Simplicity

[da_asmodai]

I would like to note that being less complex, more simple, easier for new players, etc. isn't a good thing if that comes primarily through there being less books. The real test will be comparing what's in the initial book(s) for 2e vs. what's in ONLY the Core Rulebook for 1e.

For example sure it's complex finding Archetypes in all the various published books now. So having a unified Archetype list in 2e (and streamlining how they work) is great... EXCEPT there were no Archetypes in the Core Rulebook and not having to deal with a system at all is clearly easier for new players than even the most elegant system. Furthermore I have no doubt more stuff, Archetypes, feats, whatever are going to be added in future books for 2e as well recreating the same problem.

Ultimately the question will be is 2e, easier to learn, easier to play, and at least as, if not more, customizable than the 1e rules found ONLY in the Core Rulebook. If the answer is no then what's the point? If that's the case 2e will likely get just as complex by the time it reaches the same number of published rulebooks.

[D@rK-SePHiRoTH-]

You are confusing complexity with number of character options.

The RULES will be simplified, and will stay simpler forever, no matter how many character options you add.

[blahpers]

Quote:

The RULES will be simplified, and will stay simpler forever

Dotting for posterity.

[JohnHawkins]

D@rK-SePHiRoTH- wrote:

You are confusing complexity with number of character options.

The RULES will be simplified, and will stay simpler forever, no matter how many character options you add.

Comedy gold there.

[D@rK-SePHiRoTH-]

^_^

I guess I should have pointed out that IF THEY STAY TRUE TO THEIR INTENT the rules will stay simpler forever.

What I'm trying to say is that, theoretically, it's possible to have simple rules with ton of building character options

[LuZeke]

But does "simpler" equate to "better"? That's what I'm wondering.

[Benjamin Medrano]

Streamlined does not necessarily mean simple. Simple doesn't necessarily mean bad. I could barely make heads or tails of the Kineticist at first, but once I figured it out I enjoyed it. It could be a lot more streamlined or simpler, and still be as much fun to play.

[Athaleon]

LuZeke wrote:

But does "simpler" equate to "better"? That's what I'm wondering.

Not always. In a simpler ruleset, more abstractions will be made, some of which may result in an abstraction too far. I know people who are really bothered by the fact that armor in D&D makes you harder to hit rather than functioning as damage reduction. More situations will also be relegated to DM fiat.

On the other hand, greater complexity is detrimental if it doesn't meaningfully increase depth: Complexity for the sake of pedantic simulationism, for example, or complexity just for its own sake when a simpler mechanic would do the job just as well.

For example, it sounds like PF2 will incorporate at least some level of 'Degrees of Success' when you succeed or fail at a roll by 10 or more. Degrees of Success can be very helpful and enhance verisimilitude by allowing for more possibilities than pass or fail, but their calculation often slows down gameplay. Too many possibilities can also result: For example, Apocalypse World has a 'succeed at a cost' result; usually the 'cost' implicitly means 'you don't actually succeed after all', so why not just make that a failure?

[Edymnion]

I hate the word simplicity when it comes to gaming like this.

Simplicity means lack of options. Which means a reduction in your viable choices. You can either be simple and streamlined, or you can be option rich and allow for true customization.

The two are mutually exclusive, IMO, as in over 20 years of playing tabletop games I have NEVER seen a system that managed to do both at the same time.

[master_marshmallow]

Some things should be simpler, of that there is no doubt. Could feat chains and feat taxes be fixed without a new edition? Probably not.

Initiative now seems to be tied to skill checks, and Perception has become a game mechanic like concentration did in the jump from 3.x to PFRPG which serves as your generic initiative check. This seems to indicate DEX may be less important and that skills may matter more as your characters will always want to have a decent skill to be using in place of Perception methinks.

If 'proficiency' is truly based off class level in a true d20% to succeed based on your level rather than some arbitrary number decided to set base DCs to always give a rough 50% success rate then I'll be happy with the results of it.

