Pathfinder 2E vs. 5E D&D and character "builds"

[souran]

P2E and 5E D&D are inbred cousins as games. They clearly have the same roots and both look to address core problems of 3.x D&D. Often in the same way (the similarity of how they decided to handle the "lower level spells get better as you level problem is basically plagiarism on P2Es part).

One area where they diverge massively is in character options. Not really the power of the options, but the raw number of options. 5E D&D characters make choices at first level, 3rd level, and then only choose stat ups and feats (of which the total number is small). If you are not a spell caster is is distinctly possible that you would never make a meaningful character development choice after 1st level.

P2E characters no longer racial abilities instead they have "heritage feats" they don't have "class abilities" they have "class feats", They also get skill feats, general feats, and ability boosts.

The 5E analysis for 3E characters was that they were too complicated, especially for new players. Based on the unearthed arcana segements that they have published, they pretty much admitted that most players sort through lists of class abilities and then just take the one that is the "best." If a choice is thematic but obviously less powerful or useful than another choice at the same level it might as well not exist. Theoretically, the designers think that they are doing players a favor and only putting in the "good" ones. The purple dragon knight shows that they are obviously bad at making those assessments but that is the design path they have taken.

P2E on the other hand, has decided to toss out every concept they can think of for every class, randomly tag them to various levels (level appropriate abilities are for chumps!). Every level players are picking from pools of abilities. It's pretty clear the intent is to be able to expand these, probably nearly indefinitely.

5E is unsatisfying vaporware. P2E is going to a monthly deluge of shitty, unused class abilities.

What is the correct level of player choice when leveling up? How much support should an rpg have for "builds"While these two games seem to represent a pair of extremes, I am not certain that there is a "happy middle" for these two design concepts.

I hate to say paizo does anything right, but I think that they are closer to the preferred solution. Players should make some meaningful choice every time they level, or why bother having that "level".

[Ignimortis]

What 5e does right is the ability to get your concept running at about level 4-5. What 5e does wrong is the amount of concepts supported by the system, because it literally doesn't support 90% of things you would see in 3.5, and the tools the players are given to make their own concept work are woefully inadequate.

What PF 2e does right is the amount of options available.
What PF 2e does wrong is the value of those options and there being no actual thought process involved in balancing them and making them meaningful. I'm still reeling from a Ranger "feat" for a double-digit level that allows you to make traps without components, but they're worse traps and have a penalty to their DC. That's like a level 1 ability for a trap-maker concept, and it should lose the penalty by level 3.

Hilariously, both 3.5 and PF 1e in the later stages of their life cycle were better at both those things. Somewhat. You could make lots of concepts and most of them even could have somewhat level-appropriate abilities.

[Chamomile]

Players should make some meaningful choice every time they level, or why bother having that "level".

You don't need a new build choice every level to justify having a level. A system which has 100% of its abilities locked in clear to level 20 as soon as you pick your class still benefits from having those abilities come online one by one rather than just dumping all of them onto you at once. The bare minimum needed to justify having levels is that every level you get an ability that in some way changes how you play the game. The number of build choices you need to have in your progression system is a marketing question, not a mechanical one: How often do people want to make choices?

In any case, there is basically no requisite that the choice be meaningful so long as there's no trap options. Most people can't recognize the difference between a meaningful decision and something completely trivial which is just presented with lots of pageantry. We're talking about Pathfinder and D&D, here, not the latest Den heartbreaker, so designing for the small handful of build-optimizers is a fool's choice next to designing for the strong majority of people who want their build to be given to them fully-functioning and then pick out the drapes to personalize it.

[jt]

No thesis statement, each paragraph is a separate thought.

3.5 has the most entertaining character optimization process of any game I've seen. This is, at best, entirely unrelated to being a good RPG. The part of char op I enjoy most is when you combine disparate things to create an effect (use duskblade 13 into bloodstorm blade to mass-cast touch spells at range) and that process drags in a bunch of other baggage (this wizard is throwing axes at people and stuffed their armor with thistles), which you then make part of your character. Maybe it's possible to design a game where this sort of optimization-driven baggage tends to lead to interesting roleplaying prompts. There's a limit to how many interesting facets a character can have, so even if you were designing your system around this concept, you'd want to avoid people dumpster diving for a stackable bonus (grabbing every cha-to-stat does not lead to a coherent character).

