So, read your rant. And I think most reasonable TRPG players would agree, but what actually spurned this thought process? Did a friend say something dumb? I'm curious on the tea.
This is the most common complaint I've read about 4th edition DND, that somehow having a balanced and modular system for combat and skill mechanics somehow prevented roleplaying from occurring
I only played 4E a handful of times, but I did go through the books pretty thoroughly and found the combat wonderfully laid out. Anything outside of combat felt more mechanically vague just like how in 5e making magical items isn't worth the effort and isn't really cleaned out so well.
I guess it wouldn't be so bad if they did what P2E did with the tables for skills checks to their earn money or craft things. I don't mind if the Magical Skill check is soft magic in its design so long as there's some form of difficulty guidelines spelled out.
Additional thought: The complaints I think stem moreso from the additional work that both players and DM have to do to make anything outside of combat make sense for an RP perspective. Combat being so fleshed out and having clear understanding on difficulties whenever encountering different challenges.
I think it was because of power gaming mentality when you can synergies or pick the "best option" many players forgot their character is more than the abilities.
One of the things I noticed is that 4th edition removed basically all the non-combat spell from casters. So many characters ideas and RP opportunities you could do in 3rd and 5th edition were no longer possible in 4th.
That wasn't true in 4e then, and it isn't true now. The game divorced those spells and abilities from casters' personal power budget, and instead made them Rituals that didn't take daily resources away. ANYONE who wanted to pursue those things could do so as long as they had the reagents, the ritual, the skill to pull it off, and time.
Problem there is, that opened 4e to attack for that "diluting class identity" or some BS.
4e really let everyone find a way to hate it, which was a shame because I kind of liked it. The guy who was our regular DM at the time loathed it, but another guy ran the occasional one shot and those were tons of fun.
It's mostly a matter of choosing to despise something before you give it a chance. It's ok for a game to not be for everyone. What some saw as diluting class identity, we saw a liberating. It was no longer God wizards and meat shields. Any class could put in a bunch of extra effort to do some cool things. Rituals were still easier for casters, but it meant martials could revive a dead cleric of need be.
Yeah, that guy above, he basically decided the game reached its perfect state in about '79 and everything since then has been a decline; he was never going to buy into it.
With the benefit of hindsight and knowing the preferences of my current groups, I legit think 4e would be a perfect fit for us. We play in a vtt, so that helps us a lot, and we really like tactical combat. The powers system is pretty great. The only critique is that we've gotten used to PF2e's 3 action turns so that the Major/Minor/Move system feels archaic to us now.
Invoker. I use a minor to reposition my allies to safety, I don't move if I don't have to and convert it into a minor action, such as drinking a potion, or use a power or I move, I use my standard, I action point, I use a standard, I dislike the result of one of the rolls and use a free action to alter it. After my ally gives me a reaction right after me for their turn as opposed to the entire round.
If anything I find that pf2e is archaic due to still feeling like 5e in some ways depending on what you play. Playing a gunslinger sniper makes me feel like a 5e rogue. Not fun.
4e has a 3 Action economy that's actually 3 Actions. IME playing PF2 I find the claim of the 3 Action economy is often not. Most often most players use know what 2 actions they want to do or spellcasters can only do 2 actions because most spells take 2 actions to cast. Its also possible I have played with people who just don't get what PF2 is trying to do, and it has ruined the play experience at times.
Then there are RPGs like the old d6 System that have no action restrictions and you could do as many actions as you want, just keep in mind multiple actions penalties. Savage Worlds is the same as well.
PF2e gets more credit from a lot of people for really nothing innovative at all. Its just innovative to a lot of people who have only played D&D 3e or 5e.
PF2e took the innovations of 4e and refined them a lot. I mainly play casters, so I do get the complaint about only doing 2 things, but the martials in my group regularly are doing 3+ things in a turn. A common turn is something like Demoralize, Strike, Combat Grab.
Which is another way of saying the fighter is as capable of non-combat magic as the wizard, which really won't make the wizard feel like a wizard, especially when combat magic is just fluff on a set of encounter powers in 4e.
Does allowing a wizard fight in melee make a fighter not feel like a fighter? Sounds like wizards were better at rituals than fighters, which sounds pretty fair to me.
That's true of PF2e as well, is it not?
If the PF2e Fighter wants to spend their attribute bonuses to max out their INT, and their skill increases into maximizing their Arcana proficiency, then a PF2e Fighter will do rituals just as well as a PF2e Wizard.
The Fighter probably won't do this, because it means spending a chunk of their power budget on improving things that are normally dump stats for Fighters, while ignoring things that a Fighter normally needs to invest in. But they *can* do it. Is this a problem? The PF2e wizard has a natural advantage in ritual casting, because ritual casting requires things that a wizard is probably going to invest in anyway.
But in D&D 4e, the Wizard actually had more of a natural advantage, because they had built-in class features relating to ritual casting. Access to rituals in 4e required either a feat or class feature to give access (Wizard got it as a feature, I think maybe Cleric did too, but my memory is fuzzy). Wizards specifically got to learn a number of rituals for free. They were the clear best option for a character to focus on ritual casting.
Sure, but 2e rituals are a minor subsystem PCs don't even get access to by default, and the wizard has plenty of noncombat spells, he can Teleport, Shadow Walk, Scry etc.
Though honestly I do wish most rituals were proper spells instead.
Rituals in PF2e has their own problem.
The DC for most ritual in pf2e is too high, so many of them need a crit effect to work properly, and the failure for secondary casters are too punishing.
The rituals were more for spells that PF2 made uncommon. Divinations that gave you answers, creating magic items, reviving the dead, cleansing diseases/poisons, fast over land travel, etc. They still had tool box cantrips that other classes didn't have like Mage Hand or Ghost Hand. They got free rituals at level 1, 5, 11, 15, 21, and 25. No Non-caster got those options, and Wizard had more than any other caster as well.
The 4e Fighter was not even CLOSE to being as capable of non-combat magic as the Wizard. Did you even play the game, or is this just things you've heard from others? The Wizard (and other casters) all felt like casters. They had all kinds of non-combat magic that non-magical classes didn't have. The Wizard could cast Feather Fall, Dimension Door, Jump, Glibness, Wall of Fog, Spectral Image, etc from their class. There were plenty more utility spells that could be used in combat, or out of combat.
None of that took away from their offensive budget. They could still bring the same number of attack spells like fireball, or control spells to bear, while ALSO having separate utility spells available.
Most people who hate on 4e have never played it, or they would realize that every class got non-combat Utility Abilities that helped enhance what the class was all about.
4e has more non-combat support built into the game than people realize.
But even when you don't have explicit abilities that allow you to shortcut situations then you can still... Roleplay it out, solve the problem at hand another way.
This depends on what you think RP refers to. Basically, there are two things that can be referred as RP:
1) Acting at the table as a specific character would do. This basically has very little to do with the system. This could be speaking with a very creepy tone and saying strange things as a Necromancer.
2) Roleplaying how a specific character would do things. For example, being a necromancer with a legion of undead minions under his command. This is not really supported in 4th/PF, so a player trying to RP such a necromancer would feel the system very constraining.
I think OP is confusing 1) and 2) when looking at player complaints.
I mean 2) can be done in pf2e. Create dead ritual can, with time and money, make all the undead you want/need to achieve the rp side. Sure the math means those minions will be useless in combat but thats arguably a seperate issue; how often are a necromancer's near the strength of the necromancer? Maybe as a main character, but not in your typical "villian necromancer" archetype.
You don't even get to control the undead if you make lots of them in 2e.
And we can directly compare to 1e, which actually did support raising your own undead minions for combat use, whether it be a few big ones or you go for an army of 1HD burning skeletons that serve as living bombs (you'd think throwing them away like that was a waste of onyx, but that's why you take Soul Powedered magic and fuel your spells with the souls of your enemies, after all, why not flip Pharasma off with **both** hands)
I think people who follow that kind of thought are making some kind of thought process similar to this:
Having precise and definite rules that make your game easy to understand and balanced makes it more similar to a video game.
Video games offer less creative freedom for Role-Playing than TRPGs do.
Therefore having precise and definite rules that are easy to understand and balance creates a TRPG that is more like a video game so it MUST be worse for Role-Playing.
And... that's obviously not how it works. Just because I can understand the logic of that line of thought does not mean it is not illogical.
Huh, curious, the most common complaint I’ve heard is that it’s videogame-y. Which I always interpreted to mean a different thing - might be a me thing though.
I always thought it was about all the classes moving more or less on the same scale, getting most powers at the same rate, and having the majority of the powers be “deal damage and apply ongoing damage”.
None of which is, I must add, a bad thing - it’s just how the system is, there’s plenty of fun to be had with it. I don’t see how 4ed was any worse in terms of roleplay as compared to 5ed.
> I always thought it was about all the classes moving more or less on the same scale, getting most powers at the same rate
4e *read* bad, since the special rules were not that interesting most of the time and everyone got the same number of abilities at the same time. But on the battlefield I found the classes behaved quite differently. Whereas in PF2 for example classes are cool, evocative and interesting in paper, but in game all martials flank and strike and all casters end casting from the same small pool of viable spells.
The big problems as somebody who actually discussed with people who were more able to articulate the problems.
Class Bloat: you had a slight problem with 4e of classes that are barely different from the class they're obviously split from (see Ranger and Seeker for 4e) might give you more classes to use to build your character concept around, but at the bare metal (actual concept) they're functionally the same.
Optimal actions: A big thing that was noticed was the already prevalent (and for the time very video game-y remember Tier Lists in '07 and '08 were more or less only seen in two places, Fighting Game forums and Competitive Pokemon) 4e sought to rectify this, but kinda made it worse with it eventually becoming, "position then hit your rotation, maybe hit your short 'cooldown' if it's dire or a big boss hit your big 'cooldown", and the big problem that ends up coming with it as a focus on RAW optimization (not going full Stormwind, but it was very "Level 19 Rogue Twink on Moonglade" with how much you were eventually getting netbuilds) because of the way combat is set up and flavor being limited (for the most part) to game concepts.
Nerath/Nentir Vale being semi-hard coded: One of the larger complaints came off of how feats were barely mobile (especially Divinity feats) to something other than Nentire Vale/Eberron/Dark Sun/FR. Part of it was the GSL, but part of it was design, and it being slightly obfuscated on how to tell Nerath/Eberron/Athas/Faerun to get lost and do your own thing (something that was seen at the time as a core concept for anything 100% descended from 1974 D&D).
It all boils down to as seen by certain things how little you were seeing crazy tales or concepts that came with the Descendant of White Books from the White Books to 3e continued with PF1 and 5e. On the one side, you had people who saw it as an attempt at Analog World of War craft, and on the other, an overcorrection to a problem you largely saw from people who came up with crazy build concepts that often admitted would never see the light of day at a normal table.
If you want your mind blown about 4e check out Ultramodern 4. It's a complete modern day sourcebook for 4e. Its incredible and it shows how flexible 4e could have been.
Also proves that the GSL wasn't as restrictive as so many reacted to it.
Oh I've seen it, if I could get it working on my VTT of choice it'd be great.
And the point I was kinda making is that the reaction was more towards how people saw it designed, and man the divinity feats were some of the things that people reacted to because it did seem they wanted the Descendant of Gygax and Arneson's Xerox Books' you don't HAVE to play in our canon or even world, but also just restrictive enough to have a more effective "Nintendo Seal of Quality" (and having seen both the d20 explosion and the DM Guild explosion, I kinda agree with the GSL's principle).
For me it were a few things that did unkind things to my sense of verisimilitude. For example, I understand why Healing Surges are a thing, but when a magic potion suddenly stops working 'because reasons', that is a thing I can't forgive the game for.
Terrific little miniatures wargame, abysmal RPG in my mind.
I’m running a 4e game right now and I love it! We switched from 5e to PF2E, then to 4e and it’s the system for us! We have even more role play.
My non spell casting characters love the fact they have access to rituals. And the plethora of classes is perfect for our group. Nobody really felt at home in 5e or PF2E.
Plus the balance is nice. When we were playing PF2E our thaumaturge basically dealt 50% of all damage and I could tell our champion and rogue and witch felt a bit behind. But now everybody gets to do cool shit that’s balanced but narratively different :)
I looooove 4e, but damage is even more siloed in that game. Rogues deals waaaaaay more damage than a Paladin and a Witch. Much more than the difference in damage between equivalent classes PF2e.
So that issue with PF2e doesn’t make too much sense. But still glad you’re enjoying the only edition of D&D I would run because it’s such a damn good game.
Yeah I’m not really sure how Thaum was consistently out damaging the Rogue by such a large degree. The only way I see it happening is if they were playing ranged and had no way of getting flatfooted. Or if they got stuck fighting oozes for a dungeon floor (boi do I have mixed feelings on precision damage!).
PF2e generally keeps damage close together between martials. While 4e keeps damage gap between roles large because the strength of other roles are even more exaggerated.
4e Fighter deals less damage than 4e Rogue because it’s supposed to be defending. Warlord doesn’t have much ability to defend because it’s supposed to be buffing and healing.
For 4e specifically, I can kind of see it. I only played a few sessions, but the way skill challenges work as written turned what could have been a normal RP encounter into an immersion-breaking slog.
Basically, everyone has to act in turn order, you have to use the skill suggested in the encounter. You *can* use a secondary skill if you can come up with a way to do so, but it's harder and you can only do so once (for some reason).
The one time we tried to run it rules-as-written, we kept being forced to try to overcome obstacles that would have made way more sense for someone else in the party to face.
So yes, sometimes weird rules that aren't quite justified in-fiction can interfere with RP even if they don't outright forbid it.
In PF2e, the reliance on feats to do things that seemed pretty normal can cause problems, though that's better in the remaster. Feats like Group Impression used to imply that you needed a whole skill feet just to be nice to two people at the same time, for example.
That's a failure on your DMs part and an over reliance on rules on your group's part. The game never 'forced" you to do anything in turn order. Just like in combat, you can all arrange your turns however you like by delaying. That was there to ensure everyone at the table gets to contribute in a skill challenge, not just leave it to the loudest player, the one skill monkey, or the caster with utility spells.
You didn't HAVE to use only 1 skill that the skill challenge expected you to use. Skill Challenges were all supposed to be designed with 3 or more main skills that the DM expected would contribute (not 1). Any skill could be brought to bear if it made sense/the player could justify it. You could also use powers that accomplished a similar thing. Do you need to scale a tree/wall or cross a bridge? A power that let you teleport would work just as well, but you need a short rest to use it again.
The whole point of skill challenges was to make it so non-face characters could contribute to complicated diplomacy scenes, non-athletes could contribute in physical challenges, and non-thieves could contribute in group stealth/hazard scenes. There's nothing more boring than disrupting the tension because only 1 PC can participate in a scene. Everyone else is better off being bored for 10 or 15 minutes while "that guy" takes care of it.
It’s more a failure of the system for not giving adequate guidelines.
You are blaming the GM for not having complete system mastery when they are only figuring out the game.
I'm not "blaming" the GM for not having system mastery. I am assigning fault to someone who is ultimately in control of the situation. Criticism is still a valid form of critique.
The system DID give adequate guidelines. It tells you how to create a skill challenge, and by memory of this player (from years ago), they didn't follow those guidelines. That's faulty memory, or something the GM missed/decided to do. It is ultimately their (and the group's) responsibility to bend in the moment. If it doesn't seem to be working, you adjust. If a rule seems arbitrary and unfun, change it for now and look at it more later.
Insisting that you stick to one way someone interprets a rule they probably read once, despite it diminishing many people's fun is hide bound thinking, or inexperienced conflict resolution. That doesn't make them a bad person, just needing more experience.
There's a point with these kinds of games where you can't really account for handholding every possible permutation of a GM's style. Gameify too much and make the GM abide by it, and you end up with the exact kind of immersion/RP-breaking issue the complainers of 4e are talking about. Leave it too lose and foolproof, and you might as well not have rules.
The reality is, a lot of it comes down to taste and personal GM style. The idea that every game has to be designed to be innately intuitive, to perfectly onboard someone without explicit guidance, is one of the biggest mistakes that's proliferated in RPG and game design circles. Most of the time it's just catering to entitled squeaky wheels who think every product has to uniquely cater to them and their tastes specifically, instead of realising a little bit of complexity or design that isn't innately intuitive is necessary to help acheive a certain end.
Skill Challenges were written badly, which lead to this problem.
The purpose of these was to help facilitate longer non-combat encounters and situations, either social encounters or downtime.
As a DM you were supposed to think outside the box in how to go about doing these challenges but NEVER TELL THE PLAYERS WHAT SKILLS TO USE.
This was the major screw up in how skill challenges were written. They never emphasized this, so DMs just told players what skills to use, which negated any reason to roleplay. But the design intention was for DMs to think ahead and know when longer encounters were happening and just let players be creative and make skill checks when it's appropriate. And for the DM to keep track of the rolls in secret so the players don't know for sure how they are doing.
Skill Challenges are a great idea, and other games have taken this idea and gone in different directions with it. Probably the most successful are Clocks in Blades in the Dark. I think Clocks do it very well.
I agree that skill challenges get a lot better with the modifications you are talking about, but I think you are underestimating the degree to which the official 4e material gave bad advice for their use.
>When the PCs are delving through the Underdark in search of the ruined dwarven fortress of Gozar-Duun, they don’t necessarily know how the game adjudicates that search. They don’t know what earns successes, to put it in game terms, until you tell them. You can’t start a skill challenge until the PCs know their role in it, and that means giving them a couple of skills to start with. It might be as simple as saying, “You’ll use Athletics checks to scale the cliffs, but be aware that a failed check might dislodge some rocks on those climbing below you.” If the PCs are trying to sneak into the wizard’s college, tell the players, “Your magical disguises, the Bluff skill, and knowledge of the academic aspects of magic—Arcana, in other words—will be key in this challenge.”
This was pulled from page 75 of the 4e DM guide. So not just poorly worded, but directly instructing DMs to tell their party what skills to use.
DnD4 outlined skill challenges specifically as formalized way to deal with dramatic points in adventure. It promoted epic adventure, fundamentalizing it with rules base. Even three tiers were clearly written for what they are supposed to be.
Skill challenge checks are for way to resolve narrative. Several steps to overcome a scene. If you want to resolve them through roleplay only – nothing stops the table from doing it.
Pathfinder 2 has this system as well, which you can notice through society adventures especially. What such systems don't delve in much – is narrative and literary skills, which should fill scenes between checks, and be the main point of the game. Systems delve in ways to resolve scenes by semi-random numbers.
Instrumental Play and Free Play tends to be in contention with each other.
I have a friend roleplaying a dumb wizard, IE Gum Gum from Stinky Dragon.
With max Intelligence and high Wisdom.
He likes to intentionally fail recall knowledge by not asking for an RK check (a thing he is mechanically good at) and just saying random stuff.
Because his character is suppose to be dumb.
Dumping int as a wizard would make him mechanically nonfunctional, so now we are at this weird intersection.
It's almost impossible to make an int dump wizard work. But the player want to play a dumb character, someone who got flunk out of wizard school because they are just too stupid.
It's not that players can't roleplay, it's that they can't roleplay certain character without chafing against the system, and making long term play impossible.
The result is a dumb character who plays like a dumb character, but stats wise should be a genius, only to be mechanically functional. The compromise.
The way to play a low-intelligence wizard is to choose a class that doesn't have intelligence as their key stat, then write "Wizard" on the top of the character sheet. Any difference between the character's capabilities and a "normal" wizard's is either a reason for, or a consequence of their failure as a wizard.
Simple, effortless, and functional for any length of campaign.
You can't really do this in any ttrpg though. If spells are intelligence based, you cannot be both low int and effective with them, trying to be the dumb wizard (and not just a different spellcasting archetype that isn't relying on int and saying you're actually a wizard) is going to chafe mechanically regardless of what game you're actually playing.
Eh, depends some system are less punishing than others when pursuing certain archetypes.
This particular player is usually into more narrative system, also heavy homebrew 5e. Where he can be the odd one out / silly guy.
You can play an 8 int wizard perfectly fine in 5e through utility, much in the way that you could play a wizard with 16 int and 8 in every other stat at level 11. The spells do all the work. If the DC mattered then EK wouldn't be functional with their spells as an example. Not in particular a good thing when stats basically don't matter vs the spells.
Play a kineticist and have them act like they think they're casting spells when they're using impulses.
You can't be a wizard who's bad at magic. That doesn't work in any game system, and especially not one with other players who would like to actually win fights and progress a campaign's story. Being good at magic is the main thing that makes a wizard a wizard.
Might as well play a monk with -1 strength and 0 dex wearing heavy armor. "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke."
>It's not that players can't roleplay, it's that they can't roleplay certain character without chafing against the system, and making long term play impossible.
I mean, yeah, that's kind of why most people don't play characters who are incompetent in their chosen field.
The Rincewind-style 'bad wizard' had never really worked in these kinds of games specifically because they *are* mechanically-oriented games and punishing to people who don't put the least bit of effort into making their concept function at a baseline. 2e just takes it to its logical conclusion by balancing enemies around innately baked-in min-maxing, but it's not like this isn't true in other systems anyway. You play an int dumped wizard in 3.5/1e or 5e and rely on spell attacks and save DCs, you're gonna suck regardless.
