| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is a collection of thoughts I've had over the course of many a session that have finally ended up coming together in some coherent way. I'd like to start by making it clear that although I'll be critiquing some aspects of Pathfinder's leveling here, I think leveling in Pathfinder is fine. This isn't a call to action for change so much as a reflection on what I think works and what works less well, and why.
Character levels are just about one of the most standard elements one can find in any RPG, and for good reason: it's a simple and immediately understandable way of marking character progression, plus it appeals to our monkey brains by making numbers go up. Like any RPG, Pathfinder uses levels, and it is by leveling up that our characters unlock new abilities, and rise from above-average adventurers to interplanar-grade heroes.
And that, I think, is where some of the limitations start to appear.
For starters, it's worth noting here that unlocking new abilities and becoming more powerful are two different forms of progression: although obtaining more tools that are better in different situations represents an increase in power, that is meaningfully different from, say, dealing more damage using the same ability. In Pathfinder, like in most RPGs, the two are part of the same progression: we gain more abilities, and our abilities become stronger. As you level up, you can't have one without the other.
The reason this is meaningful is because not every player has the same expectation for character progression on both fronts: some players might be fine with the official rate of progression, but some players much prefer to be able to unlock something new at faster intervals, and some I know prefer to run one-shots just so that they can try out entirely different sets of abilities fairly quickly. It's difficult to cater to the latter kind of player with faster leveling, because doing so would obviously raise their stats quicker in a way that would affect the math of encounters.
While one could adjust for this by simply using higher-level monsters to encounters, I think this hits a second issue, which is that doing so ends up changing the tone of the adventure: at level 1, a player character is a cut above average, and wild animals are dangerous threats to them. At level 20, the party can expect to fight primordial titans, deific avatars, and the Grim Reaper itself. Leveling up the party also means leveling up the threats and the stakes, which isn't appropriate for every story.
Because character levels are a marker of both power tier and character complexity, this makes Pathfinder less-suited to tell certain kinds of stories: you can't really tell a story that starts with immensely powerful characters only just getting to grips with their abilities, for example, because even a level 10 character is going to have a lot of complexity to contend with, whether it's feats, spells, or both. On the flipside, it's difficult to tell a story where the party remains just a cut above the average mortal, because disabling leveling to keep the party at that power tier also means turning off their capacity for character development via new abilities. What could in theory be a number of different levers for character complexity and power tier are just one lever, which fits some stories but not others.
And to be clear: this is fine. Although these are limitations of the system, that does not mean the system is broken or needs to change. However, I do think this has led to some problems in Pathfinder's development, specifically mythic play: mythic rules and archetypes are effectively there to bring the adventure up a power tier, but that's something already defined by leveling. Characters already gain a steadily larger influence on the world around them as they level up, because that is the natural consequence of being able to magically warp reality or cause earthquakes by stomping on the ground, which are powers that are already in line with those of heroes of myth. This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why mythic play doesn't really live up to its name, at least in my experience, and I suspect also why low-level characters aren't given access to mythic destinies, as the stakes are simply too low at that power tier for what the developers had in mind with their archetypes.
Effectively, if power tiers for an adventure were a separate lever from character complexity, it would likely have been much easier to layer on mythic rules as another, even higher tier of power. Conversely, this would also make it easier to insert a power tier for "normal" characters and thus make it easier to tell grittier stories where the party isn't all that powerful, such as horror adventures. It would also give the GM more control over the pacing of character progression, such that giving the party new abilities more frequently wouldn't have to mean bumping them up a power tier. Pathfinder doesn't do this and instead adopts a one-size-fits-all approach to its leveling: again, this is fine, and in fact this works really well for the stories told in most of Pathfinder's APs, but it does mean there are stories that could be told with the characters and abilities we have where the game's leveling kinda gets in the way.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I do agree that the increase in complexity as the character level goes up is a problem. The shear amount of tracking for Vancian casting, the number of items, longer turns because of increased action efficiency and number of options.
I do agree that the increase in complexity as the character level goes up is a problem. The shear amount of tracking for Vancian casting, the number of items, longer turns because of increased action efficiency and number of options.
I very much agree that late-level complexity and tracking becomes a problem in many cases. This thread's OP was already enough of a wall of text as-is, but I think there's also an extra bit of discussion to be had around scaling complexity, and allowing characters to develop without increasing that complexity.
At my table, I've had different kinds of players, where some were ready to sink their teeth into a meaty ability set from the very beginning, whether because they'd played a class already and knew the basics, or because they were familiar enough with tabletop games that they were actively looking for a good starting package of abilities to wrap their head around. On the flipside, I've also had players who for one reason or another don't do well with lots of mechanics to track, and prefer much more straightforward characters. I imagine you've dealt with both kinds as well, and it's difficult to cater to both types of players for a number of reasons: the rules don't really let you start characters at level 1 with lots of extra abilities, but you also can't progress without gaining extra abilities, so there's no way to cap how many mechanics to keep track of while keeping level progression.
One thing I'd like to experiment with more is dynamic retraining within the adventuring day, the basic principle being that at certain milestones, such as solving a puzzle or finishing an encounter, the whole party gets to immediately retrain an aspect of their character, such as a skill increase or skill feat for an obstacle, or perhaps a class feat or known spell for an encounter. If this works, this in my opinion could allow players to experience character progression more frequently without adding new mechanics on top each time, let alone leveling up their characters' stats. It also could mean that characters could potentially feel very dynamic even if they're capped at a small number of mechanics to track, while players who don't want to change as much could just stick to what they have. There are some potential obstacles to this, as being able to quickly adjust on the fly is an intended strength of certain characters who would then need some kind of adjustment in compensation, but it could otherwise be a useful tool, whether to keep certain players from getting bored with their characters, or to enable character progression in adventures where the party is locked to a certain power level.
I have very little experience with mythic abilities, because my current Strength of Thousands campaign began before War of Immortals was published. We did participate in the public playtest of animist and exemplar, Playtesting in A Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies, but the mythic abilities were not part of the playtest. Out of curiosity, I created a mythic NPC, Mkosa, who visited my campaign and teamed up with some PCs in a sailboat race. Mkosa felt more like the PCs than most NPCs, because his Mythic Calling resembled the PCs' free archetypes, but he was not game-breaking.
I do agree that the increase in complexity as the character level goes up is a problem. The shear amount of tracking for Vancian casting, the number of items, longer turns because of increased action efficiency and number of options.
Some feats cause no increase in complexity. For example, Quick Jump reduces the action cost of Long Jump and High Jump from two actions to one action and also removes the initial 10-foot Stride. I would like to see more feats like that.
Pathfinder 1st Edition has several feats that simply increase numbers. Those add power but not complexity. Pathfinder 2nd Edition shuns such feats, because those can change power level more than average and PF2 wants power level to be predictable. Thus, a feature like Reflex Expertise, which grants expert proficiency in Reflex saves, will be given by the class rather than by feats. That means that most feats give action efficiency, such as Quick Jump and Sudden Charge, or unlock options, such as a monk's Monastic Weaponry. Sudden Charge, despite classifying as an action efficiency feat like Quick Jump, does increase complexity by presenting a decision whether to charge or not.
When I create NPCs for my campaigns, the spellcasters take the longest to build because I have to create their spell repertoire. On the other habnd, tracking spells cast is not much of a problem, because I record their stat block on a text file and can add notes, such as a X against a spell cast. Likewise, similar notes can track consumed or one-per-day items.
PWL definitely flattens the curve for accuracy, for sure. It doesn't touch on a number of other factors, though, such as damage, so your level 20 caster casting desiccate would still wipe out most of an army of level 1 creatures. I also think power tiers go beyond numbers, as well, such that high-level characters can do things low-level characters can only dream of, like teleport across the planet or create natural disasters. If the GM's intent is to let the party progress in a way that keeps them at the same general power tier, then the variant would only cover part of that goal.
I disagree on Sudden Charge presenting an option. There is never a reason not to Sudden Charge unless you can't reach the enemy even with two Strides. At any distance less than that... if you want to attack them you just use it, put yourself next to them, and swing. Sure, you might not have needed two strides of distance. But why take the time figuring that out when you use two actions to reach the enemy and hit them either way?
I have seen players trying to figure out whether they need Sudden Charge to reach an enemy or not, counting out squares. Unless you want to use some other special attack (e.g. Vicious Swing)... just charge. In a lot of fights you don't even need to measure distance either since you can easily get to 60'+ range on it and just choose where you end up because you'll have movement to spare.
That is a reasonable viewpoint. A player who selects Sudden Charge already plans to use it regularly, so each individual decision to use it is trivial. I should have chosen a better example of an option, such as a champion's Diety's Domain, which could replace melee combat with a Fire Ray.
That does open a door in the discussion about complexity: some options displace the original method. A martial character with Sudden Charge has no need to Stride and Strike as two separate actions. My players love Cat Fall. At first glance, this skill feat is protective, because it reduces falling damage. But my players use it as an alternative to climbing down a wall or a cliff. The starlit-span (that means archery) magus Zandre in my campaign likes to climb onto rooftops to survey the area and have a good line of sight for ranged Spellstrike. With Cat Fall she can effortless leave the roof and return to ground level without a Climb action. Does Cat Fall add complexity?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
PWL definitely flattens the curve for accuracy, for sure. It doesn't touch on a number of other factors, though, such as damage, so your level 20 caster casting desiccate would still wipe out most of an army of level 1 creatures. I also think power tiers go beyond numbers, as well, such that high-level characters can do things low-level characters can only dream of, like teleport across the planet or create natural disasters. If the GM's intent is to let the party progress in a way that keeps them at the same general power tier, then the variant would only cover part of that goal.
Having played through a few PWL games it doesn't really solve the problem, just makes it take a lot longer to scale out of control mathematically. The abilities, like teleport, are always going to be at the level of power they are set and there isn't much you can do about that.
I don't think high level FA games make characters so complex that they take longer to play. It's far more likely you forget the niche things you can do because they hardly ever come up, you keep just doing the few things you designed your character to do.
Thus I have some issues with how you can, with certain classes, double and triple down on an ability and forgo a fair amount of complexity while other classes don't have much room for that but excel at just grabbing lots of different abilities.
