Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8107403" data-attributes="member: 70468">When I look at the mechanics of the Craft activity, it’s just paying a cost and making a roll. The only thing I have to look up every time is the cost of the item to determine the price. I don’t consider that complex or complicated or full of clutter.The point of the exercise was to show that Craft is actually pretty simple. You pay a cost (varies with item), you spend some time (always 4 days), you roll, and then you get your item if you succeed.Yeah, the requirements list is gross. Most of it is obvious, but I don’t think it’s something people will need to reference more than once or twice. Because of the way I have structured the activity, you can just skip past that part if you want to look up something else (like the special benefit or the results of making the check).Is the issue the structure? Having requirements, procedure, outcomes, and special cases almost always enumerated? Making a check? Is multiple degrees of success necessarily complex (or complicated or intrinsically clutter or whatever)?It’s easy in this case to write something short, but that style doesn’t scale. One might point to 5e as an exemplar of this style, but I don’t particularly like the way it moved away from having clear stat blocks. It forces you to dig through text (sometimes paragraphs) every time you just want to look something up or figure out how to resolve a mechanic.That’s not saying I think the PF2 style is great. If you take advantage of it well, it can really get right to the point and explain things more clearly than a whole bunch of text. It’s also compartmentalized, so if you remember 90% of the action or activity, it’s easy to look up the part you need. Admittedly, and Craft is an example of this, some of the stuff in the CRB isn’t as good as it could be.As for degrees of success, ehh. They were one of the things that pushed me away from the system in the beginning. They’re specifically crunchy enough that it’s hard to remember the spread of effects for every single different thing. I still look things up pretty regularly. That’s probably not something I should be doing 20+ session into a campaign.There are ways you can hide the lag of looking up. With a good GM screen (i.e., a custom one not the official one), you can have all the common activities at your fingertips. I’m pretty quick about hitting my PDFs while using roll20. It’s still not great, and we can bog down at times.I do appreciate what the extra spread of outcomes can do. It’s obviously a very important part of making encounter scaling work. I appreciate some of the affects its had on how I organize information in my notes (e.g., to make adjudicating Investigate, I’ve expanded my use of information hierarchies to knowledge). Was the view worth the climb? Not sure.</blockquote>

Verification