Bust-R-Up's page

Rather than quibble about adding damage versus extra damage, each triggering event should act as follows:

1) Combine all damage types into polls by type.

2) Apply immunities, then resistances, then weaknesses to each pool of damage.

3) Combine this damage into a single pool of damage.

4) Apply any effects that apply to the entire attack (i.e. holy from sanctified strikes).

5) Apply any applicable resistances and weaknesses to the damage.

6) Subtract damage from the HP pool of the creature or object being attacked.

This is the easiest way to deal with instances of damage without needing to rewrite how anything works.

I feel like PF3 really should have it so that each class is designed with at least 3 built-in subclasses for combat, then 3 picks for exploration, and 3 picks for social encounters. Ideally, there would also be a choice for class-based downtime activities as well. It's really hard to say, "These are the 3 pillars of adventuring", when some classes get nothing that natively interacts with one or even two of these pillars.

This would solve the Ranger/Investigator problem and ensure that each class feels complete within itself.

Weakness should check for a trigger such as a successful strike/manoeuvre, damage taken from a spell, or any other instance where damage has been taken. Then all damage that has been dealt is added together by type. Then those damage pools are checked against weakness and resistance.

If we want spells that trigger additional damage, we'd need to reword them so they can be triggered to do damage as a reaction or, if we want to be spicy, as a free action. Then, after the triggering action has resolved, they trigger and are resolved.

This is the only simple way to handle this.

Bust-R-Up wrote:

I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.

This is official errata, which means it is the PFS rule as well unless PFS issues a ruling stating otherwise. And for PFS to outright undo an errata would be wild.

I don't know what Foundry is going to do given how much pushback there is to this. Maybe they'll add the new version but leave the old version there as well. I know foundry devs have been asking Paizo for clarifications as that's where some of the updates have been coming from. so they're at least looking at the new rules.

I sure hope they don't remove the old implementation because going back to doing all this manually would be a real hassle.

You mistake my meaning. I'd rather Paizo not make errata at all, so we're stuck going with whatever PFS or Foundry does than release errata that actively makes the game worse. Sometimes, no answer is better than a bad answer.

Yup. This really isn't good for the health of the game. It buffs folks with a lot of system mastery massively and makes weakness game-warping powerful instead of just the good thing to try to land that it was before.

I mean, they gave us the answer we asked for, but the answer is really not a good idea.

Even if they revert this swiftly, it shakes my faith in the current team that this ruling ever saw print. It's like the writers don't even play-test their own game.

Tridus wrote:

Yeah the instance of damage errata feels like a tragic case of "be careful what you wish for."

We're considering ignoring it entirely at my table because of how much it can warp the game.

Tbh, I prefer a ruling I can disagree with rather than not a ruling at all.

As I said (I think in a different thread) I think it's much easier for us playing in different tables to have something and then houserule it differently if the group doesn't like it rather than having nothing and having to guess/remember each table how is running an unclear rule.

I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.

Given the recent errata and its issues. I'm starting to feel less charitable than I was after the Psychic demaster.

Paizo just needs to revert this errata. This level of burst damage trivialises encounters far more than Starlit Span IW builds ever did.

Very glad to see this errata, especially as it answers a lot of long-standing questions and rules issues. Even with regards to the Resentment nerf, I feel like it can hopefully help evaluate the Witch a bit more holistically as a class: right now, when the Witch and their power level gets discussed, it's usually just in the context of the Resentment, by far their strongest subclass. Although there are other strong patrons too, I'd argue that non-Resentment Witches could benefit from a few improvements still. Ideally, this can help lead the community to advocate more for the class, without having to contend with what up until now was a notable outlier.

We've advocated for the Wizard and Psychic, and they both ate nerfs. Nothing we say or do will get them to fix casters.

Bust-R-Up wrote:

I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.

Being frustrated by broken promises and the way things feel on a personal level is totally legitimate feedback to give Paizo. They tell us this all the time and it is not the customer’s job to be patient or understanding of the complex issues that drive business decisions away from their preferred outcomes.

From my perspective though, Paizo isn’t selling “functional RPG rules,” because they are actually giving that part away for free. I totally understand feeling like the game is the thing you are buying when you buy a Pathfinder 2nd edition Rulebook, from a player-side perspective, but by nature of the ORC license, the mechanics are free to anyone to use, develop further, and even to repackage and resell. That puts errata into a difficult space to budget around, because it is quite literally an unlimited money sink attached to the actual product that Paizo sells to keep the lights on. The company therefore has to be pretty careful not to over budget resources to a product that customers see as an essential part of the pathfinder experience, but is almost entirely just marketing and customer service.

