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Rich was a bad player. This is common for the first few sessions with a new player, but he stayed bad longer than most newbies. His goals for his character Kheld exceeded the abilities of a character of Kheld's level. He wanted Kheld to be able to do everything: fight, negotiate, solve mysteries, run a business, etc. He kept asking questions about character builds to optimize Kheld as a Renaissance man who was also the best fighter in the world. He multiclassing into investigator to get the skills he wanted. Eventually, I directed him to several build optimization guides on the internet.Rich sounds like a poor fit for TTRPGs in general as no system would meet his goals for his character at that low level and while many systems could let him dabble in mutliple skills at higher levels, this seems like a player who wouldn't be satisfied unless he was the best at everything he wanted his character to do. I feel the issue here is with Rich, not any TTRPG system he interacts with.
Rich slowly became a better player year by year. And he liked my roleplaying campaigns.
I do not want to reserve Pathfinder 2nd Edition to a top tier which only good players can play. I want less capable players to enjoy it, too. Rich made mistakes, but he was bright enough to understand when the other players explained the flaws in his logic.
In The Divinity Drive, final module of Iron Gods, Rich's character finally reached his goal. The security chief of the spaceship Divinity lent Rich's character Kheld a suit of Powered Armor. That is an artifact-level item and it made Kheld as overpowered as Rich wanted. Security chief Bastion was supposed to be an enemy, but our campaign got weird and he became an ally: Make a roll for existential philosophy (Divinity Drive spoiler).
Our next campaign was GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and Rich's character also messed up badly there. But the campaign after that was the PF2 public playtest and he did reasonably well. We switched to weekly boardgames until our first real PF2 campaign and Rich made a champion. A month later Rich developed brain cancer and he died 4 months after that at age 65.
Both Pathfinder 1st Edition and the beginnings of Pathfinder 2nd Edition made Rich happier in his last years, and I do not want to deny anyone that opportunity.
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Decoupling the fluff makes refluffung easier.
Does it? There's no reason you can't make your own fluff for monsters that already have established lore. Nobody is stopping you.
Characters are an investment of months to years of time as our average campaign reaches 15 to 17th level. I want the character I invest that much time in to be as top tier as I can make it.
I am truly not certain of how long the average group plays or the median level most reach in a campaign. If you're spending time making deliberately weak characters, you play enough that that would feel like a worthwhile expenditure of your time.
When I test out a new class or build, I want to max it out.
Yeah, my ground tended to like repeating a few adventures over and over again. A particular favourite was Red Hand of Doom, so they'd want to test new builds against it again and again, sometimes dropping characters after only a few weeks to start over again and test new builds. I'd make small changes here and there to throw off their assumptions about things, but didn't mind the ease of running familiar encounters for them to test things in.
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Rich slowly became a better player year by year. And he liked my roleplaying campaigns.
I do not want to reserve Pathfinder 2nd Edition to a top tier which only good players can play. I want less capable players to enjoy it, too. Rich made mistakes, but he was bright enough to understand when the other players explained the flaws in his logic.
In The Divinity Drive, final module of Iron Gods, Rich's character finally reached his goal. The security chief of the spaceship Divinity lent Rich's character Kheld a suit of Powered Armor. That is an artifact-level item and it made Kheld as overpowered as Rich wanted. Security chief Bastion was supposed to be an enemy, but our campaign got weird and he became an ally: Make a roll for existential philosophy (Divinity Drive spoiler).
Our next campaign was GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and Rich's character also messed up badly there. But the campaign after that was the PF2 public playtest and he did reasonably well. We switched to weekly boardgames until our first real PF2 campaign and Rich made a champion. A month later Rich developed brain cancer and he died 4 months after that at age 65.
Both Pathfinder 1st Edition and the beginnings of Pathfinder 2nd Edition made Rich happier in his last years, and I do not want to deny anyone that opportunity.
I don't think I'd do well with Rich at my table. I tend to push players to RP and get up to speed quickly. It's a flaw, but one not often exposed as I play with groups of long-term friends and avoid pick-up games where things may not play out to my tastes. This also extends to my liking of crunchier systems that take a while to master, I pick things up quickly and get bored once I can see the walls of a game's design closing in on me, 3.5 never reached that point by PF2 started out that way and only feels smaller as new additions fail to address my needs.
I'm sorry to hear that Rich has passed. 65 is too young for anybody.
Why should I have to buy two books to learn basic information about a monster? I'd rather pay more for a single book with a higher page count that gives me everything than a cut-back version with a required companion text.Using the rules, I would imagine.
There is an immense amount of lore and "fluff" for both monster families within the "fluff" books. There was a decoupling of the fluffier books and mechanical books back at launch.
Turns out that you ended up in the minority. There was a big thread about it years back.
Page count is indeed the problem here as are your personal preferences being an outlier. I was also a part of an out-group back during the time of fiction in the back of APs. I remember the announcement and while I do look back fondly on those times, I think it would be strange for me to argue that not having the fiction made it difficult for me to run the game.
The move to keeping the Core books mechanical and (for the most part) setting agnostic was a conscious choice and one informed by posters here on the forums and the consumer base. You can opine for the old days, but attributing an inability to correctly play the game to its loss is factually untrue.
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Page count is indeed the problem here as are your personal preferences being an outlier. I was also a part of an out-group back during the time of fiction in the back of APs. I remember the announcement and while I do look back fondly on those times, I think it would be strange for me to argue that not having the fiction made it difficult for me to run the game.
The move to keeping the Core books mechanical and (for the most part) setting agnostic was a conscious choice and one informed by posters here on the forums and the consumer base. You can opine for the old days, but attributing an inability to correctly play the game to its loss is factually untrue.
Page count isn't an issue if you just move to digital. Do you think WotC will be cutting content for page space as D&D Beyond continues to generate more and more revenue for them? Page space is only an issue if you're chained to doing things the old way and can't or won't pivot.
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Are you arguing to me or to Paizo? I imagine that they have more experience in the realm of publishing than I do. You can grab your soapbox, but I fear you won't find too many on your side to adopt more WotC policies.
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Are you arguing to me or to Paizo? I imagine that they have more experience in the realm of publishing than I do. You can grab your soapbox, but I fear you won't find too many on your side to adopt more WotC policies.
Both. You said page count is an issue, and I disagree as a PDF costs no more to publish at 110 pages than it would at 90. However, the reason we don't get PDF first publishing is a Paizo issue.
WotC has it's issues, like not letting their team produce the volume of work said team would like to make and handcuffing them on fixing core issues with the game, but they're a market leader for a reason.
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This is a tragic hill to die upon, but you have another thread for that, so I'll politely leave you with your capitalistic fantasies.
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Are you arguing to me or to Paizo? I imagine that they have more experience in the realm of publishing than I do. You can grab your soapbox, but I fear you won't find too many on your side to adopt more WotC policies.Both. You said page count is an issue, and I disagree as a PDF costs no more to publish at 110 pages than it would at 90. However, the reason we don't get PDF first publishing is a Paizo issue.
WotC has it's issues, like not letting their team produce the volume of work said team would like to make and handcuffing them on fixing core issues with the game, but they're a market leader for a reason.
It costs more in man hours to produce.
Then someone like you would come along nitpicking about the digital product provides more than the hardcopy product complaining Paizo won't spend more money to publish a bigger book to have the same content as the digital book.
The endless complaining and manufacturing of problems that don't exist.
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Are you arguing to me or to Paizo? I imagine that they have more experience in the realm of publishing than I do. You can grab your soapbox, but I fear you won't find too many on your side to adopt more WotC policies.Both. You said page count is an issue, and I disagree as a PDF costs no more to publish at 110 pages than it would at 90. However, the reason we don't get PDF first publishing is a Paizo issue.
WotC has it's issues, like not letting their team produce the volume of work said team would like to make and handcuffing them on fixing core issues with the game, but they're a market leader for a reason.
It costs more in man hours to produce.
Then someone like you would come along nitpicking about the digital product provides more than the hardcopy product complaining Paizo won't spend more money to publish a bigger book to have the same content as the digital book.
The endless complaining and manufacturing of problems that don't exist.
Up the costs of print books and have them set up for print on demand, and then make your main product the PDFs.
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Im happier with the current set up. I get the subscription they send me the hardcopy and i get the pdf included in the cost. I dont want to pay more for hardcopies if i dont have to.
Actually books like howl of the wild go deeper into creatures. They do a section for hydras in general for example and then provide several hydras released in that book with their individual descriptions.
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(Alghollthu snip)
Hey, just chiming in to say that the difference between the amount of lore text provided for the 3.5 Aboleth and the PF2 Alghollthu is actually a lot more equal than you're presenting!
The 3.5 Aboleth is a more-or-less standalone monster- maybe some variant stat block changes. So, the lore is all right there. You're comparing with the Alghollthu Master (Aboleth), which is just one creature of a category. Grabbing the category description as well...
In bygone millennia, aquatic monsters known as alghollthus used their occult powers to conquer and rule vast swaths of the world. Alghollthus shaped their servitors and other creatures using mental manipulation and physically transformative magic. The rulers of the alghollthus, the so-called “veiled masters,” further shaped entire societies by assuming the forms of those they controlled.
In time, the alghollthus grew frustrated with upstart surface societies and meddling gods. They used incredible magical power to call forth a cataclysm, hoping to destroy the rebellious societies they'd manipulated. Yet they miscalculated the will to survive of those they treated as their pawns, and in time the world recovered, this time free of alghollthu influence.
Today, the alghollthus have mostly remained within the deep aquatic realms where they still rule without question. Yet they have not abandoned their plots entirely, and the reemergence of servitors like faceless stalkers suggests that the alghollthus have turned their hateful eyes to the surface once again.
Ancient Influences
The veiled masters influenced the ancient Azlanti, and it was they who invoked the apocalypse of Earthfall to destroy Azlant when humanity grew too prideful. That this act also called down the magical Starstone, an artifact capable of transforming mortals into gods, was an ironic turn of events considering the alghollthus' intolerance for faith.Other Alghollthus
While the veiled masters are the rulers of alghollthu society, they are not the most powerful of their kind. Greater, more mysterious creatures that function as organic thought networks, immense aquatic engines of war, or specialized extractors of forgotten secrets dwell among their sunken cities. Meanwhile, the world above remains infested with creatures that were originally created by the alghollthus but have long since drifted away from their aquatic progenitors to become their own sinister monstrosities.
