Pathfinder 2E Simplified PF2e?

[JAMUMU]

No, you're not listening. The only thing the Feat does is allow you to have a set way of doing it. It does not mean that no one else can do it, just perhaps not in that way. That is not breaking the game, that is just something implicit in the system rather than explicit. You don't ignore any rules in that unless you find me one where it says that you have to have the feat to sow any rumor period. The problem is that you look at someone having a systemized way of doing something as meaning only they can do it, which is not ever said within the system. Again, it's implicit, not explicit.

I am listening Bud, I'm just not agreeing with you. My ears are wide freaking open, I just ain't buyin what you're sellin.

There's nothing implicit in having Critical Success Results, Success Results, failure states, and the idea of sliding difficulty around contradicting existing rumors all rolled up in a feat that you need to be expert in the skill to use.

The implication there is that because it is systematized in this way, then any other attempts to fabricate or spread rumors must in some way be lesser than this feat. Not more. The rules are the yardstick. The systematized rules spread over thousands of pages, pages that detail who can do what and when and what the effects of that are. To cut through that and say "you don't need to have a particular feat to do a thing like it says in the book, or the required proficiency level it says you need to have, and don't worry about the success levels written in the description, I'll just wing it" is all well and good. It's candy to my ears, music to my taste buds. As I have already said, any table can do that with any game. Though in my experience if you do that while running a game with as many rules and permissions as PF2 faces pushback from the players who have invested in the feats, the feats that might not work as well as they should because the referee is rolling FKR stylee.

But this loosey-goosey, have-at-it, never mind the details approach is not explicit or implicit anywhere in the PF2 texts and I would argue runs directly counter to the spirit of the game system as it appears in the books.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I am listening Bud, I'm just not agreeing with you. My ears are wide freaking open, I just ain't buyin what you're sellin.

There's nothing implicit in having Critical Success Results, Success Results, failure states, and the idea of sliding difficulty around contradicting existing rumors all rolled up in a feat that you need to be expert in the skill to use.

I mean, the implicit thing there is that if you have that Feat, it allows you to use the skill in that way. There is nothing that says that you can only use that feat to do that thing. Given that there are so many rules, that you could only do something by having the right thing would have to be something explicit for skills. Instead, there's nothing. Under your idea, something like A Home in Every Port means that you use your downtime to find lodging because you need the feat. That's inane. Instead, the implicit is true: this just makes a process that is automatic to the person who has the feat, and others can still try this in a different way.

The implication there is that because it is systematized in this way, then any other attempts to fabricate or spread rumors must in some way be lesser than this feat. Not more.

I mean, yes, but being "lesser" is not the same as "can't". That's my disagreement.

The rules are the yardstick. The systematized rules spread over thousands of pages, pages that detail who can do what and when and what the effects of that are. To cut through that and say "you don't need to have a particular feat to do a thing like it says in the book, or the required proficiency level it says you need to have, and don't worry about the success levels written in the description, I'll just wing it" is all well and good. It's candy to my ears, music to my taste buds. As I have already said, any table can do that with any game. Though in my experience if you do that while running a game with as many rules and permissions as PF2 faces pushback from the players who have invested in the feats, the feats that might not work as well as they should because the referee is rolling FKR stylee.

But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the Feats are positive, not negative: they do not take away the ability for others to do things, they add to the ability of the user to do things.

But this loosey-goosey, have-at-it, never mind the details approach is not explicit or implicit anywhere in the PF2 texts and I would argue runs directly counter to the spirit of the game system as it appears in the books.

It's not really "loosey-goosey" as it is "just because there is a skill feat doesn't mean you can't do it, you just can't do it like that".

 

[JAMUMU]

@Justice and Rule yeah I think we're disagreeing on details rather than fundamentals. A Home In Every Port means you (the PC with the feat) can scrounge up board and lodgings for the party for one night for free. Everyone else needs to pay up after schlepping around town for a few hours, assuming there's a place in town where that's possible. It's a great benefit, and while other PCs could flatter or intimidate their way to free room and board, the feat makes it 'just happen'. But the thing AHIEP hinges on is reputation. It's the character's reputation that lets this benefit occur. A skill feat system that left that part blank, to be filled in by the player (it might be reputation, silver-tongue, a willingness to splash coin around, guilt-tripping, blackmail, coercion) opens up better RP possibilities, rather than fixing them to one particular trait.

And I totally agree that if a player doesn't have a feat and they want to try something, then heck yes, roll a check and if it's impressive, we'll do you a one-time knock-off of the feat that gets you something like what you want. Or maybe on a crit it duplicates the feat mechanically, one time only. Love that.

But the text doesn't imply this anywhere. In fact, the Gamesmaster's Guide quite explicitly states the opposite. No skill feats? No use skills. Just fight monster.

