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I think it's - you don't want rocket tag gameplay, but a lot of the things you're asking for essentially lead to rocket tag gameplay because you're looking for absolute defenses, total lockdown, compounding effects only held back by limited resources and it turns out that the sum total of having a lot of these effects be easily accessed is rocket tag gameplay because every single encounter boils down to who can land a critical mass of their big swingy effect first.
Not all the effects have to be so swingy, but I consider it better if some swingy effects can still exist. The players should, ideally, have some kind of resource-limited ability to mitigate it as well (hero points, items, etc.)
Balancing these things with limited resources does put pressure on the DM to make adventuring days where players cannot just blow everything immediately every time. (For PF2E, you mostly just increase encounter difficulty if you have fewer encounters to account for increased resource expenditure and call it a day.)
I don't think this has to end up as rocket tag, but you're right that it can end up as rocket tag when done wrong. High level PF1E is indeed an example of things going pretty wrong in this way. You have to do a lot of design work to fix it.
I think if you were talking about a computer game, or one where a single player controls multiple characters, you could have a system that consistently produces the results you're looking for. But a TTRPG runs against the limits of player attention and the session reset; resource tracking gets messy, and players want to have some sort of contribution over a length of time. As such, if you implement a resource limited big flashy effect system, the median playgroup will drift towards front-loading their limited resources then going home, aka rocket-tag 5 min day.
You absolutely have a point about attention and session reset; you need fairly clear ways to track resources throughout a day, and stopping midsession is difficult without detailed notes (or a VTT).
I'm less certain the median playgroup will end up with a 5 minute rocket tag day, but I do acknowledge that it's basically on the DM to prevent it from happening. (You could also try soft-limiting expenditures via short cooldowns, "soft" cooldowns via penalties for using too many resource spends in close proximity...)
You could build, ground up, a system which is more favourable to this, but you'd need the fundamental resource system to be multi-pronged to not produce a rocket tag system - all d20 games really only have hp as the core resource, with everything else being class-specific additions that can't be used as a general vector. Have you considered Exalted 3e and their use of initiative and the withering/decisive split to soft-block repeated killing attacks?
Yeah, multiple resource pools would be fundamental to making a system where this is possible. I'm unfamiliar with Exalted, personally, but it sounds like I should look at the mechanics you're talking about.
I do know someone who runs something that is probably more appropriately called a PF1E derivative than PF1E at this point, and from my discussions with them, adding resources with both offensive and defensive expenditures—as well as expanding and sometimes buffing what pre-existing resource pools can be used for—is integral to how they tame the rocket tag. So this is probably a good port of call.
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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.
Personally, I found the game improved somewhat as we leveled and had more options, but I never really felt any of the teamplay was very interesting or involved meaningful decisions. Casters have it better just because they're expending slots, but on resourceless classes, it's kind of grim to me. My kineticist turns are extremely samey, even at 18, and don't require much thought. My low level gunslinger doesn't take much of any thought, either, and their biggest concern is just action drift from moving. Most every question I face in this game has a pretty clear answer if I want to sit down and do the math, and when it doesn't, about the only reason is I don't currently know which defense is technically best to target.
I spend a lot of pf2e gameplay (as a player) completely checked out because I'm waiting for a turn that requires almost no planning or performing a turn that doesn't really require any planning. (Even as a caster, I'm not going to be evaluating if I should spend a resource or not, for the most part—I can just do more or less what I know the game expects of me unless it looks like it's getting dire, in which case I can blow additional resources.)
We use table time to help people with their PF1 builds, so PF2 builds being easier means more playtime instead of the players fleshing anything out. Even then, PF2 building isn't significantly faster than PF1 building when you're given help. Most of my PF2 players have still wanted help or advice anyways, especially for item purchasing. My personal prep time is separate from my "help players" time because of this, so I don't get added time to help with making encounters or anything. I also mostly run APs anyways, and make adjustments either as I put the encounter on the map or as I prep in it the VTT. And it's been over a decade being on and off in the GM chair, so I already have decent confidence; not really gaining any from running the system.
WRT to the "loudness war" of difficulty between GM and players in PF1E: the tables I've been at have managed and kept track of player builds, for the most part. The GM knows what the players have, has signed off on their builds, and isn't really caught off guard. This is a problem for a totally new DM, though, yeah; and it's additional still work for an experienced DM. I further agree that PF2E raises the floor of GM performance if the GM is following the rules and the table is too.
I would say the PF2E DM still needs to track their table, though, even if not to the same degree. If your table isn't play-to-win types, you'll probably have to decrease difficulty, and some parties and builds are still significantly stronger/more synergistic than others. An optimized resentment witch will have a very different impact on encounters than an enigma bard that doesn't grab any other muses and has a poor spell selection, for example.
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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?
Absolutely not. This is not me using "risk/reward" as a trojan horse to bring up minmaxing. I mean risk/reward in the typical sense it is used in game design.
To be completely clear about minmaxing:
I tend to enjoy making the best version of some concept a lot more than I enjoy just making the best thing, period. I like going, "hey, what's the best way to build this archetype that isn't usually that great?" or "what's the best possible way to make a character that sends people flying when you punch them?" I also enjoy maxing minimums, as in, "what's the best version of this thing I know is pretty bad?" I like sifting through a bunch of options and putting things together and seeing what clicks much moreso than I like making something broken.
I will intentionally avoid certain very good spells, feats, or talents in 1E just because I want to see how worse ones feel in practice, or what it's like to build with or around them.
There is a level of optimization I don't want to dip below, sure. I want my character to be good at doing whatever I've decided they should do, and I don't want them to drag the party down. But I don't care about optimizing much past that point. I've generally not played a character in a way that would allow them to solo the game and don't really care to, because it's a pretty selfish thing to do.
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.
The part of my response to Easl where I talk about power attack, plus the part about slot machines and intermittent variable reward, are basically the responses I would give to this.
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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.
The problem is more saying "oh, it's a subjective opinion" and then speaking with an undercurrent of holding a correct (as opposed to subjective) opinion. I don't mind if people think I'm wrong and say as much. That's kind of inevitable in a discussion like this.
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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).
Most sustain spells specifically say "the first time you sustain this spell each turn" before their sustain effect; Cyclone Rondo does not. It was probably an unintentional omission, though, given that it looks like it's from the Wake the Dead comic and not something more carefully proofed like a main rulebook.
I also think that the immediate reflex save on cast (which I assume knocks prone on fail or critical fail—it's worded unusually for PF2E) really helps with the playfeel of this spell. You get an immediate benefit in addition to the benefits on sustain.
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.
I'd definitely say that good risk reward lets players feel awesome.
I do mean to point to risk/reward in the sense in which you see it constantly discussed in game design, though—that the players will feel like they're putting something on the line with their choices and can be rewarded (or penalized) accordingly. Furious Finish asks the player to wager their remaining rounds of rage on the potential payoff of a bigger attack, so there's at least some sense of risk/reward there.
The difficulty in designing risk/reward in a TTRPG is that once people start optimizing, they'll start playing for expected value, and a lot of interactions that look like they involve risk/reward (like 1E power attack) end up involving no choices at all because people just do whatever is "the best" over and over. I personally think having a resource to spend and manage that you can "wager" helps alleviate this problem a bit—provided that
1) the resource can be spent in multiple useful ways, so there's an opportunity cost on using it
2) the player doesn't know whether or not they'll need the resource in the future, so spending now or saving for later is a live question
3) ideally, the only uses of the resource that are guaranteed to work are low reward, when compared to the uses that are not guaranteed to work. the existence of guaranteed-to-work spenders isn't necessary, but helps make decisions more interesting; this is the principle behind the guaranteed stabilize (PF2) and cheat death (PF1).
