Pathfinder 2e

[Kaelik]

In terms of game mechanics, though, why should the die roll (or whatever) to find the vault be a binary, self-contained output? I know D&D does it like that, but there are plenty of systems that output results of 'yes and', 'yes but', 'no but', and 'no and'.

So basically, I see it as working when what you want is the aesthetic of solving problems by using your character abilities, but don't actually care about the details so much as you care about the visuals of your characters contributing in various thematic ways.

[Pedantic]

Yeah, I just don't think any task that you have specific abilities you could be using to solve should be abstracted out of direct moment to moment control. That's kind of the whole gameplay loop.

Pick an overarching goal> take action you think best contributes to that goal > reevaluate situation based on results > pick new action > repeat until goal is unattainable or attained.

The whole "if you can't do this, you can't advance the plot" problem feels a bit like missing the forest for the trees, both in that it presumes specific plot should resolve, and also in that it presumes scenarios that have that kind of encounter design failure point worked in.

[Username17]

Yeah, I just don't think any task that you have specific abilities you could be using to solve should be abstracted out of direct moment to moment control. That's kind of the whole gameplay loop.

Deeply and severely disagree. Again, we're back to montages. Craft a magic sword. Fortify a town. Pass a measure through the council. Train a griffin mount. Farm some golden eggs. Canvass the docks looking for potential witnesses. Fucking whatever.

The idea of doing any of those things on moment to moment control makes me want to kill myself. My character needs to be able to contribute to those actions in concrete ways, but the actual moment to moment control must be abstracted.

And once we've abstracted what I'm actually doing on a moment, we still have the issue that the other characters might be contributing in some way to the same overall task, and our abstraction should be able to handle the characters combined contributions. I mean, this shouldn't even be a contentious claim, right?

We want to get the peace treaty approved by the council of elders. And each of the player characters are going to be doing stuff that is very much not going to be tracked on a moment by moment basis, but the different actions should contribute to the success of the mission in a concrete fashion. Like obviously that's how it should work. And the fact that it doesn't work like that in most RPGs is a fucking problem.

-Username17

[Kevin Mack]

And it gets better currently you cant even make NPC'S it seems till the gamesmastery guide comes out and the besitiary has no rules for making monsters.

[Omegonthesane]

In terms of game mechanics, though, why should the die roll (or whatever) to find the vault be a binary, self-contained output? I know D&D does it like that, but there are plenty of systems that output results of 'yes and', 'yes but', 'no but', and 'no and'.

So basically, I see it as working when what you want is the aesthetic of solving problems by using your character abilities, but don't actually care about the details so much as you care about the visuals of your characters contributing in various thematic ways.

What point are you trying to make here?

[Foxwarrior]

The idea of doing any of those things on moment to moment control makes me want to kill myself.

When did you stop liking Shadowrun? Or are you strawmanning "moment to moment" as being some kind of 6 second round thing.

5-6 successes, succeeded at every mandatory task: the heist goes off without a hitch.
7+ successes, succeeded at every mandatory task: you pull off the heist without a hitch and in fact you get some additional rolls on the treasure tables. Or a player's rival in the courts gets fired for incompetence. Or you impress the underworld and you get bonuses on checks to interact with them.
etc etc

So is the designer/DM writing one of these things up for every skill challenge, in advance, arbitrarily deciding what the consequences to the players' approach can be before they've even decided what approach they'll actually try to use? If they're writing up a baking skill challenge in advance, why not do things properly and write up a baking mini game?

Pick an overarching goal> take action you think best contributes to that goal > reevaluate situation based on results > pick new action > repeat until goal is unattainable or attained.

That doesn't seem pedantic at all to me, looks like it cuts more or less right to the heart of the issue.

Ultimately a fun story is about challenges encountered and how you managed or failed to overcome them. When someone tells a good story about how they stole a corporation in EVE Online, they cover the elaborate schemes to get people installed into various levels of the organization, but don't describe each individual space flight each of those people did that turned out to not have any troublesome encounters along the way, even though the monotonous grind is actually almost all of what playing EVE Online consists of.

So the game that's best at getting right to the fun stories and gets as far away as possible from the monotonous grind should be lasering in on the mandatory tasks: how you actually managed to get past each mandatory task in the end is the story (maybe gloss over the mandatory tasks where everything went off without a hitch though, unless your method was remarkable), and "how many successes you got along the way" is just fluff about where your party is on the plucky <-> badass scale.