So instead of six paragraphs versus one (I'm not counting the separate sentence about languages, since that's part of the stat block), it's six paragraphs versus six, with one being specific to the individual type of Alghollthu. The 3.5 version gives more of a physical description and behavior, while PF2 relies on the art and specific abilities to carry that. PF2 gives more historical and societal information, while 3.5 gives more ecological details. There's certainly a difference in focus, but the actual amount being provided is pretty similar.
It's the same deal with Hobgoblins, where the details are provided in the category, and each individual Hobgoblin statblock just contains enough to distinguish them from the others. I don't know where you're checking, but Archives of Nethys puts that information underneath the statblock so that it isn't something you have to check separately. In the book itself, it'll be at the front of the creature's section and hard to miss.
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Whole lot of post incoming.
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To call this homogenization is to assume that the only way to have differentiation is numbers. Sure, the numbers in character creation are homogenized in PF2, and that's not the only way to achieve balance in theory - though I also have never seen a game with the amount of crunch that PF2 has be anything approaching balanced in the long-term without reducing pre-combat numbers to pretty small bands. But it's theoretically possible to have massively different numbers and balance it out, especially if you only publish a small amount of content to ensure it's all carefully triple-checked and playtested. But the whole point of PF2 is to try and put the focus on your active choices in combat; allowing the pre-combat numbers to be massively divergent is really running the risk of locking you into whatever your numbers dictate. If my champion's AC is massively higher than all the other martials at the cost of having terrible offensive capabilities, or if my cleric's healing spells are massively better than everyone else's healing at the cost of being terrible at other sorts of magic, then I'm already locked into things extremely strongly. I like that the champion in my Stolen Fate table is a sword + shield champion and mostly goes pretty defensively with 1 strike/turn, but in the fights against fiends recently they've been incentivized to strike 2/turn and neglect those defences a little because their Holy Avenger is really effective at triggering weaknesses.
I think this is looking in the wrong place in a few ways.
-One has to do with encounter math and variety. I deal with that a lot, a lot, a lot later in the post. Suffice it to say that I feel like the encounter builder is pretty constrained in what it allows.
-A common complaint with the game is that it tends to funnel effects into +2s or -2s, instead of making them feel unique or giving them unique mechanics. This doesn't really change that.
-Ultimately, almost all martial damage is funneled into checks against AC. This... has issues, and closes off a lot of design space. The removal of touch AC and flat AC is understandable in this design, but it hurt gameplay variety and spell attacks both. This, oddly, is something 4E did better than PF2E; I feel like I remember more abilities that hit Fort/Will/Ref DCs there, and I half suspect they didn't put such things in the game because they were afraid of it looking similar to 4e. The end result is homogenization (and casters just being harder to play than martials for no obvious reason).
I also have never felt like PF2E's in-combat options were that interesting, personally, so shifting the burden to them is a net negative. To me, the game is—as you noted it can be—pretty repetitive, and the good choices are usually pretty obvious. I'm rarely unsure of what to do or asking myself how to handle a situation. About the biggest source of interest is remembering consumable items and item abilities.
===
snip
I'd just like to say:
It had been a good long while since I'd actually seen a high level martial's DPR in play, and I'd actually forgotten how high it was until a friend reminded me of when our unchained monk shredded a wendigo in what I believe was a single good full round attack. So I went back and double checked some things. 10x HP is, in fact, not that extreme. Pretty reasonable to challenge some levels of optimization, even.
I had remembered mythic characters easily hitting 600+ a round, but I had entirely blanked on how much non-mythic characters were doing.
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"In PF2, you need to optimize in order to succeed," versus "You can make a decent character in PF1 if you have a patient group and have a character build session during session zero, I see no reason that you need to optimize," is some pretty dramatic doublethink. Like, I LOVE PF1, but you'd have to have the most shallow experience with the game to say that it required no optimization and that any character could succeed. And that's not necessarily bad if that's the sort of game you're looking for.
FWIW, I know people running PF1 who still do rolled stats (and you have to pick your class before rolling!) and have extreme diegetic restrictions on what is and isn't allowed in terms of gear, spells, etc. Optimizing is extremely hard, if not impossible, in that environment. It's not what I'd consider the "vanilla" game by a longshot. But it's worth remembering that what most of us consider bizarre and unusual gameplay is quite normal for some people. And frankly, I feel like PF1 almost works better out of the box for people like this.
I bring this up to say that PF1 experiences are so variable that "you must optimize!" and "you don't really have to optimize at all" are true of tables in PF1, much moreso than they're true of the system itself. If I'm remembering correctly, the APs were intentionally tuned for groups of t3/t4 classes to be able to clear them, as well—at least past a certain point.
In PF2, there's still table variance on how much optimization is required; the optimization ceiling is simply lower and the floor is mostly higher. But the encounter builder expects a certain level of party power to work correctly, and that power is closer to the available ceiling than the floor. So I think it's fair to say the game sort of... expects you to play to win and make all your build choices to win. In contrast, I don't personally think that expectation is as pervasive in PF1's design. PF2E pushes a very mechanically oriented playstyle and build in its rules and design; PF1E is a bit more agnostic, and frankly serves low optimization tables much better at a baseline.
There's also a lot to say about the difficulty of early 2E APs misleading people about the system's required optimization level, when it comes to this. But we've talked about it at length in other threads.
Give the games their credit for what they do. Arguing 5 years into the game's lifecycle that the core math of the game isn't interesting is very much a subjective statement and it could just be a romanticization of a previous system.
It's subjective, yes. I wouldn't say it's a romanticization, though. I have never been able to shake the feeling that PF2E's math is just... coarse. Difficulty adjustment never feels granular enough to me. And I've always noticed that people have a poor idea of what numbers "represent" compared to 1E, as well. I see a whole lot of "wow, my bonus is high!" from people whose bonuses are not, in fact, high relative to what's possible at the level and what they might be asked to do with the skill. I see a lot less of that in 1E. people have a more intuitive grasp on what they're good and bad at relative to other party members and what the game will ask of them.
PF2E's math is very functional, but it has never felt particularly elegant to me, nor does it feel like it does a good job expressing or representing anything. The numbers are just really good at creating discrete power bands.
There's not much that can be said when one is looking to remove something that has gotten so much acclaim over the years.
To be blunt, the encounter difficulty working mostly as advertised is one of the only things the game system does to truly differentiate itself from other games in the DnD lineage. (The 3A system is great, but not actually that different from the old one.) The game math is also one of the most abrasive things about the system. It's not odd that people would dislike it, given how many things are changed for the sake of achieving balance when compared to other d20 fantasy games.
Paizo's AP support is—to me, at least—a far greater factor in the game's value proposition than any of its actual mechanics. It's why I run the game when I do, and why the tables I play at adopted the game.
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A bit late to this thread, but from the GM side, I actually found the new action economy liberating. Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but back when I was GMing 1E, I always had a feeling that the NPCs could only do one thing. Move an Strike, do one gimmick ability, or do a full attack per turn. I recall vividly having my players fight a black dragon and then realizing that the dragon could barely do anything within the 1E action economy. 1E always felt to me like each creature had a prescribed list of specific actions to do due to what I consider its 2 1/2 action system. And the simple act of opening up that half action into a full, flexible action gave me a feeling that I could really play around with creatures beyond the prescribed methods, and tailor more bespoke reactions for my players from the creature.
This is an odd one. I disagree, but I don't think you're wrong to have that impression. Most of the things that make it feel otherwise are buried in the reams of options.
-There are feats and class options that give you alternate uses for your move actions (e.g. combat advice, greater grapple; barb intimidating glare, witch cackle).
-Furthermore, you were only committed to doing a full round attack once you attacked a second time, so you could attack once and then decide if you should move or spend that action another way. And many things that would be 2A in PF2E, like cleave or vital strike, are a standard action in 1E. (Those things are worse than full rounding, generally, but yeah.)
-The free step you got when using your move action for something other than moving helped significantly with this.
-Many builds and classes were able to take advantage of swift/immediate actions fairly effectively (e.g. cornugon smash build), and being able to use your swift action is an important part of optimizing anyways.
-Swift/immediate actions were divorced from attacks of opportunity, meaning that using cornugon smash or something else was more like using your third action to demoralize after using 2A to full round than spending 3A to full round and using your reaction to demoralize.
-Several combat maneuevers are usable as part of a full-round attack.
I would say your additional options open up much earlier in PF2E on most builds (from level 1!), which is a real improvement. But the options are still there in PF1E.
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Have you... actually fought a decent variety of PF2e enemies? Because they do exactly that. Taking just from Abomination Vaults alone, the early floors have zebub and wisp (miss chance), golem and shadow (immunities and resistances), the bloodsiphon and the canker cultists (large hp pools via self healing), werewolf (regeneration) and of course oozes. Oh, and the mitflits have Bane, can't forget that.
Purely from a flavour perspective, PF2e has as much variety in enemy threat profiles for a given level as 3.PF. Actually, more, because they aren't bound by the false monster-PC symmetry 3.PF suffers from, meaning you can get fun stuff like gibbering mouthers without bizarre contortions. The only 'difference' is that barring extremely terrible build choices, a poorly matched PF2e PC can still wail away for 1/5th of their expected DPR whereas in PF1e it's 0
I may make a separate thread about this, but after talking about this with someone, I've come to the conclusion that many of my frustrations with the system have to do with the implicit principle that monsters of the same level are fungible for the purposes of encounter building.
PF1E/3.5 says they're fungible, but everyone figures out almost instantly that's just false. Some monsters are clearly designed for more supportive roles in a combat, some are primary attackers, some are just nuisances. Some are high threat glass cannons with no defense, others are just weak damage sponges. And the thing is, these monsters will nominally be the same level and CR. Putting them in an encounter by themselves will result in widely variable difficulty. The primary attacker will be a much harder fight than the glass cannon, probably. And that's fine. The designs are meant to complement each other. (This is, in part, a natural consequence of having some amount of symmetry between monsters and PCs.)
PF2E makes a point of ensuring monsters of the same level are actually fungible, for the most part; and even when they're not exactly fungible, the way the xp allocation works keeps you from having much going on anyways. To explain:
-The game generally recommends you stick to moderate encounters, and save severe and extreme encounters for more climactic moments. So let's discuss moderates.
-The most enemies you can have in a moderate is 8 APL-4 enemies, each of which will individually crumple to AoE or crits in less than two rounds. APL-3? 5 enemies max. And the counts go down severely if you add in *any* enemies at party level. A single APL+0 enemy caps you to 5 total; the APL+0 and 4 weak APL-4 enemies. Having an APL+1 enemy caps you to 3 total, and a single APL+2 eats the budget.