The difference in min-maxing a fighter compared to a summoner is night and day. Both gain power every level, and can be built to be more complex and more specialized respectively, but would generally be much weaker for it.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm not really a caster guy mainly because I don't like vancian casting, but also because I dread the idea of having to micromanage 10+ spell slots from 7th level onwards when I could be playing a martial or kineticist for a simpler, and arguably more efficient, experience.
Non-casters were always easier to play than casters but the excuse used to be that casters were more complex but also stronger. That isn't the case (necessarily) in PF2e anymore, so I feel vancian should be tweaked or removed in a future edition to streamline it a bit.
That or offer an alternative for those that don't like vancian like I do.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Non-casters were always easier to play than casters but the excuse used to be that casters were more complex but also stronger. That isn't the case (necessarily) in PF2e anymore, so I feel vancian should be tweaked or removed in a future edition to streamline it a bit.
That or offer an alternative for those that don't like vancian like I do.
I definitely agree that spell slot casting should no longer be the default, even if it's still worth having around as an option for players who do enjoy it. This is probably an entire discussion by itself, but I very much agree with you that it's worth challenging the assumption around many d20 systems that casters must be complex by default and martials simple, something PF2e has attempted to some extent with individual classes but not with the fundamental martial-caster frameworks. Complexity should be opt-in, and players should have the option to play extremely simple casters as well as highly complex martials. In general, it would be nice to be able to define how many abilities each party gets based on table preference rather than character level, such that the same system could equally serve players who lean towards simplicity, including children and certain neurodivergent players, and players who lean towards complexity.
I'm not really a caster guy mainly because I don't like vancian casting, but also because I dread the idea of having to micromanage 10+ spell slots from 7th level onwards when I could be playing a martial or kineticist for a simpler, and arguably more efficient, experience.
Non-casters were always easier to play than casters but the excuse used to be that casters were more complex but also stronger. That isn't the case (necessarily) in PF2e anymore, so I feel vancian should be tweaked or removed in a future edition to streamline it a bit.
That or offer an alternative for those that don't like vancian like I do.
I don't even think casters are all that complex, at least in a turn for turn combat to combat sense. You only have 2-4 slots per level and only the top two, sometimes 3 are ever worth casting for pure number effects. So even out of 12 slots it's fairly easy to tell if you have the right tool for the situation your in. I played a druid to 20 and was surprised by how often most of my spells were not great for the situation I was in. Easily puts you in the mindset of just bring the best of the best spells. It's fairly easy to opt out and just bring chain lighting, fear and slow in all your slots and still be useful.
I think caster super complexity is an illusion of the fantasy of the perfect caster that has all the right spells in the right slot for every occasion. I have yet to see that happen, it's far more likely you need the thing you didn't take or need something you took once multiple times.
So it might actually be better to try and make things as simple as possible.
Casting might do better in future editions being more like the kineticist, even if it's flavored like a wizard adding to his spell book via feats. Otherwise casters should be able to specialize in certain spells the way martials specialize in weapons and tactics that fit with their stats and abilities.
A strength based fighter isn't going to be tumbling through with a dagger the same way an illusionist shouldn't be throwing fireballs around. There can be different mechanics in play effecting how and why you build but I think that loops back into the primary topic of the ways and rate that you acquire power.
Could it be better if items either give you the power scaling or complexity so you have more control over the power level of your game?
As for mythic, I haven't played yet but it felt to me like the mythic powers should have just been wider in scope. Do more and be more useful in general then normal abilities. Not trying to be better numbers, but more effective in outcome. Most of them should be written like the versatile cantrips or kineticists apex abilities, having a half dozen bullet points of what you could do with that power instead of a basic save or strike. Having more flexible or more capacity in the success, like instead of lifting a rock you lift a pillar or side of a house) is kinda the only way mythic makes sense in a game about mathematical balance IMO.
The problem is that I feel casters in PF2e feel designed around the assumption of the "perfect caster" unless you are playing a buff or heal bot, which I believe are widely considered to be the most effective caster playstyles in PF2e since they can't fail whatsoever at doing their thing. I don't mean that a blaster caster or debuffer are bad necessarily, but it certainly feels bad to play as either of them because the system wants you to take spells to target all defenses when selecting your spells, which is not something you can always do, specially if you want to stick to a certain flavor of spells.
That casters were designed in this way isn't something I made up. I believe Michael Sayre said so himself on the forums AFAIK.
This is a big deal to me because if I, for whatever reason, want to use a dagger for a few sessions on a fighter that chose polearms with fighter weapon mastery I will be "harming" myself while doing so, but not to the same extent a caster does when not playing optimally. Plus, the fighter's dagger won't break after a few strikes, but the caster runs the risk of running out of useful spells after a few encounters. It also doesn't help that a ton of caster feats don't work with cantrips, which I understand the reason why, but if leveled spells can feel bad to use sometimes, if you happen to be left with only cantrips that don't benefit from your features its not going to feel good. It doesn't really matter if in practice this is unlikely to happen, because it can't happen for martials which have infinite use effects even of their best attacks.
I feel more complexity at high levels is a given but also a necessity, because otherwise you end up with a system like D&D 5e where martials play exactly the same from 1st to 20th level while casters get exponentially stronger at each level. I frequently find myself at 7th+ level with a ton of options that my character has that I don't use because I already have a set rotation of actions that I know is going to be better in most situations, but I certainly prefer having stuff that I don't use rather than not having stuff to do at all, but in the case of casters in particular, I think their complexity doesn't really translate into a stronger, funnier, or more versatile playstyle.
I think the question of how complex a character feels is ultimately going to be quite subjective: to some players, a character with nearly forty spells prepared in their spell slots, several more focus spells and cantrips, additional spells from their staff, and even more spells from scrolls, plus feats and all, might be very easy to handle. To others, even a character with ten abilities to track, feats and items and all, is too much. Both of those viewpoints are valid. Similarly, if players want to roleplay a story of ordinary adventurers who have nonetheless picked up dozens of different useful skills over their lifetime, or a story of superheroes who fight multiversal threads using only a handful of powers, those are also valid bits of gameplay to want. They don't necessarily have to all work under the same system, and 2e definitely doesn't need to do that to succeed, but if there were a way to somehow achieve that, that could be worth pursuing, and could otherwise work with the in-game world and mechanics of Pathfinder.
Could it be better if items either give you the power scaling or complexity so you have more control over the power level of your game?
This is an interesting point. In my opinion, items are effectively just one way character progression manifests: although items are treated differently from character abilities in Pathfinder, the development of obtaining a cool new piece of gear is not all that dissimilar to learning a new skill or developing a new power, and simpler systems like most games under the PbtA framework treat those interchangeably. Even in Pathfinder, some characters are very much defined by items, like Alchemists and Inventors, whereas other classes have themes that in my opinion don't rely on items at all for story purposes, like the Psychic. Thus, I think character complexity and power level can be defined through items, though in similar ways to feats and spells.
As for mythic, I haven't played yet but it felt to me like the mythic powers should have just been wider in scope. Do more and be more useful in general then normal abilities. Not trying to be better numbers, but more effective in outcome. Most of them should be written like the versatile cantrips or kineticists apex abilities, having a half dozen bullet points of what you could do with that power instead of a basic save or strike. Having more flexible or more capacity in the success, like instead of lifting a rock you lift a pillar or side of a house) is kinda the only way mythic makes sense in a game about mathematical balance IMO.
I agree with this, I think narrative scope is effectively what defines power level in a balanced game. The strong character in the party going from delivering instant knockouts to commoners in a tavern brawl to stomping so hard they cause an earthquake is one example of going up several power levels, and mythic should have been a continuation of that, with even bigger and more narratively impactful effects. I do think the writers tried, as well, it's just that at high level, we already do so many epic things that mythic feats and spells ended up just being regular content with particularly florid flavor text (and, in fact, many of those feats felt pretty mundane, not to mention outright terrible). Mythic powers effectively needed to pull out all the stops and let us shape or break the entire world, and I don't think the designers were necessarily ready to go that far.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
My Oracle feels pretty complex. I've got piles of spells to work from, focus spells, cursebound abilities, archetype stuff, ancestry stuff, skill stuff... I have three reactions plus any that I prepare as spells, too. Oh, and I have items that do all kinds of things, some of which even I don't remember (including another reaction!). There's a LOT going on.
I wanted that, so it's fine, but if I were to miss a game night I doubt anyone at the table could play my character effectively (except the GM, who is very experienced) because there's so much going on.
But a fair bit of complexity is opt-in. One of my Abomination Vault players isn't engaged with PF2 mechanically but really likes playing with his friends in my game (and he's really fun to have around). I helped him build a Human Fighter. Very little complexity here: he walks up to things, crits with Vicious Swing, and has a great time. While he does have other stuff he can do, he doesn't really need to in order to feel effective.
That doesn't even change much later, and it's one of the things I really like about PF2 Fighter. It can do a lot. It doesn't have to, and for someone that wants a mechanically simple character, it can carry them a long way even with a basic understanding of the game. My son played one in Extinction Curse and he was like 7 when we started. He primarily remembered he could do 3 things: Kobold lightning breath, Swing big 2h sword, and Intimidate. He did those 3 things basically all the way to level 20. He smashed stuff and had a great time doing it. Meanwhile someone else in the same party was a Shield of Reckoning Paladin who depending on the situation would use a rapier/longsword/empty hand to grab, had to judge positioning correctly to protect a 5 person party (the rest was a Medicine Ranged Investigator and two Bards), and in general was using a much larger array of tools than the Fighter was.
Hell, I know someone who plays a fighter in PFS that uses a regular old staff as a 2h weapon. Why? Flavor. While it's clearly not as good as the optimal options, they carry their weight with it. That the game lets them do that and have it not massively drag them down is great.
I think the issue with casters is that casters just have less leeway to do that because for a lot of game, they're already harder and more complex. They need to juggle having the ability to target multiple defenses because otherwise they hit enemies that are extremely hard to do anything to, and the fallback option in Spell Attack options are just mathematically awful. So you need to be able to target every save all the time, and you need to have some way to know what save to target in the party otherwise you're guessing and wasting actions/spells. You need to ration spells for much of the game. Some classes you need to pick ahead of time what spells you'll have and if you pick wrong you've just lost those resources.
