I don’t love Pathfinder’s “a class for everything” design, but I think I like 5e’s “barely any choices to make” less.
I recently came to understand that 5e’s shallowness is a strength. It’s hard to make a bad character in 5e. But it’s also hard to make a mechanically strong one. There just aren’t enough choices to make. But that’s really good for a lot of players who aren’t going to develop any system mastery, and many of them frankly don’t want to. They just want to sit down and play, and don’t want to worry about “I need 13 Dex so I can take combat reflexes so I can take improved feint at 5th level” or whatever.
I dunno. When I was reading through PF2e, at a certain point it clicked for me that a lot of the rules actually make it easier to play a character by ear.
Take feats. There are tons, of different kinds, with different levels, sometimes with prerequisites. It seems like a lot of rules overhead, but that also means that you’re not picking from the whole list every time you get one. If a player doesn’t want to make a ton of choices, they can just pick one of the highest level feats they qualify for and have a pretty decent build. Maybe not optimized, but if they don’t want to dig into the nitty gritty, that wasn’t a priority anyway.
Plus, if a player wants to change their mind, the rules explicitly say you can swap things around. I know that works in 5e anyway by DM fiat, but still, it’s nice to have a “don’t worry too much” clause written in the books.
Ultimately a matter of personal preference, of course. I just think PF2e actually scales pretty well with player investment in the system, whether someone’s really into character builds or just wants to follow some steps and get into the action.
See, I’m one of those who had a folder chock full of character concepts I’d built and kitted out without knowing if I’d ever run them; so the folder was a ‘so long as I stick with the same GM for a long while, literally any of thees concepts can be wheeled out and minimally retooled to fit whatever we’re doing’. I don’t feel half the same urge to do that for 5e because of what you call the ‘barely any choices to make’ issue.
But if players don’t want to make mechanical choices, maybe they’d be better off playing something like Dungeon World. I don’t miss nested requirements when games hardly ever last long enough to use them, but the number of interesting gameplay choices to make in D&D is teetering on the edge of losing strategic appeal.
Oh I 100% believe that the majority of D&D 5e players would be happier with a different game. For many different reasons. Some because they want more crunch, some because they want less. Some because they don’t actually want to play a resource management dungeon crawl game at all. I mean, just look at how many players do one-fight-per-rest, and how many people cram social conflict into D&D despite the threadbare rules for it.
Unfortunately, D&D is such a big brand it just sucks all the air out of the room. Other games don’t have the community or branding.
I mean, there’s Pathfinder, but that’s kind of the blues brothers “we’ve got both kinds of music: country and western” situation. It’s very similar to D&D. I guess the next biggest is Vampire? And then way down at the end of the long tail there’s like Fate, Gurps, shadowrun. I guess PbtA and Blades games are gaining some currency lately, too.
Oh man-- I could never get folks to run Shadowrun. Admittedly, I don’t anymore either, because I don’t have my Hero Lab registration code anymore, and last I looked, there were no other good character tools for Shadowrun. (Tried that open source Chummer program back in the day, but that just wasn’t working for me.)
I don’t love Pathfinder’s “a class for everything” design, but I think I like 5e’s “barely any choices to make” less.
I recently came to understand that 5e’s shallowness is a strength. It’s hard to make a bad character in 5e. But it’s also hard to make a mechanically strong one. There just aren’t enough choices to make. But that’s really good for a lot of players who aren’t going to develop any system mastery, and many of them frankly don’t want to. They just want to sit down and play, and don’t want to worry about “I need 13 Dex so I can take combat reflexes so I can take improved feint at 5th level” or whatever.
I dunno. When I was reading through PF2e, at a certain point it clicked for me that a lot of the rules actually make it easier to play a character by ear.
Take feats. There are tons, of different kinds, with different levels, sometimes with prerequisites. It seems like a lot of rules overhead, but that also means that you’re not picking from the whole list every time you get one. If a player doesn’t want to make a ton of choices, they can just pick one of the highest level feats they qualify for and have a pretty decent build. Maybe not optimized, but if they don’t want to dig into the nitty gritty, that wasn’t a priority anyway.
Plus, if a player wants to change their mind, the rules explicitly say you can swap things around. I know that works in 5e anyway by DM fiat, but still, it’s nice to have a “don’t worry too much” clause written in the books.
Ultimately a matter of personal preference, of course. I just think PF2e actually scales pretty well with player investment in the system, whether someone’s really into character builds or just wants to follow some steps and get into the action.
I just wish pf2e wasn’t so scared of certain things, I miss my melee monster alchemists
See, I’m one of those who had a folder chock full of character concepts I’d built and kitted out without knowing if I’d ever run them; so the folder was a ‘so long as I stick with the same GM for a long while, literally any of thees concepts can be wheeled out and minimally retooled to fit whatever we’re doing’. I don’t feel half the same urge to do that for 5e because of what you call the ‘barely any choices to make’ issue.
But if players don’t want to make mechanical choices, maybe they’d be better off playing something like Dungeon World. I don’t miss nested requirements when games hardly ever last long enough to use them, but the number of interesting gameplay choices to make in D&D is teetering on the edge of losing strategic appeal.
Oh I 100% believe that the majority of D&D 5e players would be happier with a different game. For many different reasons. Some because they want more crunch, some because they want less. Some because they don’t actually want to play a resource management dungeon crawl game at all. I mean, just look at how many players do one-fight-per-rest, and how many people cram social conflict into D&D despite the threadbare rules for it.
Unfortunately, D&D is such a big brand it just sucks all the air out of the room. Other games don’t have the community or branding.
I mean, there’s Pathfinder, but that’s kind of the blues brothers “we’ve got both kinds of music: country and western” situation. It’s very similar to D&D. I guess the next biggest is Vampire? And then way down at the end of the long tail there’s like Fate, Gurps, shadowrun. I guess PbtA and Blades games are gaining some currency lately, too.
Oh man-- I could never get folks to run Shadowrun. Admittedly, I don’t anymore either, because I don’t have my Hero Lab registration code anymore, and last I looked, there were no other good character tools for Shadowrun. (Tried that open source Chummer program back in the day, but that just wasn’t working for me.)