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.
I think there are two interesting phenomena to point out here, in relation to this.
One is the existence of the "modifiers matter" plugin for the Foundry VTT. This is a plugin that tells players when their +1s and +2s or -1s and -2s changed the outcome of a check, even though that would usually be hidden information. This gives players significantly better feedback on those modifiers, and is one of the single most recommended add-ons for running Foundry in PF2E (after things like the toolbelt).
The second is how much more satisfying amped guidance usually is than a normal debuff or buff. Since the player is only informed they can use amped guidance when it would change the outcome of a check from a failure to a success, it effectively means the player knows they did something every time they're allowed to use it. The design of amped guidance obscures all the misses it can't help with and highlights the times it works, so it feels consistently gamechanging.
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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.
Yep, that sounds about right.
It's extremely difficult to challenge highly optimized PF1E characters at a high level without forcing them to burn resources beforehand, or dangling a threat over their heads that they know they'll need to conserve resources for later. Making any single fight day challenging means figuring out a way to get players to burn a lot of resources to succeed, which just won't happen unless you are literally throwing spongy enemies with several layers of unique and potentially annoying defenses at them—too many normal enemies can be dispatched with either a single full-round or a single failed save. And even then, you run into the problem of figuring out how the players are supposed to survive that many rounds against a high level enemy with that much defense.
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.
I'm not sure this is true of necessity, but doing so unquestionably accomplished the goal of making things more predictable and easier to run.
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.
For the record, I'm still playing a 1E witch every other weekend. Been a lot longer since I've been in the DM seat for a 1E game, though.
I do kind of want to ask you in particular, though, Deriven: How do you feel the tactical variety in 2E fares, especially compared to other games you might have played aside from 1E? How interesting do you feel the moment to moment decisionmaking is?
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I spend a lot of pf2e gameplay (as a player) completely checked out because I'm waiting for a turn that requires almost no planning or performing a turn that doesn't really require any planning.This sounds like simple game fatigue. You know the system so well there's no surprises any more. New classes, spells, etc. can get you a bit more squeeze, but you're looking for something beyond that. Unfortunately, I don't see what you're asking for giving you that newness. A more swingy feat, spell, or maneuver will quickly go the same way: you will learn it. You will learn exactly when to best use it and when not to. Your party will learn how to support it's use to minimize failure risk. And then it will be exactly as autopilot-y as what you do now.
I'd suggest more complex encounters and antagonists with shifted stats, changed up resistances and weaknesses, etc. so that the how of combat matters more since the what is already solved for you. But maybe you've tried that too? I don't know what to suggest. Well to reference another thread, if you want 'moar different' you could always mash up SF2E with PF2E.
PF2 does lend itself to feeling samey, though. The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.
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The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.
There's a reason you don't see published creatures who exist only to be "walls." There's nothing stopping you from making one, but a creature with extreme AC, HP, saves, but weak attack and damage would only exist to make a combat stretch longer and be frustrating. I understand if the idea is "the PCs need the silver bullet to fight off this creature," but it also means that lacking said silver bullet makes any encounter with them frustrating and uninteresting. I mean, look at the golems before the Remaster as a good case study.
EDIT: There's literally nothing stopping you from making a creature like that and the rules are easy enough to do so without much work. You can even use a monster builder to mock it up quickly.
The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.There's a reason you don't see published creatures who exist only to be "walls." There's nothing stopping you from making one, but a creature with extreme AC, HP, saves, but weak attack and damage would only exist to make a combat stretch longer and be frustrating. I understand if the idea is "the PCs need the silver bullet to fight off this creature," but it also means that lacking said silver bullet makes any encounter with them frustrating and uninteresting. I mean, look at the golems before the Remaster as a good case study.
EDIT: There's literally nothing stopping you from making a creature like that and the rules are easy enough to do so without much work. You can even use a monster builder to mock it up quickly.
Walls serve a good role as bodyguards for squishy foes. They should have low damage, but be annoying with grapples and other abilities that make bypassing them difficult. They only suck as standalone foes or the focal point of an encounter.
Anything with Resist All (Incorporeals, the entities formerly known as golems, construct armour, clockworks) or regeneration all can serve that role well. That said, they're relatively rare and have decent offense because 4e is a lesson in that those kind of monsters suck to actually play out, prompting the MM3 revision. This is, I think, one of the cases where people asking for this don't actually know what they're getting into (or should play more 4e, which I always encourage)
Those aren't the same thing. The Wall-type enemy and the assassin type on the other side of that same coin aren't meant to be solo threats. They're meant to be seen when they are PL+0 at the highest as either a fire/ice duo or as added bodies to spice up a key encounter.
Walls serve a good role as bodyguards for squishy foes. They should have low damage, but be annoying with grapples and other abilities that make bypassing them difficult. They only suck as standalone foes or the focal point of an encounter.The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.There's a reason you don't see published creatures who exist only to be "walls." There's nothing stopping you from making one, but a creature with extreme AC, HP, saves, but weak attack and damage would only exist to make a combat stretch longer and be frustrating. I understand if the idea is "the PCs need the silver bullet to fight off this creature," but it also means that lacking said silver bullet makes any encounter with them frustrating and uninteresting. I mean, look at the golems before the Remaster as a good case study.
EDIT: There's literally nothing stopping you from making a creature like that and the rules are easy enough to do so without much work. You can even use a monster builder to mock it up quickly.
These already exist and tend to follow the Soldier roadmap when building creatures.
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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.
You are posting a whole lot and most of it is very wrong. Unbelievably so. I can't even believe you're interpreting the PF1 game in this fashion.
Resource management in PF1 was only a consideration early. As the levels rose, you had fewer issues with resource management to the point you had unlimited, long duration, powerful resources that allowed you to slaughter everything.
High stats led to a greater, and greater number of spells. High charge wands and staves for a low cost gave unlimited access to long duration, powerful buffs like mirror image or stat enhancement.
Threats like getting swallowed or held were eliminated by the freedom of movement spell or the ring item which was easy to obtain. You could become immune to most energy types easily. You gained spells with a high number of slots that eliminated groups of enemies with a single casting. And so and so on.
There was no resource management past the low levels in PF1/3E. Just a growing, hard to manage power level of unlimited powerful resources.
I still recall even at high level a master summoner summoning barrage after barrage of lantern archons annihilating dragons with their terrible touch AC with this massive number of lantern archons using 20 actions a round he had summoned so many. He could do this multiple times per day. We...and I know many others from reading these forums...banned the master summoner due to this annoying use of summoning spells. It started to really irritate other players.
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.
It is just as easy to sell abilities in PF2 as PF1. That means you are focusing solely on the power of the ability versus what it does.
Vicious Swing can be sold just as well as Power Attack, but it is less powerful than Power Attack.
Spells can be sold the same way.
There is no difference in narration in PF2. Just a difference in what is powerful and what is not compared to PF1. You're assumptions are solely tied to the power level of PF1 and has little to do with the satisfying or narrating abilities which are equally so in PF2 if you are not comparing them to the power level of PF1.
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.
I had a player quit playing a fighter or any low Will save class because of save or suck spells in PF1. The only classes save or suck spells were more satisfying for is the classes that gained power from using them.
They were not more satisfying for the DM or for martial characters that were affected by them negatively when used against them and negatively when casters used to make encounters trivial so they became unnecessary.
