Wait... PF2 gives you less to do than 5e?Originally Posted by Ratman
Wait... PF2 gives you less to do than 5e?
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Yeah that is not my experience at all lol
And I was talking about 2e, but to be fair, I haven't played the original Pathfinder and my impressions of 3.5 are taken from reading it and playing a Brazilian system based on it, rather than playing it directly, so maybe my description wasn't that accurate.
Imagine if every character in 5e was an eldritch blast warlock, I guess. You could cast a spell... or you could use your cantrip that's better than everything. 3.pf's bane, fundamentally, was the fact that sufficient versatility ultimately adds up to sheer character power, as succintly explained by Xykon here. That's how the wizard is better than the thief at being a thief and cleric/druid is better than the fighter at being a fighter. The mere fact that fighter/thief have hardcoded numbers while casters can access multiple kinds of bonuses and switch them out will break something, inevitably. If you want to make it less insane, you're going to have to take options away.
However, Pathfinder isn't AD&D where rolling 4d6k3 in order and having to work with what you got was part of the thrill, so that having an 'underpowered' character is not a shame and succeeding with a bad one is virtue. Pathfinder, in order to remain authentically itself, still needs to reward system mastery and punish poor meta decisions, and make you feel like you're good at the game when you pull a little ahead. It also has the terrible side effect that you will never, ever see a dwarven wizard or an elven fighter unless they're a NPC. You still want to use the deterministic character creation to make specialized characters, or you won't keep up with the CR. You pick up stuff you can do as you level and most of the time you're going to want to use the newest stuff you got. The way the system deals with it is mechanically encouraging several different actions a turn... but there is still probably an optimal sequence for your character. Hence comparing it to a MMO rotation. Healers heal when they need and wizards cast spells from best to worst. 4e being videogamey is nothing compared to how this can turn out. That's why I said it's a good system if these patterns are being actively disturbed. Otherwise there just really isn't that much difference between a fighter full-attacking and whatever Arcane BMX Bandit is doing, besides window dressing.
It bears mentioning that the game just does not have very many mechanics at all. Enemy sheets in particular are very short. I have to hand it to the new Kingmaker for actually having kingdom management rules. That's a step in a good direction.
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I mean, you can definitely say that Champion in 5e actually just full attacks, most of what Battle Master does is dogshit so he just wants to full attack, and Eldritch Knight has like 3 spells that he doesn't really want to use until they're free. In comparison PF2e does make fighters more deliberately maneuver-based, but you're just going to be using one maneuver. So.
I thought Godbound (a relatively obscure OSR game) invented those!
Edit: It is actually cool to be proven wrong.
Last edited by Dragos Bee; January 11th, 2023 at 08:15 PM.
For the record, I don't think an easily approachable system is bad, especially for first-timers. You only start wanting some additional rules support when the game goes on for longer and the PCs want to start up their own deratization company, or smith their own magic sword, or breed their own dragonborn rust monsters. But that requires the game to run that long, which it typically won't.
I do, however, think that the gradual removal of ethical accent from within core rulebooks is a bad development - like paladins falling no longer being a thing. It's not a big deal when ranger and bow fighter is the same class because we're splitting hairs there, but when warlock and paladin are the same class, something is clearly wrong. You have a paladin of Asmodeus and a warlock of YHWH and they're the same guy except one has a lightsaber and the other has a laser gun. Call it whatever you want, and pick whatever alignment, but what makes these classes enjoyable is the additional challenge of having to behave in certain ways. Of course, the nuance has always been in how we perceive these archetypes, rather than what they mechanically do, but their nature should still be reflected with some wide strokes of mechanical rules, like evil modifiers on some spells, which actually have consequences if the wrong person uses them.
