Pathfinder 2E Simplified PF2e?

[Justice and Rule]

That would be a solid foundation, but the existence of this thread and people's played experience definitely suggest that the propensity of rules feels like a straitjacket, or at least something like a weight around the necks of players. And GMs! My thoughts around slimming down the rules center around wanting to run it without referencing minutiae every fifteen minutes and letting things just flow. If you get that from PF2 I'm happy, but our group keep snagging our wizard sleeves on the janky bits.

I think that when people see rules, they think they are meant to be unbreakable when they aren't. Certainly in combat things are meant to be hard, but when you try to define things for movement like "Move" and "Leap", you can get situations that feel kludgy when things don't line up: for example, if you you are 10 feet from an edge, you might think that you have to Move, then Leap, and then Move again, wasting movement. And by the exact letter of the rules, that would be true.

However, they talk about letting things flow more fluidly at your (the GM's) discretion. And that's true of a lot of these things: these are not meant to be absolutes, but guidelines. Similarly, I think people too strictly interpret their actions: the idea that Coercing someone takes a minute would include confronting them, telling them what you want, possibly them talking back, and you putting in a final quip or threat. It's not just you going off on an extended threat, but the entirety of the exchange. I've discussed why I've liked this before: if you want to, say, Make an Impression on multiple people, that might be a sort of party conversation that goes over several minutes and jumps between each one.

On the other hand, having to focus on influencing one person means you only definitely change their mind and not necessarily their underlings (I don't like everyone my boss likes, after all). You as a GM could still rule that it does, but that's at your discretion. Though that also creates value in having the feat: if you have Group Impression, you can be talking to the boss and you don't need to spend time directly trying to influence the others, so he might not notice that.

Honestly, I love having this conversation because it gets me thinking about how to adjudicate situations and stuff and I always have fun with that. But not sure it's exactly the point of the thread.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@Thomas Shey I wish our GM thought in those terms. That's definitely the terms I think in as a GM, but reading the text of PF2, I can see why GMs (especially) and players (hunkering over their online character sheets) play the game in the strictest, most literal terms.

Well, there's some reasons for that; understanding these are tools that have specific uses and general uses requires you to understand that while there's virtues to the first (as I reference in the post above) it can't handle every use you need to make. Its like a screwdriver. Its designed primarily to turn screws and that's what it'll do best but you can also use it to pry up the corners of things, too. But nobody who sells you a screwdriver talks about how good it is at prying up corners.

As an aside, I've known unarmed, slightly built men who did not seem in the least but intimidating. Lovely guys. Clark Kents. Until they wanted to walk into a room and intimidate every mother-morber in the mother-morbing place. In those cases, anyone Trained in Assess Opponent knew who they were. As an aside to the aside, they were usually ex-special forces.

And I'll be pretty blunt; I suspect they effectively had both the skill and the feat in that context because being able to do that is not common.

Anyway, i like PF2 and want to love it, and before I can love it I need to be able to run it comfortably. A lot of what you've said in this thread has helped me move towards that, so thank you.

And I hope I haven't been excessively aggressive in how I've responded to you; I've just seen a lot of what I can only call tunnel-vision and overextrapolation on this subject and related ones involving games for a long time now, and I tend to react with a bit of "Oh, this old **** again!" when I see it. But as I said, you're not alone in the problem.

 

[JAMUMU]

But that swings both ways. Yeah, people are going to sometimes feel its narrower than I think its intended to be; but if you don't also have elements that spell out at least some specific cases, all that does is produce the always lovely "Let's play a guessing game as to whether the GM will let you do that at all." As without those would most GMs let you get the result Intimidate does on even a single opponent without the backup up I mentioned? Would you care to bet on it? I certainly wouldn't.

But isn't that what the roll is for? Especially with the swinginess of a d20? Roll low bad. Roll high good.

 

[Prof_Dogg]

Fair enough, I bow to your superior Wisdom score. It must just be our GM then, and not a feature of the text itself.

