D&D 2E Which is the better fantasy rpg and why: D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e?

[lowkey13]

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[dave2008]

...as WotC shows no interest in developing their system.

I am not 100% sure what you mean by "developing their system," but I am guessing that, IMO, the truth is more like they are not developing the system how you want or at the speed you want. Objectively WotC has developed the system and continues to develop the system, it has just been at a historically slow pace.

I dislike the bounded accuracy concept in it's limiting of Fighters to hit better, but 5e's willingness to let it be broken easily by Rogue's Expertise or certain spells from Clerics or Wizards. If they equally applied it better, or gave Fighters something akin to Expertise with weapons, I'd like it better.

On the otherhand, while I like that PF2e has a greater advancement and no bounded accuracy, the entire feats thing is too much. It feels more like they are restricting what I can do with their class abilities rather than allowing me to do things. It feels a LOT more restrictive than other games while at the same time giving me FAR MORE to keep track of.

In the balance of the two, I'd choose AD&D...but as that is not an option, I'll go with 5e. Better something with unequally applied Bounded accuracy than a more restrictive allowance of actions based on a Feat system for everything.

Just give fighters expertise if you think that will solve your problems. That is pretty simple and I think it would be a nice feature to add to help make fighters the best at fighting. Maybe something like the variant features in the new UA like:

You can replace any Martial Archtype feature with the Grandmaster feature:

Grandmaster. You gain expertise with one weapon of your choice. You must be proficient with the weapon to gain this benefit.

 

[Dausuul]

A game where advantage is replaced/supplemented by more granular bonuses...

"Everybody" does not want this. In fact, I strongly doubt that even the majority of 5E players want this.

A game like PF2 with a clear and defined magic economy...

This neither.

 

[dave2008]

Monsters-wise PF2 win, hands down. So here I'll just say "a 5E game with PF2 monsters".

Accept dragons. 5e dragons are a few steps above PF2e dragons IMO (even more so if your using lair actions). That being said it has been a bit since I looked at PF2e dragons (and I think there is a lot of room for improvement with 5e dragons as well).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't fear bloat.
I fear change.

Additions to the game ('bloat') are just one sort of change (growth, to use a word with similar meaning but different connotation) a game can undergrow.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Tony Vargas]

Mmm. It's slightly different with RPGs. I think that the best way to to think about it is, well, are you familiar with the game Cosmic Encounter ("CE")?

Heard of it, know nothing about it.

Every game consists of, for lack of a better phrase, the basic rule system and then various ways of breaking the rules. It's hard to conceptualize in that way, but that's what it is- everything from "Extra Attack" to a spell is breaking basic rules of the game in one way or another.

Breaking rules (creating exceptions to rules) is one way to expand the options presented by a game, D&D has certainly done it's fair share of that. So is adding rules - D&D has generally done that a lot, too. OTOH, a game can also offer more options without adding or making exceptions to rules, simply by having more flexible & robust rules, to begin with, and working within them, not a pond D&D has fished a whole lot.

And as you continue to add (grow, bloat) the game, these interactions increase in ways until eventually, well, you spend most of your time arguing about the rules (and/or munchkining).

That's what I meant about how 'robust' the system is. Can you add content without adding new sub-systems? Can you add new sub-systems without interacting with many of the existing ones? Can you work within the existing rules rather than resorting to exceptions and special cases? If you do resort to exceptions, can they be contained or will they have ripple effects?

Games can be robust in the sense of being able to handle such additions, or not. D&D has generally been not. Same with PF1, but PF2 is apparently willing to try new things.

This problem is more endemic in D&D (and to a lesser extent PF) than most TTRPGs because, quite honestly, more people play them and more products are made for them.

There have been a lot of products made for more obscure games, too, actually. (I guess, if you can keep production costs low enough, very niche markets can be fairly lavishly served. Storyteller, GURPS and the 4th ed of Hero and Ysgarth and many even more obscure have just reams of material, for instance.)

 

[lowkey13]

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[Tony Vargas]

What most people view as additions to the rules, are, in fact, exceptions. Think of the design space for spells in 5e (or prior versions of D&D). More people would think of those as "additions" within a space carved out for spells- but that's not the case. Every spell is an exception to the general rule framework of D&D. That's why they employ the whole "specific beats general."

Unless you assume there's a blanket "you can't do anything not explicitly allowed by the rules" I don't see how adding rules can be seen as breaking rules. Now, there's very clearly no such blanket rule in 5e...

Everyone I know talks about creating great and robust systems, but there is only so much that can be done in that design space.

Hero System stands as a strong example. You can create anything in Hero, using, say, the 4th ed 'BBB' or HSR - a single book, at release, that you can in any edition of D&D, or RuneQuest, or any other setting or game you can think of - complete with system artifacts, like armor deflecting attacks rather than reducing damage, if you really want to - it's complex, it's not perfectly balanced (though much better-balanced than any edition of D&D, that's just stepping over a bar buried deep under ground), it's decidedly susceptible to system mastery, but it's quite robust, playable, and can handle content expansion without adding (or 'breaking,' if you prefer) rules.
It also never sold very well, because, well, once you have that core system, you don't need much else.

That doesn't mean that there aren't practices and procedures and "good design," that can be used to make things better (as I intimated above), but it also means that the holy grail of a great, flexible, endlessly expandable, perfectly balanced system will remain forever out of reach.

Meh. "Perfection is unachievable" is trivially true, and is constantly presented as a reason not to try to improve. Yet, it's equally true that there's always room for improvement.

 

[lowkey13]

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