And since what really matters in player psychology is feeling effective, that really makes life harder on casters. A Fighter played suboptimally is still a Fighter and is going to be pretty decent. A caster played suboptimally can quickly find themselves accomplishing nothing over an entire fight, and that just feels bad.
Far as mythic goes... yeah, mistakes were made there. I think the inverse scaling on mythic proficiency was a huge mistake because it warps the game massively at low level and at high level is a comparatively very minor bump (unless you're bad at the thing you're using it for, perversely). They also seemed to be trying to go for balance by keeping things reined in, but that's kind of antithetical to the idea of "mythic play" where the whole appeal was just how over-the-top-anime-like the player could feel.
I GM'd a PF1 mythic game and while it had its flaws, it succeeded at the goal of "the players feel like absolute big-deal badasses beyond ordinary heroes." PF2 doesn't succeed at that... but the mythic stuff we got is also so imbalanced with itself that the attempt to keep it balanced and reined in didn't deliver that.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think that the increasing character complexity is a defining 2e game feature, as it rewards players for mastering the system , especially now that character building mastery is much less of a thing than back in 1e.
If you're playing with PWL you also have the option of homebrewing things along the game design idea. So you can let players advance in level and give them the new things without improving the damage/heal & HP scale. This is often very easy to do with spells that have a H+1 entry, e.g. a 1st- or 2nd-rank Fireball for 2d6 / 4d6 damage respectively won't break anything, yet broaden the capabilities of your casters (& Kineticists). On martials you can withhold higher level runes. You'll have to be a bit careful with buffs/debuffs and multi-target options (e.g. Desiccate¹), but they work as well with de-heightening - it's mostly utility & "wall of text"-spells that need actual restriction. Slam Down & Synesthesia are strong options when playing at "damage level 5" for example, but they're not game-breaking and thus expand your character's options rather than power.
¹ I recommend de-heightening d10+ damage spells by reducing the number of dice by 1 and the die size by ½ per spell rank, so a 5th-rank Desiccate (H-3) would go from 10d10 to 7d7.
Although 2e does away with the ivory tower design that defined the D&D 3e-to-PF1e era -- and thank goodness for that -- I'd still quite like complexity to be something that can be easily tuned for everyone, independently of how long they've been playing or what the tone of the campaign is. Some of my players have been playing tabletop games for years and would be quite happy to jump into a complex character build right off the bat, without having to play a base template for several weeks or months that they already used for other characters many times already. Meanwhile, some of my players get overwhelmed by large amounts of options to choose from, and the solution I found that worked well was to write down their character's most important abilities on a handful of cards that they could then hold: with a literal handful of cards, this works fine, but past that amount it starts to get overwhelming again. I'd quite like it if adding or subtracting complexity to characters were something that could easily be done on the fly, even tuned independently of each character. This doesn't mean every character needs to automatically be super-simple, but it does mean complexity in my opinion shouldn't be something that's expected to inevitably happen over time, nor something that should be automatically locked away from certain character builds until much later.
De-heightening spells sounds like a fun idea and could definitely work under certain circumstances. I'm personally fine with keeping certain abilities and spells locked behind certain tiers of power -- it's going to be difficult to tell a story of just-above-average adventurers when one of them can desiccate an entire field's worth of living creatures, even for only 4d4 damage -- but I otherwise agree that there are quite a few spells and abilities out there that could be included earlier without drastically affecting the tone of the narrative. Similarly, although PWL isn't enough to completely equalize high gaps between party level and monster level, it could be a good start in case a monster is a good fit for an encounter despite a significant level difference.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Although 2e does away with the ivory tower design that defined the D&D 3e-to-PF1e era -- and thank goodness for that --
As a former resident of the ivory tower of academia, I am bewildered by the ivory tower metaphor here. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ivory tower as "A sheltered, overly-academic existence or perspective, implying a disconnection or lack of awareness of reality or practical considerations." "Ivory tower design" is essentially saying that Dungeons & Dragons and Paizo developers lacked awareness about practical gameplay in roleplaying games.
... I'd still quite like complexity to be something that can be easily tuned for everyone, independently of how long they've been playing or what the tone of the campaign is. Some of my players have been playing tabletop games for years and would be quite happy to jump into a complex character build right off the bat, without having to play a base template for several weeks or months that they already used for other characters many times already. Meanwhile, some of my players get overwhelmed by large amounts of options to choose from, and the solution I found that worked well was to write down their character's most important abilities on a handful of cards that they could then hold: with a literal handful of cards, this works fine, but past that amount it starts to get overwhelming again. I'd quite like it if adding or subtracting complexity to characters were something that could easily be done on the fly, even tuned independently of each character. This doesn't mean every character needs to automatically be super-simple, but it does mean complexity in my opinion shouldn't be something that's expected to inevitably happen over time, nor something that should be automatically locked away from certain character builds until much later.
Some complexity comes from character customization, a major selling point of Pathfinder. The character design needs enough complexity to let people distinguish between an elf character based on Legolas from Lord of the Rings and an elf character based on Link from Legend of Zelda.
My first Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign consisted of converting the PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2 rules. I learned quickly that PF2 monsters are deliberately designed for low complexity. A strong example is the Hobgoblin Archer. It appears to be a hobgoblin ranger with a crossbow and precision edge. But it lacks the iconic ranger's Hunt Prey ability, because Hunt Prey is too complex for a GM handling multiple hostile NPCs.
My PCs win combat against NPC opponents by switching to tactics that the NPCs are not designed to handle. For example, this week my party fought a 10th-level Dezullon that has regeneration 15 (deactivated by fire) and a 30-foot-range acid glob attack with amnesia venom. But the 8th-level oversized party is mostly spellcasters who prepared 60-foot-range cantrips, a magus who prefers longbow range, and a fire kineticist. Poor dezullon. The PCs took their most damage from a party member confused by the amnesia venom, and that occurred after the dezullon was dead.
The party ended the game session after encountering Thiarvo the Quick and his hireling, who want to loot archaeological ruins for treasure. Strangely, Thiarvo is trained in Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Diplomacy, Stealth,, Survival, and Thievery, but nothing effective for finding or identifying treasure buried under rubble. The writer designed him for a social encounter that might become a combat encounter, but left out the parts that would let him succeed in his mission. Simplicity can lead to unexpected gaps.
Even a 1st-level party is more complicated than their opponents. The party typically has four different character classes, but the enemy typically consists of copies of the same creature entry. The NPCs are given better numbers to balance them against the party whose versatility gives them better tactics.
As the PCs level up, they encounter weirder enemies than the animals and bandits they fought at low levels, such as flying creatures, incorporeal undead, walking plants, and spellcasters. The party needs to adapt, and the ability to adapt comes from having many abilities. Thus, the complexity of many abilities is necessary.
As a former resident of the ivory tower of academia, I am bewildered by the ivory tower metaphor here. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ivory tower as "A sheltered, overly-academic existence or perspective, implying a disconnection or lack of awareness of reality or practical considerations." "Ivory tower design" is essentially saying that Dungeons & Dragons and Paizo developers lacked awareness about practical gameplay in roleplaying games.
That is not at all what I'm referring to. Monte Cook, one of the designers for D&D 3e, posted an article on his website referring to Ivory Tower Game Design: this was a design methodology he applied to D&D where the game artificially creates system mastery by inserting deliberately suboptimal or hyper-synergistic character options. Players who mastered the game's mechanics would then be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and be rewarded with incredibly powerful builds as a result. This methodology did not at all age well, because nobody likes getting saddled with a weak build while another party member who copied a strong build online dominates every play session. Because this methodology was foundational to 3e and thus 3.5e, some of it unfortunately carried over to PF1e, which was built off of D&D 3.5e, but thankfully PF2e does not follow this design methodology at all.
As the PCs level up, they encounter weirder enemies than the animals and bandits they fought at low levels, such as flying creatures, incorporeal undead, walking plants, and spellcasters. The party needs to adapt, and the ability to adapt comes from having many abilities. Thus, the complexity of many abilities is necessary.
I question this assumption, as what wins encounters isn't necessarily the sheer amount of abilities a party has, but the right abilities for the situation. There are only a limited number of actions a party will be able to take in a given encounter, so there are only a limited number of abilities you will be able to use. A party with a smaller number of abilities could therefore still win encounters handily if those abilities are up to the task, and as Tridus mentions above, martial classes tend to be particularly well-suited for this given how they don't get hard-countered easily. I think it could be quite helpful to let the party retrain abilities more dynamically, i.e. within the adventuring day rather than over the course of lengthy downtime periods, and that could allow characters to dynamically adapt to circumstances while still keeping complexity low.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a former resident of the ivory tower of academia, I am bewildered by the ivory tower metaphor here. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ivory tower as "A sheltered, overly-academic existence or perspective, implying a disconnection or lack of awareness of reality or practical considerations." "Ivory tower design" is essentially saying that Dungeons & Dragons and Paizo developers lacked awareness about practical gameplay in roleplaying games.That is not at all what I'm referring to. Monte Cook, one of the designers for D&D 3e, posted an article on his website referring to Ivory Tower Game Design: this was a design methodology he applied to D&D where the game artificially creates system mastery by inserting deliberately suboptimal or hyper-synergistic character options.
I followed the link you provided. That article itself said, "I call the concept Ivory Tower Game Design. (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.)" Using a misnomer without clarification is bewildering.
I used to regularly play Magic: the Gathering and had a subscription to The Duelist magazine, later renamed Top Deck. I read the original article by Mark Rosewater about the psychographic profiles Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Timmy likes impressive cards, Johnny likes clever combos, and Spike likes to win games by any tactic. A card that Timmy loves is not necessarily a game-winning card, but it keeps some of their customers happy, so it is good to publish.
The customization in Pathfinder, both 1st and 2nd Edition, follows this kind of profiling. Some players are interested in playing colorful characters, so a Untamed Order druid who shapechanges would be more exciting to them then a Stone Order druid with a connection to stone and earth. But this does not mean that a untamed druid ought to be weaker than a stone druid. Instead, the Paizo designers carefully balanced each druidic order. Nevertheless, shapechanging is more complicated than manipulating the earth. The designers were willing to let some classes and subclasses be harder to play.