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

Okay how about instead of simplicity, we use elegance.

Elegant design allows you to make meaningful choices without spreadsheets. Elegant design allows customizability without compromising ease of play. Elegant is a $5 word, that makes nerds panic less because they still get to feel like the smartest person in the room because they’re better at a cooperative role playing game than other people.

[Starfox]

Much of this is merely a matter of presentation. Write something well, and it is understandable. See the kineticist for something that really is quite simple that just looked very hard.

I prefer when the basics of a class and the optional abilities are separated. Putting every ability in a long list in the class description muddles things up for me. Starfinder is a really bad read for me because of this.

[Edymnion]

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

Okay how about instead of simplicity, we use elegance.

Elegant design allows you to make meaningful choices without spreadsheets. Elegant design allows customizability without compromising ease of play. Elegant is a $5 word, that makes nerds panic less because they still get to feel like the smartest person in the room because they’re better at a cooperative role playing game than other people.

Well, you can play semantics all you want, but the proof will be in the pudding.

I have several off the wall character concepts that I judge any new system I try by. The more of those characters I can easily build while staying true to the vision, the better I consider the system to be. The less I can build precisely as envisioned, the worse I consider a system to be.

Quite a few of them are intentionally playing against type.

I have tested many, many systems, and there has been one thing that has always remained constant. The ones that can score higher on my list of test characters are more complicated to build and play.

We have not been shown anything yet that I've seen to suggest that PF2e can support truly off the wall characters. That bothers me greatly. What we've been shown is pretty much the opposite. Stats based on race/class instead of picking what you want directly. Entire feat lists locked behind class. Even what kind of actions you are allowed to take or not take being locked behind class walls.

Frankly, if PF2e can't deliver the option of letting me build whatever I want, then the simple fact is that I won't play it. I honestly do not care if its faster and easier to play. Tic Tac Toe is faster and easier to play than Chess, but that doesn't make it *better*.

[LuZeke]

Athaleon wrote:

More situations will also be relegated to DM fiat.

In my mind, when the core rules of a game rely on GM Fiat, things are going in the opposite direction where it's "simplicity for simplicity's sake". I touched on this in my post in the "Please This, Not That" thread.

Of course, overly pedantic rules can be detrimental, but so can overly simplistic rules. If the core rules rely on GM Fiat as a main solution, instead of being an out when there's no good interpretation to be had, what is the point of having a rules set to begin with?

Let's say they simplified things in PF2nd to such an extent that it doesn't really feel like Pathfinder anymore, is that really true to what got people to play Pathfinder to begin with?

Most of the people I play and have played with were drawn to Pathfinder because of its rules. It struck a balance between complexity and interpretation that people liked.

My original question here is specifically aimed at PF2nd and the idea that it's made to be "simpler". As it stands, I'm not convinced that simpler is better for "Pathfinder".

[Athaleon]

LuZeke wrote:

Athaleon wrote:

More situations will also be relegated to DM fiat.

In my mind, when the core rules of a game rely on GM Fiat, things are going in the opposite direction where it's "simplicity for simplicity's sake". I touched on this in my post in the "Please This, Not That" thread.

Of course, overly pedantic rules can be detrimental, but so can overly simplistic rules. If the core rules rely on GM Fiat as a main solution, instead of being an out when there's no good interpretation to be had, what is the point of having a rules set to begin with?

Let's say they simplified things in PF2nd to such an extent that it doesn't really feel like Pathfinder anymore, is that really true to what got people to play Pathfinder to begin with?

Most of the people I play and have played with were drawn to Pathfinder because of its rules. It struck a balance between complexity and interpretation that people liked.

My original question here is specifically aimed at PF2nd and the idea that it's made to be "simpler". As it stands, I'm not convinced that simpler is better for "Pathfinder".

That's why I included the "DM Fiat" line in the part about how "simplicity is not always better".

