thenobledrake's page

There's limits to how far you can push the gameism to break immersion and being fine with walking on the moon but your armor can't help you stand on top of mount everest doesn't just break that it nukes it.

I just now started looking into Starfinder since it is technically PF2 compatible.

And basically the first thing I end up seeing in the rule-book is that a character is in a fine-unless-they-aren't situation when it comes to being outside of typical breathable atmospheric conditions.

Need to do repairs outside your starship? The basic protections imply you are fine by saying you're protected from vacuum. Yet if you're standing in vacuum and totally not having your air supply sucked out into said vacuum and someone tosses a gas grenade at you the environment outside your suit is no longer fully separate from the environment inside your suit.

Then add the thermal capacitor upgrade to the mix and either we land on player expectation and genre shattered together as "I'll go out and repair the ship" turns lethal because the vacuum of space has an extreme temperature the character isn't actually protected from. Or else it tells us that actually, in this space fantasy setting, space is normally a comfortably moderate temperature so you don't need protection from temperature just to be able to exist safely in it.

Which is to say this is a weird thing to need to house-rule in an "space adventure" kind of game. Not a hard house-rule to figure out, just awkward to have to.

I definitely don't like the idea of balancing a game so that some characters are good in combat and others good out of combat.

It tends to lead to "It's my turn to play for a while. You guys wait until the next fight."

I think a lot of people manage to not realize that one of the main calling cards of a system that does the "you're good in a different part of play so you're not good at this part of pay" thing is players checking out.

It's like how people will fiddle with their phone until their turn gets called in combat, but turned up to an even higher degree.

And also a byproduct of players trying to self-correct the problem it causes is for all the players to take combat-leaning options and then try to turn everything they can into a combat since that usually works given that the failure condition most frequently assigned to non-combat efforts is to have combat. So they steer into it to minimize how much session time feels like "I'm waiting to play." even though their GM is likely going to ramp up combat difficulty to try and account for the combat-heavy party and incidentally increase time between turns as a result.

I don't really agree with "in PF1e is more fun to build characters"...

I also do not agree with that statement because it implies there's no possibility that a person recognizes that if you build a character "well" you will be able to regularly overcome much more potent challenges than if you build a character in some other fashion and then views that as a flaw in the game.

I personally hated building PF1 (and D&D 3.x before it) characters because I would have to weigh every choice made against whether it would cause me to overshadow the potency of other players' characters or be the potential beginning of arms race behavior with the GM (where they make challenges harder to try and challenge a potent character, only to have to continue increasing challenge because players respond to that with finding a way to be less challenged, typically because the actual desire is not to find the highest objective level of challenge they can still overcome, it is rather just to have the feeling of challenge while remaining confident in ability to overcome, so increasing the challenge is actually the opposite of what the players are looking for).

And I hate the alternatives to that, too, where I push the more mechanically potent character ideas on other players no matter what they are actually interested in just so we can all have a similar power level. Which I especially disliked while I was GMing but felt I had to do because the other outcome was someone unintentionally having a more potent character and taking up an unfair share of the spotlight.

This is likely just a case of which words the particular writer picked to use, since there's very little difference in the outcome.

However, since there is a little bit of difference given that "very hard DC for a level that's twice the ritual's spell rank." is usually 1 point of DC higher (2 points at ranks 3, 6, and 9) than it would be if the text instead said "the typical DC for a spell of its rank adjusted by a very hard modifier" there is some potential for it to have been a deliberate thing to make the DC just that extra little bit higher as part of offsetting the potential modifiers.

Though typing out that last paragraph and having to actually try to work out how to word the sentence setting the DC by mentioning the usual DC by spell rank and still not liking the phrasing after settling on something, I'd say my money is on the author picking the wording they did for the sake of it having been the easier way to communicate clearly and cleanly.

Stack the deck so you survive the bad luck, or accept the outcome.

There is an unfortunate overlap in games which have stronger consequences for bad luck and games which don't have much practical potential for stacking the deck.

Pathfinder, for example, places most stacking the deck that players could do on the other side of GM collaboration. That's not even necessarily a bad thing in terms of the design of the game because the GM should already be a cooperative element in leading the group towards desired game-play experiences, yet it is an obstacle to the activities in question because if the GM isn't always accurately foreshadowing incoming challenges so the player can be informed enough to know what stacks the deck in their favor the player is literally just hoping and guessing.

And more importantly I think there's a thought to have here; you have basically said "alter your odds so that you like them" which is a good piece of advice for anyone. Then you present that what should be done if you're not willing to do that is "shut up about not liking the outcome." Which since it's not actually fully within the player's ability to control is basically just saying "try to get what you'd actually enjoy, and if it doesn't work out I don't even remotely care and won't consider your displeasure about it to be valid." Which is not at all helpful to anyone.

Is any combat scenario ever really low to mid-risk?

Yes. Firstly and most obviously because combat risk is a relative scale so no matter whether you're talking about all combat as being a significant chance of death or talking about combat which requires 1 in 160,000 or narrower odds to actually result in a death something will be the low point of the range.

And secondly yes because combat does not actually necessitate parameters that involve death or other intense consequences, so some combats can remain lower risk despite higher chances that the party does not emerge victorious.

Dying in character creation is a punishment for being risky in character creation.

The only time I've personally seen death during character creation be a thing it was entirely down to random chance. I mean, I guess technically one of the creation systems I saw it in you could start your character before rolling on the next segment of character creation, but that is presented to players in a way that it's kind of equivalent to if Pathfinder said "next you can gain the second half of your starting class features like your skill trainings that aren't automatically set, but you also might die if you try." and even hides the potential for dying so you have to read ahead or roll it to find out instead of actually accurately framing that there's a reason to not respond to being able to roll 0+ times with "Well, I should do at least 1 since it's part of character creation."

And again I feel the need to point out that this isn't actually a real punishment that makes any practical sense because there's no practical reason for a player to not take the risk. It's not "I'd better not because [reasons]", it's just "I'll keep rolling until a character survives creation." Even when it comes to the potentiality of it having been multiple rolls to get the extra benefits there is nothing besides the GM arbitrating a limit or the player having gotten the result they wanted to stop simply continuing to roll until they get what they want.
The "punishment" is actually if you just want to be done creating your character already because you don't get all the goodies people get for letting the dice decide how much longer it will take, since that's the only behavior option you can take that has a downside to it that matters and isn't GM-derived.

A system like that, keeping away players that won't vibe with the game's ethos, is a good thing.

You're conflating two entirely unrelated things.

Signposting the style and tone of your game so people can be accurately informed as to whether it is their kind of thing or not is a good thing.