Players who mastered the game's mechanics would then be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and be rewarded with incredibly powerful builds as a result. This methodology did not at all age well, because nobody likes getting saddled with a weak build while another party member who copied a strong build online dominates every play session. Because this methodology was foundational to 3e and thus 3.5e, some of it unfortunately carried over to PF1e, which was built off of D&D 3.5e, but thankfully PF2e does not follow this design methodology at all.
Part of the fun of each new Magic: The Gathering set is figuring out the power of the new cards with new mechanics and how they work together. But PF2 is more about selecting the ancestry and class for the roleplaying the player wants than finding the most powerful ancestry and class.
As the PCs level up, they encounter weirder enemies than the animals and bandits they fought at low levels, such as flying creatures, incorporeal undead, walking plants, and spellcasters. The party needs to adapt, and the ability to adapt comes from having many abilities. Thus, the complexity of many abilities is necessary.I question this assumption, as what wins encounters isn't necessarily the sheer amount of abilities a party has, but the right abilities for the situation. There are only a limited number of actions a party will be able to take in a given encounter, so there are only a limited number of abilities you will be able to use. A party with a smaller number of abilities could therefore still win encounters handily if those abilities are up to the task, and as Tridus mentions above, martial classes tend to be particularly well-suited for this given how they don't get hard-countered easily. I think it could be quite helpful to let the party retrain abilities more dynamically, i.e. within the adventuring day rather than over the course of lengthy downtime periods, and that could allow characters to dynamically adapt to circumstances while still keeping complexity low.
More abilities overall or a few abilities with more versatile effects increase the chance of having the right abilities for the situation. Each spellcaster had only a limited number of actions during the combat with the dezullon but casting a fire spell that deactivates the dezullon's regeneration is a more effective activity than casting an acid spell against a creature that resistances acid 20. The kineticist set up a Thermal Nimbus to damage the hard-to-hit dezullon. Upon learning about the dezullon's regeneration deactivated by fire, the player said that he was glad he chose fire damage for the nimbus rather than cold damage. He chose thermal nimbus as his action because its damage is automatic and the dezullon had already demonstrated high AC and saving throws.
Pathfinder 1st Edition allows players to overspecialize their characters. For example, they could build a paladin who is an absolute master at annihilating the undead but would be mediocre at defeating living cultists. This gives the GM a dilemma: should the next encounter be a battle against undead where the paladin totally dominates and the other PCs feel like dead weight (pun intended), or should the next encounter have no undead and the paladin will underperform. A PF2 GM has fewer worries about restricting variety in foes than a PF1 GM.
As for having the ability to dynamically retrain martial abilities, that is still more abilities, but requires advance investigation to prepare properly.
I followed the link you provided. That article itself said, "I call the concept Ivory Tower Game Design. (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.)" Using a misnomer without clarification is bewildering.
I used to regularly play Magic: the Gathering and had a subscription to The Duelist magazine, later renamed Top Deck. I read the original article by Mark Rosewater about the psychographic profiles Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Timmy likes impressive cards, Johnny likes clever combos, and Spike likes to win games by any tactic. A card that Timmy loves is not necessarily a game-winning card, but it keeps some of their customers happy, so it is good to publish.
The customization in Pathfinder, both 1st and 2nd Edition, follows this kind of profiling. Some players are interested in playing colorful characters, so a Untamed Order druid who shapechanges would be more exciting to them then a Stone Order druid with a connection to stone and earth. But this does not mean that a untamed druid ought to be weaker than a stone druid. Instead, the Paizo designers carefully balanced each druidic order. Nevertheless, shapechanging is more complicated than manipulating the earth. The designers were willing to let some classes and subclasses be harder to play.
Right, but PF2e does not make Timmy options less powerful than Johnny options, is the point. D&D 3e and PF1e had suboptimal options and over-the-line options that were there to test players' system mastery, such that you could win or lose at character creation. That is no longer the case in 2e, where being more complex does not make you automatically stronger.
More abilities overall or a few abilities with more versatile effects increase the chance of having the right abilities for the situation.
Correct, but as already pointed out, it is okay if you play certain classes and don't have an optimal answer to the situation. Conversely, PF2e doesn't really do silver bullets, because once again, the game is not won at character creation. Having a hugely complex set of abilities where a few are ideally-suited to the circumstances at hand is therefore not a prerequisite for playing this game, at any level.
As for having the ability to dynamically retrain martial abilities, that is still more abilities, but requires advance investigation to prepare properly.
You're going to have to explain that one. How does having the same number of abilities, but being able to swap one out after an encounter, equal more abilities and advance investigation?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The perfectly-timed thread as I was just getting ready to ask about how 2E mythic rules have played at tables - although that’s not what I was expecting from the title of this thread. There’s some really good ideas here, and despite me enjoying the occasional challenge (e.g. my animist is a lot of fun but there’s many moving parts), I’ve also had players drop out of games due to the ‘complexity’ of their characters. I didn’t think a ranged ranger was that hard to play, but there’s that difference between people, as someone mentioned above.
I waited until my son was in his teens before introducing him to the game as a barbarian. I saw lots of people bringing their younger kids and burning them out. Now he’s just made a sorcerer and is having a blast with his goblin pyromaniac. By the way, ‘No Than You Evil’ is a fantastic rules-light RPG introduction for younger kids.
So mileage may vary by table and among players, but the game providing options of complexity regardless of the class is an interesting one. To a degree, that is already dialed into some of the classes. Perhaps it will be explored further in an Unchained book once we get closer to the next edition?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
PF2e isn't a complex game, but its way more complex than 5e which kinda became the standard for this genre of play. 5e (or rather, its player base) doesn't encourage players to read the books because "the GM should know how this works", while in PF2e is nearly impossible for someone to remember every single rule without having Archives of Nethys open in other tab. There's people that only get to play TTRPGs because they want to do the "theater game with friends" and that's perfectly fine. I'd argue those people would be much happy if playing systems that are actually simpler than 5e and that are much better designed than 5e too, but I guess thats a whole different discussion.
With that said, I really like that Paizo puts customization as one of their selling points for PF2e because that's exactly what 5e lacks and what the people that would want to try other systems would like to have, but I personally would prefer if some edges were cut to make some things simpler both because I feel it would benefit Paizo by bringing more of the casual TTRPG playerbase and because I honestly thing some of these don't really provide anything that's fun or meaningful to playing a character.
I, for example, could do away with skill feats entirely. Skills as a whole fall more towards the narrative side of the hobby but I agree there must be some mechanical rules to back them up because it makes it easier for GMs to design non-battle encounter arounds, but skill feats are weirdly designed in that they make stuff like trying to convince or scare multiple people out of combat a feat. If it had a mechanical benefit in combat like demoralizing multiple people, I agree that should be gated behind a feat, but needing a feat to make an epic speech in front of a crowd? This is just wrong. Even the feats that contribute to combat are so weirdly designed because some of them feel like things the skill should be able to do from the get go or something that you unlock from having a higher skill proficiency.
Then there's Medicine which is arguably the strongest skill in the game and each of its skill feats feels mandatory. Medicine already scales based on proficiency, why didn't feats like Ward Medic and Continual Recovery became part of this proficiency-based progression as well?
General feats aren't as egregious as skill feats but the problem I have with them is that most characters only have access to the 1st level ones. Most 3rd+ level general feats have prerequisites, which are prerequisites that are pretty much defined by your choice of class. In the case of the 7th level general feats in particular, if you aren't a rogue, fighter, or a class that gets master proficiency in Perception at 7th level then you only have access to a single general feat (Prescient Planner), which itself requires a 3rd level general feat. I know the idea behind general feats is to be, well, general in their application, but after you take Toughness, Diehard, Canny Acumen, and probably Fleet that's pretty much it in regards to general feats for most characters.
Ancestry feats are also really variable in power, with some being skill feat-level while others are arguably better than class feats. This usually depends on if the concept behind the ancestry itself has enough going on for it for the designers to make cool feats around them, but even then, cool and popular concepts that are usually covered as versatile heritages feel underpowered likely because Paizo fears certain heritage+ancestry combinations. For example, I played multiple geniekin throughout the years but I don't recall ever taking a single ancestry feat from their heritage.
I personally wouldn't mind if we came back to the old 3.X and PF1e feat system where you picked 1 feat at 1st level and every two levels thereafter allowing you to select ancestry, general, and skill feats (with variant rules like ancestry paragon for those that would actually want to select ancestry feats in particular more freely) but I know that most people would be against this idea because it would lead towards the idea of ivory tower design for some.
While I do think there is a place for skill feats, I agree that their implementation is imperfect. I think one of the biggest issues with skill feats in particular is that every character is given just one budget for everything, whether it's benefits that apply in combat or out of combat. Because out-of-combat activities are more loosely-defined and the benefits that apply exclusively there are generally not considered as significant, there are a ton of skill feats that fall by the wayside because they'll always be more situational than their encounter-focused alternatives.
Going back to the topic of complexity, I'd also say that this is one of the reasons characters can feel more complex than they need to be: if you're in combat, you don't need to be aware of your ability to use Crafting to Coerce merchants better (actual skill feat btw), and out of combat, most of your class features are unlikely to matter as well unless you're a spellcaster with exploration- or social-oriented spells. Although PF2e is a fairly modular game, its trio of combat, exploration, and downtime are tightly-coupled enough that it's difficult to cleanly plug one or the other out of play. A lot of players are barely going to touch downtime mode, and a lot of tables run exploration mode without cleaving too closely to the mechanics there either: if different modes were more loosely-coupled and character options for those modes were budgeted separately, including for subsystems too, then it would be easier to swap to a smaller number of relevant abilities for any given mode, and characters could have a more equal number of abilities at their disposal while still reducing complexity overall.
I suppose the running theme of this thread is a request for more modularity so that it's easier to dial different factors of play: I'd quite like complexity, power level, and the general focus of an adventure to be easily adjusted separately from each other, so that characters can be made as simple or as complex, or as weak or as powerful as the players want right from the start. If I want to run a combat gauntlet or a purely social adventure, I'd like to be able to easily do so within the system without having to carry over complexity or imbalances tied to aspects of the game that aren't relevant to the scenario, but if I wanted to plug in a study or circus subsystem, I'd like to be able to do that too in a way that doesn't require my players to sacrifice their characters' existing power budget for what could end up being more niche and situational game elements. In terms of feats, this might mean being able to choose feats based on a character's ancestry, background, class, or just a general list, and those feats being equally strong next to one another, but not needing to pick a specific number of each of them.