'Feeling like Pathfinder' is pretty subjective. For a cynic who doesn't like PF, anything that makes PF feel less like PF would be an improvement. But I think there is certainly some worthwhile work that could be done to PF to make it simpler/more elegant while still staying on this side of the complexity spectrum versus 5e.

[LuZeke]

Athaleon wrote:

That's why I included the "DM Fiat" line in the part about how "simplicity is not always better".

Fair point, didn't mean to change the meaning of what you said.

Until we get more information all we can do is speculate. Personally I hope PF2ed doesn't stray too far from its roots. Some people like spreadsheets :P

[Jiggy]

Edymnion wrote:

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

Okay how about instead of simplicity, we use elegance.

Elegant design allows you to make meaningful choices without spreadsheets. Elegant design allows customizability without compromising ease of play. Elegant is a $5 word, that makes nerds panic less because they still get to feel like the smartest person in the room because they’re better at a cooperative role playing game than other people.

Well, you can play semantics all you want, but the proof will be in the pudding.

I have several off the wall character concepts that I judge any new system I try by. The more of those characters I can easily build while staying true to the vision, the better I consider the system to be. The less I can build precisely as envisioned, the worse I consider a system to be.

Quite a few of them are intentionally playing against type.

I have tested many, many systems, and there has been one thing that has always remained constant. The ones that can score higher on my list of test characters are more complicated to build and play.

We have not been shown anything yet that I've seen to suggest that PF2e can support truly off the wall characters. That bothers me greatly. What we've been shown is pretty much the opposite. Stats based on race/class instead of picking what you want directly. Entire feat lists locked behind class. Even what kind of actions you are allowed to take or not take being locked behind class walls.

Frankly, if PF2e can't deliver the option of letting me build whatever I want, then the simple fact is that I won't play it. I honestly do not care if its faster and easier to play. Tic Tac Toe is faster and easier to play than Chess, but that doesn't make it *better*.

Here's a fun tidbit for your (rather clever, to be honest) stress-test: There's a tabletop RPG that I've run/played with three different groups, whose characters included the following:

Flying animal-whisperer
Mechanic/tinkerer
Teleportation-specialist mage
Disguise-style rogue
Engineer
Party planner
Luchador
Vampire historian
Flying ice-cream-maker
Professional hole-digger

Pretty crazy, right? And they were all viable, contributing party members right out of the gate at 1st level.

But the thing is, this game was simpler than Pathfinder by an order of magnitude. Teaching these newbies a system they'd never seen, letting them build their own characters, and then also playing the full intro adventure took about 3 hours for each group.

Three hours to learn, build, and play.

How many of those characters can you even build AT ALL in Pathfinder 1E, making them viable and on-concept at 1st level? This game has PF beat in flexibility, yet also leaves PF in the dust on simplicity.

I'm sorry, but your understanding of simplicity as being on the opposite end of a spectrum from flexibility is simply wrong. Not all complexity produces the same proportion of depth. Part of good game design is finding ways to get the most depth for the least complexity. Will PF2 do well in that regard? That remains to be seen.

But simpler does NOT automatically mean less flexible.

[Myrryr]

So Jiggy, are you going to tell us what this magical game is, or just describe what sounds like freeform imagination?

[Charlie Brooks]

Simplicity means different things to different people. IMO, the game could be much simpler while still fitting archetypes into the Core Rulebook just by cutting out random rules that either don't get used (ie, whetstones giving a bonus to hit for one attack roll) or which only come about in corner cases (ie, arcane spell failure, which is its own subsystem that has no overlap with any other part of the game).

[Threeshades]

Athaleon wrote:

LuZeke wrote:

But does "simpler" equate to "better"? That's what I'm wondering.

Not always. In a simpler ruleset, more abstractions will be made, some of which may result in an abstraction too far. I know people who are really bothered by the fact that armor in D&D makes you harder to hit rather than functioning as damage reduction. More situations will also be relegated to DM fiat.

I always find it curious when someone thinks armor making you harder to hit is more of an abstraction than armor reducing damage from a hit.

