| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I actually exchanged a fair number of PMs with the guy who created the Tier system on Brilliant Gameologists. He claims he created the system as an aide for GMs to better manage their campaigns by knowing which Classes were tougher to GM aka most likely to break the campaign.
That might have been his intent.
It's debatable as to what people actually use it for now these days.
Then you give the classes a reliance on some tactical situation and an ability that lets them easily achieve that tactical situation, and suddenly the game looks super dynamic until players start playing and nothing seems to matter.I think that's more or less how the game was originally designed. Probably not as formally as that, but intuitively.
Its my observation that, at least on the forums, people don't seem to identify with those ability sets along clearly divisible lines. You get people who want to conflate concepts and don't really understand how to align the underlying mechanics. Alternatively, you get people that want the mechanics and find those lines of convergence which trivializes the game for the average player.
And then even if the players make complimentary choices, the burden shifts to the GM who isn't trained and may have little or no clue about which tactical situations are run fits for which ability sets.
Ironically, a game that did this beautifully was City of Heroes...an MMORPG. Brilliant execution of this strategy. But the people who did the design also created the content and probably had an order of magnitude fewer combinations. City of Heroes had certain NPC groups which specifically countered those ability sets and they would employ them as necessary to tailor the experience.
This concept is the place I feel a game's design needs most of the effort. All of the player pieces are on the same scale from identical to distinct, but the closer you get to the piece being distinct, the more you need it to reliably perform an expected role. With extremely distinct pieces, quest design becomes complicated. I don't feel like it's complicated enough to be unapproachable, PhD or not.
It would take longer to write an adventure as you need additional solutions to every problem. Running one would be as easy as following a flow chart though. Also, it would have the beneficial side effect of forcing attention on some of the neglected aspects of the game. You'd also have fewer murder hobos if the players need good relations with NPCs in order to fill out the roles missing from the party.
People do respond to role focused concepts really poorly. Either they want to multiclass into being self sufficient, or they want to play a character that couldn't realistically be a hero within the game world. And with things meant to build up a character's core ability, they rebel against "feat taxes"
rather than intuiting that the alternative is either the feat not existing, or the feat costing two feats. Converting to a points based feat system would probably clear that up a little bit. It's hard to know with people.
For the crane wing side chat. I agree, there's going to be variation in whether or not the ability is a problem. It's fair to say that it shows up earlier than invisibility, but one of its counters is ranged weapons which are pretty common. I'd only consider cranewing to be a serious issue if most games were heavily focused on defeating unintelligent creatures without non-weapon attack options. If that's the case, then it would seem to indicate a problem with quest design.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The "three-round" fight thing is caused, I think, by the combination of a) GMs needing to run the modules strictly as written, b) often having exceedingly optimized characters, and c) modules being written to be challenging yet do-able by "any" assortment of characters. That is an assortment of challenges that I wouldn't want the core developer/rules to address, because that's a set of more stringent restraints than most home-games operate under. PF2 as reveled so far, should help with reducing item b's influence to some degree, so that alone might benefit PFS -- without it being a change inspired by PFS.
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of PFS characters are not optimized. Many, in fact, you wonder how they made it out of the crib without getting killed. (This does not apply to higher level tables, of course, after merciless Darwinian selection has had its way.) Home campaign players typically enjoy considerable access to material without paying for it, and have more generous attribute score generation than 20pt buy -- and will generally have more powerful characters at any given level. (The "money-rich" atmosphere of PFS, or at least the ability to spend the money you have between every adventure, leavens this somewhat.)
@OP: hopefully none at all. regular players shouldnt be impacted or punished for a collection of houserules' hiccups in interacting with the base rules, be they "official" houserules or not.
poor pfs encounter design of the day (favoring enemies with only a single large attack per round) led pretty directly to (among other things) the crane wing feat line being entirely gutted in the general rules environment, due to it's interaction with a particular monk archetype (as it was fairly well-balanced for it's intended level)--rather than simply altering the feat or banning that archetype in pfs play only.