As for having the ability to dynamically retrain martial abilities, that is still more abilities, but requires advance investigation to prepare properly.You're going to have to explain that one. How does having the same number of abilities, but being able to swap one out after an encounter, equal more abilities and advance investigation?
I looked in the Archives of Nethys monsters for a good example of 9th-level monster and spotted the Gbahali. My players saw a gbahali at 6th level in Spoken on the Song Wind. They were scouting ahead and spotted it before it spotted them, so they avoided the encounter entirely. But imagine that they had to face the gbahali to finish their mission. After spotting it, they would pool their knowledge about gbahalis and learn it was a fast leaper with Reactive Strike that could swallow them whole. Then under quick retraining rules they would swap abilities between encounters in order to better defend against the gbahali. Thus, advance investigation would provide them with more abilities that help against a gbahali.
My players' characters never fought a gbahali but other PCs in my Ironfang Invasion campaign once faced a nest of five Froghemoths. With that many froghemoths, someone was bound to get swallowed. When the archer ranger was grabbed by a froghemoth's tongue, the rogue/sorcerer rescued him with a Friendfetch spell before the froghemoth swallowed. When the monk was swallowed, he performed a Flurry of Blows with slashing Tiger Claw attacks to rupture his way out. And when the champions was swallowed, she yelled out that they did not need to rescue her. She was so tough that she simply slowly cut her way out with her shortsword.
Pathfinder offers many ways to deal with Swallow Whole, but the ability is sufficiently rare than no-one routinely prepares for it. Swapping abilities after recognizing a creature with Swallow Whole would be a strong tool for surviving Swallow Whole. A monk could say, "I had trained in Dragon Stance for bludgeoning dragon tail attacks, but given that a swallowing creature is ahead, I am swapping Dragon Stance for Tiger Stance."
I, for example, could do away with skill feats entirely. Skills as a whole fall more towards the narrative side of the hobby but I agree there must be some mechanical rules to back them up because it makes it easier for GMs to design non-battle encounter arounds, but skill feats are weirdly designed in that they make stuff like trying to convince or scare multiple people out of combat a feat. If it had a mechanical benefit in combat like demoralizing multiple people, I agree that should be gated behind a feat, but needing a feat to make an epic speech in front of a crowd? This is just wrong. Even the feats that contribute to combat are so weirdly designed because some of them feel like things the skill should be able to do from the get go or something that you unlock from having a higher skill proficiency.
I hold the view that if an activity, such as giving an inspiring speech, has no mechanical effect, then we don't need rules for the narrative effect. Instead, roll a Diplomacy check for the speech so that we can learn how well the crowd cheers and how fast they spread the news. The town rallying around he heroes and following their plan is a narrative result, not a mechanical effect, so it is not limited by the Make an Impression or Coerce activities.
Then there's Medicine which is arguably the strongest skill in the game and each of its skill feats feels mandatory. Medicine already scales based on proficiency, why didn't feats like Ward Medic and Continual Recovery became part of this proficiency-based progression as well?
The skill that my PCs all train is Athletics. Those with high Strength want to be able to Grapple, Trip, or Shove opponents. Those with low Strength want to be able to Climb a knotted rope or Swim across a calm river. A few PCs in any party will train in Medicine and maybe even learn Battle Medicine in case the healer character is unavailable, but Ward Medic and Continual Recovery are feats for people who heal regularly. Having secondary healers would be good for parties that want minimal time between encounters, but that is a particular style the players choose.
Then under quick retraining rules they would swap abilities between encounters in order to better defend against the gbahali. Thus, advance investigation would provide them with more abilities that help against a gbahali.
But not more abilities in total, which is the point I'm making. That, and for some reason you seem to have taken "occasionally retraining one ability after a particular milestone" and distorted it into "free, unlimited retraining in-between every encounter," which is not even remotely close to what I had proposed to begin with. I am not suggesting that the party can be made to rebuild their entire characters just to be have the perfect answer to any enemy they spot ahead of time, I'm just saying that letting the party swap out one of their abilities after beating an encounter or accomplishing a story beat could be a fun way to keep characters fresh and dynamic without adding to their complexity over time.
I suppose the running theme of this thread is a request for more modularity so that it's easier to dial different factors of play: I'd quite like complexity, power level, and the general focus of an adventure to be easily adjusted separately from each other, so that characters can be made as simple or as complex, or as weak or as powerful as the players want right from the start. If I want to run a combat gauntlet or a purely social adventure, I'd like to be able to easily do so within the system without having to carry over complexity or imbalances tied to aspects of the game that aren't relevant to the scenario, but if I wanted to plug in a study or circus subsystem, I'd like to be able to do that too in a way that doesn't require my players to sacrifice their characters' existing power budget for what could end up being more niche and situational game elements. In terms of feats, this might mean being able to choose feats based on a character's ancestry, background, class, or just a general list, and those feats being equally strong next to one another, but not needing to pick a specific number of each of them.
Five of my seven players explicitly requested that in Strength of Thousands they want to roleplay their characters as students rather than adventurers. This has made exploration and downtime activities much more important than usual in this campaign. I invented actual schoolroom classes for them to attend and pass. A critical success on passing a class earns Accolades which can be spent of a skill feat related to a class the PC passed, so my PCs have extra skill feats in addition to their free archetype. Plus, I could add additional adventures as class field trips, which are mostly exploration with only one or two instances of combat.
In my thread Common Sense Versus The Plot I learned that other GMs have had different takes on Strength of Thousands. Some ran it as almost pure combat. Others followed the service project and social events as written, but did not go beyond that for social events invented by the PCs. Thus, the importance of exploration and downtime varies drastically by the campaign and by the GM.
Combat encounters, on the other hand, have the potential to kill off characters so they need careful rules to manage unpleasant results. Thus, the rulebooks overemphasize combat.
I don't really know what the mythic rules are for. Pathfinder 2nd Edition is not good at making unexpectedly powerful characters, because it tightly links power to level. Is mythic about more power without breaking encounter balance? Or is mythic about more impressive activities without more power?
I hold the view that if an activity, such as giving an inspiring speech, has no mechanical effect, then we don't need rules for the narrative effect.
Here you said what I tried to say in a perfect, succint way. Thanks.
I think everything in regards to the stuff you can choose (feats) should revolve around combat, because that's were the focus of the system is and "wasting" choices in non-combat stuff always feels bad when those options feel (and are) subpar in comparision. If people want their characters to have a bonus when making a Diplomacy check against merchants or nobles that should be covered by the GM or background. Let's say the DC to persuade a merchant is 22. If your character is a merchant or has ties to merchant from their background then the GM should slap the easy adjustment (or very easy if it would make sense) to turn the DC to 20 (17).
There's a ton of systems where having a specific background immediately gives you a bonus to your background-related things. This could translate as a +1 to said checks or by the GM adjusting the DC as I said earlier, but since I feel a +1 "feels" better because the player sees it on their sheet, I think it would be ideal if both ideas were to be implemented together. This change alone makes the existance of at least 200 out of the 263 skill feats in the game (thanks AoN) redudant.
Then, we can take the other 63 and buff them accordingly.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Is mythic about more power without breaking encounter balance? Or is mythic about more impressive activities without more power?
I think it tried to do the latter, but part of the problem is that it's impossible to widen the narrative impact of your abilities without making those abilities more powerful. If hurling a stone turns into lobbing a mountain, that ability is going to not only feel more powerful, but also have a mechanical impact in terms of area of effect and damage. Mythic in 2e tried to give characters the flavor of epic abilities, but those abilities were mechanically balanced alongside what was already available to level 12-20 characters, in fact often being outright weaker. As a result, those abilities failed to feel truly mythic.
This in my opinion is also why I think separating power tiers from complexity and overall character progression would make things easier in the long run: if you wanted mythic play, you could just bump the party up to mythic tier and give them mythic-grade abilities that are balanced for that degree of play, without needing to figure out how to layer that on top of a leveling curve that's already designed to bring characters up a power tier. Conversely, if you wanted to tell a story of normal people, as with a horror-themed adventure, you could do so just as easily.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Because this methodology was foundational to 3e and thus 3.5e, some of it unfortunately carried over to PF1e, which was built off of D&D 3.5e, but thankfully PF2e does not follow this design methodology at all.
Uhhh, wow.
Pf2 absolutely does suffer from the exact same Ivory Tower design, like, a lot.
How many times do we see newbies being chastised for not maximizing their KAS, and their attack stat? Are they at DEX capped AC?
Even common "mistakes" like that are manifestations of this issue. Every time it's less of an "option" and is more of a "mistake," that is Ivory Tower.
Every must-grab feat to select, every trap feat to avoid, etc.
This thread of design extends aaaall the way through the game. Right now, any Alchemist PC who knows all the secret stuff is absurdly better than a noobie who trusts the system.
"Ivory" Alchemists get to do nonsense like Independent: Lab Assistant Double Brew Combine elixir + Bottled Night to make a bubble of darkness that only imposes a 50/50 miss chance on foes while administering 2x elixir effects at touch range. That was 2A, so they can then do a 1A Quick Bomber now that the foes are off-guard via Hidden.
The "newbie" Alchemist would instead spend 2A on the darkness bubble (or they wouldn't know about the item), and 1A to create the elixir while asking the ally to take and drink it on their turn. They don't even get to the bomb throw, nor administer the elixir.
I can totally believe that older D&D may have been worse, but is it just completely disconnected from reality to claim Ivory Tower design doesn't exist in pf2. It is rampant, and grows a little more with each book.
Do you know and use the 1/20 good consumables? Casters using spellscrolls? Using prebuffs when you get to initiate combat? Staves provide bonus spells per day. Filled your talisman slots? With spellhearts? Taken an Archetype to fill that gap in your class? Dodged the Draw action cost?
Think about every build-enabling item like Thrower's Bandolier, Doubling Rings, etc. Every single one of these is a dollop of Ivory nonsense, you need to know the item exists and it's function before attempting the relevant build, else you just suffer for it.