I personally find armor in 3e/PF to be one of the more straightforward and realistic systems i've seen in games, because armor doesn't reduce damage from a wounding hit, it prevents an attack from hitting in the first place. If a sword hits your armor, it doesn't hit you. If the sword goes between your armor plates, it hits you and the armor does nothing anymore.
Sure you could say that this mainly applies to plate armor, and that gambeson or leather may allow a blade to still pierce, just not as deeply, or a mace would still crush through a coat of chainmail, but then you would have to have a system that takes both aspects into account, just turning armor into damage reduction does not represent it any better.

...

Anyway, back to the original point: simpler isn't automatically better but it does have distinct advantages which in my experience (and your mileage may vary) outweigh the drawbacks. Having played for example Shadowrun 5e and D&D 5e with the same group of players, I found that the complex and detailed rules of the former often grind the game to a halt, as people have to look up all the individual modifiers for even a basic skill check, while in the latter the books only even were opened when there were two different rules interacting with each other in an unexpected way or someone used a special class ability or a spell on which they didn't completely recall the ruletext.

I suppose a successful rules design should make rules in such a way that they are intuitive rather than overly simple and consistent rather than overly complex. And if these sound like buzzwords, that's only because they are. I have no magic formula for how to make this work or guarantee that it's even possible, but in this ideal system, when something is not fully represented in the rules the basic functions of the game should guide GM's in sich a way that they would come to similar conclusions on how to handle the situation.
</wishful thinking>

All that said, I never found pathfinder too complex in its rules (maybe because I played Shadowrun and The Dark Eye, the latter being my gold standard for a game that is way too complex). I just found certain elements in its rules design that are lacking for me. I never liked the full attack system that forced a melee character to stand still to make use of their full per-round potential while a caster could move around freely on top of having more freedom of choice on what to do with their round.
Which leads into my opther main complaint, weapons (with the exception of a few specialized weapons) have only one use in combat, that being to move the opponent a little closer to critical existence failure. This bothers me not only because in armed combat there are so many more ways to use your weapon, but because playing a martial character gets boring during combat because you only do the same thing over and over again.

Really, if the new edition did nothing but remove the necessity for taking a full round to do a full attack and rebalanced damage around this fact and added new ways of making attacks beyond just dealing damage that are all about equally viable as the default dealing-damage attack at all tiers of play (things like called shots, binding weapons, switching stances, taking advantage of certain properties of the weapon, like mordhau with a sword or hooking with an axe) I'd already be pretty happy.

Im not super happy with the complete overabundance of options at this point, but I can understand that people appreciate them. All I would like to see removed, are those feats and class features that allow a character to do things which in real life anyone could do as long as they have the courage to. If something is possible without intensive training for a real person it shouldn't be locked behind a feat in the game. This does mean that the game has to be opened to improvised actions more, because a rulebook couldn't possibly cover everything you can do in reality. You shouldn't need the snoutgrip feat to hold an opponent's mouth shut. This should just be a matter of making either two consecutive grapple checks or a single one at a penalty.

Oh yeah, I must say I have fallen out of love with classes as well, an open character creation that just lets the player pick from a suite of skills and abilities I find much more interesting and it eliminates the need for pages upon pages of classes and archetypes.

I feel like I completely trailed off from the original reason I started this post. Anyway, I welcome out new edition overlords and can't wait to see what the playtest has in store for us.

Myrryr wrote:

So Jiggy, are you going to tell us what this magical game is, or just describe what sounds like freeform imagination?

Sounds to me like Jiggy is describing Open Legend. I may be wrong.

[D@rK-SePHiRoTH-]

Threeshades wrote:

All I would like to see removed, are those feats and class features that allow a character to do things which in real life anyone could do as long as they have the courage to. If something is possible without intensive training for a real person it shouldn't be locked behind a feat in the game. This does mean that the game has to be opened to improvised actions more, because a rulebook couldn't possibly cover everything you can do in reality. You shouldn't need the snoutgrip feat to hold an opponent's mouth shut. This should just be a matter of making either two consecutive grapple checks or a single one at a penalty.