The most popular character optimization in 3.5 was just trying to build a gish, because there were no good options out of the box, and people were just using the system's flexibility to force it to do the thing they wanted.

Every level should represent a meaningful difference in the challenges the characters can face. If the system can guess how a character is supposed to handle the new challenges, there doesn't need to be any decision. You only really need to have the player decide if the system can't guess how the player would want their character to gain this new capability. You're 10th level so your fighter has to fly now, and that's a conceptual leap, so are you more okay with them being so good at jumping that they can zip around and hover a while before landing, so good at balancing that they can walk on air, have a tamed cloud, or be able to convince a passing pegasus to show up just by whistling?

A lot of the need to make decisions for customization's sake could be moved away from mechanical prompts and into writing prompts. You're a 3rd level monk and you've invented a new stance which does what the system tells you it does, but what's it called?

[deaddmwalking]

It would be ideal if your concept could be supported from Level 1, even if you're not very good at it. Like, it's okay to be an 'apprentice wizard' at Level 1, rather than an arch mage, and it's okay to be a 'street rat' rogue at Level 1, rather than an internationally renowned Cat Burglar - but clearly those concepts can come online at 1st level. If your concept requires combining features of different classes, there should be support for that from Level 1.

You should get features every level. Some features can be fixed, some can be chosen from a list. It's okay if the features are not 'character defining'. It's okay to get better at something that was established as part of your character concept at Level 1. If you started out as an apprentice wizard, a feature that gives you more powerful and more frequent spell casting is an obvious feature you should have access to - if you NEED it, you shouldn't have to choose it.

If you choose options from a list, be aware that the first pick is more valuable than the second pick, which is more valuable than the 3rd. If you get a list of 20 things at 1st level and you can pick ANY ONE at each level, by the time you get to 20th level your only choice is the one thing you never chose. If you use list-based abilities they should be tiered so players can get access to a new list periodically. It's okay if not every character gets to pick every choice from a list.

Assuming a class gives you everything you need to participate in the game, selectable features should primarily give you more options rather than more powerful options.

Regarding opposition, I would disagree with jt on "Every level should represent a meaningful difference in the challenges the characters can face." Clearly an encounter with a manticore at level 7 should be slightly easier than an encounter with a manticore at level 6, but part of proving that PCs are getting more powerful is facing monsters they fought before and finding that they're no longer a threat. There will be incremental changes; new monsters should become potential challenges as you level-up and some threats will simply be too insignificant to even include them, but that process should take several levels. A solo ogre, a group of 3 ogres, and a squad of 10 ogres allow you to use the same monster at different power levels. To make this work the game should include ways to deal 'mass damage' as you gain levels. Wizards with area effects potentially show the way that works. If you can do a large amount of damage to a single target, you can only work on a mob one individual at a time; if you have tools to spread damage between targets but CAN'T concentrate it on a solo is helpful.

[jt]

It would be ideal if your concept could be supported from Level 1

Agreed.

And 3.5-style multiclassing can't do this. You either have a class that does it (in which case multiclassing has nothing further to offer) or you need to wait until at least level 2 before multiclassing can do the work. You could get around that by starting at level 2 and renumbering, but I've built systems that do this and it's a chore to communicate it.

I would disagree with jt on "Every level should represent a meaningful difference in the challenges the characters can face."

To clarify, I think every level should have a meaningful difference on the set of challenges, not on every individual challenge. It's fine if level 6 means your party can fight 10% more goblins at once, as long as somewhere else something interesting is rotating into the range of what's accessible to the party.

And going from one ogre to one per party member is also a pretty big change. It would be enough to have a constant treadmill where every level means the party can handle a new solo monster, some old solo monster is now doable in even numbers, and some old even numbers monster is now a horde. If that's the only thing that changes with levels that sounds super boring, but it can certainly be the bread and butter standard that justifies levels.

[OgreBattle]

It would be ideal if your concept could be supported from Level 1, even if you're not very good at it. Like, it's okay to be an 'apprentice wizard' at Level 1, rather than an arch mage, and it's okay to be a 'street rat' rogue at Level 1, rather than an internationally renowned Cat Burglar - but clearly those concepts can come online at 1st level. If your concept requires combining features of different classes, there should be support for that from Level 1.

How about untrained townsfolk and barely trained militia, do they have their own class levels in an inferior class or count as a fraction CR or what?

