TheGreatDarknessHot Take: 5e is too bloated with unnecessary rules and should be simplified
Calling 5e and pf2e bloated with unnecessary rules, meanwhile Pathfinder and 3.5e are quite literally full of a decade’s worth of volumes and modules, in comparison to OSR?
I don’t know if you’re a boomer, a troll, or both
PF2S is bloated with unnecessary rules. If that’s your thing, and I totally get the appeal of having a “wait let’s just see what nethys says abou — Oh apparently there are mechanics for this drug” moment; personally I find it really gets in the way of the session. Rule and move on with the story. Keep the mechanics to what they need. We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high. All the subterfuge and wordy mechanics don’t really change that at the end of the day you need to roll a d20 and generally do better than a 12 or so to do what you want.
PF2S is bloated with unnecessary rules. If that’s your thing, and I totally get the appeal of having a “wait let’s just see what nethys says abou — Oh apparently there are mechanics for this drug” moment; personally I find it really gets in the way of the session. Rule and move on with the story. Keep the mechanics to what they need. We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high. All the subterfuge and wordy mechanics don’t really change that at the end of the day you need to roll a d20 and generally do better than a 12 or so to do what you want.
-☆-I feel like pf2e has just enough rules to empower the players to the level I like
The more DM fiat a game has, the more trust I need from my players for things to go smoothly.
That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but for me structure is usually good as long as it doesn’t raise the skill floor too high.
Once I’ve got trust built and feel a bit more experimental, I like Dungeon World or even Universalis
We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high
I highly disagree with this sentiment. You do you, but this is not the general feeling of TTRPG players.
PF2e is a joke. It requires reading the whole rules and planning out a character for multiple levels before making your first character. It gatekeeps the hobby worse than FATAL.
Yeah, PF1 and 3.5e are bloated as hell. But you didn’t need to read all the feats for all the races before picking human fighter. Plus the people still playing those never used everything that was published.
NeroreroLmao, I think you confused pf1 and pf2.
In pf1 you can build yourself into a corner and create useless characters with ease.
In 2e the worst characters are still decent
Nope, I know both. They both suck because of the required over optimization. But pf1 at least didn’t have characters constantly at full hp, which is one of the biggest balance issues.
??? Have you ever played 2e? That shit is perfectly balanced. Just because fights are designed around having full hp doesn’t mean the players always are.
In pf1 you can ruin a character with an uninformed choice, in pf2 you can’t. The gap between minmaxxed or not has become reasonable in my opinion.
Yes, I’ve played it. And a lot of other games. PF2 balance is only okay and they had to do several annoying things to do it. Like how do you balance a mixed level party in pf2? The system really doesn’t like that, because of it’s number inflation.
Either you dislike the bloat of the system or don’t. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Did I say I still run these games? I hate 5e, pf2, pf1 and wouldn’t touch 3/3.5 again. I ran all of these in the past, except pf2 but I’ve played pf2 plenty to know I hate and will never run it.
I run Hackmaster and other systems (oWoD, Cthulhu, WFRP, …) which aren’t bloated messes. I just think pf1 is slightly better than pf2 because that was my experience. But that seems ridiculous to you, because you feel insulted or something. I really don’t care.
Sorry, but your hate just doesn’t seem to be based in any real reason outside of your emotions
Can you read? I hate the bloat. I play games that are not bloated. I played these games for years and found that I dislike the game philosophies they have. Those game philosophies directly result in bloat.
iAmTheTotin pf2 you can’t.
I run pf2e and love it, but I really gotta call this out as bullshit. It's actually one of the worst things new people can read about the game, imho. I read this a lot as I was learning the system and parroted it to my players. We're all experienced with TTRPGs, for the record. Despite all the chat from pf2e players that you supposedly cannot ruin a character with bad choices, I assure you it is possible.
It happened to me once, and only because a player wanted to do some stupid shit.
It was still an okayish character.
The others played what sounded cool to them and had no issues.
Relative to pf1 it’s night and day
You definitely can screw yourself a lot with uninformed choices, but they are less impactful per choice, and the base kit of classes are good enough that bad feat picks won’t make you useless.
The biggest exception here is spell selection, shit spell selection can feel really bad, and there are a decent amount of “trap” spells (not that the spells are bad, but it’s easy to misunderstand the intended purpose).
Does the existence of a whale make it wrong to call an elephant big?
They’re not just calling it big, they’re calling an elephant big in comparison to a crude 8 year old’s drawing of said elephant (and of course the colouring is not inside the lines because it doesn’t have to conform to the consistent rules of an elephant). What purpose does that serve unless you’re the 8 year old trying to make your drawing sound impressive? See how small and unique my elephant is?
Meanwhile the whale sitting right next to the elephant is like wow that was a very specific callout on their size when I’m sitting right here. That kid must really hate that elephant.
It’s quite ridiculous. Wrong or right don’t factor into it.
3.5 has a ton of splatbooks, sure, but they’re expansions. You go in one, if you want, at character creation to pull out a cool class you want to play. Not playing something out of that book? Then you never need to think about it. It’s not like you have to have encyclopedic knowledge of all the hundreds of splatbooks; all the rules are contained in the DMG and PHB, just like with 5e.