in your example would then gain 36 sp in a week.

Why you would require heroes to spend much more than a couple of weeks in downtime is beyond me, though... In any campaign where downtime longer than the occasional week is rare to non-existent, the CRB speed only has a single result = making Crafting completely worthless. But again, if you really like that, the rulebook could just have said "so use the exact same simple rules just with silver instead of gold".

Assuming that you omitted checks for Earn Income out of brevity, your proposed replacement for Craft involves more rolls than the one out of the box. Even if Earn Income doesn’t require a roll (meaning that skill is no longer a factor), it still takes longer! With the core Craft activity, I can make whatever I want in 4 days provided that I have the money to cover the cost. Yours requires at least four weeks to Earn Income half the cost of the item. If downtime is presumably limited, how is that an improvement?

It also makes dealing with Earn Income mandatory instead of something you can optionally include if you don’t want to pay for the rest of the item. Instead of just focusing on the thing I want (“I want a +1 longsword, so I pay half the cost, make this check, pay the rest out of pocket, and yay sword.”), I have to go engage some other set of rules and then come back.

We seem to have way different ideas of what simple means. For me, simplicity in a game is where like things work alike. The mechanics are consistent with few exceptions baked into the core. If I’m engaging in task resolution, I do that the same way instead of using different methods depending on the situation, task, skill, or whatever. If I run into an unexpected situation, the game gives me tools I can use adjudicate it. That doesn’t mean enumerating everything. Just a framework for determining what happens and calling for checks is enough.

The game can build stuff on top of that. In fact, it probably should. It’s not a whole lot of fun getting a new game then realizing you have to put it together before you can play it. When it comes time to manage that complexity, it should be layered in such a way that it lets me (the GM) and players focus on the task at hand. If I’ve already internalized most of the system, and I need to look something up, then I shouldn’t have to parse what I need out of a bunch of unrelated text.

We also seem to value things like color, verisimilitude, and having a world that makes some kind of sense differently. I don’t typically run heroic fantasy games. I like running games about just plain adventurers. That’s not for everyone, and that’s fine because systems like D&D and Pathfinder support mine as well as other styles of play. If we strip away all the things you identify as clutter, then what’s left? I fear it’d be a system that would be strongly oriented towards one style of game and that couldn’t do others as well as it does currently.

 

[CapnZapp]

Edit: On second thought, I'm probably coming on unintentionally strong on you Kenada. My frustrations is with Paizo, not you. I'm about to edit today's responses accordingly.

Assuming that you omitted checks for Earn Income out of brevity, your proposed replacement for Craft involves more rolls than the one out of the box. Even if Earn Income doesn’t require a roll (meaning that skill is no longer a factor), it still takes longer! With the core Craft activity, I can make whatever I want in 4 days provided that I have the money to cover the cost. Yours requires at least four weeks to Earn Income half the cost of the item. If downtime is presumably limited, how is that an improvement?

Thank you for your feedback. If I re-post this in my existing thread on Crafting, I'll be sure to credit you.

I don't understand any of this. One of us is massively misunderstanding the core rules, and possibly my "lazy ass" replacement too.

Edit: I get you now. You should be able to make your roll already after week 1. Since this thread isn't a houserule thread, I'm not going to update previous posts, but you're totally right. If four weeks allows you plow down half money, one week should allow you to plow down 7/8ths money. (Not 8/8ths - time spent should count towards the total, with no weird "four day tax" that introduces a wonky special case where brewing cheap potions becomes a losing proposition)

Feel free to discuss this, but let's not lose focus of my overarching point: the existing rules for Crafting and Earn Income are massively overengineered, unintuitive, cluttery, not-in-tune-with-the-rest-of-the-game, and time-consuming for both players and characters - even if they were to hire Kenada to rewrite the actual text in a more logical accessible way.

 

[Aldarc]

I thought NOT cultivating a particularly meaningful playstyle or game experience was the point of 5E. Trying to cultivating one would just "disempower" the GM somehow...

Possibly, but if the OSR movement was really meant to be a source of inspiration for 5E, then it's clear they didn't understand that "cultivating a particularly meaningful playstyle or game experience" is not inherently at odds with "GM empowerment".

 

[MichaelSomething]

I don't understand any of this. One of us is massively misunderstanding the core rules, and possibly my "lazy ass" replacement too.

Feel free to discuss this, but let's not lose focus of my overarching point: the existing rules for Crafting and Earn Income are massively overengineered, unintuitive, cluttery, not-in-tune-with-the-rest-of-the-game, and time-consuming for both players and characters - even if they were to hire Kenada to rewrite the actual text in a more logical accessible way.

Perhaps the purpose of the crafting rules is not for usefullness in the game but built to give readers a sense of immersion and provide world building inspiration?