[Kaelik]

In terms of game mechanics, though, why should the die roll (or whatever) to find the vault be a binary, self-contained output? I know D&D does it like that, but there are plenty of systems that output results of 'yes and', 'yes but', 'no but', and 'no and'.

So basically, I see it as working when what you want is the aesthetic of solving problems by using your character abilities, but don't actually care about the details so much as you care about the visuals of your characters contributing in various thematic ways.

What point are you trying to make here?

It seems like we are having a conflict between people who want people to do a thing, and people who want to decide if they succeed at accomplishing a very broad goal and then just tell a story about how it happened that doesn't even need to really make sense for their characters or abilities, and is just about sounding like everyone was involved.

Seems like the difference between "roll a die, if you get a high number you succeed and we will narratively describe the entire session including perhaps making up crazy situations, no it doesn't really matter anything about your character, your character could be anything and we would fit it into the story" versus "there are a bunch of things you want to do, and you try to do them with your abilities, and if you fail or succeed depends on your abilities and planning, and sometimes the fun is you fucked up and have to deal with crazy situations."

[Whatever]

It's not hard to imagine a Mythos game where every character has abilities related to investigation and solving mysteries, but when there's a fight with a Mi-Go you just do a montage thing before going back to the clues.

And it's not hard to imagine a D&D game where every character has abilities related to tactical combat, but when there's a mystery to solve you just do a montage thing before going back to the fighting.

If your game is about a particular kind of story and a particular kind of gameplay, obviously that's going to be the focus of character abilities, narrative, and table time. But if you want to have stuff happen that's outside your basic paradigm (AND YOU DO), then it makes sense to have actual rules to cover everything that you don't care about.

The point isn't to do some rolls and then make up a whole story about the vault and then call it a day. The point is to abstract away the part of the game that no one showed up to play, so that you can get on to the actual fight that happens once you have the treasure from the vault.

If you're playing a heist game, where getting the treasure is the point, then obviously you don't abstract away that part of the game. But maybe you DO abstract away the court trial that happens when one character gets arrested. Everyone does "something" to help (buying a great lawyer, leaning on witnesses, making the case to the media, whatever), you make your rolls, and then you get back to the game you're all there to play.

[OgreBattle]

Whatever, do you figure the montage for heist mystery and combat would be the same or do you imagine different systems for them

[Username17]

When did you stop liking Shadowrun? Or are you strawmanning "moment to moment" as being some kind of 6 second round thing.

This is a weird statement, both because Shadowrun has rules related to teamwork and montages and also because some of those rules work well and that's really good and some of those rules work badly and that's really bad. Shadowrun 4 is both proof that cooperation and montage rules are useful and good and also that deficient montage and cooperation rules are noticeable deficiencies of the system.

The Shadowrun 4 basic teamwork rule of player 2 making a test and adding dice equal to hits to player 1's dicepool is pretty good and covers many but not all things. The Shadowrun 4 Extended Test rules are deterministic hot garbage and should not be used. The Shadowrun 4 Matrix rules are unplayable precisely because they attempt to model individual actions where there are too many to plausibly track at the table.

And because of those deficiencies, the most common house rule for information gathering legwork is "everyone rolls a test, like Etiquette or Datasearch or something, and the MC gives out clues based on the total or the best roll or something." And you know what? The game would obviously be better if that was formalized. Because fucking obviously.

-Username17

[Dean]

I have two problems with the basic Skill Challenge model of make X successes over y rounds. The first is I don't understand why a lot of the challenges presented have the round limit. With some it's clear but even of the example tests of crafting a magic sword, fortifying a town, passing a measure, training a griffin mount, farming some eggs and canvassing on the docks there are already a bunch that make it clear that telling a party to roll 5 successes in 3 rounds of rolling would beg the question "Why just 3 rounds?". It seems abstract to the point of being verisimilitude breaking. At the point where I'm rolling some dice to do abstract things over an undefined period of time I don't see any reason for us to not just use Apocalypse World. The Apoc world thing where you say vaguely what you want to happen, roll a rando skill and get a 7 to do it and a 10 to do it really good and then have your DM tell you what happened with that as a prompt seems to be exactly the same to me.

The second problem I have with the roll X skills over y rounds model is it is super fucked up by different party sizes. Whether I'm playing with 2 people or 6 people seems like it would determine whether my group found the challenges written in that system impossible to succeed at or basically impossible to lose. I also don't understand what would stop a group of any size from just paying 20 random commoners a silver a day to also help in the skill challenge and crush anything within their RNG. And if you included a sliding DC chart that went up or down based on group size I would once again say that that challenges my verisimilitude of the system, as someone getting 20 peasants involved makes raising a barn suddenly harder.

