why would you undermine socialist organizers in paizo by using wizards of the coast, the corporate devil of the tabletop world?

  • NuraShiny [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.