The choice to give away the meat of their system is a choice they have made freely. It doesn't free them from the expectation - that they themselves have created - to provide errata for these rules.

The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity.

I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.

Now that this thread has some answers, here's my take:

I personally lean toward quality being close to the same as it's always been. Paizo has never really been good at communication, errata, editing, etc. The store being worse is new but not surprising, given how much trouble they had changing over to the new store period.

I wish Paizo were better at all of these things and less pressed for both time and money. Hasbro needs somebody to keep them honest in the TTRPG space, and Paizo, for better or worse, is the runner-up. Sadly, the thin margins, staff churn, and general financial climate of both the PNW and the US at large seem to be conspiring to make life harder for them.

I know that no company is ever perfect, but Paizo seems to be making more unforced errors than usual after the remaster than they were before it. Even the much-promised rework of their online shop hasn't been without its issues. My question is: Has this change in quality worried you, and if so, how might it affect your purchases going forward?

It does not matter whether or not there is a point to talking about unamped. The point is, folks are looking at unamped, and unamped's math checks out, so you need to stress that it's where amped is concerned that the nerf is too far. If you keep leaving that out, people will not get the full message. You cannot explain yourself if the other person lacks the context you do, until you give them that context. If you are frustrated wondering why people don't seem to take to your points, that is why.

Also, bare in mind, some players actually will use the unamped versions of spells because they are at will, not 2-3 times per encounter strings seperated by 10-minute rests, or they might be using other amps, like warp space, or because they simply are out of focus points, and haven't had a chance to rest. You can question whether they are tactically sound for using such amps, but different players play differently.

The math and conversation about scaling only makes sense if we're talking about the amped version.

Kitusser wrote:

Maybe it's because you are pretending like it's impossible to make any claim without a scientific study behind it.

Nope, that's still just you insisting I'm wrong by default by framing the very disagreement as impossible instead of actually engaging with the idea I presented.

You claim I'm asking for a "scientific study" when all I am asking for is a singular self-selected check where you actually show the work to arrive at your "99.9% of campaigns" claims instead of pretending like it is controversial for me to say "any given pair of GMs and/or authors have no particular reason pushing them toward particular creature choices, so they are probably going to pick different stuff"

So what mix of creatures would it take to make the new IW equal to the old one? Then, once you have your list of creatures, of all the combinations possible from all 1st party sources, what percentage of combinations work out to the new IW being equal to or better than the old one?

selling the Psychic?

defending them?

That kind of framing is missing the point of the discussion and polluting it.

Understanding what it is actually doing is the point.
And we can see that the new version after comparing it to creatures with actual resistances is operating like the old one against on level resistances minus the old IW crit potential that was out of line with the rest of the system. And when it is perfomring like the old version it is out performing anything else that is suffering against on level resistance.
It overperforms against higher resistances for the level.

So yeah that is what imaginary weapon has to offer.
But its not everything a psychic has to offer, its a tiny fraction of the class and only one subclass.

The spell that was so good before that everybody was complaining about how crazy the psychic was... Wait, that never happened. The only issue was how it interacted with another class via an archetype, and that was nuked like 4 different ways, as if 4 different people worked on this update and none were sure what any of the others were planning.

Kitusser wrote:

Unicore wrote:

If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.

So now the standard for how good a spell is, is how often people talk about it?

I don't even know what point you're trying to make in this comment.

My point is that the psychic class does not need to have the best damaging cantrip/focus spell in the game, especially not as a melee only option. That is not a good spell to build a Psychic character around.

Now, personally, I think a decent melee cantrip/focus spell option is nice to have for the psychic, as it works pretty great as a back up option for when you get forced into melee, but the remastered version is fine for that. It is still in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, and probably in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells.

The obsession around it has always been "its a focus spell that heightens at 2d8, that is what the ceiling of PF2 should be for focus spells." The developers appear to be saying, "No, that is too high of a ceiling for focus spells." That is why I believe people are reacting so intensely about it. It has nothing to do with the psychic.

Unicore, could you step back and state exactly why you feel this change is positive and what you hope to gain by continuing this conversation?