Obnoxious design that doesn't actually have anything to do with the style or tone of the game so even people that would love the game once they are allowed to play it might be trolled away from it before finding out whether or not the game is for them is a bad thing.

And if you think the bad thing is actually a good thing, that's the foundation of gatekeeping and elitism. There's literally no reason to risk annoying a play away from giving an honest shot to a game other than so that people that toughed out the deliberate annoyance can use it as a pretense to claim superiority.

That's what death during character creation is; it's not the style of the game because it's not game-play, it is just an annoyance. It doesn't even prepare someone for most of the games that I know of that have used it because once you get a character in play your chances of dying, despite being high, are always attached to choices which have obvious consequences - a completely different case than the "roll here for more character details unless you want to skip it, oops you died" lol-so-random character creation. So if a player believed that the game was going to operate in the same fashion of death being an entirely random consequence for attempting to do anything - if they believed what the game was telling them at that point - they would have an inaccurate impression of how the game worked.

So you've basically just misapplied "it's not for everyone" as being free license for designers to literally try to stop people from even knowing what a game is like because you've misconstrued people stopping playing as an inherently good thing.

Or we just have groups that understand that a game that uses dice inherently opens the door for bad luck. Some people like PF2's character builder and very guardrailed systems, and some people are risking their character in the creation phase while rolling up a Traveller.

You're treating things as exclusive to each other when they aren't.

You also might be doing the thing many people do where they hold a belief without ever questioning it even as the moments pop up that outsiders can point to as a reason why questioning the belief would make sense.

Because you're not actually talking about the difference between an open door for bad luck and a closed door for bad luck. I laugh off bad luck easily; in my most recent session of PF2 I critically failed 5 times, even including managing to have 2 hero points provide me natural 1s.

It's very easy to have the "haha, that was dumb. Great sessions guys, see you next time." reaction because those staggeringly bad rolls had small consequences. I basically just made it take longer to complete a goal the party was working towards because these didn't happen in combat. Even if they had happened in combat, I would have been able to laugh it off so long as my character made it through with no lasting downside.

But if a game makes it so that any bad luck even close to what I experience means massive consequences like sitting out of play or having to say goodbye to the character I have to stop and ask "Why?" I mean, it's one thing if I'm satisfied with having played the character and ready to try something new or if I've intentionally maneuvered my character into risky circumstances, and an entirely different thing if I basically can't ever be in low- to mid-risk scenarios in the first place because of how a games dice mechanics work.

And the "die while creating your character" thing is a great example. In my experience no one is actually amused by those results. It's like rolling for ability scores; even the people that "love" doing it are actually meaning that they love when it goes a particular way - and most of them are going to keep at the random tries until it does go that particular way. The bad results are not a thing they actively enjoy and are not even a thing which improves their enjoyment by providing contrast, they are just a time sink and a pretense that are tolerated because the rest of what happens once they have passed is actually enjoyed. And instead of questioning whether "I like random character creation" deserves an asterisk elaborating upon the points which could actually be removed without spoiling the experience, it's just "I like random character creation." Even as they sigh and groan about the result they rolled this time being obnoxious.

Meanwhile I'm over here thinking death during character creation sounds a lot like a video game crashing when you try to start a new game. It's not even really "quirky" for it to have been an on-purpose possibility, it's just someone having had an idea and run with it because they don't care how their choices relate to player psychology, or because they didn't even have the design sense to consider what a player would be experiencing while attempting to play the game from any perspective other than their own.

A more predictable game is also more favorable to the GM, too. The GM and the PCs are not enemies

This is a very important factor for me in how I pick which systems to run; how close to my expectations for a scenario that scenario will play out in practice.

The reason being that I've had plenty of experiences with systems that have lower predictability that lead to player disappointment. The most flagrant of examples I can give being that I was running Dungeon Crawl Classics and decided that I would have an enemy cast a spell and while I checked the spell results chart to see what the spell could potentially do before the session, I had not remembered the extra boost to the result that would result from a critical result. So when the spell was cast and the critical was rolled, it obliterated the entire party with no chance of mitigation.

So now those players don't want to do anything with DCC beyond one-shots, no matter how much I profess to them that I won't have an enemy cast a spell with random effects ever again.

I think there are some GMs that don't think about the predictability of outcomes as being such an important thing because they are artificially setting the predictability by way of being willing to fudge their dice rolls. Since it's logically less important to have random undesired outcomes be genuinely impossible when you're already set on pretending results you didn't want didn't happen in the first place.

Since the prior case before the adjustment was that the effect dropped off at the start of the champion's turn and the change was to make that actually happen at the end of the champion's turn so that at the very least the champion gains the benefit, it is definitionally not a "nerf."

As shroudb points out, this is just the reality of duration being tied to turn timing.

In this specific case, I think the important thing to remember is that the effect that may or may not last all that long is actually the secondary benefit - the main point of the reaction, to protect an ally from damage, works equally well regardless of how the initiative rolls happen to have turned out.

That seems directly at odds with James Jacob's GM advice at the start of Abomination Vaults, which states:

Yup. James did want to have the "you might find your way to tougher encounters depend on which way you choose to go" aspect of the old-style dungeon crawls, but is not an incompetent enough designer to actually have wanted taking a wrong turn to be an actual death sentence for the characters because... well, to phrase it as simply as possible; there's a reason why that's no longer the generally accepted design approach and why even back when it was the generally accepted design approach significant numbers of groups made alterations or various kinds to mitigate the impact of that kind of design.

I feel like it's just another example of the gamer phenomena in which someone touts a particular unhelpful design choice as being actually good as a matter of ego and then mitigates it for themself while treating self-mitigation as fine to do even if the result is the same as the designed-mitigation they are decrying as a bad thing. Like how video gamers will insist they prefer games that don't tell them what they are supposed to be doing in any clear and direct fashion and then happily look up a guide to find out what they swore they didn't actually want to be told.

Gotta disagree about the level 1 thing. I had an encounter in Abomination Vaults at level 3 where a +2 lvl caster cast a Chilling Darkness at our cloistered cleric, critted and would have massive damaged the character from 100% to -100% in one shot, if I hadn't forgotten that, yes, clerics of Sarenrae are indeed sanctified holy. 10d6 times two via critical hit can absolutely kill a character with massive damage even at level 3, if you roll just a little above average.

I've also seen some spells get right up next to invoking the massive damage rules but not actually trigger it because the player happened to decide to boost Constitution.

It actually takes quite a few levels before all characters (even 6 ancestry HP and didn't spend boosts on Con ones) are not at risk of a BBEG's top rank spell getting a critical amount of damage and a decent damage roll triggering massive damage rules.