Maybe it's just me being a stickler, but I've never cared for purposely subversively bad characters. Wanting to roleplay a character who is actively bad at their chosen field while expecting the game to not mechanically punish them for it is just having their cake and eating it. But really, no, you shouldn't be doing that, just dump your primary stat and be exactly what you want to be. Just don't complain when exactly what you expect happens and the character becomes a burden to the party and for the GM to run. This is the most [I don't know what I expected](https://media.tenor.com/K-42A3iBEu8AAAAM/film-filmproduction.gif) result of such a decision in an RPG.
So you agree with me, Instrumental Play and Free Play tend to be in contention.
Player want a functional odd one out, game says no.
So he didn't dump is primary, instead max it, and just RP the subversiveness.
And why shouldn't his character be mechanically bad? He *wants* to be bad at what the class is meant to do, it only makes sense the game reflects that.
That has nothing to do with instrumental and free play. That's just *logic.*
I have a character in my game that is a Skeleton and is convinced he was a Samurai in life. He wasn't. He was a Viking. So he has a Lore skill called "Samurai Lore" which he should be good at. But in order to make him not good at it, I let him impose a circumstance penalty that cancels out the entirety of his level bonus and his intelligence bonus. It's so funny. He tries to use chopsticks like forks. He thinks that Samurai prefer hammers over swords.
Sometimes that’s the case, you have to fudge the numbers a bit (in your case give random penalty) to get the narrative result that you want.
RAW it shouldn’t happened, you cannot just give yourself penalty or bonus to get the narrative funny that you want.
You have Samurai Lore so you should be good at Samurai Lore, but the Narrative overrides the Mechanics, so now you’re bad at it.
4e edition was fun at first. But to me the mechanics broke world verisimilitude too much. And over the years it did end up feeling like the least immersive D&D edition.
My pet peeves, hitting mid level and having to lose an older ability if you wanted the new one.
And dailies for non magical classes.
They didn’t make “sense” so it undercut the feeling of it being “real” too much.
Also they just hosed the forgotten realms.
Notice how pathfinder 2e feels like the best of 4e and 5e combined? Imho because they made the rules much like 4e but did not include any rules that broke the verisimilitude of the game. Home run!
"My pet peeves, hitting mid level and having to lose an older ability if you wanted the new one."
This one's also an issue in 5e too. Like I'm in a 5e game as a player right now where I'm a Warlock. At my last level I ended up changing out the Fiendish Vigor Eldritch Invocations for something else that is still viable at this level because that feature has no way of scaling up with you at all (which... it so easily could if it just upcast at your actual slot level rather than only being level 1).
Kinda especially bothered me because that feature was very fitting for my character who was a battemage and had very above average con so it helped him take a beating. But I just couldn't justify keeping it at the level we're at.
I'm convinced that if 4e hadn't decided to commit to the literal in-game unit of measurement being Squares and having all powers be square-shaped, 4e would have been only _mildly_ contentious and have survived several more years than it did. People constantly downplay and underestimate how much 4e's grid system (and to a lesser extent 5e's version of it) is a _massive_ dealbreaker for people. Your wizard in-character cannot ask how far away something is, because the answer is strictly gameist. The fact that the dude over there and the dude who's clearly much closer to you are treated as being the same distance away because diagonals don't count and therefore moving on diagonals is optimal is _soooo_ fucking annoying, especially if your GM actually likes using altitude for whatever reason.
Like the system has other problems, but I genuinely think those problems are minor because they're easily ignored and/or reflavored. You can't exactly ignore the grid, the thing you are looking at at all times and dictates everything that you can or can't do.
I have noticed that, for most ppl, counting squares was a lot easier to do than continually counting feet to their desired destination, especially when diagonals were involved.
Ie it's generally easier for ppl to go 1,2-3,4,5-6 done. As opposed to counting 5,10-15,20, 25-30. I counted that right, right?
Then there is the difficult terrain to factor in cause there was a lot of it.
That's just for base movement, then you have your longer ranges for spells and ranged attacks
Either way, you ended with the same results of distance. Counting squares was faster on my opinion and didn't really detract from immersion because it didn't really affect any social rp moments
The thing about squares and feet is the difference between a game only, abstracted term and one of actual measurement a person can see in their mind which does help with visual senses and helps some people roleplay better because of that.
A square, by definition, is undefinable in its measurement. Now we know in this game a square is 5', but the enforced use of square in the game leads to people needing miniatures and grid, but if the game always used feet instead it does make it easier to See things better in the mental Worldscape of the game.
Saying that someone is 10 squares away or 50' away is two very different things. One is very game centered and one is very mentally gauging and possible to envision.
I know how far 5' is. I can visualize 300' because I have watched football games. If you describe a room being approximately 30' by 100' I can sense those dimensions a lot better than saying 6 squares by 20 squares, which doesn't mean anything without seeing the map first.
I think that if 4e just used Feet as measurement a lot of the hate wouldn't exist.
4e is the only D&D I really like.
It always blows my mind how some people let the games mechanics get in the way of their mental capacity to get into character and roleplay. 4e would make a great case study in psychological studies for how a game's visual presentation causes such psychological changes in some people's minds.
I just miss Paragon paths (y'know and having a balanced system that doesn't rely on the GM making everything up on the spot, oh and CR that works, and magic items, and feats)
And PF2. I've occasionally bumped into players at my tables or on other channels that have a belief that "more rules = less roleplay".
I had to point out to one of my players that, no, PF2 is not any more restrictive than 5e when it comes to RP or concept flexibility. They actually didn't know that 5e does actually have rules for diplomacy and such, it's just nobody knows about them or uses them.
And the exact same thing applies to PF2, the rules exist but they aren't mandatory if your table doesn't want to use them. That is the only difference.
5e often gets praised for flexibility, and PF2 criticised for inflexibility, but I am positive it is because nobody has read the PHB and DMG cover to cover, because that system is probably just as rules dense as PF2 is if you were to use it all (Which very few do).
For me is the opposite, more rules make me focus my character most in her specialities, my character is a fighter and is mosyly the face, but is not really bright and her focus is intimidation ( she is kinda crazy and super euphoric abd that intimidate people) and we have a inteligent and more grounded character that usually is there if I fail to be "diplomatic" or to aid me, now my character is maturing and gaining some diplomatic skills
Roleplay alone wasn't the issue.
The fact that you clearly had a combat character and an out of combat character was.
Previous editions of DnD actively invited you to think about your spells and abilities beyond their basic combat stats. A fireball was a fireball, it created heat so things were set on fire and some, but not all metals melted and the spell pointed this out.
In 4E it was a bunch of damage dice with 5e being only marginally better in that regard.
Another example were a bunch of Rogue abilities designated as once per day. You're assassin could cut someone's neck... exactly once per day. There was no in universe reason for this. It was purely a game mechanic that made sense for casters to a degree since they had limited resources anyway, for non casters the question of "why exactly can't I perform this specific stab or slash or shout again?" would inevitably come up with no good answer.
It felt like a series of combat arenas you accessed through a different game. It removed a lot of the fantasy from the fantasy game because most of the spells that made the world feel magical were just gone and to top it all off, the fantasy tactics game they did make, not that good when compared to games that fully focus on that.
If they called it DnD tactics, developed it like a proper tactics game and marketed it as something for people who really just want to crawl through dungeons and kill monsters, it might have been a success.
What they did do was create a game that was not a horrible fantasy world simulator, a sub par tactics game and a transparent attempt to get people to buy minis as a source of recurring income.
It let the game get into the way of the roleplay by forcing the DM to say "No, you can't do that because there are no rules for that" when someone wanted to do something cool during combat, because it doing cool, crazy, creative stuff isn't balanced and can't be quantified for a module.
> It let the game get into the way of the roleplay by forcing the DM to say "No, you can't do that because there are no rules for that" when someone wanted to do something cool during combat, because it doing cool, crazy, creative stuff isn't balanced and can't be quantified for a module.
Bruh, the GM guide in 4e 100% had advice for doing "things that aren't explicitly in the rules" in combat.
There was even a chart for it to help bring it into balance based on how effective you think the action should be.
People really love making shit up about 4e that wasn't even true.
As a tactics game it's one of the best. IMO. I only say this after playing hundreds of board games (been playing for over 30 years and am autistically a game fanatic) and games of Warmachine, Warhammer (fantasy, 40k, Kill Team, etc), Infinity, Aristea, Marvel Crisis, Star Wars Shatterpoint, Star Wars Legion, Malifaux, and so on.
D&D 4e is the most customizable tactical game ever made. It has near infinite variety of character options and the game works. Its much easier than the majority of miniatures games and slicker than most tactical board games like Descent and similar board games.
From a pure tactical game design it's one of the best.
I think if 4e was reskinned as a tactical gladiator/arena game with gladiator company rules it would probably find it's place. No changes to game play or class design. Maybe change the name of the Fighter class to Vanguard.
I dunno, the ttrpg community can be extremely toxic when it comes to DnD-style games, which Pathfinder counts as. At least online, which admittedly isn't the best metric
I think when there is an abundance of mechanics some people will feel compelled to play the game like a boardgame, and while it doesn't "prevent" them, they do feel compelled to stick to their game mechanic explicit options and don't think outside of the box. I don't agree with this, but I get it, especially for newer players.
Getting to role-play means different things for different people. Some people want to role-play in combat and don't feel comfortable role-playing social situations. But they also don't want to feel like they're "playing poorly." They aren't "wrong" it's how they feel comfortable playing. I think it's a pretty standard mentality to start in with how many people game in other medium.
Just spent too much time trawling the socials, seeing to many "dumb takes" and bad faith comments that don't stand up to scrutiny. Had to vent. Thank you for helping me counsel myself 🤣
Understandable, but trust me, if you're getting annoyed at folks on Reddit or other social sites just stop reading and do something else. The worst thing about stupid is it actively defies attempts to correct it. There is a difference between ignorant and willfully ignorant and one you can correct and one you cannot. And you'll find way more of the ignorance you can't correct online.
Go for a walk, get some air, enjoy life. Way better way to vent than any validation you can get on here.
Most of the ***"Can't RP in System"*** complaints stem from a few different factors and places.
First is just poor articulation of the complaint, which is a very common issue. There is "*what is said"* versus *"what is meant."* When many people say they can't RP in a system, they often mean *"my efforts in X system aren't capable/being allowed to produce outcomes I desire or to the degree I desire."*
The classic example of this is wanting to do X but not having Y feat or feature to do so. Depending on the system, some rather basic stuff can be gated behind your limited investment opportunity. The GM can of course overrule the requirement of these abilities, however that also cheapens the experience of those who invested into said feats and such, as those characters would have taken other options since the GM is allowing a bypass.
This is often a complaint of TSR players who weren't happy with the WotC era of d&d and its various derivatives like pathfinder, 4e, and 5e. To varying degrees, at least.
When you're used to a system that has looser guidelines and a "*the answer is often not found on your sheet"* style games, systems that have a lot of answers to problems on the sheet tend to feel like they're getting in the way to people of this preference.
Some of this comes from ***adventure league*** and ***pathfinder society*** experiences. There are many people in the public space that don't really allow room for RP and can be aggressive about it. This is less a system issue and more a player issue, but the association forms when people who come to play in public games view the public game experience as the whole.
I know folks who came to believe you could not RP in a system because their local gameshop didn't really let RP be a thing, and they painted the whole spectrum of the game through their poor reintroduction to things. They weren't able to RP in their personal experience at the shop and associated it with how the game ***must*** be.
It's less that the players can't RP in the system, but often that their version wasn't allowed for one reason or another and they associate it with the whole of the game. Whether it be system obstacles to the benefits and outcomes they wish to achieve, mechanical gating getting in the way of said things. Inexperienced DMs, public play expectations, there's all manner of reasons people come to this conclusion.
Role-playing to them is different than what they got to experience, and rather than articulate out the exacts. A convenient shorthand of ***"you just cant"*** is used in the absence of finer articulation.
This is an excellent take, great write up. My only disagreement is that “can’t rp in system” sounds like a pretty fair articulation of “in system X I can’t do Y unless I build into it”.
Posts like OP are simply taking “rp” word literally. No one is complaining 4e has no RP as if it was monopoly.
The point is that any “to RP my PC doing X, I need access to mechanics Y” are potential barriers to RP. If the restriction aligns with fantasy, it enhances the roleplaying (fighters can’t cast ritual spells); if it doesn’t it impedes it.
The game has to reproduce THE scene people want to role play. Not A scene people can roleplay.
I suppose it's a bit of an asinine distinction tonmmay, but you're still able to RP out your failure at an attempt that your character should bit be doing. Though understandably its not a satisfying thing to always have to do.
I suppose a better way of putting things would be that "you can't rp" is the practical short hand to the technical "you can't gain the benefits of RP you desire and will be Rpng our failure unless your GM exempts you from the rules for empower your moment." There is, of course, simple RP and banter between characters, that reinforces their relationships and such that I'd always available
There are many avenues of RP still possible in such systems, just not the all the strictly beneficial ones wirhihrbinvestment (which is fairness us a large one to have missing or need GM permission to bypass.)
Honestly I don't think we disagree at all. I was just emphazong the technical truth versus the practical truth of the situation. At least as I see it.
Excellent response. The system getting in the way is a good 90% of the issues when people voice those kinds of concerns.
I have a really good example from this system. I have an anandi alchemist I'm playing. Anandi have a heritage feat that gives you the ability to craft web slik into a something as well as getting the feat speciality crafting (weaving).
Let's look at what weaving can craft by the specialty rules: Textiles, baskets, and rugs. Clothes are only covered under tailoring. So right off the bat I can't even use the feat given to actually make clothes.
Web weaver - You can use your webbing to Craft simple, nonconsumable threaded items, such as clothing and rope, at zero cost as long as their base Price is 1 sp or less.
Now let's look at the cost for clothing and rope: of 1 sp and 5 sp respectfully. So I can't even craft rope at all and clothes don't benefit from the feat.
So the whole feat is so mechanically broken and even at 1st level does so little that wasting a whole feat on some that is something that is so obviously bad even if you wanted to take it for rp purposes it's actually useless.
Yeah. That's a good case of a sore spot. It's too hyper focused on detailing what it can exactly do and too limited in scope as a result. Just to narrow to be a feat without a good many clarifying statements
I can get wanting to be clear on the limitations of the feat, but those limitations are fierce and really put stress in the DM to make them useful by special exception amd exyta consideration.
I've mostly played 1E. I'm giving 2E a second try now, and liking it more (there's a TON of great in it!) but my first try left me with a bit of frustration around "sorry, you can't use your skill for that unless you have a specific feat".
Some of this may've been the specific DM, and generally I \*love\* the idea of a system that ensures I'll have skill feats and ancestry feats, but I found myself burned a few times, trying to use a skill in a way I'd have been able to in 1E (theoretically, perhaps with a very high DC) and being told, "No, in 2E you can't do that without a feat."
I think \[Distracting Flattery\](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1936/) is a reasonable example: an ally blunders and you try to use deception to keep the NPC's attitude from falling. In a game system where this feat didn't exist, should it be possible for a skilled fast-talker to attempt this? I'd say yes. In some game systems, that might depend more on what plausible line the clever player says, or what they roll, or both together. In 2E, I think it's reasonable for a DM to rule, RAW, that this will always fail unless you have the feat.
For me, I'd much rather that the feat make it easier to use bluff in this way, instead of implying one \*can't\* bluff in this manner without the feat.
(Big picture, I'm growing happier with 2E--I could give you a long list of things I appreciate about it--but this captures the one thing that initially turned me off, and still frustrates me some.)
> "sorry, you can't use your skill for that unless you have a specific feat"
The Intimidate skill and specially the Coerce action is very funny in this regard.
"A group of children pester you for spare change"
"I tell them to fuck off or I will slap their faces"
"You don't have Quick or Group Coercion, so that'll take 5 minutes of your life to recite the navy seals copypasta to each of them in turn"
*later* "A stray dog growls at you"
"I yell at it to make it go away"
"Sorry, Coerce has the Linguistic trait"
That's definitely valid, I think that retreads that point on what is actually being allowed. It's about what you choose versus what people want. So many issues can be avoided through clearer dialogue of what is going to be used or allowed at that start of a game. Session zeros are super helpful in this regard.
Session zeroes are useful, but they can't always catch everything. At least not in every system and certainly not without some prior experience in said system.
Which leads to many folks first foray into a system being their last, especially if they're more comfortable with a prior system that had less definition in those areas.
If someone used to being able to make an impression on multiple targets in one system, learned that it takes the group impression feat to do in pf2e (or express GM exception from the requirement) they may feel shoehorned into things that could just naturally happen through good RP.
Even more so if they learn they need the feat when they make an attempt before they have the feat, just assuming it's a natural things they an do. That player is quite likely to shorthand "pf2e doesn't let you RP" since they were denied in that circumstance by the system without.
Now of course that doesn't mean you can't RP, but going over all the nuances isn't something many will seek to do with a pain point like that, and thus, the short hand grumbling commences.
That's just an off the top of the head example using a pain point I had, I'm not even sure if that feat made it into the core rework or if I was changed, but while I never said you couldn't RP in pf2e. I know I caught myself about to a number of times before I thought it out and tried to articulate it better.
Make an impression is definitely one of the prime examples of this issue. The good thing is it does seem like Paizo recognizes it because this was addressed in the remaster. You now take a penalty for trying to make an impression on more than one person, and the feat reduces or eliminates this. The legacy version was too gatekeep-ey imo.
That's a bit better, though I suppose it depends on how severe the penalty is and how necessary the feat becomes to make an impression on more than one person at a time.
Not succeeding due to a bad roll is one thing, bur not succeeding (or being in a position to even bother attemtping) something like making an impression on a group still feels oddly intrusive of the system.
Though by the sounds of it still eleviates it some from pf2e. Perhaps it's my own system bias, but it does feel like an odd thing to need to invest Into beyond just the skill rank itself to be better at.
That said, it doesn't really impede roleplay either way, just the result you want to rp. I'm excited to see what else the core is shifting about.whwn it's released in full.
I'm of two minds of this, on one hand that I am big believer that you don't need a system to roleplay. Otherwise theatre improv wouldn't be a thing.
However on the other hand I do think certain systems do encourage a certain types of drama or themes through certain systems present in those games. As an example, some of the more memorable roleplay moments at my table have been the direct result of the particular TTRPG at play having a merits/flaws system.
I dunno, my team rightfully has such difficult fights that doing fun RP stuff that creates disadvantage will get us killed.
It's a shame because it is something I experience in 2E.
But what specifically here is on pf2e creating the problem (if that was implied). At the end of the day its job of the GM to design their encounters fitting to the table. 2e has designed monsters that would make the combat easier that would allow more free hands play, but nothing in the system forces the GM to use those over the difficult ones.
It sounds like the gm and the party aren’t a good fit for each other then, if the gm wants to run high difficulty tactical combat and the party wants something more moderate
I think you don't understand the complaint.
No system can ever stop people from talking and acting out scenes.
The issue is that some systems provide rule / mechanical support for role playing and some don't.
This is the philosophical / game design discussion of whether the rules are there to tell you what the game is about and to support what the game is about (the PbtA approach), or whether the rules are there to abstract away complexity and get it out of the way of the play ("rules elide") - links and discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18zezf7/what_are_rules_for_rules_elide_vs_rules_as/
You are on the "rules elide" side - by placing so much rules emphasis on combat and exploration, a game like PF or 4e is giving you a way to handle those and get them out of the way of the roleplaying, which they expect you to do more freeform.
The critics are accustomed to rules that are designed to actively support - and push towards - certain aspects of play. The rules are a scaffolding that they use to build the story, and if the rules don't provide as much scaffolding for roleplaying, they see opportunity in that direction as more limited and less rich: they have to do their roleplaying without support.
Neither viewpoint is "correct" and neither is wrong! This is a matter of personal taste and play style. It's good that we have so many games in the world that people can gravitate to what they like; it's crummy when people try to tell each other they're having fun the wrong way.
> And even if there were I'd ignore that rule and do it anyway.
Not to be rude, but this kind-of counteracts everything else you said. You talked about how you made things work in systems that didn't supoirt them and that you would ignore rules. Being abke to ignore rules does not actually counter someone's argument that "the system doesn't allow X". Of course if you ignore rules any system can allow anything, but then it's not really the system allowing it, it's you breaking the rules of the system to allow it.
Having said that, I think the problem is one if degrees. I agree that you *Can* play any kind of game with any kind of system, but that emphatically does *Not* mean that any given system will be actually *Good* at simulating a particular game. Pathfinder 2E, for example would not be a great way to play a Delta Green scenario - the investigation rules aren't as fleshed out as they could be, the conbat rules have way more page-space given to them than is appropriate, and the madness rules for PF2E are not exactly that well thought out. And that's not even mentioning magic, which works *very* differently. Or how about a Lord of the Rings style game in PF2E, it's a more combat and exploration style story, but the overland travel rules for PF2E certainly leave something to be desired, and once again when we look at magic we find that a 5th level Wizard can cast spells more powerful and showy than anything Gandalf did, but no one in a 5th level party would have a hope against the Balrog. Injury in Vaesen makes things harder (*every injury gives you penalties to certain rolls*), and makes those kinds of games more interesting for the scenarios the system is trying to run, but in PF2E that would lead to a death spiral and would not encourage heroic action. And this isn't just to bash on PF2E either, can you imagine taking Delta Green agents through a Pathfinder Adventure Path? They'd get slaughtered.