Tridus wrote:

There's ballpark ~100 non unique creatures weak to slashing or bludgeoning. I can't get an exact number because I can't get the filter to behave how I want it. Probably doing something wrong. Comparatively, there are exactly 2 weak to force, and they're from the same AP. So in terms of exploting weaknesses, this change is a massive loss.

There are ~288 non-unique resistant to both bludgeoning and slashing from what I can tell on AoN (usually in the form of physical resistance), but that's out of ~2840 non-unique creatures.

All this assumes an equal distribution of creatures in adventures. Which, nice as it would be to get a more balanced distribution of creatures, isn't exactly how it's done.

Are you claiming that bludgeoning resistance is overrepresented across all Paizo-published encounters? If so, what is the distribution of such creatures among those encounters?

Also, why aren't we assuming that our caster is switching to another option against resistant foes while using IW against foes where it hits for neutral or better damage? If you have a d6-based cantrip that you can amp against resistant foes and IW for everything else, this change is always a nerf regardless of what the distribution of enemies may be.

The issue with the current lack of quality control is that we're also not getting timely errata, and developers won't answer rules questions on social media (including these forums), so we're stuck with unclear or outright broken rules indefinitely. Add in that Paizo seems to be taking a mostly nerf-heavy approach to balance, and the quality that shone through at the start of PF2's life seems to be rapidly sliding into the rear-view mirror.

I think surprisingly the interesting part of stats isn't so much what you choose to do about your main stat. That's pretty much baked in, you're gonna get it high. But what are the other stats you choose to focus on? Is your cleric going to go for community leadership and charisma? Is your sorcerer going to pick up a champion dedication and athletics to grab and trip people? Is your cleric going to focus on dexterity and archery to use your third action? Does your champion of Torag want to Craft and repair their own shield? (And yes, those are all characters I actually play and enjoy, not merely theory.)

Secondary stats are solved. If you don't have a primary stat that works with saves, you'll boost the stats that help you make saving throws. Otherwise, you'll either boost Str or Cha because Int is a complete dump stat in this edition. You can choose to deviate, but doing so will make you weaker than you could be.

Spells

Disagree. After about level 5 spells really take off. I do think it was a mistake in the remaster to remove the ability modifier from cantrip damage. Nobody enjoys rolling all 1s on lots of dice. Slightly fewer dice but with a higher static bonus was nicer. Maybe that should have been added to regular spells too, if consistency between spells and cantrips was the concern. Make the fireball 1d6 smaller but add your casting stat.

But really, I've played two casters to level 20 and one 17, and have a bunch more around level 7. Basically, once you start getting fireball or your tradition's equivalent (sorcerer dragon breath, divine wrath etc.) it really takes off. When you throw it into a room and calculate that you did more than a hundred damage in a single turn while the martials are still walking to meet enemies, it's not weak.

Some spells are good and carry classes, but the average spell is bad, and certain categories of spells are vastly better than others due to the way PF2's math works out. Buffs are great. AoE is very strong. Debuffs... that depends on the effect they have when the enemy succeeds. Single target damage... trash for anybody other than Magus. Utility spells are fine, but best as a wand or a scroll.

Dedications

I disagree with you there. The majority of my characters end up picking up a dedication. The class dedications in particular are often as powerful or more so than regular class feats. Rogue, champion, alchemist are particularly good. But I've also used wizard dedication on a fighter (Jump is extremely useful; Tailwind and Haste also pretty nice), wizard dedication on a magus (just want more spell slots), monk on the same magus (archer with a sideline in unarmed combat when enemies come close), rogue on cleric (in 20 levels I think I took 7 rogue feats and only 3 cleric feats) and so on.

Dedications are much like spells, where some are very good, and the rest are all afterthoughts. I'd rather just bring back true multiclassing than spend time messing with classes as feats again.

I know that a lot of the recent time crunch, combined with some staff moving on aren't something the current team can control, but it's tough to see the lack of polish and care in recent releases. The lack of errata and their seeming desire to ignore anything that won't immediately result in sales, combined with a lack of communication from anyone by Maya, only makes things feel worse.

I know that Paizo isn't a tech company or a social media company, but the modern consumer expects access to lead developers, frequent fixes to rules/printing issues, and a general level of polish that Paizo hasn't delivered for a few years now.

I hope things improve because the hobby is better when everything is running smoothly.