No, it's definitely a feature of the text itself... I like PF2 in a lot of ways. But it's the least RP focused system I've seen... That's not to say you can't RP in it but simply to say that the system doesn't lend itself to RP so much as character building. It's a system for people who like numbers and systems at least as much as RP if not more. There's not a lot of GM fiat systemically allowed (which is not to say a good GM can't just declare fiat anyhow). When I GM it, I usually allow dice rolls to be explained narratively. In some of my PF2 games where the players had some experience in other systems, they "get" it. In a group who has never played OSR or similar "open interpretation" systems and only played PF2, they'd rather just roll the dice and move on. Both ways are fun, I don't deny that. But PF2 definitely has a high population of the people who like "I roll, I hit, I do X damage!" versus "I feint under my opponent's sword and catching him off-guard, slide my blade into his body". And I think the system "trains" them to do that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think its an impression carried over from 3E/PF1. Where you could always do it without a feat but it was usually likely to fail and get your PC hurt. To be fair to PF2, I think they backed that off some for some of the reasons J&R states, but I still think there is an issue with cool fighting against utility in the lists. That's my biggest beef with PF2.

There's a little problem that's hard to avoid when you have big chunky things like feats: they're all going to cost the same, even if one only comes up rarely and one all the time. They try to address some of this with the class/ancestry/skill/general feat split, which is at least better than just one big pile, but its still going to come down to a feat slot is a feat slot. There's a reason outside the D&D-sphere (where things like special abilities that aren't baked into a class are kind of an alien element), most games that do such things have variable costs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But isn't that what the roll is for? Especially with the swinginess of a d20? Roll low bad. Roll high good.

I'm not sure even if I accept that (and I don't altogether, and don't get me started on whether a resolution roll as linear as a D20 or a D100 is really the best way to go--a lot of dice rolls in games I consider ways to represent variables in a situation that are below the level that can reasonably be kept track of by anyone, GM or player) that helps, because its pretty unlikely many GMs are going to go "No matter how likely or unlikely I see it, this is just a straight roll".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Both ways are fun, I don't deny that. But PF2 definitely has a high population of the people who like "I roll, I hit, I do X damage!" versus "I feint under my opponent's sword and catching him off-guard, slide my blade into his body". And I think the system "trains" them to do that.

I'll just note I was seeing that 45 years ago in OD&D. Unless you're going to provide a benefit to more specific narration, most people are going to tend to not do it with any regularity (heck, even when there's some benefit a lot of people will drop into that out of imagination fatigue).

 

[Prof_Dogg]

I'll just note I was seeing that 45 years ago in OD&D. Unless you're going to provide a benefit to more specific narration, most people are going to tend to not do it with any regularity (heck, even when there's some benefit a lot of people will drop into that out of imagination fatigue).

Same generation here... I was part of the Rolemaster conversion groups where ICE tried to mechanically build it into AD&D through crit systems and such. Looking back, I think they went overboard with tying narration to rolls (Oh, the crit charts galore!) but the spirit was in the right place. And since most of the groups I played with afterward then were essentially branches of that crowd, we maintained the spirit mostly. Sure, some "Just roll the damned die" came up but it was a good balance...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Same generation here... I was part of the Rolemaster conversion groups where ICE tried to mechanically build it into AD&D through crit systems and such. Looking back, I think they went overboard with tying narration to rolls (Oh, the crit charts galore!) but the spirit was in the right place. And since most of the groups I played with afterward then were essentially branches of that crowd, we maintained the spirit mostly. Sure, some "Just roll the damned die" came up but it was a good balance...

I'm just suggesting that at the end of the day, that's much, much more about the people involved than the system involved. People who like to narrate detail will do so, people who find it fatiguing or tedious won't, and some will land in the middle. The GM can end up putting his thumb on the scale, but even he only has so much impact, and the only way the system will is if it gets into the guts of what you're doing very deep.

 

[Justice and Rule]

If I'm being honest, I've found that it's not the number of rules that inspire roleplaying as much as how much players get get out of the rules. I didn't get more RP out of my group with 5E, which has considerably fewer rules tacked on to its skill system. In fact, I created a set of "skill actions/uses" for my players in the first month because they were hesitant to use skills because they weren't sure what they could actually do with them.

For whatever reason, I think the biggest inhibitor I've seen to RP is just the fantasy landscape sometimes. When I run an FFG Star Wars game, people get into it deep because I think they more deeply understand the universe and can engage with it more. Similarly, when we play Tales from the Loop I think many of them connect with the being a kid and the idea of the 80's that they can engage with the setting more easily.