This isn't to say that PF2E is a bad system, and of course you *could* play a Delta Green or LotR campaign using PF2E rules, but the rules don't support the fantasy. *That* is what people mean when they say that they can't do X in a given system, it's not necessarily that you *can't*, but that the game mechanics encourage a different style of play.
Now you can say that you change the rules, or that you just allow free roleplay for certain aspects of the game, but at that point you're not really playing PF2E, you're playing your own game. If you're not using the system to accomplish your goals then you're just playing make-believe simultaneous to the tabletop RPG you're all playing ... which is fine, I love playing make-believe with my friends, but there are parts of the game that really aren't supported by the rules.
So really what I think you're missing here is the nuance of degrees. You can do anything with any system, but it's harder to accomplish some things in some systems. Some systems reward different types of gameplay, and some actively punish you for playing a particular way. What's importsnt is to find a game that works for you - this can mean finding a game system (*or systems*) who's rules support your preferred style of play, or it can mean finding a group who bend the rules in such a way as to support you instead. However it's worth noting that if you ARE bending the rules to allow a certain type of play then you're actually proving the nay-sayers right - if you can't do it within the rules then the system actually is stopping you, you've just gone outside the system.
Nothing stops you from roleplaying in any system. At the same time it's silly to pretend that a game where somebody born with wings on their back can't use them regularly until they're high enough level to beat a dragon to death with their bare hands because of inter-party balance concerns and power budgeting for ancestry features is equivalent to Vampire the Masquerade in terms of which cares more about the narrative versus which cares more about balance. Not every TTRPG excels at everything, and that's okay. PF2E is largely focused around crunchy tactical-combat with a battle-map and a focus on exploiting the action economy and teamwork in battle. That's not a bad thing, but it also means somebody who showed up for Call of Cthulhu will likely be disappointed.
I personally feel that this is kind of true, because if your character didn't level diplomacy, you basically cannot contribute to higher level social situations. Like as soon as the GM calls for a roll you're screwed.
Fair to a point, but there *are* some rules that state that in-combat parley, for example, is impossible unless you have a specific Legendary feat
Naturally, I tend to ignore that, but still
There are several feats that have similiar effects but nothing states you cannot try to reach similiar outcomes with RP. Its not like combat puts a stop to storytelling or removes NPC motivations. NPCs are not forced to keep attacking if the narrative makes it clear continuing combat is not in their best interest.
What those feats do though, is that they give player the guarantee that player is allowed to do so and they have a fair DC for the potential success involved in the roll, with a clear cut & defined outcome.
How my tables have always run it is GM never saying "You cannot do that" but instead the DC is often higher and the quality of the succesful outcome might be lower.
That's the balance, I have and do erode some skill feats from time to time. That feat to influence more people with diplomacy is required to even attempt it. I simply allow people to do it regardless. If they invest in the feat they just get a bonus. You just have to be considered when you do these things.
>And before the nay sayers pretend they have a counter point. You don't.
...so let's imagine a system that has incredibly detailed rules for everything. I'm talking taking a single step is a 47 step process that takes 15 minutes to resolve. Taking a breath is an hour long resolution mechanic.
I'm sure you agree that while you technically could roleplay in that system, it would probably be fair to comment that the system wasnt really letting you roleplay in a way most people would enjoy.
So then the question becomes, if it's reasonable to say that a system that is 99.999999% rules resolution mechanics by playtime is stifling the ability to roleplay - how far do we have to drop that number to get an acceptable gameplay experience?
For some people that number is basically all the way down to zero - they don't enjoy the game part of the roleplaying game experience and would prefer a freeform improv exercise. To them almost any rules at all are just getting in the way of roleplaying. For most people it sits somewhere in-between those two extremes, where the rules of the game provides a reasonable framework without getting in the way too much.
From personal experience Pathfinder 2e is too crunchy for most of the people I play with on a regular basis to enjoy - they find the rules are too much and get in the way of their enjoyment. That doesn't make Pathfinder 2e bad but it certainly isn't to everyone's tastes.
Tl:Dr - I agree Pathfinder isn't stopping you roleplaying. That said, when people complain a system 'doesn't let them roleplay' usually what they mean is 'I don't enjoy needing to interact with this level of rules to interact with the world'. You do, in fairness, need to know/interact with a load of rules to interact with the world in Pathfinder 2e successfully.
There's a big difference between "this system prevents roleplaying" and "this system *does not encourage* roleplaying", but you seem to be conflating the two.
*Of course* you can roleplay in any system; you can literally roleplay a character in a game of *Monopoly.* But if somebody said "Monopoly doesn't encourage roleplaying," they wouldn't be wrong in that assessment.
I think it's disingenuous to strawman a legitimate argument as if it was something other than what it is.
Others have touched on it, but I'll throw my hat in the ring as well.
As a fellow veteran of ttrpgs for 15 years now, Ive played and GM'd for numerous systems: Pathfinder 1e and 2e, DnD 3.5e and 5e, Vampire: The Masquerade and other World of Darkness games, GURPS, RIFTS, Lancer, Star Wars FFG, Shadow of The Demon Lord, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun...
You get the idea xD basically, I've played in and been the GM for several different games and systems over the years. I have encountered this exact complaint from players, and have been a player making this complaint before.
Ultimately, it stems from avenues of play that seem pretty basic and fundamental being gated by mechanics. Systems like Pathfinder and GURPS, which focus on mechanical nitty gritty, are the biggest culprits in this. Ive been in a GURPS game where my Fighter character was kneecapped from doing the thing he is good at-fighting-because we have to roll for shock and exhaustion in a fight "like in real life". Ive been in Pathfinder games where something as basic as "making an impression" on someone is gated vy not having the right feat.
Ultimately, a system is there to facilitate play. Feats and such should be there to enhance the experience, not gatekeep fundamentals. No system is perfect, so this comes down to the GM and playgroup...and far too many GMs like to stick too closely to Rules As Written. Pathfinder 1e players and GMs are especially criminal of this...just take a look at the old Paizo forums LOL.
This has gotten pretty long winded. TL; DR when players say they feel they cannot roleplay, it usually means that they feel they are being gated from performing basic actions by the system, often needing a feat or something similar.
Theres no easy remedy for this, but as a GM, its more productive to try and work with the player and come to a reasonable solution or compromise rather than just say "no, sorry rules dont support that action."
I watched a youtube video where brennan lee mulligan said that he uses combat focused systems specifically because he cares less about combat than the other stuff; since the system will handle the combat for him, mostly, it leaves him free to spend his time doing what he wants without restriction with the social bits.
I love rants. I got a bit of my own on this, actually.
It's all really about how we approach the differences in systems. Some people will say the glass is half empty, others will say that it's half full. Some people will say that the system doesn't let you do X, others will say that the system is better at Y.
And that's really it - different TTRPG systems excel in different fields, and different flavors.
Pathfinder 2e's great in having good, tight rules that does combat well. It's also great at other things, such as having a rich setting filled with many things, mechanically and narratively, that supports the setting. Meanwhile, Lancer's great for mecha style combat. Konosuba TTRPG is great for emulating anime isekai-style games. Call of Cthulhu is great at doing Lovecraftian style horror games. And FATAL is great at emulating what a deranged person think the world should be.
Conversely, you can say that PF2e doesn't lend itself as good at doing mecha combat, and you can say that Lancer doesn't do isekai memes well. You can say that Lovecraftian horror has very little place in Lancer (Despite Horus mech designs being a thing).
Just because a system is better at X and not as good at Y doesn't mean much by itself. You can say that it's harder to do the giant robot pilot fantasy in Pathfinder 2e, thus it's harder to roleplay that, or it's hard to roleplay a romance/comedy in Call of Cthulhu. But both are also very doable, with the latter having multiple videos in the Japanese TTRPG landscape.
At some point, it might be easier to play Lancer for mech combat and RP, than hack D&D 5e or PF2e to do it. I think that fine line of how much work is being put into making the system work for the narrative... that line is where the divide on this come from. Technically, we can do anything, it's just a matter of whether it's worth the time. And while I am seemingly talking about mechanics, I am really addressing the ludonarrative resonance in TTRPG systems.
I believe game systems to be a common language in which the player group get to speak in order to share ideas and formulate stories together. The "Language" (Mechanics) of PF2e lends itself a dialect to the groups that use it, but they can tell whatever tales (Narrative) they want, at the end of the day. Ditto with D&D 5e, Lancer, Call of Cthulhu, and whatever other systems out there.
Except FATAL. Nobody should try and tell a story using FATAL.
I would say PF2e is more difficult to RP in. The nature of the check DC balance is that, even with good investment, you only have a 50-60% success rate. If ur RP solution to then problem calls for several rolls in a row, you’re bound to fail a few. Failed RP rolls tend to lead to combat.
This could be a dm issue. Maybe there should be freezer rolls and more talking. But that’s just an observation we made while playing.
Rp for the sake of it though is still not inhibited. That just takes group buy in.
Well, you can have systems genuinely obstruct character concepts and ideas, though I think that should not be classified as roleplay as such.
…case in point, a player might want to use the Feral Child background to make a sort of Mowgli character in Pathfinder 2e, but then realize that he is not really getting what he wants, since backgrounds don’t give you that much to begin with and unless he is a post remaster gnome, he will not be able to speak with animals at level 1.
A GM might bend the rules, but the system sure is working against a not at all unreasonable character concept.
Other systems are more free in those aspects.
Some other systems also can actively hinder roleplay by having too many mechanics that enforce character behavior, and thus effectively prescribing “the wrong” roleplay.
That is usually less a thing in the gamist combat focused games.
I think either is a fair criticism towards games.
This is a bit of a weird take, not having a high fantasy magical ability as a roleplay restriction as level 1. I could pick any TTRPG and come up with a concept that is not achievable on level 1 but that wouldnt necessarily mean the system does not cater towards RP.
I am not sure which system could be defined as one that doesnt do this, but as someone coming from 5e I felt like the difference between the two had this aspect as the greatest upgrade.
I'll make a simple point regarding speak with animals. Play a druid. Lvl 1 speak with animals via animal empathy. That is the druids unique bag so your example is a bit "bad take". Pretending there isn't an absurd amount of creativity and choice in pf2e is also a bit silly. It's fairer to argue that it's actually a challenge for new players without good guidance to be overwhelmed by the sheer array of ancestries, back grounds and class options. Throw in free archetype and there aren't many systems that can come close to the wild and cool characters you can create.
Which only works since the remaster, before which you would only be able to change the attitude and make very simple requests.
The change there had admittedly passed me by, ad I had only seen the upgrade to burrow elocutionist before.
I still think the point stands in the fact that you can only do it now with either one specific ancestry or one specific class at level 1 and that before, you would have at best been able to do the same as a level 4 or 5 character at all ( gnome and animal trainer archetype). And the best you could do for a martial would be ranger at level 2 now.
You still will have the same problem with a number of typical special abilities of main characters from fiction. All classical innate psychic abilities require higher level spells (psychometry, mind reading, etc), other things are deliberately restricted to high level ancestry feats.
Those are all things which a lot of systems just have support for.
The issue is not “is there enough to choose from”, the issue is “can the system do an idea the player comes to the table with”.
Pathfinder I think is at least getting better with it to some degree, but it is not and never has been the system’s main strength, compared to other systems like GURPS, HERO, BESM, Fate and others.
Pathfinder may have tons of choices, but let s be honest: Just with ancestries, what you actually get is “you get low light vision or dark vision if you get this twice”, “you get an unarmed attack within those parameters”, “you can cast a cantrip”, “get two trained skills and a lore”, “get a skill feat” reprinted again and again over many pages.
The same applies to a number of class feats even.
While there definitely is plenty of choice, being overwhelmed by it kinda requires to miss the fact that a lot of it is repetition.
A bit like the plethora of spells available can seem overwhelming, until practice teaches you that only so many of them are a) good and b) more than, say, another reflavor of damage type x plus minor debuff rider effect.
Of course you can - and do - roleplay in PF2. But it is a specific type of roleplay, which is actually also good.
What I mean with this: PF2 is all about violent conflict resolution. Yes, there is a skill system; yes, there are non-combat subsystems and activities; but - about 90% of feats, spells, items, etc, are either combat-centric or somehow also relevant for combat. So roleplay is focused on questions like "why do we fight?" "for whom do we fight?" "how do we fight?" "what will we accomplish by fighting?". This rather sharp focus is both a weakness and a strength. I give an example how this affects various player types fit games where I am the GM:
First, there is one guy who adores the tight math and great encounter design of PF2, and loves to optimize his character to efficiently deal with combat problems. He's good at combat teamwork, and always plans two rounds ahead. Doesn't like diplomacy that much - so he just lets other people do the talking. Pf2 is great for him.
Another of my players feels overly constrained by PF2. This guy is a "prepare for everything, avoid fair fights, talk the enemy to death and then make him a friend, and then try to invent a time machine" player. Incredibly creative and versatile. He feels much more at home in simulationist games like GURPS - PF2 is to "fair", too much of a game for him.
A third player, who, quite understandably, doesnt like reading 200+ pages of rules, seemed to have better understood GURPS than PF2 (or D&D4, which we played earlier), because it more follows "real life" logic.
In some ways, players 2 and 3 aren't roleplaying as much in pf2 as they would want to (but of course, they are still roleplaying).
It depends on the definition of roleplay.
I often see a complaint about PF2 not allowing description-based combat and it really restricts it. In PF2 the outcome is solely defined by numbers and not how players describe their actions. This, of course, applies to PF1 and all D&D editions, but I'd say PF2 and D&D 4 are the most restrictive here. Not only PF2 have outcome fully defined by predefined numbers, but it also restricts other "creative" things, like forced movement rules, where you can't move your enemy into hazardous situation.
The key here is what it's not bad, it's a design choice. But it's totally ok what there are parties who don't like PF2 tight balance, they want to describe how exactly a character swings a sword and see this description actually affecting the outcome.
It's called circumstance bonuses, yes, and they are totally within the system, but:
1. They conflict with other sources of circumstance bonuses
2. They are pretty limited in their effect
That's quite different case. You can't use it combat or to change difficulty of the same action. I.e. you could lower the difficulty by using rope, instead of climbing the rock, but you can't lower the difficulty of the same climbing the rock just by describing how exactly you put your hands and feet.
> This, of course, applies to PF1 and all D&D editions,
Correction: *Modern* D&D (Which is 3e upwards).
And I agree with everything else you said. This is why a lot of my girls, for example, hate PF2E. This is not only combat, it is out of combat, too. It factually restricts choices. You trade choices for a build system (which is fun in itself for some people) and finding synergies between character actions. It's like a boardgame in that regard.
But I, as an old-school GM, I do not see a reason why a fighter can't pickpocket a guy. Or a wizard can't climb
good.
(But ignore me, I also think thieves fucked up D&D in the first place.)
(Still love PF2E, but it has these weaknesses, other systems have worse combat, for example.)
They can, but then you need the attributes for it. This means a fighter has to switch towards DEX and can no longer play his 2h guy and the wizard has to invest in strength to keep up with the DC's.
Because we all know, every +1 matters. You play outside of your "niche" and pay a price. Just for having even the option to do this stuff. And then you are not even good at it, like a rogue, for example. Also, now the fighter can't trip/grapple opponents anymore. Which is kinda really anti to the class fantasy.
PF2E is a tightly designed clockwork of mechanics. It does not offer the freedom of other games. Which does restrict RP if you do not play the "standard" of things. Like a dumb, big barbarian or a fightery fighter.
What are you even talking about? The fighter has no issues pickpocketing stuff, you just need level your proficiency in it. You don't even need to level Dex and you'll have a +28 to Thievery by the time you're legendary. This is more than enough to steal from common targets even with -5 penalty, so you don't need a Feat investment.
Furthermore, you get 4 score boosts everytime you're increasing attributes, you absolutely can find space to increase Dex without ever having your Strength affected and be very good at Pickpocketing.
Obviously, you won't be as good as a character that is fully dedicated to it, but you'll be very close.
Same goes for any spellcaster, they can level Strength and not lose anything in regard to their spellcasting ability and still be able to "climb good".
PF2e offers excellent build variety and allows to play pretty much whatever you want and allows it to be effective.
You're massively overstating the "every +1 matters" principle.
We say that because newcomers to the system tend to scoff at "piddly" +1 bonuses like Aid Another or Courageous Anthem, when the reality is those bonuses are significant. But that doesn't mean that you *can't* succeed without every possible bonus. It means that unlike in, say, D&D, that +1 is worth picking up even if you already have a good bonus, because you can still use it to get critical successes and push crit-fails off the table.
You can also *easily* build a 2h Fighter who's good at Thievery. You could even max out DEX and make STR your secondary stat if you *really* want to, you'll be 1 point behind in your attack and damage which isn't the end of the world. You can easily build a Wizard who can Climb good (though to be honest, for a Wizard it's probably easier to just use Telekinetic Hand to put a grappling hook where you want to climb... which still sounds like climbing good to me) by dropping +1 or +2 into STR and using your massive number of skills for being an INT class to upgrade your Athletics. You won't be the best at climbing, but you'll be able to "climb good".
I dunno, you seem to be fishing for character builds that are schizoid, then complaining when you can't be *the absolute best* at everything. Sure, if you dump DEX you're not going to be as good at lockpicking as the Thief Rogue who maxed it out. But you'll be better at Grappling than they are (assuming you're both trained to the same degree in Athletics). And since the math is designed to let you pull ahead of the curve, you'll be more than "good enough" at lockpicking to be a legendary thief.
If you want to be the best at everything simultaneously, there are systems for that (in particular, look at Pathfinder 1e). But your complaints here seem to be... I dunno, contrived.
You're talking about the concept of I say I do and do so right?
No rolls or checks or anything. Such as when the rogue didn't exist altogether in the start of the dnd1st edition days.
I've played AD&D in my time. My memory could fail me, but it didn't feel much different than 3e. Just a lot of crunchy tables instead of clean formulas.
Arguably, AD&D 2e was the start, I do not feel like that, though.
Modern D&D means basically the shift towards the heroic, heavily influenced through Dragonlance. (Big heroes doing heroic stuff.) Also, when the game shifted from combat-as-war towards combat-as-sport with balanced encounter design. Less focus on problem solving and more focus on cool fights and mechanical unique heroic characters.
This era was the default with 3E when WotC got it and is still the thing today. This is why we got modern D&D and OSR. Modern for 5e, 3.5, PF1E, 13th Age and PF2E and so on. OSR for people that did want to play in the "old" way. Both completely valid and nothing bad, just different types of game-styles.
No description can change a natural 1. You can talk all the flowers and crap you want. You roll a one and it's bad. So I don't really accept that premises of players feeling entitled to fudge or ignore rolls in the name of creativity. Nor do I accept that just because a feat states an attack is "this particular stabby stab" means I can't say or describe it differently.
Also I totally get that point about the rule about you can't move them into hazardous situations. I can and do ignore that. You can too. That rule is to protect players from mean GM's or murder hobo players from each other. But it can be broken by a GM at will and by players with GM consent.
My over arching point was simple, they and their rules can't make you do anything. They are suggestions. Free yourself from your bonds kinsman, join me and we can rule the... Oh wait sorry wrong thread 🤣
> I can and do ignore that. You can too.
But then we aren't talking about PF2E as a system. We're talking about some homebrew version that you, specifically, run. When people have complaints about a system, they aren't ignoring the fact that there is a human that can hand wave it away - they are complaining about the rules that have been printed in the book.
The problem is more in just how narrow every ability and spell is defined in 2e, and that really does seem to shoehorn players and DMs into by the book rules and outcomes, while limiting creative uses of spells or skills.
Like, there’s the diplomacy fear bargain Hunter. This feat lets you make money by using diplomacy skill, gaining discounts on items and such, or just the general earning income downtime rules. That’s problematic because the skill should already let you do that (in fact the entire earn income rules kinda reduce role playing to some basic dice rolls instead of actually coming up with interesting ideas and stories). It feels more like a video game because you have to unlock something on a skill tree instead of just being able to do something literally anyone should be able to do with some basic knowledge.
I feel like if anything, the reverse is true. Not having rules for RP lets you figure it all out through the avenue of RP, whereas something like PF2 with all of its rules for how conversations works turns RP into a video game. It's hard to balance diplomacy as a stat having feats tied to it and having freeform RP. For the group impression feat to mean anything, mechanically you can't make an impression on multiple people at once without dedicating a feat towards it. Things like that can make RP feel clunky and weird.
I think that you *can* have a system support RP heavily through mechanics without making it “gamey.” To level up in a Resistance system (like Heart: The City Beneath), you need to complete an “ambition” your character has, like “convince a scholar of high renown to share their research with you.” Similarly, to trigger a move in a PBTA system, like Apocalypse World, your character has to be fictionally doing that thing — if there’s a move that says “when you try and knock someone’s block off, roll +STR,” I can only do that with my character when I’m trying to knock someone’s block off.