-Let's say you want a buffing enemy and some lackeys. If you want to buff a lot of enemies, they have to be individually weak, to the point the buffs may not even affect their critrate; and yet if you want the buffing enemy to withstand any sustained fire, they start to eat up most or all of the encounter budget.
-Furthermore, let's look at the monster building tables. Even if we pick an APL-4 creature with a high or extreme to-hit for its level, it's only around the mark of a low to-hit for our current level. And monsters with higher damage will usually have lower to-hits.
The end result is it's hard to make a moderate encounter out of this that feels too threatening. It would be ideal, sometimes, to have more monsters that have to-hit and damage more closely matched to an on-level encounter, but also have worse initiative and die quicker. This is easier at low level. But since the monsters get beefier as you level, this becomes less and less plausible; APL-4 moderate HP becomes pretty close to the current level's low HP as the game progresses. The game just isn't designed with this kind of thing in mind. There are all kinds of threat profiles the game can't really create if enemies have to be roughly similar in threat level when standalone, and it frustrates me to no end.
If you want something like an APL+2 buffing monster with weak attacks for their level and good defense, and 4 lackies with the best threat profile you can muster, that's... an extreme encounter, and the lackies are still capped to APL-2. That's how restrictive the encounter builder is, here. You end up with a punching bag of a wannabe bard and enemies that can be hit by incap spells.
The game puts up a lot of safeguards to get its set-and-forget balance, and I really feel those rails every time I interact with the encounter building.
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Paizo's AP support is—to me, at least—a far greater factor in the game's value proposition than any of its actual mechanics. It's why I run the game when I do, and why the tables I play at adopted the game.
The APs are great. They were especially great in PF1/3E given the amount of work to generate a stat set for enemies.
But another advantage we have found with PF2 is it is much easier to do your own adventures and to adapt old modules to the PF2 ruleset.
One of our DMs adapted the old Against the Giants module for PF2.
One DM builds his own adventures rather than uses an AP or module. He's found PF2 challenge system to make this easy as he can grab a creature or NPD, make some quick changes, and make it challenging.
The accurate challenge system makes DMing anything easier to do.
It's also extremely easy to modify existing NPCs or monsters.
Write your own powers for a monster using the action and challenge system.
I have found it easier and better in every way to create combat and non-combat encounters in PF2.
I have not found it less dynamic or interesting than any edition of the game as the RP part of what happens with successful rolls is always far more important than the mechanics. You can still very much design the RP portion to make it entertaining, interesting, and dynamic. It's much easier to do with the more accurate challenge system.
I don't feel constrained at all with encounter creation in PF2. In fact, I feel it freed me to be very creative in monster creation knowing the base statistics will provide a sufficient challenge to the PCs.
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Are you arguing to me or to Paizo? I imagine that they have more experience in the realm of publishing than I do. You can grab your soapbox, but I fear you won't find too many on your side to adopt more WotC policies.Both. You said page count is an issue, and I disagree as a PDF costs no more to publish at 110 pages than it would at 90. However, the reason we don't get PDF first publishing is a Paizo issue.
WotC has it's issues, like not letting their team produce the volume of work said team would like to make and handcuffing them on fixing core issues with the game, but they're a market leader for a reason.
Brand name and momentum. That’s the reason,
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If you're talking actual threat level, that's a good thing isn't it? It is good that the encounters Paizo rates as moderate are actually moderate difficulty.
The complaint is more that I can't make a great version of the encounter within the moderate budget, if that makes sense. An APL+0 buffer and 4 APL-4 enemies is going to have the buffed enemies feel more toothless than I'd ideally like.
Like, let's say you have some enemies with on-level damage but very low initiative and poor enough defense they die to 2A from a martial a good 80% of the time. Those enemies can be a credible threat if left alone, but since they can die on the first turn of combat—and sometimes without doing anything—it means they're not actually contributing much to the encounter's difficulty in the longterm. They exist to provide consequences if the party doesn't focus them. They're a bit of a scare. You could use them to make an encounter that's not really more dangerous than the one the game currently provides—heck, it might even be less dangerous—but it'd have a distinct feel that I'd like to be able to throw at a party.
It's not smoke and mirrors, since these enemies will indeed hurt you if they live. But it's definitely a bit of GM sleight of hand. And the ability to provide that kind of dynamic (and others) is valuable, in my book.
...this is not a core PF2E engine problem, it's an I-Need-A-Build-A-Bear-Monster-Generator problem. I.e. something that lets you explore weirder tradeoffs in AC vs. to-hit vs. HP vs. special abilities etc. And maybe an expanded monster handbook with published 'beastie groups' of a certain encounter difficulty as a group rather than as individuals. Or where the monsters are categorized ("support", "tank", "cannon" etc.) and then the book gives advice on what to add in with what to make a level-balanced encounter.
Eh, you could frame it that way if you wanted. I see it as an engine problem because all the content follows that mold on purpose and the encounter and monster building rules are designed around it. But you're right. You could certainly have an Advanced Monster Guide with Advanced Encounter Building Guidelines or somesuch, yeah.
I mean... if you have enough system mastery in 3.PF to pick out the 'right' monsters for the difficulty you want (which you are given no useful advice - there are glass cannon-looking enemies that secretly have bonkers defenses and 'primary attackers' that can be rendered incapable of attacking by mundane geometry, and certain categories of sensibly-put-together monsters are completely lacking in one aspect or another), you have the system mastery to tweak the monsters in PF2e to have higher damage and lower hp.
Yes, though I feel PF2E has a feel to the system (and the community surrounding it) that makes me prefer to avoid homebrewing too much. I'll also admit that running games on Foundry makes it a pain, as well.
Still, my Season of Ghosts group might have some mean words for their DM in the future. I may start experimenting with some pretty cursed levers, like:
-enemies with strong offense that are automatically crit if they're hit at all, or enemies with save /downgrade/ effects
-enemies with low HP and AC generally
-enemies that have high defense but very poor offense (possibly with some kind of mechanic to accelerate the fight against them once they're the only enemies left, like DR or AC that reduces over time)
-enemies with low HP and AC but crit immunity, or fortification
-enemies with obnoxious 1/day abilities going into more combats
I might look into making templated forms of some of these for the purposes of testing, honestly. It'll probably be a bit clunky to test and try out without making entirely new enemies. But given how much it could improve system satisfaction for me as a DM, it's probably worth it regardless.
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The OP's complaints about gameplay really kind of fascinate me, because I had the opposite take to such a high degree I have trouble even understanding it.
I have a bunch of issues with PF2, but like- ... PF1 is almost defined as a game by how narrow the in-play options are.
Every martial is going to full attack every round past low levels (sometimes when you first get your second attack it's not quite worth it, but not long after that... and if you're doing some gimmick fighting style you might not even be free for the first five levels) because it provides monstrously better returns than doing anything else. It doesn't matter if you're a daring, agile swashbuckler, a hardened fighter, a veteran archer, a desperado gunslinger, a druid transformed into a dinosaur, you're going to hit your funny make as many attacks as possible in a single turn button every turn unless you're incapable of it.
Spellcasters have more options, but a lot of build tools and design elements still revolve around brute forcing a winning strategy that applies in all circumstances, both because that's how build resources are often allocated and because there's no reason to play to the encounter if you already have a winning strategy.
It's not that I'm trying to discredit the OP or invalidate their experiences it's more that I just cannot comprehend it because the thing they're talking about is such a basic staple of PF1 and so much conceptually less relevant in PF2 (at least between classes, individual classes can be overly rigid, but at least they tend to be rigid in different ways unlike PF1).
The end result is it's hard to make a moderate encounter out of this that feels too threatening.
But encounter budget is a factor of difficulty. Aren't you essentially saying that you can't build an easy encounter that's hard?
It seems you're asking for something definitionally impossible. If you want a harder encounter you need to build a harder encounter.
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I may make a separate thread about this, but after talking about this with someone, I've come to the conclusion that many of my frustrations with the system have to do with the implicit principle that monsters of the same level are fungible for the purposes of encounter building.Have you... actually fought a decent variety of PF2e enemies? Because they do exactly that. Taking just from Abomination Vaults alone, the early floors have zebub and wisp (miss chance), golem and shadow (immunities and resistances), the bloodsiphon and the canker cultists (large hp pools via self healing), werewolf (regeneration) and of course oozes. Oh, and the mitflits have Bane, can't forget that.
Purely from a flavour perspective, PF2e has as much variety in enemy threat profiles for a given level as 3.PF. Actually, more, because they aren't bound by the false monster-PC symmetry 3.PF suffers from, meaning you can get fun stuff like gibbering mouthers without bizarre contortions. The only 'difference' is that barring extremely terrible build choices, a poorly matched PF2e PC can still wail away for 1/5th of their expected DPR whereas in PF1e it's 0
Yes, please make that thread. I often make threads for side discussions like these, but the topic I would chose would probably differ from yours.
PF1E/3.5 says they're fungible, but everyone figures out almost instantly that's just false. Some monsters are clearly designed for more supportive roles in a combat, some are primary attackers, some are just nuisances. Some are high threat glass cannons with no defense, others are just weak damage sponges. And the thing is, these monsters will nominally be the same level and CR. Putting them in an encounter by themselves will result in widely variable difficulty. The primary attacker will be a much harder fight than the glass cannon, probably. And that's fine. The designs are meant to complement each other. (This is, in part, a natural consequence of having some amount of symmetry between monsters and PCs.)
PF2E makes a point of ensuring monsters of the same level are actually fungible, for the most part; and even when they're not exactly fungible, the way the xp allocation works keeps you from having much going on anyways. To explain:
-The game generally recommends you stick to moderate encounters, and save severe and extreme encounters for more climactic moments. So let's discuss moderates.
-The most enemies you can have in a moderate is 8 APL-4 enemies, each of which will individually crumple to AoE or crits in less than two rounds. APL-3? 5 enemies max. And the counts go down severely if you add in *any* enemies at party level. A single APL+0 enemy caps you to 5 total; the APL+0 and 4 weak APL-4 enemies. Having an APL+1 enemy caps you to 3 total, and a single APL+2 eats the budget.
-Let's say you want a buffing enemy and some lackeys. If you want to buff a lot of enemies, they have to be individually weak, to the point the buffs may not even affect their critrate; and yet if you want the buffing enemy to withstand any sustained fire, they start to eat up most or all of the encounter budget.
-Furthermore, let's look at the monster building tables. Even if we pick an APL-4 creature with a high or extreme to-hit for its level, it's only around the mark of a low to-hit for our current level. And monsters with higher damage will usually have lower to-hits.
I have repeated those Moderate-Threat recommendations in my thread Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters. But in my campaigns, I often set up back-to-back Moderate Threats or a stream of enemies that delivers a new Low Threat every two rounds. This lets me throw lots more Level-3 enemies at the PCs.