______________________
Pf2 is so stuffed with Ivory Tower design, that Paizo know that their own guidance for gp per level to the GMs is just wrong, and is way too little gp, but instead of editing their own book to tell the public, they just internally tell their own AP devs.
How TF is that okay? You need to have heard about the one dev post in the forums to even be aware of this, how the flying f%*$ is that "we said in the book it's X, but actually, it's Y" BS okay?
That particular expression of Ivory Tower BS is the absolute worst, the "truth beyond the book" type. You cannot even filter search AoN to climb that tower.
And pf2 is *heavy* with that s&##. So much guidance, fun-important questions, rule clarifications, etc, that just don't exist unless you search online discussions for that specific issue; if you even know there's an issue in need of online help in the first place.
The core of Ivory Tower is that "You don't know what you don't know." It can be incredibly frustrating to be blindsided by unknown options that are hugely impactful.
(This doesn't just include option selections, but the mechanical interaction / synergy between them too; you cannot make informed decisions without understanding *the effects of* what you are choosing between)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Pathfinder offers many ways to deal with Swallow Whole, but the ability is sufficiently rare than no-one routinely prepares for it. Swapping abilities after recognizing a creature with Swallow Whole would be a strong tool for surviving Swallow Whole. A monk could say, "I had trained in Dragon Stance for bludgeoning dragon tail attacks, but given that a swallowing creature is ahead, I am swapping Dragon Stance for Tiger Stance."
I played in a 3.5 game many years ago where we were spies on a convert operation in hostile territory, with a list of targets. That meant that we usually had foreknowledge of who we needed to attack and could go learn about them before doing it.
We had spellcasters, two Artificers, and my lockdown Crusader. So most folks could pretty easily adapt their toolkit to what we were fighting as we could plan ahead.
The net result of that was really long planning sessions and combat being over before it started because we won it during planning. We'd show up having already hard-countered what the enemy could do, then I'd get them in lockdown (because Lockdown Crusader), and that was it. By high level we had lists of buffs and things to do written all the way down a 2x3' whiteboard (that was also our combat map) and we'd spend more time planning and preparing for encounters than actually doing them. This required poring over books and material looking for the specific things we needed each time.
The GM had to massively overscale anything to actually challenge us or outright change it so it could do things we had no way to know about... which became a huge problem when he ambushed us and dramatically over-estimated what we could do without advance planning. That led to an equally lopsided encounter in the other direction and then a Deus Ex Machina to get out of the situation because there was no real way we could possibly survive.
This was also extremely not fun for the players who didn't have the system mastery or interest in doing all this planning and wanted to, you know, play D&D. We spent more time planning encounters than doing meaningful actions in them. Our ability to do that raised our power level so much that it warped the whole game.
That's absolutely what would happen in PF2 if everyone could swap abilities out at will in preparation for any given encounter. It's also what happens in video games where you plan for raids and have specs and such: people respec for a given raid to get the optimal output on it, which means that becomes the expectation and new difficulty floor in future raids.
If the players can plan to counter everything a GM can do in advance, the GM has to step it up if they want an encounter to feel challenging. This is bad for the game, especially for players with less system mastery who won't know "oh I see X, so I need to go grab Y ability" who will fall farther behind in power. It's pushing the game back toward Ivory Tower Design as Monte Cook defined it because it's making system mastery more powerful.
It's also punishing classes that have versatility as part of their power budget, like Alchemist's ability to pull out whatever they might need on demand if anyone can simply rebuild their character on the fly to always have what they need. It also rewards hyper specialists over more versatile builds in general, because versatility right now is power as you'll have a good tool more often. If that doesn't matter, why not hyper-focus?
Plus, it's actually fun to not have optimal tools and have to figure out how to use what you have. That's where the memorable stories come from: the cases where players took a difficult situation and managed to find a creative way out of it.
tl;dr: This is a bad idea.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I can totally believe that older D&D may have been worse, but is it just completely disconnected from reality to claim Ivory Tower design doesn't exist in pf2. It is rampant, and grows a little more with each book.
You're grossly underestimating how much worse it was. PF2 has this because in any game with this level of complexity and buildcraft, power combos will exist and some stuff will be better than other stuff. Especially with Paizo's general lack of post-release support.
But you can play a sub-optimal alchemist and it'll work fine. I know someone who plays a Fighter in PFS that uses a regular old staff as a 2h weapon. This is hilariously not optimized. The character still works fine. My son's bomber alchemist doesn't use any of the tricks you mentioned and isn't at all optimal. Plus it was built by an 11 year old. It works fine and he's having a great time playing it.
It's so much better in PF2 that entire concepts from older editions don't exist anymore. PF2 class tier lists are about "which class is best."
The 3.5 tier list was literally "you can't put classes more than 2 tiers apart in the same party because the game will flat out not work." Tier 1 classes in 3.5 were so powerful that they warp the game, being the best at everything and having the ability to solve every problem. They're better at other clases than the thing that class is supposed to be the best at, while also doing their own thing. Like it was easy to make a Cleric that was a better fighter than Fighter, while also still being a Cleric (one of the strongest classes in the game). Some classes didn't work properly at their stated thing at all.
3.5 has feats literally put into the game specifically as traps for people that didn't know better to be punished for taking. There's "I Win" buttons littered throughout the spell list if you know what splatbook to find them in.
PF1 inherits a lot of that, though they tried to sand the worst parts down.
The key difference is that in 3.x/PF1, it's deliberate. It's Ivory Tower Design because the design is specifically trying to do that. The bad stuff is there as a trap, and the good stuff is there to be game breaking as a reward for figuring out how to break the game (and you flat out could break the game). You can make a bad character very easily despite making what appear to be entirely reasonable choices, and a bad character is so bad that you'll watch other people solo the game while you do nothing on a routine basis.
PF2 actively tries to steer people toward having a character that can participate in all aspects of play in any party and carry its own weight. It doesn't always succeed at that, but the design is specifically trying to do it. The power combos can almost never break the game without "creative" interpretation or things that are clearly unintended/errors. You have to make really hard mistakes to make a truly bad character in PF2, and the definition of "bad character" has changed significantly as a result of that. It's almost impossible to make a character in PF2 that's as bad as a bad character in 3.5, where it was easy for a newbie to do it because a bunch of classes were in that position.
So no, PF2 isn't Ivory Tower Design.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ivory Tower pain is all about not having the info you need to make informed decisions (but knowing that the info is out there somewhere).
Ivory Tower design is hard-baked into the bones of pf2 thanks to systems like Archetyping. Any time you could take a class feat, you can instead take a dedication feat to start an archetype. Knowing when it's helpful and which ones to pick is Ivory Tower.
You're grossly underestimating how much worse it was. [...]
So no, PF2 isn't Ivory Tower Design.
This math doesn't add. No, another game being worse in the past does not remove its existence from pf2. Yall have got to stop falling for that impulse to wallpaper over this very real source of anti-fun.
I know a few people who bounced off the system entirely because Ivory Tower creates a "smell" that players are quick to pick up. When they see another player (probably me) do some nonsense combo like snap their fingers to 0A draw scroll from a Retrieval Belt --> 2A spellcast --> ect --> etc.
That tells the other players that out of game time spent on things like advanced searching AoN will produce significant gains in power. Now, every caster has a "belt scroll slot" that can be filled to provide a once-per-battle pseudo spell slot.
It reveals that no matter how "passable" it is to play without that investment, that player *knows* that they are outside the Ivory Tower.
That's where the name came from. It's the appearance of players being segregated between those in the know, and those who realize that they are *not* in the know.
That is a *huge* turn off for a lot of folks, who are quick to peace out. They are playing to have fun, not to do homework.
Even something like discovering that all FP classes have at least one Focused item that is designed specifically to appeal to them with a 0A FP regain ability is a big turnoff to a lot of players.
Instead of an "oh cool, now I've got a neat item to buy,"
I've seen that discovery of the [focused] item group cause significant aggravation;
it's an "Oh great, if gear can do something as important as restore FP, now I have to search the books to find which one fits my PC."
That's because they know it's not about that one item, it about the change in dynamic of the game system. It gives the impression that you *are supposed to* be climbing the Ivory Tower. Core runes being explained (to the GM) as essential assumed items is yet another proof positive of Ivory design being foundational to pf2.
Every now and then, you can spot reddit comments from people that didn't know that weapon/armor runes were considered essential/mandatory like that.
_______________________
I'm fond of complexity in systems, and video games have made some progress to allowing complexity to not result in Ivory nonsense. Complexity does NOT have to result in Ivory pain, and my experience with old video games from before they started figuring all this out has enabled me to personally not be as negatively impacted by the (significantly) hostile game design.
Any time you see a key word like a stat in a different color, and then mouse over it to pop-out an explanation of exactly what that stat or ability does, that's "Anti-Ivory" design. It's not "free" to do that, it takes significant dev time, especially for indies. But they know just how important it is.
It's about giving the player as much info as they want, right when they want to know it, for the sake of making all choices as informed as possible.
You know how the
"Ding! pick one of these three options for your next ___" is nearly universal these days?
That's a *massive* Anti-Ivory measure. By limiting the choices to a tiny trio/etc instead of "any from a list," that allows players to make a maximally informed choice after only 10 ish seconds to mouse over the options.
Some things do still require experience/play to gauge value, such as non-stat effects like "adds a shrapnel blast," but those can still provide their numbers, radius, damage, proc chance, etc, to the player for better information.
Games that nail the ability to have a ton of complexity, while designing proper Anti-Ivory measures often end up being VERY successful breakouts from their niche.
Both Slay the Spire and Inscryption come to mind. Even Megabonk. They were able to appeal to gamers outside of their genre niche because they mitigated the Ivory b#~!@+&* that usually comes with that genre. If a player dies/fails and has a "well, if I had known about ___ then I wouldn't have done ___!" that's Ivory design hurting the game. Badly. It only takes a few of those "died because of hidden interaction/knowledge" for people to drop single player games like that.
____________________
Pf2 has Ivory in its bones, but that doesn't mean the system has to let it kneecap the play experience. Things like AoN and Pathbuilder do an amazing job of helping where they can. But only Paizo can do something like the "pending errata" page and help mitigate it that much more.
Even the trait system itself is an Anti-Ivory measure, btw.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ivory Tower pain is all about not having the info you need to make informed decisions (but knowing that the info is out there somewhere).
