Making the Game Playable at All Levels - Possible Pitfalls I See

[JDragon_ITTS]

As I understand it, one of the goals of PF2 is to address some of the challenges of playing at higher levels. I agree 100% that this is an issue that needs to be addressed, however I have some concerns about how it is being done. Please see my thoughts and let me know what you think and your own experiences.

Now for reference I have been playing "D&D" for 30+ years starting with the Red box (Elmore Cover) Basic set, up through 5th ed, with Pathfinder being my game of choice since it came out.

What it looks like has been done to accomplish the goal of making high level player easier is reducing the power level of characters over all and then spreading the power they get more evenly over those levels. This seems to have the biggest impact at lower levels which concerns me.

It seems like the changes are making the levels that get the most play less interesting and in turn possibly less fun. My reasoning behind this is that most new games start at 1st level or maybe 3rd depending on what story a GM is trying to tell. The game starts, you play through 1st, 2nd, 3rd level and then the holidays hit, or the GM gets busy at work (or any other number of real life things) and the game pauses or totally stops. At some point someone steps up or or maybe the GM comes back, but now the group wants to do something else or the GM has another cool idea and your back to 1st level with new characters thus never getting to those higher level and the cool things.

For me and I think others,I play because I want my characters to be able to do cool things, have cool powers and even cooler toys. The changes I'm seeing, some to streamline the system, some to make it more approachable and other to make higher level play easier seem to be taking these things away.

As I said above I agree higher level games can get unwieldy, difficult to play & run and something needs to be done. I personally don't see the way things are going as a great solution as it dilutes the play over all.

Off the top of my head I don't have any different ideas on how to fix high level play, but currently as I see the rules I wold rather keep the current system than dilute the system just to make levels that don't get played that often more playable.

I will be playing and running sessions of Doomsday Dawn and maybe find my concerns are moot in long term play, only time will tell and I didn't want to miss my opportunity to have my feedback heard.

Thanks for reading.

JD

[Syndrous]

I think it's more that the normal plethora of magic items is still small and piddly at this point, the playtest printed about 1/10 of the total magic items available from Paizo published materials.

I am a big fan of proficiency gated feats being more meaningful to make my high level players feel more impactful, use scaling feats and making them impactful would be an awesome.