The fungibility of monsters is an interesting point. It means that we can calculate how difficult the monster will be to defeat. It does not mean that the monsters feel the same in combat. One number cannot describe much.
Futhermore, I have had variety in combat without variety in opponents. I repeatedly threw Hobgoblin Soldiers against the party in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. The 2nd module created some higher-level hobgoblins for fighting the party at 4th and 5th level, but that did not feel right, so I grouped 4 Hobgoblin Soldiers together into a Large 5th-level troop unit that I called a Hobgobli Troop. High hit points, low AC, fewer attacks with a higher attack bonus. Later I grouped 4 Hobgoblin troops into a 9th-level Hobgoblin Formation. It let the players feel like they were fighting the same army, but more of them at once. The goal of the adventure was not combat as a sport but combat to save their villages from invasion. So against the Ironfang Legion, most of their opponents were the same, except for three varieties across three ranges of levels, and the players liked that. But they had variety in ambushing patrols on the road, rescuing villages from occupying hobgoblins, taking down hobgoblin garrisons, defeating the assault on Longshadow by 20 Hobgoblin Formations with the aid of Longshadow archers they trained, etc.
The end result is it's hard to make a moderate encounter out of this that feels too threatening. It would be ideal, sometimes, to have more monsters that have to-hit and damage more closely matched to an on-level encounter, but also have worse initiative and die quicker. This is easier at low level. But since the monsters get beefier as you level, this becomes less and less plausible; APL-4 moderate HP becomes pretty close to the current level's low HP as the game progresses. The game just isn't designed with this kind of thing in mind. There are all kinds of threat profiles the game can't really create if enemies have to be roughly similar in threat level when standalone, and it frustrates me to no end.
Moderate Threats are not supposed to be threatening. They are the weakest threat that feels like a real fight, so the party has to stay on their toes during the encounter. An adventuring day can have several Moderate Threats because the party does not have to consume significant resources during the fight. A seriously threatening fight, such as Severe Threat, forces the spellcasters to use their highest ranked spells and the martial characters will be so low in hit points that they need healing magic. Too many Severe Threats would exhaust the party beyond what 10-minute rest and recuperation periods can restore.
But on a day when the party will have only one encounter, Severe Threat is fine.
If you want something like an APL+2 buffing monster with weak attacks for their level and good defense, and 4 lackies with the best threat profile you can muster, that's... an extreme encounter, and the lackies are still capped to APL-2. That's how restrictive the encounter builder is, here. You end up with a punching bag of a wannabe bard and enemies that can be hit by incap spells.
Putting 5 enemies against a 4-member party and one of those enemies is definitely more powerful that than any party member and the other enemies are not totally useless--what do you expect? It will be a tough fight that the party could lose.
But my players have defeated Beyond-Extreme Threats. They most often used a divide-and-conquer strategy after carefully scouting the situation. One Extreme Threat becomes two back-to-back Moderate Threats when divided. One Beyond-Extreme Threat can become a stream of Moderate and Low Threats.
The game puts up a lot of safeguards to get its set-and-forget balance, and I really feel those rails every time I interact with the encounter building.
I have dug deeper into the restrictive math and learned how to manipulate it for more freedom. And my players are quite clever about tactics.
I have been reading about investing lately, and "Set and Forget" is lamented as an underperforming investing strategy. Has the phrase been used elsewhere?
But my players have defeated Beyond-Extreme Threats. They most often used a divide-and-conquer strategy after carefully scouting the situation. One Extreme Threat becomes two back-to-back Moderate Threats when divided. One Beyond-Extreme Threat can become a stream of Moderate and Low Threats.
This even holds true at level 1.
I threw a 280 xp encounter at my players the other day for a side game to our main campaign.It consisted of a level 2 spellcaster 3 level -1 lackies and 4 level one enemies that attacked if someone came close enough to them.
The terrain had a 10ft center path dividing the encounter and the players could begin this encounter on either side or on the center path.
It was harrowing and one character did almost rip up character sheet die but they won.
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I think this is looking in the wrong place in a few ways.
-One has to do with encounter math and variety. I deal with that a lot, a lot, a lot later in the post. Suffice it to say that I feel like the encounter builder is pretty constrained in what it allows.
-A common complaint with the game is that it tends to funnel effects into +2s or -2s, instead of making them feel unique or giving them unique mechanics. This doesn't really change that.
-Ultimately, almost all martial damage is funneled into checks against AC. This... has issues, and closes off a lot of design space. The removal of touch AC and flat AC is understandable in this design, but it hurt gameplay variety and spell attacks both. This, oddly, is something 4E did better than PF2E; I feel like I remember more abilities that hit Fort/Will/Ref DCs there, and I half suspect they didn't put such things in the game because they were afraid of it looking similar to 4e. The end result is homogenization (and casters just being harder to play than martials for no obvious reason).I also have never felt like PF2E's in-combat options were that interesting, personally, so shifting the burden to them is a net negative. To me, the game is—as you noted it can be—pretty repetitive, and the good choices are usually pretty obvious. I'm rarely unsure of what to do or asking myself how to handle a situation. About the biggest source of interest is remembering consumable items and item abilities.
I'm not sure that a common complaint is that the game funnels effects into +2s or -2s, I've barely seen that discussed, outside of some people's frustration with bonuses and penalties not stacking. I don't think the wording you've outlined is a reasonable complaint - I feel like PF2 goes out of its way to avoid giving mathematical bonuses. If we look at some random list of abilities, like lets say the 1st and 2nd level barbarian feats, the options include:
- Passive abilities without any maths behind them at all (better vision, being able to intimidate things in a rage and without speaking, doing a different elemental damage when raging, ignore restrictions on getting benefits from re-raging in combat)- Active abilities that don't give you bonuses (or the bonuses aren't the focus) but give you different options (let you take a moment to concentrate, move a great distance and still attack, maintain full move speed and bust through terrain, risk all your remaining rage damage on one big hit, frighten an enemy if you hit them, follow someone attempting to escape, resist frighten and sickened)
- Active abilities that primarily give you numerical bonuses (adrenaline rush is a permanent bonus on doing heavy lifting things, draconic arrogance boosts your emotion saves, raging thrower stacks with everything but boosts your thrown weapon damage)
That's 3 out of the 15 that meaningfully engage in changing modifiers, while the vast majority give you different ways of engaging with the game. That's my experience for the vast majority of classes as well, the game really does focus on trying to give you a variety of ways to engage with combats, and those methods are rarely just different numerical bonuses. The fact that the primary way to engage with non-AC defences as a martial requires active investment is a problem, I agree - I tend to play martials who have a variety of options for targeting different defences via either things like feinting/demoralize/bon mot/stealth/combat maneuvers, the fact that you need to know those options exist and invest in them can lead to people building characters that don't have a great deal of options available. I don't think touch or flatfooted AC would help here, however - just giving martials a different way of debuffing AC isn't going to address concerns about being unable to target other defences. This is also something that different classes can help with, and post-Core classes have tended to be better at - inventors, thaumaturge, exemplars, and swashbucklers are all much better at letting you get meaningful advantages out of targeting other defences.
All that being said, if you don't enjoy the in-combat options, I don't think PF2 is really the game that you should be spending your time playing. There are many excellent games out there, and PF2's focus and key area of advantage is making tactical combat interesting and focusing on it - I'd happily encourage you to try varying combats in a way that encourages tactical flexibility (something the APs are often bad at), but if the fundamental baseline of the system isn't interesting to you, why not play some of the many other good ttRPGs out there?
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I'll probably address the monster stuff whenever I write up the thread for it.
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I'm not sure that a common complaint is that the game funnels effects into +2s or -2s, I've barely seen that discussed, outside of some people's frustration with bonuses and penalties not stacking.
The vast majority of the teamwork people so highly praise the game for revolves around doling out +1s, +2s, -1s, and -2s.
...The fact that the primary way to engage with non-AC defences as a martial requires active investment is a problem, I agree - I tend to play martials who have a variety of options for targeting different defences via either things like feinting/demoralize/bon mot/stealth/combat maneuvers, the fact that you need to know those options exist and invest in them can lead to people building characters that don't have a great deal of options available.
You indirectly point it out right here. What is feint? A -2. Demoralize? -1. Bon Mot? -2. Stealth? Hidden, and -2 (from off-guard). Most combat maneuvers you will actually perform inflict off-guard, so yep, another -2.
Rage is literally an additional 2 damage at a baseline.
The vast majority of your class's innate progression is literally +2s (proficiency upgrades, weapon specialization, etc).
I don't think the wording you've outlined is a reasonable complaint - I feel like PF2 goes out of its way to avoid giving mathematical bonuses. If we look at some random list of abilities, like lets say the 1st and 2nd level barbarian feats, the options include:
Admittedly, a lot of what I'm talking about isn't feat choices and is instead play, especially third actions or 2A activities that incorporate maneuvers. And some of it is the pressure I feel as a DM from the game's design principles—clever player ideas and requests can't be parsed in a way that outstrips what the game would actually offer unless it's a unique circumstance and I can't expect it to be repeatable, so if you're getting any bonus at all, it's probably a +1 or +2 circumstance bonus. I also feel like, in general, a lot of conditions boil down to straightforward penalties in a manner I find unsatisfying.
Separately, I do feel a depressing amount of feats and headline class features boil down to pure action compression, through either "do these three predefined actions in the space of two" or "do these two predefined actions in the space of one." But that's something different. Those abilities are typically very powerful and also extremely unexciting. (I think the amount of people who just go, "That's it?" when they see summoner's Act Together should let you know this is not intuitive design and not the kind of thing that tends to get people excited. Act Together is so strong it carries the whole class, so that's... yeah.)
If I want to directly address the 1st/2nd level barb feats...
---Passive abilities without any maths behind them at all (better vision, being able to intimidate things in a rage and without speaking, doing a different elemental damage when raging, ignore restrictions on getting benefits from re-raging in combat)
Darkvision is a pure passive, yeah. Raging Intimidate... lets you do an action that gives enemies a -1 while raging, and gives you the skill feats you would take anyways if you were leveling intimidate. Elemental damage is about your elemental damage bonus (which is 2+2 more from the instinct). Rerage isn't about modifiers, yeah.