Ivory Tower design is hard-baked into the bones of pf2 thanks to systems like Archetyping. Any time you could take a class feat, you can instead take a dedication feat to start an archetype. Knowing when it's helpful and which ones to pick is Ivory Tower.
This math doesn't add. No, another game being worse in the past does not remove its existence from pf2. Yall have got to stop falling for that impulse to wallpaper over this very real source of anti-fun.You're grossly underestimating how much worse it was. [...]
So no, PF2 isn't Ivory Tower Design.
No, you're literally redefinining "Ivory Tower Design" to mean something completely different and then using that new definition to try and make your point. That doesn't fly.
What you're describing and what PF2 is occurs in any game where there's meaningful mechanical build customization. Every game that does that will have better and worse combinations because that's just the reality of allowing for so many combinations of different things.
Ivory Tower design is when you deliberately add trap options so that people can make wrong choices, wind up with a bad character, and then gain the system mastery to know not to do that anymore. PF2 goes out of its way to not do that and tries really hard to steer people into making functional choices, even if it allows them to do something else.
Like, you can dump your KAS if you want to. The game lets you do it. The game also actively encourages you to not do that by telling you it's a key ability for your class and giving you a bonus in it that you can't change. That's the opposite of Ivory Tower design.
Feats being silo'd so you can't use a class feat on something that actively does nothing for your class without going out of your way to do so is another example. Sure, the game lets you pick a useless archetype instead of taking a class feat if you really want to. The game also doesn't encourage it, putting the class feats right up at the front of the book in the class itself while telling you that you can archetype at all is a couple hundred pages later in another section.
This is as opposed to 3.5/PF1, where the feats you want are in a list of 3000 feats, most of which are useless to you and some of which are actively trying to trick you.
You also don't seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to how the 3.x design worked in comparison to what we have now.
I know a few people who bounced off the system entirely because Ivory Tower creates a "smell" that players are quick to pick up. When they see another player (probably me) do some nonsense combo like snap their fingers to 0A draw scroll from a Retrieval Belt --> 2A spellcast --> ect --> etc.
The term you're looking for here is crunchy. It's a crunchy system with lots of stuff, some of which gives you extra things if you take it. That's how a crunchy system works.
And some people don't like crunchy systems. That's why so many other types of systems exist.
That's not Ivory Tower design. Your deliberate attempt to change the definition to suit you is absurd.
That's where the name came from. It's the appearance of players being segregated between those in the know, and those who realize that they are *not* in the know.
The name came from Monte Cook, who defined it in the essay already linked in this thread.
That is a *huge* turn off for a lot of folks, who are quick to peace out. They are playing to have fun, not to do homework.Even something like discovering that all FP classes have at least one Focused item that is designed specifically to appeal to them with a 0A FP regain ability is a big turnoff to a lot of players.
That's crunch, again. Totally fine that it's not for some folks. There's games even crunchier than this one and I have nothing to do with them for that reason. It's just too much.
It's still not the same thing.
Pf2 has Ivory in its bones, but that doesn't mean the system has to let it kneecap the play experience. Things like AoN and Pathbuilder do an amazing job of helping where they can. But only Paizo can do something like the "pending errata" page and help mitigate it that much more.
What does errata have to do with this? The lack of errata is a support problem, not an Ivory Tower design problem.
Even the trait system itself is an Anti-Ivory measure, btw.
Yeah, because PF2 deliberately moved away from the Ivory Tower design of PF1. That's the point everyone else is making.
The perfectly-timed thread as I was just getting ready to ask about how 2E mythic rules have played at tables - although that’s not what I was expecting from the title of this thread.
There was a thread a while ago that did some mythic encounters and saw how they went. You might be able to find it by searching the forum, but I couldn't.
It'd probably best for another thread as it's a topic on its own, but the short answer is "inconsistently". Mythic destinies vary massively in effectiveness (beyond what you'd expect for PF2). The mythic rules in general are not great, have some odd effects on how the game plays, and IMO heavily favour martials over casters. You know how a lot of people say PF2 favors martials over casters in general? Mythic is what it looks like when it's true.
Put it this way: my GM wants to run Revenge of the Runelords sometime. I told him I was excited for that, but if he uses the mythic rules, I'm playing a martial. I don't care if the entire party is all martials, I refuse to play a mythic caster.
Usually I'm the one at the table who will ask what others are playing and then make something complimentary, whatever that happens to be (I play a lot of healers and support/buffers). But not this time. (I also won't take an animal companion because they're awful in mythic, or a Kineticist because mythic forgot that class exists.)
Then under quick retraining rules they would swap abilities between encounters in order to better defend against the gbahali. Thus, advance investigation would provide them with more abilities that help against a gbahali.But not more abilities in total, which is the point I'm making. That, and for some reason you seem to have taken "occasionally retraining one ability after a particular milestone" and distorted it into "free, unlimited retraining in-between every encounter," which is not even remotely close to what I had proposed to begin with. I am not suggesting that the party can be made to rebuild their entire characters just to be have the perfect answer to any enemy they spot ahead of time, I'm just saying that letting the party swap out one of their abilities after beating an encounter or accomplishing a story beat could be a fun way to keep characters fresh and dynamic without adding to their complexity over time.
I understand that I had misunderstood Teridax. Sorry about derailing part of this discussion with my confusion.
One thing I'd like to experiment with more is dynamic retraining within the adventuring day, the basic principle being that at certain milestones, such as solving a puzzle or finishing an encounter, the whole party gets to immediately retrain an aspect of their character, such as a skill increase or skill feat for an obstacle, or perhaps a class feat or known spell for an encounter.
To me the milestone sounded like a mere encounter, and that reminded me of Pathfinder 1st Edition's Martial Flexibility abilities. I guess Teridax's milestone is supposed to be a meaningfully successful encounter that could enlighten the character.
In contrast, I occasionally--about four times during a campaign of seven players--will have a player ask me, "This feat is not working for my character. I never find a good opportunity to use it. Can I retrain it?" The player's desire to retrain has not been from success and curiosity, but from disappointment.
Inspired retraining would be a nicely balanced mythic ability. At no point would the character have an unusually powerful ability; instead, they would be constantly adapting via adventure. Does War of Immortals offer such a mythic ability? When I built Mkosa, the character was already defined as a Wildspell. Heh, the Wildspell entry in Archives of Nethys copied the three-sentence description of Mkosa. Thus, I focused on Wildspell and merely scanned the other mythic destinies.
|
The perfectly-timed thread as I was just getting ready to ask about how 2E mythic rules have played at tables - although that’s not what I was expecting from the title of this thread.There was a thread a while ago that did some mythic encounters and saw how they went. You might be able to find it by searching the forum, but I couldn't.
It'd probably best for another thread as it's a topic on its own, but the short answer is "inconsistently". Mythic destinies vary massively in effectiveness (beyond what you'd expect for PF2). The mythic rules in general are not great, have some odd effects on how the game plays, and IMO heavily favour martials over casters. You know how a lot of people say PF2 favors martials over casters in general? Mythic is what it looks like when it's true.
Put it this way: my GM wants to run Revenge of the Runelords sometime. I told him I was excited for that, but if he uses the mythic rules, I'm playing a martial. I don't care if the entire party is all martials, I refuse to play a mythic caster.
Usually I'm the one at the table who will ask what others are playing and then make something complimentary, whatever that happens to be (I play a lot of healers and support/buffers). But not this time. (I also won't take an animal companion because they're awful in mythic, or a Kineticist because mythic forgot that class exists.)
Inspired by this post, I just asked on the Mythic APs product threads for feedback on playing a Mythic caster.
I hope we will get good news this way.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Again, Ivory Tower is all about players not having the key info that they think would change their in-game decisions. ("If I had know that __ existed, of course I would have picked it!")
It's *not* the existence of options and lingo, but they certainly can create the conditions that result in the Ivory problem.
It's about the player being presented with an A or B (or a __) choice, and grumbling "Well, I can't know that A is what I want, because I don't know how "+2 Power" affects my damage!"
It's about "knowing that you are excluded from the Ivory Tower;" the anti-fun you get when you know that your choices are coming from a place of ignorance, and would be different if only you had the out-of-reach info.
This is also why I advocated for Monster Hunter to add a training room w/ damage numbers for years until it finally happened.
(For most of the series, you had to vaguely guess what your damage was, until community wikis opened up the Ivory Tower for the few that found them in those early internet days.)
Practice rooms, etc, types of player tools act as failsafes where even if you don't wiki dive into damage formulas, you can still conduct your own tests to uncover that key choice-changing information.
Even from the start, Dark Souls knew to let the player hit a button to inspect a stat to pop-out a detailed explanation of what it does.
(And that the final HP damage numbers were just too important/informative to hide for the sake of immersion/etc.)
_______
Paizo keeping an updated "Pending errata" page would help any time players struggle to understand some erroneous text that is in that particular list. Again, this specific tool is definitionally the only one that cannot be built by the community; only Paizo can share that Ivory info.
"Pending errata" is Anti-Ivory in the same way a wiki is; it's just a shortcut to info that can inform decisions. Not as good as in-game hover text, but is the bare minimum that should be expected in 2025.
(and also can dramatically smooth table play to end arguments about things like "adds rune ___ to ___" ability effects. Are all of these supposed to be updated into "adds rune ___ *effect* to ___"? Who tf knows!)
Again, Firework Tech is presently breaking alchemy balance, right now. For those that care about performance, Alchemy as a sub-system is bent out of shape. The core chassis feature of an entire class is poachable.
Some official recognition that it was an "error" to provide recharging VVs would essentially bug fix the game for countless players.
While far more rare than it used to be, that exact kind of thing still happens any time we get a dev post speaking to an issue.
Think about how often someone comments that pf2 is a ~better game because of resources like AoN and Pathbuilder. Trying to navigate pf2's Ivory Tower is made much easier by these tools, and that really does matter a hecking lot.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
How many times do we see newbies being chastised for not maximizing their KAS, and their attack stat?
I honestly never seen this.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
How many times do we see newbies being chastised for not maximizing their KAS, and their attack stat?I honestly never seen this.
A lot more common to see on reddit. If they do a search, they'll likely find that info before making a post, so it's not really likely for someone to stumble upon these forums and ask here.
