I've considered having certain INT breakpoints (e.g. +2, +4, +6) give training in a lore of the player's choice in addition to its normal benefits, myself.
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I think you misread what I wrote. Outside of mookbusting, only "success" matters. For mookbusting, I even said much further upthread that AoE incap is my preferred method. ...So I did misread. That's my bad. I still wouldn't agree that only success matters for single target, though. I can understand sort of calibrating your expectations to single targets succeeding their saves. But there -are- single target spells where the failure condition is a huge part of why the spell is valuable, like confusion. 2x APL+0 isn't even a fight outside of the very earliest levels. It's a mild inconvenience unless the party collectively can't roll above a 2. If you can't resourcelessly clear fodder moderates like that, the party has deeper issues. Same idea also applies to some severe budget encounters: e.g., 3x APL+0, or 2x APL+1 on odd levels. Moderates can still go south at any level; depends on how annoying the enemies are for the party's strategy, even before the possibility of bad luck. As a DM, I hesitate to call anything I'd actually put on the table "fodder." That being said, I know where you're coming from.
It's less that spells only as useful as their success entry and more that a lot of spells are balanced with the expectation that they hit multiple enemies and see maybe 1 fail and 2 successes. I'd also say a lot of mookbusting incap spells are more effective than you're giving them credit for; I've seen Calm end a surprising amount of combats. Incap spells are situational, but very strong when they're applicable. A lot of single target incap-style spells -are- bad, but a few are strong enough to pick despite the downsides (like Uncontrollable Dance). It's also true that a spell like Paralyze can have a huge impact in a fight that's something like 2x APL+0 enemies. I dislike single target incap because it's inherently more situational than AoE incap, but it is still very useful when it's relevant. I'd also note that buff spells also don't have guaranteed effects, because a buff didn't actually do anything if it didn't change any outcomes. Heroism isn't more "guaranteed" to be useful than a blast, and can often have significantly less impact than a fireball would.
WRT stunned: I often forget the "senseless" part because it's omitted on the premaster GM screen, which I still use. (I never bothered to get a new one.) That's my bad. To be clear on what I meant, I meant the distinction as a negative. I get differentiating them, since they are different, but I do not think that differentiating them needs to come hand in hand with narrative text being belittled as compared to rules text since I still think they're two parts of an important whole. My issue with the term "flavor text" is the negative connotation, not the differentiation. What I find silly is saying one part of the whole is less needed than any other. Since I've been pretty clear about how I don't think the flavor text is important to parsing what things do, I should also be clear: I think the flavor text is a really important part of TTRPG game design, and helps keep the game from feeling like a soulless number pusher. I also think a good fit between mechanics and flavor text is an integral part of the game design. I just don't think flavor text is a good port of call to understand how to run the game mechanically in most cases.
The duration of stunned is determined by how it ticks down. If the system had an incap spell that inflicted stunned 4, it'd eat 3A on the first turn and 1A on the second. Slowed always eats the same amount of actions every turn. I can't think of any effect inflicts stunned at high enough values for this to matter, though. The most important difference between slowed and stunned as the game is currently designed, though, is that being stunned keeps you from using reactions until it wears off.
The boomerang argument was patently ridiculous at the time, and remains ridiculous now. From a mechanics perspective, people were arguing the weapon got the returning rune for free; nothing about the way we know the game balances weapons indicates a returning rune fits in the boomerang's power budget, and it certainly doesn't have any of the powerlevel cuts you would expect if a weapon were to get a returning rune for free. That argument doesn't withstand scrutiny, either mechanical (free returning rune is silly) or narrative (boomerangs don't come back when they hit something in real life).
I'll admit that this one slapped me until I doublechecked that "you can't act" is indeed treated as keyword text by the game every time it appears. The break in formatting convention on stunned is genuinely confusing (and I wish it were more obvious that "you can't act" is basically a keyword).
"Water" and "soil" aren't keyword terms, no. But in Ravel of Thorns, they -are- a part of the mechanics. It's the same as how a valid burst for Entangle in 1E must contain vegetation. You can pull things that aren't part of the mechanical "scaffolding" created by the basic rules and conditions into said scaffolding in this way. No one should think that's impossible. Likewise, spells and similar effects can sometimes create new mechanics wholesale and introduce rules for them—Usurp the Lunar Reins (Kineticist L18 feat) is a good example of this. The problem comes when someone particularly foolhardy or stubborn reads this The moon has always been connected to the tides, and now you can grasp that connection. You can create massive amounts of water and control these tides, subverting even the moon's sovereignty over the oceans and seas. Choose an area 50 feet long by 50 feet wide within 500 feet, and choose two different effects from the options provided below. The effects take place in the listed order... and then asks why Usurp the Lunar Reins doesn't let them control gravity, because the tides are a gravity thing, right?
...Because there's a pretty clear distinction between what's a mechanically parse-able clause and what isn't, and the first sentence or clause of many spell descriptions (or, well, of any description of -anything-) has no mechanical meaning. You push into the target's mind and daze it with a mental jolt. You plant fear in the target... Freezing sleet and heavy snowfall collect on the target's feet and legs... I could probably go through almost every spell in the game and do this. They're conventionally written by giving a narrative effect and then explaining the mechanical cashout. The narrative portion has no obvious effect on how you parse the spell. That being said, I agree that when the mechanical cashout is vague or poorly written, the flavor can be a guidepost to figure out what was probably intended. But that's not the same as saying these sentences above have a mechanical meaning. Seriously, this. It drives me nuts when people claim "X doesn't work the way it says it does because that part is flavour text." What are you basing that on except that you want to argue the opposite of what the book says and the only way to do it is to just ignore that part? The opposite is usually the worse offense—it's easy to use flavor text to argue a spell should do more than it actually does. The examples from Agonarchy illustrate the problem well.
Attack roll spells -can- be reliable, but only with setup. It's situational and requires more teamwork than an equivalent save spell. -You can't flank, yeah, but grapple and trip can still give you off-guard
Altogether, this can get you into extremely reliable territory, approaching 70%+ hit rate even on difficult targets. However... it's some "when the stars align" stuff.
The downsides are there for risk/reward gameplay and to aid the feeling of burst at a cost. The game has also sanded this off almost everywhere it appeared since then, and the mechanic didn't feel like it worked as intended even on release. The class was an outlier in how extreme this design was, even premaster—and it just hasn't aged well at all. It should probably be changed, but I hope it can be changed in a fun way.
In the early levels, Psychic is absurdly fragile but also does great damage. Cleaving with amped imaginary weapon is /really/ good from like 1-4, for example, especially with psyche unleashed. Sorc can't replicate that sustainably. Psychic falls off really fast, though.
I wonder if you could make unleash activate when you amp a cantrip (or cast a slotted spell?) and have it extend an additional round when you use an amp. Tying it into other class mechanics would maybe feel more satisfying.
If nothing else, 3 slots per level instead of 2 would go a long way and take up the same page space. It makes the class less unique, but this is a post-remaster-oracle world. I have a hard time justifying 2 slots for the class without other changes. If it keeps 2 slots, I think a bump to 8 hp/level and light armor proficiency would probably be welcome. Several class kits push it towards melee, and it's horribly equipped for it as it stands. The "glass cannon" fantasy that playstyle embodies just... doesn't have much room to exist in PF2E. I'd also love to see improvements to unleash psyche, as well, but I don't really know what I'd want there. There are a lot of possible improvements, but it's hard to improve the feature and also maintain the bursty feel of the class.
I do think it's both frustrating and unintuitive that blocking a huge crit could outright destroy your shield, thus costing you a good chunk of change. It's not like the shield blocks more damage on a crit than a normal hit, anyways, so the additional penalty stings. I understand not wanting to bog things down with "shields take non-crit damage even when players take crit damage" by default. But it's a pretty quick houserule fix to the problem, and might be worth implementing at some tables. I do think shield block is incredibly strong as-is, though. Shields generally offer everyone a ton of survivability, especially at low levels, and shield block is the icing on the cake.
It could be cool for Paizo to make a magus class archtype that gives up spellstrike for a different kind of cast+ This is reminiscent of the pf1 warpriest, really, where you got to cast stuff like divine favor as a swift action. However, I'm not really sure it makes sense here. Those spells sort of existed to compensate for being 3/4ths BAB as a divine caster playing in melee, and warpriest got to take less time to buff in exchange for having 6th casting. Those buffs just aren't needed in PF2E—the class being proposed here would, presumably, be a full martial.
I think they're generally too fast relative to spell and attack ranges at high levels, yes. A lot of them can't be fought in the open. The few among them that have an effective means of attacking at range are obnoxious if played to kill the party. You kind of have to set the fight somewhere that the huge fly speed won't matter much, or have the dragon be very aggressively trying to take down the party. Even then, it'd be really hard to keep the dragon from running if it felt it was at risk of dying. If you integrate a dragon into a custom campaign, you may want to either nerf the flight speed, or make dealing with the dragon's speed an important narrative problem.
You're not wrong, but I'm also not sure I'd really draw an equivalency between some feats being stronger than others and a hypothetical homebrew that lets you sell skill increases for damage. Oh, I figured we weren't discussing that. I marked it out more as a fun design exercise than a serious suggestion, and no one had seemed to directly respond. I kind of thought that post was mostly ignored (and understandably so) and we had moved past it; for some reason, I had actually thought you were responding to talk about classless PF. (Classless systems also have the potential to let you avoid dead choices more often, was my logic.) ...In retrospect, it makes way more sense you were responding to my post.
PF1 had some mechanics like that. The trouble is that it often becomes an exercise in trading away a thing you'll never use in exchange for a direct boost to something you want to focus on, which means what looks like an equitable trade is really just free power. PF2E isn't free of this, either. Multiclass archetypes are imbalanced in many cases, and some regular archetypes are clearly out of line as well. Making class feats fungible doesn't make the things you can swap them for equally powerful. You can still gain free power by dumping class feats at levels with bad options. (Many class feats are weirdly worse than taking an archetype dedication or later archetype feats, as well. E.G., am I ever taking cantrip expansion over a casting dedication? Can I get an attack reaction on a martial that doesn't natively have one, greatly increasing my ability to take advantage of both the action economy and my flanking partner spamming trip?) It also creates a frustrating asymmetry between classes that really want their class feats (like kineticist) and classes that need them substantially less (wizard being the classic example, here). The latter ends up with substantially more build flexibility. Classes that want an early feat (like champions who want their reaction upgrade, kineticists that want their first impulses and weapon infusion, etc.) get an especially raw deal, since L2 is generally the most comfortable level to start an archetype. The delta is generally lower than a character giving up later features or power in PF1 to hit a specific powerspike timing (which was especially common with some prestige class builds). But it's definitely still there. Everyone here is aware of how much the strongest archetypes can buy you, especially compared to picking actively bad feats.
Total aside: Ever since skills, to-hit, and saves were somewhat standardized under the proficiency system, I've wondered what it'd look like if you broke the walls down between this stuff and just made an "oops all skills" variant of PF2E. Higher proficiency tiers would certainly need to cost more "increases" than lower tiers; perhaps you'd need to make it so non-KAS or class skills cost more to increase, or discount the increases based on the modifier you have in the relevant ability score in some way. And weapon proficiency, armor proficiency, saves, class DCs, and the like would need to cost far more increases than bumping a skill would—probably an amount that'd vary per class, honestly. But it'd be really funny. Want to trade some skills for a better save? Want to trade that save for some more trained skills? Sure. I don't think it's a good idea without a whole lot of tuning, and even then it opens a lot of ways for someone to fall flat on their face. It also invites Grog, who can't use a skill for his life but has legendary proficiency in martial weapons and has silly AC in heavy armor but can't pass a will save on his life—you really have to make it so it's much harder to build tall and outside of the "intended" path. But if you could do it, I think some people would be happy to take 2 lower AC or a worse reflex save for some more skills. The game kind of lets you do this exact thing anyways by investing into INT on classes it's not good on. This would be more granular. Again, I don't think this is a great idea for the game as designed. I'm not suggesting it. I do just think it's really amusing, and homebrewing it out would be a fun design exercise. How many skill increases do I think +2 AC is worth, anyways? What levers can I create to keep the trades from breaking the game? These are fun questions to try to force yourself to answer—for me, anyways.