----Active abilities that don't give you bonuses (or the bonuses aren't the focus) but give you different options (let you take a moment to concentrate, move a great distance and still attack, maintain full move speed and bust through terrain, risk all your remaining rage damage on one big hit, frighten an enemy if you hit them, follow someone attempting to escape, resist frighten and sickened)
"The bonuses aren't the focus" is a bit of sleight of hand, there, particularly for Shake It Off (which is entirely about getting rid of penalties) and Intimidating Strike (which exists entirely so you can inflict a -1 status penalty with your attack bonus). Furious Finish is entirely about the damage bonus, but it's an interesting damage bonus that ties into other mechanics in a neat way, so I definitely give it a pass. Sudden charge is boring-but-strong action compression; probably the best feat here unless your DM puts most of your encounters starting within one move action. Bashing Charge is boring and questionable action compression (because how often do you need to do this, and why are you adding MAP to do so?).
And the others, you already said were primarily bonuses. So I'd argue more of those are ultimately about bonuses and penalties than you let on.
All that being said, if you don't enjoy the in-combat options, I don't think PF2 is really the game that you should be spending your time playing. There are many excellent games out there, and PF2's focus and key area of advantage is making tactical combat interesting and focusing on it - I'd happily encourage you to try varying combats in a way that encourages tactical flexibility (something the APs are often bad at), but if the fundamental baseline of the system isn't interesting to you, why not play some of the many other good ttRPGs out there?
This completely ignores the social aspect of both running and playing the game. I'm not going to bail a group I've played with for over a decade because people wanted to try 2E. And I have an easier time getting people to play 2E than 1E nowadays if I want to run a campaign (with a different group). I'm just one of five or more people at the table, you know? I'm not going to explode a group because I could enjoy combat more playing another system.
Most of the people I play with are already my friends in some capacity or other, as well. I'm not just shopping around for tables with strangers, where it'd make a bit more sense to drop if I wasn't having a good time. Even if I find combat dull, roleplaying with people I'm friends with is pretty system agnostic.
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Can you give an example of what you think is a good ability?
You don't like passives, you don't numbers-based mechanics, you don't like action compression, and you don't like unique solutions.
What would a good ability look like?
I think the amount of people who just go, "That's it?" when they see summoner's Act Together should let you know this is not intuitive design
The amount of people from my experience is pretty small, so I'm not sure what to make of this. I see people griping about how their health works, or about their underlying proficiencies, or the fact that all eidolons are essentially strikers, but not so much Act Together.
Feel like this is kind of a pitfall of vaguely outsourcing critiques to some nebulous group opinion that might not even exist in other social circles, because from this all I can gather is that you think people don't like an ability, rather than understanding what your issues with it are.
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It's not intuitive, but I think there's a lot of self-inflicted disappointment with optimization out there. PF2E is not a build-to-win game, so your best optimization just gets you good. Which some players may think 'that's it?' to. This may be what the OP is struggling with.
The disappointment isn't really in it being weak, or something. The disappointment is simply in it not feeling or looking as strong as it actually is. Does that make sense?
This is a general problem with PF2E, in my experience. Things that are good tend not to obviously feel good.
A personal example of this is freezing rain. Many people whose opinions I trust say freezing rain is an excellent spell that can really mess up an encounter, and that they've used it to great effect many times. When I read freezing rain, it looks like one of the most finicky spells I can imagine and it looks like it would forever to really get value. I would probably never try it without being told to do so. It seems the effect is just that good when multiple enemies are involved, even if you're paying 3A for movable mudpit and 1A sustains for weak damage and slowed 1 on fail. The math just works out that you chew up enough enemy actions between difficult terrain and the sustain, even if you're spending a lot of them yourself.
As an aside, I think action compression abilities are bad about this in general. They're mathematically very good. But they often don't feel like they're buying you as much as they actually are, because a lot of them don't have you do anything new within your compressed actions, and they often just gain you something that feels lower value (like a demoralize).
Can you give an example of what you think is a good ability?
Let's just go back to the barbarian feats. Of all of those feats, I think Furious Finish is probably the most interesting. Is it a feat I'm choosing if I want to play the best possible barb? Probably not. But there's a real hook to the risk/reward, the damage, the way other people will want to buff you up for this juiced 1A attack. The way it plays off your rage timer is fun. It has cool things going on, interacts with other mechanics, has an element of resource management, and has good flavor to boot.
A lot of abilities in PF2E don't interact much with other abilities or class mechanics in this way. And I'd say PF2E doesn't really create a good sense of risk and reward either, in all my experience as a player and GM. Low level play feels extremely risky and not that rewarding, and mid and high level play often feels neither risky nor rewarding. Resource management isn't all that important for most classes, either, which makes it hard for the game to create a sense of risk. (And personally, resource management is one of my favorite gameplay elements in any game.)
As a second example: spellstrike has problems, but I think spending slots on spellstrike to gamble for your spike damage (ignoring that amped IW is basically always the same or better—that, unfortunately, puts a real damper on things) has a good feel. Magus has issues, but the slot machine isn't one of its issues.
I don't think I understand what you mean by risk and reward for low level and high level play. Not to say that your experience isnt what it is but doesnt that just come down to how encounters are put together and run by GMs?
A GM can choose the XP budget
Can choose the terrain and hazards from a plain 30x30 room to 2 airships changing altitude and direction each round as they attempt to align cannons and evade the others.
Can choose the creatures the encounter is composed of and even adjust any qualities of them. Or make their own.
And GMs decide how creatures act out their turns.
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I don't think I understand what you mean by risk and reward for low level and high level play. Not to say that your experience isnt what it is but doesnt that just come down to how encounters are put together and run by GMs?
No. I could handpick four players' poker hands and tell them to play a round, and the risks they would take when they bet (or wouldn't take, if they folded) would still be their choice.
Player options can have risk and reward beyond just the odds of their d20 roll. PF2E just doesn't offer a ton of ways that player options can have risk aside from attacks of opportunity, and players endlessly complain about dealing with reactive strike with things like spellstrike anyways. The game has even actively removed some elements of risk over its lifespan, like Barb's -1 AC on rage.
One of the only player resources to manage with a risk/reward profile is hero points, since spending them now means you can't stabilize with them later. I'm actually a very big fan of the hero point deck for this reason; additional hero point options improve the resource management aspects of the game immensely.
I get what you're saying but haven't experienced it. For summoner, Act Together is strong and at least to me, it feels strong.
Maybe the players you're talking to value damage over everything else? A big damage roll can be quite emotionally satisfying. A mass slow effect is great. Hazardous terrain coupled with it so the opponents that fail their save need both actions to move anywhere is great. But for some players it maybe doesn't scratch the itch the way rolling 10d6 fire damage does.
Some of my issue with freezing rain is unintuitive math (the spell works because you can expect a decent amount of enemies to fail over time in a multi-enemy encounter); some of it is just the upfront 3A investment feeling bad since it has no immediate effect on your turn; some of it is how restrictive it is on your current and future action economy. To me, it's a good spell with a bad playfeel.
I would generally say that PF2E trusts its math too much to sell an ability's power, and neglects selling abilities on playfeel and neglects trying to sell them to people who won't understand the math. I would excoriate 5e's balance as much as anyone else*, but using Color Spray in 5e feels more exciting than using some 5th rank spells in 2E. The strength of the spell is a huge part of it, yes. But I think rolling 6d10 alone helps sell the spell. The player feels like they're doing something when they cast it, even if they lowroll and only affect one creature. It's more interactive for the player than a save. And inflicting "blinded" sounds strong even if you don't know what it means mechanically and don't get how great it is to give advantage to party attacks and disadvantage to enemy attacks. Blinded being strong does also help, in terms of selling the fantasy, yeah.
As a much more general principle to point at, a player also feels like they're spending an important resource when they use color spray in 5E, and they get a lot for doing so. 2E pretty much treats spell expenditure as a given, in contrast, and is balanced assuming 1x top rank slot spent per moderate encounter. That's just a caster's baseline contribution in 2E, and 2E design doesn't expect you to feel like you're burning something important if you spend that single top rank slot. This is correct for balance, but really out of line with what most people (whose first instinct is usually to save "important" resources for when they're "needed") will do when given a resource pool. So caster playfeel tends to be off if you're new, and you need to recalibrate your expectations in a way most players just will not ever do.
(An aside: an entirely different resource system would've made more sense for how 2E casters are expected to play, IMO. I understand why they chose not to do this, but Vancian casting—as much as I personally enjoy it—just does not feel like something that jibes with the design of the rest of the system. And it doesn't encourage players to play like the system wants them to.)
This sort of problem is everywhere in 2E. The game ignores typical player psychology left and right, and just trusts inherently irrational humans—humans with no ability to do the statistics necessary to understand why things are how they are, and no bonafides in game design to understand it either—will get used to things that feel wrong but work out.
And as an example more in line with what I've already mentioned, understanding action compression is strong in 2E requires you to at least understand concepts like action efficiency. I would not personally want to design a game that requires you to understand action efficiency to feel good while playing it.
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*To be clear, I'd also excoriate vanilla 5e's tactical variety and a lot of its design choices. Being unable to delay is... well, let's just say I don't like it. I could go on a while.
Honestly, the more I read from you, the more I'm getting the sense you want battles to be a short, sharp back-and-forth of near death blows that likely ends by the second round. In other words, you're the rare person for which 'rocket tag gameplay' is a glowing review of a game, and so you like 3.PF, which at moderate optimisation on both sides of the table is rocket tag gameplay (which the majority of 3.PF players grudgingly bore with or kept trying to homebrew out, resulting in 4e/PF2e).
This is the wrong takeaway entirely. I don't like rocket tag, and I don't want battles to last basically a round. I'd be much happier with a PF1E combat where the enemy does literally have 10x HP at high levels if we have ways to handle it. The rocket tag really is a bug to me, not a feature.
And I've given examples involving spike damage, yes. But an ability doesn't only need to involve spike damage for me to like it. It's more that a lot of the satisfying PF2E abilities ultimately involve spike damage.
An example of an ability I like that doesn't involve spike damage is the Spirit Warrior archetype's Transcendent Deflection. (https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=7030)
-The ability completely blocks an attack (so it has an incredibly noticeable effect).
-The ability costs you your current weapon, and forces you to have extras or a backup weapon and spend and action drawing it. So there's some cost associated with it, even if it's something you can bypass to a degree.
-The ability is intended to work in concert with one of the effects of Cutting Heaven, Crushing Earth, that lets you apply your handwraps of mighty blows runes to a melee weapon. CHCE lets you break weapons without worrying about losing your offense! So it has a cool interaction with other parts of your build.
-The ability works in a way that actually feels like you're doing the thing the ability says you're doing. The mechanics match the flavor very, very well.
I'd also argue a lot of incap spells feel good when they work, even if the incap trait itself is pretty feelbad. I suppose incap itself has a level of risk/reward in having you guess the encounter makeup, even if the way it makes you guess the encounter makeup rubs me the wrong way.