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank, at least for traditional dungeon crawling adventures go. The dwarves didn’t need Bilbo Baggins for his back stabbing ability or single target damage potential.

GMs shouldn’t be gleefully sadistic about denying players knowledge about future information about potential threats and encounters, especially starting from session 0, but if there are going to be haunts in a spooky ghost campaign and no one advances religion past trained, that again is a player side choice to make the campaign more challenging than it needed to be. Players don’t have to beat every encounter on their first try to have a a fun and successful campaign.

Why are we gating the ability to notice things by class at all? Is this really a niche that needed protecting?

I'd sneak in and make a new errata document exactly 180 degrees off the community consensus on every issue. I'm enough of a GM that being the monkey's paw just has too strong an appeal.

Even if you do spot a hazard, solving or not solving it tends to be equally meaningless. If you fail to solve it, you rest, make a few rolls, and move on. If you do solve it, you spend some time, make a few rolls, and move on. Official material doesn't suggest a living dungeon or any actionable time pressure, so you never come out of a stand-alone hazard down any resources.

So long as healing and recovering focus points cost nothing but time, these types of traps cannot be interesting unless they actually take down a PC and keep the party from healing them for long enough that you have a casualty. Even that would often feel more cheap than engaging.

Traps would be more interesting if they could pick off hirelings and limit how much loot you can recover, if HP and focus points weren't so easily recovered, or if APs were designed with collapsing encounters and time tracks where x minutes spent resting causes some meaningful change in the dungeon that makes continuing more difficult.

Bust-R-Up wrote:

I don't think strong in un-synergized parties is the bar we should be setting for nerfs.

Eh, I'd argue that's the most dangerous place, because it leads to the most feelsbad. If you're doing well because you're in a well-synchronised party, the only person feeling bad is the GM. If you're doing well in an un-synchrosied party, you're liable to steal the spotlight and that's the main issue with power level difference, isn't it?

I don't think amps should be barred entirely but I think it should be treated like every other caster dedication and you have to take a separate feat to get the amp. Yes, yes, Blessed One, but Blessed One gives a single focus spell. Psychic dedication gives you choice from close to a dozen, and they definitely aren't stinkers like Wizard focus spells can be.

Stealing the spotlight by using Amped Guidance to aid the rest of the party seems pretty hard to do.

The only broken interaction is with a specific subclass of Magus, not with the dedication or amped spells in general.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

ScooterScoots wrote:

Teridax wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Give me an example of a battle where this is useful past level 14. During the actual battle that doesn't interfere with your other party members hammering the creature.

I can't speak on AestheticDialectic's behalf, but I'll point out two problems I'm seeing with this sentence: the first is that the whole point of wall spells is generally that your party won't be hammering some of the creatures. As you yourself mention, wall spells are great because they let you split up groups of enemies, isolating some of them and forcing them to waste actions breaking the wall while your party focuses on whoever's left exposed. They're strong for pretty much the same reason quandary is strong: you effectively apply the effect you want immediately, no rolling needed, and any actions the enemy spends on dealing with the spell after that is a win. The second, much simpler problem is that if hammering the monsters through raw damage, especially just a single nuke spell, is all your party needs to do to win encounters, then chances are the encounters you're facing aren't challenging enough for utility or backup options to really matter. Nothing wrong with easy encounters, but it does change the nature of a discussion around strategic options, not that wall spells are necessarily the most topical subject in a thread about the Animist.

It’s literally just defeat in detail, this s@#! is in the art of war. Strike the enemy while their forces are divided and all of your strength obliterates part of theirs, and then go on to the next part. Old as dirt. Don’t understand why Devarin doesn’t appreciate that.

PF2 is not The Art of War. It has its own optimal way to do things and damage scaling.

The principle of concentration of force does not disappear when a situation becomes turn based.

However AoE tends to want large clumps of foes for the most efficient damage per spell slot. There's a reason we don't favor human wave tactics against modern weapons and that when such tactics are attempted losses are catastrophic.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I can see the value if the extending is required, but I don't see the value if the spell lands.

I'm not sure why you value the condition extending of the witch familiar ability so highly given if a synesthesia or other debuff hits, it lasts for a minute, no extending required

That if is why resentment is so good. I expect enemies to succeed their saves, particularly the most difficult ones and synesthesia is 1 round when the enemy succeeds. So I highly value that the witch can extend this indefinitely. Same goes for slow to use another example. Yes synesthesia and true target together are brutal, Witches can do this, and they may not buff as easily as the bard but if they need to they still can given they have the same spell list with the same number of slots

How many actions does it take for them to get a buff up and then start debuffing the enemy compared to the bard? The difference between can do something and is good at doing so is really in the action costs in PF2.

