I recommend this video to look more into OSR philosophy regarding the rules: https://www.youtube.com/live/bCxZ3TivVUM?si=aZ-y2U_AVjn9a6Ua
Calling 5e and pf2e bloated with unnecessary rules, meanwhile Pathfinder and 3.5e are quite literally full of a couple decade’s worth of volumes and modules, in comparison to OSR?
I don’t know if you’re a boomer, a troll, or both
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PF2S is bloated with unnecessary rules. If that’s your thing, and I totally get the appeal of having a “wait let’s just see what nethys says abou — Oh apparently there are mechanics for this drug” moment; personally I find it really gets in the way of the session. Rule and move on with the story. Keep the mechanics to what they need. We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high. All the subterfuge and wordy mechanics don’t really change that at the end of the day you need to roll a d20 and generally do better than a 12 or so to do what you want.
I feel like pf2e has just enough rules to empower the players to the level I like
The more DM fiat a game has, the more trust I need from my players for things to go smoothly.
That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but for me structure is usually good as long as it doesn’t raise the skill floor too high.
Once I’ve got trust built and feel a bit more experimental, I like Dungeon World or even Universalis
Same I find it easy to gm and the players have enough of a grip of the system to be able to do something out of left field and I can find a way to make it work with the system so that play is smooth but consistent.
We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high
I highly disagree with this sentiment. You do you, but this is not the general feeling of TTRPG players.
PF2e is a joke. It requires reading the whole rules and planning out a character for multiple levels before making your first character. It gatekeeps the hobby worse than FATAL.
Yeah, PF1 and 3.5e are bloated as hell. But you didn’t need to read all the feats for all the races before picking human fighter. Plus the people still playing those never used everything that was published.
Lmao, I think you confused pf1 and pf2. In pf1 you can build yourself into a corner and create useless characters with ease. In 2e the worst characters are still decent
Nope, I know both. They both suck because of the required over optimization. But pf1 at least didn’t have characters constantly at full hp, which is one of the biggest balance issues.
??? Have you ever played 2e? That shit is perfectly balanced. Just because fights are designed around having full hp doesn’t mean the players always are.
In pf1 you can ruin a character with an uninformed choice, in pf2 you can’t. The gap between minmaxxed or not has become reasonable in my opinion.
in pf2 you can’t.
I run pf2e and love it, but I really gotta call this out as bullshit. It’s actually one of the worst things new people can read about the game, imho. I read this a lot as I was learning the system and parroted it to my players. We’re all experienced with TTRPGs, for the record. Despite all the chat from pf2e players that you supposedly cannot ruin a character with bad choices, I assure you it is possible.
Yes, I’ve played it. And a lot of other games. PF2 balance is only okay and they had to do several annoying things to do it. Like how do you balance a mixed level party in pf2? The system really doesn’t like that, because of it’s number inflation.
Either you dislike the bloat of the system or don’t. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Did I say I still run these games? I hate 5e, pf2, pf1 and wouldn’t touch 3/3.5 again. I ran all of these in the past, except pf2 but I’ve played pf2 plenty to know I hate and will never run it.
I run Hackmaster and other systems (oWoD, Cthulhu, WFRP, …) which aren’t bloated messes. I just think pf1 is slightly better than pf2 because that was my experience. But that seems ridiculous to you, because you feel insulted or something. I really don’t care.
5e isn’t just needlessly complex, it is an unreferencable mess that has very poor general rules with lots of exceptions and poor standardization. The rules for traveling are so misplaced that most players don’t know they exist, not that it’s possible to find them when needed. And when there are general rules, they tend to be unfun. Stuff like crafting has no depth in 5e, it’s just time + gold = item. It might “work”, but it’s just bookkeeping there is no hidden fun.
For fantasy, I prefer Hackmaster 5e, because it keeps the complexity and detail without dumping special case rules onto players. It’s not perfect, but it’s way more engaging and characters feel way more interesting. WFRP 4e is also nice, but not as deep (it does suffer from rules being scattered everywhere). I’ll likely end up playing OSE ot some point.
5e has both too many rules and not enough rules.
It has very specific rules in some places. Item interactions, many spell specifics, grapple, holding your breath, etc.
It has very lackluster rules in other places. Social conflict, item and spell crafting, metagame stuff like making your own class or species.
I think a lot of people playing DND would be happier playing a different system. Just not the same system for everyone.
