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With all the grappling options available, one of my players can pretty consistently pin most things he encounters with a roll of an 11 or higher and it just grinds every encounter to a halt as even if the monster can escape, his pin rate is so high it doesn't really matter.
Do I need to just ban grappling as a tactic or is there some way to make this fun?
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Ranged and mobile monsters. Enemies wearing electrostatic field armor upgrades. Solarian enemies with corona and electrostatic fields combined who then supernova three rounds in. Spellcasters. Incorporeal monsters. Bosses mixed in with the mooks rather than obviously wielding different weapons and armor.
If they can break free easily, have them reverse the grapple instead of just freeing themselves. Maybe they can pin the player back.
Throw groups at the party who can ignore whoever the one player grappled and attack the rest of the party instead.
Or have the other enemies attack the guy who is grappling, who is now relatively defenseless against them.
How so? Multiple enemies could move up to try to flank the grappler, but they could do that to any melee fighter. Since the grappler doesn't gain the grappled condition, they aren't under any other kind of defense debuff.
If they have sufficient arms (and one of the most popular grappler races does), they may even still have a reach AoO against approaching enemies.
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Have you tried this?
As someone who has played a grappling character rather extensively, I would suggest two solutions:
From my experience, the biggest problems are that the pin rate is very high if you've sufficiently optimized, as you point out, its around 45% for on-level enemies. Just a somewhat lower pin rate will make grappling far less powerful without nuking the person's character from orbit.
Things I don't like to see when playing my grappling character include multiple-enemy encounters where grappling is no advantage over just attacking, spread out ranged enemies, and enemies with special defenses against grapplers.
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As someone who has played a grappling character rather extensively, I would suggest two solutions:
Change the threshold to pin a creature from KAC+13 to KAC+16
Swap out single creatures for multiple creatures From my experience, the biggest problems are that the pin rate is very high if you've sufficiently optimized, as you point out, its around 45% for on-level enemies. Just a somewhat lower pin rate will make grappling far less powerful without nuking the person's character from orbit.
This is exactly my issue - I dont mind GRAPPLING as a grappled creature has ways of fighting back without rendering the grapple useless - its the pin rate that's making things suck.
I will try simply raising the pin threshold and see how that helps.
If the player of that character is OK with having the character nerf'ed, then that should work well enough. If not, then it is going to cause a bit of hard feelings.
As Cellion said, playing a grappling character is already rather fun - especially when all of the encounters are susceptible to having grapple/pin be a win button.
If that one character is dominating the play and the other players are having less fun as a result, the better option is to design encounters that don't have 'take out this one enemy' as a win condition. Like others have pointed out, multiple enemies, and ranged enemies work well. Other options that I can think of: skill-based encounters like traps or social encounters, and battles on the run - where all the characters have to stay moving for one reason or another.
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It's pretty bad. When you consider the bonuses that a character that optimizes for grappling can stack, they can effectively grapple on EAC-2 and pin on EAC+3.
The vanguard I've been playing does not have a racial bonus to grapple, which makes it a little less terrible, but I still have started making a point of only pulling out the garrotte sometimes, to keep things from always going the same way, with the most prominent threat immediately shut down.