Basically while punishing failure rather than rewarding success has the negative of only incentivizing the best person to play it is also true that rewarding success with no caveats makes it optimal to include every single person you can find and punishes you if you don't use as many people as possible.

[Username17]

I have two problems with the basic Skill Challenge model of make X successes over y rounds. The first is I don't understand why a lot of the challenges presented have the round limit. With some it's clear but even of the example tests of crafting a magic sword, fortifying a town, passing a measure, training a griffin mount, farming some eggs and canvassing on the docks there are already a bunch that make it clear that telling a party to roll 5 successes in 3 rounds of rolling would beg the question "Why just 3 rounds?".

This is an incoherent question. Why would a task be handled in one roll? Why would a task be handled in two rolls? Why would a task be handled in ten rolls? Because I get to be the president of tautology club, that's why!

The choice to make a roll for the beginning, middle, and end of a task is arbitrary, but no more or less arbitrary than making a single roll for the entirety. If it takes a week to craft a magic sword you could make a single test for the entire week, a test for each day, a test for each hour, or literally any other number of die rolls, because the choice of how to split up the task into distinct failure/success points and assignments to roll physical dice is an arbitrary choice.

The argument for rolling three times and not once or twice or seventy times is one of iterative probability and table time for resolution. It has absolutely nothing to do with verisimilitude one way or the other. There is no 'in-world' argument to be made for how much of a task should be defined by the result of a particular die roll, because in-world there are no die rolls.

The second problem I have with the roll X skills over y rounds model is it is super fucked up by different party sizes.

This is absolutely true. Rules for teamwork always incentivize using the largest possible team when they are working properly. See: 3E D&D's 'Nanobots' exploit. All teamwork rules need to address this in some way - even if it's just to have a gentlemen's agreement to have none of the players get followed around by Gonzo's helpful chicken chorus.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

It's not hard to imagine a Mythos game where every character has abilities related to investigation and solving mysteries, but when there's a fight with a Mi-Go you just do a montage thing before going back to the clues.

And it's not hard to imagine a D&D game where every character has abilities related to tactical combat, but when there's a mystery to solve you just do a montage thing before going back to the fighting.

If your game is about a particular kind of story and a particular kind of gameplay, obviously that's going to be the focus of character abilities, narrative, and table time. But if you want to have stuff happen that's outside your basic paradigm (AND YOU DO), then it makes sense to have actual rules to cover everything that you don't care about.

The point isn't to do some rolls and then make up a whole story about the vault and then call it a day. The point is to abstract away the part of the game that no one showed up to play, so that you can get on to the actual fight that happens once you have the treasure from the vault.

If you're playing a heist game, where getting the treasure is the point, then obviously you don't abstract away that part of the game. But maybe you DO abstract away the court trial that happens when one character gets arrested. Everyone does "something" to help (buying a great lawyer, leaning on witnesses, making the case to the media, whatever), you make your rolls, and then you get back to the game you're all there to play.

I don't think I'd like literally any of those things to be abstracted to the level being recommended here in any of those examples. Dealing with the law post heist probably shouldn't be abstracted out in a heist game, dealing with a mystery in D&D DEFINITELY shouldn't be abstracted out, and dealing with a combat in a Mythos game probably shouldn't be abstracted out like this.

Maybe I just think the conception of skill tests period is garbage I don't know, but I want to resolve literally all of those things with my actual abilities and team making decisions.

[Whatever]

Whatever, do you figure the montage for heist mystery and combat would be the same or do you imagine different systems for them

Assuming that you're playing a game where all are equally ancillary to the main focus, then I'd have no problem using the same rules in each case.

If a particular table doesn't want to abstract away some element of the story, that's fine. But taking away the option to abstract any part of the story is terrible.

Let's look at a very common part of D&D: getting your supplies together before the adventure. Here's a few ways to handle it:

1) players decide what they want (rope, pitons, etc), write it down on their character sheets, mark off the PHB costs from their total cash, and go adventure.

2) the players haggle a bit with different NPCs, make some rolls for gathering food in the woods, spend some time finding a merchant with a 1000gp diamond, etc.

