
Ritterin Sophia |
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So here's one of my problems with 2E. I don't like systems that make me feel trapped to one generic method of play for a given character class or type. I remember Paizo saying they would not be abandoning allowing to you to customize your character. With the playtest I don't see this as an true statement on their part at least from the current rules we have in front of us.
To give but one glaring example in PF2E Golarian is being baked into the core books, but herein lies a problem. Paladin's are supposed to be champions of their deity, I know Paizo says they want to look at removing the alignment limitation but traditionally these have been Lawful Good ones and most playtesters (and people in general because it's part of the cultural zeitgeist) are going to default to Lawful Good. But let's look at the three LG Deities presented: Erastil, Iomedae, and Torag. What are their favored weapons? For Torag it's a warhammer, for Iomedae a longsword, and for Erastil it's a longbow.
Champions of deities with ranged favored weapons can not comprehensively incorporate that weapon into their fighting style. This would be one thing if only the Divine Archer archetype could do that in PF1, but no, a Paladin built solely on the CRB could effectively wield a longbow as their weapon of choice without it significantly impacting the utility of their class abilities.
I don't like that because I've been playing D&D Pathfinder long enough that playing a stereotype as your only option gets boring real quick. It is, in fact, the reason why I was so absolutely disappointed in Starfinder after being so hyped about it, I was looking forward to basically playing a ranged Solarion, but that's basically impossible to pull off because of both the system and class design. And Starfinder had left me leery of PF2, because like Saga Edition was a test of rules later utilized in 4E (though better conceived in that case) I dreaded Starfinder was a prelude to PF2E; likewise, PF2E has left me disillusioned with Paizo's design philosophy as a whole because as is often the case I really regret that my concerns bear out. I hate being right.
If I wanted to play a system that favored streamlining over character options I'd just play 4E or 5E. And I get it, Paizo's not a cooperative, it has a legal obligation to maximize their investor's share values, which can't be done if all your consumers already bought your core products a decade ago and only buy a new copy when that one wears out. But I'd at least have thought, given how Paizo and Pathfinder became what they are, they'd be leery of treading down the same path Wizards did for the same reason. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does often rhyme.