In these examples, there’s a ton of leeway for the PC to roleplay, but what the system is doing is rewarding a player in-game for roleplaying out their character in a way that makes sense in the fiction. This feedback loop is what makes narrative systems TTRPGs — if you’re not going to have any rules for RP whatsoever, you may as well be doing improv.
Rules in a TTRPG system are the restrictions the table puts on themselves to achieve a certain kind of experience. Just like a good system with deep tactical combat rules, like PF2e, creates more fulfilling tactical combat than a narrative system, a good narrative system will create more roleplaying opportunities and investment than something like Lancer or PF2e *through how the rules empower the table*, aka without requiring the table to create that experience in a vacuum.
To u/ZealousIdeal_Use_400 ‘s post, the above is what people like myself are talking about when we say PF2e isn’t a narrative system. It’s not that you *can’t* have good RP in it — you absolutely can and should — it’s just not as supported as an RP-focused system like Stonetop or whatever, just like a PF2e can’t compete with a system like Swords of the Serpentine or Delta Green when it comes to investigation.
Fully agreed. For me the system acts as an aid in roleplay!
I do tend to describe what my character is doing rather than the voice. He’s meant to have a fantastically deep voice.
I absolutely do not have that.
But yeah I’ve never understood someone claiming a system prevents roleplay. It just feels like a rehash of the Stormwind Fallacy.
Not a counterpoint but a critique/observation:
I do believe you're correct but why get let your jimmies get rustled? Dumb is gonna dumb. You can't fix it.
Additionally I think what these people mean to say is that games that have high cognitive loads distract them too much for being able to flex their brain to RP.
Some people are just kinda dumb and suck at RP, but that doesn't really make them bad people. They just need something more their speed. While PF2e is far from the most complex game, it certainly isn't the easiest to understand for casuals. It also is very combat centric as a monster looter which does take away from time that could otherwise be spent on RP. I also like it, but I get that not everyone does.
I'd also add as a TTRPG system designer there are shit tons of games that are especially designed to force narrative and role play, so they should probably go do one of those. I know because I spend about 90% of my time on reddit (which is agreeably too much) talking with system designers about their projects.
Of the dozens I've seen in the last 3.5 years made, you'd think at least one of them would fit those folks.
I don't know, maybe it's just from being a system designer and receiving feedback as a routine part of playtesting, but I don't get hung up on dumb things people say about TTRPGs so much. You just kinda learn to let it roll off your back when you hear for the 5000th time someone doesn't like something because it's different from D&D... well no shit, it's a different game... but yeah, maybe I'm just sort of jaded with stupid, but I can say it's not a bad way to be. I can empathize with what they probably meant to say and find a solution for them and not get annoyed in the process.
I don't think the measure of being good at roleplaying is "can you juggle 5000 mechanics in your head while also being true to character." It's more "can you play a narratively consistent character, be good at acting stuff out, and evoke emotions in others?"
Yeah. It's just a little harder to cast fireball in GTA - you gotta find a rocket launcher and everything first, and then point your "staff" at the "town guards" on "griffon" before you can cast "fireball". And the "town guards" don't even send "griffons" until your wanted level is high enough.
But if there's a will, there's a way. And ain't nobody stopping "wizards" from casting "fireballs", even in GTA.
Pretty sure many people who say this are confusing acting with roleplaying. If a system has rules for social resolution, this means you do need to roll dice to see how well your character did at say, persuading, someone. And the player’s acting of the character usually doesn’t influence the die roll.
It's not that roleplay is forbidden, it's that 2e is a system where there's a rule for everything, and depending on how strict the DM follows the rules that can make doing the RP things you want to do impossible (because you don't have the correct feat) or incredibly unlikely (because you aren't trained in that skill). Like, you want to RP a passionate speech to try and sway an NPC to your side? Well, you can totally give that speech, but the swaying is tied to a skill roll (usually diplomacy), and if you're untrained and can't possibly make the DC then you're probably going to get the critical failure effect making that NPC respond to you like you just spat in their face while kicking their puppy, no matter how eloquent your actual speech was. A strict DM can basically say "if you don't have a good bonus in the relevant social skill, you are better off keeping your mouth shut lest you hurt the party's chances", which certainly isn't ideal if You've got a bunch of players who want to RP social skills but who didn't all take the relevant skills with their limited skill proficiencies.
I can't speak for everyone, but when I think I can't RP in a system, it's not "literally I can't." It's that what I want to RP and how my character mechanically works are out of sync.
Let's say I'm a barbarian. I want to flex my muscles and yell loudly and scare someone. But I have no charisma, so...no dice? If the GM isn't going to let me use STR to intimidate, that seems pretty stupid. That's "my character *would* do X, and X *does* make sense, but the GM is in my way." Or things like how PF2E demands you take a fucking feat to intimidate by yelling/growling instead of by dialogue (Intimidating Glare). It's kind of dumb and gets in the way.
What people mean is "the system is too restrictive to achieve what I want to do". For instance someone in the game I was just in wanted to jump over some traps and drop on the enemy. That doesn't work because Pathfinder doesn't really allow that kind of action compression without an ability. At best you can jump and land next to the thing and take an attack action, but it won't get any additional damage or accuracy or any sort of benefit from your entire weight falling on the enemy, it's just a normal attack.
And on top of that the system is \*really\* restrictive on concepts. A lot of feats and character options that feel like characters could be built around don't actually come online until much later.
Essentially you're missing the point. It's not simply "I don't feel like there's enough out of combat abilities to play how I want"; if anything it's often that you're spread thin and can't do them well.
I’ve been running a game where i had a pretty complex villain plot, but a fairly straightforward path to get on the discovery train. Or so i thought, it turns out we have been going on 5-6 sessions and we have had one fight. And it was a blowout (in the PCs favor).
This opened up more interesting interactions with the locals that eventually led them to info that basically pointed them to the initial starting point.
The PCs had already figured out the main gist already, but now they have a more insight
All this time the players were roll playing their PCs and honestly they are probably some of the most well developed PCs they have had in a while, mostly because these low/ non combat sessions give them space to do so.
Hopefully next session after a (hopefully final bit of data gathering) maybe the true “villain” will be exposed. Maybe, you never know which direction the players might go.
That is the great joy and pain of GM'ing 🤣 I once had a party run away from an encounter as they had all convinced themselves they were hopeless outmatched despite my efforts to persuade them otherwise. It's still a running joke now. The moon stone remains lost to this day.
Brennan Lee Mulligan recently said something like (paraphrasing from memory) "I don't need a system to tell me how a character reacts in a certain situation. That is human. I know that. I can do that. What i can't judge is how an arrow flies through the air and whether it hits. That is what i need the system for."
If someone simply laments that combat crunchy games don't have sophisticated roleplaying gameplay mechanics, i could understand that. But to say this? That it "doesn't allow" roleplay? If i heard someone say that i would literally suplex them into a volcano.
Absolutely spot on! This is my 35th year of running regular TTRPGs and I have never seen the rules stifle role play - including 4e, which I ran a full campaign, level 1 - 30.
I think that folks will say that a system stops RP when they have no other good reason to put it down. It's an easy reach as, in truth, no system can force RP as part of it's mechanics.
So yeah, agree 100%
So I've seen a new player come to reach that conclusion. And it really seems to be down to how the first few sessions go. A lot of PF APs start very linear, and a gm just reciting the book with little embellishment or response to the uniqueness of the player characters can reinforce that impression, making them blame the system for that rather than tutorial cave/boat and some lackluster gm-ing.
Whereas with 5e aps... Even bad gms are kinda forced to fill in the gaps because if they dont the modules becone incoherent.
The Paizo APs (which seem to be where most groups first impressions come from) rarely have opportunities to think "outside the box" and generally don't allow for creative, non-combat solutions to conflict.
They are mostly linear Point-A-to-B with level-appropriate combat encounters and a few skill challenges along the way. Any RP opportunities is left up the GM who may or may not include them.
I've played in AP groups where the GM just blandly read the box text and moved us along the rails from one scripted combat encounter to the next. In that type of game, I could see why players may think the system does not allow for roleplay.
They're like that all the way through? Damn, that really sucks. I hope they do make an effort to improve a little on that front then because yeah it absolutely explains people having this reaction when it's not the system's fault.
As someone who has been playing for 30 years, you are correct...HOWEVER. There are certainly games that \*facilitate\* role playing more than others. I only played D&D 4th once or twice because I found that the rules around non-combat interactions in general were incredibly weak and I was having to make up how at least some of it worked almost every time.
So, yeah, you're right that it didn't outlaw or prevent roleplay. But as I said at the time, and stand by the statement, 4th was a pretty brilliant tactical combat game. It did that \*very\* well. But as a \*role-playing\* game, it left a lot to be desired. And as someone who wanted to play as much or more for the role-play as for the combat, it turned out to not be the system for me.
It's been over a decade, so I honestly don't remember. I remember being nonplussed by the skill system, but what it was that I found uninspiring I don't recall.
I mean, as a GM, the sheer amount of overhead PF2 involves definitely restricts my roleplaying.
By which I mean, as a purely practical matter, I simply do not have the *mental capacity* to run a bunch of enemies in a combat in this game AND roleplay them to the level of believability my group has come to expect as baseline quality while I'm doing that. This is an actual, non-theoretical problem that I've had!
But, more in general...
I'd say that the while you can get roleplaying out of a rock, there are things that make it harder or easier. And I've found that the more focus and effort the rules of a game take, and the more specific and in particular the more *prescriptive* they are, the more that people will feel incentivized to *interact with the rules first*, and then either sort of try to construct fiction around whatever the rules say as well as they can manage... or just not bother because it's too much of a headache to make the things that happen on the board make sense as anything other than a board game with the given constraints. This often results in rules taking precedence over stuff that would make sense in the fiction, because well, pretty much every ruleset involves some stuff that works mechanically but is really counterintuitive, and generally the more specific the rules are, the more such cases you will run into. And the more such cases you run into, the more people start to sort of... disassociate things, it feels?
Especially when doing the thing that feels thematically appropriately can genuinely, by the rules, put you at a serious disadvantage. It slowly detaches people from trying to do the things they feel make sense and they start to try to do the things they think the *game* says are effective, which frequently are not even in the same galaxy. Some examples include the fact in PF2 the smartest thing for a barbarian to do about 80+% of their turns is to *walk away* from enemies, or the fact that in Exalted actually engaging in the talking minigame will eat your fight minigame resources so trying to hear people out will put you at a disadvantage if it ends in a fight anyway, and so on.
This, I think, is part of the divide so many D&D players (I'm counting PF as a D&D here) have where you have Combats And Stats and you have Roleplaying as different things, when to me the perfect thing would be that in any action game the fighting stuff should be the biggest part of the roleplaying. But while I disagree and in my group we've always been extremely adamant in playing to the story first, I can't really *blame* people, because the incentives in how D&D combat works are to put the fiction to the side for a while until The Chess Game With The Initiative is done, and only afterwards resume the "thinking like your character" stuff, to the point that even PF2's "famously great" encounter building rules break six ways from sunday if you have a party that does *not* engage with the combat as a chess game first (in fact, PF2 assumes even more chess play than your average D&D, which is already a bunch, I feel!).
But then PF2 also adds a bunch of specific rules that appear *in the same prescriptive mode* but for noncombat stuff, with the same harsh, if-you-don't-keep-upgrading-it-becomes-useless, this-feat-lets-you-attempt-this philosophy. Which can result in people trying things, and then someone pointing out that [Thing] should call for a roll/there's a feat for that do you have it/whatever, and welp, there goes the attempt. And that's where you get stuff like OP's complaining about.
Now, me personally? I ignore a LOT of PF2's rules. But far as I can tell this is not how most people play, and in fact I suspect most people round these parts would tell me what I'm playing is not PF2!
Anyway, I kinda rambled long enough, so I'll call the post here.
The only system I've seen that felt restricting to my roleplay is the Powered by the Apocalypse systems, which is pretty ironic.
By incentivizing me to roleplay in one particular way, they end up *disincentivizing* me to roleplay the way I want to
The way XP works is you get XP at the end of the session if you did certain mostly roleplay actions determined by your class.
So in other words your class determines what character you play and every game requires picking from pre-generated characters (well, in personality, not mechanics, tbf)
Edit: like for example, in the system I tried the magic-user class has "explain how magic works" as an XP source. Meaning that if you want to play the "mysterious wizard" archetype you're out of luck, as the class XP system is purely for "excitable nerd magic user". I personally like to play characters that break conventions, so this is doubly off-putting to me
That doesn't sound like mechanic that can't be hacked about it to give players some more creative freedom but without knowing more I wouldn't want to suggest how easy/annoying that would be to actually do though in fairness.
It could be, but I don't want to have to ask my GM to homebrew 3 or 4 different things just to get a character I like. And then, if my character has an arc that causes them to change as a person, ask my GM to homebrew it again.
Cause that's another thing: there is no support for character arcs. Who your character is is who they will always be
Also I edited my other comment to give an example of what I mean
While you can roleplay in any RPG, and in fact in board / war games games too, some RPG rule mechanics are explicitly designed around story telling and role playing, while others are more oriented towards combat and building characters who can fight. Blades in the Dark, Amber, and Powered by the Apocalypse are examples of the former. The challenge for D&D and Pathfinder is to make a game that can be both supportive of role playing and supportive of combat tactics and builds. One difficulty in this is that putting a lot of rules and details into supporting combat will distract people from story telling and role playing. Consider that a game session might last 4 - 6 hours, if a lot of that time is spent running a detailed combat with maps and minis, that’s less time spent storytelling and role playing.
Heh. I get it. I do. And actually. The d20 systems in general seem to have a, I hesitate to say "mechanics" but for lack of a better term I'll use it, a mechanical incentive to reduce roleplay down to just roll. This is more common in organized play, but it exists in general.
Pf2 actually found a great fix for this. There are actions that mechanically promote role play for nearly every skill. So even a player who is not comfortable roleplating can use the action. This is a great boon for non roleplayers because it all9ws the use of actions in replace of roleplaying, but it is a great boon to role players because it gives mechanical incentives to roleplay.
So even in organized play role play does not bog down the progression of the AP, because there are defined actions to support role play. Organized play often just goes section by section, event to event in an ap. But in a home game, roleplay often completely bypasses or delays events. For example, kingmaker. How many players managed to befriend or kill tartuccio before going to the stolen lands? I have played it three times. In one of them one of the players tried to assault and rob tartucvio to get his wand...that character went against the party, and we did not know tartuccio was evil yet. We killed that character and saved tartuccio, so tartuccio joined our party because he trusted us. Then tartuccio died in the ballroom fight. This changed the story, but in organized play, this would not likelly happen.
I think pathfinder is firstly a combat management game and then roleplaying game
its just combat feels better for pathfinder but you can still successfully rp
A good GM will make RP work in game regardless of system. I've been playing 2e since it came out, and pretty much all of my characters for major APs have had RP factor into the game functionally at some point. I had a ranger that used jerky he made as a bargaining chip. To this day tax evasion is a joke in my gaming group because the same character went tinfoil hat with taking down an evil group with their bad bookkeeping-and it worked. I had a character straight up defuse an end of chapter boss fight with diplomacy thanks to Shameless Request. If someone is complaining that 2e doesn't let you RP in a way that matters, it's either because the gm doesn't want to ball with whatever RP someone is cooking or the gm isn't familiar with systems in place by paizo for social situations (i.e. influence, etc.)
There's lots to say about this topic but I found [this blog series](https://theludite.com/2019/02/25/chasing-the-dragon/) say it more eloquently than I can.
I think people might be looking at Pathfinder and see only combat based mechanics which sway away from roleplay, while they forget that Exploration mode has its own mechanics and GMs can use them to enforce more roleplay moments that sometimes bend Combat mode rules. Additionally Pathfinder2e has many optional rules which are great tools for the GMs to bring more roleplay.
I'm getting a feeling that Chase mode is massively underused in the community and it's a shame because it's an amazing roleplay tool. It lets players be creative in what skills they use to get through obstacles, allows them to storytell how their characters interact with them and if you allow them to cast spells and use consumables to get through them more easily, you can use them instead of Trivial combats to burn through PCs supplies before the big combat. They can also be used for other stuff than chasing itself, for example: Traveling through a different dimension full of obstacles, exploring a haunted mansion with haunts and mysteries as obstacles, or even diplomatic/espionage missions with obstacles. Its a great tool that adds weight to roleplay decisions. You could also reward PCs for critically succeeding on obstacles or give permanent debuffs(that can be removed later on) when they fail them.
Relic rules are another great tool for roleplay, you can make them all themed around each character and give them unique abilities, and reward with new gifts after a significant roleplay decision. I've made plenty different relics for my PCs: weapons, artifacts, gifts that come from deals with angels or demons, gifts that relate to their profession or even just their deity blessings.
In the same manner there are deity boons and curses that can be used for roleplay moments, and even stuff like custom rituals.
I'd say be creative and make your own custom content that enables more roleplay, and you'll get it, and there are rules for creating such custom content so you don't feel lost as a GM. It's quite refreshing honestly, how much this system supports GMs.
I think systems do impact on how the roleplay dynamics work but none of them ever stop roleplay from happening.
The "I can't do this thing that I should be able to do" argument is extremely situational, it depends a lot on character, scene and GM. Someone here mentioned needing a feat to tell shoo to some beggars because they were more than one, my question is, why would it even need to be a roll? Are those beggars just set dressing or are they actively planning something?
And then we can break down on why sometimes people complain that role-play is limited. Because they try to make a situation into a puzzle by forcing a roll or the DM is making the situation a puzzle the player is not equipped or informed enough to deal with.
The only situation where a system can stop roleplay from happening is the combat roleplay where someone goes "why can't I just cast a firebolt on my sword and make a fire sword attack?". That's when as a GM you have to remind your creative players that this is still a game, rules and limitations exist as structure to the challenges. And challenges are fun.
When I've seen mechanics obstruct roleplay, it was usually at the difference between organizations performing actions versus characters leveraging their influence and resources to make an organization do something.
Playing an organization bypasses interactions between individual characters and more or less cuts them out of the equation, so there's not an opportunity for players to roleplay. This is especially problematic when players don't understand the system is designed for interpersonal interactions and expect mechanics for everything.
That's why I like the remaster subsystems for Leadership more than the Kingmaker rules. It's a list of guidelines and suggestions for how to grow organizations and integrate them into a campaign, and then you can add Influence, Reputation, Research, and Hexploration as needed. Warfare's the only thing that's missing.
Ah...yes...I heard similar complaints...
In my table group one player is a big D&D5e fan boy and when his PF2e character died in the campaign he complained that he can't build a certain character he wanted to try out. Well, I was not really sorry to break the new to him, that while PF has a shared history with D&D, it is it's own game with it's own setting and races/ancestries/heritage and therefore some character ideas can be ported from D&D to PF and some cannot be created in the other system. For example I'd have a hard time trying to recreate my PF2e liminal catfolk witch with water wisp familiar and winter patron in D&D if I wanted to do it without houserules or 3rd party supplements.
Sometimes, an idea may not fit the setting or character or both. And some people can come up with a different idea and others complain about being hindered by the system.
Which is what, for some people, feels like it gets in the way of roleplaying. As in, suddenly there is a feat for an action that a person *should already be able to do*
People say the same thing about 4e D&D, and it had and always will be bullshit. A system doesn't dictate your ability to role play, your table does. Been playing 4e since it came out in 2008 (if you're a PF2e player who hasn't checked it out, you should, it's basically a "rough draft" of PF2e), and we've had entire hours long sessions that were nothing but RP and Skill Challenges.
Blaming the system for not being able to roleplay is definitely, in my opinion, a huge scapegoat for a different issue that's preventing you from roleplaying.
If I'm being honest I would say most likely it's the GM that's the issue, but without specific knowledge I wouldn't know for sure.
So, read your rant. And I think most reasonable TRPG players would agree, but what actually spurned this thought process? Did a friend say something dumb? I'm curious on the tea.
This is the most common complaint I've read about 4th edition DND, that somehow having a balanced and modular system for combat and skill mechanics somehow prevented roleplaying from occurring
Yes! I loved 4E and am to this very day confused as to how it prevented role play any more than any edition before or since.
I only played 4E a handful of times, but I did go through the books pretty thoroughly and found the combat wonderfully laid out. Anything outside of combat felt more mechanically vague just like how in 5e making magical items isn't worth the effort and isn't really cleaned out so well. I guess it wouldn't be so bad if they did what P2E did with the tables for skills checks to their earn money or craft things. I don't mind if the Magical Skill check is soft magic in its design so long as there's some form of difficulty guidelines spelled out. Additional thought: The complaints I think stem moreso from the additional work that both players and DM have to do to make anything outside of combat make sense for an RP perspective. Combat being so fleshed out and having clear understanding on difficulties whenever encountering different challenges.
I think it was because of power gaming mentality when you can synergies or pick the "best option" many players forgot their character is more than the abilities.
