OverworkedDM's page

You can put me in the camp that prefers 3.X multiclassing however I doubt this is an area that will change.

Simply as restraining players into more straight-jacked classes is easier to balance against and write modules for. That, and it would be much easier on organized play.

The statement that it is good if it is more versatile or powerful is also unlikely to happen due to the design space this idea exists in.

3.X made the naive assumption that 1 level of 1 class = 1 level in a different as far as power goes.

This system relies on 1 normal feat is = 1 multi-class feat.
So if you make multiclass feats better than normal then everyone becomes dual classed.
Conversely you can actually get away with multiclass feats being sub-par as people will still sort-of take them for role-play reasons.

So just by the way the game works I suspect multiclass feat characters will always feel a bit unsatisfying. But unless there is a big fuss I cant see it changing. There is for instance people whom like this system.

Except I would not have that issue in PF1 as it is unbounded. Which was my point.
As "peasant NPC" with bad saves, bad bab, d4 hp per level and 2 skills per level. He is just not going to be that good at combat regardless of level.
Now he could have a real good profession accountant number (such that the CEO was impressed with his work) but the rest is likely to be garbage as the system is not bounded. Especially once you factor in his physical attributes will have been on the wane, he has no real armour to speak of.
Should the orks invade through HR I am perfectly fine with John kicking the bucket last. He may also heroically scratch one of them with his d3-1 points of damage from a letter opener.

Considering the desire to make the religions more themed however going into alignment discussions is going to never result in a consistent answer. We have as a society been inventing morality systems since the Greeks. As I think has been shown by this message board refining the same god into to several different alignments.

I would as a GM prefer a vow/commandment/tenant system.

Thou shall encourage free love,
Thou shall revere cats
Thou shall protect peoples home.

The above should make the clergy thematically consistent while avoiding the pitfall of alignment restrictions.

The fact that player power is baked into wealth means there is a very large financial variance over items.

The real world solved this by moving away from coins as there is a finite limit to the metal in the world. The bank cheque becoming notes etc.

Now if you role-play'd in a world that "functionally" has debit-credit cards in that see that dragon loot of 100,000 gold pieces hovered up and placed somewhere. Then from an out of character point of view mostly forgotten about. Then the 3.5 paradigm kinda worked.

On the other hand if you have an interest in encumbrance or actual economics then it was bizarre. Your +1 magic sword required you to bring considerably more gold by weight than the sword itself to the wizard. Also most adventures post level 7 would require a wheelbarrow in order to carry the coins they needed to shop.

So the need to make higher denomination currency plausible due to the adventurer economy I can get behind.

On the other hand they whole need to wholesale change all the numbers is odd and makes porting old adventures hard. Id have thought the simple video game currency of 100cp to 1sp, 100sp to 1gp, 100gp to 1pp would have been much simpler. It also covers much more of the magic item prices.

I will say I will not buy a system that uses +1 per level with bounded accuracy. I was not a fan of it in the systems that pre-date PF2. So currently it is looking like I may only use PF2 as a place to pillage for house rules.

Flat(ish) Math with bounded accuracy has some advantages. (AKA dice is god)

1) It leaves more of the monster manual usable as levels go by. As even if all the monster represents is a theoretical threat that is often enough when made part of a mixed encounter.

2) Simple math, I don't know why it takes Dave so long to add 21 to a dice roll but it does. So simpler math can be quicker.

3) Fairly static DC's make GMing easier to get familiarity with.

It has some issues in that:

1) It can feel mechanically boring.
2) It can have narrative issues, the uncharismatic half ork barbarian winning the battle of the bands against the half-elf bard is interesting once. After the third time the half elf player was not amused.
3) Everyone rolls for everything as its mostly up-to the dice which can be slow.

Unbounded Math of the PF1 kind did also give me some advantages.

1) Player agency if they wanted to be good at something, they could be to the point the math breaks and spins off into the setting sun. Took me a while as a GM to be happy with this but these days its yes your character is absurdly good at this you succeed.

2) One resolution system, the difference between an epic jump and a normal one, the DC.

3) Can help characters feel different. Wizard verse fighter etc.

Downsides are

1) Math is someone suspect and can take time for the player to resolve.
2) Saves can get to the state where it becomes fairly binary.
3) Can encourage "roll-play" over role-play.

The PF2 system comes with only downsides for me and my GMing.
1) Monsters become obsolete as per PF1
2) Math is still going to take Dave god knows how long to resolve.
3) Its mechanically dissonant from expected results. (The whom is better at first aid example, the new paramedic just out of school or nearing retirement John from accounting who has never seen a bandage before(*)...) The patch for this is feat gates but lets be honest gates have never been particularity popular.
4) Resolution complexity, instead of the DC, it's now DC plus when-either or not it should be trained only, expert only etc...
5) You can end up on a treadmill that defeats all sense of progress. If at level one I need a 11 to succeed at a task and by level 10 I still need an 11 it going to feel quite similar, regardless of the numbers involved.

(*) Yes you can "sort of" fix this issue by ensuring that all NPC's in a world don't exceed level 4. However from what I read of adventure paths this is not the case and it is also quite limiting for GMing to only have such worlds.
Also the its fantasy who cares argument misses the point it is easier to make the fantastical magical if the base system at least ensure the narrative expected result is the default. The John from accounting saved the casualty because of the magic beans he ate is interesting in a way. He saved the casualty because of his 30 years reading excel documents is weird.
(The to level he must have seen combat is only true in a world without quest exp. He could have just completed a lot of accounting quests. A kill only XP world is fundamentally different and changes the very social structure.)

Currently we have the situation where :
It looks like a duck
It quacks like a duck
It's a duck.

They act like races, they look like races...

Now I am up for a more diverse character creation system however this currently is just a re-painted existing system.

One thing that would help me as GM is if you split learned behaviour (call it culture maybe?) from genetics. Make it two buckets you get to pick your feats from, culture and race. This combination would then be your ancestry.

It would let me create diverse towns etc quite fast.

Take the classic Wood-elves
Here one could make wood basically the culture of militant tree-huggers often ascribed to that style of elf.

Then it becomes:
Goldwoods is a town in a forest populated by wood-elves and wood-halflings. Quick and dirty and I have a theme and if the PC's decide to go postal ill know both races will be good with bows and climbing trees.

It also will solve the issue of "adopted" you want to be a dwarf brought up in Goldwoods - easy just be a wood-dwarf and write your adopted parents down.
It also solves the issue of you're a loner elf abandoned at birth who can use an elven curved-blade... for reasons of genetic memory maybe?