https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw3UoN6ZWu4
Utkarsh posted this video to his Patreon last week, and I’ve been looking forward to folks’ responses to it since. It’s good stuff! Give it a watch.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the balance mandate in Pathfinder 2e – thoughts and feelings that seem to go against a trend in the discourse around the game. Thoughts that often get me labelled an unquestioning white knight of a fanboy.
I’ve gotten to actually play very little PF2e, as a player. Like 90% of my experience with the game has been as a GM – originally a trepidatious and uneasy GM, unilaterally pulling my table away from 5e after the OGL nonsense a few years ago – so I have to admit that my pain points have been very different from many players.
But I’ve come to identify those players’ pain points not as the system, but as their GMs. At least for the ones who I think have valid frustrations. I’ve come to understand that a significant number (a minority, I hope) of Pathfinder 2e GMs functionally run the game as if they are just a computer code interpreter. Too many people are seeing the robust support the system gives them and, apparently, deciding that they don’t have to do any actual thinking.
“The spell/feat/action does what the spell/feat/action does, no more, no less” is a common thing I see said, as I look on in horror and disappointment, realizing that a lot of my peers in this space – both GMs and players alike – get their fun from bureaucratic middle-managment. And while their fun is valid (as is yours), they seem to think that I should be getting my fun from the same thing, and worse, that pages spent on anyone else’s fun are just “bloat”.
But what came out of this video – or, at least, the comments on the promo post on Reddit – is that a lot of vocal complainers are really just feeling aggrieved because they want to be more powerful than the other creatures at the table, players and enemies alike.
u/Killchrono put together a really good response about the bitter feelings that opened my mind to some folks’ feelings about player-dictated power scaling. Or, rather, the lack of it in the system.
I get that this is a big part of what power-gaming was in 3e (and therefore in PF1), and to an extent what it is in 5e, but I have always found this element of the games to be kind of gauche. I mean, I totally get it from a theorycrafting perspective – I like puzzles, and build optimization is a kind of puzzle – but bringing this kind of thing to an actual live table says a whole lot about someone as a person (assuming, of course, it’s not an explicitly gonzo table). So the fact that the designers decided that Level was going to be the measure of character power in PF2, and that that measure was going to be as accurate as possible has been a huge gift to me. Theory-crafters get to keep their lane, but their monster trucks don’t get to squish my little Honda Civic, as it were.
For a while now, I’ve had this feeling that a lot of complaints about “balance” were coming from a place of players being used to break the level curve, but not being able to be honest with themselves that they are, in practice, playing a character that is 2-3 levels higher than everyone else around them. This is not a popular opinion among those who feel held back by the game’s guardrails, of course, but the hollowness of their push-back has kind of solidified my feelings on the issue.
But I was not at all prepared to see people crawl out of the shadows to say, out and proud, that they resented not being able to be more powerful than others at the table. And, while it was only a handful of people being so brash and mask-off about it all, they came fast, and hard, and kind of all over the place.
To plagiarize myself from elsewhere: I was totally blindsided by some people popping in to say the quiet part loud: that they should be allowed to be the main character if they know the magic cheat codes.
It’s going to take me a little bit to shake that one off.
And here is u/Killchrono’s reply, which I think is must-read:
So there’s a line of thought that’s come to make me realize why a lot of the discussions surrounding PF2e seem so needlessly antagonistic, and a big part of it comes down to a weird quirk and hypocrisy I’ve noticed in discussions about it over the years.
Back before Remaster, there was a tonne of discussion about how the online community about the game is hostile to homebrew and house rules. Obviously there still is, but after the Remaster came out (particularly PC2, where a lot of the more controversial changes were made like the orcale rework), there was a notable shift in tone towards saying things like ‘use the old rules’ and ‘just change it if you don’t like it’ was poo-poo’d.