Exactly. It’s sort of an uncomfortable middle ground, but also just kind of messy.
And I’m tired, as someone who DMed it a bunch, hearing people act like broken or missing rules aren’t a problem, or somehow even a good thing, because the DM can just make something up. Yeah, not shit. I can do that in literally any game I run. It’s just unpleasant to do in 5e, yet I have to do it all the damn time to keep the game running smoothly. I’d rather have a game that either supports me as a GM, or is easier to improvise.
I think it was a different thread where I posted about how a guy in my dnd group straight face told us something like “the beauty of DND is we can just try out different rules. If we want to do a chase scene we can try it one way, and if it doesn’t work or we don’t like it we can try something else”.
I’m just like that’s not a unique property of DND. That’s just how playing make believe works. And I’d rather have a game that runs okay out of the box rather than keep playtesting as a DM, or deal with unchecked dm whims as a player.
That sounds familiar! Partly because I recall reading that, but also because it’s a frustratingly common scenario.
D&D is, for a ton of people, synonymous with tabletop RPGs. Often that means people think the things they like about playing tabletop RPGs are unique to D&D, even they aren’t.
What gets me are people who complain about Pathfinder 2e having more rules. You’re just as free to ignore them, and no one has to read much less memorize all the rules. Besides, is anyone under the illusion that players are learning all the rules to 5e?
It also suffers from not using consistent language and keywords in the rulings.
The more recent rewrites are better but there would be way fewer discussions on “what exactly does this mean” if there were consistent keywords for things.
…also I am currently writing a pile of homebrew to try and run a spelljammer game because those books they released inspired me to run a Treasure Planet campaign but didn’t give me nearly enough material.
If you got to look up rules and nobody cares or wants to, skip it. Its my advice. Use rules only if its necessary and soemwhat contributing to a fun experience.
This is universal.
This. Our entire campaign is home-brewed using the 5e ruleset, but the application of those rules is selective when it needs to be.
For the most part, we’re following them, but if there’s a rule that results in a level of attention to detail that we simply don’t care to implement, or would have less fun trying to religiously adhere too, we just scrap it in favour of something a bit more light-touch and call it a house rule.
Rules provide a great framework to base your game on, but the ultimate aim is to create an enjoyable experience and have fun, so bend them and break them when and where you need to for the benefit of all involved.
One risk with this is when you have a new player join your group. They might expect raw and be surprised by a whole kettle of home brew.
I for one would be annoyed if I joined a group and found they were ignoring the rest rules. They may be having fun but I would have made different decisions if I’d known what they were actually playing.
Every change should be treated the same : you tell about them at character creation and you tell them during the game while allowing for their set of rules on the present session if you cannot think of them in advance. Homebrew, legal rules, anything should be the same. It’s not during a game that you tell the multiclass druid cleric that the steroid goodberries dont work in your game, as he’s trying to heal someone after a fight. This actually happened to me. Don’t fucking nerf the core of a character’s mechanics midgame.
This makes sense.
In my imagination there is a large set of players who “homebrew” stuff because they don’t know or understand the rules, and a very large subset of those players are also disorganized. A sizable subset also just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
So they’ll be like “oh we let the wizard attack and cast a spell on the same turn. Is that not the normal way?”
But for people who homebrew with intention and thought, yeah, what you said.
5e is pretty light though, and in most cases too light so the DM has no idea what to do and has to resort to “Rulings”.
PF2e on the otherhand is crunchy AF and its awesome like that. It doesn´t have extra rules for everything, its all based on the same framework, which is pretty awesome.
You see, OSR fans would argue both 5e and Pathfinder have broken core rules engine because if it was well designed, you could apply it to all situations and wouldn’t need separate rules for every minutia. By these standards 5e is crunch heavy with unnecessary things like “how to hold your breath”
PF2 is certainly easier to run. But tell me when it becomes a RPG, it’s basically a video game system ported to tabletop. Everything is about the builds, not the characters.
What would it take to make it a RPG? Some characters are flawed in certain things while excel at others. But what you want your character to be, its in your hands due to how you build your character. That´s part of your character, same goes to the backstory you may have developed and inform your build.
Well they could stop gamifying RP and exploration so players actually get into character instead of just rolling dice. But that’s a pretty fundamental shift, so they won’t do it.