So no, you are flat out wrong that save or suck spells were more satisfying for anyone but the narrow caster based that used them to destroy any sense of balance in the game.
It's more complicated than that, and involves mostly looking for balanced designs that still feel impactful and interesting.
PF2 has shifted what is impactful. That is it. They still provide plenty of more balanced, impactful options that don't leave martials wondering they even played a martial in the first place.
I have found that direct damage spells are highly impactful in PF2. Debuff spells are highly impactful in PF2 and makes it more fun for martials rather than making their existence pointless. Maneuvers are highly impactful.
Basically, working as a team is more impactful rather than a single, well built character with the highest initiative solving the encounter with no help.
So no, I don't understand your meaning. I think it amounts to, "I prefer the power of PF1 and I don't like not being able to end encounters with powerful spells and abilities that let me destroy everything alone." That's how I read what you statements.
I played PF1 for however long, over a decade. It was the most insane power fantasy version of D&D ever made requiring minimal to no teamwork. Casters were massively out of hand for exactly the reason you are advocating a return to.
The game is set more where it should be which means using an impactful spells helps your team win rather than win on your own.
How satisfying for the other team members was it when Master Summoner guy took twenty actions with their lantern archon array to wipe out a dragon alone?
How fun was it when Mr. God Wizard dropped a mass hold monster that turned the fight against the fearsome level 15 troll army into a series of coup de gras actions for the martials?
How much was it when the mind blank, greater invis, mirror image, energy immunity wizard or sorcerer took their turn dropping some quickened enervate with an energy drain or a death spell ending the boss monster in round 1 while the DM who put all that work in had to look at the other players and go, "I guess its over. I hope you had fun."
That sure was satisfying the entire group of players. Just made them all feel like they had a great time, especially if they made some martial that wanted to make some attack rolls.
Then let's not forget the players that spent every dime getting heavy fortification before adding an enhancement bonus on their armor to avoid enemy critical hits. This was so much fun. Level 11 plus characters that spent every dime they had on heavy fortification before they increased their armor to +2.
So satisfying as a DM to watch. You going to get anything else on your armor? Nope. +1 heavy fortification armor. Now I'll increase the +1.
And you built your crit range as wide and high as you could get it? Yep. He who crits the most and hardest while avoiding the crits wins in melee.
Then the mobile, individualized wind wall spells that turned archery into a joke. Archers all had to wait for the casters to bring down the mobile, individual wind walls down to use their bows or they were useless.
Impactful? Sounds more like invincible.
I think PF2 has plenty of impactful options that you can narrate well. It doesn't have the options that trivialize the game or make you invincible.
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.
Yep, that sounds about right.
It's extremely difficult to challenge highly optimized PF1E characters at a high level without forcing them to burn resources beforehand, or dangling a threat over their heads that they know they'll need to conserve resources for later. Making any single fight day challenging means figuring out a way to get players to burn a lot of resources to succeed, which just won't happen unless you are literally throwing spongy enemies with several layers of unique and potentially annoying defenses at them—too many normal enemies can be dispatched with either a single full-round or a single failed save. And even then, you run into the problem of figuring out how the players are supposed to survive that many rounds against a high level enemy with that much defense.
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...
I think the group tactical variety in PF2 is much, much better than PF1.
I think martial tactical variety in PF2 is much better than PF1.
I think caster tactical variety is much less in PF2 because tactical variety in PF1 for casters consisted of, "I have so many powerful options, I can win alone. I don't need martials. They are superfluous."
I built so many casters in PF1 that obliterated that game out of the box that I can't even count them all. The wizard was my number one class in PF1, which is why I have trouble enjoying them in PF2. I freely admit at this point part of is I can't get use to the loss of power that wizards used to have.
I keep hearing people say, "The schools weren't so great in PF1." I don't even understand that. Divination was amazing with the initiative bonus. Intensify spells was great with Evocation, especially if you dipped a level into sorc for a bloodline damage bonus. Admixture school was great for mixing damage up on the fly. Metamagic feats were insanely powerful, especially when you added in Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection.
When mythic came out, I built a mythic cleric that reached +10 levels above my level for casting holy word. I was blowing up demon armies with that character.
The only martial I considered powerful was the magus because they could cast.
Fighter and rogue were trash classes you only dipped into or played to torture yourself.
As a caster in PF1/3E I used my 10 years plus of power gaming well.
I'm glad Paizo and WotC are teaching a new generation that gaming isn't about a lop-sided caster power fantasy game. That these games were meant to be played as a team of characters working together to win. It's much better for the long-term health of the game.
This sounds like simple game fatigue. You know the system so well there's no surprises any more. New classes, spells, etc. can get you a bit more squeeze, but you're looking for something beyond that. Unfortunately, I don't see what you're asking for giving you that newness. A more swingy feat, spell, or maneuver will quickly go the same way: you will learn it. You will learn exactly when to best use it and when not to. Your party will learn how to support it's use to minimize failure risk. And then it will be exactly as autopilot-y as what you do now.
I'm unsure. I think a lot of the reason I was excited about playtest necromancer, even though it was a mess, is that 1) its implied gameplan is largely based around managing thralls as a resource and 2) thralls have some constant, low value by occupying space, making decisions involving them somewhat more interesting. I think the resource management is just that valuable to me in a more game-y game like PF2E.
I also haven't burned out on the system from the DM side, so there's that.
Our GM does that too. But yet I've never ever seen a player use a HP to try and increase a success to a crit. Not once.
I could've sworn I said people tried for failure to success, not success to crit. I've never seen someone gamble success to crit success, either.
I fully agree, but I think as an imagination game, that's mostly up to the gm and players. That's how we do it. Got a big success, the GM will ask you to narrate what happens. Or the enemies get some big fail, the GM narrates a spectacular spell effect. I do not think it's Paizo's responsibility or even their capability to give a really spectacular narrative oomph to every minor game element (and let's face it, individual spells are minor elements to the system as a whole).
That doesn't really help while picking spells and feats, though, which is when you really need to be selling people on those abilities.
It also doesn't help with mechanics with more empty-feeling flavor, or mechanics where the already-stated flavor doesn't match the mechanics as well as it could. I feel like the frightened status is my go-to example of this: no amount of narration will make "-x status penalty to everything, decreases by 1 every turn" feel like "you're scared." Yeah, it's a direct translation of "shaken" from 1E. But shaken was part of a tiered set of statuses, and shaken was the lowest tier. The rest of that set was an integral part of selling the mechanical link between the -2 penalty and being afraid. Shaken, you're a bit disturbed (so -2); frightened, you also have to flee; panicked, you drop everything and flee wildly. The progression sells the metaphor of the mechanics here, with frightened and panicked actually doing the bulk of the work of making the fear effects feel like fear effects.
If frightened (in 2E) had you start fleeing at frightened 4, the design would work a bit better. (I think there's a haunt in a Season of Ghosts encounter that adds this effect, which is where I got it.) It doesn't have much of any gameplay effect, since you'll essentially never hit frightened 4. But it does a lot of work in selling that the status penalty really is a result of being afraid.
Don't get me wrong—good narration from players and GM is integral to a good tabletop experience. But I think that a system that seeds good narration with how its mechanics are crafted, described, and played is a far better system. And I've felt from day 1 that this is something PF2E was worse at than 1E.
(about intermittent variable reward) ...the tempo of a ttrpg play is just so much slower than either slots or video rpgs that I don't think your argument applies.