Where does a house cat fit in the level/CR paradigm

[Foxwarrior]

So how does the solo->squad->horde paradigm work when you want monsters generally to be simple, with only a few classed exceptions? Can you do PC-classed death knight->squad of PC-classed death knights->horde of PC-classed death knights? Or are you supposed to go from complex PC class solo to roughly as strong but much simpler monster class version squad?

[deaddmwalking]

It would be ideal if your concept could be supported from Level 1, even if you're not very good at it. Like, it's okay to be an 'apprentice wizard' at Level 1, rather than an arch mage, and it's okay to be a 'street rat' rogue at Level 1, rather than an internationally renowned Cat Burglar - but clearly those concepts can come online at 1st level. If your concept requires combining features of different classes, there should be support for that from Level 1.

How about untrained townsfolk and barely trained militia, do they have their own class levels in an inferior class or count as a fraction CR or what?

Where does a house cat fit in the level/CR paradigm

Personally, I'd suggest at a 1st level character represent someone who is nominally trained in their career. In 3.x a 1st level fighter knows how to don and wear full-plate armor which is not really a skill you can pick up in the 10 minutes between 'I'm a dirt farmer tending my daddy's farm' and 'Orcs are attacking and I'm going to grab my grandpa's hunting spear and defend the homestead'.

In 3.x, they do address this, indicating that a PC class represents a marked increase in ability relative to an NPC class.

Within the confines of 3.x, you could represent this as beginning as a commoner, and having the ability to transform the commoner level into a Warrior level (improving BAB/Saves/HD) with the only issue being skill selections. Since the acquisition and division of class skills is a dumpster fire, that would have to be changed which takes us outside of 3.x as written. In any case, Commoner->Warrior->PC Martial Class could certainly work if you're trying to go from Zero to Hero. A 1st level PC should have some relevant experiences, whether that is serving in the militia, or spending years scavenging a living on the tough streets, or studying with a mentor (knight/wizard/priest) and learning the start of their craft.

As far as where to draw the line on what constitutes a challenge, I think you can safely put 'house cat' on the 'not a physical threat' list.

I don't trust the source, but

could a cat ever emerge victorious in mortal combat against a healthy human? According to Brian Palmer at Slate, it doesn't appear to have happened in recorded history, but just because something hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't.

The problem in 3.x is if a cat can't kill a human, they also can't kill a mouse. If they do 1d2-4 points of damage, they can't DO damage, even on a critical hit. To 'fix' this, you'd have to 'shift scales' periodically. In a medium frame, a human deals 1d8 points of damage with a long sword and a cat deals 1d2-4 points of damage with claws. But if you shrank that human down to the size of a mouse?

In a normal scale, a cat is two sizes smaller than a human; if the humans are the size of a mouse (diminutive?), the cat is one size bigger. If you leave the humans the same (longsword does 1d8), you could increase the size/strength of the cat. 1d2-4 becomes 1d4+0. Now I don't know that it's worth playing with these kinds of scenarios, but you kind of have to accept that relative scale matters to ensure that a praying mantis can kill a hummingbird (but it can't hurt a human).

So for me, a housecat (and a praying mantis) aren't normally worth including in the CR system. They may not be less than zero, but they're close enough to it that you shouldn't care under normal circumstances. But CR is a number line, and the number of values between 0 and 1 is infinite; the number of values between .0025 and .0026 is also infinite. If you wanted to play D&D with cats instead of Heroes, it should be THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE by changing the scale, but that doesn't actually interest me - it's just a helpful tool to imagine the world working when 'harmless' animals interact with each other.

[deaddmwalking]

So how does the solo->squad->horde paradigm work when you want monsters generally to be simple, with only a few classed exceptions? Can you do PC-classed death knight->squad of PC-classed death knights->horde of PC-classed death knights? Or are you supposed to go from complex PC class solo to roughly as strong but much simpler monster class version squad?

My opinion only:

Simple monsters lend themselves to becoming hordes, complex monsters don't.

In the 'single ogre/3 ogre/squad of ogres' example, the first is an appropriate challenge for a 3rd level party (very difficult for a lower level party); the second is probably appropriate for a 5th level party (challenging) and a squad of 8 might be somewhat challenging for a party of 7th level. At 13th+ level, they really could be fodder - hordes that mostly matter in the background.