Are you one of the players who wants to “just talk out” social conflicts? That’s a totally valid way to play but I hate it. Or at least I hate it when the game has stats for like charisma and intelligence. I cannot be 20 charisma in real life do not try to make me.
No. I use different ways to resolve social conflicts based on what the situation is. Sometimes that’s rolling dice, sometimes it’s talking in character and sometimes it’s in-between stuff. Stop trying to shove me into some stereotype. Are you going to stereotype me as a Hackmaster gm? A Keeper? An ultraviolet? A storyteller?
I don’t expect pf2 players to understand my point of view, especially non-gamemasters.
But how does roling dice, when the outcome of a situation is uncertain, inhibit you from roleplaying your character?
It doesn’t. It just conditions players towards not doing it by replacing interacting with the world with interacting with rules and dice. Which doesn’t stop experienced players, but misleads new players in a video game mindset.
Okay, but what can a solid and crunchy RPG System do for new players that expect Skyrim on a table? And on the other hand, what can those player get out of a rules light game? They would be entirely lost. Which then would result in just make.believe, which doesn´t need rules to begin with.
Have you ever played with new players? I’ve ran non-dnd with new players several times. Including systems like Call of Cthulhu. Objectively speaking Cthulhu (BRP) is pretty rules light and my players had no trouble learning it. They just said what they wanted to do and I told them what to roll. They start to find the freedom in the system and get more creative. And a similar situation happens when I run more complex systems. I honestly have no clue what you are worried about. Players can learn how to play these games, they aren’t that hard.
To be clear, you’re mad that an RPG has too much G in its RP?
No, I dislike games like pf2 because the MDA framework they have designed is detrimental to the medium of roleplaying games. Because the mechanics encourage players to use PC in non-diegetic dynamics crippling the aesthetics of any setting or genre.
The builds are an expression of character development tho.
Character development as characterization or character development as shonen protagonist?
PF2 is probably best game to play shonen protagonists, I’ll give it that.
Depends on the game the group likes. More narrative driven game it can conflict and have issues
However, there is something nice about knowing a balanced way to do x or y across the board and at different tables.
A good gm should be able to make a note of something or make a quick call especially in pf2e case were generic difficulty dc per level is given
However, there is something nice about knowing a balanced way to do x or y across the board and at different tables.
I don’t agree with this argument. Balancing is the job of the GM. Unless the GM acts as a glorified screenreader who only reads a pre-made adventure to the players with no influence what happens. But if the GM decides what monsters you run into, the GM has more influence over the balancing than the game framework. So why not lean into it fully and make the GM responsible for the whole balancing?
I mean, pen&paper RPGs aren’t a players vs GM game, but instead the GM plays together with the players to create an interesting experience where everyone has fun. No need for the framework to do balancing, because a good GM will do that.
So why not lean into it fully and make the GM responsible for the whole balancing?
Because having things balanced properly in regard to the myriad options that are possible in people imaginations is hard, especially related to combat. Improper balacing leads to people having a bad time, while having an established, fair ruleset lets the DM and the players focus on other things.
No need for the framework to do balancing, because a good GM will do that.
But at this point why even have rules? A “good GM” can just entirely improvise a system.
But at this point why even have rules? A “good GM” can just entirely improvise a system. On the other hand,. if you’re the slave to rules, are you even still the GM or just a refferee? It’s a sliding scale people fall on, honestly. 5e tried to have it cake and eat it too, insert itself in the middle. You could argue it succeeded, but that makes people naturally drift away from it in either direction. I just think we tend to forget the scale goes both ways and there are more options than Pathfinder with rules for everything.
You sound like you’re trying to say that GMs who run modules by the book aren’t real GMs, and that’s some gatekeepy bullshit.
While GM decides what monsters to throw into players, they still need to know what they could use without it being either underwhelming or overwhelming. You dismiss this simply by saying: “just be a good DM”.
- New DM’s will want guidelines to start from.
- If combat is important having written rules help to use consistent ruling on same situation in different instances.
- Story focused DM might reduce amount of effort needed to plan combat, since there is no need to build it from scratch.
Disadvantage of having to look up rules then you don’t remember them could be mitigated by just saying: Look guys, I don’t remember ruling now, so not to break the flow, I will rule it this way, and look it up later.
So while for most players rule heavy systems are less accessible, they are actually more accessible for many DMs, and since mastering have much higher barrier of entry, such systems at least should not be dismissed outright.