I think dumping INT is plenty acceptable, but I'd probably pick champion over sorcerer if I wanted to go CHA. Heavy armor is useful and lets you have less DEX; Fire Ray is still a good focus spell. You're not getting much spell-wise from the sorcerer archetype that you can't get from your own class slots, though. If you want to use the sorcerer archetype specifically for slotted casting, I'd say you're barking up the wrong tree. You would have a better time keeping your int high (so your magus spells are better), taking an archetype with a good focus spell to spellstrike with, and using your magus slots to play a pinch-hit caster. I feel like you're dangerously close to asking, "what if I dumped the stat my class uses to cast and used a different stat to cast spells I'll get from an archetype, even though the archetype spells are always behind in spell rank and cost feats to acquire and that means what I'm suggesting is strictly worse?" Even if you dump INT, your magus slots will be more valuable than your sorcerer slots because on-rank buffs and saveless spells will be strong regardless of your save DCs. Your sorc slots are always 3 levels (as in, character levels of progression) behind at a minimum. And progressing sorc spells will require you to invest skill increases in an INT or WIS-based skill, which you might not feel so hot on after dumping INT. This isn't to say there's no reason at all to take the Sorc archetype; you could use it to pick up an interesting focus spell for flavor or utility, and if you took the premaster sorc archetype, I believe Dangerous Sorcery would give your slotted spellstrikes a sizable damage boost. I do also wonder if, at high level, you couldn't cheese a lot of value out of Explosion of Power and 1A magic missile casts on a third action (at the cost of delaying spellstrike). But I would never try to use it to replace the Magus casting. The magus casting is just better by default.
I'll probably back up and reply to some stuff from earlier in another post, but the feat thing is easy to comment on: A lot of feats do feel like they're so required or important that they should just be class features, and sometimes classes have competing "packages" of de-facto feat chains that feel like they may as well be delineated subclasses. I find both really awkward. Skill feats are both poorly balanced and also kind of frustrating, because part of what determines what skills you want to increase is how good the proficiency-gated feats are. Any skill with bad expert/master/legendary feats just doesn't feel great to increase. I feel like this is a large part of why intimidate continues to feel like such a great skill to take—it has a consistently good set of skill feats.
I understand making a lot of these assumptions about my points in the context of the conversation. But just like before, there's very little I disagree with here, if anything. Most of my points are more about things I wish 2E had, not things I think 1E had—especially if players were optimizing. I will say that I probably do have a bias towards thinking about lower level play, since I've spent a lot more playtime in 1-10 than 11-20; in contrast, I feel like you're talking about higher level play much more consistently. That may play into it. After all, the "sweetspot" for 1E play is almost universally agreed to be around L6, when you have enough resources to feel flexible but before resources spiral out of relevance entirely, and when casters are strong but have yet to completely invalidate martials. Thinking more about levels close to that sweetspot will produce a very different impression of play than thinking about high level play. And indeed, 1E does have more resource management than 2E... at lower levels, and I believe I already said the game didn't do risk/reward too much better overall. As I said in an earlier post: I understand inferring that I thought 1E was better on this count, but I agree it mostly isn't. There's not a ton of risk/reward analysis on something like stinking cloud with an optimized DC or a full round from an optimized martial. You're completely right that there's nothing interesting about something like power attack. The only thing where I really consider 1E better on this count is how there are somewhat more resources to manage even on martials (be that rounds of rage, smites per day, spells on 4th casters, etc.), and how spell power is more intuitively in line with a naive player's expectations for spending a """scarce""" resource (at the cost of martial classes being far outstripped in power and options in a way I do indeed dislike). That's not a massive victory by any stretch. ...But I do not think 1E is some paragon of risk/reward design. It's barely better than 2E in a lot of cases, and not for particularly glamorous reasons. I'm not in conflict with you here. A lot of those resources I mention there (like rage) stop being a constraint in real play very quickly; only things that stay below maybe 3-4 uses a day remain managed resources, and even initially limited resources like paladin smite end up with more uses than you'll commonly need by level 10 or 13. In PF1E, the adventuring day never scales in length in a way proportionate to player resource gain, and it would be obnoxious if it did. PF2E tries to deal with this from two directions. One is to reduce attrition for non-casters, and often remove resources entirely; and the other is to keep only the most recently acquired caster resources (i.e. their highest rank slots) at full relevance and mostly restrict lower rank slots to enhancing action economy and turn efficiency, thus ensuring casters don't go into every combat stocked with reams of explosive spells they can use every turn without consequence. It solves the problem by severely restricting caster burst potential while also removing resource management. I don't really like the solution, but it's functional. You can see that I even noted the issue of 1E's excessive high level resources in my last set of posts: It's extremely difficult to challenge highly optimized PF1E characters at a high level without forcing them to burn resources beforehand, or dangling a threat over their heads that they know they'll need to conserve resources for later. Making any single fight day challenging means figuring out a way to get players to burn a lot of resources to succeed, which just won't happen unless you are literally throwing spongy enemies with several layers of unique and potentially annoying defenses at them—too many normal enemies can be dispatched with either a single full-round or a single failed save. And even then, you run into the problem of figuring out how the players are supposed to survive that many rounds against a high level enemy with that much defense. I just... don't disagree with what you're saying. I think a lot more about the sweetspot at lower levels, and emphasize it more than you are. But I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I still recall even at high level a master summoner summoning barrage after barrage of lantern archons annihilating dragons with their terrible touch AC with this massive number of lantern archons using 20 actions a round he had summoned so many. He could do this multiple times per day. We...and I know many others from reading these forums...banned the master summoner due to this annoying use of summoning spells. It started to really irritate other players. The idea of anyone not banning master summoner strikes me as absurd. I could only ever countenance allowing it in a solo campaign. That thing is an absolute travesty of design. I'm sorry if you had to actually deal with that absurd thing in play. It is just as easy to sell abilities in PF2 as PF1. That means you are focusing solely on the power of the ability versus what it does. I feel like I've tried to explain multiple times that I'm not focused purely on power, using examples like this discussion of freezing rain. ..Let's say playtesting reveals that people don't like freezing rain even though you know it's a good spell. Maybe that means you need to play around with some levers—reduce the action cost to 2A but make the rain AoE smaller, keep it 3A and reduce the size but have it do damage and have enemies save immediately, keep it as is but reduce the damage in exchange for letting allies not have to save or giving them save upgrades... You shift things around until it has about the same amount of power but feels better to use. The point here is about improving playfeel without increasing strength. The same idea undergirds my mention of how amped guidance tends to feel better than many simple +1 buffs, and that's even though its effect is more limited and it eats up a more important action type: The second is how much more satisfying amped guidance usually is than a normal debuff or buff. Since the player is only informed they can use amped guidance when it would change the outcome of a check from a failure to a success, it effectively means the player knows they did something every time they're allowed to use it. The design of amped guidance obscures all the misses it can't help with and highlights the times it works, so it feels consistently gamechanging. My discussion of the frightened status in my replies to Easl also explains why I don't think the status feels very good, and how a change with virtually no real gameplay impact (making enemies flee if they reach frightened 4) would greatly improve the "click" and fantasy of the mechanic without increasing its power in practice. And when responding to Bluemagetim, I emphatically explained that trying to play the most powerful build possible isn't my goal. My 1E witch has dodged a several of her most powerful options on purpose, and has repeatedly opted to prepare several spells (like named bullet and screech) that are more fun for other members of the party even if they're worse than some of the stronger control options I could be taking. Raw power is not my primary concern in this discussion, or in table play.
I've just had the opposite experience. Again, as I said earlier, I got dusted by Disintegrate on a character that had Fort as one of their better saves in the first or second round of the final combat of a campaign. Not like I've never been on the receiving end of it. I'm also a bit confused by your player's response when there are equally obnoxious save-or-sucks on fortitude. Again, Baleful Polymorph exists. And reflex is the save to keep from being entombed by wall of stone. Will is the most iconic save-or-suck, yeah, and probably has the most memorable ones. But there's nasty saves to fail on all of them. If the concern is that it can happen at all, I figure the effects would be removed entirely from PF2E—but they're still there. Someone can (and will) crit fail baleful polymorph, even through hero point use. It'll happen. Is there a threshold of probability where this becomes okay? And in spite of what you're saying, I've seen casters still dominate encounters with save or sucks in 2E. Even at low levels, calm can be worryingly effective. PF2 has shifted what is impactful. That is it. They still provide plenty of more balanced, impactful options that don't leave martials wondering they even played a martial in the first place. I see what's impactful as a matter of player psychology more than a matter of game math. For example, a +2 in PF2E will make you crit on 2 more die faces and hit on 2 more die faces in the best case. And indeed, this is similar to a +4 in a system without DC+/-10, since critting is essentially just hitting twice—better, really, since the damage is action-compressed on a crit. But +4 in a system without DC+/-10 still reads better than +2 in a system with DC+/-10. Understanding why the +2 is good requires bringing in additional context most players will never bother with. They'll just see small numbers and feel like they're not doing much. People have taken forever to pick up on how strong AoE spells actually are in PF2E because it requires understanding encounter budgets and doing more advanced math to see that 1) if there are a lot of enemies to AoE down, they're almost certainly individually weak and more likely to fail saves and 2) crit failures are actually pretty likely when you start slamming enough enemies, and it is quite uncommon for all targets to succeed against your AoE. (As an aside, people also commonly overestimate how strong chain lightning is because they don't understand how likely it is to stop when you're hitting a lot of enemies. It does big damage and the chain ending feels unlikely, so it's regarded as exceptionally strong.) The extra steps required to understand the game sincerely hurt the gamefeel for a lot of players. Things that aren't actually very strong overall can feel impactful, and things that feel very unimpactful can be strong. Things can also feel unimpactful even if they're obviously strong when there's a mismatch between player expectation and what's in front of them—something I see happen with greater invis in PF2E. 4th rank invis isn't very good at making you unseen in combat, so I've seen people be disappointed by it. But is an absurdly strong defensive spell, since it gives enemies a 50% miss chance, and it's an excellent spell to use on ranged combatants because it makes enemies flat to them without their having to spend actions. People look at it and think they'll get to be the invisible wizard from PF1, realize it doesn't work that way, and then don't actually see what it's good at instead and get frustrated. Frankly, it'd be less confusing if it were named Blink instead, because it's more similar to PF1E Blink in practice. Instead of reading 4th rank and invis and thinking, "this is greater invis, but I stop being truly invis every time I do something, and have to spend an action to hide," it's instead, "wow, this is blink but I can be fully invisible if I hide or start the spell out of sight." That's a massive difference in how people perceive the exact same spell. I sincerely believe that lower power does not have to feel worse.
I'll admit I was more curious about your experiences in other games than in your experiences with just PF1 and PF2, but I accept that you feel that casters in PF1 basically ruined playing as martials regardless of what the martials did or didn't have on offer.