A Dark Naga, on the other hand, is a solo monster at 8th level; having 8 of them wouldn't be appropriate until 14th level; using them as background hordes wouldn't make sense until you were well into epic levels. I'm sure there are some low-level monsters that are complex, but generally complexity scales with level so it isn't GENERALLY a problem.

[Rawbeard]

What 5e does wrong is the amount of concepts supported by the system, because it literally doesn't support 90% of things you would see in 3.5, and the tools the players are given to make their own concept work are woefully inadequate.

you still can't play the Ranger without Playtest materials. that is amazing, if you ask me.

[Foxwarrior]

the first (1 ogre) is an appropriate challenge for a 3rd level party (very difficult for a lower level party); the second (3 ogres) is probably appropriate for a 5th level party
A Dark Naga, on the other hand, is a solo monster at 8th level; having 8 of them wouldn't be appropriate until 14th level

Shift goalposts much?

I'm sure there are some low-level monsters that are complex, but generally complexity scales with level so it isn't GENERALLY a problem.

I feel like this argument boils down to "14th level is already too complex to play so I wouldn't worry about it." I mean, I kind of agree, but perhaps someone should do something about that.

[deaddmwalking]

I feel like this argument boils down to "14th level is already too complex to play so I wouldn't worry about it." I mean, I kind of agree, but perhaps someone should do something about that.

I didn't mean it that way. I meant that by the time ogres are appropriate as hordes, you're playing at high levels. By the time a high level monster is appropriate as a horde, you're playing at epic levels.

I couldn't think of a 'complex' low-level monster that would be appropriate as a horde. I mean, I can't imagine a horde of will-o-wisps because organization is still a thing - your humanoids are the ones that tend to congregate into armies.

If you can think of a CR 3 monster that would be really complex to run as a horde at Level ~14, it'd be worth looking at. Your horde monsters aren't going to be above CR 5ish at levels people play. Like, I can imagine having hundreds of Minotaurs (possibly some with class levels), but I struggle to imagine a situation you'd want hundreds of Ogre Mages.

Assuming complexity correlates with high level, you should not have a situation where you need a horde of complex monsters because you should never need a horde of high level monsters. High level monsters are inappropriate for low-level characters as solos; high level monsters are appropriate for high level characters are solos; there's really no room for high level monsters as hordes.

[jt]

Not every monster needs to scale to cannon fodder territory, and they don't need to be on the same schedule (though that'd be really handy).

If you want to turn formerly complex monsters into cannon fodder, you can achieve that with some form of spell resistance / generalized ability resistance. So an enemy that had a bag of tricks before is reduced to their best one later because most of their stuff just bounces off of you. Then as a matter of monster design, the thing that best penetrates high level immunities always happens to be the ability that's most fun to reduce the monster to, not necessarily the same as the one that was most effective when level appropriate.

And gaining generalized immunity to level 3 effects or whatever it's called by level 14 becomes one of the things your character class is expected to provide.

[Foxwarrior]

Ooh, I quite like the idea that you can simplify monsters by introducing "this tall to ride" style immunities for the players. If you're really sneaky you can even do that in the PC class abilities too, so a mob of low-level PC-classed Wizards ends up being simple to use as well.

Edit: might want to make sure the "this tall to ride" stuff doesn't accidentally get handed out to boss enemies though, don't want the players to be reduced to using their simple but fun ability in boss fights.

[jt]

If the abilities that are easiest to be immune to are battlefield control and lockdown abilities, having a boss monster shrug them off could be a feature (so long as the characters all have a back up plan). This is aligned with but not the same as wanting the most finicky abilities to be the ones that are easy to be immune to.

[zugschef]

What 5e does right is the ability to get your concept running at about level 4-5.

How is that good? So a game from levels 1-4 only includes characters without a concept?

[Ignimortis]

How is that good? So a game from levels 1-4 only includes characters without a concept?

Because in 3.5 you could easily have concepts that only work after 10 levels or something. Like that gish example - Duskblade starts working at level 3, and then stops working at level 6, because their "cast and strike" feature now requires them to choose between Full Attack and actually doing their gishy thing, and then it picks back up at level 13, which is way too late.

And no, I didn't mean that levels 1 to 4 in 5e are conceptless. But I've never seen a game where a character equivalent to D&D 1st level would already be a complete concept, unless that concept was very low-power and probably very mundane, like a young thug with no skills to speak of. So levels 4-5, where the game actually starts playing like the heroic fantasy it purports itself to be, is a good point for actual concepts to start coming online.