While I initially dismissed the OP'S idea, the more I considered it, the more intriguing and even tantalizing it became.

My first idea, when considering above the cut PCs who would start adventuring with initial power greater than usual, was the usual "play at higher level" piece of advice I usually give when people complain about PCs not being strong enough in PF2.

But this does not answer the OP's idea of powerful PCs with low complexity, because level and complexity are indeed deeply tied in PF2.

My proposal then would be to basically build PCs as NPCs.

The NPCs creation rules give us the target scores for key numbers in the game for each level.

A system that allows PCs to be built with 1st-level complexity while hitting these target numbers should work fine.

Maybe with additional stat boosts and Proficiency increases from the start and some homebrew rules to give PCs the numbers required.

Basically, just choose the equivalent level of your starting PCs, build them as 1st-level PCs and raise their numbers to be on par with equivalent level NPCs.

This could also work for a "Monster Mash" style one shot where everybody plays as and/or designs a monster and a short adventure is run.

@Teridax I'm just going to agree to disagree on this. I see what you're asking for, and think it could be a cool project for a larger team, but I don't see it working for Paizo and their current staff and general design philosophy.

If you think you can do better than Paizo, then take their market. It's that simple. If you think Paizo is doing such a bad job and you can do a much better job of producing a tabletop RPG with balanced, well done content with no filler and all options are equal, then by all means make that game and beat Paizo and WoTC since they been doing this for decades and haven't been able to figure out how to do what some of you are asking for in this theoretically perfect game Trip H thinks exists.

I've never seen that game before, but hey Trip H and Bust think this game exists. This perfect game with perfect content that isn't filler and is balanced and such. All options equal. No complexity, but narrative depth whatever that means in this context.

I say make that game. Shock the table top RPG world with this perfect math game with all options as valuable as all other options. Make it profitable. And then take market share.

Go for it. You obviously know better than the Paizo and WotC designers with their decades of experience.

Once you've made this perfect game, then let us all know so we can give it a shot.

Nah, I'm good.

My point also isn't that PF2 is bad and that I could do it better. It's that asking for the eventual PF3 to be PF2 but with even more feats in even more buckets is going to make the problem worse. The more you force the writers to make, the less time they have to test and proofread it all. This is assuming that Paizo wants to keep their current release schedule and not do Kickstarter campaigns for new books every 6 months to recoup costs or some other crazy thing to justify the added effort.

[W]eapons are pretty broadly effective based on design, force, and technique. Realism generally sides with, "size doesn't matter."

This only applies when those weapons are being wielded by beings of roughly similar size and anatomy in one-on-one conditions. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. You're not going to put a 4'9" person of slight build up against a 6'5" monster and expect anything like a fair fight.

PF2 players do gain more power. They just don't gain enough power to win alone or turn the enemies into a joke.

I've played several characters from level 1 to 17 to 20 in PF1 and PF2. Main difference is in PF1 the power scaled so the DM had to build encounters outside the rules to effectively challenge the PCs because the rule system did not hold up at all. The power scaling was so heavily in favor of the PCs in PF1 that any attempt to challenge the players required extensive work as well as extensive system mastery to do so. I had to calculate average damage per round of a PC group as well as the save DCs of selected spells with feats like Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection to counter those specific, nigh unbeatable combinations. I had to do so by going outside the rule system in PF2 because the capabilities of PF1 PCs was far outside the ability of rules to provide a challenge. The game was essentially broken past level 12 to 15. That isn't narrative impact, that is narrative destruction. The narrative became irrelevant because the player choices had enabled them to bypass the system's ability to challenge them.

PF2 the players still get stronger and very, very strong in the 12 to 20 range. But not so strong that the system can't create challenges. You are still forced to engage with the narrative challenges, while not being able to destroy them.

You still get to launch powerful AOE. YOu can still beat the bosses. You can still beat all the challenges. Your decisions, tactics, and abilities still influence the narrative heavily. In fact, they are influence the narrative more than they did in PF1 because you have to play well in PF2 because you don't get to win the game by choosing some broken combination of spells and abilities not well tested by the design team that led to narrative destruction.