Helpful Steps is a cool spell that has a lot of uses. Seashell of Stolen Sound is arguably a bad spell, but I love it to death because it does something unique and has good flavor.
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I don't think I understand what you mean by risk and reward for low level and high level play. Not to say that your experience isnt what it is but doesnt that just come down to how encounters are put together and run by GMs?No. I could handpick four players' poker hands and tell them to play a round, and the risks they would take when they bet (or wouldn't take, if they folded) would still be their choice.
Player options can have risk and reward beyond just the odds of their d20 roll. PF2E just doesn't offer a ton of ways that player options can have risk aside from attacks of opportunity, and players endlessly complain about dealing with reactive strike with things like spellstrike anyways. The game has even actively removed some elements of risk over its lifespan, like Barb's -1 AC on rage.
One of the only player resources to manage with a risk/reward profile is hero points, since spending them now means you can't stabilize with them later. I'm actually a very big fan of the hero point deck for this reason; additional hero point options improve the resource management aspects of the game immensely.
Some of my issue with freezing rain is unintuitive math (the spell works because you can expect a decent amount of enemies to fail over time in a multi-enemy encounter); some of it is just the upfront 3A investment feeling bad since it has no immediate effect on your turn; some of it is how restrictive it is on your current and future action economy. To...I get what you're saying but haven't experienced it. For summoner, Act Together is strong and at least to me, it feels strong.
Maybe the players you're talking to value damage over everything else? A big damage roll can be quite emotionally satisfying. A mass slow effect is great. Hazardous terrain coupled with it so the opponents that fail their save need both actions to move anywhere is great. But for some players it maybe doesn't scratch the itch the way rolling 10d6 fire damage does.
This is all subjective. We're getting a lot of subjective discussions pushing personal preference lately.
Paizo won't be designing the game based on subjective preferences unless a large enough portion of their player base shares these preferences.
I don't agree with much you've written about risk-reward analysis. PF1 had a lot of low risk-high reward options which is why it was broken. The low risk-high reward was further exacerbated by excessive buff stacking combined with excessive penalty stacking.
I did not see much risk-reward in PF1/3E. I saw massive numbers of low risk-high reward options that clearly outshined anything the enemies could do unless you specifically designed them to counter the low risk-high reward abilities players chose.
PF2 has much tighter math that allows a GM a much tighter ability to create the risk-reward necessary to make an encounter challenging or trivial. That's what risk reward should be about. How risky is the encounter. Not some strange idea you have that high risk-high reward abilities existed in PF1 when they did not.
Just a lot of low risk-high reward abilities that allowed players to utterly annihilate encounters. Don't try to sell me it was otherwise when I created these characters as did my players. There was nothing risky about choosing Power Attack or getting hasted or Spell Combat for a magus in PF1 letting you cast a spell and attack with a high crit range. It was massive low risk-high reward optimization that made DMing a nightmare.
We get it. You miss PF1/3E for. Your reasons are personal preference. This whole risk-reward line of debate doesn't make sense. Those of us that played PF1/3E cannot agree with you. PF1/3E was stacks up on stacks of low risk-high reward abilities that players who prefer that game try to argue is "agency" or this line of reasoning your pushing or meaningful choice which many of us who DMed often just viewed as super optimization options that allowed PCs to destroy the game with broken, poorly scaled abilities that made the high level game mostly unplayable.
Risk-reward is scaled much better in PF2 leading to what we all refer to as better balance. It's much easier to manipulate risk-reward to get it where you want it to be.
You're doing this reasoning dance that we've all seen a ton of times which the players taking that side of the debate can't clearly state their miss the extreme power of character building in PF1. We all know there are PF player that miss the power of PF1/3E because it was the most power fantasy of any version of a d20 game ever made. Which is why PF2 after much input and data review of the previous edition of the game powered down and balanced much better to ensure a game that did not break at high level.
No one wants to go back to the low risk-high reward play of PF1 where you could obliterate almost everything you fight, especially a coordinated party all using low risk-high reward abilities.
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Paizo won't be designing the game based on subjective preferences unless a large enough portion of their player base shares these preferences.
This game design is about as clearly guided by the subjective preferences of its own designers as any other game. I'm unsure a "large enough portion of the playerbase" would have shared the 2E designers' preferences for making "4E with a different coat of paint and some legacy elements 4E had intentionally removed" when PF2E was being created, but that's exactly what we ended up with anyways. Frankly, if you told anyone this game was going to end up even remotely like 4E 10 years ago, you'd have had a riot on your hands. But here we are.
There's a weird undercurrent here that some "subjective preferences" are objectively incorrect, or at least that some are better than others. I can't really stand for that. It's a classically incoherent position that precludes discussion.
I understand people here like 2E, generally speaking, and I can understand why most of the regulars do. In your case, for example, I think it makes perfect sense that a table of full-on optimizers would burn out trying to keep 1E challenging and interesting; 2E saves you a ton of design work. (And indeed, I think it's more accurate to call it literal game design work than prep if you're trying to plug 1E's holes.) This is an extremely common sentiment I've seen over and over, and I think it's completely understandable. 2E has been a hit with players like this. A lot of other regulars are DMs who like that 2E is generally smoother to run and prep for. I think that's totally understandable as well.
My tables generally did not want to optimize to that degree to begin with and were generally not mechanically minded. We did not benefit very much from what 2E offered—though I did pick up a player that would've never willingly played 1E that very much liked 4E, and I've liked having them.
I don't agree with much you've written about risk-reward analysis. PF1 had a lot of low risk-high reward options which is why it was broken. The low risk-high reward was further exacerbated by excessive buff stacking combined with excessive penalty stacking.
I did not see much risk-reward in PF1/3E. I saw massive numbers of low risk-high reward options that clearly outshined anything the enemies could do unless you specifically designed them to counter the low risk-high reward abilities players chose.
I understand inferring that I thought 1E was better on this count, but I agree it mostly isn't. There's not a ton of risk/reward analysis on something like stinking cloud with an optimized DC or a full round from an optimized martial. You're completely right that there's nothing interesting about something like power attack. The only thing where I really consider 1E better on this count is how there are somewhat more resources to manage even on martials (be that rounds of rage, smites per day, spells on 4th casters, etc.), and how spell power is more intuitively in line with a naive player's expectations for spending a """scarce""" resource (at the cost of martial classes being far outstripped in power and options in a way I do indeed dislike). That's not a massive victory by any stretch.
I think 1E is somewhat better at lining up abilities with what players will subjectively perceive as strong or interesting-sounding. I like how character building works better by default, and like archetypes and prestige classes and class progressions better even if many of the built-in class abilities are useless ribbons. I like spellcasting better because I'm not terribly enamoured of the removal of caster level based scaling and how the alternative has felt wrt lower rank slots. (I used to hate how much weaker casting was, but it doesn't bother me that much now; I adjusted my expectations to match the game. I hate the comparative lack of ribbon and cute utility spells a lot more than that nowadays.) I prefer how a lot of mechanics feel to use in 1E, in general. But I do not think 1E is some paragon of risk/reward design. It's barely better than 2E in a lot of cases, and not for particularly glamorous reasons.
The problem is mainly that 2E is not at all good at the things 1E was good at, while also not shoring up 1E's gameplay design all that much past making the balance function and streamlining the action economy. 2E, to me, literally sheds much of what was interesting about 1E on purpose while only really giving me balanced math and a nicer but ultimately very similar action system in exchange. When my table wasn't a bunch of optimizers or all that mechanically oriented to begin with, that just doesn't feel great.
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EDIT: Something I realized I needed to point out is that everyone is talking as though risk/reward is just some property of encounter designs, or something.
I am literally referring to risks taken by players when they make choices and the rewards or penalties they receive for making those choices. Encounter design plays into it, but what I really care about is the kinds of decisions a player can make.
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Also, the more you play PF2 as a group the more fun it gets, in a way that PF1 couldn't really match. In PF1, when you have system mastery, GMing becomes functional as you learn the ins and outs of encounter design, but Players also learn more and more tricks to tip the scales, so you don't reach a point where all of the group's combined experience is making the system sing. There's a tension there.
With PF2, you rapidly gain confidence in GMing and can start bending your expertise towards clever encounter design and challenges. The players learn the rules and get a sense for how to quickly and easily build characters, but aren't able to break the game balance so they bend their expertise toward fleshing out character options and stories, and thinking more about the group as a whole for strategies and cohesion.
After playing PF2 this long, there's been a lot more opportunities for oneshots and quick campaigns because no one has to go to the optimization mines to work long hours on a character. We can jump right into the action. Our longer campaigns were also more fun because I could whip up custom side stories with so much more ease, so players felt more like it was an open world.
By risk/reward do you actually mean the ability to min max?
is that a better term for what your describing?
I see magus as a very high risk reward class where as fighter is made to provide consistency. But because of the action sink of their abilitities they are still balanced.
Casters can be high risk high reward if you load up spells with great crit fails but bad success results. But they only get so many chances a day and taking the risk of doing nothing feels bad.
But I have to agree with you to a certain degree because the game has guardrails like incapacitate where it seems the designers asked do we need extreme outcomes here and answered no.
Extremes have been weeded out of the play experience in several areas for balance and consistency and that would mean less ability to character design into increasing those extreme results while giving up things you dont care about.
There's a weird undercurrent here that some "subjective preferences" are objectively incorrect, or at least that some are better than others.
I mean yeah that's just true. Everyone being entitled to an opinion doesn't mean everyone is entitled to be right, and there have historically been some wildly incoherent or nonsensical personal preferences put forward in discussions that would just make things worse for most people if implemented.
... On some level it would be weird to not think someone holding absolutely antithetical viewpoints to you that would fundamentally harm your ability to use a thing if their ideas were canonized was wrong.
A personal example of this is freezing rain. Many people whose opinions I trust say freezing rain is an excellent spell that can really mess up an encounter, and that they've used it to great effect many times. When I read freezing rain, it looks like one of the most finicky spells I can imagine and it looks like it would forever to really get value. I would probably never try it without being told to do so. It seems the effect is just that good when multiple enemies are involved, even if you're paying 3A for movable mudpit and 1A sustains for weak damage and slowed 1 on fail. The math just works out that you chew up enough enemy actions between difficult terrain and the sustain, even if you're spending a lot of them yourself.
