why would you undermine socialist organizers in paizo by using wizards of the coast, the corporate devil of the tabletop world?
Frankly: Because the Pathfinder rules aren't good. the 3 action economy is good on paper, but leads to you always doing the same thing on your turn without fail, because deviating is just mechanically worse by such a wide margin that being creative becomes suboptimal. Also, the buff and bonus stacking is terrible as soon as you have a few casters in your party.
You can just google all the 5E rules you will ever need to play it.
You could say the exact same thing about the standard action-move action economy in 5e, where if you're doing anything but casting a relevant spell of the highest level available to you (or using an equivalent class ability), you're losing massive amounts of efficiency.
D&D 5e "solved" the problem of buff stacking by hyper-simplifying bonuses and penalties, but I'm not the biggest fan of that solution. Keeping track of a lot of +1s and +2s is easier than ever before with the rise of programs like Foundry and Fantasy Grounds, and PF2e reduced the number of bonus types so that you can't have more than 4 stacked at any given time - it's not like when 3.5 was fresh and you needed have scratch paper to keep track of all your relevant modifiers as you played.
You can say 'there is a best way to do X' to any situation in a TTRPG. But if there is an optimal way to do damage, I would rather it be quick then not and one action in D&D 5E is quicker then three in Pathfinder 2E.
I disagree about D&D simplifying things. They cut a lot of stuff out and were left with just a few mechanics that govern everything. Either you get advantage, or you get a bonus dice, or both.
That is far more fun to me and also far easier then finding the however many bonuses that boost you the most and taking them. Or just not caring where your boost comes from, as long as your number is higher. I have looked at mid-level characters in Pathfinder having a +15 or something silly like that to their 'main thing' and that is just a silly level of bonus stacking even before we consider spells and other stuff. Not to mention that it leads to super specialized characters, because your stats can go above 20 and you have one main stat you usually want to boost.
the 3 action economy is good on paper, but leads to you always doing the same thing on your turn without fail, because deviating is just mechanically worse by such a wide margin that being creative becomes suboptimal.
Are you saying this with regard to non-strike actions? Because there's definitely a variance in strategy based on terrain or special circumstance. Shoving someone off the side of a bridge is generally more effective than hitting them with your weapon, for instance. Tripping someone is an excellent way of capturing a character you want to slow down or disable rather than kill. Dropping Prone or Taking Cover is still a great way to quickly boost your AC against ranged attacks. Leaping allows you to circumvent hazards and terrain impediments. Point Out lets you leverage a high perception check or special ability to remove the Undetected status. Etc. I don't see anything on the list that's always worse than your standard strike.
Also, the buff and bonus stacking is terrible as soon as you have a few casters in your party.
The game is much friendlier to martial characters in that regard. I noticed a lot of the Debuff/Control Wizard suite of powers was nerfed as well, which left a bad taste in the mouth of plenty of career casters.
But I've generally heard good things about 3 action economy as an alternative to standard/move/swift. You're the first person I've heard claim it makes more creative maneuvers less appealing.
martial characters are objectively the strongest in pf2e. theyre actually balanced with spellcasters, with a slight edge to things like fighter and gunslinger
its almost like paizo hired someone to do math and balance it
Are you saying this with regard to non-strike actions? Because there’s definitely a variance in strategy based on terrain or special circumstance. Shoving someone off the side of a bridge is generally more effective than hitting them with your weapon, for instance. Tripping someone is an excellent way of capturing a character you want to slow down or disable rather than kill. Dropping Prone or Taking Cover is still a great way to quickly boost your AC against ranged attacks. Leaping allows you to circumvent hazards and terrain impediments. Point Out lets you leverage a high perception check or special ability to remove the Undetected status. Etc. I don’t see anything on the list that’s always worse than your standard strike.
I am pointing it out in regards to DPS optimization. Yes you can do many things, but most things that get you anywhere are worse then others for a given character. In your normal fight in a game, in a room with some obstacles, you may be able to use one of your actions now and again to do something cool, but as soon as it comes to the question of 'how do I do damage to this guy?', then there is one way that is mathematically the best and so everyone ends up using it. Importantly: you do decide what that way is via your feats, but it still ends up shoehorning you into one particular attack pattern.