This sounds like simple game fatigue. You know the system so well there's no surprises any more. New classes, spells, etc. can get you a bit more squeeze, but you're looking for something beyond that. Unfortunately, I don't see what you're asking for giving you that newness. A more swingy feat, spell, or maneuver will quickly go the same way: you will learn it. You will learn exactly when to best use it and when not to. Your party will learn how to support it's use to minimize failure risk. And then it will be exactly as autopilot-y as what you do now. I'm unsure. I think a lot of the reason I was excited about playtest necromancer, even though it was a mess, is that 1) its implied gameplan is largely based around managing thralls as a resource and 2) thralls have some constant, low value by occupying space, making decisions involving them somewhat more interesting. I think the resource management is just that valuable to me in a more game-y game like PF2E. I also haven't burned out on the system from the DM side, so there's that. Our GM does that too. But yet I've never ever seen a player use a HP to try and increase a success to a crit. Not once. I could've sworn I said people tried for failure to success, not success to crit. I've never seen someone gamble success to crit success, either. I fully agree, but I think as an imagination game, that's mostly up to the gm and players. That's how we do it. Got a big success, the GM will ask you to narrate what happens. Or the enemies get some big fail, the GM narrates a spectacular spell effect. I do not think it's Paizo's responsibility or even their capability to give a really spectacular narrative oomph to every minor game element (and let's face it, individual spells are minor elements to the system as a whole). That doesn't really help while picking spells and feats, though, which is when you really need to be selling people on those abilities. It also doesn't help with mechanics with more empty-feeling flavor, or mechanics where the already-stated flavor doesn't match the mechanics as well as it could. I feel like the frightened status is my go-to example of this: no amount of narration will make "-x status penalty to everything, decreases by 1 every turn" feel like "you're scared." Yeah, it's a direct translation of "shaken" from 1E. But shaken was part of a tiered set of statuses, and shaken was the lowest tier. The rest of that set was an integral part of selling the mechanical link between the -2 penalty and being afraid. Shaken, you're a bit disturbed (so -2); frightened, you also have to flee; panicked, you drop everything and flee wildly. The progression sells the metaphor of the mechanics here, with frightened and panicked actually doing the bulk of the work of making the fear effects feel like fear effects. If frightened (in 2E) had you start fleeing at frightened 4, the design would work a bit better. (I think there's a haunt in a Season of Ghosts encounter that adds this effect, which is where I got it.) It doesn't have much of any gameplay effect, since you'll essentially never hit frightened 4. But it does a lot of work in selling that the status penalty really is a result of being afraid. Don't get me wrong—good narration from players and GM is integral to a good tabletop experience. But I think that a system that seeds good narration with how its mechanics are crafted, described, and played is a far better system. And I've felt from day 1 that this is something PF2E was worse at than 1E. (about intermittent variable reward) ...the tempo of a ttrpg play is just so much slower than either slots or video rpgs that I don't think your argument applies. I think that's a fair thing to point out, but my experience has been that it's beneficial to my enjoyment of the game even if the rolls aren't coming in hot and fast. Very much a "the lows make the highs sweeter" sort of deal. It does mean there are some nights where you feel you walk away like you did nothing, but that also frankly happens when you play games like poker or mahjong as well—and it doesn't make those games less enjoyable. I am worried I'm ignoring an important frequency concern with this comparison. Maybe you'll crash out on fewer poker nights, or something; maybe you play more hands than you'll roll dice. But TTRPGs leave a lot of ways open to enjoy a game even if you're having bad luck, too, so there's that. There's a certain satisfaction in discarding well in riichi mahjong or feeling like you're keeping to a good gameplan in poker, too, I admit, so maybe I'm overselling this. Still, I think there's something there. Yes. So maybe talk to your GM about trial running some homebrew spells? It sounds like you are experienced enough and thematically-interested enough not to abuse the privilege for powergaming, so you should be able to come up with some fairly balanced new stuff. Even if I felt it would solve issues, I don't really think it's fair to other players at the table unless they're getting similar treatment—and that ends up increasing GM workload. === Anything with Resist All (Incorporeals, the entities formerly known as golems, construct armour, clockworks) or regeneration all can serve that role well. That said, they're relatively rare and have decent offense because 4e is a lesson in that those kind of monsters suck to actually play out, prompting the MM3 revision. This is, I think, one of the cases where people asking for this don't actually know what they're getting into (or should play more 4e, which I always encourage) I do think monsters like that are useful, but need a clear sort of "killswitch" to ensure they don't make the combat drag out forever. Defenses decreasing significantly past a certain HP threshold, defenses that lower drastically over time, enemies that start combat with a pool of large temp HP that also goes away whether or not they're getting hit or perhaps can be removed in special ways... Mechanics like that. Does that make sense? That said, genuinely, have you tried 4e? It's a game with resource management on multiple tiers, where the daily effects tend to have very splashy, visible effects that usually feel good to pull off, where the healing attrition is easily tracked via healing surges instead of allowing either actual (PF2e) or effective past certain levels (PF1e) full heals, where milestones give a pull factor to continuing the adventure, where monster roles allow you to easily build skewed encounters, where minions, elites and solos exists to break hard from the norm in a balanced manner. It seems it genuinely fills all your requirements. I have played 4e; I have never run 4e. I played a warlord and a paladin. Mechanically, I generally felt player decisionspace was a bit too light, and some of its design tricks (like minions) felt pretty transparent as a player. However, looking back, I think it's genuinely a more coherent system than 2E in a lot of ways. It's less burdened by the desire to avoid backlash and is able to slaughter sacred cows without remorse. So you aren't just stuck with Vancian casting in a system that shouldn't have it, have more agressive use of fort/ref/will defenses, etc. It was a game built with a clear vision in mind, or at least feels that way. I have a hard time remembering details of many of the 4e encounters I played, which I consider a bad sign. But I think it's also been over a decade for one of those campaigns, so I don't know how much I could realistically expect to remember. Neither game hit high level play, either, so I can't comment on it. I always felt like I would've been happier if 4E were used to run a game that truly felt like an SRPG like Fire Emblem, and players had multiple characters. Nowadays, I'd probably add that 4e probably would've done well to just have separate rules for in and out of combat. ICON is going this direction, and will probably be a good game whenever the rules get more usability and readability passes. (There's too much keywording without reminder text, right now, and some rules wordings are vague in a frustrating way.) If you haven't tried ICON yourself, you might find the design space it tries to occupy (with a BitD narrative shell stapled to a combat shell with combat clearly inspired by games like FFT) pretty interesting.
Yep, that sounds about right. It's extremely difficult to challenge highly optimized PF1E characters at a high level without forcing them to burn resources beforehand, or dangling a threat over their heads that they know they'll need to conserve resources for later. Making any single fight day challenging means figuring out a way to get players to burn a lot of resources to succeed, which just won't happen unless you are literally throwing spongy enemies with several layers of unique and potentially annoying defenses at them—too many normal enemies can be dispatched with either a single full-round or a single failed save. And even then, you run into the problem of figuring out how the players are supposed to survive that many rounds against a high level enemy with that much defense. Lowering the impact of feats and class abilities was a necessary change to make the game scale in a way that was easier to run as a DM and required a flatter power escalation with a more controlled probability range. I'm not sure this is true of necessity, but doing so unquestionably accomplished the goal of making things more predictable and easier to run. I wonder if the poster is omitting rule discussions on purpose hoping the other players in the debate don't know the rules well enough to know the poster is wrong or the poster doesn't know the rules themselves or have forgotten. For the record, I'm still playing a 1E witch every other weekend. Been a lot longer since I've been in the DM seat for a 1E game, though. I do kind of want to ask you in particular, though, Deriven: How do you feel the tactical variety in 2E fares, especially compared to other games you might have played aside from 1E? How interesting do you feel the moment to moment decisionmaking is?
Absolutely not. This is not me using "risk/reward" as a trojan horse to bring up minmaxing. I mean risk/reward in the typical sense it is used in game design. To be completely clear about minmaxing: I tend to enjoy making the best version of some concept a lot more than I enjoy just making the best thing, period. I like going, "hey, what's the best way to build this archetype that isn't usually that great?" or "what's the best possible way to make a character that sends people flying when you punch them?" I also enjoy maxing minimums, as in, "what's the best version of this thing I know is pretty bad?" I like sifting through a bunch of options and putting things together and seeing what clicks much moreso than I like making something broken. I will intentionally avoid certain very good spells, feats, or talents in 1E just because I want to see how worse ones feel in practice, or what it's like to build with or around them. There is a level of optimization I don't want to dip below, sure. I want my character to be good at doing whatever I've decided they should do, and I don't want them to drag the party down. But I don't care about optimizing much past that point. I've generally not played a character in a way that would allow them to solo the game and don't really care to, because it's a pretty selfish thing to do.
The part of my response to Easl where I talk about power attack, plus the part about slot machines and intermittent variable reward, are basically the responses I would give to this. ===
The problem is more saying "oh, it's a subjective opinion" and then speaking with an undercurrent of holding a correct (as opposed to subjective) opinion. I don't mind if people think I'm wrong and say as much. That's kind of inevitable in a discussion like this. === I find that curious, because one player in my Strength of Thousands game really likes Cyclone Rondo, which is like a 3rd-rank version of Freezing Rain. Her bard Stargazer has to make a small sacrifice to cast Cyclone Rondo, because its 3-action casting means she cannot cast a bard composition that turn, but then her following turns are Stride, sustain Cyclone Rondo, and cast Courageous Anthem. She likes that Cyclone Rondo is both damage and battlefield control and preserves her spell slots. And if she Sustains Cyclone Rondo twice in one turn, it deals damage twice and can move twice (I think that is how the rules work). Most sustain spells specifically say "the first time you sustain this spell each turn" before their sustain effect; Cyclone Rondo does not. It was probably an unintentional omission, though, given that it looks like it's from the Wake the Dead comic and not something more carefully proofed like a main rulebook. I also think that the immediate reflex save on cast (which I assume knocks prone on fail or critical fail—it's worded unusually for PF2E) really helps with the playfeel of this spell. You get an immediate benefit in addition to the benefits on sustain. I think that Witch of Miracles' risk/reward property is about being able to be awesome. I have a bias toward this conclusion, because I believe that my role as a GM is to give my players opportunities to demonstrate that their characters are awesome. I'd definitely say that good risk reward lets players feel awesome. I do mean to point to risk/reward in the sense in which you see it constantly discussed in game design, though—that the players will feel like they're putting something on the line with their choices and can be rewarded (or penalized) accordingly. Furious Finish asks the player to wager their remaining rounds of rage on the potential payoff of a bigger attack, so there's at least some sense of risk/reward there. The difficulty in designing risk/reward in a TTRPG is that once people start optimizing, they'll start playing for expected value, and a lot of interactions that look like they involve risk/reward (like 1E power attack) end up involving no choices at all because people just do whatever is "the best" over and over. I personally think having a resource to spend and manage that you can "wager" helps alleviate this problem a bit—provided that 1) the resource can be spent in multiple useful ways, so there's an opportunity cost on using it
Witch of Miracles had talked earlier about the prevalence of +1 and +2 bonuses. On a d20, a +2 is merely 10% more. It can have a 20% effect, because it usually means a 10% chance of turning a miss into a hit and a 10% chance of turning a hit into a critical hit, but the most dramatic hits are against high-AC opponents in which the chance of critical hits does not increase because it requires a natural 20 even with a +2 bonus to hit. A temporary +2 bonus purchased with an action is practical efficiency rather than awesomeness. I think there are two interesting phenomena to point out here, in relation to this. One is the existence of the "modifiers matter" plugin for the Foundry VTT. This is a plugin that tells players when their +1s and +2s or -1s and -2s changed the outcome of a check, even though that would usually be hidden information. This gives players significantly better feedback on those modifiers, and is one of the single most recommended add-ons for running Foundry in PF2E (after things like the toolbelt). The second is how much more satisfying amped guidance usually is than a normal debuff or buff. Since the player is only informed they can use amped guidance when it would change the outcome of a check from a failure to a success, it effectively means the player knows they did something every time they're allowed to use it. The design of amped guidance obscures all the misses it can't help with and highlights the times it works, so it feels consistently gamechanging.
I think it's - you don't want rocket tag gameplay, but a lot of the things you're asking for essentially lead to rocket tag gameplay because you're looking for absolute defenses, total lockdown, compounding effects only held back by limited resources and it turns out that the sum total of having a lot of these effects be easily accessed is rocket tag gameplay because every single encounter boils down to who can land a critical mass of their big swingy effect first. Not all the effects have to be so swingy, but I consider it better if some swingy effects can still exist. The players should, ideally, have some kind of resource-limited ability to mitigate it as well (hero points, items, etc.) Balancing these things with limited resources does put pressure on the DM to make adventuring days where players cannot just blow everything immediately every time. (For PF2E, you mostly just increase encounter difficulty if you have fewer encounters to account for increased resource expenditure and call it a day.) I don't think this has to end up as rocket tag, but you're right that it can end up as rocket tag when done wrong. High level PF1E is indeed an example of things going pretty wrong in this way. You have to do a lot of design work to fix it. I think if you were talking about a computer game, or one where a single player controls multiple characters, you could have a system that consistently produces the results you're looking for. But a TTRPG runs against the limits of player attention and the session reset; resource tracking gets messy, and players want to have some sort of contribution over a length of time. As such, if you implement a resource limited big flashy effect system, the median playgroup will drift towards front-loading their limited resources then going home, aka rocket-tag 5 min day. You absolutely have a point about attention and session reset; you need fairly clear ways to track resources throughout a day, and stopping midsession is difficult without detailed notes (or a VTT). I'm less certain the median playgroup will end up with a 5 minute rocket tag day, but I do acknowledge that it's basically on the DM to prevent it from happening. (You could also try soft-limiting expenditures via short cooldowns, "soft" cooldowns via penalties for using too many resource spends in close proximity...) You could build, ground up, a system which is more favourable to this, but you'd need the fundamental resource system to be multi-pronged to not produce a rocket tag system - all d20 games really only have hp as the core resource, with everything else being class-specific additions that can't be used as a general vector. Have you considered Exalted 3e and their use of initiative and the withering/decisive split to soft-block repeated killing attacks? Yeah, multiple resource pools would be fundamental to making a system where this is possible. I'm unfamiliar with Exalted, personally, but it sounds like I should look at the mechanics you're talking about. I do know someone who runs something that is probably more appropriately called a PF1E derivative than PF1E at this point, and from my discussions with them, adding resources with both offensive and defensive expenditures—as well as expanding and sometimes buffing what pre-existing resource pools can be used for—is integral to how they tame the rocket tag. So this is probably a good port of call. ===
Personally, I found the game improved somewhat as we leveled and had more options, but I never really felt any of the teamplay was very interesting or involved meaningful decisions. Casters have it better just because they're expending slots, but on resourceless classes, it's kind of grim to me. My kineticist turns are extremely samey, even at 18, and don't require much thought. My low level gunslinger doesn't take much of any thought, either, and their biggest concern is just action drift from moving. Most every question I face in this game has a pretty clear answer if I want to sit down and do the math, and when it doesn't, about the only reason is I don't currently know which defense is technically best to target. I spend a lot of pf2e gameplay (as a player) completely checked out because I'm waiting for a turn that requires almost no planning or performing a turn that doesn't really require any planning. (Even as a caster, I'm not going to be evaluating if I should spend a resource or not, for the most part—I can just do more or less what I know the game expects of me unless it looks like it's getting dire, in which case I can blow additional resources.) We use table time to help people with their PF1 builds, so PF2 builds being easier means more playtime instead of the players fleshing anything out. Even then, PF2 building isn't significantly faster than PF1 building when you're given help. Most of my PF2 players have still wanted help or advice anyways, especially for item purchasing. My personal prep time is separate from my "help players" time because of this, so I don't get added time to help with making encounters or anything. I also mostly run APs anyways, and make adjustments either as I put the encounter on the map or as I prep in it the VTT. And it's been over a decade being on and off in the GM chair, so I already have decent confidence; not really gaining any from running the system. WRT to the "loudness war" of difficulty between GM and players in PF1E: the tables I've been at have managed and kept track of player builds, for the most part. The GM knows what the players have, has signed off on their builds, and isn't really caught off guard. This is a problem for a totally new DM, though, yeah; and it's additional still work for an experienced DM. I further agree that PF2E raises the floor of GM performance if the GM is following the rules and the table is too. I would say the PF2E DM still needs to track their table, though, even if not to the same degree. If your table isn't play-to-win types, you'll probably have to decrease difficulty, and some parties and builds are still significantly stronger/more synergistic than others. An optimized resentment witch will have a very different impact on encounters than an enigma bard that doesn't grab any other muses and has a poor spell selection, for example.