 

[Justice and Rule]

@Justice and Rule yeah I think we're disagreeing on details rather than fundamentals. A Home In Every Port means you (the PC with the feat) can scrounge up board and lodgings for the party for one night for free. Everyone else needs to pay up after schlepping around town for a few hours, assuming there's a place in town where that's possible. It's a great benefit, and while other PCs could flatter or intimidate their way to free room and board, the feat makes it 'just happen'. But the thing AHIEP hinges on is reputation. It's the character's reputation that lets this benefit occur. A skill feat system that left that part blank, to be filled in by the player (it might be reputation, silver-tongue, a willingness to splash coin around, guilt-tripping, blackmail, coercion) opens up better RP possibilities, rather than fixing them to one particular trait.

And I totally agree that if a player doesn't have a feat and they want to try something, then heck yes, roll a check and if it's impressive, we'll do you a one-time knock-off of the feat that gets you something like what you want. Or maybe on a crit it duplicates the feat mechanically, one time only. Love that.

But the text doesn't imply this anywhere. In fact, the Gamesmaster's Guide quite explicitly states the opposite. No skill feats? No use skills. Just fight monster.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't need to be in the text every time because it's implicit: there is no rule dictating you can't, which you'd think it would tell you given how many rules the system already has.

Also you can say that it's a Reputation thing, but there's no reputation system really and it's based on Charisma . At the end of the day, you could still find free room and board, but you can't just do it like Mr. Charisma in your party. That's the difference I find: you aren't going to do it automatically or with just one roll: instead, you can still do that thing, just the GM gives you what you need to do as needed. It's not directly spelled out, but it doesn't need to be because if it wanted to you not to do something it would say so. This is just a prescriptive reading of the rules, rather than proscriptive.

 

[Staffan]

(Personally, I'm of the opinion that one of the problems with most games is they're unwilling to apply some of the mechanical nuance that is usually applied to combat systems and apply them to other parts of the game, but some people either do want roll-and-get-it-done or requiring more GM/player interaction to make those parts actually sparkle).

I've seen one game take that approach: Exalted 3rd edition. It is fairly clear that the designers looked at 1st and 2nd edition and thought:

1. Having dozens of Melee charms* and only six Bureaucracy charms makes PCs taking the Bureaucracy skill feel bad because the game doesn't like them.
2. The reason there are dozens of Melee charms is that we have a very complex combat system but pretty much no mechanical support for Bureaucracy.
3. So let's make rules for Bureaucracy, both for the "running an organization" part and the "trading" part.
4. Now the Bureaucracy rules have plenty of mechanical hooks so we can make 20+ charms for Bureaucracy.

But having a charm that lets you know when someone is influencing an underling means that the effects of influencing an underling have to be mechanically relevant. And then expand that to things like social influence, medicine, lore, crafting, investigation, sailing, and so on, and the game becomes ridiculously complex.

So that's a needle that's ridiculously hard to thread.

* Sort of like magic-powered feats.

 

[payn]

Thomas Shey: (Personally, I'm of the opinion that one of the problems with most games is they're unwilling to apply some of the mechanical nuance that is usually applied to combat systems and apply them to other parts of the game, but some people either do want roll-and-get-it-done or requiring more GM/player interaction to make those parts actually sparkle).

I've seen one game take that approach: Exalted 3rd edition. It is fairly clear that the designers looked at 1st and 2nd edition and thought:

1. Having dozens of Melee charms* and only six Bureaucracy charms makes PCs taking the Bureaucracy skill feel bad because the game doesn't like them.
2. The reason there are dozens of Melee charms is that we have a very complex combat system but pretty much no mechanical support for Bureaucracy.
3. So let's make rules for Bureaucracy, both for the "running an organization" part and the "trading" part.
4. Now the Bureaucracy rules have plenty of mechanical hooks so we can make 20+ charms for Bureaucracy.

But having a charm that lets you know when someone is influencing an underling means that the effects of influencing an underling have to be mechanically relevant. And then expand that to things like social influence, medicine, lore, crafting, investigation, sailing, and so on, and the game becomes ridiculously complex.

So that's a needle that's ridiculously hard to thread.

* Sort of like magic-powered feats.

I dont know if I understand all the words coming out of this post, but it has given me some thought to this. Traditional D&D and its derivatives have always worked the pillars of social, exploration, and combat at different mechanical heft. Some pillars allow more ambiguity, more rulings over rules if you will. From most scripted, mechanically speaking, to least is usually Combat/exploration/social. Folks are going to view this from their experience. The more you roll over mechanics, especially in a universal system like PF2, folks are going to gravitate towards rules over rulings style play. Which is why folks are looking at the character sheet as the arbiter of possibilities.