Obviously if your DM finagles each encounter to have many ways to influence outcomes, then using those is a good idea, but that is something you could do in any system. I don't have top play Pathfinder 2E to shove a guy off a bridge or take cover behind a wall from archer fire.
The game is much friendlier to martial characters in that regard. I noticed a lot of the Debuff/Control Wizard suite of powers was nerfed as well, which left a bad taste in the mouth of plenty of career casters.
Arguably it's a problem even without casters, but casters just make it a lot worse because things become a pain to track. the high bonuses you accrue as a Pathfinder character do not help matters either though. If you don't stack something to high heaven, you might as well ignore the stat and try not to have it come up for you. Which is a problem 5E D&D also runs into, but at a far higher level one rarely reaches in normal play.
I don’t have top play Pathfinder 2E to shove a guy off a bridge or take cover behind a wall from archer fire.
No. But I don't see anything in PF2e that makes the standard feint-roll-stab pattern a more appealing approach than swinging in on a chandelier and kicking a guy off a balcony. You do need the opportunity, but finding those moments is as much a part of the game as picking your feats.
Obviously if your DM finagles each encounter to have many ways to influence outcomes, then using those is a good idea
Part of being a good DM is creating exciting venues and scenarios for play. If you're just in the hallway scene from Old Boy for 20 levels, no wonder the system feels a bit dull.
Putting your players on the top of a train or in the belly of a whale or on a slender bridge arching over an active volcano gives them opportunities to try something other than basic combat tricks.
the high bonuses you accrue as a Pathfinder character do not help matters either though. If you don’t stack something to high heaven, you might as well ignore the stat and try not to have it come up for you. Which is a problem 5E D&D also runs into, but at a far higher level one rarely reaches in normal play.
I thought one of the better aspects of PF2e and 5e was how they cleaned up higher level play. I know back in 3.5e, you'd run into characters with ACs so high that it was virtually impossible to hit them. And this became annoying when two such characters got in a fight - rolling d20+40 to hit AC 60 for an indefinite amount of time. My impression from friends who played high level games in the newer systems was that this was far less common.
In my experience, the "sweet spot" for these games tends to be in the 5th-11th level range, as you get to play a fully realized character concept (a wizard that can fly and throw fireballs, a fighter that can whirlwind attack, etc) without reaching that absurdist demigod status where characters can't physically interact with each other anymore.
yea 1e was a straight improvement over 3.5 but the same really can't be said for 2e.
paizo has a lot of trans socialist employees so youre indirectly funding their medical transitions 🤔
I really recommend Basic Fantasy. The books are free on their website, and printed books are at cost and fairly cheap. Paizo rules are a bit too much for me. Too much time litigating rules and feats. Their illustrations are awesome though..
I usually run Pathfinder with Sentinel and stay at a distance and watch my teammates die :xi-gun:
what if I just dislike d&d-likes after realizing that wargaming is literally the most boring part of role-playing? lemme play a system that prioritizes story-telling and characterization instead. pathfinder 2e and d&d 5e both just feel like they took a fun and interesting part of the game away (mechanical character building) and replaced it with a bunch of stuff that all winds up feeling the same no matter what you actually do with your character. roll for initiative
lemme play a system that prioritizes story-telling and characterization instead
You don't really need a mechanical system to do that. You just need a DM and players that prioritize things other than combat in gameplay.
Yeah, there are settings like World of Darkness that include a focus on social and political machinations. But put a bunch of wargamers at the table and your game of Vampire just becomes another D&D-with-Shotguns-In-The-Sewers. By contrast, if you put a bunch of drama-nerd LARPers in your D&D campaign, they'll all show up playing spoony bards.
RPGs have a specific way they are designed to be played, and for (modern) D&D games, that is to get into a certain amount of "encounters" per day, and going by how much of the pagecount is given to the combat part of the game, it's clear that fighting is supposed to be the primary mode of conflict resolution.
