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Small piddly circumstance bonuses being so widespread is bad for the game.

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For one thing, it has a very negative impact on a sense of progression and player buy in. Nobody likes having to balance 5 different unexciting feats, races, and class features. It makes the game overly complicated and messy.

People should be excited to take an option. Flipping through page after page of boring options that give you +1 to save DCs while doing backflips next to a goblin isn't going to do that. In fact it's going to do the opposite.

Please, PLEASE make the base feats in the core more interesting, especially at low level. So many are so terribly boring that they should be thrown out.
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Especially as circumstance bonuses don't stack anyway, so quite a bit of the time many of those bonuses are redundant.

I'm feeling this about a lot of the game (though it may be a bit different at higher levels): all the feats are feeble and my characters just don't seem to be any good at anything. Compare my PF1 3rd level Unrogue who has +14 Stealth, +8 initiative, TWF daggers and can use that combo to seriously shiv someone. In PF2, the equivalent rogue is just...meh.
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It goes beyond circumstance bonuses: the entire book needs half as many player options, and each of them need to be twice as powerful as the current ones. None of my choices feel exciting.
Scarab Sages

It's so dull I'm having a hard time getting people for a playtest game and I don't blame them
Dark Archive
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I do think it would be more rewarding of strategic gameplay if circumstance bonuses from different sources stacked. If my party has managed to flank and trip and blind the enemy, it should do more than just flat-footed.

If it's any benefit, my stance on this has softened quite a bit and I feel like I overreacted a good amount when I made this topic. I've ran 5 sessions and have played in a couple of level 12 sessions.
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Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Mudfoot wrote:
Especially as circumstance bonuses don't stack anyway, so quite a bit of the time many of those bonuses are redundant.

In PF1, circumstance bonuses did stack. Maybe whoever provided such a wide variety of circumstance bonuses forgot about that being changed in PF2?

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