Now, to really strain the noodles. Is this because folks like to play that way, or just that they have adapted over time to that kind of play?

 

[Justice and Rule]

I dont know if I understand all the words coming out of this post, but it has given me some thought to this. Traditional D&D and its derivatives have always worked the pillars of social, exploration, and combat at different mechanical heft. Some pillars allow more ambiguity, more rulings over rules if you will. From most scripted, mechanically speaking, to least is usually Combat/exploration/social. Folks are going to view this from their experience. The more you roll over mechanics, especially in a universal system like PF2, folks are going to gravitate towards rules over rulings style play. Which is why folks are looking at the character sheet as the arbiter of possibilities.

Now, to really strain the noodles. Is this because folks like to play that way, or just that they have adapted over time to that kind of play?

Probably the latter more than the former, especially with systems that like to "simulate reality" like 3.X did. I mean, I've seen my players struggle with rules and then go to system with more narrative mechanics and be completely comfortable making stuff up.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've seen one game take that approach: Exalted 3rd edition. It is fairly clear that the designers looked at 1st and 2nd edition and thought:

1. Having dozens of Melee charms* and only six Bureaucracy charms makes PCs taking the Bureaucracy skill feel bad because the game doesn't like them.
2. The reason there are dozens of Melee charms is that we have a very complex combat system but pretty much no mechanical support for Bureaucracy.
3. So let's make rules for Bureaucracy, both for the "running an organization" part and the "trading" part.
4. Now the Bureaucracy rules have plenty of mechanical hooks so we can make 20+ charms for Bureaucracy.

But having a charm that lets you know when someone is influencing an underling means that the effects of influencing an underling have to be mechanically relevant. And then expand that to things like social influence, medicine, lore, crafting, investigation, sailing, and so on, and the game becomes ridiculously complex.

So that's a needle that's ridiculously hard to thread.

* Sort of like magic-powered feats.

Sure. But it still adds up to the fact that if the only parts of the game that has any real mechanical heft is combat, that's the part that's going to get a disproportionate amount of attention from PCs. Its not a coincidence that, unlike most other modern or SF games, cyberpunk games typically give hacking a larger footprint; because its important in the genre. Same reason in a lot of middling-gritty post-apocalypse games that scavenging and survival usually get a bit more love.

Its legitimate to argue that you can't give everything the same attention as combat--and its even kind of justified, because there are a lot of other things that tend to come down to "let the specialist do it and most of the rest of you step back", and that combat can have an immediate and personal effect--but the downright schematic level of attention most things get in most games doesn't strike me as a virtue. It only makes sense if the things involving it are supposed to be nothing but transient obstacles, or its assumed that outside of combat everything is supposed to be mostly in the GM's lap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I dont know if I understand all the words coming out of this post, but it has given me some thought to this. Traditional D&D and its derivatives have always worked the pillars of social, exploration, and combat at different mechanical heft. Some pillars allow more ambiguity, more rulings over rules if you will. From most scripted, mechanically speaking, to least is usually Combat/exploration/social. Folks are going to view this from their experience. The more you roll over mechanics, especially in a universal system like PF2, folks are going to gravitate towards rules over rulings style play. Which is why folks are looking at the character sheet as the arbiter of possibilities.

Now, to really strain the noodles. Is this because folks like to play that way, or just that they have adapted over time to that kind of play?

My own feeling is that people who are really in love with not using their character's abilities as at least the basis of deciding what sort of solutions they'll attempt (because no one is going to assume one or more die rolls aren't going to be in there somewhere, so you don't want to take an approach where that's likely to go badly) are unlikely to do more than give a passing look to a game with as much mechanical heft as PF2e has. There are a ton of D&D variants that are more than willing to throw most things into GM judgment calls (which in the end is to one degree or another what "the solution is not on your sheet" always comes down to to one degree or another), so why go for a game that doesn't focus on that ethos?

Edit: Obvious I and J and R have opposite perceptions here.

 

[payn]

Probably the latter more than the former, especially with systems that like to "simulate reality" like 3.X did. I mean, I've seen my players struggle with rules and then go to system with more narrative mechanics and be completely comfortable making stuff up.

I know what you mean. For a time I blamed the universal mechanic for my dislike of certain RPGs. Though, I am a big fan of Traveller which is a simple universal mechanic game. It has a flatter progression, the combat system largely uses the same system as exploration and social. Though, in its simplicity, it feels more OSR. Players, in my experience, feel more free to try things out, build narratives, make stuff up.

Complex and variable systems like D&D/PF have a lot of nuance. There is a lot of variety in characters and what they can do mechanically. So, its often folks look to those mechanics for answers/actions. Of course, there are folks who can/like both. Though, I'm now of the opinion that PF2 cant really be stripped down to an OSR like game with its soul intact. Thats not a bad thing. YMMV.