I have the PHB for that game- I bought it after we came off a PF1 game, then went into 5e. One thing bugs me- they dont explain what a “critical success” is in the rules. They mention it several times and several skills tell you what happens with such an event. But they left off explaining it.
It is an interesting system for designing characters.
If Pathfinder 2e, Crit Success/Fail is getting +/- 10 more than you needed. So if you hit on a 30 and get a 40 after mods, you got a crit even if you didn’t roll a 20 (a 20 or 1 is still a crit/fail but you don’t NEED a 20/1).
Since I had the rules explained to me more than I tried to learn them from the book, I don’t know if or where they explain this.
One nice thing about the system is it makes small mods more meaningful. A +1 to hit can not only turn a miss into a hit but could also turn a hit into a critical which doesn’t happen when you only crit on a natural 20. Likewise, enemies can critically fail from a -1 penalty placed on them which is important due to PF2e’s scaled approach to spell effects.
The funny thing about GURPS books is they were designed to be useful whether you played GURPS or not. If you picked up GURPS Rome it gave you a lot of useful information about running a game in different eras of Rome’s history or even alternate history like the Roman Empire existing into the 20th century. I’ve got the latest print of GURPS Horror by Kenneth Hite and it’s got great advice about how to run all sorts of different horror scenarios.
While I’m a Cyberpunk 2020 kind of guy, I love the Shadowrun setting but I hate the rules. I haven’t played since 2nd edition, but I picked up 5th edition, and after reading the book I put it away thinking, “I’m never going to run this game for anyone.”
“What I like about Star Wars is that the universe is wide open. There just aren’t a lot of books filling in the setting like you see with Star Trek.” – My friend Chris when we picked up the West End Games version of Star Wars back in 1987.
The webcomic Darths and Droids has a bit of DMing advice blogged in with every installment. The system the comic is using is left deliberately ambiguous, and probably doesn’t exactly correspond to any real-world system at all, but the advice is all system-generic.
To clarify, a 20 or a 1 shifts the success up one or down one. If you need a 20 and have a +21, a 1 would still fail but not critically fail. If you need a 10 and have +21, and roll a 1, it would be a success instead of a critical success.
Thanks for the discussion!
Yes, on hit, but it didn’t explain on skill checks or saving throws. On skill checks, many skills do explain what occurs on a critical.
I have the Discworld GURPS book and it is fun reading.
I’m starting to remember why I don’t play Pathfinder.
Fair enough; I’m liking PF2e more than I liked 5e but plenty of games out there for everyone.
PF1e was a bit too crunchy for me but 2e hits about just right.
Far be it from me to yuck anyone else’s yum. If you and your pals are having a good time playing Pathfinder then I am genuinely happy for you. You keep on rocking with your bad selves.
No system will ever be perfect for me. I like starting with a system that is rules not rulings because my players, whether they know it or not, prefer that. They aren’t looking for a system that let’s them control the narrative. They want to show up and be presented with an adventure. As the forever DM, I’m fine with that and I try to oblige.
The short version is that PF2 is more like the DND adventure board games, imo. The math and abilities are balanced out so that they have a sliding bounded range. I like that over 5E because it’s what makes high level characters feel like heroes to me. I also agree that it is a lot of rules to learn and takes time. That is certainly annoying.
I’m not trying to convince you to play anything you don’t like. I guess I’m trying to explain why PF2 is complex. It’s so the numbers work out at every level, which they do. In contrast to 5E, PF2 has a lot of stuff and any type of character imagined can be made. That also adds to the complexity. It’s why as a GM, I don’t care if my players want to respec their characters to be more in line with what they wanted. We are all mature enough to talk it out.
PF1 clings onto the simulationist / wargaming roots of 3E, where each class had some aspect of their character get so powerful that they couldn’t be easily challenged anymore. The “sweet spot” of levels five to nine don’t last long enough. I think that’s what they manage to do with PF2, apply that sweet spot across all levels.
Thanks for the discussion!
Yeah, I’m the same. I haven’t had a real chance at Pathfinder 2e yet, but am thinking of switching when my current 1st ed campaign ends. I have an old friend who comes into town twice a year to run a 5th ed. campaign for the old crew, which is great for the opportunity to game with those guys, but the system itself just leaves me meh. What really sealed the deal for me with 5th ed was, surprisingly, Baldur’s Gate 3. Such a great game welded to such a mediocre game system! I ended up dropping the game in the last act, when I’d gone three level ups without making a single interesting choice for my character’s progression, and was still spamming the same abilities I’d gotten back at ~3rd level.
I think I just don’t like non crunchy game systems. I got into a Dungeon World campaign a bit back, and while the story was fine, I still have no real idea what the system actually does. In practice, it seemed like it was just, “describe the cool thing your character does, and then he does it.” There were dice involved, but they seemed to have minimal effect. Could have just been a bad DM, though,
I totally get why you wouldn’t like 5e then. They really simplified things. Rather than all kinds of modifiers, they have a simple advantage/disadvantage system. You get a proficiency bonus score that then applies to everything you’re proficient in rather than having different ranks for stuff. And so on.