I find that curious, because one player in my Strength of Thousands game really likes Cyclone Rondo, which is like a 3rd-rank version of Freezing Rain. Her bard Stargazer has to make a small sacrifice to cast Cyclone Rondo, because its 3-action casting means she cannot cast a bard composition that turn, but then her following turns are Stride, sustain Cyclone Rondo, and cast Courageous Anthem. She likes that Cyclone Rondo is both damage and battlefield control and preserves her spell slots. And if she Sustains Cyclone Rondo twice in one turn, it deals damage twice and can move twice (I think that is how the rules work).
On the other hand, Cyclone Rondo is a 3rd-rank spell and Freezing Rain is a 5th-rank spell, so I feel that Freezing Rain should be four times as awesome. It isn't. It covers 16 times the area of Cyclone Rondo, can move twice as far, and can avoid dealing damage if necessary. Both spells deal the same damage. Alas, bigger is not more awesome. Cyclone Rondo feels like chasing enemies with a mini-tornado, but I think Freezing Rain would feel more like a big area effect.
Stargazer is never going to learn Freezing Rain for comparison, because it is not on the occult spell list.
Let's just go back to the barbarian feats. Of all of those feats, I think Furious Finish is probably the most interesting. Is it a feat I'm choosing if I want to play the best possible barb? Probably not. But there's a real hook to the risk/reward, the damage, the way other people will want to buff you up for this juiced 1A attack. The way it plays off your rage timer is fun. It has cool things going on, interacts with other mechanics, has an element of resource management, and has good flavor to boot.
Furious Finish ends the barbarian's rage and leaves them fatigued and unable to rage again in exchange for dealing much more damage on a Strike if the Strike hits. Sounds dramatically awesome. It could also backfire dramatically on a miss.
I think that Witch of Miracles' risk/reward property is about being able to be awesome. I have a bias toward this conclusion, because I believe that my role as a GM is to give my players opportunities to demonstrate that their characters are awesome.
In a later comment,
I would generally say that PF2E trusts its math too much to sell an ability's power, and neglects selling abilities on playfeel and neglects trying to sell them to people who won't understand the math.
No, the math says that feats are weak, even class feats which are the strongest kind. Most of a characters power comes from ability scores, proficiency rank, adding level to proficiency, and its strongest class abilities. So the math is not selling an optional ability's power.
Witch of Miracles had talked earlier about the prevalence of +1 and +2 bonuses. On a d20, a +2 is merely 10% more. It can have a 20% effect, because it usually means a 10% chance of turning a miss into a hit and a 10% chance of turning a hit into a critical hit, but the most dramatic hits are against high-AC opponents in which the chance of critical hits does not increase because it requires a natural 20 even with a +2 bonus to hit. A temporary +2 bonus purchased with an action is practical efficiency rather than awesomeness.
Also, the more you play PF2 as a group the more fun it gets, in a way that PF1 couldn't really match. In PF1, when you have system mastery, GMing becomes functional as you learn the ins and outs of encounter design, but Players also learn more and more tricks to tip the scales, so you don't reach a point where all of the group's combined experience is making the system sing. There's a tension there.
This is the key to awesomeness that my players use. They can outsmart and dominate an enemy force through tactical teamwork.
Let me use Fort Phaendar from Ironfang Invasion as an example. The party is supposed to liberate the village of Phaendar, converted into a fort by the Ironfang Legion, in PART 2, HOMECOMING at 16th level in Vault of the Onyx Citadel. My players did it at 12th level. I reduced the level of the troops at Fort Phaendar, because I lacked time to convert them all to PF2 rules. I mostly replaced various enemies ranging from CR 10 to CR 14 with 9th-level Hobgoblin Formations. But I carefully ported CR 14 slavemaster Ettoran Phark and CR 15 commander Stabvistin. Stabvistin was a duel-wielding master of melee combat, good enough to be annoying against a 16th-level party but now he was going to face a 12th-level party.
I have written this conflict before at I love PF2E butttt.... #149, Each Encounter is its own Creature #12, and Full Party Optimization #3,because it was awesome. The party had hoped to avoid the commander, but the monk Ren-zar'jo ended up face-to-face with him. So the rogue Binny came in riding atop the sorcerer Honey transformed into a flying dragon. Honey got in a breathe weapon attack on Commander Scabvistin, but then she had to land 50 feet away to let Binny do her work. Closing in on Scabvistin to attack with dragon jaws and claws would have opened up a world of hurt from Scabvistin's counterattacks. The rules penalize a PC riding another PC, which is why Honey landed so that Binny was sitting on her rather riding. On the other hand, Scabvistin could not simply run up to them, because he had temporarily switched to his backup bow for ranged combat. Interacting to draw a melee weapon and two Strides to the dragon would have left Honey laughing as she flew into the air to move away, taking only a Reactive Strike rather than one of Scabvistin's specialty attacks. Thus, melee-master Scabvistin was forced to stand still and Strike with his bow. And Binny kept him perpetually off-guard with Precise Debilitations, so that she could deal sneak attack damage and two other party members--ranger and druid--attacking from range also had an easier target. Scabvistin was nullified and died.
Okay, Scabvistin was only a Severe Threat against four 12th-level characters, but those characters had been fighting other troops and were not longer at full spells and hit points. The druid was casting Ray of Frost cantrip rather than top-rank spells. At the party's current readiness, he counted as Extreme Threat, but against their tactics, he was Moderate Threat. I loved it.
Precise Debiliations is a good class feat designed to make the Debiliations class feature more versatile, but most rogues would be flanking and not need it. Dragon Form is a good 6th-rank spell, but ordinarily a sorcerer using it takes lots of damage. Used together, they crippled a powerful enemy. That is how my players display awesomeness.
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By risk/reward do you actually mean the ability to min max?
is that a better term for what your describing?I see magus as a very high risk reward class where as fighter is made to provide consistency. But because of the action sink of their abilitities they are still balanced.
Casters can be high risk high reward if you load up spells with great crit fails but bad success results. But they only get so many chances a day and taking the risk of doing nothing feels bad.But I have to agree with you to a certain degree because the game has guardrails like incapacitate where it seems the designers asked do we need extreme outcomes here and answered no.
Extremes have been weeded out of the play experience in several areas for balance and consistency and that would mean less ability to character design into increasing those extreme results while giving up things you dont care about.
I played a magus to 20 in PF1 and PF2. There wasn't any risk in the PF1 magus. It was a brutal class that annihilated what it faced with a massive crit range.
Concentration checks in PF1 completely eliminated the risk of AOOs from casting in PF1 past the low levels. Eliminated them for the magus and eliminated them for every caster.
It's always astounding in these debates how little I see from posters stating the rules of the game, how they worked, and builds. I don't see it when talking about PF2 or PF1. Just these long posts omitting rules that completely negate the basis for the debate.
PF1 magus build using dex was pretty simple to obtain. You had four base feats to build on for the big dog crit build:
weapon finesse
Piranha Strike
Improved Critical
Intensify Spell (Shocking Grasp)
I wonder if the poster is omitting rule discussions on purpose hoping the other players in the debate don't know the rules well enough to know the poster is wrong or the poster doesn't know the rules themselves or have forgotten.
Some of these arguments are so poorly constructed that only a PF2 player that had never played PF1/3E would even think they represented the PF1/3E game.
I want to make it clear that in PF1 there were no high risk-high reward options. There were low risk-high reward options and low risk-low reward options. Optimization in PF1/3E consisted of taking the low risk-high reward options (min-maxing) while avoiding the low risk-low reward options (Trap options).
A personal example of this is freezing rain. Many people whose opinions I trust say freezing rain is an excellent spell that can really mess up an encounter, and that they've used it to great effect many times. When I read freezing rain, it looks like one of the most finicky spells I can imagine and it looks like it would forever to really get value. I would probably never try it without being told to do so. It seems the effect is just that good when multiple enemies are involved, even if you're paying 3A for movable mudpit and 1A sustains for weak damage and slowed 1 on fail. The math just works out that you chew up enough enemy actions between difficult terrain and the sustain, even if you're spending a lot of them yourself.I find that curious, because one player in my Strength of Thousands game really likes Cyclone Rondo, which is like a 3rd-rank version of Freezing Rain. Her bard Stargazer has to make a small sacrifice to cast Cyclone Rondo, because its 3-action casting means she cannot cast a bard composition that turn, but then her following turns are Stride, sustain Cyclone Rondo, and cast Courageous Anthem. She likes that Cyclone Rondo is both damage and battlefield control and preserves her spell slots. And if she Sustains Cyclone Rondo twice in one turn, it deals damage twice and can move twice (I think that is how the rules work).
On the other hand, Cyclone Rondo is a 3rd-rank spell and Freezing Rain is a 5th-rank spell, so I feel that Freezing Rain should be four times as awesome. It isn't. It covers 16 times the area of Cyclone Rondo, can move twice as far, and can avoid dealing damage if necessary. Both spells deal the same damage. Alas, bigger is not more awesome. Cyclone Rondo feels like chasing enemies with a mini-tornado, but I think Freezing Rain would feel more like a big area effect.
Stargazer is never going to learn Freezing Rain...
I will take the moderate increases in power from feats over what I saw in PF1. To me the change was a necessary change from PF1/3E.
I still recall playing kingmaker and designing a high level encounter where each enemy was designed to take on a specific party member. But the players didn't cooperate. Thus the caster player going first because "divination school" cast clashing rocks on the melee enemy sealing them away for a few rounds then the AOE cross-blooded orc/elemental sorc AOE crushed the opposing group with quicken spell. The melees were left doing almost nothing and contributing almost nothing to the combat.
I put quite a bit of design work into that encounter to have it ended within a few rounds by the insane caster power level from all those "awesome" low risk-high reward feats like quicken spell with the awesome low risk-high reward class abilities like stacking damage and the divination school initiative bonus with spell perfection or spell specialization.
Lowering the impact of feats and class abilities was a necessary change to make the game scale in a way that was easier to run as a DM and required a flatter power escalation with a more controlled probability range.
Sure, it was awesome to utterly annihilate your enemies and rules lawyer the DM to make them follow the clever min-max combination you built up to, but it wasn't fun for the DM and made for a pretty miserable game for groups, especially martials who also made characters they liked that became the lackeys of casters.
I built so many incredibly powerful characters that I have a bad taste for PF1/3E. They kept adding options to the game that it reached the point as a DM that ever new book that came out I thought, "What insanely overpowered option is coming out in this book? What am I going to have to fix next?"
By risk/reward do you actually mean the ability to min max?
is that a better term for what your describing?I see magus as a very high risk reward class where as fighter is made to provide consistency. But because of the action sink of their abilitities they are still balanced.