I think that's a fair thing to point out, but my experience has been that it's beneficial to my enjoyment of the game even if the rolls aren't coming in hot and fast. Very much a "the lows make the highs sweeter" sort of deal.
It does mean there are some nights where you feel you walk away like you did nothing, but that also frankly happens when you play games like poker or mahjong as well—and it doesn't make those games less enjoyable.
I am worried I'm ignoring an important frequency concern with this comparison. Maybe you'll crash out on fewer poker nights, or something; maybe you play more hands than you'll roll dice. But TTRPGs leave a lot of ways open to enjoy a game even if you're having bad luck, too, so there's that. There's a certain satisfaction in discarding well in riichi mahjong or feeling like you're keeping to a good gameplan in poker, too, I admit, so maybe I'm overselling this. Still, I think there's something there.
Yes. So maybe talk to your GM about trial running some homebrew spells? It sounds like you are experienced enough and thematically-interested enough not to abuse the privilege for powergaming, so you should be able to come up with some fairly balanced new stuff.
Even if I felt it would solve issues, I don't really think it's fair to other players at the table unless they're getting similar treatment—and that ends up increasing GM workload.
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Anything with Resist All (Incorporeals, the entities formerly known as golems, construct armour, clockworks) or regeneration all can serve that role well. That said, they're relatively rare and have decent offense because 4e is a lesson in that those kind of monsters suck to actually play out, prompting the MM3 revision. This is, I think, one of the cases where people asking for this don't actually know what they're getting into (or should play more 4e, which I always encourage)
I do think monsters like that are useful, but need a clear sort of "killswitch" to ensure they don't make the combat drag out forever. Defenses decreasing significantly past a certain HP threshold, defenses that lower drastically over time, enemies that start combat with a pool of large temp HP that also goes away whether or not they're getting hit or perhaps can be removed in special ways... Mechanics like that. Does that make sense?
That said, genuinely, have you tried 4e? It's a game with resource management on multiple tiers, where the daily effects tend to have very splashy, visible effects that usually feel good to pull off, where the healing attrition is easily tracked via healing surges instead of allowing either actual (PF2e) or effective past certain levels (PF1e) full heals, where milestones give a pull factor to continuing the adventure, where monster roles allow you to easily build skewed encounters, where minions, elites and solos exists to break hard from the norm in a balanced manner. It seems it genuinely fills all your requirements.
I have played 4e; I have never run 4e. I played a warlord and a paladin. Mechanically, I generally felt player decisionspace was a bit too light, and some of its design tricks (like minions) felt pretty transparent as a player. However, looking back, I think it's genuinely a more coherent system than 2E in a lot of ways. It's less burdened by the desire to avoid backlash and is able to slaughter sacred cows without remorse. So you aren't just stuck with Vancian casting in a system that shouldn't have it, have more agressive use of fort/ref/will defenses, etc. It was a game built with a clear vision in mind, or at least feels that way.
I have a hard time remembering details of many of the 4e encounters I played, which I consider a bad sign. But I think it's also been over a decade for one of those campaigns, so I don't know how much I could realistically expect to remember. Neither game hit high level play, either, so I can't comment on it.
I always felt like I would've been happier if 4E were used to run a game that truly felt like an SRPG like Fire Emblem, and players had multiple characters. Nowadays, I'd probably add that 4e probably would've done well to just have separate rules for in and out of combat. ICON is going this direction, and will probably be a good game whenever the rules get more usability and readability passes. (There's too much keywording without reminder text, right now, and some rules wordings are vague in a frustrating way.) If you haven't tried ICON yourself, you might find the design space it tries to occupy (with a BitD narrative shell stapled to a combat shell with combat clearly inspired by games like FFT) pretty interesting.
You are posting a whole lot and most of it is very wrong. Unbelievably so. I can't even believe you're interpreting the PF1 game in this fashion.
Resource management in PF1 was only a consideration early. As the levels rose, you had fewer issues with resource management to the point you had unlimited, long duration, powerful resources that allowed you to slaughter everything.
High stats led to a greater, and greater number of spells. High charge wands and staves for a low cost gave unlimited access to long duration, powerful buffs like mirror image or stat enhancement.
Threats like getting swallowed or held were eliminated by the freedom of movement spell or the ring item which was easy to obtain. You could become immune to most energy types easily. You gained spells with a high number of slots that eliminated groups of enemies with a single casting. And so and so on.
There was no resource management past the low levels in PF1/3E. Just a growing, hard to manage power level of unlimited powerful resources.
I understand making a lot of these assumptions about my points in the context of the conversation. But just like before, there's very little I disagree with here, if anything. Most of my points are more about things I wish 2E had, not things I think 1E had—especially if players were optimizing.
I will say that I probably do have a bias towards thinking about lower level play, since I've spent a lot more playtime in 1-10 than 11-20; in contrast, I feel like you're talking about higher level play much more consistently. That may play into it. After all, the "sweetspot" for 1E play is almost universally agreed to be around L6, when you have enough resources to feel flexible but before resources spiral out of relevance entirely, and when casters are strong but have yet to completely invalidate martials. Thinking more about levels close to that sweetspot will produce a very different impression of play than thinking about high level play.
And indeed, 1E does have more resource management than 2E... at lower levels, and I believe I already said the game didn't do risk/reward too much better overall. As I said in an earlier post:
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.
...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.
I'm not in conflict with you here. A lot of those resources I mention there (like rage) stop being a constraint in real play very quickly; only things that stay below maybe 3-4 uses a day remain managed resources, and even initially limited resources like paladin smite end up with more uses than you'll commonly need by level 10 or 13. In PF1E, the adventuring day never scales in length in a way proportionate to player resource gain, and it would be obnoxious if it did. PF2E tries to deal with this from two directions. One is to reduce attrition for non-casters, and often remove resources entirely; and the other is to keep only the most recently acquired caster resources (i.e. their highest rank slots) at full relevance and mostly restrict lower rank slots to enhancing action economy and turn efficiency, thus ensuring casters don't go into every combat stocked with reams of explosive spells they can use every turn without consequence. It solves the problem by severely restricting caster burst potential while also removing resource management. I don't really like the solution, but it's functional.
You can see that I even noted the issue of 1E's excessive high level resources in my last set of posts:
It's extremely difficult to challenge highly optimized PF1E characters at a high level without forcing them to burn resources beforehand, or dangling a threat over their heads that they know they'll need to conserve resources for later. Making any single fight day challenging means figuring out a way to get players to burn a lot of resources to succeed, which just won't happen unless you are literally throwing spongy enemies with several layers of unique and potentially annoying defenses at them—too many normal enemies can be dispatched with either a single full-round or a single failed save. And even then, you run into the problem of figuring out how the players are supposed to survive that many rounds against a high level enemy with that much defense.
I just... don't disagree with what you're saying. I think a lot more about the sweetspot at lower levels, and emphasize it more than you are. But I don't disagree with anything you're saying.
I still recall even at high level a master summoner summoning barrage after barrage of lantern archons annihilating dragons with their terrible touch AC with this massive number of lantern archons using 20 actions a round he had summoned so many. He could do this multiple times per day. We...and I know many others from reading these forums...banned the master summoner due to this annoying use of summoning spells. It started to really irritate other players.
The idea of anyone not banning master summoner strikes me as absurd. I could only ever countenance allowing it in a solo campaign. That thing is an absolute travesty of design. I'm sorry if you had to actually deal with that absurd thing in play.
It is just as easy to sell abilities in PF2 as PF1. That means you are focusing solely on the power of the ability versus what it does.