[WiserOdin032402]

I'm gonna just nip that heroic fantasy statement in the bud there, Igni. No, it doesn't. Thanks to bounded accuracy and the design of the Monster Manual, you basically stay low fantasy heroes forever unless you're a full caster. Unless your concept uses a lot of magic or makes your weapon count as magic half the monster manual is either only taking half damage from you with their utterly massive HP pools or flat immune to your mundane weapon damage.

And of course, bounded accuracy means armies > your party unless you're all wizards/bards/warlocks/clerics.

5e, by design, never starts playing like heroic fantasy.

[maglag]

I'm gonna just nip that heroic fantasy statement in the bud there, Igni. No, it doesn't. Thanks to bounded accuracy and the design of the Monster Manual, you basically stay low fantasy heroes forever unless you're a full caster. Unless your concept uses a lot of magic or makes your weapon count as magic half the monster manual is either only taking half damage from you with their utterly massive HP pools or flat immune to your mundane weapon damage.

And of course, bounded accuracy means armies > your party unless you're all wizards/bards/warlocks/clerics.

5e, by design, never starts playing like heroic fantasy.

And how's that different from 3.X where high-level non-casters die to armies natural 20ing them just fine and plenty of 3.X monsters will go "You're not a caster? Then you really can't beat me because I can kite you forever while wearing you down with my huge SLA array and/or endless minion spam".

[WiserOdin032402]

And how's that different from 3.X where high-level non-casters die to armies natural 20ing them just fine and plenty of 3.X monsters will go "You're not a caster? Then you really can't beat me because I can kite you forever while wearing you down with my huge SLA array and/or endless minion spam".

Because you need to assemble thousands of people to even get that ball rolling on nat-20ing noncasters to death and even then they have some form sort of way to deal with crowds so they'll be able to take most of your army with them.

In 5e it takes at most about one hundred people to kill any big huge thing, which includes players. And 5e still hasn't solved that last problem of players being kited to death by just about anything with the ability to kite them so that's just a D&D problem.

[Rawbeard]

my... I mean... a friends... 5e group just reached level 5. we have a bunch of potions, a scroll and a wand of magic missile. pretty high fantasy stuff, if you ask me.

god, this game is depressing when you think about it. on the other hand it gives players some "technically" OP shit via class and subclass... unless you take one of the wrong choices, which is most of them.

the "modularity" of Pathfinder 2 gives me anxiety and I fucking love Pathfinder for having archtypes and alternate racial traits to custom tailer your character to your concept. FUCK. am I getting too old for this shit?

[OgreBattle]

PF1 archtypes and traits have some familiarity to them being a D&D3e derived game, but PF2 seems to be a mixed bag of things that have similar names but do inconsistent things, so anxiety is a normal reaction

[Ignimortis]

I'm gonna just nip that heroic fantasy statement in the bud there, Igni. No, it doesn't. Thanks to bounded accuracy and the design of the Monster Manual, you basically stay low fantasy heroes forever unless you're a full caster. Unless your concept uses a lot of magic or makes your weapon count as magic half the monster manual is either only taking half damage from you with their utterly massive HP pools or flat immune to your mundane weapon damage.

And of course, bounded accuracy means armies > your party unless you're all wizards/bards/warlocks/clerics.

5e, by design, never starts playing like heroic fantasy.

Well, it never becomes high-powered heroic fantasy. The genre is there, it's just...very poorly executed. It's just that particular kind of heroic fantasy that never actually grows, you know, like...Like no other fantasy at all. It's a crippled idea of what D&D ought to be, except it ceased to be that thing about 20 years before 5e was released and 3e buried that particular coffin so deep that only a very deviant soul would actually want to dig it up.

Wow, that metaphor kinda ran away from me. But yes, coming to 5e from 3.5e it feels very...2e-ish in its' assumptions, and not even high-level 2e.

So I figure 5e is a heroic fantasy game in tone. Or it was intended to be such. It's just that its' mechanics are bad even at that. It never gets out of the proverbial first tome of the trilogy.

[Foxwarrior]

It never gets out of the proverbial first tome of the trilogy.

So what you're saying is, there's a chance for someone to write levels 21-40 and make the game start to get wild? I'm down for doing it, if you've got the dosh.