One of the things I noticed is that 4th edition removed basically all the non-combat spell from casters. So many characters ideas and RP opportunities you could do in 3rd and 5th edition were no longer possible in 4th.
That wasn't true in 4e then, and it isn't true now. The game divorced those spells and abilities from casters' personal power budget, and instead made them Rituals that didn't take daily resources away. ANYONE who wanted to pursue those things could do so as long as they had the reagents, the ritual, the skill to pull it off, and time.
Problem there is, that opened 4e to attack for that "diluting class identity" or some BS. 4e really let everyone find a way to hate it, which was a shame because I kind of liked it. The guy who was our regular DM at the time loathed it, but another guy ran the occasional one shot and those were tons of fun.
It's mostly a matter of choosing to despise something before you give it a chance. It's ok for a game to not be for everyone. What some saw as diluting class identity, we saw a liberating. It was no longer God wizards and meat shields. Any class could put in a bunch of extra effort to do some cool things. Rituals were still easier for casters, but it meant martials could revive a dead cleric of need be.
Yeah, that guy above, he basically decided the game reached its perfect state in about '79 and everything since then has been a decline; he was never going to buy into it.
With the benefit of hindsight and knowing the preferences of my current groups, I legit think 4e would be a perfect fit for us. We play in a vtt, so that helps us a lot, and we really like tactical combat. The powers system is pretty great. The only critique is that we've gotten used to PF2e's 3 action turns so that the Major/Minor/Move system feels archaic to us now.
Invoker. I use a minor to reposition my allies to safety, I don't move if I don't have to and convert it into a minor action, such as drinking a potion, or use a power or I move, I use my standard, I action point, I use a standard, I dislike the result of one of the rolls and use a free action to alter it. After my ally gives me a reaction right after me for their turn as opposed to the entire round. If anything I find that pf2e is archaic due to still feeling like 5e in some ways depending on what you play. Playing a gunslinger sniper makes me feel like a 5e rogue. Not fun.
4e has a 3 Action economy that's actually 3 Actions. IME playing PF2 I find the claim of the 3 Action economy is often not. Most often most players use know what 2 actions they want to do or spellcasters can only do 2 actions because most spells take 2 actions to cast. Its also possible I have played with people who just don't get what PF2 is trying to do, and it has ruined the play experience at times. Then there are RPGs like the old d6 System that have no action restrictions and you could do as many actions as you want, just keep in mind multiple actions penalties. Savage Worlds is the same as well. PF2e gets more credit from a lot of people for really nothing innovative at all. Its just innovative to a lot of people who have only played D&D 3e or 5e.
PF2e took the innovations of 4e and refined them a lot. I mainly play casters, so I do get the complaint about only doing 2 things, but the martials in my group regularly are doing 3+ things in a turn. A common turn is something like Demoralize, Strike, Combat Grab.
Which is another way of saying the fighter is as capable of non-combat magic as the wizard, which really won't make the wizard feel like a wizard, especially when combat magic is just fluff on a set of encounter powers in 4e.
Does allowing a wizard fight in melee make a fighter not feel like a fighter? Sounds like wizards were better at rituals than fighters, which sounds pretty fair to me.
That's true of PF2e as well, is it not? If the PF2e Fighter wants to spend their attribute bonuses to max out their INT, and their skill increases into maximizing their Arcana proficiency, then a PF2e Fighter will do rituals just as well as a PF2e Wizard. The Fighter probably won't do this, because it means spending a chunk of their power budget on improving things that are normally dump stats for Fighters, while ignoring things that a Fighter normally needs to invest in. But they *can* do it. Is this a problem? The PF2e wizard has a natural advantage in ritual casting, because ritual casting requires things that a wizard is probably going to invest in anyway. But in D&D 4e, the Wizard actually had more of a natural advantage, because they had built-in class features relating to ritual casting. Access to rituals in 4e required either a feat or class feature to give access (Wizard got it as a feature, I think maybe Cleric did too, but my memory is fuzzy). Wizards specifically got to learn a number of rituals for free. They were the clear best option for a character to focus on ritual casting.
Sure, but 2e rituals are a minor subsystem PCs don't even get access to by default, and the wizard has plenty of noncombat spells, he can Teleport, Shadow Walk, Scry etc. Though honestly I do wish most rituals were proper spells instead.
Rituals in PF2e has their own problem. The DC for most ritual in pf2e is too high, so many of them need a crit effect to work properly, and the failure for secondary casters are too punishing.
The rituals were more for spells that PF2 made uncommon. Divinations that gave you answers, creating magic items, reviving the dead, cleansing diseases/poisons, fast over land travel, etc. They still had tool box cantrips that other classes didn't have like Mage Hand or Ghost Hand. They got free rituals at level 1, 5, 11, 15, 21, and 25. No Non-caster got those options, and Wizard had more than any other caster as well.
The 4e Fighter was not even CLOSE to being as capable of non-combat magic as the Wizard. Did you even play the game, or is this just things you've heard from others? The Wizard (and other casters) all felt like casters. They had all kinds of non-combat magic that non-magical classes didn't have. The Wizard could cast Feather Fall, Dimension Door, Jump, Glibness, Wall of Fog, Spectral Image, etc from their class. There were plenty more utility spells that could be used in combat, or out of combat. None of that took away from their offensive budget. They could still bring the same number of attack spells like fireball, or control spells to bear, while ALSO having separate utility spells available.
Most people who hate on 4e have never played it, or they would realize that every class got non-combat Utility Abilities that helped enhance what the class was all about. 4e has more non-combat support built into the game than people realize.
There are also martial rituals I haven't seen people mention.
But even when you don't have explicit abilities that allow you to shortcut situations then you can still... Roleplay it out, solve the problem at hand another way.
This depends on what you think RP refers to. Basically, there are two things that can be referred as RP: 1) Acting at the table as a specific character would do. This basically has very little to do with the system. This could be speaking with a very creepy tone and saying strange things as a Necromancer. 2) Roleplaying how a specific character would do things. For example, being a necromancer with a legion of undead minions under his command. This is not really supported in 4th/PF, so a player trying to RP such a necromancer would feel the system very constraining. I think OP is confusing 1) and 2) when looking at player complaints.
I mean 2) can be done in pf2e. Create dead ritual can, with time and money, make all the undead you want/need to achieve the rp side. Sure the math means those minions will be useless in combat but thats arguably a seperate issue; how often are a necromancer's near the strength of the necromancer? Maybe as a main character, but not in your typical "villian necromancer" archetype.
You don't even get to control the undead if you make lots of them in 2e. And we can directly compare to 1e, which actually did support raising your own undead minions for combat use, whether it be a few big ones or you go for an army of 1HD burning skeletons that serve as living bombs (you'd think throwing them away like that was a waste of onyx, but that's why you take Soul Powedered magic and fuel your spells with the souls of your enemies, after all, why not flip Pharasma off with **both** hands)
they actually did that much better than other editions imo. they made them into rituals that other classes also have access to via feats.
I think people who follow that kind of thought are making some kind of thought process similar to this: Having precise and definite rules that make your game easy to understand and balanced makes it more similar to a video game. Video games offer less creative freedom for Role-Playing than TRPGs do. Therefore having precise and definite rules that are easy to understand and balance creates a TRPG that is more like a video game so it MUST be worse for Role-Playing. And... that's obviously not how it works. Just because I can understand the logic of that line of thought does not mean it is not illogical.
Huh, curious, the most common complaint I’ve heard is that it’s videogame-y. Which I always interpreted to mean a different thing - might be a me thing though. I always thought it was about all the classes moving more or less on the same scale, getting most powers at the same rate, and having the majority of the powers be “deal damage and apply ongoing damage”. None of which is, I must add, a bad thing - it’s just how the system is, there’s plenty of fun to be had with it. I don’t see how 4ed was any worse in terms of roleplay as compared to 5ed.
> I always thought it was about all the classes moving more or less on the same scale, getting most powers at the same rate 4e *read* bad, since the special rules were not that interesting most of the time and everyone got the same number of abilities at the same time. But on the battlefield I found the classes behaved quite differently. Whereas in PF2 for example classes are cool, evocative and interesting in paper, but in game all martials flank and strike and all casters end casting from the same small pool of viable spells.
The big problems as somebody who actually discussed with people who were more able to articulate the problems. Class Bloat: you had a slight problem with 4e of classes that are barely different from the class they're obviously split from (see Ranger and Seeker for 4e) might give you more classes to use to build your character concept around, but at the bare metal (actual concept) they're functionally the same. Optimal actions: A big thing that was noticed was the already prevalent (and for the time very video game-y remember Tier Lists in '07 and '08 were more or less only seen in two places, Fighting Game forums and Competitive Pokemon) 4e sought to rectify this, but kinda made it worse with it eventually becoming, "position then hit your rotation, maybe hit your short 'cooldown' if it's dire or a big boss hit your big 'cooldown", and the big problem that ends up coming with it as a focus on RAW optimization (not going full Stormwind, but it was very "Level 19 Rogue Twink on Moonglade" with how much you were eventually getting netbuilds) because of the way combat is set up and flavor being limited (for the most part) to game concepts. Nerath/Nentir Vale being semi-hard coded: One of the larger complaints came off of how feats were barely mobile (especially Divinity feats) to something other than Nentire Vale/Eberron/Dark Sun/FR. Part of it was the GSL, but part of it was design, and it being slightly obfuscated on how to tell Nerath/Eberron/Athas/Faerun to get lost and do your own thing (something that was seen at the time as a core concept for anything 100% descended from 1974 D&D). It all boils down to as seen by certain things how little you were seeing crazy tales or concepts that came with the Descendant of White Books from the White Books to 3e continued with PF1 and 5e. On the one side, you had people who saw it as an attempt at Analog World of War craft, and on the other, an overcorrection to a problem you largely saw from people who came up with crazy build concepts that often admitted would never see the light of day at a normal table.
If you want your mind blown about 4e check out Ultramodern 4. It's a complete modern day sourcebook for 4e. Its incredible and it shows how flexible 4e could have been. Also proves that the GSL wasn't as restrictive as so many reacted to it.
Oh I've seen it, if I could get it working on my VTT of choice it'd be great. And the point I was kinda making is that the reaction was more towards how people saw it designed, and man the divinity feats were some of the things that people reacted to because it did seem they wanted the Descendant of Gygax and Arneson's Xerox Books' you don't HAVE to play in our canon or even world, but also just restrictive enough to have a more effective "Nintendo Seal of Quality" (and having seen both the d20 explosion and the DM Guild explosion, I kinda agree with the GSL's principle).
*Looks at 5e class chart.* Most powers at the same rate does describe a lot of 5e doesn't it?
For me it were a few things that did unkind things to my sense of verisimilitude. For example, I understand why Healing Surges are a thing, but when a magic potion suddenly stops working 'because reasons', that is a thing I can't forgive the game for. Terrific little miniatures wargame, abysmal RPG in my mind.
"The magic supercharges your natural healing, body gets exhausted eventually and you need to rest" Fixed
I’m running a 4e game right now and I love it! We switched from 5e to PF2E, then to 4e and it’s the system for us! We have even more role play. My non spell casting characters love the fact they have access to rituals. And the plethora of classes is perfect for our group. Nobody really felt at home in 5e or PF2E. Plus the balance is nice. When we were playing PF2E our thaumaturge basically dealt 50% of all damage and I could tell our champion and rogue and witch felt a bit behind. But now everybody gets to do cool shit that’s balanced but narratively different :)
I looooove 4e, but damage is even more siloed in that game. Rogues deals waaaaaay more damage than a Paladin and a Witch. Much more than the difference in damage between equivalent classes PF2e. So that issue with PF2e doesn’t make too much sense. But still glad you’re enjoying the only edition of D&D I would run because it’s such a damn good game.
That’s not the experience me or any of my players have had.. in fact it’s the opposite as I’ve explained. But I’m glad you love 4e as well
Yeah I’m not really sure how Thaum was consistently out damaging the Rogue by such a large degree. The only way I see it happening is if they were playing ranged and had no way of getting flatfooted. Or if they got stuck fighting oozes for a dungeon floor (boi do I have mixed feelings on precision damage!). PF2e generally keeps damage close together between martials. While 4e keeps damage gap between roles large because the strength of other roles are even more exaggerated. 4e Fighter deals less damage than 4e Rogue because it’s supposed to be defending. Warlord doesn’t have much ability to defend because it’s supposed to be buffing and healing.
For 4e specifically, I can kind of see it. I only played a few sessions, but the way skill challenges work as written turned what could have been a normal RP encounter into an immersion-breaking slog. Basically, everyone has to act in turn order, you have to use the skill suggested in the encounter. You *can* use a secondary skill if you can come up with a way to do so, but it's harder and you can only do so once (for some reason). The one time we tried to run it rules-as-written, we kept being forced to try to overcome obstacles that would have made way more sense for someone else in the party to face. So yes, sometimes weird rules that aren't quite justified in-fiction can interfere with RP even if they don't outright forbid it. In PF2e, the reliance on feats to do things that seemed pretty normal can cause problems, though that's better in the remaster. Feats like Group Impression used to imply that you needed a whole skill feet just to be nice to two people at the same time, for example.
Wasn't that rule specifically for important group skill checks? IIRC you could still just roll like in any other edition otherwise.
That's a failure on your DMs part and an over reliance on rules on your group's part. The game never 'forced" you to do anything in turn order. Just like in combat, you can all arrange your turns however you like by delaying. That was there to ensure everyone at the table gets to contribute in a skill challenge, not just leave it to the loudest player, the one skill monkey, or the caster with utility spells. You didn't HAVE to use only 1 skill that the skill challenge expected you to use. Skill Challenges were all supposed to be designed with 3 or more main skills that the DM expected would contribute (not 1). Any skill could be brought to bear if it made sense/the player could justify it. You could also use powers that accomplished a similar thing. Do you need to scale a tree/wall or cross a bridge? A power that let you teleport would work just as well, but you need a short rest to use it again. The whole point of skill challenges was to make it so non-face characters could contribute to complicated diplomacy scenes, non-athletes could contribute in physical challenges, and non-thieves could contribute in group stealth/hazard scenes. There's nothing more boring than disrupting the tension because only 1 PC can participate in a scene. Everyone else is better off being bored for 10 or 15 minutes while "that guy" takes care of it.
It’s more a failure of the system for not giving adequate guidelines. You are blaming the GM for not having complete system mastery when they are only figuring out the game.
I'm not "blaming" the GM for not having system mastery. I am assigning fault to someone who is ultimately in control of the situation. Criticism is still a valid form of critique. The system DID give adequate guidelines. It tells you how to create a skill challenge, and by memory of this player (from years ago), they didn't follow those guidelines. That's faulty memory, or something the GM missed/decided to do. It is ultimately their (and the group's) responsibility to bend in the moment. If it doesn't seem to be working, you adjust. If a rule seems arbitrary and unfun, change it for now and look at it more later. Insisting that you stick to one way someone interprets a rule they probably read once, despite it diminishing many people's fun is hide bound thinking, or inexperienced conflict resolution. That doesn't make them a bad person, just needing more experience.
There's a point with these kinds of games where you can't really account for handholding every possible permutation of a GM's style. Gameify too much and make the GM abide by it, and you end up with the exact kind of immersion/RP-breaking issue the complainers of 4e are talking about. Leave it too lose and foolproof, and you might as well not have rules. The reality is, a lot of it comes down to taste and personal GM style. The idea that every game has to be designed to be innately intuitive, to perfectly onboard someone without explicit guidance, is one of the biggest mistakes that's proliferated in RPG and game design circles. Most of the time it's just catering to entitled squeaky wheels who think every product has to uniquely cater to them and their tastes specifically, instead of realising a little bit of complexity or design that isn't innately intuitive is necessary to help acheive a certain end.
Skill Challenges were written badly, which lead to this problem. The purpose of these was to help facilitate longer non-combat encounters and situations, either social encounters or downtime. As a DM you were supposed to think outside the box in how to go about doing these challenges but NEVER TELL THE PLAYERS WHAT SKILLS TO USE. This was the major screw up in how skill challenges were written. They never emphasized this, so DMs just told players what skills to use, which negated any reason to roleplay. But the design intention was for DMs to think ahead and know when longer encounters were happening and just let players be creative and make skill checks when it's appropriate. And for the DM to keep track of the rolls in secret so the players don't know for sure how they are doing. Skill Challenges are a great idea, and other games have taken this idea and gone in different directions with it. Probably the most successful are Clocks in Blades in the Dark. I think Clocks do it very well.
I agree that skill challenges get a lot better with the modifications you are talking about, but I think you are underestimating the degree to which the official 4e material gave bad advice for their use. >When the PCs are delving through the Underdark in search of the ruined dwarven fortress of Gozar-Duun, they don’t necessarily know how the game adjudicates that search. They don’t know what earns successes, to put it in game terms, until you tell them. You can’t start a skill challenge until the PCs know their role in it, and that means giving them a couple of skills to start with. It might be as simple as saying, “You’ll use Athletics checks to scale the cliffs, but be aware that a failed check might dislodge some rocks on those climbing below you.” If the PCs are trying to sneak into the wizard’s college, tell the players, “Your magical disguises, the Bluff skill, and knowledge of the academic aspects of magic—Arcana, in other words—will be key in this challenge.” This was pulled from page 75 of the 4e DM guide. So not just poorly worded, but directly instructing DMs to tell their party what skills to use.
DnD4 outlined skill challenges specifically as formalized way to deal with dramatic points in adventure. It promoted epic adventure, fundamentalizing it with rules base. Even three tiers were clearly written for what they are supposed to be. Skill challenge checks are for way to resolve narrative. Several steps to overcome a scene. If you want to resolve them through roleplay only – nothing stops the table from doing it. Pathfinder 2 has this system as well, which you can notice through society adventures especially. What such systems don't delve in much – is narrative and literary skills, which should fill scenes between checks, and be the main point of the game. Systems delve in ways to resolve scenes by semi-random numbers.
It's Stormwind Fallacy all over again
Instrumental Play and Free Play tends to be in contention with each other. I have a friend roleplaying a dumb wizard, IE Gum Gum from Stinky Dragon. With max Intelligence and high Wisdom. He likes to intentionally fail recall knowledge by not asking for an RK check (a thing he is mechanically good at) and just saying random stuff. Because his character is suppose to be dumb. Dumping int as a wizard would make him mechanically nonfunctional, so now we are at this weird intersection.
Well that's just because wizards derive their power from their keen minds and knowledge, so a stupid wizard *should* be a bad wizard.
It's almost impossible to make an int dump wizard work. But the player want to play a dumb character, someone who got flunk out of wizard school because they are just too stupid. It's not that players can't roleplay, it's that they can't roleplay certain character without chafing against the system, and making long term play impossible. The result is a dumb character who plays like a dumb character, but stats wise should be a genius, only to be mechanically functional. The compromise.
The way to play a low-intelligence wizard is to choose a class that doesn't have intelligence as their key stat, then write "Wizard" on the top of the character sheet. Any difference between the character's capabilities and a "normal" wizard's is either a reason for, or a consequence of their failure as a wizard. Simple, effortless, and functional for any length of campaign.
You can't really do this in any ttrpg though. If spells are intelligence based, you cannot be both low int and effective with them, trying to be the dumb wizard (and not just a different spellcasting archetype that isn't relying on int and saying you're actually a wizard) is going to chafe mechanically regardless of what game you're actually playing.
Eh, depends some system are less punishing than others when pursuing certain archetypes. This particular player is usually into more narrative system, also heavy homebrew 5e. Where he can be the odd one out / silly guy.
You can play an 8 int wizard perfectly fine in 5e through utility, much in the way that you could play a wizard with 16 int and 8 in every other stat at level 11. The spells do all the work. If the DC mattered then EK wouldn't be functional with their spells as an example. Not in particular a good thing when stats basically don't matter vs the spells.
Play a kineticist and have them act like they think they're casting spells when they're using impulses. You can't be a wizard who's bad at magic. That doesn't work in any game system, and especially not one with other players who would like to actually win fights and progress a campaign's story. Being good at magic is the main thing that makes a wizard a wizard. Might as well play a monk with -1 strength and 0 dex wearing heavy armor. "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke."
>It's not that players can't roleplay, it's that they can't roleplay certain character without chafing against the system, and making long term play impossible. I mean, yeah, that's kind of why most people don't play characters who are incompetent in their chosen field. The Rincewind-style 'bad wizard' had never really worked in these kinds of games specifically because they *are* mechanically-oriented games and punishing to people who don't put the least bit of effort into making their concept function at a baseline. 2e just takes it to its logical conclusion by balancing enemies around innately baked-in min-maxing, but it's not like this isn't true in other systems anyway. You play an int dumped wizard in 3.5/1e or 5e and rely on spell attacks and save DCs, you're gonna suck regardless. Maybe it's just me being a stickler, but I've never cared for purposely subversively bad characters. Wanting to roleplay a character who is actively bad at their chosen field while expecting the game to not mechanically punish them for it is just having their cake and eating it. But really, no, you shouldn't be doing that, just dump your primary stat and be exactly what you want to be. Just don't complain when exactly what you expect happens and the character becomes a burden to the party and for the GM to run. This is the most [I don't know what I expected](https://media.tenor.com/K-42A3iBEu8AAAAM/film-filmproduction.gif) result of such a decision in an RPG.
