pathfinder

179 readers

2 users here now

founded 9 months ago

MODERATORS

When it comes to rules, what makes you say "I recognize that the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it"? (aussie.zone)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In other words, what’s an official rule or interaction between different rules in Pathfinder 2e that you think is dumb?

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The crafting rules. You spend at least 4 days to make an item for the same price you could have bought it for.

Oh, you can spend additional time to get the cost down to half, with the same rules as earn income? Well, you could also earn income the whole time, just buy the item and still have more money left than if you made it yourself.

I get that the rules are that way to prevent players from taking item balancing completely out of the GMs control with huge discounts. But it just feels bad for a player to invest into crafting only to be "allowed" to waste 4 extra days to essentially buy an item.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

Honestly, I think the crafting times are a bit much, but...

Oh, you can spend additional time to get the cost down to half, with the same rules as earn income? Well, you could also earn income the whole time, just buy the item and still have more money left than if you made it yourself.

... is just the way that, you know, economies work. It really is often more efficient to buy something than it is to make it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I recently handwaved the exact number of in-game days needed to retrain a feat because the player was feeling frustrated and had only used that feat maybe once in the entire campaign

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The whole downtime rules seem really weird to me. I like the fact that they exist, in theory, but they're just so different from how I've always played I couldn't see myself use them.

I, and my players, tend to like actually role-playing what their characters do. Not just saying "I'm gonna schmooze" and rolling a die to see the result.

But also, I've never had large amounts of dedicated downtime. I play large campaigns. The PCs have shit to do, and the BBEG isn't gonna wait around for a month while they craft.

The downtime rules seem like they're made for a very old-school type of play where you go out and raid a dungeon and head back to town until you next decide to raid a dungeon, without as much of an overarching plot. And that's just not how I've ever played.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I like PF2's downtime stuff, but I don't like how many activities have a minimum duration of >2 days. In my experience, neither players nor the adventure will tolerate that much time spent not adventuring.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

I, and my players, tend to like actually role-playing what their characters do. Not just saying "I'm gonna schmooze" and rolling a die to see the result.

I see people talk about running downtime like this,and exploration like this, too, and I scratch my head.

It's always been pretty clear to me that these sections of the book are for the GM, to give them tools to consistently adjudicate player choices, not to give players a value menu to order from

So, you do your roleplay, the GM sees what you're doing and maps it on to some Activity, and the Activity tells them how to decide how effective you were, mechanically.

Like, if a player ever told me that they were going to "use Avoid Notice", I'd just tilt my head at them and ask them again what their character was doing, and that I'll figure out what that means, mechanically. Because maybe they don't get to Avoid Notice because they've tailed for the last 20 miles by someone they themselves didn't notice.

This was maybe one of the bigger downsides to having both player and GM facing material in the same book, I think.