Oh yeah, I must say I have fallen out of love with classes as well, an open character creation that just lets the player pick from a suite of skills and abilities I find much more interesting and it eliminates the need for pages upon pages of classes and archetypes.

this. So much this. Please Paizo,

make the people who really understand your system

PROUD

It might sound as a bold statement, even arrogant; I don't care.

This kind of consideration shows players maturity and it's as a matter of fact what the game needs.

Please Paizo,

LISTEN

[Arachnofiend]

master_marshmallow wrote:

Initiative now seems to be tied to skill checks, and Perception has become a game mechanic like concentration did in the jump from 3.x to PFRPG which serves as your generic initiative check. This seems to indicate DEX may be less important and that skills may matter more as your characters will always want to have a decent skill to be using in place of Perception methinks.

I kinda hope they get really wacky with what skills can be used for initiative. I wanna build a Barbarian that uses Intimidate for initiative.

Every time she walks into a room she just yells "So who here is ready to RUMBLE?!?"

[MR. H]

I recommend people take a gander at Savage Worlds. Core book pdf or paperback is $10.

I love how this system is actually very complicated while being thin on the actual rules. For example, the rules for being on fire work for both a person being on fire and a town burning to the ground and it's all covered in one paragraph. Another example, they added full Mech-Walker rules that capture a huge variety of mech types in 4 pages. Our group plays that game like pathfinder. It's a mid-crunch game and the mechanics for things aren't as nuanced as PF but it gets the job done.

I'm just saying it is possible to decrease the overall page-count of a system without making it "simple". I hope Paizo is making 2e's rules denser, not streamlined in the way the term has become associated as just removing large chunks of the game and calling it better (looking at you 5e, Fable, many AAA video game studios, and to some extents even Starfinder).

[master_marshmallow]

Arachnofiend wrote:

master_marshmallow wrote:

Initiative now seems to be tied to skill checks, and Perception has become a game mechanic like concentration did in the jump from 3.x to PFRPG which serves as your generic initiative check. This seems to indicate DEX may be less important and that skills may matter more as your characters will always want to have a decent skill to be using in place of Perception methinks.

I kinda hope they get really wacky with what skills can be used for initiative. I wanna build a Barbarian that uses Intimidate for initiative.

Every time she walks into a room she just yells "So who here is ready to RUMBLE?!?"

That would be amazing.

I like the idea that they are trying to tie skills into combat more. Maneuvers work like this now, which means they probably work the same way as feint and might have a single easy rule to cover the math.

I like that.

I want to see what agile weapons are.

[PossibleCabbage]

Simplicity is not an end goal, it is a means to accomplish an end goal- elegance.

It benefits nobody if it takes a 12 page rules forum thread to figure out how a class feature interacts with a new feat. It also benefits nobody if players want to do things but can't because there's no rule that allows for it.

So ideally you have a set of rules that is easy to understand and apply, which nonetheless allow for a vast number of potential outcomes, choices, and interactions.

[Jiggy]

Myrryr wrote:

So Jiggy, are you going to tell us what this magical game is, or just describe what sounds like freeform imagination?

Tails of Equestria.

[Jiggy]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Simplicity is not an end goal, it is a means to accomplish an end goal- elegance.

It benefits nobody if it takes a 12 page rules forum thread to figure out how a class feature interacts with a new feat. It also benefits nobody if players want to do things but can't because there's no rule that allows for it.

So ideally you have a set of rules that is easy to understand and apply, which nonetheless allow for a vast number of potential outcomes, choices, and interactions.

There's a really great video about the relationship between complexity and depth and how depth is the goal and the addition of complexity is the sort of like the currency with which you purchase that depth. Part of good game design is figuring out how to get a "good deal" by getting a lot of depth for only a little complexity, and trimming out any elements of complexity that don't produce enough depth to be worth the "price".