An average critical for a disintegrate for example is 132 damage, which means it would massive damage kill any character with only 66 maximum HP which could be a level 10 elven wizard. An actual high roll for the damage, which could go as high as 240 with a critical makes it so even a level 10 dwarven fighter with a +1 constitution modifier is straight up dead if they manage a critical failure result. Demonstrating that a wide variety of characters that are in a relatively high level boss fight against a level +2 caster can still have a chance to see a massive damage rule kill them off.

The wording involved is pretty rough because of phrasing choices.

"...all your Swipe attacks" being an odd thing to say when there is only one attack roll involved. It's clear enough that the intention is to add the bonus from the Swipe trait to the total of the attack roll when comparing it to both targets instead of just to one target, but it's definitely not the clearest way to state that. Even just "If you're using a weapon with the sweep trait, its modifier applies to this attack roll." would be cleaner.

Despite that oddness of phrasing, though, I feel it's indicative of the intention that the Swipe activity be the equivalent of two attacks in every way other than those specifically stated - which are that sweep applies to both targets rather than just whichever was second, and instead of rolling the attack and damage rolls for the second target you just apply the same result as for the first target.

I don't see any reason in that to not have critical specialization apply for both targets, whether it's an axe specialization adding some damage to a nearby target, a sword leaving both flat-footed, or a flail causing both to have to save or fall prone.

I don't get how this is somehow me stating "bad wrong fun" when I'm describing a personal experience as shared one.

It's the language you use.

Much like how there is a difference between if I were to say "I am not a fan of the sort of challenge that you're looking for from combat" which is respectful of your opinion as being different but equally valid, and if I were to say "I don't want all that tryhard nonsense".

When you describe not-your-preference with terms like "lobotomy" you cross the line between just sharing your own personal experience and making a value judgement upon preferences other than your own.

And the mire just deepens as you say things like "the players are expected to take the narrative seriously, which includes encounter mode" as if that is not equally true of games that don't match your difficulty preference because you're adding implications that there's really only your way of playing and complete nonsense where nothing matters.

It feels incredibly cheap every time the GM blatantly lobotomizes a foe to prevent them from killing the PCs.

Multiple people have already asked people to not turn this into "badwrongfun" comments.

So let me explain how this is a problem statement; You're presuming that the options are either A) monsters do what you personally have decided makes sense for them to do, or B) Blatant lobotomization.

That's not how things actually work, though. There's a whole range of things which creatures can do that make equal amounts of sense in-fiction while still producing different game difficulty results - especially if encounters are designed with victory parameters outside of reducing the opposition to 0 collective HP.

There's little worse for the feeling of victory and "merit" than for the player to realize the GM is cheating in their favor, and will defy logic to bail them out any time there's real danger.

This is a thing where it's not actually down to the players having something hidden from them that they will be disappointed by finding out - at least not outside of literal fudging, which is a separate topic entirely and I think I discourage people from doing.

The reality of the game is, and always remains, that the GM is setting the degree of challenge. No matter what degree they set it to, that remains true. Thus the only way that the GM is able to "bail them out any time there's real danger" is if the GM is behaving in an inconsistent manner.

By which I mean it is not an encounter that is set up by me and run by me in my style the entire time I am running it that will feel like the players are getting some kind of illogical bail out - characters will die if their choices and the dice lead to that, I've just set the odds lower than I could have. It is only if someone where to start out an encounter going for a higher difficulty and then swap over to lower difficulty somewhere mid process... which nobody but people going "that'd be dumb and that's why the way you play the game is objectively bad" are actually talking about doing.

So now you should be able to recognize that negatively charged language like "bail out", "lobotomy", "cheating", and "defy logic" is not just you stating your own opinion, but you taking the extra step to denigrate someone's opinion on the grounds of being different from yours, which doesn't even help you to do because it makes it seem like you don't even have enough faith in your own opinion to rely on its strengths to show its strengths and have to instead trash talk the "competition."

And one last thing; Even when it comes to the way you are used to playing, at some point the GM eases up instead of going as hard as they actually could to kill PCs. That's an inherent truth to the way the game works because the GM can set up literally every bit of the encounter parameters so they have every advantage and numbers to overcome the randomness of the d20. Thus every time a PC survives an encounter it is the direct result of the GM having made some choice at some point of the process that was in effect "that will be hard enough". The line you imagine that separates the GM at your table (whether it is you or not) from other GMs doing that (by allegedly defying logic even though the logic is literally the same; this will make the game fun for my players) is so arbitrary as to not actually meaningfully exist.

Instantly excusing them without questioning why there aren't really any real errata done in such a big timeframe is not doing anyone any good.

It's not "instantly excusing them", it's questioning what actually could reasonably have been done in the time and understanding it's not the thing you over-hyped yourself (like many others have) into believing was reasonable when it genuinely wasn't.

You're effectively trying to have it both ways by saying that you understand things can't be fixed right away and then throwing that out because what you were hoping gets fixed didn't get fixed yet.

And throwing the implication that because you haven't been informed of what is being worked on and when it's being worked on into the mix just makes the whole "they're not doing enough" claim even more obviously unreasonable - at least to everyone that isn't stuck in the cognitive dissonance pit of proving their expectations were actually totally reasonable by saying things like "real errata" to imply that the errata we do have don't actually count.

Sadly I have to agree that more and more content that comes out is riddled with errors, mistakes, and things that slip through the cracks way more than what it used to be beforehand.

Which is also why the lattest round of Errata was such a dissapointment since it failed to address countless things pointed in the dedicated thread for it and instead had some barebones trivial changes.

This, I feel, is a point on which many people fail to set proper expectations and do not realize it.

The Remaster cramming extra work into the same amount of time is the likely culprit for why the level of errors present in products has gone up, and while the Remaster is "done" now so the schedule can return to some normalcy there is now the extra work of finding all the errors and deciding what to actually do about them.

And while people might think fixing a lot of the errors is just reading the thread where message board users have collected what they've found and doing what the posters suggest as a fix, that's not how things really work. The team can't just go "okay, sounds good" to some armchair game designer, they have a responsibility to everyone else playing the game to actually check things out. Which is a fundamental thing, really, the people posting disappointment about how the thread didn't have a different impact were thinking it was going to be a thing it was never going to be since any errata suggestion is always going to be a thing that the team adds to the list of stuff to check in on and nothing further than that.

And there's only so many hours in the day, so the work pace isn't going to magically increase just because people hope this time the errata list will be 5 times bigger than last time.

Here is a good question though, Does a Mythic Character gain the Mythic Trait? and if not, despite all this natural language presenting them as characters in a mythic campaign, are they truly considered mythic in gamesense?

So... that's just not at all how this game works.

Because it is written in and intended to be read in casual language, it must be enough that the section of the book which describes how a PC obtains their mythic calling, feats, and the like, is titled "Mythic Characters" and that means having any of those things is a result of and proof of your being a mythic character.

