| dragonhunterq |
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Just an idle thought in reaction to another's comment, but in general I think I agree that it is easier to houserule something out than to houserule something in - I'm sure there are exceptions.
It's not going to stop me from telling you you the things I really don't want to see in 'my' pathfinder 2! :)
.. but I think I would rather see the rules for something I don't like that I can then ignore than have to try and create something - judging by past experience that won't turn out so well!
| Matthias W |
This is definitely one of those things where a lot rides on the "generally." Not wanting to bother with the alignment system has never dissuaded me from roleplaying out moral conflicts, because while alignment has never really provided any value added as far as I can tell, it's quiet and unobtrusive and doesn't get upset when you neglect it. By contrast, I've definitely shied away from certain builds or tactics in combat because they would have required me to interact with grappling rules. Even worse is when systems get balanced around rules that people tend to ignore, like spellbook copying rules or encumbrance.
Sometimes, math behind the scenes can affect how easy it is to ignore certain systems - for instance, the base 3e chassis is balanced (insert joke here) around a certain number of encounters, entailing a certain amount of treasure, per level; if you throw in automatic bonus progression, then treasure's influence on the math gets deëmphasized, and it becomes basically trivial to throw out much of the bookkeeping and advance levels by plot milestones or just keeping pace with when players are about to get bored. (Although experience is already one of the easier systems to handwave, fortunately.
In a game with hundreds of pages of rules, most tables aren't going to bother learning all the rules and will generally not even know when they're using houserules - compare how even a simple game like Monopoly has common houserules that people think are in the base game and that make the game worse for most players - so a lot of good design behind the curtains is in expanding the scope of this kind of easy ignorability.
| Bloodrealm |
It depends on how much of the system is "unified mechanics." You can't get rid of something you don't like very easily if it's inextricably tied to 5 other things. This is one of the ways I think PF1 is quite nice. Sure, there are a lot of different parts and some of them may not be the way you feel is the best way to implement them, but loads of those are mostly modular and modified/replaced pretty easily.