Check it out HERE.

[Logan Bonner]

Arachnofiend wrote:

master_marshmallow wrote:

Initiative now seems to be tied to skill checks, and Perception has become a game mechanic like concentration did in the jump from 3.x to PFRPG which serves as your generic initiative check. This seems to indicate DEX may be less important and that skills may matter more as your characters will always want to have a decent skill to be using in place of Perception methinks.

I kinda hope they get really wacky with what skills can be used for initiative. I wanna build a Barbarian that uses Intimidate for initiative.

Every time she walks into a room she just yells "So who here is ready to RUMBLE?!?"

Well, it's up to the GM whether that will work, but if she had the right setup, this sounds legit to me! :D

[Bloodrealm]

LuZeke wrote:

Athaleon wrote:

More situations will also be relegated to DM fiat.

In my mind, when the core rules of a game rely on GM Fiat, things are going in the opposite direction where it's "simplicity for simplicity's sake".

Games that have a lot of mechanics relying on GM discretion are usually storytelling devices first and games second. Pathfinder (and the D&D family in general) is a game first and a storytelling device second.

[gnoams]

I hope they make this new edition intelligent, not simple.

[Jiggy]

gnoams wrote:

I hope they make this new edition intelligent, not simple.

There's no direct correlation between intelligence and complexity in game design. For example, last I checked, the interface in Dwarf Fortress was simultaneously complex and stupid.

Sometimes a complex design choice is stupid, sometimes it's intelligent. Sometimes a simple design choice is stupid, sometimes it's intelligent.

The best part is: that's okay! The people who are enjoying simpler games than you do aren't a threat to you, so you don't need to manufacture a way to feel superior to them. You can just announce your preferences as preferences and your opinion will still be valid.

Own your desires! Declare them proudly! You can just say "I want a complex game" and that's great! You don't have to make it about your superior intelligence in order for it to be okay that you like complex games!

Relax, breathe, be liberated. :)

[Sadida]

There can be depth within simplicity. Complexity is not a must for depth to mean something. The fallacy lies in weighing simplicity or complexity over the other as something more important rather than finding a middle ground.

- Just my 2 copper

[blahpers]

And then there's the middle ground fallacy. : )

[the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh]

Threeshades wrote:

always find it curious when someone thinks armor making you harder to hit is more of an abstraction than armor reducing damage from a hit.

I personally find armor in 3e/PF to be one of the more straightforward and realistic systems i've seen in games, because armor doesn't reduce damage from a wounding hit, it prevents an attack from hitting in the first place. If a sword hits your armor, it doesn't hit you. If the sword goes between your armor plates, it hits you and the armor does nothing anymore.
Sure you could say that this mainly applies to plate armor, and that gambeson or leather may allow a blade to still pierce, just not as deeply, or a mace would still crush through a coat of chainmail, but then you would have to have a system that takes both aspects into account,

Which would be an utterly awesome place to add complexity.

Quote:

Having played for example Shadowrun 5e and D&D 5e with the same group of players, I found that the complex and detailed rules of the former often grind the game to a halt, as people have to look up all the individual modifiers for even a basic skill check, while in the latter the books only even were opened when there were two different rules interacting with each other in an unexpected way or someone used a special class ability or a spell on which they didn't completely recall the ruletext.

I suppose if you play mostly with people for whom looking things up to get them right is not actively part of the fun, that would be a problem. This is not the majority of my experience.

Quote:

I suppose a successful rules design should make rules in such a way that they are intuitive rather than overly simple and consistent rather than overly complex.

"intuitive" is one of the worst words to see applied to game design, IMO, because what people find intuitive varies widely in ways an "intuitive" design can ridiculously easily kick to the kerb.

Quote:

Oh yeah, I must say I have fallen out of love with classes as well, an open character creation that just lets the player pick from a suite of skills and abilities I find much more interesting and it eliminates the need for pages upon pages of classes and archetypes.