A whole lot of post(s) incoming, yet again. === I thought the reason PF2E made things less 'save or suck' is because people didn't like that part of the PF1 game? Are you suggesting Paizo add that back in? Parties already tend to spend quite a few actions buying down risk: that's what buffs and debuffs do. So I'm not sure there would be a huge appetite for higher-risk higher-payoff feats, spells, etc. My experience was that optimizers typically avoided save-or-suck spells because they were unreliable, but a lot of less mathematically inclined players enjoyed swinging for the fences with things like Suffocate or Baleful Polymorph. Can think of several successful casts of Baleful Polymorph at the table I play at, actually. Those players were very satisfied. Save or suck spells aren't that fun to play against, but having extreme threats that aren't just outright death can provide variety to the player experience if that the game gives levers to handle it. 1E with a slightly accelerated hero point gain handles it... okay, if you're careful and have a grip on how many hero points the party needs. And even then, it's not great, but okay. You ideally need a resource that replenishes faster, is more specifically tailored to dealing with incap-type spells, or both if those effects are consistently on the table. PF2E makes these sorts of spells less awful to play against by shunting the worst outcomes onto crit fail and giving them incap. But it also makes them significantly less satisfying for players to use in exchange. It also only helps so much, since it's not even odd for players to still have a party member critically fail against an AoE incap spell; in our higher level 2E game, we've had critical failures against rank 7 paralyze, for example, and also had an unlucky crit failure on a single target incap like feeblemind or warp mind at one point. To be clear, I should also say that I have gotten save or suck'd directly out of the final fight in a 1E campaign, and it happened within the first two rounds of combat. I believe I failed a disintegrate save and died instantly with no chance of revival. I know how exactly how frustrating it can be. In some respect, we already have them and people don't use them. Vicious Swing, the kineticist's 'do a 2A strike for +CON damage' are examples of 'swing for the fences' moves. It would be fairly easy for Paizo to create a spellshape feat that for 1A causes a direct damage save spell to do 0 on a successful save but adds a fairly big damage bonus (+50%?) on a failed save. But I do not think most players would use it as a higher risk strategy; I think what you'd see is parties using more caster buffs before the caster uses it, so they can get that juicy damage bonus with no added risk. D20 systems are already quite swingy just because d20. I don't personally see a big community appetite to make is swingier. The problem with these abilities is the same problem 1E power attack has: either they're better on average, or they aren't. When they are, you basically always use them, and when they aren't their usecases end up pretty narrow. 1E power attack, you basically always use. It'd sound like there's some risk in lowering your accuracy, but since it basically always comes out to more damage in the long run, you usually just power attack unless you know any hit will kill or your odds of hitting are exceptionally low. There's no actual decisionmaking in it. 2E vicious swing, you basically never use unless DR will eat through most of the damage of doing two individual attacks instead. And kineticist's 2A blast is almost never worth it in practice, period. Personally, I think abilities like this don't really work as risk/reward levers because you just do an expected return analysis, do what it says, and the decisionmaking is over. You really need to be spending some kind of additional resource (and preferably one that has multiple uses, so there's an opportunity cost) in order to get a real sense of risk and reward, imo. I like HPs but I do not see them as giving the player riskier options, at all. AFAICT they tend to never be used to crit hunt or other swing for the fences moves; they tend to be used to reroll crit fails. I.e. to reduce swinginess instead of being used as a higher risk, higher payoff option. Tables I play at tend to give out 1 per hour to each player instead of just one per hour, in addition to buffing the reroll in some way (usually just a +2) or using the hero point deck. So there's more leeway to use them to reroll misses on MAP-0 strikes or regular failures. Why is it Paizo's job to 'sell' players on using odd spells? It's a basic part of game design. In MtG, some big green 8/8 with trample is going to be a large creature like a dinosaur or something, right? That's all flavor that sells that fantasy of playing an 8/8 with trample. It's an important part of the card. It feels really different to play a blank piece of carboard labeled "GGGGG, 8/8, trample" than it feels to play a card with a picture of a t-rex. The flavor sells the card. For most people, much of their satisfaction in using an ability comes from how it feels, is narrated, and so on. Selling abilities with more than just their math significantly heightens the game's appeal, in the same way the art of the big dino heightens the appeal of the 8/8 with trample. And (as I discuss a bit more below) part of "selling" spells is just making sure the gameplay feedback is good, as well. To me, this question is basically identical to asking "why is it a game designer's job to do game design?" It's what a TTRPG dev is paid to do—make their game feel good to play. I think that's why most more modern ttrpg systems just got rid of the slot system. Even when mathematically balanced, the pain of expending a day-limited resource to do nothing is just not fun. But most systems don't make casting more fun by making the success effect bigger - that's "save or suck." They made it more fun by making resource regeneration faster. A la the kineticist. Focus spells. In other systems, heath-based spells. Or just 'all day' spells comparable to nonspell attacks. Get the trend? Most players don't want higher risk for higher reward - they want almost the opposite, i.e. characters that can more consistently do cool moves. Again, I personally think resource management is important for having compelling gameplay. I think it's understandable to shift a game away from resource management if the focus of the game isn't really the combat and is more about the narrative. But to me, PF2E shifted the focus more heavily onto the combat, if anything, while also removing resource management. That just doesn't square for me. Also, I really take issue with this: "the pain of expending a day-limited resource to do nothing is just not fun." This misunderstands how probability and player psychology work in tandem to make a game enjoyable. If spending a limited resource and sometimes getting nothing were truly awful, people wouldn't get addicted to slot machines. It is fundamental to the psychology of this kind of game design that you sometimes fail and get nothing or almost nothing—but at a controlled rate that isn't too terribly annoying. This is the reason why Zelda games have 1 rupee chests, and why mimics are interesting design in spite of being incredibly frustrating. This is intermittent variable reward, and when well-tuned, it is key to designing a lot of genres of game. RPGs are among the genres where it's most important. I am not sure what solution you are proposing. I get the sense you want to buff up indirect effect spells until even the most innumerate player will read it and go 'oh wow, that's worth casting.' But then such a spell would be completely out of whack in terms of actual game effectiveness, so we don't want that. I get the sense you do not want the game to reduce complexity as a means of making it more intuitive. But beyond those two options, I am not sure what your third is. It's more complicated than that, and involves mostly looking for balanced designs that still feel impactful and interesting. Let's say playtesting reveals, that people don't like freezing rain even though you know it's a good spell. Maybe that means you need to play around with some levers—reduce the action cost to 2A but make the rain AoE smaller, keep it 3A and reduce the size but have it do damage and have enemies save immediately, keep it as is but reduce the damage in exchange for letting allies not have to save or giving them save upgrades... You shift things around until it has about the same amount of power but feels better to use. Does that example make sense? Some combinations of power just won't read as well as others or feel as good to play as others, even if they're ultimately equally balanced. It is the job of game designers to thread this needle, and find what is both balanced and feels good.
Paizo won't be designing the game based on subjective preferences unless a large enough portion of their player base shares these preferences. This game design is about as clearly guided by the subjective preferences of its own designers as any other game. I'm unsure a "large enough portion of the playerbase" would have shared the 2E designers' preferences for making "4E with a different coat of paint and some legacy elements 4E had intentionally removed" when PF2E was being created, but that's exactly what we ended up with anyways. Frankly, if you told anyone this game was going to end up even remotely like 4E 10 years ago, you'd have had a riot on your hands. But here we are. There's a weird undercurrent here that some "subjective preferences" are objectively incorrect, or at least that some are better than others. I can't really stand for that. It's a classically incoherent position that precludes discussion. I understand people here like 2E, generally speaking, and I can understand why most of the regulars do. In your case, for example, I think it makes perfect sense that a table of full-on optimizers would burn out trying to keep 1E challenging and interesting; 2E saves you a ton of design work. (And indeed, I think it's more accurate to call it literal game design work than prep if you're trying to plug 1E's holes.) This is an extremely common sentiment I've seen over and over, and I think it's completely understandable. 2E has been a hit with players like this. A lot of other regulars are DMs who like that 2E is generally smoother to run and prep for. I think that's totally understandable as well. My tables generally did not want to optimize to that degree to begin with and were generally not mechanically minded. We did not benefit very much from what 2E offered—though I did pick up a player that would've never willingly played 1E that very much liked 4E, and I've liked having them.
I understand inferring that I thought 1E was better on this count, but I agree it mostly isn't. There's not a ton of risk/reward analysis on something like stinking cloud with an optimized DC or a full round from an optimized martial. You're completely right that there's nothing interesting about something like power attack. The only thing where I really consider 1E better on this count is how there are somewhat more resources to manage even on martials (be that rounds of rage, smites per day, spells on 4th casters, etc.), and how spell power is more intuitively in line with a naive player's expectations for spending a """scarce""" resource (at the cost of martial classes being far outstripped in power and options in a way I do indeed dislike). That's not a massive victory by any stretch. I think 1E is somewhat better at lining up abilities with what players will subjectively perceive as strong or interesting-sounding. I like how character building works better by default, and like archetypes and prestige classes and class progressions better even if many of the built-in class abilities are useless ribbons. I like spellcasting better because I'm not terribly enamoured of the removal of caster level based scaling and how the alternative has felt wrt lower rank slots. (I used to hate how much weaker casting was, but it doesn't bother me that much now; I adjusted my expectations to match the game. I hate the comparative lack of ribbon and cute utility spells a lot more than that nowadays.) I prefer how a lot of mechanics feel to use in 1E, in general. But I do not think 1E is some paragon of risk/reward design. It's barely better than 2E in a lot of cases, and not for particularly glamorous reasons. The problem is mainly that 2E is not at all good at the things 1E was good at, while also not shoring up 1E's gameplay design all that much past making the balance function and streamlining the action economy. 2E, to me, literally sheds much of what was interesting about 1E on purpose while only really giving me balanced math and a nicer but ultimately very similar action system in exchange. When my table wasn't a bunch of optimizers or all that mechanically oriented to begin with, that just doesn't feel great. === EDIT: Something I realized I needed to point out is that everyone is talking as though risk/reward is just some property of encounter designs, or something. I am literally referring to risks taken by players when they make choices and the rewards or penalties they receive for making those choices. Encounter design plays into it, but what I really care about is the kinds of decisions a player can make.