This idea that you can't or don't impact the narrative in PF2 is a false one. You have to engage with the narrative in PF2 because you can't win during character creation so you destroy the narrative making the DM nothing more than a game engine for a power fantasy.

If narrative destruction is what you're looking for, then yeah, PF2 doesn't let you destroy the narrative during character creation. If narrative impact and engagement is what you're looking for, then PF2 does a much better job because you have to engage with the narrative and fight challenging enemies that you can't easily beat in character creation due to a broken rule system.

I never said PF2 characters don't gain power as they gain levels. I was saying that they gain power and complexity as they level. If you want power without complexity you might need to modify the game to work for that need, likewise if you want complexity without power you would also need to do some work there.

This whole thread is about how it would be nice to decouple character power from breadth of ability, and campaign scope. I don't really think we need easy, medium, and hard to play versions of each classes that all reach the same level of power, but there seems to be a desire for that hence the existence of this thread.

Thanks for listing the problem with every game system ever made. Not new problems. What you stated above was even worse in PF1, far, far, far worse.

Let me state it plainly then. I don't think Paizo has it in them to make more material than they already do without the quality of that material dropping even more than it already has.

Do they thought? The underlying mechanics are similar but the fantasy and type of things being done between the two classes are significantly different. Very little I want to accomplish by being a Wizard is redundant with what I want to accomplish as a Bard. Asking me to play a Bard instead of a Wizard does nothing for me if I wanted something similar to the Wizard.

If a player at my table wanted to play a caster and liked the Wizard's theme, but didn't like the mechanics and liked the mechanics of the Bard but not the themes my job as GM would be to make that work for them. It's not a system lever, it's a good GM lever. The idea that we need to have a Mage (Basic), Sage (Mid), Wizard (High) progression of classes with the same theme but different levels of mechanical complexity seems like a lot of work for very little gain. Especially when those classes are all supposed to be equally useful in all modes of play with special care taken to ensure balance in combat between those three classes (class options?) and every other class.

You failed to respond to the key part of my argument.

PF2 has its worse balance when you compare parts within each module to each other. Spells have must haves and never takes, classes have great feats and duds, skill feats have a handful of useful picks and then everything else. How do you propose to make everything feats, allow people to dial up and down how many feats characters are going to have, and ensure that feats are all equally worth taking? Are we okay with 90% of feats being duds and trusting that we've narrowed the ceiling and floor enough that the game works even if you take 50 bad feats and somebody else takes 500 good ones?

That's not really a complexity lever, though, that's just some classes being inherently more complex than others.

That is a lever. You can play a Wizard and have to know all the good spells to keep up or play a Bard and get much of the same flexibility that is inherent to spell casters, but have a far higher floor if you don't tune everything optimally. To a player who "wants to cast spells" those classes represent the same thing but take different levels of player effort to get the same in character results.

I don't think that's an inherently bad thing either, though I do mention in this thread that I'd like spells to be rolled into feats and no longer make spell slots the default mode of casting, so that playing a caster doesn't automatically entail having to manage a large collection of spells and limited per-day resources. Feats, however, could make for an excellent complexity lever, so if the party decides they all want super-complex characters, you could just give them 30 feats each to play with, and if they want simple characters, you could give them 5 feats each. The fact that you can dial that sort of value up or down easily is what makes something a lever in balance and design terms.

Spells as feats is a very 4e D&D "everything is a power" way of solving what, to many people, isn't even a problem. While I'd prefer a skill check based system where spells apply fatigue to the caster based on the spell's level and where in the 4DOS a spellcasting attempt landed, if nobody else wants it there's no point in making it.

As for complexity being tied to feats. D&D 5e 2014 tried that by making feats optional and basically every table ever used feats to the point where 2024 D&D had to add stats to more feats because they realized how bad it felt to get stats or feats every 4 levels. Feats = power, or at least more options to solve issues, so why would players not settle on 30 feats being the standard and anything else being weird of for new players only?

I fail to see why more modularity would entail worse balance, and as a matter of fact I think modularity would make balancing easier by decoupling unrelated systems from one another, such as combat and exploration.

The issue is when you create more work for the team, and making everything a discreet sub system that is 100% perfectly optional is more work, quality suffers if you expect the same team to deliver it in the same time and page count. So you either get less content, worse content, or burnt out designers. Paizo can't just double its staff and make the perfect system even if we all wish they could.