3) players do an entire wilderness combat encounter to hunt some deer, figure out how much leather and meat that comes out to, craft some leather helmets and bracers, do a quick favor for farmer bob to get some grain, another favor for miller marge to grind it, etc etc etc

Now, it's important to note that none of these choices are inherently wrong. Some tables will want to spend as close to 0 time as possible on the managing supplies minigame, but other tables will want that to be a major focus. And that's okay! But it's nice to have rules that allow the game to move along quickly if that's what people want.

If players want to have "gathering supplies" be a part of the story but they don't feel like rolling perception, initiative, and attack rolls against some deer in the woods, then it's nice to have the option of a skill challenge as a middle ground. Not everyone will take it, but for some tables and some stories, it's a satisfying compromise. And that's all it's trying to be.

[souran]

So, getting back to the original topic

2E still seems like a DOA game. I see people discussing have played it.

However, much like I said earlier, the game appears to be ridding on the adventure paths much as Pathfinder has for more than half its lifetime.

I know that some folks think the idea that you would run anything except a player driven open-world sandbox is anathema; but it turns out that there is a huge hunger for people to be given shake-and-bake campaigns that get to sufficiently high level that people can feel like they basically have played a character enough. Additionally, people will by APs because of their stories even if they include segments or even whole adventures that are on rails because plot matters.

That said pathfinder 2E published AP appears to be an even worse disaster than the 2E game itself. Everybody says that the story is horrible, the encounters Unmemorable, and the story logic inane.

This may be a worse disaster than 2E itself being a dead game because Paizo was certainly figuring that they could sell their APs and world under the 5E ruleset if 2E bombed. However, if the word gets around that all the magic is gone from the Pathfinder AP writing team the company is well and truly sunk.

[Pedantic]

Maybe I just think the conception of skill tests period is garbage I don't know, but I want to resolve literally all of those things with my actual abilities and team making decisions.

Yeah, I've always just thought of skill checks as "abilities that have a built in percentage chance to activate" and "weird attack rolls with wonky defenses" for opposed checks.

I can see the case for a downtime rules system, where you're abstracting large chunks of time that are outside the gameplay loop altogether, but I don't think I'd ever want to see a skill challenge structure enter the primary focus of the game. Plus, I don't know that you'd want to use skill checks as the driving force behind a downtime system anyway. That feels more like the sort of thing you'd want to create a separate resource pool of time and/or money and a maybe offer some abilities that provide specific bonuses to specific actions.

[Kaelik]

Maybe I just think the conception of skill tests period is garbage I don't know, but I want to resolve literally all of those things with my actual abilities and team making decisions.

Yeah, I've always just thought of skill checks as "abilities that have a built in percentage chance to activate" and "weird attack rolls with wonky defenses" for opposed checks.

I can see the case for a downtime rules system, where you're abstracting large chunks of time that are outside the gameplay loop altogether, but I don't think I'd ever want to see a skill challenge structure enter the primary focus of the game. Plus, I don't know that you'd want to use skill checks as the driving force behind a downtime system anyway. That feels more like the sort of thing you'd want to create a separate resource pool of time and/or money and a maybe offer some abilities that provide specific bonuses to specific actions.

Yeah I've been writing a downtime management system for grafting into shadowrun and it is very very much the opposite of the skill challenge system.

[Dean]

If it takes a week to craft a magic sword you could make a single test for the entire week, a test for each day, a test for each hour, or literally any other number of die rolls, because the choice of how to split up the task into distinct failure/success points and assignments to roll physical dice is an arbitrary choice.

So do I know going in that making the three rolls for crafting will each take a day, the three rolls for canvassing will each take an hour, and the three rolls for building a fortress will each take a year? Do each of these skill challenge types come with their own descriptions and then you just say which of your skills you're using? Is it listed in those descriptions what getting no successes, half the successes, full success, or double success means in those particular challenges? Is that closer to what you're envisioning or is it more freeform and Apocalypse world-like where it can handle any input you want but the resolution is basically that you try to roll X successes over Y rounds and then your DM tells you what happened based on you succeeding, succeeding with complication, or failing.

[Username17]

So do I know going in that making the three rolls for crafting will each take a day, the three rolls for canvassing will each take an hour, and the three rolls for building a fortress will each take a year?

Maybe. It depends on how your game handles time. The outputs of the die rolls might change how long the task takes. It really depends on what you're rolling for.

Are we rolling to check how long it takes to complete a task? If so, you obviously wouldn't now how long the die roll was going to represent until the die roll had been made. Are we rolling to check how well a task is completed? If so, the timeframe might be fixed and known before the choice to roll the dice is made.