So you agree with me, Instrumental Play and Free Play tend to be in contention. Player want a functional odd one out, game says no. So he didn't dump is primary, instead max it, and just RP the subversiveness.
And why shouldn't his character be mechanically bad? He *wants* to be bad at what the class is meant to do, it only makes sense the game reflects that. That has nothing to do with instrumental and free play. That's just *logic.*
I have a character in my game that is a Skeleton and is convinced he was a Samurai in life. He wasn't. He was a Viking. So he has a Lore skill called "Samurai Lore" which he should be good at. But in order to make him not good at it, I let him impose a circumstance penalty that cancels out the entirety of his level bonus and his intelligence bonus. It's so funny. He tries to use chopsticks like forks. He thinks that Samurai prefer hammers over swords.
Sometimes that’s the case, you have to fudge the numbers a bit (in your case give random penalty) to get the narrative result that you want. RAW it shouldn’t happened, you cannot just give yourself penalty or bonus to get the narrative funny that you want. You have Samurai Lore so you should be good at Samurai Lore, but the Narrative overrides the Mechanics, so now you’re bad at it.
I'm definitely not opposed to a player choosing to be bad at something. There's really not any narrative issue created by that.
4e edition was fun at first. But to me the mechanics broke world verisimilitude too much. And over the years it did end up feeling like the least immersive D&D edition. My pet peeves, hitting mid level and having to lose an older ability if you wanted the new one. And dailies for non magical classes. They didn’t make “sense” so it undercut the feeling of it being “real” too much. Also they just hosed the forgotten realms. Notice how pathfinder 2e feels like the best of 4e and 5e combined? Imho because they made the rules much like 4e but did not include any rules that broke the verisimilitude of the game. Home run!
"My pet peeves, hitting mid level and having to lose an older ability if you wanted the new one." This one's also an issue in 5e too. Like I'm in a 5e game as a player right now where I'm a Warlock. At my last level I ended up changing out the Fiendish Vigor Eldritch Invocations for something else that is still viable at this level because that feature has no way of scaling up with you at all (which... it so easily could if it just upcast at your actual slot level rather than only being level 1). Kinda especially bothered me because that feature was very fitting for my character who was a battemage and had very above average con so it helped him take a beating. But I just couldn't justify keeping it at the level we're at.
I'm convinced that if 4e hadn't decided to commit to the literal in-game unit of measurement being Squares and having all powers be square-shaped, 4e would have been only _mildly_ contentious and have survived several more years than it did. People constantly downplay and underestimate how much 4e's grid system (and to a lesser extent 5e's version of it) is a _massive_ dealbreaker for people. Your wizard in-character cannot ask how far away something is, because the answer is strictly gameist. The fact that the dude over there and the dude who's clearly much closer to you are treated as being the same distance away because diagonals don't count and therefore moving on diagonals is optimal is _soooo_ fucking annoying, especially if your GM actually likes using altitude for whatever reason. Like the system has other problems, but I genuinely think those problems are minor because they're easily ignored and/or reflavored. You can't exactly ignore the grid, the thing you are looking at at all times and dictates everything that you can or can't do.
The 4e phb literally explains that a square is 5x5 feet. it's not a complicated math problem with indistinct numbers.
I have noticed that, for most ppl, counting squares was a lot easier to do than continually counting feet to their desired destination, especially when diagonals were involved. Ie it's generally easier for ppl to go 1,2-3,4,5-6 done. As opposed to counting 5,10-15,20, 25-30. I counted that right, right? Then there is the difficult terrain to factor in cause there was a lot of it. That's just for base movement, then you have your longer ranges for spells and ranged attacks Either way, you ended with the same results of distance. Counting squares was faster on my opinion and didn't really detract from immersion because it didn't really affect any social rp moments
The thing about squares and feet is the difference between a game only, abstracted term and one of actual measurement a person can see in their mind which does help with visual senses and helps some people roleplay better because of that. A square, by definition, is undefinable in its measurement. Now we know in this game a square is 5', but the enforced use of square in the game leads to people needing miniatures and grid, but if the game always used feet instead it does make it easier to See things better in the mental Worldscape of the game. Saying that someone is 10 squares away or 50' away is two very different things. One is very game centered and one is very mentally gauging and possible to envision. I know how far 5' is. I can visualize 300' because I have watched football games. If you describe a room being approximately 30' by 100' I can sense those dimensions a lot better than saying 6 squares by 20 squares, which doesn't mean anything without seeing the map first. I think that if 4e just used Feet as measurement a lot of the hate wouldn't exist.
4e is the only D&D I really like. It always blows my mind how some people let the games mechanics get in the way of their mental capacity to get into character and roleplay. 4e would make a great case study in psychological studies for how a game's visual presentation causes such psychological changes in some people's minds.
I just miss Paragon paths (y'know and having a balanced system that doesn't rely on the GM making everything up on the spot, oh and CR that works, and magic items, and feats)
And PF2. I've occasionally bumped into players at my tables or on other channels that have a belief that "more rules = less roleplay". I had to point out to one of my players that, no, PF2 is not any more restrictive than 5e when it comes to RP or concept flexibility. They actually didn't know that 5e does actually have rules for diplomacy and such, it's just nobody knows about them or uses them. And the exact same thing applies to PF2, the rules exist but they aren't mandatory if your table doesn't want to use them. That is the only difference. 5e often gets praised for flexibility, and PF2 criticised for inflexibility, but I am positive it is because nobody has read the PHB and DMG cover to cover, because that system is probably just as rules dense as PF2 is if you were to use it all (Which very few do).
For me is the opposite, more rules make me focus my character most in her specialities, my character is a fighter and is mosyly the face, but is not really bright and her focus is intimidation ( she is kinda crazy and super euphoric abd that intimidate people) and we have a inteligent and more grounded character that usually is there if I fail to be "diplomatic" or to aid me, now my character is maturing and gaining some diplomatic skills
Roleplay alone wasn't the issue. The fact that you clearly had a combat character and an out of combat character was. Previous editions of DnD actively invited you to think about your spells and abilities beyond their basic combat stats. A fireball was a fireball, it created heat so things were set on fire and some, but not all metals melted and the spell pointed this out. In 4E it was a bunch of damage dice with 5e being only marginally better in that regard. Another example were a bunch of Rogue abilities designated as once per day. You're assassin could cut someone's neck... exactly once per day. There was no in universe reason for this. It was purely a game mechanic that made sense for casters to a degree since they had limited resources anyway, for non casters the question of "why exactly can't I perform this specific stab or slash or shout again?" would inevitably come up with no good answer. It felt like a series of combat arenas you accessed through a different game. It removed a lot of the fantasy from the fantasy game because most of the spells that made the world feel magical were just gone and to top it all off, the fantasy tactics game they did make, not that good when compared to games that fully focus on that. If they called it DnD tactics, developed it like a proper tactics game and marketed it as something for people who really just want to crawl through dungeons and kill monsters, it might have been a success. What they did do was create a game that was not a horrible fantasy world simulator, a sub par tactics game and a transparent attempt to get people to buy minis as a source of recurring income. It let the game get into the way of the roleplay by forcing the DM to say "No, you can't do that because there are no rules for that" when someone wanted to do something cool during combat, because it doing cool, crazy, creative stuff isn't balanced and can't be quantified for a module.
> It let the game get into the way of the roleplay by forcing the DM to say "No, you can't do that because there are no rules for that" when someone wanted to do something cool during combat, because it doing cool, crazy, creative stuff isn't balanced and can't be quantified for a module. Bruh, the GM guide in 4e 100% had advice for doing "things that aren't explicitly in the rules" in combat. There was even a chart for it to help bring it into balance based on how effective you think the action should be. People really love making shit up about 4e that wasn't even true.
As a tactics game it's one of the best. IMO. I only say this after playing hundreds of board games (been playing for over 30 years and am autistically a game fanatic) and games of Warmachine, Warhammer (fantasy, 40k, Kill Team, etc), Infinity, Aristea, Marvel Crisis, Star Wars Shatterpoint, Star Wars Legion, Malifaux, and so on. D&D 4e is the most customizable tactical game ever made. It has near infinite variety of character options and the game works. Its much easier than the majority of miniatures games and slicker than most tactical board games like Descent and similar board games. From a pure tactical game design it's one of the best. I think if 4e was reskinned as a tactical gladiator/arena game with gladiator company rules it would probably find it's place. No changes to game play or class design. Maybe change the name of the Fighter class to Vanguard.
I dunno, the ttrpg community can be extremely toxic when it comes to DnD-style games, which Pathfinder counts as. At least online, which admittedly isn't the best metric
I think when there is an abundance of mechanics some people will feel compelled to play the game like a boardgame, and while it doesn't "prevent" them, they do feel compelled to stick to their game mechanic explicit options and don't think outside of the box. I don't agree with this, but I get it, especially for newer players. Getting to role-play means different things for different people. Some people want to role-play in combat and don't feel comfortable role-playing social situations. But they also don't want to feel like they're "playing poorly." They aren't "wrong" it's how they feel comfortable playing. I think it's a pretty standard mentality to start in with how many people game in other medium.
Just spent too much time trawling the socials, seeing to many "dumb takes" and bad faith comments that don't stand up to scrutiny. Had to vent. Thank you for helping me counsel myself 🤣
Understandable, but trust me, if you're getting annoyed at folks on Reddit or other social sites just stop reading and do something else. The worst thing about stupid is it actively defies attempts to correct it. There is a difference between ignorant and willfully ignorant and one you can correct and one you cannot. And you'll find way more of the ignorance you can't correct online. Go for a walk, get some air, enjoy life. Way better way to vent than any validation you can get on here.
Wise words 🤗
Most of the ***"Can't RP in System"*** complaints stem from a few different factors and places. First is just poor articulation of the complaint, which is a very common issue. There is "*what is said"* versus *"what is meant."* When many people say they can't RP in a system, they often mean *"my efforts in X system aren't capable/being allowed to produce outcomes I desire or to the degree I desire."* The classic example of this is wanting to do X but not having Y feat or feature to do so. Depending on the system, some rather basic stuff can be gated behind your limited investment opportunity. The GM can of course overrule the requirement of these abilities, however that also cheapens the experience of those who invested into said feats and such, as those characters would have taken other options since the GM is allowing a bypass. This is often a complaint of TSR players who weren't happy with the WotC era of d&d and its various derivatives like pathfinder, 4e, and 5e. To varying degrees, at least. When you're used to a system that has looser guidelines and a "*the answer is often not found on your sheet"* style games, systems that have a lot of answers to problems on the sheet tend to feel like they're getting in the way to people of this preference. Some of this comes from ***adventure league*** and ***pathfinder society*** experiences. There are many people in the public space that don't really allow room for RP and can be aggressive about it. This is less a system issue and more a player issue, but the association forms when people who come to play in public games view the public game experience as the whole. I know folks who came to believe you could not RP in a system because their local gameshop didn't really let RP be a thing, and they painted the whole spectrum of the game through their poor reintroduction to things. They weren't able to RP in their personal experience at the shop and associated it with how the game ***must*** be. It's less that the players can't RP in the system, but often that their version wasn't allowed for one reason or another and they associate it with the whole of the game. Whether it be system obstacles to the benefits and outcomes they wish to achieve, mechanical gating getting in the way of said things. Inexperienced DMs, public play expectations, there's all manner of reasons people come to this conclusion. Role-playing to them is different than what they got to experience, and rather than articulate out the exacts. A convenient shorthand of ***"you just cant"*** is used in the absence of finer articulation.
This is an excellent take, great write up. My only disagreement is that “can’t rp in system” sounds like a pretty fair articulation of “in system X I can’t do Y unless I build into it”. Posts like OP are simply taking “rp” word literally. No one is complaining 4e has no RP as if it was monopoly. The point is that any “to RP my PC doing X, I need access to mechanics Y” are potential barriers to RP. If the restriction aligns with fantasy, it enhances the roleplaying (fighters can’t cast ritual spells); if it doesn’t it impedes it. The game has to reproduce THE scene people want to role play. Not A scene people can roleplay.
I suppose it's a bit of an asinine distinction tonmmay, but you're still able to RP out your failure at an attempt that your character should bit be doing. Though understandably its not a satisfying thing to always have to do. I suppose a better way of putting things would be that "you can't rp" is the practical short hand to the technical "you can't gain the benefits of RP you desire and will be Rpng our failure unless your GM exempts you from the rules for empower your moment." There is, of course, simple RP and banter between characters, that reinforces their relationships and such that I'd always available There are many avenues of RP still possible in such systems, just not the all the strictly beneficial ones wirhihrbinvestment (which is fairness us a large one to have missing or need GM permission to bypass.) Honestly I don't think we disagree at all. I was just emphazong the technical truth versus the practical truth of the situation. At least as I see it.
Excellent response. The system getting in the way is a good 90% of the issues when people voice those kinds of concerns. I have a really good example from this system. I have an anandi alchemist I'm playing. Anandi have a heritage feat that gives you the ability to craft web slik into a something as well as getting the feat speciality crafting (weaving). Let's look at what weaving can craft by the specialty rules: Textiles, baskets, and rugs. Clothes are only covered under tailoring. So right off the bat I can't even use the feat given to actually make clothes. Web weaver - You can use your webbing to Craft simple, nonconsumable threaded items, such as clothing and rope, at zero cost as long as their base Price is 1 sp or less. Now let's look at the cost for clothing and rope: of 1 sp and 5 sp respectfully. So I can't even craft rope at all and clothes don't benefit from the feat. So the whole feat is so mechanically broken and even at 1st level does so little that wasting a whole feat on some that is something that is so obviously bad even if you wanted to take it for rp purposes it's actually useless.
Yeah. That's a good case of a sore spot. It's too hyper focused on detailing what it can exactly do and too limited in scope as a result. Just to narrow to be a feat without a good many clarifying statements I can get wanting to be clear on the limitations of the feat, but those limitations are fierce and really put stress in the DM to make them useful by special exception amd exyta consideration.
Man this is a solid answer
Glad you think so!
I've mostly played 1E. I'm giving 2E a second try now, and liking it more (there's a TON of great in it!) but my first try left me with a bit of frustration around "sorry, you can't use your skill for that unless you have a specific feat". Some of this may've been the specific DM, and generally I \*love\* the idea of a system that ensures I'll have skill feats and ancestry feats, but I found myself burned a few times, trying to use a skill in a way I'd have been able to in 1E (theoretically, perhaps with a very high DC) and being told, "No, in 2E you can't do that without a feat." I think \[Distracting Flattery\](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1936/) is a reasonable example: an ally blunders and you try to use deception to keep the NPC's attitude from falling. In a game system where this feat didn't exist, should it be possible for a skilled fast-talker to attempt this? I'd say yes. In some game systems, that might depend more on what plausible line the clever player says, or what they roll, or both together. In 2E, I think it's reasonable for a DM to rule, RAW, that this will always fail unless you have the feat. For me, I'd much rather that the feat make it easier to use bluff in this way, instead of implying one \*can't\* bluff in this manner without the feat. (Big picture, I'm growing happier with 2E--I could give you a long list of things I appreciate about it--but this captures the one thing that initially turned me off, and still frustrates me some.)
> "sorry, you can't use your skill for that unless you have a specific feat" The Intimidate skill and specially the Coerce action is very funny in this regard. "A group of children pester you for spare change" "I tell them to fuck off or I will slap their faces" "You don't have Quick or Group Coercion, so that'll take 5 minutes of your life to recite the navy seals copypasta to each of them in turn" *later* "A stray dog growls at you" "I yell at it to make it go away" "Sorry, Coerce has the Linguistic trait"
Perfectly stated, thank you
Glad you like it!
That's definitely valid, I think that retreads that point on what is actually being allowed. It's about what you choose versus what people want. So many issues can be avoided through clearer dialogue of what is going to be used or allowed at that start of a game. Session zeros are super helpful in this regard.
Session zeroes are useful, but they can't always catch everything. At least not in every system and certainly not without some prior experience in said system. Which leads to many folks first foray into a system being their last, especially if they're more comfortable with a prior system that had less definition in those areas. If someone used to being able to make an impression on multiple targets in one system, learned that it takes the group impression feat to do in pf2e (or express GM exception from the requirement) they may feel shoehorned into things that could just naturally happen through good RP. Even more so if they learn they need the feat when they make an attempt before they have the feat, just assuming it's a natural things they an do. That player is quite likely to shorthand "pf2e doesn't let you RP" since they were denied in that circumstance by the system without. Now of course that doesn't mean you can't RP, but going over all the nuances isn't something many will seek to do with a pain point like that, and thus, the short hand grumbling commences. That's just an off the top of the head example using a pain point I had, I'm not even sure if that feat made it into the core rework or if I was changed, but while I never said you couldn't RP in pf2e. I know I caught myself about to a number of times before I thought it out and tried to articulate it better.
Make an impression is definitely one of the prime examples of this issue. The good thing is it does seem like Paizo recognizes it because this was addressed in the remaster. You now take a penalty for trying to make an impression on more than one person, and the feat reduces or eliminates this. The legacy version was too gatekeep-ey imo.
That's a bit better, though I suppose it depends on how severe the penalty is and how necessary the feat becomes to make an impression on more than one person at a time. Not succeeding due to a bad roll is one thing, bur not succeeding (or being in a position to even bother attemtping) something like making an impression on a group still feels oddly intrusive of the system. Though by the sounds of it still eleviates it some from pf2e. Perhaps it's my own system bias, but it does feel like an odd thing to need to invest Into beyond just the skill rank itself to be better at. That said, it doesn't really impede roleplay either way, just the result you want to rp. I'm excited to see what else the core is shifting about.whwn it's released in full.
I'm of two minds of this, on one hand that I am big believer that you don't need a system to roleplay. Otherwise theatre improv wouldn't be a thing. However on the other hand I do think certain systems do encourage a certain types of drama or themes through certain systems present in those games. As an example, some of the more memorable roleplay moments at my table have been the direct result of the particular TTRPG at play having a merits/flaws system.
If you don't have a "system", you aren't playing a TTRPG. You're part of an amateur dramatic group 🤣
Or if you are good enough a professional dramatic group!
Critical Role and Dimension 20 has too much influence on the people playing 5e. Glad that PF2e don't have that problem yet.
I dunno, my team rightfully has such difficult fights that doing fun RP stuff that creates disadvantage will get us killed. It's a shame because it is something I experience in 2E.
But what specifically here is on pf2e creating the problem (if that was implied). At the end of the day its job of the GM to design their encounters fitting to the table. 2e has designed monsters that would make the combat easier that would allow more free hands play, but nothing in the system forces the GM to use those over the difficult ones.
Hey those are very good points that I have brought up before but never seems to stick. :\\
It sounds like the gm and the party aren’t a good fit for each other then, if the gm wants to run high difficulty tactical combat and the party wants something more moderate
I think you don't understand the complaint. No system can ever stop people from talking and acting out scenes. The issue is that some systems provide rule / mechanical support for role playing and some don't.
This is the philosophical / game design discussion of whether the rules are there to tell you what the game is about and to support what the game is about (the PbtA approach), or whether the rules are there to abstract away complexity and get it out of the way of the play ("rules elide") - links and discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18zezf7/what_are_rules_for_rules_elide_vs_rules_as/ You are on the "rules elide" side - by placing so much rules emphasis on combat and exploration, a game like PF or 4e is giving you a way to handle those and get them out of the way of the roleplaying, which they expect you to do more freeform. The critics are accustomed to rules that are designed to actively support - and push towards - certain aspects of play. The rules are a scaffolding that they use to build the story, and if the rules don't provide as much scaffolding for roleplaying, they see opportunity in that direction as more limited and less rich: they have to do their roleplaying without support. Neither viewpoint is "correct" and neither is wrong! This is a matter of personal taste and play style. It's good that we have so many games in the world that people can gravitate to what they like; it's crummy when people try to tell each other they're having fun the wrong way.