Just because some forty year-old RPG system exists that never aimed for balance in the first place doesn't mean modular games are doomed to poor balance, and TTRPGs have evolved enough since that I think the opposite can be stated in confidence, as shown in particular with systems like PbtA that are both extremely easy to customize and generally balanced by default. PF2e itself made itself much better-balanced than 1e in large part by making itself more modular as well, which has made it a lot easier for it to isolate elements of its design cleanly and ensure they remain balanced without getting knocked out of whack by some totally unrelated mechanic.

PbtA is a rules light game. Show me a crunchy rules heavy game that does modularity well and maintains balance equally when played with the bare minimum rules and with every rule at once?

Yeah, you could make everything feats. Then every level you get an action feat, a defense feat, a skill feat, a movement feat, an exploration feat, ad nauseum. But at what point does enough become enough and how do we ensure that there are 10 good exploration feats and 90 crap ones? For a 2e example, a well built caster is balanced, but spells aren't internally balanced so a new player could pick bad, or overly narrow spells, and have a worse time than if they stuck with haste, fireball, synesthesia, slow, etc.

The top end of these systems might mostly come out to balanced, but what about the second and third tiers of junk that are just wasting page count?

The weapon size issue the OP has isn't the real issue. The issue is that the mechanics are disconnected from fluff in a way that prevents some players from fully engaging with the fiction. Size bonuses are just one visible example of this, but skill feats (feats in general), how some feats sound amazing in the fluff and then do nothing at the table, monsters and players being created differently, are all things that might take a player out of the action.

PF1 often let you "fix" these troubles by "breaking" sub-optimal options and making a functional build out of them that works at good, but not broken level tables.

I'd say what I'm discussing is the polar opposite of this: power level is narrative scope, such that it is impossible to discuss a character's power level without also discussing the impact they can have on the world and the story, as well as the scale of adventures suited to them. The proposal for future editions isn't to eliminate power or complexity progression, but to decouple these from one another and give the GM more control over when to apply those: if the players want more complexity, that's a dial the GM ought to easily be able to turn, and if the narrative calls for a change in power level, that's something the GM similarly ought to be able to easily apply on the post. Having multiple levers that can be flipped independently of each other would allow for a lot more flexibility than the single, catch-all, and fairly rigid mechanic that is character level.

PF2 already has complexity levers that aren't tied to power and it's one of the most complained about aspects of the system. The fighter adds 1 + 1 and gets damage while the wizard does calculus to get a similar effect.

As for decoupling power and scope and adding in complexity as an additional system. That sounds like GURPs which has a lot of drop in sub systems and not a lot of balance. The idea that you can get perfect granularity and tunability and PF2 levels of balance on the time and design budgets that Paizo have simply can't work out. If we get more modular systems, you have to expect that balance will suffer and I'm not sure fans of PF2e are willing to make that trade.

Squiggit wrote:

Witch of Miracles wrote:

These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them.

It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation.

Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.

Maybe you've simply had different experiences than me, but the proportion of those players to other kinds of players has been unusually high in PF2E. At no point did I say those posters don't exist elsewhere. I simply feel like they make up an unusually large percentage of participants (emphasis on unusually). My experience is that most of the people who grow really attached to PF2E and talk about it online are attached to the mechanical aspect of the game, and they're attached to it as a game. Not as many Vorthoses in online discussion, to drag out that term from discussing types of MtG players, but a whole lot of spikes.

Another way of putting it is that lot of other crunchy RPGs have commenters who're invested in the mechanics, but like the crunch as a form of simulation or representation or...

I stopped lurking just to agree with this. If you look at the PF2 sub-Reddit the idea of homebrew seems to repel people and there are very few meme posts. It's a self selected mechanically focused group of players, these forums are also very self selected to consist mostly of people who don't ruffle the feathers of established posters too much. Outsiders with radically different views don't seem to stick around very long.

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On topic this idea of power without narrative scope and narrative scope without power is at odds with the core of what D20 fantasy is. Most players enjoy gaining more ability to impact the world as they level and can handle the added mental load that comes with that.

For players that don't I'd probably space out ability levels and stat levels so they hit level 20 in terms of skill numbers, HP, to hit, etc., but only have 10 levels worth of feats and abilities to remember. You'd need to scale spells with level as a 5th rank spell splashing against 20th level HP won't work, but in a reworking of this magnitude that shouldn't be outside of your scope.