Before I could tell you what the consequences and costs of a test would be, I'd have to know what question the die roll was supposed to answer.

But for example: in SR4 you are at times called upon to make tests to acquire contraband gear on the black market. The base rules in SR4 use the extended test rules, which are bad. But you would like something that did that. And you'd like it to output time and cost as well as meeting minimum thresholds as to whether you find the item for sale at all. I could see something in thee rounds where you needed to spend at least one round trying to get it in less time, one round getting it for less money, and a third round doing either of those things (or trying again if you failed one of the first two). But no, obviously such a system would not correspond to a specific amount of time per roll. The time involved is a function of the outputs, not the inputs.

-Username17

[GâtFromKI]

You know the caricature about the role players being fat guys who don't know what "sport" means.

Is it really a caricature? In Pathfinder 2, a PC who makes a 11-minute-jogging is fatigued for the rest of the day; after 21 minutes he's exhausted. In other words, the designers literally think sport is so hard, doing some sport during 11 minutes cripples you for the rest of the day. For most people, 11 minute isn't even the warm-up, but for pathfinder's designers, it's the limit of the human body. When was the last time any of them did any physical activity?

... is there anything more stupid in PF2?

[saithorthepyro]

I mean, Barbarian Instincts have limited Paladin style codes of conduct that range from mildly annoying to possibly lethal.

Dragon Instinct
Anathema
Letting a personal insult against you slide is anathema to your instinct. Choose whether your character respects or abhors your dragon type. If you respect it, defying such a dragon is anathema, and if you abhor it, failing to defeat such a dragon you come across is anathema.

Maybe not more stupid than that, but I'd say around equal.

[deaddmwalking]

Paizo has proven that we need a way to more accurately measure things that are mind-bogglingly stupid.

I feel that some of the weird motion/action rules are up there. For instance, quick draw now lets you attack as an immediate action (iirc) so you can't quickdraw your weapon as you approach someone; you have to wait until you're right there. But if you draw your weapon in front of someone, you provoke an AoO. Either you draw before you approach (so no attack for you) or you draw when you get there (so they get a free attack on you first).

[Suzerain]

I've seen a few feeble defences of the game as being "fun at the table" in some nebulous way, but even those have admitted that chargen is awful 4e-style squeezing of every last +1 you can. Even then, nothing stacks or synergises anyway, because this is Paizo, and god forbid they allow synergies in chargen.

Regardless, loads of groups have fun at the table with 5e and that doesn't make it any more than a lurching hollow leather golem of a game. Charitably, having fun with a bad game means your group is one that can spin straw into gold. Uncharitably, it means that your group isn't really invested or interested in the game as a game.

[jt]

People will usually follow the rules even when they're less fun than making shit up. That's why 5E is better than many other bad games - it runs out of rules before it can do anything truly stupid, and then you have to make shit up. It also looks convincingly like a game that has rules for long enough that you probably won't notice until you're at a table with a character and invested in the game, so people will play 5E that aren't willing to play a rules-lite, even though that's what they're doing once they get in.

So it's entirely plausible to me that there's some sort of similar "failing at failing" thing going on with PF2 and it's actually fun at the table for some reason.

[Username17]

Finding a sweet spot for physical properties like time and space and speed and shit is actually really hard. If you ask a modeling question like "How many bullets can someone fire in 3 seconds?" and if you ask another modeling question like "How long do firefights take when people on both sides have 30 bullets in their magazines?" you do not get answers that divide evenly into each other. Actual factual gun battles take much more time than a series of Mozambique Fire Drills run end to end, and so it's actually quite difficult to both model actual gun fights and model the amount of shooting an "active shooter" can do.

Similarly, if you track movement rates by the time it takes a SWAT team to clear a four room apartment you get extremely different numbers than if you track movement rates by the time it takes one of those officers to jog to work in the morning. It just does.

Making timeframes and speeds and carrying capacities and other physical properties output by the game system that are remotely realistic when the parameters of the question being asked changes even slightly is extremely difficult. 3rd edition D&D is actually a very impressive work because of how many things just kind of work out. Especially if you spend your time working with ropes and pulleys to take apart trap filled underground bunkers, the number of times that speeds or lifting capacities or whatever are significantly off base is pretty low. Most of the time it pretty much works.

The issue I'm seeing with PF2 is not that the real world outputs are sometimes retarded - it's that I'm unaware of any time the outputs are better than just doing it cops and robbers style. Is there any reference frame where any of the outputs are better than just making it up as you go? I kinda think the answer is "No."

-Username17