I don't think I understand what you mean by risk and reward for low level and high level play. Not to say that your experience isnt what it is but doesnt that just come down to how encounters are put together and run by GMs? No. I could handpick four players' poker hands and tell them to play a round, and the risks they would take when they bet (or wouldn't take, if they folded) would still be their choice. Player options can have risk and reward beyond just the odds of their d20 roll. PF2E just doesn't offer a ton of ways that player options can have risk aside from attacks of opportunity, and players endlessly complain about dealing with reactive strike with things like spellstrike anyways. The game has even actively removed some elements of risk over its lifespan, like Barb's -1 AC on rage. One of the only player resources to manage with a risk/reward profile is hero points, since spending them now means you can't stabilize with them later. I'm actually a very big fan of the hero point deck for this reason; additional hero point options improve the resource management aspects of the game immensely.
Some of my issue with freezing rain is unintuitive math (the spell works because you can expect a decent amount of enemies to fail over time in a multi-enemy encounter); some of it is just the upfront 3A investment feeling bad since it has no immediate effect on your turn; some of it is how restrictive it is on your current and future action economy. To me, it's a good spell with a bad playfeel. I would generally say that PF2E trusts its math too much to sell an ability's power, and neglects selling abilities on playfeel and neglects trying to sell them to people who won't understand the math. I would excoriate 5e's balance as much as anyone else*, but using Color Spray in 5e feels more exciting than using some 5th rank spells in 2E. The strength of the spell is a huge part of it, yes. But I think rolling 6d10 alone helps sell the spell. The player feels like they're doing something when they cast it, even if they lowroll and only affect one creature. It's more interactive for the player than a save. And inflicting "blinded" sounds strong even if you don't know what it means mechanically and don't get how great it is to give advantage to party attacks and disadvantage to enemy attacks. Blinded being strong does also help, in terms of selling the fantasy, yeah. As a much more general principle to point at, a player also feels like they're spending an important resource when they use color spray in 5E, and they get a lot for doing so. 2E pretty much treats spell expenditure as a given, in contrast, and is balanced assuming 1x top rank slot spent per moderate encounter. That's just a caster's baseline contribution in 2E, and 2E design doesn't expect you to feel like you're burning something important if you spend that single top rank slot. This is correct for balance, but really out of line with what most people (whose first instinct is usually to save "important" resources for when they're "needed") will do when given a resource pool. So caster playfeel tends to be off if you're new, and you need to recalibrate your expectations in a way most players just will not ever do. (An aside: an entirely different resource system would've made more sense for how 2E casters are expected to play, IMO. I understand why they chose not to do this, but Vancian casting—as much as I personally enjoy it—just does not feel like something that jibes with the design of the rest of the system. And it doesn't encourage players to play like the system wants them to.) This sort of problem is everywhere in 2E. The game ignores typical player psychology left and right, and just trusts inherently irrational humans—humans with no ability to do the statistics necessary to understand why things are how they are, and no bonafides in game design to understand it either—will get used to things that feel wrong but work out. And as an example more in line with what I've already mentioned, understanding action compression is strong in 2E requires you to at least understand concepts like action efficiency. I would not personally want to design a game that requires you to understand action efficiency to feel good while playing it. === *To be clear, I'd also excoriate vanilla 5e's tactical variety and a lot of its design choices. Being unable to delay is... well, let's just say I don't like it. I could go on a while. Honestly, the more I read from you, the more I'm getting the sense you want battles to be a short, sharp back-and-forth of near death blows that likely ends by the second round. In other words, you're the rare person for which 'rocket tag gameplay' is a glowing review of a game, and so you like 3.PF, which at moderate optimisation on both sides of the table is rocket tag gameplay (which the majority of 3.PF players grudgingly bore with or kept trying to homebrew out, resulting in 4e/PF2e). This is the wrong takeaway entirely. I don't like rocket tag, and I don't want battles to last basically a round. I'd be much happier with a PF1E combat where the enemy does literally have 10x HP at high levels if we have ways to handle it. The rocket tag really is a bug to me, not a feature. And I've given examples involving spike damage, yes. But an ability doesn't only need to involve spike damage for me to like it. It's more that a lot of the satisfying PF2E abilities ultimately involve spike damage. An example of an ability I like that doesn't involve spike damage is the Spirit Warrior archetype's Transcendent Deflection. (https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=7030) -The ability completely blocks an attack (so it has an incredibly noticeable effect).
I'd also argue a lot of incap spells feel good when they work, even if the incap trait itself is pretty feelbad. I suppose incap itself has a level of risk/reward in having you guess the encounter makeup, even if the way it makes you guess the encounter makeup rubs me the wrong way. Helpful Steps is a cool spell that has a lot of uses. Seashell of Stolen Sound is arguably a bad spell, but I love it to death because it does something unique and has good flavor.
It's not intuitive, but I think there's a lot of self-inflicted disappointment with optimization out there. PF2E is not a build-to-win game, so your best optimization just gets you good. Which some players may think 'that's it?' to. This may be what the OP is struggling with. The disappointment isn't really in it being weak, or something. The disappointment is simply in it not feeling or looking as strong as it actually is. Does that make sense? This is a general problem with PF2E, in my experience. Things that are good tend not to obviously feel good. A personal example of this is freezing rain. Many people whose opinions I trust say freezing rain is an excellent spell that can really mess up an encounter, and that they've used it to great effect many times. When I read freezing rain, it looks like one of the most finicky spells I can imagine and it looks like it would forever to really get value. I would probably never try it without being told to do so. It seems the effect is just that good when multiple enemies are involved, even if you're paying 3A for movable mudpit and 1A sustains for weak damage and slowed 1 on fail. The math just works out that you chew up enough enemy actions between difficult terrain and the sustain, even if you're spending a lot of them yourself. As an aside, I think action compression abilities are bad about this in general. They're mathematically very good. But they often don't feel like they're buying you as much as they actually are, because a lot of them don't have you do anything new within your compressed actions, and they often just gain you something that feels lower value (like a demoralize). Can you give an example of what you think is a good ability? Let's just go back to the barbarian feats. Of all of those feats, I think Furious Finish is probably the most interesting. Is it a feat I'm choosing if I want to play the best possible barb? Probably not. But there's a real hook to the risk/reward, the damage, the way other people will want to buff you up for this juiced 1A attack. The way it plays off your rage timer is fun. It has cool things going on, interacts with other mechanics, has an element of resource management, and has good flavor to boot. A lot of abilities in PF2E don't interact much with other abilities or class mechanics in this way. And I'd say PF2E doesn't really create a good sense of risk and reward either, in all my experience as a player and GM. Low level play feels extremely risky and not that rewarding, and mid and high level play often feels neither risky nor rewarding. Resource management isn't all that important for most classes, either, which makes it hard for the game to create a sense of risk. (And personally, resource management is one of my favorite gameplay elements in any game.) As a second example: spellstrike has problems, but I think spending slots on spellstrike to gamble for your spike damage (ignoring that amped IW is basically always the same or better—that, unfortunately, puts a real damper on things) has a good feel. Magus has issues, but the slot machine isn't one of its issues.
I'll probably address the monster stuff whenever I write up the thread for it. === I'm not sure that a common complaint is that the game funnels effects into +2s or -2s, I've barely seen that discussed, outside of some people's frustration with bonuses and penalties not stacking. The vast majority of the teamwork people so highly praise the game for revolves around doling out +1s, +2s, -1s, and -2s. ...The fact that the primary way to engage with non-AC defences as a martial requires active investment is a problem, I agree - I tend to play martials who have a variety of options for targeting different defences via either things like feinting/demoralize/bon mot/stealth/combat maneuvers, the fact that you need to know those options exist and invest in them can lead to people building characters that don't have a great deal of options available. You indirectly point it out right here. What is feint? A -2. Demoralize? -1. Bon Mot? -2. Stealth? Hidden, and -2 (from off-guard). Most combat maneuvers you will actually perform inflict off-guard, so yep, another -2. Rage is literally an additional 2 damage at a baseline. The vast majority of your class's innate progression is literally +2s (proficiency upgrades, weapon specialization, etc). I don't think the wording you've outlined is a reasonable complaint - I feel like PF2 goes out of its way to avoid giving mathematical bonuses. If we look at some random list of abilities, like lets say the 1st and 2nd level barbarian feats, the options include: Admittedly, a lot of what I'm talking about isn't feat choices and is instead play, especially third actions or 2A activities that incorporate maneuvers. And some of it is the pressure I feel as a DM from the game's design principles—clever player ideas and requests can't be parsed in a way that outstrips what the game would actually offer unless it's a unique circumstance and I can't expect it to be repeatable, so if you're getting any bonus at all, it's probably a +1 or +2 circumstance bonus. I also feel like, in general, a lot of conditions boil down to straightforward penalties in a manner I find unsatisfying. Separately, I do feel a depressing amount of feats and headline class features boil down to pure action compression, through either "do these three predefined actions in the space of two" or "do these two predefined actions in the space of one." But that's something different. Those abilities are typically very powerful and also extremely unexciting. (I think the amount of people who just go, "That's it?" when they see summoner's Act Together should let you know this is not intuitive design and not the kind of thing that tends to get people excited. Act Together is so strong it carries the whole class, so that's... yeah.) If I want to directly address the 1st/2nd level barb feats... ---Passive abilities without any maths behind them at all (better vision, being able to intimidate things in a rage and without speaking, doing a different elemental damage when raging, ignore restrictions on getting benefits from re-raging in combat) Darkvision is a pure passive, yeah. Raging Intimidate... lets you do an action that gives enemies a -1 while raging, and gives you the skill feats you would take anyways if you were leveling intimidate. Elemental damage is about your elemental damage bonus (which is 2+2 more from the instinct). Rerage isn't about modifiers, yeah. ----Active abilities that don't give you bonuses (or the bonuses aren't the focus) but give you different options (let you take a moment to concentrate, move a great distance and still attack, maintain full move speed and bust through terrain, risk all your remaining rage damage on one big hit, frighten an enemy if you hit them, follow someone attempting to escape, resist frighten and sickened) "The bonuses aren't the focus" is a bit of sleight of hand, there, particularly for Shake It Off (which is entirely about getting rid of penalties) and Intimidating Strike (which exists entirely so you can inflict a -1 status penalty with your attack bonus). Furious Finish is entirely about the damage bonus, but it's an interesting damage bonus that ties into other mechanics in a neat way, so I definitely give it a pass. Sudden charge is boring-but-strong action compression; probably the best feat here unless your DM puts most of your encounters starting within one move action. Bashing Charge is boring and questionable action compression (because how often do you need to do this, and why are you adding MAP to do so?). And the others, you already said were primarily bonuses. So I'd argue more of those are ultimately about bonuses and penalties than you let on. All that being said, if you don't enjoy the in-combat options, I don't think PF2 is really the game that you should be spending your time playing. There are many excellent games out there, and PF2's focus and key area of advantage is making tactical combat interesting and focusing on it - I'd happily encourage you to try varying combats in a way that encourages tactical flexibility (something the APs are often bad at), but if the fundamental baseline of the system isn't interesting to you, why not play some of the many other good ttRPGs out there? This completely ignores the social aspect of both running and playing the game. I'm not going to bail a group I've played with for over a decade because people wanted to try 2E. And I have an easier time getting people to play 2E than 1E nowadays if I want to run a campaign (with a different group). I'm just one of five or more people at the table, you know? I'm not going to explode a group because I could enjoy combat more playing another system. Most of the people I play with are already my friends in some capacity or other, as well. I'm not just shopping around for tables with strangers, where it'd make a bit more sense to drop if I wasn't having a good time. Even if I find combat dull, roleplaying with people I'm friends with is pretty system agnostic.