To my mind, ten or twenty or even fifty well defined classes represent ten or twenty or fifty sets of character mechanics to check for balance and fun and functionality.

On the other hand, a suite of even fifty distinct skills and abilities represents abut 3 * 10^64 possible combinations to check likewise. Checking those combinations to a similar degree of thoroughness is just not possible.

I like GURPS a lot, but I have difficulty seeing how anything following the mix-and-match model can come out recognisably Pathfinder without more lurking problems than any amount of playtesting can find.

[gnoams]

Currently I see 5e as the Disney version of d&d, it's designed to be accessible for all ages, like g-pg rated film. Pathfinder is the pg13-r rated category, it uses more advanced ideas to be more engaging/interesting to an older audience. Each fills a different niche, and that is great. I hope pf2e remains a more advanced game. We don't need two versions of d&d made for kids.

[the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh]

Jiggy wrote:

There's no direct correlation between intelligence and complexity in game design. For example, last I checked, the interface in Dwarf Fortress was simultaneously complex and stupid.

Sometimes a complex design choice is stupid, sometimes it's intelligent. Sometimes a simple design choice is stupid, sometimes it's intelligent.)

While I agree very much in principle, in practice I have a very strong preference for complexity for its own sake; somewhere between as an aesthetic, and as keeping that much of my brain engaged being more fun, and that feels like an opinion worth expressing.

I don't play Dwarf Fortress, but I am an absolute Sandcastle Builder addict, to a large extent because complexity management in the interface there goes so far into complexity for its own sake that it goes out the far side of stupid into awesome.

[the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh]

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

Elegant design allows you to make meaningful choices without spreadsheets.

I think I disagree that using spreadsheets to play the game is a problem because I see spreadsheets as part of the game and part of the fun.

Come to think of it, one of the computer games I have got most playing time out of (about 1000 hours and nowhere near done with it), kittensgame, essentially is a spreadsheet.

[Jiggy]

gnoams wrote:

Currently I see 5e as the Disney version of d&d, it's designed to be accessible for all ages, like g-pg rated film. Pathfinder is the pg13-r rated category, it uses more advanced ideas to be more engaging/interesting to an older audience. Each fills a different niche, and that is great. I hope pf2e remains a more advanced game. We don't need two versions of d&d made for kids.

There you go again. Pathfinder is more complicated to use than 5E (and it is absolutely okay to prefer that!) but that does not make it more "advanced".

An old wall-mounted crank phone is more complicated to make a call on than my smartphone, but my smartphone is the more advanced of the two.

Sometimes, simplicity of use is a direct result of "advanced" design.

[Arachnofiend]

Jiggy wrote:

gnoams wrote:

Currently I see 5e as the Disney version of d&d, it's designed to be accessible for all ages, like g-pg rated film. Pathfinder is the pg13-r rated category, it uses more advanced ideas to be more engaging/interesting to an older audience. Each fills a different niche, and that is great. I hope pf2e remains a more advanced game. We don't need two versions of d&d made for kids.

There you go again. Pathfinder is more complicated to use than 5E (and it is absolutely okay to prefer that!) but that does not make it more "advanced".

An old wall-mounted crank phone is more complicated to make a call on than my smartphone, but my smartphone is the more advanced of the two.

Sometimes, simplicity of use is a direct result of "advanced" design.

The problem with this analogy is that, in reality, Pathfinder is the smart phone. The more you know about the device, the more possibilities open up; you're rewarded for your system mastery with tons of extra stuff you can do beyond just "I make calls".

For a crank phone, or 5e... It's been stripped to the bone until you have exactly one option of what to do with it. There is no customization, there are no extra features, just the one exact purpose the device is built for.

[Bloodrealm]

That doesn't make the fact that PF1 is more advanced than 5E not true. 5E took PF1, gutted it almost entirely, filled in a couple of spots with 4E, and then left the rest empty.