 

[CapnZapp]

The mechanics are consistent with few exceptions baked into the core. If I’m engaging in task resolution, I do that the same way instead of using different methods depending on the situation, task, skill, or whatever. If I run into an unexpected situation, the game gives me tools I can use adjudicate it. That doesn’t mean enumerating everything. Just a framework for determining what happens and calling for checks is enough.

Edit: I don't want my trashing of the PF2 rules to come off as individually confrontational so I've moved my response to a post where I'm addressing everyone instead of as a reply to any single poster (just below).

 

[CapnZapp]

Pathfinder 2 is absolutely everything but "consistent with few exceptions". The game in general is shock full of weird little special rules, conditions, and limitations. Very little of it feels earned, or contributive to the play experience.

The game screams for a general mechanism to grease the wheels, one that empowers the gamesmaster to allow slight deviations from what the framework lets you do.

The core three-action mechanism can cause weird artifacts, such as when you're 30 feet from a door. Escaping through that door? That's a hard no to that. You can't - you move 25 feet, then five more feet, then Interact to open the door... and you're out of actions. But could the GM simply... let you? Perhaps ask for a DC 15 Acrobatics check to make you feel less... emasculated? That's a hard no to that. There are dozens of feats that would get instantly invalidated if the GM just let the heroes act... heroically, like in every other edition of D&D. Quick Jump, Combat Climber, ... just look at these feats and think about what they say about the game.

Let me tell y'all what they're saying: They're saying "You need me not to suck weirdly". Even a level 20 character is completely inflexibly restricted and locked-down until she takes a specific feat. Or ten.

Instead of looking at their prototype three-action framework and going "we need to let the GM allow skill checks to transcend and ignore the weird artefacts that can happen" Paizo instead said "let's double down on the hard no's by inventing a feat for everything we can identify as something to lock down!" "Gating things behind feats must be good, right, since it means more options! Right? Right?"

When I reflect upon 4E's failure and 5E's success, I draw the exact opposite conclusion about how to design my game as did Paizo. They went ahead and doubled down on exactly the things 4E wallowed in, and that 5E eschews!

---

Nearly every feat and item brings some kind of tiny puny and frankly unnecessary special condition or limitation that increases the rules burden on the player and GM.

Far too many feats work the "same, same but different" way than a feat you'd think would do the same thing. It does, just with niggly little differences.

Everyday actions like climb, jump, crawl are weirdly locked down. Related feats come across not as making you awesome. Instead they make you not actively suck.

Too many magic items work like in 4th edition in that they're too much of a hassle to be worth the bother. Getting a +1 or +2 bonus once every blue moon on a specific check just isn't worth remembering.

I could probably present a hundred different examples proving this beyond the slightest doubt, but I fear it would mean going down a rabbit hole that gives actual mental damage, so I shan't.

To illustrate this point, let me quote myself from all the way back to page two of this discussion (thanks whoever just gave this post a like!)

Try gamesmastering

The first time you are about to let a character crawl or swim a bit faster, or jump over a low wall, maybe just asking for an Athletics or Acrobatics check just like you're used to from most of those other games... just being generous and speeding along gameplay, you think...

...and another player opens one of the rulebooks and points to a feat that lets you do exactly that specific little thing...

..you will likely never say the game is no more or less complex ever again!

I'll always remember that feeling of hopeless helplessness and frustration when I realized the game is actively working against me.

 

[glass]

When I reflect upon 4E's failure and 5E's success, I draw the exact opposite conclusion about how to design my game as did Paizo. They went ahead and doubled down on exactly the things 4E wallowed in, and that 5E eschews!

Except 4e was stupendously succesful by any standard that is not "Hasbro Core Brand" (a metric by which every single RPG ever published is a failure), and that was with all the obvious self-inflicted marketting wounds. A 4e-like game is an obvious and popular niche that has been largely abandonded by WotC, so it makes sense that Paizo should go after that niche. Not that PF2 is particularly similar to 4e, but if it were it would not be the disaster you are trying to paint.

_
glass.

 

[CapnZapp]

I definitely am painting certain aspects of PF2 as disastrous. I am convinced they will contribute to the edition's premature demise.

Our group have played one small sandbox to level 7 and now an official AP to level 13. We're already seeing the very unfun limitations that the rules work so hard to obscure, and we're starting to buckle under the extremely heavy rules load that a quick review of a level 1 playthru can't catch. And we consider ourselves very capable of heavy rules loads.

My aim is not to bitch (or rather not just to bitch) but point out exactly where the pain points are, analyze them and provide better options. Even if they aren't used, they should amply illustrate Paizo's shortcomings by showing how things could have been.

If nothing else, I can't stay silent when somebody is seriously suggesting this game is simple in any way shape or form.