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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8144115" data-attributes="member: 6778210">I mean, I disagree. The whole "hundreds of feats" thing is overblown because at any given time, you are not looking at 99% of them. Your class, ancestry, and level act as hard limits on what you need to look at, since they all limit your selection. And your character concept will soft-limit it, because if you aren't making a character based around intimidation, you don't need to look at those feats. Really, at any given time, you are probably looking at a choice between a dozen different options.And I think the problem here is that you think you don't have to memorize more in GM-focused games, but you really do: the difference is that one instance is front-loaded, while the other is not. In a Player-empowered game, I have to memorize the system that was set out in the rules, and in a GM-empowered game, you have to remember what the GM decided previously. You will be memorizing more rules one way or another, it's just a matter of when you decide to memorize them. I'm fine with either, though I find the former to be nicer on the players than the latter because the players can know their options ahead of time rather than having to look to me to tell them what they can and can't do. There's rules layering either way, what is different is when you layer them.To relate a story, one of my early problems in 5E was getting my players to use their skills because they didn't really know what they did: there's not really clear ideas as to what you can do with each one, especially when you have overlaps like Investigation/Perception, Nature/Survival, and Performance/Instrument Tool proficiency. Some of them are obvious (Stealth, Sleight of Hand, Deception, Persuasion) and some of them feel really limited (History, which I ended up using closer to PF2's Society skill). After a while I ended up copying down 4E skill descriptions and skill actions to give the players an idea of what they can do with them, and this helped them a lot. In PF2, it gives you specific actions which you can use, which both helps you understand what the skill can do and gives you an idea of how to use the skill beyond what they have written down.Another example would be crafting: 5E has tool proficiencies, like Herbalism. I had a player who wanted to make potions, but there's just nothing written down in the books on it. So I set out trying to give him some basic guidance, and he's looking up what other people did. And that's fine in certain respects, but it also creates more work for me, as well as having to double check and game out in my head these systems that other people have created that he was bringing to me. Meanwhile PF2 has that already in-built, and while I have problems with it I can also fix them as I see fit I can make small changes and not have to create it out of whole cloth.And none of this means I dislike 5E: I wouldn't play it if I didn't like it. But in playing it I've found that I desire something that is a bit more structured so that I'm not constantly having to create precedents and systems on the fly instead. PF2 provides that.Also not sure that more rules make for more munchkining; to me, that's more of a balancing thing than anything. PF2 seems reasonably well-balanced on the whole, though admittedly I have less experience with it than other systems that I've played.</blockquote>

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