Balancing is the job of the GM.
And some systems make that job easier for the GM than other systems. Winning all the time without challenge is boring. Getting TPKd every other session does not feel good. A good GM should hit somewhere in-between. So you either have a system that helps you do that or you really need to have a lot of experience.
Yes, the GM balances - they decide what type and how hard the encounters will be. But after that decision is made, it’s the job of the system to provide the GM with tools to build that encounter and help me balance things: How much skeletons provide the difficulty I want? Is a lich too much? Red dragon or white dragon?
In 5e, you don’t have the proper tools imo - the challenge rating is next to useless. In PF2, you have something akin to point buy for encounters - and if it says the encounter will be “moderate threat” - then you can trust that in 99% of the cases.
But at the end of the day, as a GM, if I want to provide my players with a hard, but fair fight, I don’t want to have to guess what will work and what won’t. Yes, with a lot of experience I will have an idea of that, but why would I pay for a system that just offloads the hard part of their game design to me? Good encounter-building tools don’t get in the way of your creativity.
5e has also undermined experience by constantly introducing powercreep. So even after years of running, 5e is frustrating to run.
The framework helps the GM be able to do so, its another tool.
I mainly say that in such a way that if a character is thought to be a pusher the player would know that to push I have to be this close and cant push something thats x times bigger (or some other thing). A GM can (and should) adjust and change things if it would make it more fun for the table but the framework helps understand the world better. for some parts the GM is not directing but explaining what happened.
I push the rock off the edge of the cliff, bar something else, it should fall. The GM at that point is giving the results of that action, what is the result? the GM could simply say that it fell and hurt someone it landed on nearly killing them. the issue comes when the same situation comes up and the GM does something different because they think it should do differently (a different GM more then likely ) this breaks flow if things are different. (assuming all things are the same in both situations for simplicity of course). The Frame work put that a rock fall would deal X amount for how far it fell and the players would have the knowledge (while it would be slightly meta, it would be a “world” known if the rock would deal less damage then the pointy sword XP )
That’s what I meant by balance across areas, expectations are known on what some cause and effects are. Frameworks are great ways to help guide things through HOWEVER, a giving framework/gamesystem is not perfect nor a fit all for all game types and tables. A Group also shouldn’t need to “go into the weeds” constantly (or at all during a session), something made on the fly or close enough is good to keep things moving.
I mean, pen&paper RPGs aren’t a players vs GM game, but instead the GM plays together with the players to create an interesting experience where everyone has fun.
Full Agree, but the next part is that the Framework helps the GM do the balancing
So why not lean into it fully and make the GM responsible for the whole balancing
Because they should have fun too? Having to rule and improvise everything makes for a harder job for them, needing to keep track of everything to make it consistent, and it’s also bad for players too, since they don’t really know what to expect.
Keep balance for computer games. If I’m playing an RPG I want to be able to do crazy things if I plan and execute it properly. And rules for stumble attacks of opportunity for holy clerics of the sun just get in the way of the good stuff.
This is entirely correct. Balance does not matter in most games, because most games have resources that are depleted over a long term. You don’t need balance when healing takes weeks or difficult to replace resources.
For games like 5e and pf2, where characters constantly are at full health, spells and equipment, combat needs to almost kill the party every time to be worth rolling dice.
Yes; or be an incredibly long boring slog because it needs to divorce the party from so many resources.
The extremely simplified version of these systems being called complex is… Not what I thought I’d ever see.
Seriously. 5e is already a watered-down, anemic shadow of what 3.5 was… and this is too complex?
Being less complex than 3.5 isn’t indicator of being simple, that bar is on the floor.
It’s not the complexity. It’s the bloat, terrible interactions and game dynamics. 3.5 didn’t suffer from gm burn out, but 5e does. Because 5e is a bigger mess.
Me and OSR are a complete mismatch in execution. But we work in theory and design. Where we clash is where the meme is. Simple basic rules that are to be used in pretty much every situation. Where the GM is empowered to make those rulings. Where the GM is King.
I have tried running them and constantly kept asking myself “according to the rules what am I supposed to do?” as I want to run systems as they want to be ran. What is a failure? How does the outcome space look like? And when I get to play I feel I get to relinquish so much control to the GM that I feel almost powerless. The GMs rulings and fiat rules. Sure these are my experiences and I can love OSRs and their designs while not wanting to acctually play them.