Otherwise there is no such thing as a mythic character when it comes to PCs because there's no part of the text that says to add the mythic trait to your character or otherwise defines what a mythic character even is. And just about every mythic rule mentions mythic characters as though that's what you must be if you're engaging this rule, with phrasing such as "At 1st level, or whenever they receive their mythic power, a mythic character gains a mythic Calling and the Rewrite Fate ability (see page 78)." where you can see that either you are a mythic character just because the rules are in play despite not having explicitly added a trait or the rules are not actually functional even at their base level.

I think following the game conventions the other way around produces a more workable result; Mythic Resistance is clear but causes problems so we don't stick to the wording, and by doing that we make Mythic Strike also able to be functional.

That way we aren't effectively just deleting one thing even though that is, technically, simpler.

Downing PCs is not so GM dependent, but finishing PCs is highly GM dependent. How aggressively enemies target downed players is entirely up to the DM, and players die with much more regularity if so targeted. It's not odd you'd see a lot of variance.

That's the exact reason the majority of deaths seen in campaigns my group has played have been the result of afflictions and persistent damage.

I don't target downed PCs at all, and even try to avoid overlapping area damage on them if there's anything else it can make sense for an enemy to do.

I even take it further than most GMs that avoid targeting downed PCs do and have enemies attack every character that has chosen to be on the front lines (and any ranged attackers receive range attacks from any un-engaged opponents) rather than fully focusing fire.

Because I find that I hit the goal I am aiming for when I GM, so I make sure I am never aiming to get as many PCs down as possible because I'd end up with constant PC deaths if I were.

There is a counterpoint to this in that they absolutely intended for parties where only some PCs are mythic as seen in the Mixed Play Variant Rule

If that were a genuine intention and not a "I dunno, maybe you'd do this" half-mention that doesn't even cover all the ins and outs of what it mentions... it would be in the book itself, not the random extra PDF.

I don't like the way that Mythic Resistance functions as written because it only functions if the GM is using Mythic for enemies but not also using Mythic for PCs.

So since I believe that not to be intended, as Mythic rules are presented as a game-wide toggle, I have to believe that the wording of "non-mythic creatures" is actually intended to be something else.

I've picked "non-mythic Strikes" as a thing to fill in. And in doing so have made it so that the typical play case of an enemy with Mythic Resistance is that they reduce damage of the characters fighting against them which gets overcome if the character has a mythic weapon (which they usually won't because of item level... because these rules are fairly poorly constructed in more than just this one place), or has used one of the available options to get Mythic Proficiency on the Strike they are making - but then doesn't also apply against spells which are already having enough trouble when they have to go up against Mythic Resilience so they don't need to also have Mythic Resistance affect them.

It is when too many characters die farther along the story or in a place where it is really hard to introduce the super random weird characters my players like to make that the story tends to go flat and everyone decides they want to abandon the campaign.

And even when it's not a problem for the story to introduce a new character of the appropriate level, the player may look at the prospect of making all those build choices all at once and feel like they'd rather just not.

Especially because diving into a character build you haven't already gotten used to at a higher level means you're more likely to make mistakes or forget features and that means you're more likely to end up with another dead character while you're still working on figuring out how best to play this one.

I know I have had that happen, and seen it happen for others through the years, where it's not "I don't want to continue this campaign" but "I don't want to make another character" that is the obstacle to a player proceeding forward. Which thankfully modern game systems have helped out by removing the old penalties like hard limits on how many times you can be raised or reducing your level as a result of dying so all it takes is saying yes to access to resurrect to keep someone able to play (though that still has the death-spiral causing 1 week debuff that can stick a campaign in the position of being "we don't have a week, so death spiral time it is" or "we take a week and that doesn't affect anything significantly so it's basically just like if there wasn't a debuff to wait out in the first place").

My own thoughts on the likelihood of death in a game are basically that it should have an inverse relationship to the degree of time and effort it takes for a player to make another character.

Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not?

It depends on whether or not you had the opportunity to know what to prepare for or not.

Many campaigns operate under the assumption that players functionally can't know what to expect, especially at tables run by GMs with a worry about "meta-gaming" because they can turn even the most obvious kind of information into something a character has to pass a check to actually know even if it's just "there's probably spiders in The Spider Wood, and since we're traveling through The Spider Wood, we should prepare for spiders" in nature. So even level of preparedness can come down to random chance intersection of what you are prepared for and what the GM picked.

So it takes a lot of accurate hinting and meaningful options to respond to that hinting to even arrive at an encounter that isn't "the players were unaware this was to be their opponent." in nature, and that's the thing that is basically mandatory in order for a death to not be "random."

Without using any incorrectly tuned monsters, you can still defeat the PCs if you build an encounter to attack a weakness or set the fight in terrain that doesn't favour them. The point is that you always need to be aware when building encounters and that building a "too hard" encounter can happen at any level.

There's still a massive and very important difference between the awareness you're talking about coming from "I have read the material" rather than from "I have read the material, and also figured out where said material was actually leading me astray".

The whole point of the authors even bothering to write guidance on how to build encounters is so that people can just read that and have things work out as intended.

Pretending "well, we could just figure it out for ourselves even if that doesn't work" means anything other than that failed design can be fixed is nonsense. You may as well follow that reasoning all the way and just make the whole game up yourself instead of paying someone else for a product you don't even expect them to have made function for you.

We know, because they told us.

Alright, so... who said, and if possible quote them for me, anything even remotely similar to that they made the changes they made for people with no interest in the class.

Because that's the spin people that don't like the changes have chosen to put on it.

The changes are VASTLY less popular with people who were playing Oracles at the time they landed than they are with people who weren't doing that.

There's a very important distinction you're glossing over in there; why the people that were not playing the class had chosen not to play it (or to stop playing).

You're presenting it as if people that were playing the class, whether because they felt it didn't have any meaningful problems or because they were choosing to tough them out despite how meaningful they viewed the problems as being, are innately more important than any people that counted problems as significant enough to talk them out of playing the class despite their interest in it. And then presenting anyone choosing not to play the class before the changes as if they were not at all interested in it.

Kind of like if you were to say that someone's not actually worth trying to please with Sorcerer changes if they were actually playing a Fighter at the time of the updates. It's not actually logical, and it isn't actually helping your point look well formed.

The game still hides high threat creatures at the same CR as easy creatures - lesser deaths anyone? So the GM should always be aware of what makes an encounter go from challenging to deadly, what kinds of threats are easier or harder for their party, and when to give the party an opening to run versus finishing them all off.

Yes, it does. And also yes, that was a bad choice on the part of the designers.