Reddit has existing users that can find the pf2 sub and post a question to the weekly Q&A thread inside of 30sec, quicker than they can find the answer via searching.
There's also the question : cause mismatch making this specific noob trap rather common to uncover as the cause behind other questions.
The question typically is "I'm having a hard time playing this game, it seems my PC is struggling." which then prompts the common troubleshooting questions, especially "Did you max your KAS and attack stats?" and nope, first time D&D-ish players frequently do not.
This is why I still hate species/race defaulting to limited stat options, and especially how Backgrounds do the same.
New players don't know that they cannot trust the game system.
They trust the game (to not have s%@% design for legacy reasons) and pick what species and background they think fits best from an ~RP point of view, then don't worry when that fails to max their KAS.
The idea of picking their stat first, then limiting themself to a subset of roleplaying choices (rightfully) pisses people off. That's not just Ivory design, that's explicitly anti-roleplay design in a TT Role Playing Game.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I hold the view that if an activity, such as giving an inspiring speech, has no mechanical effect, then we don't need rules for the narrative effect. Instead, roll a Diplomacy check for the speech so that we can learn how well the crowd cheers and how fast they spread the news.
While I largely agree with you this exact example shows a problem with this approach.
Surely that should be a performance (Oratory) check and not a diplomacy check? At the least, the Perform (Oratory) should have a lower DC.
Even if the mechanics aren't spelled out in the rules or on the character sheet, I DO want there to be a significant effect based on the character abilities and NOT just player actions.
I've been in more than one campaign where social skills were all but useless because the GM did some combination of "Use the players words", "Rule of Cool", "Rule of Story" and I've been sitting there wondering why the heck I invested so many resources in my characters social skills.
That said, I absolutely loathe the player who goes "I roll a diplomacy check" without telling me what the character is saying and doing.
How many times do we see newbies being chastised for not maximizing their KAS, and their attack stat?I honestly never seen this.A lot more common to see on reddit. If they do a search, they'll likely find that info before making a post, so it's not really likely for someone to stumble upon these forums and ask here.
Reddit has existing users that can find the pf2 sub and post a question to the weekly Q&A thread inside of 30sec, quicker than they can find the answer via searching.
There's also the question : cause mismatch making this specific noob trap rather common to uncover as the cause behind other questions.
The question typically is "I'm having a hard time playing this game, it seems my PC is struggling." which then prompts the common troubleshooting questions, especially "Did you max your KAS and attack stats?" and nope, first time D&D-ish players frequently do not.
This is why I still hate species/race defaulting to limited stat options, and especially how Backgrounds do the same.
New players don't know that they cannot trust the game system.
They trust the game (to not have s$&+ design for legacy reasons) and pick what species and background they think fits best from an ~RP point of view, then don't worry when that fails to max their KAS.The idea of picking their stat first, then limiting themself to a subset of roleplaying choices (rightfully) pisses people off. That's not just Ivory design, that's explicitly anti-roleplay design in a TT Role Playing Game.
I honestly think you are being hyperbolic here.
Saying that people do not max their KAS is a "common mistake" is really overblowing things here. I won't deny there must be some people that did it at some point, but saying its a "common mistake" when character creation pretty much leads you to max your KAS is being misguided for the sake of presenting your argument as valid.
Like Ryangwy said, if I were to take your arguments at face value only 1 page TTRPGs wouldn't have ivory design.
I've been in more than one campaign where social skills were all but useless because the GM did some combination of "Use the players words", "Rule of Cool", "Rule of Story" and I've been sitting there wondering why the heck I invested so many resources in my characters social skills.
This is exactly why non-combat stuff should never compete with combat-related stuff. As I said earlier, skills exist between the narrative and mechanical side of TTRPGs so its common for tables to use them in vastly different ways and adapt their rules for the sake of RP. I totally agree that skills should have rules that back them up and effects based on the results, but skill feats like Group Impression shouldn't exist because its a non-combat effect that the GM is likely going to handwave in most situations that competes directly with Bon Mot (and that's only if we keep the discussion around Diplomacy skill feats, because it can get way worse). I think its harmful for a TTRPG to gate basic actions that don't provide benefits in combat behind a tax because that limits roleplaying.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Pf2 explicitly "tricks" players into *not* maxing their KAS by the way that ancestry and background affect stats.
That is not common nor expected behavior (to those without the Ivory info).
You *need* some connection to the Ivory info to know better. Most of the time, someone at the table will say something, but I'll bet my PC that genuine, 0-info-primed noobies may fail to max their KAS & attack stat >25% of the time.
It's super easy to "forget" how much decision-changing info is not presented to noobies *before* they have to make the decision. Either the GM lets them do a rebuild after it has been discovered, or someone told them before they made the "mistake," but the stat building thing is honestly crazy common.
I myself "didn't know" how important and often WIS is invoked as a stat during my first AP, and while that stat is a degree of importance behind KAS & attacking, it was enough to ask my GM for a rebuild.
If I'm remembering right, it was because of me bringing it up that we found out that another fellow noobie had not maxed their attack stat, and had been suffering that deficit for how ever many sessions it had been.
Even if that "Ivory trap" of the starting stat build was uncovered by a player back in D&D 3.5, it's still an Ivory trap they once had to navigate. It's ridiculously normal for newbies to get caught in it.
IMO, the ancestry & background mechanic of pf2 altering stats is responsible for just how common it is in this system specifically.
I hold the view that if an activity, such as giving an inspiring speech, has no mechanical effect, then we don't need rules for the narrative effect. Instead, roll a Diplomacy check for the speech so that we can learn how well the crowd cheers and how fast they spread the news.While I largely agree with you this exact example shows a problem with this approach.
Surely that should be a performance (Oratory) check and not a diplomacy check? At the least, the Perform (Oratory) should have a lower DC.
Even if the mechanics aren't spelled out in the rules or on the character sheet, I DO want there to be a significant effect based on the character abilities and NOT just player actions.
I've been in more than one campaign where social skills were all but useless because the GM did some combination of "Use the players words", "Rule of Cool", "Rule of Story" and I've been sitting there wondering why the heck I invested so many resources in my characters social skills.
That said, I absolutely loathe the player who goes "I roll a diplomacy check" without telling me what the character is saying and doing.
Diplomacy would be to convince the crowd and Performace would be to impress the crowd. Either would have the same narrative benefit. My playerds know to ask me about alternative skill checks if they would prefer a different skill.
As for using player words, some of my players love to talk in character and others don't. Both make the same skill check. For the non-talkers, I need to know what they are trying to say so that I can roleplay a response. This is easier with the talkers.
Pf2 explicitly "tricks" players into *not* maxing their KAS by the way that ancestry and background affect stats.
That is not common nor expected behavior (to those without the Ivory info).
You *need* some connection to the Ivory info to know better. Most of the time, someone at the table will say something, but I'll bet my PC that genuine, 0-info-primed noobies may fail to max their KAS & attack stat >25% of the time.
The Player Core points out that the Key Attribute is important:
Key Attribute
This is the attribute modifier that a member of your class cares about the most. Many of your most useful and powerful abilities are tied to this attribute in some way.
For example, a barbarian, with Key Attribute listed as Strength, obviously views Strength as important. A player who selects a background that does not boost a physical stat is deliberately playing against the stereotype of a barbarian. Guard boosts Strength or Charisma, Martial Disciple boost Strength or Dexterity, Runner boosts Strength or Intelligence, and Warrior boosts Strength or Constitution. A few appropriate-sounding backgrounds boost another physical attribute, such as Hunter boosting Dexterity or Wisdom and Nomad boosting Constitution and Wisdom, but Dexterity and Constitution are beneficial to a barbarian. A player who selects Magical Merchant, which boosts Intelligence or Wisdom, would be deliberately playing against type for a barbarian.
A player building a gnome barbarian when gnomes have an attribute flaw in Strength would also know that they are going against type. The ancestry's free boost could cancel the flaw to Str, or the player could use the alternative method of a pair of two free boosts, but leaving the flaw alone would be a blatant conflict rather than an honest oversight.
And a +3 is a reasonable bonus for 1st-level key attribute. +4 is better, but unless the GM is running a gruelingly difficult campaign, +3 is enough at the beginning.
The fleshwarp rogue Roshan in my Strength of Thousands campaign started with no attribute bonus above a +2. Part of the problem is that she started with Magical Experiment background that gives only a single attribute boost and it must be to Constitution. But her build is a carefully crafted experiment, a rogue with versatile heritage Ifrit and two magical archetypes, one from a free archetype and one from Eldritch Trickster racket, so her attribute needs are across the board. This was not ignorance. And the character worked at low levels with those low bonuses, using Athletics maneuvers to debuff opponents so that the primary spellcasters had an easier target. Of course, she boosted the most important attributes at 5th level.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
A system allowing players to so easily not max their KAS is itself telling the players that maxing the KAS is not that important.
Players "trust" the game system by default; they don't expect it to be possible to hurt your PC that badly in the build step.
Dark Souls is useful again as a comparison. Your starting attribute stats certainly matter a good deal, but the impact of your starting selection is not really relevant in the long term. It's a choice of theme and starting gameplan, like picking the sorcerer because you want to start with a ranged spell attack. You very quickly gain enough stat points to make the starting spread irrelevant.
In pf2, no genuine noobie has the experience to know how hard and impactful it is to +1 your KAS.
That text around your KAS (and which neglects to mention your attack stat) is nowhere near strong enough wording for how much it is a "shoot yourself in the foot" situation if you don't outright max that KAS.
Again, people default think that if they can so easily create a mis-match between their background, species, and class stats, that it's mathematically not a big deal to do so. They don't know what they don't know.
My own "clue" that allowed me to max my KAS on my very first PC was the book / Pathbuilder having the option to not use the species stats, and instead pick any 2.
I recognized for such an alternative rule to be so close to default, that the ancestry stats must have been a big deal (& therefore problem).
Being told verbally that pf2 didn't have legacy design problems only made it harder for me to "know better" and distrust the system in that instance.
Even "common wisdoms" like "every +1 matters" are spread as Anti-Ivory measures; that phrase addresses one of the most common knowledge gaps that harms ttrpg outsider newbies.
First time newbies don't even have that aphorism in their brain at that stage.