I feel like I've tried to explain multiple times that I'm not focused purely on power, using examples like this discussion of freezing rain.
..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.
The point here is about improving playfeel without increasing strength. The same idea undergirds my mention of how amped guidance tends to feel better than many simple +1 buffs, and that's even though its effect is more limited and it eats up a more important action type:
The second is how much more satisfying amped guidance usually is than a normal debuff or buff. Since the player is only informed they can use amped guidance when it would change the outcome of a check from a failure to a success, it effectively means the player knows they did something every time they're allowed to use it. The design of amped guidance obscures all the misses it can't help with and highlights the times it works, so it feels consistently gamechanging.
My discussion of the frightened status in my replies to Easl also explains why I don't think the status feels very good, and how a change with virtually no real gameplay impact (making enemies flee if they reach frightened 4) would greatly improve the "click" and fantasy of the mechanic without increasing its power in practice.
And when responding to Bluemagetim, I emphatically explained that trying to play the most powerful build possible isn't my goal. My 1E witch has dodged a several of her most powerful options on purpose, and has repeatedly opted to prepare several spells (like named bullet and screech) that are more fun for other members of the party even if they're worse than some of the stronger control options I could be taking.
Raw power is not my primary concern in this discussion, or in table play.
I had a player quit playing a fighter or any low Will save class because of save or suck spells in PF1. The only classes save or suck spells were more satisfying for is the classes that gained power from using them.
They were not more satisfying for the DM or for martial characters that were affected by them negatively when used against them and negatively when casters used to make encounters trivial so they became unnecessary.
So no, you are flat out wrong that save or suck spells were more satisfying for anyone but the narrow caster based that used them to destroy any sense of balance in the game.
I've just had the opposite experience. Again, as I said earlier, I got dusted by Disintegrate on a character that had Fort as one of their better saves in the first or second round of the final combat of a campaign. Not like I've never been on the receiving end of it.
I'm also a bit confused by your player's response when there are equally obnoxious save-or-sucks on fortitude. Again, Baleful Polymorph exists. And reflex is the save to keep from being entombed by wall of stone. Will is the most iconic save-or-suck, yeah, and probably has the most memorable ones. But there's nasty saves to fail on all of them.
If the concern is that it can happen at all, I figure the effects would be removed entirely from PF2E—but they're still there. Someone can (and will) crit fail baleful polymorph, even through hero point use. It'll happen. Is there a threshold of probability where this becomes okay?
And in spite of what you're saying, I've seen casters still dominate encounters with save or sucks in 2E. Even at low levels, calm can be worryingly effective.
PF2 has shifted what is impactful. That is it. They still provide plenty of more balanced, impactful options that don't leave martials wondering they even played a martial in the first place.
I see what's impactful as a matter of player psychology more than a matter of game math. For example, a +2 in PF2E will make you crit on 2 more die faces and hit on 2 more die faces in the best case. And indeed, this is similar to a +4 in a system without DC+/-10, since critting is essentially just hitting twice—better, really, since the damage is action-compressed on a crit. But +4 in a system without DC+/-10 still reads better than +2 in a system with DC+/-10. Understanding why the +2 is good requires bringing in additional context most players will never bother with. They'll just see small numbers and feel like they're not doing much.
People have taken forever to pick up on how strong AoE spells actually are in PF2E because it requires understanding encounter budgets and doing more advanced math to see that 1) if there are a lot of enemies to AoE down, they're almost certainly individually weak and more likely to fail saves and 2) crit failures are actually pretty likely when you start slamming enough enemies, and it is quite uncommon for all targets to succeed against your AoE.
(As an aside, people also commonly overestimate how strong chain lightning is because they don't understand how likely it is to stop when you're hitting a lot of enemies. It does big damage and the chain ending feels unlikely, so it's regarded as exceptionally strong.)
The extra steps required to understand the game sincerely hurt the gamefeel for a lot of players.
Things that aren't actually very strong overall can feel impactful, and things that feel very unimpactful can be strong.
Things can also feel unimpactful even if they're obviously strong when there's a mismatch between player expectation and what's in front of them—something I see happen with greater invis in PF2E. 4th rank invis isn't very good at making you unseen in combat, so I've seen people be disappointed by it. But is an absurdly strong defensive spell, since it gives enemies a 50% miss chance, and it's an excellent spell to use on ranged combatants because it makes enemies flat to them without their having to spend actions. People look at it and think they'll get to be the invisible wizard from PF1, realize it doesn't work that way, and then don't actually see what it's good at instead and get frustrated. Frankly, it'd be less confusing if it were named Blink instead, because it's more similar to PF1E Blink in practice. Instead of reading 4th rank and invis and thinking, "this is greater invis, but I stop being truly invis every time I do something, and have to spend an action to hide," it's instead, "wow, this is blink but I can be fully invisible if I hide or start the spell out of sight." That's a massive difference in how people perceive the exact same spell.
I sincerely believe that lower power does not have to feel worse.
I think the group tactical variety in PF2 is much, much better than PF1.
I think martial tactical variety in PF2 is much better than PF1.
I think caster tactical variety is much less in PF2 because tactical variety in PF1 for casters consisted of, "I have so many powerful options, I can win alone. I don't need martials. They are superfluous."
I'll admit I was more curious about your experiences in other games than in your experiences with just PF1 and PF2, but I accept that you feel that casters in PF1 basically ruined playing as martials regardless of what the martials did or didn't have on offer.
I sincerely believe that lower power does not have to feel worse.
Yes, it does. Your posts are evidence of this because you are hanging on to a game that no matter how much you post, it is nothing more than missing the power of PF1.
None of the subjective arguments you are making amount to much other than, "I miss the power of PF1."
PF2 is what a balanced game looks like. Less stacking, less immunity, less ways to win the game immediately, less ways to break the game. This is exactly what less power looks like and it feels worse to you.
It doesn't feel worse to me. It feels better as an overall game.
It's what you don't seem to be accepting is that you are making a completely subjective argument without any basis in fact or objective analysis.
It's just "I think this and I think that" and expecting people to understand because you are posting in a reasonable tone.
Sorry, you just want more power. Most of us don't want that environment back.
You're even playing a witch, one of the most broken PF1 classes in the game. I am so glad the Slumber Hex is gone. I hated that hex as a DM. Just ridiculous to be able to sleep people again and again and again to end fights.
Game has changed. I hope it never goes back to the PF1 brokeness.
PF2 is what a balanced game looks like. It's never going to be any different once you have played a game like PF1 with a power level that was so imbalanced in the favor of players, even more so with caster players. It is by its very nature less power and for players like you no matter how you try to pretend it's not your point, the loss of power feels worse.
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PF2 is what a balanced game looks like. Less stacking, less immunity, less ways to win the game immediately, less ways to break the game. This is exactly what less power looks like and it feels worse to you.
So is Gloomhaven, and it does flashy and unique better than PF2. There's no excuse for balanced to mean boring when we have games that deliver both.
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If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?
Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?
I don't play Gloomhaver. Your view of Gloomhaven is subjective as well, not objective. So once again, you are pretending...pretending...your personal preference applies to everyone.
1) Have you tried it?
2) You do the same thing when you call people out and claim your group's way of playing is superior.
3) Shouting down a discussion rather than disengaging or engaging with it in good faith is poor form.
If you think that game is better, then play it. Why are you on a PF2 forum trying to make PF2 into Gloomhaven since you find it more exciting?