There is no upside for their having chosen to make it so that we don't just have things which are accurately labeled and things which are errors awaiting errata, we also have things that are just plain "wrong" on purpose. There is, however, the downside that now we all have to always second guess whether something is an error awaiting errata or an intentional deviation - also known as not being able to trust the designers to design correctly.

Just because the beginner box came out well after the game doesn't mean you shouldn't have a separate teaching tool

Having two teaching tools is not what I was arguing against.

What I was arguing against was the implication that the Beginner Box should be the only thing considered a teaching tool and anything else, even the core products for the game, defaulting to exempt from criticism of the "not great to learn the game from this" sort.

Did they ever clarify if Oracles are supposed to get 4 spells known per rank? Cuz I saw something suggesting that was the case for PFS and was seriously unsure what the divine sorcerer had going for it if that's intended.

Yes. The FAQ has an errata mention for the discrepancy between the text and the table which says the table is correct.

What the divine sorcerer options are supposed to have going for them are blood magic and other sorcerer-specific things.

Having played a Life Oracle in PFS I can state by experience that it had no impact on the parties tactics.

A 10-foot aura of Concealment/difficult terrain can be annoying but it's hardly a reason to consider the Oracle has to be "handled" by the party.

You're basically arguing semantics here.

When other people say "handled" they are talking about the same things you are when you say "can be annoying". The difference is not that you know how things were and the people that don't agree with you don't know, it's that you think the situation we're all accurately aware of was fine and other people don't.

There doesn't have to be some insurmountable level of difficulty in making an oracle work well in order for someone to be unhappy with the feeling that oracle takes extra effort and, because it'd be unbalanced otherwise, doesn't really get extra cool stuff compared to "I could just play a sorcerer" or "I could just play a cleric."

It is the job of Entry level scenarios like the Beginner Box to teach the game mechanics to new players. Not the job of Player Core.

That's not actually a fair claim.

If, and only if, Paizo had intentionally set up the situation so that the Beginner Box were available before the core of the game and actually had it be the basic rules of the game to then be expanded upon with other products (rather than being a one-off product featuring alternate rules that don't actually match the rest of the game) would it be reasonable to expect the Beginner Box to be carrying the weight of expectation of teaching the game to people.

In reality, though, people were playing PF2 for almost a year and a half before the Beginner Box even came out. So if the core rulebook weren't supposed to be showing people how to play the game there was literally nothing supposed to be doing that job for over a year - which is clearly nonsense.

You mean that the GM has less things to learn. Because it's a question of experience, not something you can't control ever.

It's not about fewer things to learn as a GM, it's about what it actually means if one of the things the GM needs to learn is when the game itself cannot be trusted.

That is what makes consistency a key thing. If things are consistent then they can actually be learned - meaning what was true in a previous case can be assumed to be true of a future similar case and that assumption not prove to be wrong. Without consistency, it's less learning how things work and more guessing whether or not one case is like another case or is not.

And this is actually a thing you can measure the effect of by looking at people that play in situations where their rules are less consistent in how they work out, whether it's because their GM is regularly altering things purposely to tinker with them, or that they play with multiple GMs that have noteable "table variance" differences. The more inconsistency a person sees in the play experience the more they will feel the need to ask how something works, even if it is something they've done repeatedly over numerous sessions, instead of feeling able to trust that they already know how it works.

But I'm also not sure how good "the changes were made for people who hated the class" actually is as a practical goal.

This is unuseful spin specifically spun in order to try and present an attempt to make a class work better for a group of players that happens to not include one's self as having been motivated by idiocy and thus label it as both inherently and obviously bad.

That's not what happened with the oracle. What did happen is that a class which a lot of people found appealing but struggled to actually make use of as a direct result of its design got a revision that makes it far easier for them to work with.

It's not the "Paizo changed it for people that never had any interest in playing the class" people that liked the prior version better than the newer version want to pretend it was. And presenting it as if it were has no upside - Paizo isn't going to look at someone mischaracterizing their intentions to improve a class and go "ah man, we should be listening to what this person thinks, their inability to even give us the benefit of the doubt is a clear indicator they know what's what."

You are an adult with strong experience in board and ttrp games.

There's also something they are glossing over in their bringing up of board games in this discussion; Board Games, especially the more complex ones, almost always make a concerted effort to be approachable.

Rather than just organizing the book in the order that rules might make themselves relevant, there's a section at the front - if not a separate pamphlet or the like - which explicitly says "Hey new person, start here and do this." with the intention being that someone could crack open the box and actually be enjoying the product on a whim in an afternoon.

The exact opposite of the presented attitude of not thinking anything needs to be done to help on-board new players because the ones that are 'actually interested' will tough out or laugh off the learning curve, rather than give up on a game they'd otherwise love because their initial experience seemed to indicate it wasn't for them and nothing the game said seemed to say any different.

Except, when you're new to it and neither the GM or the players have experience, if you actually trust the encounter-building system or went with an old AP, you may get OSR style luck-based deadliness.

This brings up something that I think is really important when it comes to this topic, especially as it applies to the subset of players that didn't just not have a good first experience with PF2, but had such a bad experience their initial reaction was to go play something else.

The guidelines on the encounter building system haven't changed at all. The core book when it released said everything that a reader would need to read in order to arrive at the appropriate conclusions about how to design encounters, even for low-level parties, and get what they want to from the game play experience.

Yet many people don't learn all that well from just reading the rule book to them self, and they want to get to the playing part because that is where information will full incorporate for them. To do that, most folks are going to turn to published adventure content - and that is where PF2 hit a major snag.

The earliest adventures did not have an extreme level of care taken to make sure that the encounter designs found within fit the intentions of the guidelines. Instead those products feature encounter design that pretty much just followed how PF1 encounters would regularly be built to compensate for the known inaccuracy of the previous game's challenge evaluation metrics. The result being that most encounters found in those early adventure products were high-difficulty even if they were lower-budget.

That has a distinct and measurable effect upon how people view the encounter guidelines. That's how come you can see people that will argue that there wasn't actually anything out of line because the charts cover level -4 to level +4, so multiple different cases of a level +3 creature with next to no plot significance is "fine" - especially easy to fall into the belief of, despite it not actually fully lining up with what the new game's guidelines say, because it fits the familiar notions carried in from PF1. And people talking about how those encounter spreads are all "technically within the guidelines" gives people that didn't actually want their game play to be that level of difficult the mistaken impression that that difficulty was the intended difficulty and not a byproduct of authors doing whatever they want with little quality checking and the assumption that GMs are going to smooth out anything that would be a ripple for their own group (basically, the devs mistakenly treating "every group is different, so we can't make material work for every group" as an excuse to not bother confirming material works for even just one particular hypothetical group outside of just "hypothetically, this is the perfect adventure for somebody somewhere").