Other systems that don't make combat any more mechanically complex or involved than other methods of conflict resolution (IIRC Fate and PBTA games do this) are generally going to be better for a group that wants to roleplay, because you won't be working against the system itself. I'm not saying you can't have fun just solving things with freeform RP using D&D, but in that scenario, D&D itself won't be contributing anything to the fun you're having.
going by how much of the pagecount is given to the combat part of the game, it’s clear that fighting is supposed to be the primary mode of conflict resolution.
Combat tends to be rules-intensive, while social encounters are more abstract and DM/player driven. But there are plenty of pages in the rulebook dedicated to non-combat skills and powers. And I've played (and DM'd) games that are combat-lite. d20 systems work just fine.
Fighting is only the primary means of conflict resolution when the scenario is combat-focused. Survivalist, diplomacy-driven, and mystery/puzzler games tend to reserve combat as the consequences for initial failure rather than the first course of action.
I’m not saying you can’t have fun just solving things with freeform RP using D&D, but in that scenario, D&D itself won’t be contributing anything to the fun you’re having.
I played a Sherlock Holmes style murder mystery in which combat lasted a sum total of eight rounds for the full six hour session. The skill suit and class powers in D&D/PF gives you a wealth of non-combat gameplay mechanics, assuming you build with that style of play in mind.
sure but at that point why call it d&d? what does the system bring to the table? other systems encourage players who are just playing for mechanical advantage to do so by engaging with the story telling instead of on whacking gelatinous cubes with pointy sticks.
sure but at that point why call it d&d?
Because that's the name of the game that you're playing?
other systems encourage players who are just playing for mechanical advantage to do so by engaging with the story telling
Sure. But I've found the best storytelling happens among players who are just looking to tell a good story.
That tends to come less from a particular system than from experience playing ttrpgs generally speaking.
look up PbtA and Savage Worlds. They’re talking about entirely new game systems.
I've played a variety of systems, including Alternity and GURPS and Megaversal and World of Darkness and FATE. I'm not arguing that d20 is the definitive system.
they’re arguing for equally good game systems made by independent developers which are also roleplaying games, but they encourage different playstyles
In my experience, the thing that encourages the playstyle is the setting far more than the game mechanics. Using the WoD framework - Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage all run on the same fundamental system. But Vampire is inherently a political game. Werewolf is heavily tilted towards raw physical combat. Mage can't help but wobble between mystery/thriller and long debate about metaphysics. They're all built on the same core framework. Even then, you can absolutely play a Gunslinger Mage or an Eldrich Researcher Werewolf, if that's the game you're playing in.
The thing that really draws people to Wizards of the Coast / Paizo tends to be the volume of players and the volume of content. Paizo, in particular, is really good about releasing new adventure modules annually. That's the grease a lot of tables need to get going.
I've heard really good things about Burning Wheel but I've never played it myself. It might be right up your alley.
I've never had the chance. haven't had a regular group to play with in years. I also really want to run FATE
What other alternatives are there? Battling in TTRPGs is horribly boring.
I haven't kept up in years but FATE and World of Darkness come to mind.
Because I’m not learning an entire system just to find out that no one actually wanted to play it with me twice. I still really want to run that cyberpunk campaign
Yea it was based on 3.5 originally, I think the concern is less (rpg) systems based and more that Wotc is a shitty corporation and Paizo is smaller. I don’t know if paizo has any socialists in it, never heard that before, but they were ahead of the curve on at least attempting to tone down some of the more racist shit in the games
No question of that. I recall Paizo even in its early days when Pathfinder was a tiny pamphlet was already ahead of the curve compared to WotC just in daring to draw black characters. I don't know what it's like today, or if it's even unionized, but not being as bad as a Hasbro subsidiary is a low but necessary bar.
the union is led by them. they released a small adventure as part of the unionization which had a bunch of kobolds unionizing and killing strikebreakers with hammers and sickles
I thought pathfinder was based on 3e
Edit: oh wait 2e of pathfinder ah
because when i say "hey do you wanna play dnd with me" people know what i'm talking about