If you're talking actual threat level, that's a good thing isn't it? It is good that the encounters Paizo rates as moderate are actually moderate difficulty. The complaint is more that I can't make a great version of the encounter within the moderate budget, if that makes sense. An APL+0 buffer and 4 APL-4 enemies is going to have the buffed enemies feel more toothless than I'd ideally like. Like, let's say you have some enemies with on-level damage but very low initiative and poor enough defense they die to 2A from a martial a good 80% of the time. Those enemies can be a credible threat if left alone, but since they can die on the first turn of combat—and sometimes without doing anything—it means they're not actually contributing much to the encounter's difficulty in the longterm. They exist to provide consequences if the party doesn't focus them. They're a bit of a scare. You could use them to make an encounter that's not really more dangerous than the one the game currently provides—heck, it might even be less dangerous—but it'd have a distinct feel that I'd like to be able to throw at a party. It's not smoke and mirrors, since these enemies will indeed hurt you if they live. But it's definitely a bit of GM sleight of hand. And the ability to provide that kind of dynamic (and others) is valuable, in my book. ...this is not a core PF2E engine problem, it's an I-Need-A-Build-A-Bear-Monster-Generator problem. I.e. something that lets you explore weirder tradeoffs in AC vs. to-hit vs. HP vs. special abilities etc. And maybe an expanded monster handbook with published 'beastie groups' of a certain encounter difficulty as a group rather than as individuals. Or where the monsters are categorized ("support", "tank", "cannon" etc.) and then the book gives advice on what to add in with what to make a level-balanced encounter. Eh, you could frame it that way if you wanted. I see it as an engine problem because all the content follows that mold on purpose and the encounter and monster building rules are designed around it. But you're right. You could certainly have an Advanced Monster Guide with Advanced Encounter Building Guidelines or somesuch, yeah. I mean... if you have enough system mastery in 3.PF to pick out the 'right' monsters for the difficulty you want (which you are given no useful advice - there are glass cannon-looking enemies that secretly have bonkers defenses and 'primary attackers' that can be rendered incapable of attacking by mundane geometry, and certain categories of sensibly-put-together monsters are completely lacking in one aspect or another), you have the system mastery to tweak the monsters in PF2e to have higher damage and lower hp. Yes, though I feel PF2E has a feel to the system (and the community surrounding it) that makes me prefer to avoid homebrewing too much. I'll also admit that running games on Foundry makes it a pain, as well. Still, my Season of Ghosts group might have some mean words for their DM in the future. I may start experimenting with some pretty cursed levers, like: -enemies with strong offense that are automatically crit if they're hit at all, or enemies with save /downgrade/ effects
I might look into making templated forms of some of these for the purposes of testing, honestly. It'll probably be a bit clunky to test and try out without making entirely new enemies. But given how much it could improve system satisfaction for me as a DM, it's probably worth it regardless.
A bit late to this thread, but from the GM side, I actually found the new action economy liberating. Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but back when I was GMing 1E, I always had a feeling that the NPCs could only do one thing. Move an Strike, do one gimmick ability, or do a full attack per turn. I recall vividly having my players fight a black dragon and then realizing that the dragon could barely do anything within the 1E action economy. 1E always felt to me like each creature had a prescribed list of specific actions to do due to what I consider its 2 1/2 action system. And the simple act of opening up that half action into a full, flexible action gave me a feeling that I could really play around with creatures beyond the prescribed methods, and tailor more bespoke reactions for my players from the creature. This is an odd one. I disagree, but I don't think you're wrong to have that impression. Most of the things that make it feel otherwise are buried in the reams of options. -There are feats and class options that give you alternate uses for your move actions (e.g. combat advice, greater grapple; barb intimidating glare, witch cackle).
I would say your additional options open up much earlier in PF2E on most builds (from level 1!), which is a real improvement. But the options are still there in PF1E. ===
I may make a separate thread about this, but after talking about this with someone, I've come to the conclusion that many of my frustrations with the system have to do with the implicit principle that monsters of the same level are fungible for the purposes of encounter building. PF1E/3.5 says they're fungible, but everyone figures out almost instantly that's just false. Some monsters are clearly designed for more supportive roles in a combat, some are primary attackers, some are just nuisances. Some are high threat glass cannons with no defense, others are just weak damage sponges. And the thing is, these monsters will nominally be the same level and CR. Putting them in an encounter by themselves will result in widely variable difficulty. The primary attacker will be a much harder fight than the glass cannon, probably. And that's fine. The designs are meant to complement each other. (This is, in part, a natural consequence of having some amount of symmetry between monsters and PCs.) PF2E makes a point of ensuring monsters of the same level are actually fungible, for the most part; and even when they're not exactly fungible, the way the xp allocation works keeps you from having much going on anyways. To explain: -The game generally recommends you stick to moderate encounters, and save severe and extreme encounters for more climactic moments. So let's discuss moderates.
The end result is it's hard to make a moderate encounter out of this that feels too threatening. It would be ideal, sometimes, to have more monsters that have to-hit and damage more closely matched to an on-level encounter, but also have worse initiative and die quicker. This is easier at low level. But since the monsters get beefier as you level, this becomes less and less plausible; APL-4 moderate HP becomes pretty close to the current level's low HP as the game progresses. The game just isn't designed with this kind of thing in mind. There are all kinds of threat profiles the game can't really create if enemies have to be roughly similar in threat level when standalone, and it frustrates me to no end. If you want something like an APL+2 buffing monster with weak attacks for their level and good defense, and 4 lackies with the best threat profile you can muster, that's... an extreme encounter, and the lackies are still capped to APL-2. That's how restrictive the encounter builder is, here. You end up with a punching bag of a wannabe bard and enemies that can be hit by incap spells. The game puts up a lot of safeguards to get its set-and-forget balance, and I really feel those rails every time I interact with the encounter building.
Whole lot of post incoming. === To call this homogenization is to assume that the only way to have differentiation is numbers. Sure, the numbers in character creation are homogenized in PF2, and that's not the only way to achieve balance in theory - though I also have never seen a game with the amount of crunch that PF2 has be anything approaching balanced in the long-term without reducing pre-combat numbers to pretty small bands. But it's theoretically possible to have massively different numbers and balance it out, especially if you only publish a small amount of content to ensure it's all carefully triple-checked and playtested. But the whole point of PF2 is to try and put the focus on your active choices in combat; allowing the pre-combat numbers to be massively divergent is really running the risk of locking you into whatever your numbers dictate. If my champion's AC is massively higher than all the other martials at the cost of having terrible offensive capabilities, or if my cleric's healing spells are massively better than everyone else's healing at the cost of being terrible at other sorts of magic, then I'm already locked into things extremely strongly. I like that the champion in my Stolen Fate table is a sword + shield champion and mostly goes pretty defensively with 1 strike/turn, but in the fights against fiends recently they've been incentivized to strike 2/turn and neglect those defences a little because their Holy Avenger is really effective at triggering weaknesses. I think this is looking in the wrong place in a few ways. -One has to do with encounter math and variety. I deal with that a lot, a lot, a lot later in the post. Suffice it to say that I feel like the encounter builder is pretty constrained in what it allows.
I also have never felt like PF2E's in-combat options were that interesting, personally, so shifting the burden to them is a net negative. To me, the game is—as you noted it can be—pretty repetitive, and the good choices are usually pretty obvious. I'm rarely unsure of what to do or asking myself how to handle a situation. About the biggest source of interest is remembering consumable items and item abilities. === snip I'd just like to say: It had been a good long while since I'd actually seen a high level martial's DPR in play, and I'd actually forgotten how high it was until a friend reminded me of when our unchained monk shredded a wendigo in what I believe was a single good full round attack. So I went back and double checked some things. 10x HP is, in fact, not that extreme. Pretty reasonable to challenge some levels of optimization, even. I had remembered mythic characters easily hitting 600+ a round, but I had entirely blanked on how much non-mythic characters were doing. === "In PF2, you need to optimize in order to succeed," versus "You can make a decent character in PF1 if you have a patient group and have a character build session during session zero, I see no reason that you need to optimize," is some pretty dramatic doublethink. Like, I LOVE PF1, but you'd have to have the most shallow experience with the game to say that it required no optimization and that any character could succeed. And that's not necessarily bad if that's the sort of game you're looking for. FWIW, I know people running PF1 who still do rolled stats (and you have to pick your class before rolling!) and have extreme diegetic restrictions on what is and isn't allowed in terms of gear, spells, etc. Optimizing is extremely hard, if not impossible, in that environment. It's not what I'd consider the "vanilla" game by a longshot. But it's worth remembering that what most of us consider bizarre and unusual gameplay is quite normal for some people. And frankly, I feel like PF1 almost works better out of the box for people like this. I bring this up to say that PF1 experiences are so variable that "you must optimize!" and "you don't really have to optimize at all" are true of tables in PF1, much moreso than they're true of the system itself. If I'm remembering correctly, the APs were intentionally tuned for groups of t3/t4 classes to be able to clear them, as well—at least past a certain point. In PF2, there's still table variance on how much optimization is required; the optimization ceiling is simply lower and the floor is mostly higher. But the encounter builder expects a certain level of party power to work correctly, and that power is closer to the available ceiling than the floor. So I think it's fair to say the game sort of... expects you to play to win and make all your build choices to win. In contrast, I don't personally think that expectation is as pervasive in PF1's design. PF2E pushes a very mechanically oriented playstyle and build in its rules and design; PF1E is a bit more agnostic, and frankly serves low optimization tables much better at a baseline. There's also a lot to say about the difficulty of early 2E APs misleading people about the system's required optimization level, when it comes to this. But we've talked about it at length in other threads. Give the games their credit for what they do. Arguing 5 years into the game's lifecycle that the core math of the game isn't interesting is very much a subjective statement and it could just be a romanticization of a previous system. It's subjective, yes. I wouldn't say it's a romanticization, though. I have never been able to shake the feeling that PF2E's math is just... coarse. Difficulty adjustment never feels granular enough to me. And I've always noticed that people have a poor idea of what numbers "represent" compared to 1E, as well. I see a whole lot of "wow, my bonus is high!" from people whose bonuses are not, in fact, high relative to what's possible at the level and what they might be asked to do with the skill. I see a lot less of that in 1E. people have a more intuitive grasp on what they're good and bad at relative to other party members and what the game will ask of them. PF2E's math is very functional, but it has never felt particularly elegant to me, nor does it feel like it does a good job expressing or representing anything. The numbers are just really good at creating discrete power bands. There's not much that can be said when one is looking to remove something that has gotten so much acclaim over the years. To be blunt, the encounter difficulty working mostly as advertised is one of the only things the game system does to truly differentiate itself from other games in the DnD lineage. (The 3A system is great, but not actually that different from the old one.) The game math is also one of the most abrasive things about the system. It's not odd that people would dislike it, given how many things are changed for the sake of achieving balance when compared to other d20 fantasy games. Paizo's AP support is—to me, at least—a far greater factor in the game's value proposition than any of its actual mechanics. It's why I run the game when I do, and why the tables I play at adopted the game.
I'll probably write up a longer post later responding to other posts, but I'd like to clarify that I strongly agree that PF1E is full of landmines for inexperienced players. At my and my friend's table, we typically check the optimizers to let them know if things are okay or pushing it; on the other hand, we typically ask new players who aren't ready to dive into the deep end what they're trying to accomplish and give them build suggestions wholesale. (We'll also direct them to pretty specific, relevant advice if they want to study up on their own.) Trying to build a character with no system knowledge is a nightmare, and funnily enough, it can be a nightmare in basically any direction—a table of people who have no idea what's going on will just as easily fumble the bag as accidentally have someone stumble into premaster summoner and look comedically strong. (And summoner isn't even -that- busted in the grand scheme—it's just really easy to make a good summoner when compared to many other classes.) You can still fumble the bag in PF2E real easy if you think your choices should mean much of anything outside of their mechanical value (i.e., Please Do Not Give Yourself Points in Charisma without a Plan and Please Max Your KAS and Please Wear the Best Armor You Can), but as long as you don't perform a few cardinal sins, you'll at least be able to mindlessly stride, strike, or use combat maneuvers on a martial and contribute at a passable floor. There are also fewer points of absolute failure. Players will still generally need help with their 2E builds, but the results are far less variable and disastrous if they don't get it. I'll also admit I'm -very- guilty of romanticizing the variety of PF1E builds, but I also desperately miss class archetypes and swappable features that aren't feats and whole load of other things about the PF1E design that basically just got thrown away. (I'm a "we always play with FA" kind of player in 2E.) I also miss the kinds of true flavor overhauls the 1E archetype system and prestige class system were capable of, and I feel those didn't really have to die. I would really love to see something as simple as just "hey, after ten levels in Fighter, you can take this one alternate class path with some different feats and features that does a cool thing." 2E archetypes don't really scratch the itch I want them to, unfortunately. I like bespoke things more than things I'm supposed to mix and match to approximate my idea. ...A lot more to say later, probably.