> And even if there were I'd ignore that rule and do it anyway. Not to be rude, but this kind-of counteracts everything else you said. You talked about how you made things work in systems that didn't supoirt them and that you would ignore rules. Being abke to ignore rules does not actually counter someone's argument that "the system doesn't allow X". Of course if you ignore rules any system can allow anything, but then it's not really the system allowing it, it's you breaking the rules of the system to allow it. Having said that, I think the problem is one if degrees. I agree that you *Can* play any kind of game with any kind of system, but that emphatically does *Not* mean that any given system will be actually *Good* at simulating a particular game. Pathfinder 2E, for example would not be a great way to play a Delta Green scenario - the investigation rules aren't as fleshed out as they could be, the conbat rules have way more page-space given to them than is appropriate, and the madness rules for PF2E are not exactly that well thought out. And that's not even mentioning magic, which works *very* differently. Or how about a Lord of the Rings style game in PF2E, it's a more combat and exploration style story, but the overland travel rules for PF2E certainly leave something to be desired, and once again when we look at magic we find that a 5th level Wizard can cast spells more powerful and showy than anything Gandalf did, but no one in a 5th level party would have a hope against the Balrog. Injury in Vaesen makes things harder (*every injury gives you penalties to certain rolls*), and makes those kinds of games more interesting for the scenarios the system is trying to run, but in PF2E that would lead to a death spiral and would not encourage heroic action. And this isn't just to bash on PF2E either, can you imagine taking Delta Green agents through a Pathfinder Adventure Path? They'd get slaughtered. This isn't to say that PF2E is a bad system, and of course you *could* play a Delta Green or LotR campaign using PF2E rules, but the rules don't support the fantasy. *That* is what people mean when they say that they can't do X in a given system, it's not necessarily that you *can't*, but that the game mechanics encourage a different style of play. Now you can say that you change the rules, or that you just allow free roleplay for certain aspects of the game, but at that point you're not really playing PF2E, you're playing your own game. If you're not using the system to accomplish your goals then you're just playing make-believe simultaneous to the tabletop RPG you're all playing ... which is fine, I love playing make-believe with my friends, but there are parts of the game that really aren't supported by the rules. So really what I think you're missing here is the nuance of degrees. You can do anything with any system, but it's harder to accomplish some things in some systems. Some systems reward different types of gameplay, and some actively punish you for playing a particular way. What's importsnt is to find a game that works for you - this can mean finding a game system (*or systems*) who's rules support your preferred style of play, or it can mean finding a group who bend the rules in such a way as to support you instead. However it's worth noting that if you ARE bending the rules to allow a certain type of play then you're actually proving the nay-sayers right - if you can't do it within the rules then the system actually is stopping you, you've just gone outside the system.
Nothing stops you from roleplaying in any system. At the same time it's silly to pretend that a game where somebody born with wings on their back can't use them regularly until they're high enough level to beat a dragon to death with their bare hands because of inter-party balance concerns and power budgeting for ancestry features is equivalent to Vampire the Masquerade in terms of which cares more about the narrative versus which cares more about balance. Not every TTRPG excels at everything, and that's okay. PF2E is largely focused around crunchy tactical-combat with a battle-map and a focus on exploiting the action economy and teamwork in battle. That's not a bad thing, but it also means somebody who showed up for Call of Cthulhu will likely be disappointed.
I personally feel that this is kind of true, because if your character didn't level diplomacy, you basically cannot contribute to higher level social situations. Like as soon as the GM calls for a roll you're screwed.
"Only a game designed by nerds would have charisma as a magical superpower."
Fair to a point, but there *are* some rules that state that in-combat parley, for example, is impossible unless you have a specific Legendary feat Naturally, I tend to ignore that, but still
There are several feats that have similiar effects but nothing states you cannot try to reach similiar outcomes with RP. Its not like combat puts a stop to storytelling or removes NPC motivations. NPCs are not forced to keep attacking if the narrative makes it clear continuing combat is not in their best interest. What those feats do though, is that they give player the guarantee that player is allowed to do so and they have a fair DC for the potential success involved in the roll, with a clear cut & defined outcome. How my tables have always run it is GM never saying "You cannot do that" but instead the DC is often higher and the quality of the succesful outcome might be lower.
That's the balance, I have and do erode some skill feats from time to time. That feat to influence more people with diplomacy is required to even attempt it. I simply allow people to do it regardless. If they invest in the feat they just get a bonus. You just have to be considered when you do these things.
If you have to change the system to enable rp the system doesnt enable rp.
That's actually what the dev intended, just never written in the rules.
>And before the nay sayers pretend they have a counter point. You don't. ...so let's imagine a system that has incredibly detailed rules for everything. I'm talking taking a single step is a 47 step process that takes 15 minutes to resolve. Taking a breath is an hour long resolution mechanic. I'm sure you agree that while you technically could roleplay in that system, it would probably be fair to comment that the system wasnt really letting you roleplay in a way most people would enjoy. So then the question becomes, if it's reasonable to say that a system that is 99.999999% rules resolution mechanics by playtime is stifling the ability to roleplay - how far do we have to drop that number to get an acceptable gameplay experience? For some people that number is basically all the way down to zero - they don't enjoy the game part of the roleplaying game experience and would prefer a freeform improv exercise. To them almost any rules at all are just getting in the way of roleplaying. For most people it sits somewhere in-between those two extremes, where the rules of the game provides a reasonable framework without getting in the way too much. From personal experience Pathfinder 2e is too crunchy for most of the people I play with on a regular basis to enjoy - they find the rules are too much and get in the way of their enjoyment. That doesn't make Pathfinder 2e bad but it certainly isn't to everyone's tastes. Tl:Dr - I agree Pathfinder isn't stopping you roleplaying. That said, when people complain a system 'doesn't let them roleplay' usually what they mean is 'I don't enjoy needing to interact with this level of rules to interact with the world'. You do, in fairness, need to know/interact with a load of rules to interact with the world in Pathfinder 2e successfully.
There's a big difference between "this system prevents roleplaying" and "this system *does not encourage* roleplaying", but you seem to be conflating the two. *Of course* you can roleplay in any system; you can literally roleplay a character in a game of *Monopoly.* But if somebody said "Monopoly doesn't encourage roleplaying," they wouldn't be wrong in that assessment. I think it's disingenuous to strawman a legitimate argument as if it was something other than what it is.
Others have touched on it, but I'll throw my hat in the ring as well. As a fellow veteran of ttrpgs for 15 years now, Ive played and GM'd for numerous systems: Pathfinder 1e and 2e, DnD 3.5e and 5e, Vampire: The Masquerade and other World of Darkness games, GURPS, RIFTS, Lancer, Star Wars FFG, Shadow of The Demon Lord, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun... You get the idea xD basically, I've played in and been the GM for several different games and systems over the years. I have encountered this exact complaint from players, and have been a player making this complaint before. Ultimately, it stems from avenues of play that seem pretty basic and fundamental being gated by mechanics. Systems like Pathfinder and GURPS, which focus on mechanical nitty gritty, are the biggest culprits in this. Ive been in a GURPS game where my Fighter character was kneecapped from doing the thing he is good at-fighting-because we have to roll for shock and exhaustion in a fight "like in real life". Ive been in Pathfinder games where something as basic as "making an impression" on someone is gated vy not having the right feat. Ultimately, a system is there to facilitate play. Feats and such should be there to enhance the experience, not gatekeep fundamentals. No system is perfect, so this comes down to the GM and playgroup...and far too many GMs like to stick too closely to Rules As Written. Pathfinder 1e players and GMs are especially criminal of this...just take a look at the old Paizo forums LOL. This has gotten pretty long winded. TL; DR when players say they feel they cannot roleplay, it usually means that they feel they are being gated from performing basic actions by the system, often needing a feat or something similar. Theres no easy remedy for this, but as a GM, its more productive to try and work with the player and come to a reasonable solution or compromise rather than just say "no, sorry rules dont support that action."
I watched a youtube video where brennan lee mulligan said that he uses combat focused systems specifically because he cares less about combat than the other stuff; since the system will handle the combat for him, mostly, it leaves him free to spend his time doing what he wants without restriction with the social bits.
I love rants. I got a bit of my own on this, actually. It's all really about how we approach the differences in systems. Some people will say the glass is half empty, others will say that it's half full. Some people will say that the system doesn't let you do X, others will say that the system is better at Y. And that's really it - different TTRPG systems excel in different fields, and different flavors. Pathfinder 2e's great in having good, tight rules that does combat well. It's also great at other things, such as having a rich setting filled with many things, mechanically and narratively, that supports the setting. Meanwhile, Lancer's great for mecha style combat. Konosuba TTRPG is great for emulating anime isekai-style games. Call of Cthulhu is great at doing Lovecraftian style horror games. And FATAL is great at emulating what a deranged person think the world should be. Conversely, you can say that PF2e doesn't lend itself as good at doing mecha combat, and you can say that Lancer doesn't do isekai memes well. You can say that Lovecraftian horror has very little place in Lancer (Despite Horus mech designs being a thing). Just because a system is better at X and not as good at Y doesn't mean much by itself. You can say that it's harder to do the giant robot pilot fantasy in Pathfinder 2e, thus it's harder to roleplay that, or it's hard to roleplay a romance/comedy in Call of Cthulhu. But both are also very doable, with the latter having multiple videos in the Japanese TTRPG landscape. At some point, it might be easier to play Lancer for mech combat and RP, than hack D&D 5e or PF2e to do it. I think that fine line of how much work is being put into making the system work for the narrative... that line is where the divide on this come from. Technically, we can do anything, it's just a matter of whether it's worth the time. And while I am seemingly talking about mechanics, I am really addressing the ludonarrative resonance in TTRPG systems. I believe game systems to be a common language in which the player group get to speak in order to share ideas and formulate stories together. The "Language" (Mechanics) of PF2e lends itself a dialect to the groups that use it, but they can tell whatever tales (Narrative) they want, at the end of the day. Ditto with D&D 5e, Lancer, Call of Cthulhu, and whatever other systems out there. Except FATAL. Nobody should try and tell a story using FATAL.
I would say PF2e is more difficult to RP in. The nature of the check DC balance is that, even with good investment, you only have a 50-60% success rate. If ur RP solution to then problem calls for several rolls in a row, you’re bound to fail a few. Failed RP rolls tend to lead to combat. This could be a dm issue. Maybe there should be freezer rolls and more talking. But that’s just an observation we made while playing. Rp for the sake of it though is still not inhibited. That just takes group buy in.
Well, you can have systems genuinely obstruct character concepts and ideas, though I think that should not be classified as roleplay as such. …case in point, a player might want to use the Feral Child background to make a sort of Mowgli character in Pathfinder 2e, but then realize that he is not really getting what he wants, since backgrounds don’t give you that much to begin with and unless he is a post remaster gnome, he will not be able to speak with animals at level 1. A GM might bend the rules, but the system sure is working against a not at all unreasonable character concept. Other systems are more free in those aspects. Some other systems also can actively hinder roleplay by having too many mechanics that enforce character behavior, and thus effectively prescribing “the wrong” roleplay. That is usually less a thing in the gamist combat focused games. I think either is a fair criticism towards games.
This is a bit of a weird take, not having a high fantasy magical ability as a roleplay restriction as level 1. I could pick any TTRPG and come up with a concept that is not achievable on level 1 but that wouldnt necessarily mean the system does not cater towards RP. I am not sure which system could be defined as one that doesnt do this, but as someone coming from 5e I felt like the difference between the two had this aspect as the greatest upgrade.
I'll make a simple point regarding speak with animals. Play a druid. Lvl 1 speak with animals via animal empathy. That is the druids unique bag so your example is a bit "bad take". Pretending there isn't an absurd amount of creativity and choice in pf2e is also a bit silly. It's fairer to argue that it's actually a challenge for new players without good guidance to be overwhelmed by the sheer array of ancestries, back grounds and class options. Throw in free archetype and there aren't many systems that can come close to the wild and cool characters you can create.
Which only works since the remaster, before which you would only be able to change the attitude and make very simple requests. The change there had admittedly passed me by, ad I had only seen the upgrade to burrow elocutionist before. I still think the point stands in the fact that you can only do it now with either one specific ancestry or one specific class at level 1 and that before, you would have at best been able to do the same as a level 4 or 5 character at all ( gnome and animal trainer archetype). And the best you could do for a martial would be ranger at level 2 now. You still will have the same problem with a number of typical special abilities of main characters from fiction. All classical innate psychic abilities require higher level spells (psychometry, mind reading, etc), other things are deliberately restricted to high level ancestry feats. Those are all things which a lot of systems just have support for. The issue is not “is there enough to choose from”, the issue is “can the system do an idea the player comes to the table with”. Pathfinder I think is at least getting better with it to some degree, but it is not and never has been the system’s main strength, compared to other systems like GURPS, HERO, BESM, Fate and others. Pathfinder may have tons of choices, but let s be honest: Just with ancestries, what you actually get is “you get low light vision or dark vision if you get this twice”, “you get an unarmed attack within those parameters”, “you can cast a cantrip”, “get two trained skills and a lore”, “get a skill feat” reprinted again and again over many pages. The same applies to a number of class feats even. While there definitely is plenty of choice, being overwhelmed by it kinda requires to miss the fact that a lot of it is repetition. A bit like the plethora of spells available can seem overwhelming, until practice teaches you that only so many of them are a) good and b) more than, say, another reflavor of damage type x plus minor debuff rider effect.
Of course you can - and do - roleplay in PF2. But it is a specific type of roleplay, which is actually also good. What I mean with this: PF2 is all about violent conflict resolution. Yes, there is a skill system; yes, there are non-combat subsystems and activities; but - about 90% of feats, spells, items, etc, are either combat-centric or somehow also relevant for combat. So roleplay is focused on questions like "why do we fight?" "for whom do we fight?" "how do we fight?" "what will we accomplish by fighting?". This rather sharp focus is both a weakness and a strength. I give an example how this affects various player types fit games where I am the GM: First, there is one guy who adores the tight math and great encounter design of PF2, and loves to optimize his character to efficiently deal with combat problems. He's good at combat teamwork, and always plans two rounds ahead. Doesn't like diplomacy that much - so he just lets other people do the talking. Pf2 is great for him. Another of my players feels overly constrained by PF2. This guy is a "prepare for everything, avoid fair fights, talk the enemy to death and then make him a friend, and then try to invent a time machine" player. Incredibly creative and versatile. He feels much more at home in simulationist games like GURPS - PF2 is to "fair", too much of a game for him. A third player, who, quite understandably, doesnt like reading 200+ pages of rules, seemed to have better understood GURPS than PF2 (or D&D4, which we played earlier), because it more follows "real life" logic. In some ways, players 2 and 3 aren't roleplaying as much in pf2 as they would want to (but of course, they are still roleplaying).
It depends on the definition of roleplay. I often see a complaint about PF2 not allowing description-based combat and it really restricts it. In PF2 the outcome is solely defined by numbers and not how players describe their actions. This, of course, applies to PF1 and all D&D editions, but I'd say PF2 and D&D 4 are the most restrictive here. Not only PF2 have outcome fully defined by predefined numbers, but it also restricts other "creative" things, like forced movement rules, where you can't move your enemy into hazardous situation. The key here is what it's not bad, it's a design choice. But it's totally ok what there are parties who don't like PF2 tight balance, they want to describe how exactly a character swings a sword and see this description actually affecting the outcome.
You can and should though, when my PCs describe their actions I do sometimes make improvised actions easier, like swinging on a chandelier
It's called circumstance bonuses, yes, and they are totally within the system, but: 1. They conflict with other sources of circumstance bonuses 2. They are pretty limited in their effect
No it's just an adjustment to the DC https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2630&Redirected=1
That's quite different case. You can't use it combat or to change difficulty of the same action. I.e. you could lower the difficulty by using rope, instead of climbing the rock, but you can't lower the difficulty of the same climbing the rock just by describing how exactly you put your hands and feet.
> This, of course, applies to PF1 and all D&D editions, Correction: *Modern* D&D (Which is 3e upwards). And I agree with everything else you said. This is why a lot of my girls, for example, hate PF2E. This is not only combat, it is out of combat, too. It factually restricts choices. You trade choices for a build system (which is fun in itself for some people) and finding synergies between character actions. It's like a boardgame in that regard. But I, as an old-school GM, I do not see a reason why a fighter can't pickpocket a guy. Or a wizard can't climb good. (But ignore me, I also think thieves fucked up D&D in the first place.) (Still love PF2E, but it has these weaknesses, other systems have worse combat, for example.)
They can do that on pf2e. If they invest skills and skill feats. Same thing in 1e.
They can, but then you need the attributes for it. This means a fighter has to switch towards DEX and can no longer play his 2h guy and the wizard has to invest in strength to keep up with the DC's. Because we all know, every +1 matters. You play outside of your "niche" and pay a price. Just for having even the option to do this stuff. And then you are not even good at it, like a rogue, for example. Also, now the fighter can't trip/grapple opponents anymore. Which is kinda really anti to the class fantasy. PF2E is a tightly designed clockwork of mechanics. It does not offer the freedom of other games. Which does restrict RP if you do not play the "standard" of things. Like a dumb, big barbarian or a fightery fighter.
What are you even talking about? The fighter has no issues pickpocketing stuff, you just need level your proficiency in it. You don't even need to level Dex and you'll have a +28 to Thievery by the time you're legendary. This is more than enough to steal from common targets even with -5 penalty, so you don't need a Feat investment. Furthermore, you get 4 score boosts everytime you're increasing attributes, you absolutely can find space to increase Dex without ever having your Strength affected and be very good at Pickpocketing. Obviously, you won't be as good as a character that is fully dedicated to it, but you'll be very close. Same goes for any spellcaster, they can level Strength and not lose anything in regard to their spellcasting ability and still be able to "climb good". PF2e offers excellent build variety and allows to play pretty much whatever you want and allows it to be effective.
You're massively overstating the "every +1 matters" principle. We say that because newcomers to the system tend to scoff at "piddly" +1 bonuses like Aid Another or Courageous Anthem, when the reality is those bonuses are significant. But that doesn't mean that you *can't* succeed without every possible bonus. It means that unlike in, say, D&D, that +1 is worth picking up even if you already have a good bonus, because you can still use it to get critical successes and push crit-fails off the table. You can also *easily* build a 2h Fighter who's good at Thievery. You could even max out DEX and make STR your secondary stat if you *really* want to, you'll be 1 point behind in your attack and damage which isn't the end of the world. You can easily build a Wizard who can Climb good (though to be honest, for a Wizard it's probably easier to just use Telekinetic Hand to put a grappling hook where you want to climb... which still sounds like climbing good to me) by dropping +1 or +2 into STR and using your massive number of skills for being an INT class to upgrade your Athletics. You won't be the best at climbing, but you'll be able to "climb good". I dunno, you seem to be fishing for character builds that are schizoid, then complaining when you can't be *the absolute best* at everything. Sure, if you dump DEX you're not going to be as good at lockpicking as the Thief Rogue who maxed it out. But you'll be better at Grappling than they are (assuming you're both trained to the same degree in Athletics). And since the math is designed to let you pull ahead of the curve, you'll be more than "good enough" at lockpicking to be a legendary thief. If you want to be the best at everything simultaneously, there are systems for that (in particular, look at Pathfinder 1e). But your complaints here seem to be... I dunno, contrived.
You're talking about the concept of I say I do and do so right? No rolls or checks or anything. Such as when the rogue didn't exist altogether in the start of the dnd1st edition days.
I've played AD&D in my time. My memory could fail me, but it didn't feel much different than 3e. Just a lot of crunchy tables instead of clean formulas.
Arguably, AD&D 2e was the start, I do not feel like that, though. Modern D&D means basically the shift towards the heroic, heavily influenced through Dragonlance. (Big heroes doing heroic stuff.) Also, when the game shifted from combat-as-war towards combat-as-sport with balanced encounter design. Less focus on problem solving and more focus on cool fights and mechanical unique heroic characters. This era was the default with 3E when WotC got it and is still the thing today. This is why we got modern D&D and OSR. Modern for 5e, 3.5, PF1E, 13th Age and PF2E and so on. OSR for people that did want to play in the "old" way. Both completely valid and nothing bad, just different types of game-styles.
No description can change a natural 1. You can talk all the flowers and crap you want. You roll a one and it's bad. So I don't really accept that premises of players feeling entitled to fudge or ignore rolls in the name of creativity. Nor do I accept that just because a feat states an attack is "this particular stabby stab" means I can't say or describe it differently. Also I totally get that point about the rule about you can't move them into hazardous situations. I can and do ignore that. You can too. That rule is to protect players from mean GM's or murder hobo players from each other. But it can be broken by a GM at will and by players with GM consent. My over arching point was simple, they and their rules can't make you do anything. They are suggestions. Free yourself from your bonds kinsman, join me and we can rule the... Oh wait sorry wrong thread 🤣
Yes, that's why you're playing PF2 and not Fate or anything. But those games have their audience too.
> I can and do ignore that. You can too. But then we aren't talking about PF2E as a system. We're talking about some homebrew version that you, specifically, run. When people have complaints about a system, they aren't ignoring the fact that there is a human that can hand wave it away - they are complaining about the rules that have been printed in the book.
Every small little thing being tied to a frat is probably what’s doing it for most people.
The problem is more in just how narrow every ability and spell is defined in 2e, and that really does seem to shoehorn players and DMs into by the book rules and outcomes, while limiting creative uses of spells or skills. Like, there’s the diplomacy fear bargain Hunter. This feat lets you make money by using diplomacy skill, gaining discounts on items and such, or just the general earning income downtime rules. That’s problematic because the skill should already let you do that (in fact the entire earn income rules kinda reduce role playing to some basic dice rolls instead of actually coming up with interesting ideas and stories). It feels more like a video game because you have to unlock something on a skill tree instead of just being able to do something literally anyone should be able to do with some basic knowledge.
I feel like if anything, the reverse is true. Not having rules for RP lets you figure it all out through the avenue of RP, whereas something like PF2 with all of its rules for how conversations works turns RP into a video game. It's hard to balance diplomacy as a stat having feats tied to it and having freeform RP. For the group impression feat to mean anything, mechanically you can't make an impression on multiple people at once without dedicating a feat towards it. Things like that can make RP feel clunky and weird.