You've yet to prove that PF2 even has the issue you're claiming, much less that it's a significant source of players bouncing off the game.

And this is where we are done; you are not a willing participant in discussion.

You've just waved your hand and now magically all of everyone else's experiences and points they have made are entirely invalid to even consider as evidence.

It's super weird that despite this unilateral declaration of your own correctness you're still trying to argue with people.

... I think the 'as written' material that Paizo produces should try and be accessible to a wide range of skills, not just experienced players.

At the very least they could be more up-front about their writing procedures so that there's fewer instances of a disconnect between what the customer thinks they are purchasing and what they are actually being sold.

Because for me that's the real root of the problem; people are making the not-inherently-unreasonable assumption that published adventure products are an "until you're comfortable making decisions on your own" kind of product, while the authors are making the also not-inherently-unreasonable assumption they are "some ideas and shortcuts to preparedness to customize and use as seen fit" kind of product. That just needs Paizo to put a line of text about how they assume GMs are going to alter their works up in that front bit of the blurb where it says stuff like the general vibe of the adventure and what levels it is for so that it's not a thing people know only because it is the explanation that makes a bunch of other things make sense and it has been said outside of the game materials by the people involved in making them.

I don't think expecting people who will stick with TTRPGs long term to have some grace and self-understanding is unreasonable.

No, the unreasonable thing you are doing is implying that the cause for someone bouncing off of a game is a lack of "grace and self-understanding" rather than the game having not done its job to onboard them smoothly.

This idea that we should design games so that even the least self-aware groups can run them perfectly without any prior knowledge is a pipe dream.

And you continue the unreasonable thing you are doing by putting this into the extremes shown by this statement, where you're not open to the conversation about what could be done better and instead are just calling it only a problem for the worst at games - and double-dosing on that completely asinine behavior by also throwing "perfectly" in the mix when everyone else is just talking about "better."

You've effectively thrown out any actually argument, undercut every point you could possibly have made, and loudly proclaimed that you're not even open to being convinced you might be wrong in any way by pretending this is just a case of "it's not for everybody."

And you're still not actually addressing that your expectations are that new players are going to be competent enough to realize what went wrong even though something going wrong in the first place is proof of their lack of competence of the relevant sort.

Then laugh it off as both sides being new and roll up a new game

This is a thing I like to call "the assumption of competent incompetence."

This sets up that a group trying out a game did not have the off-the-bat understanding of the system to produce an outcome they liked with it, which shows the group lacks competence in the relevant areas. It then rolls on to the next point and presumes that in the complete lack of reason for any changes in competence that the group will have enough competence to identify the difference between "we goofed" and "this game sucks."

And the entire idea that this kind of "filter" is actually a good thing because players should either have off-the-bat understanding or else a high tolerance for what appear as failings of the game so that they can "earn" the ability to have the fun they came looking for is just elitism - the same old tired line of "I toughed out poor experiences, so everyone else should be happy to do so too" that has never added anything worthwhile to anything in the history of that sentiment cropping up.

Thinking the game is improved because some people that could enjoy it don't actually know that because they bounced off a poorly-wrought initial experience is just... well, it's words I'm not allowed to say on this website. It's not an "upside".

Considering the thread title, I'd argue that your example is a really great example of a "doesn't do a good job of teaching people how to play" scenario. Why would you ever use an extremely dangerous ogre instead of, say (cough cough), a small pest in someone's cellar? Are you trying to kill your fresh green player's wizard? Seems like you're throwing the kiddies into the pool and saying 'well if they can't swim, that's their fault not mine.' Instead of, y'know, teaching them how to swim.

At the very least, the scenario provided seems to imply that a player could have heard "dangerous ogre boss down there" and actively chosen to not go do that portion of the adventure until they'd leveled up or otherwise reduced the danger.

A choice which a lot of players are actually regularly taught they don't get to make because of reasons like "play the adventure that is prepared, don't be disruptive and derail the campaign". And even when not in that particular scenario and with a GM that is genuinely open to players choosing whatever they want to choose and rolling with that no matter how much of their prep work it might skip or invalidate, the GM might still have failed to communicate in a clear fashion.

GMs regularly leave important things to the players' ability to sort out the difference between "extremely dangerous ogre boss" meaning "this is the adventure, the NPCs want the PCs to deal with this" and "extremely dangerous ogre boss" meaning "the GM is trying to warn you against messing with this" and forget to hold them self accountable since what the players know about the game world starts with the GM.

Not to mention that if this is an AP a GM is choosing to run because they are new and want to see how the pros do things to learn, they won't even know that the ogre is not a run-of-the-mill encounter. Because, unfortunately, APs are not written assuming a fresh GM that doesn't know when and where to question what the author has presented - they are instead written assuming the GMs that run them are going to tweak anything and everything and actually know what they are doing, and it's the rulebooks themselves which are oriented towards explaining the how and why.

A change in wording doesn't necessitate a change in meaning.

It's not unreasonable to assume that a different wording can have a different meaning, but it absolutely can be (and is in the case of this wording) unreasonable to assume that a different wording must have a different meaning.

And this continued push-back as if what I've said is some kind of crazy outlandish thing kind of shows that it's not about whether the rule says what it says or works how people want it to work, it's about the argument itself because even after the errata clarifies it is just like many people already said it definitely was just on reading the text rather than assuming its meaning it just turns into "see, Paizo says I was right and it did need clarification." even though the clarification proves that their prior argument were incorrect.

Sometimes ones want to be argumentative hides for the forest for the trees.

This kind of thing very much reads like "I'm allowed to argue, but since I don't like your argument you are actually not allowed to because you're doing it wrong."

You are making the case that downsides, or costs, should not be something which can be mitigated. You want these costs to hurt, so that any potential upside is paid for.

I'm actually making two cases; one is that if downsides or costs don't actually hurt then they cannot have an upside and also be fair.

The other is that, because the game being fair is more important than most other things, we should not treat situations like the pre-errata runelord where you pay something unquestionably tolerable and in exchange receive something unquestionably beneficial because that's not actually fair - that's how you get one option that is better than the others.

Its a fine idea on paper, but the nature of the medium means that there exists no real costs a player could be asked to pay that aren't in some way mitigatable if - and this is where we cross the absurdity boundry in your reasoning - we don't count "no longer does certain things" as a cost.

You pretending what I'm saying crosses into absurdity doesn't actually make it true.

You keep mis-framing the situation I'm talking about as if I am saying there shouldn't be any pros and cons to the available choices, where what I am saying is actually that we shouldn't treat artificial limitations as being valuable enough to pay for genuine benefits.

Reductions in agency which encourage alternative lines of play is the entire point!