I don't even understand this sentiment. Prior to PF2 it was extremely difficult to hit the mark, especially if your group was a group of optimizers. My players built characters in PF1/3E that any DM that tried to run the game in an as written fashion wouldn't even be able to challenge the PCs past a certain level. It would have taken highly detailed work to challenge the PCs. Most tables I've played at and ran aren't quadruple optimizers. I agree that it's quite difficult to challenge an extremely optimized party, especially at high levels, but the game genuinely falls apart at high level anyways. Early levels are easier, but you still need a good idea of what to allow and what not to allow, and "PFS legal only" doesn't cut it—even if it helps for the PFS level range. -Emergency Force Sphere- is still PFS legal, and that spell is broken as anything. If you let anything go, yeah—PF1E is impossible to balance. I don't know a single person who still runs it without clear houserules about what is and isn't allowed, though. Sponging hp up by 10x sounds... a bit extreme. But yeah, lucky bad saves will do it on any enemy. Slumber witch alone is the epitome of it, and requires no optimization effort whatsoever and no resource expenditure. It gets even worse when you have players trying to play optimized exploiter wizards, etc. And I think a lot of people underestimate the sheer damage output of some martials because they're usually classed as t3 or t4; some classes can just steal the spotlight out of nowhere with a full round, and they'll look like more of a problem at some level ranges than a caster does. PF2E's math and balance means you don't need to account for any of this or have any extra knowledge of what to ward players away from to cap the game's powerlevel where you want it. It makes encounter math far more predictable, as well. I don't disagree. I just can't say the outcome has given me much satisfaction.
There are ways to balance a game that aren't what PF2E is. PF2E is completely functional and serviceable. But the outcome is also limited and predictable in exchange, because of how that was achieved. I don't think that a game's monster design must work like PF2E for the game to be balanced. There's a lot of pushback against the kinds of homogenization PF2E uses to achieve its balance in almost every gaming sphere I interact in. People who play the MMOs I play complain about classes becoming too samey for balance. People complain about fighting games homogenizing different characters' options. This isn't something universally liked or good. It's just that the people who dislike it won't be posting on the official paizo boards for the game. WRT AC: AC is a painfully informative number because of how the game is designed. If you have a rough idea of a creature's function and what AC progression that design would usually have, knowing a creature's AC lets you infer quite a lot. Outliers like will-o-wisps (which are effectively gimmick enemies designed to dodge tank) or oozes (low AC, annoying abilities, crit immunity) are rare, and usually obvious. In PF1E, knowing AC doesn't tell you very much; AC half looks like it was rolled on a random table sometimes. In PF2E, that number will usually tell you far too much instead. If the AC of an enemy is off even 1 or 2 points, their difficulty skyrockets, so it -has- to be formulaic.
How much does that actually vary the combat, really? Okay, I spend an interact action to flip the table, or we have to look up the vertical reach table if we're new and see if I need to do anything special after the rat climbs up onto the shelf. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I'm not seeing anything too special here mechanically. I think it does a really good job of narratively selling the rat, to be clear. I just don't think any of this makes the encounter much more compelling to play out, nor does it change the basic gameplay of the encounter all that much. ... That doesn't mean PF1e made it easier to have low and high level people coexist, it means they lied about the level of some things. Unless you consider a giant crocodile being worth more XP than a shadow despite being objectively less dangerous to be an important worldbuilding statement about the state of the world (in other words, you consider XP, the spending of it, and levels to all be fundamental aspects of the world broadly known to people) there is no real difference from the world of PF2e where crocodiles are lower level than shadows, accurately, for the people living in it. I did say you could argue I'd be talking differently if CR evaluations were more accurate, and I do still think there's something to that. I do think an important thing that's on a lot of PF1E enemies, though, is... how should I put this? PF1E enemies can genuinely be much weaker than they initially appear. They can have signifiers of a certain level of power without having much else of that level of power. It is very possible for an enemy to have a few tricks that really sell how dangerous it is without it being much of a threat in reality, because those tricks are horrifying—but that's all it has. PF2E monster design won't do this by default, for the most part, because enemies have a pretty consistent powerlevel. PF2E monsters also tend to make it more difficult to have scary but lowball outcomes, like being paralyzed by lower level ghouls, failing hold person checks, etc. Incap is pretty much always on those effects, so the party gets success upgrades. You can't really make people feel scared with those effects in the same way you can in 1E. Most PF2E combats have been both mechanically unengaging and narratively forgettable for me, and the ones that haven't typically involved overtuned enemies or encounters, everyone nearly dying, or both. You have to really work to sell an encounter yourself, in my experience, because the mechanics generally won't do it for you.
As far as pf2e goes an issue I've seen brought up on multiple occasions on the part of players is the meaninglessness of most moderate and below encounters. As long as the casters aren't forced to expend any of their highest 2-3 slots worth of spells then the ability to resourcelessly heal to full afterwards makes them feel like pity-combats that just serve to shovel exp into the players at the expected rate. I feel like a lot of what you're pointing to is the lack of attrition. Since the "default" mode of play has become to rest after every encounter, and many APs are written and balanced as though you will do exactly that, every encounter feels like it has very few consequences for later encounters. There's not much resource management. Since you can just rest off all the encounter's consequences besides spell slot expenditure, it feels like the encounter doesn't really matter that much. You -can- design areas intended to be tackled in succession without resting, but it requires lowering the encounter difficulty a fair bit. I think the results are often worthwhile, but it takes you off the rails a bit. I'd especially encourage it if the party has a cleric, since it gives them more reasons to burn through their font. his is particularly an issue because of how carefully balanced everything is within it's expected difficulty band, as once players get a feel for how the party is generally doing by turns 2-3 in a combat of each difficulty they can generally eyeball when the game is pulling it's punches to "make them feel powerful". I want to point this out, in specific. I find encounters are so predictably constructed that I'm usually tabulating encounter budgets in my head and am basing my actions and targeting decisions on them. I hate it. If you have half an idea of the monster construction rules or have seen enough bestiary monsters, you can also often use check results during combat to confirm or deny your assumptions and adjust accordingly. The "balanced" math becomes something of a two-way street; sure, it's easy for the GM to make encounters, but it's depressingly easy for a player to reverse-engineer the encounter. You have to start making encounters that sit inbetween encounter budget numbers and using elite and weak templates when you have multiples of the same type of monster to make it more difficult to reverse engineer the combat. Even then, the second someone crits on a 16 or 17, the party usually knows an enemy is just fluff. DC +/-10 also made it way easier to reverse engineer ACs, and a lack of opposed rolls makes it easier to reverse engineer other defenses with things like Demoralize, Bon Mot, and combat maneuvers. There's not much you can do to keep a party from metagaming this out if they want to, and the DC+/-10 system gives them ample incentive to do so. It also helped that the game itself was comfortable with players feeling competent and powerful in those moments, unlike pf2e where the game is specifically balanced around players failing at their core action types over and over again in these kinds of high-stakes battles. I feel that this is an impression derived primarily from low level, and it's another reason the game feels awful in that level band. Skills don't feel so hot early. But skills, in particular, become extremely reliable as you level. At level 7, a character with expert in a KAS-based skill keeping up with item investment should have about an 80% success rate vs DC by level, and their success rate won't dip below that thereafter. (It can become particularly absurd with status and circumstance bonuses.) Hitting enemies also becomes less painful as you become able to dole out ever higher status bonuses and penalties. Perhaps in a different vein, but I was really bothered by the locking of classic problem solving resources behind the uncommon and rare tags, presumably because Paizo didn't want people ruining their premade narratives with an unfortunate Speak With Dead or to have players bypass a puzzle or get somewhere "out of bounds" from the adventure using Dimension Door or Teleport. These were the kinds of options that enabled alternative, or even level agnostic, methods of problem solving. I partially agree, but I also see this more as a codification of common houserules and an ease-of-use improvement. A lot of tables barred this stuff anyways, and plenty more new GMs got a nasty surprise when they realized they had to check the reams of spells the game had on offer to make sure their plots couldn't just be trivialized. Making it opt-in instead of opt-out saves a lot of headaches. I still miss free access to those spells, though. Referring back to the first paragraph of this post, the removal of these kinds of options greatly contributed to pf2e's issue with removing meaningful narrative input from the player side of the screen by locking challenges into clear "you WILL find encounters at X point of the level band trivial/easy/hard/impossible and you WILL like it because you have no recourse to do otherwise". It's important that players have the ability to override the narrative flow the GM or AP author has pre-built by doing both better and worse than the game expects, but pf2e's purposeful design of putting PCs so close to the power ceiling means the only option mechanically available to players is to do worse than the rules expect (an unwillingness to abandon this design philosophy is a major contributor to why the Mythic rules and options were such a disaster). I think there is something to this, though. The easy mechanical levers for doing "gamechanging" things are removed, so the party is left with soft levers that are basically just negotiating with the GM. You can still do things that are unexpected and off the rails, but it requires additional buy-in, because it's mostly occurring on the storytelling layer and not the mechanical layer. I'm not in perfect agreement, because some of what you're describing really is just "gotcha" power; surprising a new DM with "Speak with Dead" probably isn't a great example of narrative sway. But I do think that a campaign designed with the possibility of using Speak with Dead to gain information (without breaking the plot in half) has more player agency available than one not so designed, and I only see that as a good thing. I do also think, a bit cynically, that this more boxed-in design is better for paizo as a company. APs are their bread and butter, and a less-disruptable AP is an easier AP to run and a better product for prospective GMs.
My assertion basically boils down to, "before, some enemies were more dangerous, and others were less dangerous. The more dangerous ones, typically casters or enemies with high defenses and/or nasty gimmicks requiring very specific counters, were horrifying; the less dangerous ones, typically plain martial enemies, were less horrifying, though still strong. This gave you at least some wiggle room if you wanted to use less terrifying enemies, which was common. Now, essentially every enemy past a certain level gap is guaranteed to be horrifying." To me, you went from having some wiggle room to almost none. I don't think it'd be wholly unfair to argue that some of the less scary enemies should've just had a lower CR, or perhaps that the scarier ones should have a higher CR, and that if that everything were rated correctly I'd be talking differently. But given how utterly inconsistent the scaling is in PF1E, and how diverse strengths and weaknesses can be for monsters and NPCs, my experience was that it was possible to find an enemy that was nominally strong and scary that the party could still handle if I were paying attention to the party. Now, I don't feel like it's really possible in the same way. I just feel like there was such a homogenization of difficulty levels (and perhaps also of ways something can be difficult, though I want to think about that a while before I commit to it) that it went from a hard-but-doable task to a task I cannot really do at all. Perhaps the biggest difference that lets me feel that it was possible in PF1E is that PF1E still asks you to build non-monster enemies like PCs. Most PC-style enemies (or monsters with PC class levels) are weaker than their CR would indicate because the rules for evaluating the threat level of those enemies are so bad, and it's easy to mess around with their gear and so on and use that as a targeted difficulty lever. PF2E, they're just monsters built with the monster rules, and the difficulty is far more consistent. When you pull up the premade NPCs for 1E, you get such an absurd diversity of strengths at the same CR that it's kind of silly. 2E is intentionally the opposite.
None of my comments were about the gunslinger, they were about guns. I was pointing out that if the 2-action routine of [strike, reload] does more damage for a dueling pistol than a shortbow's [strike, strike] if you have > 70% chance to hit, then that gives guns a solid, class-agnostic niche of being better in fights against larger numbers of enemies, and then reload actions can help you differentiate your gameplay further. Gunslingers would fit into that by boosting the level of enemies where it's trivial to get that threshold - for instance, a sniper gunslinger who reloads to Hide and gets the enemies flat-footed is going to be hitting that 75% chance against a same-level enemy from the previous example, and a single -1 from something like Demoralize would get them to that point against a level+1 enemy.Why should there be single-target weapons that are designed to be effective only against PL-1 (or worse) enemies that only become useful against tougher foes if used by a Gunslinger? This seems like poor weapon design when no other weapon, or class of weapon, has to deal with being so narrowly useful. Most simple weapons are this narrowly useful in practice; the crossbow is a good example. Yes, everyone can use one. This also means that the only people who will use it are weird gunslingers and people who can't use any better ranged weapon. Most weapons are narrowly useful for specific builds, period. And you often aren't going to pick your weapon without taking your class, subclass, and available feats into account, either. To me, complaining that gunslinger locks you into guns—a weapon type with a massive variety, frankly, more than most other kinds of weapons—makes about as much sense as complaining that Starlit Span is a ranged magus. Playing gunslinger doesn't even force you into being pure ranged, even. Drifter and Triggerbrand have significant melee capability, even if they're obviously worse than pistolero and sniper. This complaint always feels off to me. The list of guns is massive, and practically every build in the game specializes in using one weapon (or a specific paired set of weapons) anyways because using more than that is too expensive.