Casters can be high risk high reward if you load up spells with great crit fails but bad success results. But they only get so many chances a day and taking the risk of doing nothing feels bad.But I have to agree with you to a certain degree because the game has guardrails like incapacitate where it seems the designers asked do we need extreme outcomes here and answered no.
Extremes have been weeded out of the play experience in several areas for balance and consistency and that would mean less ability to character design into increasing those extreme results while giving up things you dont care about.I played a magus to 20 in PF1 and PF2. There wasn't any risk in the PF1 magus. It was a brutal class that annihilated what it faced with a massive crit range.
Concentration checks in PF1 completely eliminated the risk of AOOs from casting in PF1 past the low levels. Eliminated them for the magus and eliminated them for every caster.
It's always astounding in these debates how little I see from posters stating the rules of the game, how they worked, and builds. I don't see it when talking about PF2 or PF1. Just these long posts omitting rules that completely negate the basis for the debate.
PF1 magus build using dex was pretty simple to obtain. You had four base feats to build on for the big dog crit build:
weapon finesse
Piranha Strike
Improved Critical
Intensify Spell (Shocking Grasp)I wonder if the poster is omitting rule discussions on purpose hoping the other players in the debate don't know the rules well enough to know the poster is wrong or the poster doesn't know the rules themselves or have forgotten.
Some of these arguments are so poorly constructed that...
I don't think you read my post with the understanding I was going for.
To clarify I am only talking about PF2 for the class examples of magus, fighter or spellcasting in general. Edit: to address your point a bit better, I am actually making the point that risk reward is not what I think Witch of Miracles means by risk and reward, I think they mean min/maxing which is what PF1 was about. You stack bonuses for the one thing you want to be good at or you cant hit and spells dont stick. Different concept than risk/reward entirely.What specifically am I wrong about now that you understand I was speaking about PF2 not PF1?
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...By risk/reward do you actually mean the ability to min max?
is that a better term for what your describing?I see magus as a very high risk reward class where as fighter is made to provide consistency. But because of the action sink of their abilitities they are still balanced.
Casters can be high risk high reward if you load up spells with great crit fails but bad success results. But they only get so many chances a day and taking the risk of doing nothing feels bad.But I have to agree with you to a certain degree because the game has guardrails like incapacitate where it seems the designers asked do we need extreme outcomes here and answered no.
Extremes have been weeded out of the play experience in several areas for balance and consistency and that would mean less ability to character design into increasing those extreme results while giving up things you dont care about.I played a magus to 20 in PF1 and PF2. There wasn't any risk in the PF1 magus. It was a brutal class that annihilated what it faced with a massive crit range.
Concentration checks in PF1 completely eliminated the risk of AOOs from casting in PF1 past the low levels. Eliminated them for the magus and eliminated them for every caster.
It's always astounding in these debates how little I see from posters stating the rules of the game, how they worked, and builds. I don't see it when talking about PF2 or PF1. Just these long posts omitting rules that completely negate the basis for the debate.
PF1 magus build using dex was pretty simple to obtain. You had four base feats to build on for the big dog crit build:
weapon finesse
Piranha Strike
Improved Critical
Intensify Spell (Shocking Grasp)I wonder if the poster is omitting rule discussions on purpose hoping the other players in the debate don't know the rules well enough to know the poster is wrong or the poster doesn't know the rules themselves or have forgotten.
Some of these
The only thing I saw that was inaccurate was that anything in PF1 was high risk-high reward. It was low risk. Low risk-high reward or low risk-low reward. The PF1/3E game was the most player friendly, power fantasy version of the game ever made where players could build to destroy the game practically alone for casters.
I think they talking about these games and wanting any real action taken, that a full discussion of the mechanics should be included, especially comparative mechanics to show you understand the mechanics of both games.
Nebulous, subjective criticisms based on personal preference are not very actionable by Paizo.
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A whole lot of post(s) incoming, yet again.
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I thought the reason PF2E made things less 'save or suck' is because people didn't like that part of the PF1 game? Are you suggesting Paizo add that back in? Parties already tend to spend quite a few actions buying down risk: that's what buffs and debuffs do. So I'm not sure there would be a huge appetite for higher-risk higher-payoff feats, spells, etc.
My experience was that optimizers typically avoided save-or-suck spells because they were unreliable, but a lot of less mathematically inclined players enjoyed swinging for the fences with things like Suffocate or Baleful Polymorph. Can think of several successful casts of Baleful Polymorph at the table I play at, actually. Those players were very satisfied.
Save or suck spells aren't that fun to play against, but having extreme threats that aren't just outright death can provide variety to the player experience if that the game gives levers to handle it. 1E with a slightly accelerated hero point gain handles it... okay, if you're careful and have a grip on how many hero points the party needs. And even then, it's not great, but okay. You ideally need a resource that replenishes faster, is more specifically tailored to dealing with incap-type spells, or both if those effects are consistently on the table.
PF2E makes these sorts of spells less awful to play against by shunting the worst outcomes onto crit fail and giving them incap. But it also makes them significantly less satisfying for players to use in exchange. It also only helps so much, since it's not even odd for players to still have a party member critically fail against an AoE incap spell; in our higher level 2E game, we've had critical failures against rank 7 paralyze, for example, and also had an unlucky crit failure on a single target incap like feeblemind or warp mind at one point.
To be clear, I should also say that I have gotten save or suck'd directly out of the final fight in a 1E campaign, and it happened within the first two rounds of combat. I believe I failed a disintegrate save and died instantly with no chance of revival. I know how exactly how frustrating it can be.
In some respect, we already have them and people don't use them. Vicious Swing, the kineticist's 'do a 2A strike for +CON damage' are examples of 'swing for the fences' moves. It would be fairly easy for Paizo to create a spellshape feat that for 1A causes a direct damage save spell to do 0 on a successful save but adds a fairly big damage bonus (+50%?) on a failed save. But I do not think most players would use it as a higher risk strategy; I think what you'd see is parties using more caster buffs before the caster uses it, so they can get that juicy damage bonus with no added risk. D20 systems are already quite swingy just because d20. I don't personally see a big community appetite to make is swingier.
The problem with these abilities is the same problem 1E power attack has: either they're better on average, or they aren't. When they are, you basically always use them, and when they aren't their usecases end up pretty narrow.
1E power attack, you basically always use. It'd sound like there's some risk in lowering your accuracy, but since it basically always comes out to more damage in the long run, you usually just power attack unless you know any hit will kill or your odds of hitting are exceptionally low. There's no actual decisionmaking in it. 2E vicious swing, you basically never use unless DR will eat through most of the damage of doing two individual attacks instead. And kineticist's 2A blast is almost never worth it in practice, period.
Personally, I think abilities like this don't really work as risk/reward levers because you just do an expected return analysis, do what it says, and the decisionmaking is over. You really need to be spending some kind of additional resource (and preferably one that has multiple uses, so there's an opportunity cost) in order to get a real sense of risk and reward, imo.
I like HPs but I do not see them as giving the player riskier options, at all. AFAICT they tend to never be used to crit hunt or other swing for the fences moves; they tend to be used to reroll crit fails. I.e. to reduce swinginess instead of being used as a higher risk, higher payoff option.
Tables I play at tend to give out 1 per hour to each player instead of just one per hour, in addition to buffing the reroll in some way (usually just a +2) or using the hero point deck. So there's more leeway to use them to reroll misses on MAP-0 strikes or regular failures.
Why is it Paizo's job to 'sell' players on using odd spells?
It's a basic part of game design. In MtG, some big green 8/8 with trample is going to be a large creature like a dinosaur or something, right? That's all flavor that sells that fantasy of playing an 8/8 with trample. It's an important part of the card. It feels really different to play a blank piece of carboard labeled "GGGGG, 8/8, trample" than it feels to play a card with a picture of a t-rex. The flavor sells the card.
For most people, much of their satisfaction in using an ability comes from how it feels, is narrated, and so on. Selling abilities with more than just their math significantly heightens the game's appeal, in the same way the art of the big dino heightens the appeal of the 8/8 with trample.
And (as I discuss a bit more below) part of "selling" spells is just making sure the gameplay feedback is good, as well.
To me, this question is basically identical to asking "why is it a game designer's job to do game design?" It's what a TTRPG dev is paid to do—make their game feel good to play.
I think that's why most more modern ttrpg systems just got rid of the slot system. Even when mathematically balanced, the pain of expending a day-limited resource to do nothing is just not fun. But most systems don't make casting more fun by making the success effect bigger - that's "save or suck." They made it more fun by making resource regeneration faster. A la the kineticist. Focus spells. In other systems, heath-based spells. Or just 'all day' spells comparable to nonspell attacks. Get the trend? Most players don't want higher risk for higher reward - they want almost the opposite, i.e. characters that can more consistently do cool moves.
Again, I personally think resource management is important for having compelling gameplay.
I think it's understandable to shift a game away from resource management if the focus of the game isn't really the combat and is more about the narrative. But to me, PF2E shifted the focus more heavily onto the combat, if anything, while also removing resource management. That just doesn't square for me.
Also, I really take issue with this: "the pain of expending a day-limited resource to do nothing is just not fun." This misunderstands how probability and player psychology work in tandem to make a game enjoyable. If spending a limited resource and sometimes getting nothing were truly awful, people wouldn't get addicted to slot machines. It is fundamental to the psychology of this kind of game design that you sometimes fail and get nothing or almost nothing—but at a controlled rate that isn't too terribly annoying. This is the reason why Zelda games have 1 rupee chests, and why mimics are interesting design in spite of being incredibly frustrating. This is intermittent variable reward, and when well-tuned, it is key to designing a lot of genres of game. RPGs are among the genres where it's most important.
I am not sure what solution you are proposing. I get the sense you want to buff up indirect effect spells until even the most innumerate player will read it and go 'oh wow, that's worth casting.' But then such a spell would be completely out of whack in terms of actual game effectiveness, so we don't want that. I get the sense you do not want the game to reduce complexity as a means of making it more intuitive. But beyond those two options, I am not sure what your third is.
It's more complicated than that, and involves mostly looking for balanced designs that still feel impactful and interesting. Let's say playtesting reveals, that people don't like freezing rain even though you know it's a good spell. Maybe that means you need to play around with some levers—reduce the action cost to 2A but make the rain AoE smaller, keep it 3A and reduce the size but have it do damage and have enemies save immediately, keep it as is but reduce the damage in exchange for letting allies not have to save or giving them save upgrades... You shift things around until it has about the same amount of power but feels better to use.
Does that example make sense? Some combinations of power just won't read as well as others or feel as good to play as others, even if they're ultimately equally balanced. It is the job of game designers to thread this needle, and find what is both balanced and feels good.