I do. Unlike many posters here, I play many different systems and post about them. I rag on D&D 5e in those spaces, Gloomhaven in theirs, even my darlings BattleTech and Cyberpunk aren't immune. I engage with things I like critically and things I dislike not at all.
I'm beginning to wonder if you are a poster with a lot of different IDs who shows up here every few months trying to push their ideas just to troll the forum. I wish I had a way to check it because I believe you are probably doing just that.
No one spends this much time arguing for other games and claiming other games are better and wanting to go back to PF1 or some other game while spending all their time on a game they don't like and don't find exciting.
That's troll behavior.
I've reported you for this as it is a personal attack. Address my arguments, not me as a person or baseless speculation about my motives.
Gloomhaven, unless I missed the mark, is also a board game, which means it has a fixed set of possibilities and has near-total control over things like pacing, so it can do very different things from a TTRPG that has to be robust enough to accommodate a wide range of scenarios.
It has fewer moving parts than PF2, but not by as large a degree as you would think. It's like 4e D&D in terms of how many options a character has open to them in combat, and can be played with randomly generated dungeons. The biggest lack compared to a proper TTRPG is enemy variety, and their TTRPG that's in the works should fix this.
This somewhat ties back to Witch of Miracles on the attrition as a way to budget flashiness - a board game can force you at gun point to run exactly five combats before resting and hence balance attrition around that, but the lessons learnt from 3.PF and 5e is that due to RL circumstances and player caution the average playgroup trends towards one or two resource-exhausting encounters before calling it quits,
You can solve this with a dungeon clock that forces the party to move through at a measured, but fair pace, or else risk consequences. If an encounter is cleared every 7 minutes on average or else the final boss gets a buff, it forces attrition to be meaningful because you need to plan when you can afford to rest and when you have to push.
and then you have Deriven Firelion's group on the extreme end of 'the entire dungeon is one encounter'.
That relies on handing the enemies the idiot ball, as mindlessly rushing the party while they're buffed is suicidal. The intelligent enemies should be falling back, setting ambushes with heavy concentrations of force, and waiting for the party's buffs to run out. It sounds like his group ends up playing SEALs versus Militia far too often, and then DF assumes their group is uniquely awesome. Not an attack on him, just an observation that his anecdotes about how his group plays tend to exaggerate his group's skills while merely claiming intelligent enemies with few examples of his group encountering an enemy force as well coordinated as his party.
The reality of the table is that tracking attrition is the first thing to go when a group has in or out of game issues, which is why modern games are moving away from this - however, that also means attrition can't buy as much power anymore.
This is a huge shame because resource management is such a large part of giving a game the room to allow players to feel awesome without letting anything work as a go-to solution or always forcing a 5-minute adventuring day.
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If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?
Seems really odd to hang around arguing on the forums of a game you don’t even like. Seems like poor usage of time.
Seems really odd to hang around arguing on the forums of a game you don’t even like. Seems like poor usage of time.If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?
If I didn't like PF2, I wouldn't talk about it. I'm just critical of things I like.
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If I didn't like PF2, I wouldn't talk about it. I'm just critical of things I like.Seems really odd to hang around arguing on the forums of a game you don’t even like. Seems like poor usage of time.If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?
Ok. Name positives then. Because you sure can’t tell:
Ok. Name positives then. Because you sure can’t tell:
The three-action system has a lot of potential, as does 4-DoS.
Once you get over your D&D and PF1 ideas of how it should work, combat flows smoothly and is easy to pick up.
The way stats are generated in character creation is a perfect blend of point buy and array while giving you at least the illusion of choice.
Further skill consolidation is good, and using skills for initiative is inspired.
The balance is nice, even if I'd like it a few notches looser.
Creating monsters is quick, easy, and just works without any fuss.
The APs are quality.
I can go on, but there's no point. Being positive here gets a thread with 3 posts and then crickets. If you're spicy, you generate ideas that might actually translate to your own table.
Ok. Name positives then. Because you sure can’t tell:The three-action system has a lot of potential, as does 4-DoS.
Once you get over your D&D and PF1 ideas of how it should work, combat flows smoothly and is easy to pick up.
The way stats are generated in character creation is a perfect blend of point buy and array while giving you at least the illusion of choice.
Further skill consolidation is good, and using skills for initiative is inspired.
The balance is nice, even if I'd like it a few notches looser.
Creating monsters is quick, easy, and just works without any fuss.
The APs are quality.
I can go on, but there's no point. Being positive here gets a thread with 3 posts and then crickets. If you're spicy, you generate ideas that might actually translate to your own table.
I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.
I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.
Fair. I think if you want to double the list again to have more detail, you'd also want to hand out many more trained skills and skill increases. I'm not against it, but if you want characters that do a few things well, the consolidation works.
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I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.Fair. I think if you want to double the list again to have more detail, you'd also want to hand out many more trained skills and skill increases. I'm not against it, but if you want characters that do a few things well, the consolidation works.
Not double it but some things are weird. Sense motive and basic perception ring the same thing, for one example. If you’re a ranger out in the woods who barely interacts with people and is good and spotting things a long way off, you are ALSO an expert and picking up on people’s motives. There are other cases where to be good at one thing you have to also be good at a totally conceptually unrelated thing.
Not double it but some things are weird. Sense motive and basic perception ring the same thing, for one example. If you’re a ranger out in the woods who barely interacts with people and is good and spotting things a long way off, you are ALSO an expert and picking up on people’s motives. There are other cases where to be good at one thing you have to also be good at a totally conceptually unrelated thing.I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.Fair. I think if you want to double the list again to have more detail, you'd also want to hand out many more trained skills and skill increases. I'm not against it, but if you want characters that do a few things well, the consolidation works.
Yeah, the way some skills are overbroad is a tricky one. You need them and want them to feel good, but bundling too much makes distinct character flaws and RPing your sheet much harder.
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Skill consolidation was probably the thing that I was immediately interested when I saw PF2e for the first time. In PF1e even skilled and smart classes often felt dumber than me since you had to spend most of your skill ranks in the meta skills if you didn't want to be a pebble in your party's way (or buy wands with all the low level spells that easily replaced them, what a fantastic and well-design system, right?). It also kinda makes sense for someone that can see really far in detail to be good at spotting when someone does a smirk or similar when they are lying. The thing is that most people think Sense Motive is a lie detector when it isn't, since noticing a weird hand gesture or something can mean that the person is probably nervous or hiding information.
Meanwhile, someone with Spellcraft in PF1e was capable of identyfing any spell in existance or craft any magic item in existance (as long as you had the prerequisite feat) and I haven't seen a single person arguing about it. The same with each specific Knowledge category allowing a character to, in theory, know stuff in the realms of the gods even if they didn't even leave their hometowm. Like everything in 3.X and PF1e, the bias towards magic was so big that all magic-related stuff was way more broad and general in its use than mundane martial stuff, which was usually limited, lackluster, and could be easily replaced with magic.
Even within PF2e I'd argue Survival could be merged into Nature since its widely accepted that Survival is easily one of the most situational skills in the system, and Crafting and Performance could probably become Lore skills and turn their bespoke actions (Repair, Craft, and Perform) into generic actions that you can make with any skill that fits the circumstance like Recall Knowledge. Acting could quire Diplomacy or Deception, dancing could require Acrobatics or Athletics, instruments could require Thievery, or crafting magic items would require any of the magic skills. This plus the appropiate lores which would work like the already existing skills.