5e has too many rules? If anything it seems to be lacking rules. D&D in general has too many options, but 5e often has nothing if you want rules to handle specific non-combat situations,
When systems go even lighter, it stops even feeling like we are playing a Game, and it starts feeling like annotated improv, which is very much not what I want to play. It never feels right to me as a player to be making sweeping declarations without knowledge of what the GM and the other players are planning.
Okay, explain to me why do you need rules for holding your breath in 5e. Because that’s a good example of too many rules, in OSR you would use something already existing.
And you do you, but really the OSR tend to teach players to find ways to avoid rolling altogether by stacking deck in their favor before attempting something.
Frankly I could point it right back at you as the example of a good thing to have. If you need to dive underwater without equipment or cross smoke during a fire, it’s useful to have a reference of how long you can keep at it, how many rounds does that take, how much distance you can cross, what happens once you can’t keep at it anymore. We are talking about adventurers, it’s surprising that this is somehow thought of as an irrelevant edge case.
Are we expecting that the player should always have spells or some magic scuba for this?
I really don’t get what’s with OSR and not wanting to roll. I’m playing an RPG, I’m up for rolling. Though in this case, the rule does not even require rolling until you are already drowning.
For the few times your players want to swim a lot underwater OR if you use monsters designed to drown them long term
Meh, don’t play it, then. Why turn everything into a competiton?
Because
editionsystem wars are fun?(in moderation)
I hereby grant everyone permission to make up whatever rules they want for their rule sets.
Having rules for more situations is a feature, not a bug. You can always choose not to look up the rule and make something up, but if you ever want something that a designer spent some time on instead of making it up on the fly, you have the option
On the other hand, if you had basic rules be flexible and understandable enough, you could by common sense apply them to most of situations and devs could focus on polishing the edges where you would need a specific rules, which should be few and far in-between.
It really is crazy how hard new players defend 5e and pf2 when so many other games make GMing actually fun and easy.
Rule 1: The DM describes the environment.
Rule 2: The players describe what they want to do.
Rule 3: The DM narrates the results of the adventurers actions.
The rules on how to play are pretty basic and very flexible. You can easily play an entire game or campaign not going past those three rules or needing anything more in depth than that.
Some folks like crunch. Some folks like heavy crunch, some like light crunch. Some folks just want a mushy bowl of cereal. We’re all just playing make believe. What rules you use is up to your table and what kind of crunch they want.
5e is the worst of both worlds. It is both far too convoluted while offering almost nothing to play with.
Hah you wrote basically the same thing I did.
If we simplify 5e any more it’s gonna turn into Snakes & Ladders. And clearly OSR already exists, so there’s no need to change other systems.
5e is actually on the high end of medium crunch. That’s not a bad thing though. The game mostly works and it is fun, but it does have its rough spots. I agree with you about not needing to change it though
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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can try games Powered by the Apocalypse!
Played in few one-shots, wish I could get into a longer game but I’m busy between running 5e, playing Vampire and trying to get second campaign in fate or BitD going.
5e is already too simple, playing anything simpler makes me want to vomit.
Plus, OSR games are generally made by the most absolute vicious racists and general bigots imaginable. Genuinely awful in every way possible.
Can you link me some sources on the racism/bigotry? Genuinely curious, didn’t realize this was the case.
OSR has a vocal minority or reacitonaries giving it bad name. But even among perpetually online, they’re a minority. Facebook had two OSR fan groups - one for reactionaries (it’s now deleted) and other being very welcoming and progressive. The latter had ten times as many members.
He’s likely referring to the New TSR, which did make a pretty racist race section for a game. But they already are basically dead as a company, if not actually bankrupt.
The only other scandals would be WotC getting sued for labelling Adnd stuff as racist, when WotC made at least 2 books with racist art in the 2020s. Or the Zac S lawsuit, where a pornstar OSR creator was accused of stuff then won the lawsuit so easily he looks like the nice guy in porn. Reggie (LotFP) is also weird, but not the average creator. He’s basically just an eccentric artist.
The OSR is way less bigotted than WotC. Hell Shadowdark was made by a lesbian and she is very well regarded even by people critical of SD as a system.
Oh wow, a Zak S apologist. Die.
I enjoy The Black Hack and Old School Essentials. You’re not saying they’re racist right?
I once again recommend the video, as it adresses both your points.