That's not really what this is, though.

The runelord does not encourage playing any differently than you could already play without the runelord - at least not outside of the isn't-what-most-are-going-to-do case of casting spells that break your anathema on purpose so that you are then encouraged to cast only those spells since they are the ones that you don't have risk of failing until you get your atonement dealt with.

The only "stick" involved is entirely avoidable as you can just not break your anathema, which I can only phrase so many different ways means that it isn't a valid reason to get any extra carrots or else you're just unfairly laden with carrots.

Pointless clarifications is a poor concept. Most of the people asking for clarifications are asking in good faith. Most of the people asking genuinely don't understand. There are a lot of different perspectives, abilities and cultures out there. We still don't agree on some of the basics. A fair portion of what has already been published is confused. I'd much rather Paizo fixed what they have already published than publish more. Unfortunately that is not what pays the bills for them.

Anybody asking in good faith would be satisfied just to find discussion where someone else explains a reading of the rules that produces an outcome that isn't the nonfunctional or problematic one they brought forward in their good faith questioning.

The only people that actually need errata to provide the clarification on something which is clear to others but not to them are the ones that whether they meant to or not have lost their good faith on the matter. The ones that, no matter who explains a different more favorable way to read the text or how they explain it, are going to argue against it - some even as they say things like "that's how it should work, for sure, but that's definitely not what the book says to do so I'm not going to do it like that until I see some errata" - because it's no longer about how the rule works to them, it's about the argument itself.

By that logic when the rogue gained Critical Success when rolling a Success on all 3 Saving Throws at level 17, we should have all assumed that it was "Too good to be true" and ignored it because that is silly...

Nope, that's a complete misrepresentation of the logic I presented.

"Read the rules as if their intention is to function" is not at all the same as "Read the rules as if anything that strikes you as odd is definitely an error."

Because not only could someone read the wording of the feature that "needed errata" and come to the conclusion I did that it worked just fine because the rune limit clearly shouldn't be applied since just adding a rune to a mundane weapon as the feature seemed to say it could do was already breaking the standard rules, they could also read the rogue feature you thing is "too good" and come to the conclusion that it's actually fine even though it's odd and not even really unfair in the grand scale of things because of how much about what a rogue can do can be hard-countered just by the particulars of an encounter.

Giving the rules the benefit of the doubt that they are supposed to actually do something is not the hyper-obstacle you present it as being with your, for lack of a better term, whataboutism.

The players intention of ever using those spells is immaterial.

That cannot be true while having the inability to choose treated as a reason for added benefit. Because if it were truly immaterial whether the player intended to take those spells or not, there'd be no reason to give them some other bonus for giving up the ability to do so.

Perhaps if players were allowed to strick their fingers in mousetraps at the start of each session, that woud suffice.

Bringing up something deliberate ridiculous doesn't make your point look stronger. It actually makes it look like you don't even feel you have a point so you're distracting from that with what is just one step removed (since you didn't actually attribute this ridiculous thing to me) from a straw man.

As to my actual argument here; there's no genuine downside, so there shouldn't be too strong of an upside. And that's the smartest approach to the situation because no matter how big the penalties get a player will dive right into every available one if the upside is worth it even in situations where that produces an undesirable result because players will optimize their own fun out of things if allowed to - the old one-trick-pony builds that players then lament are boring to play because they can't contribute outside of their one trick being the biggest example of this reality.

Regular Wizard: Don't worry, party members. I didn't prepare Water Breathing [or other niche spell here] today, but we can rest up for the night and I'll prepare it tomorrow.
Could you imaging the inconvenience if the last group of bandits didn't have that scroll I could learn the spell from?

Runelord of Lust: I guess we're walking back to the nearest major city to go shopping.

It's presumptuous to present the "regular wizard" as having a niche spell in their spellbook. These aren't clerics and druids able to swap to any common thing on their entire list, they are limited list casters that are only guaranteed a handful of choices and are going to prioritize non-niche options for the campaigns they are in.

And you're also presenting a scenario of inequality where one side has the GM involved in providing tools to overcome an obstacle that they can make use of in the form of bandits with a scroll to learn from, and the other side doesn't get that involvement in a tool they can use such as potions of water breathing. Further skewing the case is that learning the scroll is still a choice and a chance, not a guarantee, and carries a cost so a player might simply have not whether they had the option or not - and that's all without me diving into the contrived nature of the scenario where a party that didn't have any caster at all would be equally stumped by the scenario so it's not actually a runelord problem you're pointing at.

Nah, nothing bad faith in taking an ability at face value...

You mean the "face value" of that it says it adds a rune to a weapon so it just does, and since it doesn't say the weapon has to have a potency rune to be chosen for the feature that has to mean that the typical limitation on how many runes a weapon can have can't possibly apply?

...or the "face value" where people insist on reading the feature as having the limitation it clearly violates because it doesn't redundantly state that it does like it used to?

There was nothing to "correct" as the rules already said what they still say, they just used fewer words to do it before errata came along to change literally nothing other than whether or not the wording was redundant.

That Paizo caves to people asking them for pointless clarifications is not something we should ever be "glad" about because every moment they spend on "yes, it works like the intent should have been obvious that it works" is a moment they couldn't spend on something more worthwhile.

Imo, it's more akin to a rogue promising to never train in Thievery for a bonus to Stealth.

Sure... but that's not actually any different despite your presentation that it is.

Wanting to be sneaky no more implies that you also actually care about being able to pick pockets, open locks, and disable devices than want to play a spell caster implies you actually want to be able to do every kind of magic there is to do.

Especially when we get to the "you were only actually going to prepare so many spells in the first place" of it, missing out on broad categories of magic - no matter how desirable they are - is not actually a problem for the player.

In order for it to be an actual obstacle or inconvenience there'd have to be a pronounced weakness inherent to the scenario of "I couldn't choose that" that isn't just as present in the scenario of "I didn't choose that even though I could". And since there's no difference between "this character doesn't know electric arc or fireball" and "it would violate this character's anathema to cast electric arc or fireball" there is no actual inherent value in that anathema.

And that you can point at every runelord option and say desirable spells it can't do - which happen to be other sins go-to sorts of spells - proves that getting by without certain things is hardly even inconvenient outside of having the GM/group inflicted case of "I was allowed to pick an option that is awful in the campaign and am not being allowed to do anything other than tough it out."

Language is bit wonky here, however there are two good arguments against theory that hydra regeneration is fixed according to original number of heads - a) then it would be enough to just state original 18 reg in case o prismhydra rather than specifically use 3xheads b) linking regeneration to heads still on necks is tradition since PF 1e if not DnD 3,5 - but there it was more clearly stated as minimal regeneration was always 5.