Skill consolidation was probably the thing that I was immediately interested when I saw PF2e for the first time. In PF1e even skilled and smart classes often felt dumber than me since you had to spend most of your skill ranks in the meta skills if you didn't want to be a pebble in your party's way (or buy wands with all the low level spells that easily replaced them, what a fantastic and well-design system, right?). It also kinda makes sense for someone that can see really far in detail to be good at spotting when someone does a smirk or similar when they are lying. The thing is that most people think Sense Motive is a lie detector when it isn't, since noticing a weird hand gesture or something can mean that the person is probably nervous or hiding information.
Meanwhile, someone with Spellcraft in PF1e was capable of identyfing any spell in existance or craft any magic item in existance (as long as you had the prerequisite feat) and I haven't seen a single person arguing about it. The same with each specific Knowledge category allowing a character to, in theory, know stuff in the realms of the gods even if they didn't even leave their hometowm. Like everything in 3.X and PF1e, the bias towards magic was so big that all magic-related stuff was way more broad and general in its use than mundane martial stuff, which was usually limited, lackluster, and could be easily replaced with magic.
Even within PF2e I'd argue Survival could be merged into Nature since its widely accepted that Survival is easily one of the most situational skills in the system, and Crafting and Performance could probably become Lore skills and turn their bespoke actions (Repair, Craft, and Perform) into generic actions that you can make with any skill that fits the circumstance like Recall Knowledge. Acting could quire Diplomacy or Deception, dancing could require Acrobatics or Athletics, instruments could require Thievery, or crafting magic items would require any of the magic skills. This plus the appropiate lores which would work...
Non granular skills are less useful and less mmersive and more ‘video games’. And that CAN make sense, but it shouldn’t be the only option.
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I think its interesting how people often find PF2e being less about RP than, for example, D&D 5e or rules light systems because it has more rules (I'm not trying to mean that's your take Arssanguinus, but I thought about this while reading your comment) when due to the ammount of rules the skill system has in PF2e over the aforementioned systems is what IMO can make it a more interactive narrative experience without requiring GM input.
Back to the topic at hand, I would kinda be onboard for PF3e to ditch skills entirely to make it more "rules light" as long as there were still ways to represent characters being more proficient at X than Y. Skill monkey classes always appealed to me but I always hated how skills in most systems feel arbitrarily designed (I said in my earlier comment the biggest problems I had with skills in PF1e, but other systems like D&D 5e certainly have some too like Perception and Investigation being different skills when the system already allows you to use different attributes for skills, so rolling Perception with Intelligence or Investigation with Wisdom feels redudant, plus other stuff that I'm honestly lazy to write about at the moment). In contrast, PF2e skills feel designed with mechanics and balance in mind, with logic being kinda like afterthought in some cases (like Crafting allowing you to craft anything ranging from a pencil to a cruise, but since Crafting is situational and pretty much optional it barely matters and I actually prefer it that way) but I'm curious to see if there could be a middle ground here for both designs to co-exist.
I just think the crunch went too far. There were some superfluous skills. Just not quite so many. Some things should not have been combined.
I think its interesting how people often find PF2e being less about RP than, for example, D&D 5e or rules light systems because it has more rules (I'm not trying to mean that's your take Arssanguinus, but I thought about this while reading your comment) when due to the ammount of rules the skill system has in PF2e over the aforementioned systems is what IMO can make it a more interactive narrative experience without requiring GM input.
Back to the topic at hand, I would kinda be onboard for PF3e to ditch skills entirely to make it more "rules light" as long as there were still ways to represent characters being more proficient at X than Y. Skill monkey classes always appealed to me but I always hated how skills in most systems feel arbitrarily designed (I said in my earlier comment the biggest problems I had with skills in PF1e, but other systems like D&D 5e certainly have some too like Perception and Investigation being different skills when the system already allows you to use different attributes for skills, so rolling Perception with Intelligence or Investigation with Wisdom feels redudant, plus other stuff that I'm honestly lazy to write about at the moment). In contrast, PF2e skills feel designed with mechanics and balance in mind, with logic being kinda like afterthought in some cases (like Crafting allowing you to craft anything ranging from a pencil to a cruise, but since Crafting is situational and pretty much optional it barely matters and I actually prefer it that way) but I'm curious to see if there could be a middle ground here for both designs to co-exist.
Skills should be more fleshed out, but D20 (and THAC0) based systems have always treated them like a minor concern. I'll always advocate for ditching skill feats, making more actions into skill actions, and giving skills the same space in the book that spells get with DC penalties and bonuses based on what you're trying to accomplish. Any skill feat should, at best, negate an explicitly listed penalty for using that skill action without it.
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Skills should be more fleshed out, but D20 (and THAC0) based systems have always treated them like a minor concern. I'll always advocate for ditching skill feats, making more actions into skill actions, and giving skills the same space in the book that spells get with DC penalties and bonuses based on what you're trying to accomplish. Any skill feat should, at best, negate an explicitly listed penalty for...I think its interesting how people often find PF2e being less about RP than, for example, D&D 5e or rules light systems because it has more rules (I'm not trying to mean that's your take Arssanguinus, but I thought about this while reading your comment) when due to the ammount of rules the skill system has in PF2e over the aforementioned systems is what IMO can make it a more interactive narrative experience without requiring GM input.
Back to the topic at hand, I would kinda be onboard for PF3e to ditch skills entirely to make it more "rules light" as long as there were still ways to represent characters being more proficient at X than Y. Skill monkey classes always appealed to me but I always hated how skills in most systems feel arbitrarily designed (I said in my earlier comment the biggest problems I had with skills in PF1e, but other systems like D&D 5e certainly have some too like Perception and Investigation being different skills when the system already allows you to use different attributes for skills, so rolling Perception with Intelligence or Investigation with Wisdom feels redudant, plus other stuff that I'm honestly lazy to write about at the moment). In contrast, PF2e skills feel designed with mechanics and balance in mind, with logic being kinda like afterthought in some cases (like Crafting allowing you to craft anything ranging from a pencil to a cruise, but since Crafting is situational and pretty much optional it barely matters and I actually prefer it that way) but I'm curious to see if there could be a middle ground here for both designs to co-exist.
I totally agree with ditching skill feats. My table did this like a year ago (if you meet the prerequisites of a skill feat its yours, with a few exceptions) and its certainly been for the better in terms of speeding up character creation and character advancement, but also in terms of roleplay and character expression during play.
All the good things I said earlier about PF2e skills disappear when talking about skill feats. There's skills that clearly had preferential treatment in regards to skill feats (Medicine feels like it doesn't have a single bad skill feat, while Nature has like 1 good skill feat and it doesn't even have a legendary-tier skill feat). There's some examples of situational skills like Arcana (which is mainly used for RK checks and I believe its the skill with least amount of monsters that can be identified using it) that gain some goodies like a free cantrip, limited darkvision, and Unified Theory which is insane, but I feel like most of the time skills that are already good on their own receive the best skill feats while the niche skills receive fodder, which makes investing into those skills worse than it already is because it forces you to swim through a sea of gargabe to find the least bad and situational option. But even when talking about the best skills like Medicine, if you take a skill increase into it at 3rd level its very likely that you are going to take Continual Recovery either at 3rd or 4th level, only to then take Ward Medic at 4th or 6th level.
There really isn't a choice here. You took an increase into a skill, and there's like 2 or 3 feats that you can take which are also the highest tier of skill you can currently take. Even if the system allows you to take a trained-tier skill feat, why wouldn't you take the expert-tier ones if you just expended a skill increase into that skill? Gifting skill feats if you meet their prerequisites effectively skips a step in the process but ends in a somewhat similar result. Some skills benefit from this more than others, but since you don't have to min-max your skill increases to avoid having to take Eye for Numbers it is more likely for a PC to use their skill increases into niche or flavor skills (or at least, that's whats happened in my table both as a GM and player).