I too like crunchy systems, which is why I loved Hackmaster, but I think (for me at least) simpler ones have their place. And we’re in a 5e campaign my old GM is running, and he had a stroke 5 years ago and was in a coma for months so he struggles now with systems that are too complex, but 5e is his speed. So I’m glad it exists.
I do like me a system you can dive into and really theorycraft though.
5e is the absolute best system when it comes to doing a pretty good job at every single thing. There are lots and lots of systems that do a couple of things really well at the expense of other things, or are built around just one really clever mechanical hook and don’t much bother with other aspects.
But if you want a game that’s solid and accessible all the way through, it’s 5e. If there’s even a close second I don’t know what it is.
We did switch from 3.5 to PF1 and enjoyed it. But we didnt think PF2 had any good reason to be out, and 5e was already being played by a couple of us= so we went with 5e- the easiest version since "Basic’ to learn and play.
We are adding bits for 2024 however.
Basic was. Note the past tense.
5th edition absolutely sucks at skills. Most things don’t have any guidelines for the DCs, and even once you do set a DC, it’s mostly luck, not skill.
The rules are somewhat vague. It works for our campaign, because as I said before we are intentionally keeping it pretty simple due to my friend’s limitations, so it’s “good enough”. But yeah, the DC has no guidelines and even what skill/attribute actually applies in a situation is “DM’s call”.
We go by the idea that a DC of 10 is the default for any skill use, and you adjust up or down depending on if it’s harder or easier than “normal”. A 1st level PC with proficiency in a skill and a high attribute would have a total +5 to a roll (+3 for a 16-17 attribute, +2 for proficiency bonus), so they only need a 5 on a D20 to succeed (75% success chance). That seems to work well enough.
But it’s really subjective, and you have to be okay with that. It’s not as smooth as combat which I think they’ve done a pretty good job of simplifying while still making it feel like D&D. (I’ve played every edition from 1st through 5th over the years, so what “feels like D&D” can vary quite a bit, admittedly.)
Skill checks are identical to weapon attacks. What would be a challenging AC for a monster? That’s also a challenging skill check DC, provided the character has a good stat and is proficient in the skill. If they’re not proficient or if they have a poor stat, it’s going to be harder. If they have expertise it’s going to be way easier.
One thing I think is often overlooked is that the skill/stat combinations are defaults but not mandatory. The DM can tie any stat to any skill, which adds a a bit of depth and flavor to the system.
Tool proficiencies are also a great way for characters to be good at stuff regardless of their skill proficiencies.
That flexibility is nice, but it just adds to the vagueness.
Which depending on your perspective is a strength or a weakness. Some people want firmer rules so that you spend less time deliberating over an action, others want freedom to allow for more narrative play.
But that’s the thing, saying what “challenging” is, is still no guidance at all. The book does tell us what’s “easy, hard, very hard, almost impossible”, but what actual tasks does that correspond to? Like, is an “almost impossible” task swimming across the English Channel, or is it swimming up Niagara Falls?
And unless you have expertise (which is unavailable to most classes), the highest skill modifier you can get is +11, and the lowest is -1, which means that, if you take someone who’s as good as they can possibly be at something, and take a task that they can only succeed at 80% of the time, someone who’s as bad as it’s possible to be will still succeed at it 20% of the time. Even with expertise, the range is -1 to +17, so it’s still impossible to have a task that the skilled person always succeeds at and the unskilled person never succeeds at (even though in real life, there are plenty of skills where there’s a whole hierarchy of this).
This makes itself felt in games, too. In my first 5th edition party, the best “face” in the party was the half-orc barbarian, who was built about the way you expect a stereotypical half-orc barbarian to be. She just kept on getting luckier than, say, the 16 Cha paladin. Now, as it happened, the player playing the paladin didn’t care about being the party face, so no harm done, but if they had cared, and that was their reason for putting the 16 in Cha (as opposed to spell save DCs and the Aura of Grace), how do you think that player would have felt about constantly being upstaged by the 8 Cha barbarian?
Skills are another area where 5th ed falls flat for me. I don’t like how you have a tiny selection of skills, you’re equally good at all of them (barring ability modifiers) and you never get any more. I like being able to put one or two points into a skill, just for minor checks or just pure flavor - one rank in Knowledge: Nobility, to reflect their aristocratic background, or enough points in Survival that I can reliably build a campfire when I’m out in the wilderness. Stuff like that. In 5th, if I don’t know it at first level, I can’t ever learn it.
(At least, as far as I can tell from ~eight sessions of a table top game spread across four years, and about 3/4s of BG3. I’m not claiming any degree of system mastery here)