Neither of those are "good arguments".

In the case of the prismhydra you're presuming that the way things are is not the result of copy-paste or the equivalent by starting with the hydra statblock and then making the necessary adjustments, so it's not a good argument to say what you believe about a piece of text must be true because a second piece of text has the same wording - that doesn't actually support any conclusion more than any other.

And in the case of "tradition" that's the worst argument because no one should ever be expected to know anything other than what is in the rules text itself in order to understand a rule. Reference within the same game rule set is okay, but does need to be explicit rather than the kind of thing people sometimes do where they try to prove one rule says what they think it does by mentioning an unreferenced feat. Expecting that everyone playing this rule set knows how PF1 or even further back worked is just nonsense - especially given that the whole point of a new edition is so that what used to be true can be changed if the designer wants it to.

Has anyone play tested or heard any feedback with the pre-errata remastered Runelord? I can understand the visceral fears stemming from previous editions of TTRPGS (fear of power creep) but I am having trouble visualizing why having a few more (balanced) spells breaks the game especially with the heavy anathema.

I was playing one, though admittedly not for long.

9 charges in a staff at 5th level instead of 6 was just enough so that I felt like I'd never run out of spells throughout the day. Though also I feel the need to mention that just in general between slots, bonded object, focus, scrolls, and having a staff at all it tends to be that a wizard gets to the end of their adventuring day without having spent all their spells in the first place - meaning the extra that were possible with the old wording of runelord were not just "not breaking the game" they were also "not really changing anything in practice" so it isn't a problem of any practical sort that they are gone now.

"Heavy anathema" is not actually a reason to alter the balance of things unless those anathema are actually difficult to avoid. In the case of runelord where the player can select their sin and then plan accordingly there are hardly even any downsides to the character and no chance of "oops, I wasn't supposed to do that, now I have to atone" coming up. So it's basically just "can I have a bonus to Athletics if I promise to never train myself in Thievery?" level of hoping to be better at what want to do in exchange for giving up a thing you weren't going to do anyways.

It's not "rewriting history", it's believing that changing the wording doesn't mean we have to assume the function is anything other than what it actually says.

All the new phrasing needed was for people to stop the "it's different from what it used to be so it has to be a different outcome too" and focus on the "if it doesn't just do what it says without ignoring a rule it doesn't say it follows, the feature doesn't even function because of the also unstated need to have a +1 potency rune on the weapon you choose to use the feature on."

The errata to clarify the situation for people that were insisting on reading the text as including words it didn't have by adding words that aren't actually necessary to reach the desired meaning is just a waste of time and effort.

We didn't have to wait for this to get to "That champion feature actually works" because we could all have just understood that the conclusion caused by reading hyper-strictly was a bad conclusion from the start.

What we really don't need is to create any kind of expectation that we get rules corrections or clarifications outside of the errata schedule because literally all that ever leads to is people being entitled and angry that they aren't getting even more responses even more rapidly.

This isn't even reverting the wording with extra steps, it's clarifying that the text does in fact say what it already said with a bit of redundancy because some people insisted on reading not explicitly saying one thing as the same as explicitly saying the opposite of that unstated thing.

Some year on, coming back to this idea and I actually think the alternative scores are worse balanced than the original.

I kind of agree. By which I mean I agree with the conclusion that the rule wasn't worth using because it doesn't reduce overall number of problems with ability score appeal to different characters, it just changes what they are - even though I disagree with some of the exact problems you state.

I think the only thing that would actually improve ability scores without introducing a new problem is to revise the set and not be beholden to their being 6 of them.

Like, just to give a knowingly poor example, leaving Dexterity a singular score as it is in the default rules but then altering the other scores as stated in this variant to produce 5 scores that each have enough important to most characters to at least consider not leaving one at a 10 (or 8) rather than having each character have a score or two that are foregone conclusions "safe to ignore".

The point that you May not understand Is that in a game such as pathfinder 2e since, mathematically wise, your power level Is STRICTLY controlled by level progression (unlike previous editions) when we speak about numbers the best you can get Is usually (and in case It Is) the literal bare minimum.

That's definitionally incorrect.

Characters survive the game just fine without even having a shield, let alone blocking with one. You've arbitrarily decided that despite that reality if a character chooses to block with a shield it has to be at the degree of a sturdy shield, which also isn't actually true - citation: I've been running this game since it began existing and watching everything work out fine, no destroyed magical shields, no character deaths that would have been avoided by just a bit more shield block potency, and the addition of the shield reinforcing rune making that all possible without having to make the trade off of not having your shield also have some kind of special power.

You've even managed to get things backwards with the "unlike previous editions" comment because in those previous editions if you weren't building your character as potently as your GM assumed you were when setting up encounters then you would actually be at extreme risk of character death because the difference between the low end for your level and the high end for your level was significant, and PF2 just plain isn't like that - shield blocking included.

Are you saying that a shield lasting three shield blocks when i can do It twice per turn on myself or an ally Is "the best there Is and actually super strong" hell no It Isn't.

Hell yes, it is.

By choosing a piece of equipment a character can get an effective boost to HP that exceeds any other choice in the same fashion. Like, my wizard at 5th level can spend a 3rd level spell slot on an extra 13 hit points for the day that can't be replenished, while even just a steel shield blocking 3 attacks throughout the day is an extra 15 hit points that can be replenished if there were opportunities to repair. So that you have decided to put so much weight on the amazing benefit that you get from a shield (and the feats you took to use it more often and in situations it normally couldn't be) as to consider it disappoint how you only get this extremely potent benefit is what is called a "you problem" not a "game problem."

The argument you imply is unquestionable that full sturdy shield performance is "the bare minimum" and that you should actually get even more than that takes the same form and tone as this following statement: I should be able to cast every spell heightened to my highest rank as often as I want without ever running out. Even if someone thinks that makes sense, it is completely out of line with what is reasonable to expect from the game given the game's actual design.

I wouldn't care about all of this if i played in a homebrew game with an expert game Master...

This is all horsewaffle. It would have been even if you had mentioned that you only play in Society games, but it is just a deeper pile since you state you play a home game. Talk to your GM. The authors writing the APs they are running assume the GM is going to change the content to fit their group, so give your GM the opportunity to do that and talk to them about what you want from the game experience. Stop refusing to accept you are in control of your own gaming experience and passing off the situation like your GM also has no say in what happens and your group just has to play something that you're not fully enjoying.

They are not "reduce the DC by 5" abilities, so there's no way for them to do anything other than exactly what they say they do and set the DC to 10 normally and 5 with appropriate assistance.

Things have to be presented as modifiers to be treated as modifiers, and that is what it would require to bring up any potential for them to both modify the same thing at the same time.