I have a similar concern with ancestry feats too. It isn't as bad as with skill feats because there's always at least one ancestry feat you want from each ancestry, not to mention versatile heritages, custom heritages, and the Adopted Ancestry general feat allowing you to poach the best from other ancestries too, but I often find myself playing certain combinations where one of the halves only exists as something written on the character sheet and not something that can be expressed through mechanics. Not to mention general feats which there's too few and its very easy to simply not meet their prerequisites with certain classes. In that sense I kinda miss the old PF1e feats that, while having the downside of weighting situational and flavor stuff with the mandatory combat ones, if they were just limited to ancestry, general, and skill feats I don't think would make much of a problem since its all the situational and kinda flavorful options anyways. Make it so you get a general feat at 1st and every two levels, take all ancestry feats, general feats, and the best skill feats and turn them into general feats, with all the situational or boring skill feats being deleted or merged into the skills themselves. This or allow PCs to take general feats with their ancestry feats, and even ancestry feats with their class feats.
I totally agree with ditching skill feats. My table did this like a year ago (if you meet the prerequisites of a skill feat its yours, with a few exceptions) and its certainly been for the better in terms of speeding up character creation and character advancement, but also in terms of roleplay and character expression during play.
All the good things I said earlier about PF2e skills disappear when talking about skill feats. There's skills that clearly had preferential treatment in regards to skill feats (Medicine feels like it doesn't have a single bad skill feat, while Nature has like 1 good skill feat and it doesn't even have a legendary-tier skill feat). There's some examples of situational skills like Arcana (which is mainly used for RK checks and I believe its the skill with least amount of monsters that can be identified using it) that gain some goodies like a free cantrip, limited darkvision, and Unified Theory which is insane, but I feel like most of the time skills that are already good on their own receive the best skill feats while the niche skills receive fodder, which makes investing into those skills worse than it already is because it forces you to swim through a sea of gargabe to find the least bad and situational option. But even when talking about the best skills like Medicine, if you take a skill increase into it at 3rd level its very likely that you are going to take Continual Recovery either at 3rd or 4th level, only to then take Ward Medic at 4th or 6th level.
There really isn't a choice here. You took an increase into a skill, and there's like 2 or 3 feats that you can take which are also the highest tier of skill you can currently take. Even if the system allows you to take a trained-tier skill feat, why wouldn't you take the expert-tier ones if you just expended a skill increase into that skill? Gifting skill feats if you meet their prerequisites effectively skips a step in the process but ends in a somewhat similar result. Some skills benefit from this more than others, but since you don't have to min-max your skill increases to avoid having to take Eye for Numbers it is more likely for a PC to use their skill increases into niche or flavor skills (or at least, that's whats happened in my table both as a GM and player).
I have a similar concern with ancestry feats too. It isn't as bad as with skill feats because there's always at least one ancestry feat you want from each ancestry, not to mention versatile heritages, custom heritages, and the Adopted Ancestry general feat allowing you to poach the best from other ancestries too, but I often find myself playing certain combinations where one of the halves only exists as something written on the character sheet and not something that can be expressed through mechanics. Not to mention general feats which there's too few and its very easy to simply not meet their prerequisites with certain classes. In that sense I kinda miss the old PF1e feats that, while having the downside of weighting situational and flavor stuff with the mandatory combat ones, if they were just limited to ancestry, general, and skill feats I don't think would make much of a problem since its all the situational and kinda flavorful options anyways. Make it so you get a general feat at 1st and every two levels, take all ancestry feats, general feats, and the best skill feats and turn them into general feats, with all the situational or boring skill feats being deleted or merged into the skills themselves. This or allow PCs to take general feats with their ancestry feats, and even ancestry feats with their class feats.
Unironically, D&D 5e does feats right. You get a precious few and they're build defining, but you never feel forced to take one just to get to a baseline level of effectiveness. PF2 made too many things into feats, and it most results in false choices.
Eh, I'm not sure about it. All martials take Great Weapon Master (or the closest equivalent for their prefered weapon) and all casters take War Caster or Spell Sniper. There's also too few feats (both the amount you get and the amount that exist in the system) and since people rarely play above 8th level because the system breaks itself most people only get 1 or 2 feats in their whole career, and at the cost of their attribute increases.
Ideally I would like a middle point between 5e and PF2e in this regard.
Eh, I'm not sure about it. All martials take Great Weapon Master (or the closest equivalent for their prefered weapon) and all casters take War Caster or Spell Sniper.
Those have been somewhat addressed in the 2024 version. Players also commonly skip feats for ASIs, but you're correct that twice as many feats would be ideal. Decoupling stats from feats also makes sense, but I'm against offering stat growth the way PF2 does it, as it feels like you should only ever boost your key stat and saves, unless you have a very good reason to do something else.
I’ve played a lot of Gloom, Frost, and Jaws. IMO it has the same issues as PF2E I mentioned to Witch. I.e. it gets more repetitive once you know it well.
You can, and should, try playing with the "bad" cards and "bad" characters and see if you feel the same way. Obviously, in the end, it's a game focused on combat, so certain tactics will rule the day, but such is true of literally everything. Sports teams don't run trick plays all the time because the standard systems are what work.
I’d also say that the limited objective + burn mechanic just does not compare at all analogously to slot spells in PF2E.
Make every PF2 dungeon floor a self-contained battle with set objectives and a time limit. If you need to add to it, grant a free refresh of burned resources in line with the added threat.
So long as PF stays as a d20 class system with spell slots, I’m not sure the comparison really provides any lessons learned that can be incorporated into either the PF2E system or GMing to make the PF2E player experience better.
Spell slots need to die for PF3, there's no reason to keep them.
In any event, the Gloom ‘spell’ system is certainly ‘boring’ from the perspective of every magical character having less ‘spells’ than even a Kineticist in PF2E. So if people like Witch are looking for a wider variety of good, effective spells that a single PC can access, then Gloom is definitely not the model to use.
Fair, but you can keep expanding them in line with the current templates. I bet the TTRPG will add more variety, but the system does work best with a limited set of skills per character.
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There's skills that clearly had preferential treatment in regards to skill feats (Medicine feels like it doesn't have a single bad skill feat, while Nature has like 1 good skill feat and it doesn't even have a legendary-tier skill feat).
TBH that can kind of be a double edged sword. Medicine has much stronger skill feats than Nature, but in turn I feel like I get most of what I expect out of nature from just skill increases, while medicine with just skill increases feels kind of bad.
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Unironically, D&D 5e does feats right. You get a precious few and they're build defining, but you never feel forced to take one just to get to a baseline level of effectiveness. PF2 made too many things into feats, and it most results in false choices.
I disagree on this.
I feel like Skill feats and Class feats are generally in a good spot with PF2, I like where they are. Although some skills are a bit lacking, generally skills and their feats are good (I'm specifically thinking they probably should have combined Survival skill into something else).
I will kind of agree that General feats aren't in a great place. There's like 3 good ones that are pretty much always taken, and none that are interesting. Or at least effective enough + interesting enough to actually care about taking.
I also don't feel like any class is forced to take a specific feat to be effective. Feats in PF2 generally give you more options, making your more versatile rather than directly making your more powerful (making numbers bigger) like feats often did in PF1.