Like, 5e has it on just good faith that surely a cleric of Ilmater won't be burning down orphanages, but we all know how tabletop actually goes, and what kind of players it attracts at low level. What if it's just a part of the character's arc and not even stupid behavior? How is it mechanically reflected when your powers are taken away in 5e? Who knows? It's not as easy as changing gods, either, since your sheet has a bunch of stuff from the archetype. You've got oathbreaker paladins, but that's obviously far more extreme than just screwing things up in a big way. If you're not going to bother with flavor in core, these classes shouldn't be core at all.
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There's something to be said about mechanical complexity itself. Certain splatbook systems from old editions can't be passed into new ones because they are too big, and there just aren't enough rule layers to go around anymore. The one that immediately springs to mind is Birthright's bloodline powers, which make you roll on a big table for freak mutations you get at chargen, ranging from talking to cats and having perfect direction sense to enthralling entire military units, shooting laser beams from your eyes, or being completely immortal. When you translate that table into 3.pf, the system is basically capable enough of doing that, but it kinda goes against the spirit of 3.pf to give someone an unfair advantage. Ironically. But if you try to do it with 5e, it just doesn't really have a way of representing or codifying half these powers at all.
I see, and ouch!
In one of my games, an offline one, a cleric of Lathander accidentally burned down the Lathander temple through sheer recklessness. I dealt with it by having Lathander remove all his spell slots above 1st level until he properly repented (he was 8th level). It was the beginning of a long character arc where it culminated in him eventually saving the city and ending up with his powers back after a great deal of effort. So I just did it off the cuff. I like the concepts of alignment behaviors and so forth though, but it always gets difficult when you get into delving into what counts as evil and good and why.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
That is so awesome!
And yes, Order of the Stick did some commentary on how Alignment Worked a while back. Its take on it was a mite... cynical.
Well, not even cynicism, it's just hard to draw a line. Let me give an example.
In the same game, there was an incident where one PC got overtaken by a cursed sword -- that he'd been using for a while, despite the rest of the party warning him against it -- and went on a rampage while dominated by it, ending up killing a whole village that the party had rescued before, before the party could find him and subdue him. Now that he was subdued, they had to decide what to do with him.
He was still under the curse and they had no way to remove it, so at any time he might fly off the handle again. The Paladin wanted to administer justice, but the party all disagreed on how to do that. Travel all the way back to the city, which was a day away, to have him handed over to the authorities? But he'd likely break out by then and they couldn't keep him subdued that long, possibly. And even if they could, they were on the way to stop a bigger bad guy, so it would make them lose their quarry. Or as a Paladin, is said Paladin able to dispense justice himself right then and there and execute the captured PC? Or do they just let him go and forgive him because it was the cursed sword that made him do it? Should he have blame for it? On the other hand, he knew the risk when he got into it, sort of like drunk driving, so he was still responsible for it. At the same time, he was pleading for aid and forgiveness. Maybe they should just go back to the city after all since it IS only a day away, regardless of the complications; they're not so far out that they're beyond the reach of any law.
What is the "lawful good" play here? The party ended up debating for like the entire session and then for like 3000 messages afterwards in chat after the game before they could settle on a decision the next session.
Though, I should say, the fact it's not a snap decision is what makes it good. It ended up being one of my favorite decisions, along with the group's.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
What was said decision?
What do you think?
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Definitely not killing him, so they cut off the harm with the cursed sword?
If you mean just remove the sword from him, he could teleport it back to himself Eldritch Knight style.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Oh, so cutting off his arms won't work.
Perhaps destroying the sword?
They didn't have anything out there with them that could destroy it. Hence the dilemma!
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Oh, so they killed him? Or killed, then resurrected?
Pragmatically speaking - amputate his hands.
Umm... I did assume they cut off his arms.
You really just need to get the fingers, make sure he can't actually hold it in his hand, even if it's attuned to him. This is a game where he could earn his hands back, eventually.
The one risk this has is that someone less morally minded could kill him before you get to a temple and take the sword for themselves. But that's good drama.
Indeed; I can see why!
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