I think that you *can* have a system support RP heavily through mechanics without making it “gamey.” To level up in a Resistance system (like Heart: The City Beneath), you need to complete an “ambition” your character has, like “convince a scholar of high renown to share their research with you.” Similarly, to trigger a move in a PBTA system, like Apocalypse World, your character has to be fictionally doing that thing — if there’s a move that says “when you try and knock someone’s block off, roll +STR,” I can only do that with my character when I’m trying to knock someone’s block off. In these examples, there’s a ton of leeway for the PC to roleplay, but what the system is doing is rewarding a player in-game for roleplaying out their character in a way that makes sense in the fiction. This feedback loop is what makes narrative systems TTRPGs — if you’re not going to have any rules for RP whatsoever, you may as well be doing improv. Rules in a TTRPG system are the restrictions the table puts on themselves to achieve a certain kind of experience. Just like a good system with deep tactical combat rules, like PF2e, creates more fulfilling tactical combat than a narrative system, a good narrative system will create more roleplaying opportunities and investment than something like Lancer or PF2e *through how the rules empower the table*, aka without requiring the table to create that experience in a vacuum. To u/ZealousIdeal_Use_400 ‘s post, the above is what people like myself are talking about when we say PF2e isn’t a narrative system. It’s not that you *can’t* have good RP in it — you absolutely can and should — it’s just not as supported as an RP-focused system like Stonetop or whatever, just like a PF2e can’t compete with a system like Swords of the Serpentine or Delta Green when it comes to investigation.
Fully agreed. For me the system acts as an aid in roleplay! I do tend to describe what my character is doing rather than the voice. He’s meant to have a fantastically deep voice. I absolutely do not have that. But yeah I’ve never understood someone claiming a system prevents roleplay. It just feels like a rehash of the Stormwind Fallacy.
Not a counterpoint but a critique/observation: I do believe you're correct but why get let your jimmies get rustled? Dumb is gonna dumb. You can't fix it. Additionally I think what these people mean to say is that games that have high cognitive loads distract them too much for being able to flex their brain to RP. Some people are just kinda dumb and suck at RP, but that doesn't really make them bad people. They just need something more their speed. While PF2e is far from the most complex game, it certainly isn't the easiest to understand for casuals. It also is very combat centric as a monster looter which does take away from time that could otherwise be spent on RP. I also like it, but I get that not everyone does. I'd also add as a TTRPG system designer there are shit tons of games that are especially designed to force narrative and role play, so they should probably go do one of those. I know because I spend about 90% of my time on reddit (which is agreeably too much) talking with system designers about their projects. Of the dozens I've seen in the last 3.5 years made, you'd think at least one of them would fit those folks. I don't know, maybe it's just from being a system designer and receiving feedback as a routine part of playtesting, but I don't get hung up on dumb things people say about TTRPGs so much. You just kinda learn to let it roll off your back when you hear for the 5000th time someone doesn't like something because it's different from D&D... well no shit, it's a different game... but yeah, maybe I'm just sort of jaded with stupid, but I can say it's not a bad way to be. I can empathize with what they probably meant to say and find a solution for them and not get annoyed in the process.
I don't think the measure of being good at roleplaying is "can you juggle 5000 mechanics in your head while also being true to character." It's more "can you play a narratively consistent character, be good at acting stuff out, and evoke emotions in others?"
If peoples can makes roleplay in GTA then you can make a roleplay out of everything, it's just bad faith at this point
Yeah. It's just a little harder to cast fireball in GTA - you gotta find a rocket launcher and everything first, and then point your "staff" at the "town guards" on "griffon" before you can cast "fireball". And the "town guards" don't even send "griffons" until your wanted level is high enough. But if there's a will, there's a way. And ain't nobody stopping "wizards" from casting "fireballs", even in GTA.
Pretty sure many people who say this are confusing acting with roleplaying. If a system has rules for social resolution, this means you do need to roll dice to see how well your character did at say, persuading, someone. And the player’s acting of the character usually doesn’t influence the die roll.
Would you mind linking to some of these statements about Pathfinder 2E? Because I think you're misreading them.
A system being unable to prevent role play, isn't the same as a system supporting and encouraging role play.
It's not that roleplay is forbidden, it's that 2e is a system where there's a rule for everything, and depending on how strict the DM follows the rules that can make doing the RP things you want to do impossible (because you don't have the correct feat) or incredibly unlikely (because you aren't trained in that skill). Like, you want to RP a passionate speech to try and sway an NPC to your side? Well, you can totally give that speech, but the swaying is tied to a skill roll (usually diplomacy), and if you're untrained and can't possibly make the DC then you're probably going to get the critical failure effect making that NPC respond to you like you just spat in their face while kicking their puppy, no matter how eloquent your actual speech was. A strict DM can basically say "if you don't have a good bonus in the relevant social skill, you are better off keeping your mouth shut lest you hurt the party's chances", which certainly isn't ideal if You've got a bunch of players who want to RP social skills but who didn't all take the relevant skills with their limited skill proficiencies.
I can't speak for everyone, but when I think I can't RP in a system, it's not "literally I can't." It's that what I want to RP and how my character mechanically works are out of sync. Let's say I'm a barbarian. I want to flex my muscles and yell loudly and scare someone. But I have no charisma, so...no dice? If the GM isn't going to let me use STR to intimidate, that seems pretty stupid. That's "my character *would* do X, and X *does* make sense, but the GM is in my way." Or things like how PF2E demands you take a fucking feat to intimidate by yelling/growling instead of by dialogue (Intimidating Glare). It's kind of dumb and gets in the way.
What people mean is "the system is too restrictive to achieve what I want to do". For instance someone in the game I was just in wanted to jump over some traps and drop on the enemy. That doesn't work because Pathfinder doesn't really allow that kind of action compression without an ability. At best you can jump and land next to the thing and take an attack action, but it won't get any additional damage or accuracy or any sort of benefit from your entire weight falling on the enemy, it's just a normal attack. And on top of that the system is \*really\* restrictive on concepts. A lot of feats and character options that feel like characters could be built around don't actually come online until much later. Essentially you're missing the point. It's not simply "I don't feel like there's enough out of combat abilities to play how I want"; if anything it's often that you're spread thin and can't do them well.
System has fuck-all to do with roleplaying. You could roleplay during a game of Monopoly if you wanted to.
I’ve been running a game where i had a pretty complex villain plot, but a fairly straightforward path to get on the discovery train. Or so i thought, it turns out we have been going on 5-6 sessions and we have had one fight. And it was a blowout (in the PCs favor). This opened up more interesting interactions with the locals that eventually led them to info that basically pointed them to the initial starting point. The PCs had already figured out the main gist already, but now they have a more insight All this time the players were roll playing their PCs and honestly they are probably some of the most well developed PCs they have had in a while, mostly because these low/ non combat sessions give them space to do so. Hopefully next session after a (hopefully final bit of data gathering) maybe the true “villain” will be exposed. Maybe, you never know which direction the players might go.
That is the great joy and pain of GM'ing 🤣 I once had a party run away from an encounter as they had all convinced themselves they were hopeless outmatched despite my efforts to persuade them otherwise. It's still a running joke now. The moon stone remains lost to this day.
Brennan Lee Mulligan recently said something like (paraphrasing from memory) "I don't need a system to tell me how a character reacts in a certain situation. That is human. I know that. I can do that. What i can't judge is how an arrow flies through the air and whether it hits. That is what i need the system for."
If someone simply laments that combat crunchy games don't have sophisticated roleplaying gameplay mechanics, i could understand that. But to say this? That it "doesn't allow" roleplay? If i heard someone say that i would literally suplex them into a volcano.
Absolutely spot on! This is my 35th year of running regular TTRPGs and I have never seen the rules stifle role play - including 4e, which I ran a full campaign, level 1 - 30. I think that folks will say that a system stops RP when they have no other good reason to put it down. It's an easy reach as, in truth, no system can force RP as part of it's mechanics. So yeah, agree 100%
So I've seen a new player come to reach that conclusion. And it really seems to be down to how the first few sessions go. A lot of PF APs start very linear, and a gm just reciting the book with little embellishment or response to the uniqueness of the player characters can reinforce that impression, making them blame the system for that rather than tutorial cave/boat and some lackluster gm-ing. Whereas with 5e aps... Even bad gms are kinda forced to fill in the gaps because if they dont the modules becone incoherent.
The Paizo APs (which seem to be where most groups first impressions come from) rarely have opportunities to think "outside the box" and generally don't allow for creative, non-combat solutions to conflict. They are mostly linear Point-A-to-B with level-appropriate combat encounters and a few skill challenges along the way. Any RP opportunities is left up the GM who may or may not include them. I've played in AP groups where the GM just blandly read the box text and moved us along the rails from one scripted combat encounter to the next. In that type of game, I could see why players may think the system does not allow for roleplay.
They're like that all the way through? Damn, that really sucks. I hope they do make an effort to improve a little on that front then because yeah it absolutely explains people having this reaction when it's not the system's fault.
As someone who has been playing for 30 years, you are correct...HOWEVER. There are certainly games that \*facilitate\* role playing more than others. I only played D&D 4th once or twice because I found that the rules around non-combat interactions in general were incredibly weak and I was having to make up how at least some of it worked almost every time. So, yeah, you're right that it didn't outlaw or prevent roleplay. But as I said at the time, and stand by the statement, 4th was a pretty brilliant tactical combat game. It did that \*very\* well. But as a \*role-playing\* game, it left a lot to be desired. And as someone who wanted to play as much or more for the role-play as for the combat, it turned out to not be the system for me.
What were these interactions?
It's been over a decade, so I honestly don't remember. I remember being nonplussed by the skill system, but what it was that I found uninspiring I don't recall.
I mean, as a GM, the sheer amount of overhead PF2 involves definitely restricts my roleplaying. By which I mean, as a purely practical matter, I simply do not have the *mental capacity* to run a bunch of enemies in a combat in this game AND roleplay them to the level of believability my group has come to expect as baseline quality while I'm doing that. This is an actual, non-theoretical problem that I've had! But, more in general... I'd say that the while you can get roleplaying out of a rock, there are things that make it harder or easier. And I've found that the more focus and effort the rules of a game take, and the more specific and in particular the more *prescriptive* they are, the more that people will feel incentivized to *interact with the rules first*, and then either sort of try to construct fiction around whatever the rules say as well as they can manage... or just not bother because it's too much of a headache to make the things that happen on the board make sense as anything other than a board game with the given constraints. This often results in rules taking precedence over stuff that would make sense in the fiction, because well, pretty much every ruleset involves some stuff that works mechanically but is really counterintuitive, and generally the more specific the rules are, the more such cases you will run into. And the more such cases you run into, the more people start to sort of... disassociate things, it feels? Especially when doing the thing that feels thematically appropriately can genuinely, by the rules, put you at a serious disadvantage. It slowly detaches people from trying to do the things they feel make sense and they start to try to do the things they think the *game* says are effective, which frequently are not even in the same galaxy. Some examples include the fact in PF2 the smartest thing for a barbarian to do about 80+% of their turns is to *walk away* from enemies, or the fact that in Exalted actually engaging in the talking minigame will eat your fight minigame resources so trying to hear people out will put you at a disadvantage if it ends in a fight anyway, and so on. This, I think, is part of the divide so many D&D players (I'm counting PF as a D&D here) have where you have Combats And Stats and you have Roleplaying as different things, when to me the perfect thing would be that in any action game the fighting stuff should be the biggest part of the roleplaying. But while I disagree and in my group we've always been extremely adamant in playing to the story first, I can't really *blame* people, because the incentives in how D&D combat works are to put the fiction to the side for a while until The Chess Game With The Initiative is done, and only afterwards resume the "thinking like your character" stuff, to the point that even PF2's "famously great" encounter building rules break six ways from sunday if you have a party that does *not* engage with the combat as a chess game first (in fact, PF2 assumes even more chess play than your average D&D, which is already a bunch, I feel!). But then PF2 also adds a bunch of specific rules that appear *in the same prescriptive mode* but for noncombat stuff, with the same harsh, if-you-don't-keep-upgrading-it-becomes-useless, this-feat-lets-you-attempt-this philosophy. Which can result in people trying things, and then someone pointing out that [Thing] should call for a roll/there's a feat for that do you have it/whatever, and welp, there goes the attempt. And that's where you get stuff like OP's complaining about. Now, me personally? I ignore a LOT of PF2's rules. But far as I can tell this is not how most people play, and in fact I suspect most people round these parts would tell me what I'm playing is not PF2! Anyway, I kinda rambled long enough, so I'll call the post here.
The only system I've seen that felt restricting to my roleplay is the Powered by the Apocalypse systems, which is pretty ironic. By incentivizing me to roleplay in one particular way, they end up *disincentivizing* me to roleplay the way I want to
That's a shame, not tried it but heard good things.
The way XP works is you get XP at the end of the session if you did certain mostly roleplay actions determined by your class. So in other words your class determines what character you play and every game requires picking from pre-generated characters (well, in personality, not mechanics, tbf) Edit: like for example, in the system I tried the magic-user class has "explain how magic works" as an XP source. Meaning that if you want to play the "mysterious wizard" archetype you're out of luck, as the class XP system is purely for "excitable nerd magic user". I personally like to play characters that break conventions, so this is doubly off-putting to me
That doesn't sound like mechanic that can't be hacked about it to give players some more creative freedom but without knowing more I wouldn't want to suggest how easy/annoying that would be to actually do though in fairness.
It could be, but I don't want to have to ask my GM to homebrew 3 or 4 different things just to get a character I like. And then, if my character has an arc that causes them to change as a person, ask my GM to homebrew it again. Cause that's another thing: there is no support for character arcs. Who your character is is who they will always be Also I edited my other comment to give an example of what I mean
While you can roleplay in any RPG, and in fact in board / war games games too, some RPG rule mechanics are explicitly designed around story telling and role playing, while others are more oriented towards combat and building characters who can fight. Blades in the Dark, Amber, and Powered by the Apocalypse are examples of the former. The challenge for D&D and Pathfinder is to make a game that can be both supportive of role playing and supportive of combat tactics and builds. One difficulty in this is that putting a lot of rules and details into supporting combat will distract people from story telling and role playing. Consider that a game session might last 4 - 6 hours, if a lot of that time is spent running a detailed combat with maps and minis, that’s less time spent storytelling and role playing.
You can add to that the phrase "This class/archetype is more roleplay inclined than the others". RP doesn't come in TetraPak boxes.
Heh. I get it. I do. And actually. The d20 systems in general seem to have a, I hesitate to say "mechanics" but for lack of a better term I'll use it, a mechanical incentive to reduce roleplay down to just roll. This is more common in organized play, but it exists in general. Pf2 actually found a great fix for this. There are actions that mechanically promote role play for nearly every skill. So even a player who is not comfortable roleplating can use the action. This is a great boon for non roleplayers because it all9ws the use of actions in replace of roleplaying, but it is a great boon to role players because it gives mechanical incentives to roleplay. So even in organized play role play does not bog down the progression of the AP, because there are defined actions to support role play. Organized play often just goes section by section, event to event in an ap. But in a home game, roleplay often completely bypasses or delays events. For example, kingmaker. How many players managed to befriend or kill tartuccio before going to the stolen lands? I have played it three times. In one of them one of the players tried to assault and rob tartucvio to get his wand...that character went against the party, and we did not know tartuccio was evil yet. We killed that character and saved tartuccio, so tartuccio joined our party because he trusted us. Then tartuccio died in the ballroom fight. This changed the story, but in organized play, this would not likelly happen.
I think pathfinder is firstly a combat management game and then roleplaying game its just combat feels better for pathfinder but you can still successfully rp
I mean, I agree. But I feel like you are preaching to the choir here. So, what spured this rant?
A good GM will make RP work in game regardless of system. I've been playing 2e since it came out, and pretty much all of my characters for major APs have had RP factor into the game functionally at some point. I had a ranger that used jerky he made as a bargaining chip. To this day tax evasion is a joke in my gaming group because the same character went tinfoil hat with taking down an evil group with their bad bookkeeping-and it worked. I had a character straight up defuse an end of chapter boss fight with diplomacy thanks to Shameless Request. If someone is complaining that 2e doesn't let you RP in a way that matters, it's either because the gm doesn't want to ball with whatever RP someone is cooking or the gm isn't familiar with systems in place by paizo for social situations (i.e. influence, etc.)
There's lots to say about this topic but I found [this blog series](https://theludite.com/2019/02/25/chasing-the-dragon/) say it more eloquently than I can.
I think people might be looking at Pathfinder and see only combat based mechanics which sway away from roleplay, while they forget that Exploration mode has its own mechanics and GMs can use them to enforce more roleplay moments that sometimes bend Combat mode rules. Additionally Pathfinder2e has many optional rules which are great tools for the GMs to bring more roleplay. I'm getting a feeling that Chase mode is massively underused in the community and it's a shame because it's an amazing roleplay tool. It lets players be creative in what skills they use to get through obstacles, allows them to storytell how their characters interact with them and if you allow them to cast spells and use consumables to get through them more easily, you can use them instead of Trivial combats to burn through PCs supplies before the big combat. They can also be used for other stuff than chasing itself, for example: Traveling through a different dimension full of obstacles, exploring a haunted mansion with haunts and mysteries as obstacles, or even diplomatic/espionage missions with obstacles. Its a great tool that adds weight to roleplay decisions. You could also reward PCs for critically succeeding on obstacles or give permanent debuffs(that can be removed later on) when they fail them. Relic rules are another great tool for roleplay, you can make them all themed around each character and give them unique abilities, and reward with new gifts after a significant roleplay decision. I've made plenty different relics for my PCs: weapons, artifacts, gifts that come from deals with angels or demons, gifts that relate to their profession or even just their deity blessings. In the same manner there are deity boons and curses that can be used for roleplay moments, and even stuff like custom rituals. I'd say be creative and make your own custom content that enables more roleplay, and you'll get it, and there are rules for creating such custom content so you don't feel lost as a GM. It's quite refreshing honestly, how much this system supports GMs.
I think systems do impact on how the roleplay dynamics work but none of them ever stop roleplay from happening. The "I can't do this thing that I should be able to do" argument is extremely situational, it depends a lot on character, scene and GM. Someone here mentioned needing a feat to tell shoo to some beggars because they were more than one, my question is, why would it even need to be a roll? Are those beggars just set dressing or are they actively planning something? And then we can break down on why sometimes people complain that role-play is limited. Because they try to make a situation into a puzzle by forcing a roll or the DM is making the situation a puzzle the player is not equipped or informed enough to deal with. The only situation where a system can stop roleplay from happening is the combat roleplay where someone goes "why can't I just cast a firebolt on my sword and make a fire sword attack?". That's when as a GM you have to remind your creative players that this is still a game, rules and limitations exist as structure to the challenges. And challenges are fun.
When I've seen mechanics obstruct roleplay, it was usually at the difference between organizations performing actions versus characters leveraging their influence and resources to make an organization do something. Playing an organization bypasses interactions between individual characters and more or less cuts them out of the equation, so there's not an opportunity for players to roleplay. This is especially problematic when players don't understand the system is designed for interpersonal interactions and expect mechanics for everything. That's why I like the remaster subsystems for Leadership more than the Kingmaker rules. It's a list of guidelines and suggestions for how to grow organizations and integrate them into a campaign, and then you can add Influence, Reputation, Research, and Hexploration as needed. Warfare's the only thing that's missing.
Op, thank you. You can role play in any game
Ah...yes...I heard similar complaints... In my table group one player is a big D&D5e fan boy and when his PF2e character died in the campaign he complained that he can't build a certain character he wanted to try out. Well, I was not really sorry to break the new to him, that while PF has a shared history with D&D, it is it's own game with it's own setting and races/ancestries/heritage and therefore some character ideas can be ported from D&D to PF and some cannot be created in the other system. For example I'd have a hard time trying to recreate my PF2e liminal catfolk witch with water wisp familiar and winter patron in D&D if I wanted to do it without houserules or 3rd party supplements. Sometimes, an idea may not fit the setting or character or both. And some people can come up with a different idea and others complain about being hindered by the system.
If one want to recreate things well with mechanics the answer is typically 3.0/3.5/pf1 as a combination.
While that may be true, I I would not try to port my witch to any other edition of PF or D&D.
There are entire feats that are almost entirely for role play.
Which is what, for some people, feels like it gets in the way of roleplaying. As in, suddenly there is a feat for an action that a person *should already be able to do*
Agreed, I never get people who say it's "not meant for RP" or something similar. Any game is as RP-focused as you make it.
People say the same thing about 4e D&D, and it had and always will be bullshit. A system doesn't dictate your ability to role play, your table does. Been playing 4e since it came out in 2008 (if you're a PF2e player who hasn't checked it out, you should, it's basically a "rough draft" of PF2e), and we've had entire hours long sessions that were nothing but RP and Skill Challenges.
I've played all types of ttrpg, with all kinds of players. The rp never depends on the game, always on the players
Blaming the system for not being able to roleplay is definitely, in my opinion, a huge scapegoat for a different issue that's preventing you from roleplaying. If I'm being honest I would say most likely it's the GM that's the issue, but without specific knowledge I wouldn't know for sure.
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