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When the homie asks why you'd rather play Pathfinder than 5e
(lemmygrad.ml)
No, I don't care that 'it's more book keeping'; when 5e has kineticists, then we can talk.
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 tones, 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.)
i don't fully understand this argument. each character has 1 main stat + god stat of dex. if you don't max = bad. if you do max = strong. it's that simple tbh.
5e is legit a great casual system to just sit down and go. i do not mean this in a bad way - it's a great introductory system for casuals or rp'ers who don't wanna be a stat nerd
The differences between a weak and strong character in 5e are pretty small.
The core resolution is 1d20+stuff. The random factor is the biggest factor. A fighter who has 14 strength will roll 1d20+2. An "optimized" fighter at 16 will roll 1d20+3. That is a tiny difference. The die roll is a bigger factor than your stats and other choices you made. Even at higher levels, the guy who went 14 str 14 int and took the 'actor' feat on their fighter for fun instead of a strength ASI isn't really that far behind. They'll still hit a good amount of the time, especially because the target numbers are constrained pretty tightly via Bounded Accuracy. A casual player probably won't even realize their character would have hit on that 12 if it had been built "better".
So if you don't max out your main stat you'll possibly have a "bad" character as far as 5e optimization goes, but that doesn't go very far. The actual difference is tiny.
Conversely, there's not really a lot of ways to make a character more effective. 3e had Feats as the main way to differentiate your character, but those are sparse in 5e. Like if you want to make a rogue that's better at sneak attacks, there's not really a mechanism there beyond "level up". In 3e, for example, there were more feats and also prestige classes. You could prestige into Assassin for death attacks, or Shadowdancer for hide-in-plain-sight, or whatever. 5e has multiclassing, but that's often a huge opportunity cost compared to prestige classes.
Many characters on leveling up in 5e don't receive many choices. Some levels have zero choices. Rogue, for example, has no choices to make at all for 2nd, 5th, and 7th level. 6th lets you pick where to put expertise, which is a pretty small choice.
Strong disagree that it's actually a great introductory system. It is overflowing with idiosyncratic stuff (such as a 14 being a +2 bonus). It is geared largely towards "resource management combat game", and the further you move from that concept the more it breaks down.
Fate or a PbtA game are probably much better introductions for people who want to play a casual roleplaying game together. Fate IMO is actually closer to how someone who hasn't played RPGs would intuit them working.
However, the simplicity of the system is a strength of it. If it had more choices and depth, some players would bounce off. I don't know if it's possible to make a system that has both depth and appeals to "Bobby doesn't read or remember rules" archetypes.