The bard was already made from another run of a similar campaign, in this case. It was no additional effort or wasted prep. If I were running it without the benefit of previous work, I'd not have bothered preparing a statblock. I'd just have a few details like a ballpark number for her performance skill, a few spells she'd use, and so on. The point was just introducing the character since she probably be relevant later, and showing off some of the sorts of things the party themselves might be able to do one day. If other stuff came up I could fill in numbers as they became relevant. === WRT fictional tropes: Yes, there are tropes like "the villain grossly miscalculates or underestimates the protagonist," "the villain thinks the party is beneath their notice," and all kinds of standard contrivances. I personally find that when the main ways the players interact with things are skill checks and fighting and tactics, and they're expected to earn progress mechanically, they are very aware of when punches are pulled or when it feels like the GM is giving them a bone. Such freebies tend to make the players feel like their agency doesn't really matter. This is an oversimplification, but books and movies make you a passenger and a TTRPG made in the vein of DnD makes you a problem solver. When you're thrust into that problem-solving seat, it feels bad (at least to me and a lot of my tables) when how well you do isn't really relevant or the puzzle doesn't actually make sense to begin with. The interactive nature of the medium just has a tendency to amplify certain kinds of storytelling faults and bring them to the fore. You are helping write the story instead of just passively consuming it, so you don that authorial hat and become more likely to ask questions if things feel off. You're helping create the story, so you're more aware of the construction lines. I'm not sure I'm expressing this well, but I hope you can at least see what I'm getting at here. I also think the default tone of these games doesn't match that trope space very well. I can think of many other games that emulate it more effectively, partially because those games set out to do so on purpose.
The statement about this being a difference in degree and not kind is important, here. Someone like Nualia would be a nightmare for first or second level PCs if she were directly translated to pf2e. You can say that Nualia would probably been designed differently if Rise were built from the ground up for PF2E, and that's true. But I don't really consider it positive that you need to weaken the main enemy of the first book in such a direct manner to prevent the question, "why isn't the current arc villain just killing us?" from popping up. She's still quite scary in 1E, but not to the same degree. (And god, I don't even want to imagine that stupid Barghest fight in PF2E. That's an encounter that simply would not exist. Shouldn't exist in PF1E either, to be fair.) The thing that bothers me is how consistently the problem shows up. 3-4 levels is very normal arc length; that's about one book of an AP and about the length of the module. Given that an enemy that's a moderate encounter at the end of the arc is going to be APL+5 or APL+6 at the start of it, why /don't/ they just solo the party early on? They have an exceptionally good shot at doing so. If they take even two lackeys, it's beyond an extreme encounter. Why don't they do that, even? This isn't even some wizard doing a scry and fry. This is literally Jim Sword-and-board ambushing and soloing four people. The first response is weakening the villain to solve the problem. But this makes the villain less imposing and interesting, mechanically. And it makes the villain such that they're probably going to end up on level with the party—if not lower—when they're actually fought in ~3 levels. After all, if they can't solo the party at the outset of their arc, they're only APL+2 or 3 at the start of the arc. That means that the eventual fight against them will have them be an APL+0 or APL-1 creature, which I would describe as anticlimactic. If designed so they alone will be a good challenge for the party in three levels, or at least will be a significant part of a severe challenge or extreme challenge, that means they start their arc at like APL+5-7. But again, even the most boring APL+6 fighter-type enemy could probably wipe a party with strike, raise a shield, reactive strike, and nothing else. The math is just that disadvantageous. This feels exceedingly bad. I did say this is always a question you have to try to jump through some hoops to answer; that was sincere, not a throwaway. To me the problem is that the question just comes up so much more readily. It's one thing to ask why the level 20 wizard doesn't scry and fry. It's another to ask why the cr5 or cr6 fighterguy doesn't just massacre the party at the first sign they're causing trouble. This is literally just turning the bad balance of PF1 into a point in its favor somehow because level 1-2 characters can take on level 7-10 threats if well built. If we look at level 1-2 PCs built by the same people who made the demon stat blocks, it is plainly obvious that the intent of the story is that they cannot defeat those creatures. In this context, I would note that it's not solely a downside. One of the design intentions of 5e with bounded accuracy was to enable a wider variety of monsters to be usable as challenges at the same level. Having a very tight and narrowly bound range of allowable challenges where 90% of them function more or less as expected is not inherently better than having a wider range of possible encounters that need more GM experience and know-how to balance. This is a tradeoff between options and ease of use. It is also a tradeoff between having One Designed Powerlevel and a variety of possible powerlevels that can be played at. Neither is strictly superior, and it's clear from the history of TTRPGs in general that "combat balanced to the degree of PF2E" is not necessary to have an enjoyable or successful game. I know several people who outright consider it a detriment. Those people don't really post here because the game isn't for them on any count. It doesn't matter what level the bard is does it? To be a renowned performer doesn't require they be a level 17 bard or the PCs even know that. If I'm DMing the same situation and the party tries to murderhobo the bard, I kill them. I don't roll it out or write up a level 17 bard...I finish them. When the bard is using advanced magics as part of their performance, it matters. When the bard is someone the party might fight much later on in the campaign, it matters. There's a whole lot going on with that bard. In general, you can use the Bard's mechanics as part of the performance to impress on the party just how strong they are. And that is something I would be doing even if the party doesn't interact with them directly at all.
I used that as the easiest example of a way the level gap could immediately become relevant. It could be just as easily relevant if they tried to lie to get into her graces, or interact with her in any number of other ways. This isn't hypothetical, for what it's worth. I've done this sort of scenario in a 1E game. The bard is a relevant piece of worldbuilding for down the line. The party did choose to just enjoy her performance, but I wouldn't have underplayed her strength if the party did attempt to interact with her.
Yes he is. Because Joe the Grunt Minion doesn't exist outside the narrative. Acting as though any of these things exist outside the narrative isn't at all how the game works. These things exist only as challenges against a party with clear guidelines for how to use them. I don't really know what to say other than I disagree. I'll certainly try to design things so that John Minionguy won't come into play until the party can handle him, but John Minionguy is just John Minionguy. Like, I've had plot-critical high level NPCs show up just in the background early in campaigns. I will put them in places where it makes sense and the party isn't fighting them, yes, but they're still high level. Like, let's say Aria, the most renowned performer on the continent, is putting on a show; the party is second level and watching them. I'm not going to make this level 17 bard level 4 just because the party is nearby and some murderhobo might try to attack them, and then make the bard level 17 again when the party leaves. That's just awful. I want some semblance of coherence here.
Levels aren't simulationist in and of themselves, no. They're obviously the opposite of simulationist. But it's clear they're supposed to represent something, at the least. Certain kinds of mathematical level gaps can cause more issues for suspension of disbelief than others. PF2E's math (which I believe makes you about 1.5x stronger every two levels?) has such fast scaling that it's difficult to avoid the issues, and much of the scaling is innate to leveling. A lot of PF1E's scaling is in gear, buffs, and spell power instead. There's a huge difference between a game where level is added to AC and saves and one where level isn't directly added to AC and saves, in particular. Combine that with DC+/-10 and the greater HP scaling, and it becomes difficult to even look for excuses. A level 10 grunt minion is a level 10 grunt minion because the story wants the grunt minion to be a challenge to level 14 characters. Once that grunt minion enters a low level zone with level 1 characters, it becomes level a level-1 grunt minion rather than being able to conquer the area. Because grunt minions are built to represent a challenge to a particular level of PC, not in any way intended to mirror any type of reality. I feel like this is confusing design and narrative/diegetics. Like, yes, when you design an encounter for level 1 characters you're not putting in a level 10 monster. But diegetically, John Minionguy at Big Evilguy's castle isn't just going to become weaker the second he comes in the vicinity of the party. John Minionguy just won't interact with the party until it's "safe" from a design perspective. It's not like the party has a reality warping field. In any game, there's always the question, "why can't the heroes just be dispatched by the BBEG if he's so strong?" We answer this in many ways—some convoluted, some not. But it is always a question. PF2E just makes that question more pointed than ever, considering how much more powerful even John Minionguy's own minions might be when compared to the party at certain points. It's not so much a difference in kind as a difference in degree. PF2E just makes the artifice that much more difficult to ignore, because the gap widens so much faster.
for example, a level 10 grunt minion at the very bottom of the level 18 BBEG's organizational hierarchy could conquer a substantial portion of the world and live like a king as long as they only attacked parts of the world that are in "low level zones", so why are they putting up with their current situation? Relative to the level 18 party, a level 14 grunt minion is, well, a grunt. Relative to a town of peasants and guards not exceeding level 5, the level 14 grunt minion is deific. This is just how the game math works.
I agree with the above post. I think I have a few nitpicks about how it's worded, but I've started to type up a post addressing the same issues and decided against it multiple times. At bottom, PF2E is a substantially different play experience from PF1E if your group played in a more narratively-focused manner. A lot of the rules and flavor that were "common sense" narrative inclusions, like coup de grace, are changed to be fundamentally more restricted or impossible. (And nowhere is this more obvious than the experience of a spellcaster, whose narrative power is close to universally pushed back a spell rank and also made uncommon, making it so you both get it later and require GM permission to take it.) The game is clearly focused on being a balanced game, focused on making a fair sort of "combat as sport" game instead of the "combat as war" more narratively focused PF1E tables were used to. Something that sounds like it should be debilitating to an enemy is often just a -2; most fantastic-sounding flavor produces rather unspectacular effects. The game tries to sort of split the difference between being PF1E and being a board game—or even just between PF1E and DnD 4e. This system is, frankly, 4e with a coat of paint and some changes meant to make it more appealing to the old 1E crowd. The game is a success at being easier to run (in most cases—I still find everything surrounding invisibility and stealth a headache, as have all my players) and it is a success at being balanced (for most of its run—as the above poster noted, it's only really 5-14 or 18 that things truly work as advertised, but it working as advertised at any level range is an achievement for a DnD-lineage game, let alone for that large of one). I think it's an utter failure at making players feel like the gameplay is having them do the things the narrative is telling them they're doing, and I personally consider that a cardinal sin in TTRPG design; and I think the level 1 and level 2 experience is awful, and that's also a cardinal sin. I run it anyways because it's well-supported and the people I run the game for are more mechanically inclined. === I would also note, as a quick correction: you -can- aid out of combat. Encounter mode actions are usable in exploration mode unless the action or its traits say otherwise. (The main example, here, is stances.)
Okay, yeah, this school is actually good. Does the forced movement from the focus spell break grapples?
For some reason the new oracle doesn't suffer this problem. I think because it has so many resources. 4 spell slots per level, 3 focus points, and the curse on top of cantrips and general melee. They have a lot of resources to use. That makes sense. I mostly think about premaster oracle, since they're what shows up at my table more.
Deriven is still basically doing the PF1E dungeon powerclears, where you'd slap on your long buffs and make a mad rush through the dungeon to bonk everything you could before the buffs wore off—no breaks, no rests. So the alchemist is, indeed, not regenerating vials at Deriven's table. FWIW, I see basically every focus-point-heavy class run into this issue in real play. It's not to the same degree as at Deriven's table, to be sure. But a lot of groups don't actually like taking rests when there's some kind of plot pressure, and anyone balanced around regaining focus points or a similar resource (like a psychic or oracle or alchemist) tends to suffer disproportionately.
Oh, something else I should've noted: technically, ranged has incentive to move to avoid lesser cover from their allies being in the way. Unfortunately, the aim-aiding rune is a tax on the melee martials and deletes this positioning problem almost entirely.
Reaction to activate penalizes gunslinger pretty heavily, since that means they can't use Fake Out.
I feel like the biggest issue for improving ranged versatility is the game's math and design. In general, if there's a melee maneuver that gives a bonus or penalty, you'd want the ranged bonus to give less than that. But let's take an example of a melee maneuver: Dirty Trick. It gives the opponent Clumsy 1, so a -1. There's no room to create a ranged version of it because -1 is the smallest penalty you can give. Other effects, it's just not obvious how you could make them worth much. You could make a ranged maneuver that overlaps grapple or trip and gives a -1 circumstance penalty to AC, but it taking a whole action to break or making someone spend an action to get up from prone is probably too much, and -1 circumstance to enemy AC isn't all that helpful to anyone besides the ranged. It'd also overlap functionality with intimidate and create a diversion somewhat, which both already exist to help a ranged decrease AC. When you look at the conditions to inflict anything similar with pre-existing feats, too, they're expensive. Take Monk's pinning fire. If you hit with both flurry attacks and spend a reaction, and the enemy fails a reflex save, you immobilize the enemy until they succeed a DC 10 athletics check? As a level 8 feat? Stuff like assisting shot is also pretty depressing. Press trait, in conjunction with the desirability of double shot, make it rough a lot of the time. The most interesting non-attack options for ranged are often spells gotten from your class or archetyping. And that's nothing unique to ranged. I don't feel like ranged is weak, not in the least. And I'm not pinning that assessment on starlit span, either; I think ranged is strong, generally. I just think the options available to ranged martials are less interesting, particularly the ones exclusive to ranged martials.
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