Now you’d think it would be the people who were ‘enforcing’ the so-called RAW purity who were doing this, or it was just a plain old Goomba Fallacy where the people complaining about the changes weren’t the same as the ones who were complaining about the rules purity…except they were, because even barring the fact I’m a chronically online pedant who knows too many of the regular usernames around here and I recognized a lot of the same ones popping up in those discussions, it was clear it was the people who were already dissatisfied with the game who were making complaints about the changes like the oracle rework, or cantrips or poisons being nerfed, or the mistaken changes to the death rules before they were clarified in errata.
So the line of questioning becomes, why not use the old rules?
Simply put, it was a combination of people who felt fatalistic about being unable to negotiate or change things about the game they perceived they had no power over, and online pedants who were just trying to score one-ups on people who were defending the changes by enforcing an arbitrary Oberoni Fallacy to discuss it in the most RAW-enforced way possible.
Now the latter in this case can be summarily dismissed because that’s the kind of toxic, self-important point-scoring that leads to unproductive discussions, but it’s the former here is what I’m interested in. Changing rules at the table really is an insular decision that should be made within your group. Why does it matter what Reddit thinks? Why do you need Reddit’s permission to discuss that with your GM, let alone feel the need to change the RAW entirely to what you want to get what you want?
Simply put: the GM isn’t letting you under the auspices that they’re sticking to the rules, because clearly Paizo knows better and if the rules are designed that way, that’s the way the game should be run. So the only way to change your table’s experience, is to change the official rules.
Now let’s be clear about something: this train of thought is not entirely unfounded. It’s why people care so much about releases like Remaster or DnD 2024. The RPG zeitgeist has a more direct influence on people’s decision making than the online discourse would have you believe, and most of the time it gives this disproportionate deference to official releases as being the Source of Truth for what the most up to date and polished version of the game is, while completely undermining the wider sentiment that the RPG space is this self-determinate bastion of free thought where you can make the game whatever you want. And there are definitely ‘sheeple GMs’, for lack of a less crass phrase - that go by what the official sentiment is and stick to RAW as rigidly as possible, not allowing house rules, homebrew, 3pp, etc. even going so far as to assume the official designers inherently know better how to design and tune their own game, even if they’ve proven they can’t.
Simultaneously and non-contradictorily, none of this changes the fact that yes, in the end it really is between you and your GM how you decide to handle rules at your own table. Just because the game ‘expects’ something as a baseline, doesn’t mean you have to abide by it.
This comes down to a more important question I also think gets overlooked here: has your GM not thought about this?
Or do you simply disagree with your GM?
This got me thinking about why these sorts of complaints are less prevalent in the more ‘popular’ d20s over the past few decades like 3.5/1e and 5e, and it was discussing a completely different topic related to what you’re discussing here. I’d regularly point out, having overpowered options in 3.5/1e or 5e was no different to comparing the modifiers, DCs, and wider scaling abilities of lower level creatures in PF2e. What the math is more or less exactly the same, what is the breakpoint?
The thing that gets regularly pointed out is that in 3.5/1e (less so 5e since feats and magic items are technically optional rules, but more so in terms of how they’re generally tuned), is that in those systems, that power scale is determined by the player’s available RAW choices, not by the GM adjusting the challenges or going out of band of the expected power band each level to grant it. In PF2e, the maths is so tight and foolproof, the baseline is more or less ‘normal difficulty’ at best. In 3.5/1e and 5e, you can game it so you are superlative to any assumed baselines.
And that’s when it hit me: it’s about being the determiner of the power cap. In 3.5/1e and 5e, it’s very easy for a player running with a sheeple/Abed-type GM who runs perfectly neutrally and says ‘well it’s in the rules so I’ll allow it’ to set their own power caps, because the rules permissively allow it. You can’t do that in PF2e. In PF2e, it is entirely dependent on the GM to be permissive to those power spikes, because the ‘expected baseline’ is a more level power cap.
This results in two kinds of players who are dissatisfied: those who are not being selfish or malicious just used to the mechanical permissiveness of those other systems suddenly feeling stifled, and those who’s need for enjoyment relies on (if not is entirely dependent on) feeling superior to other people at the table.
That’s why a lot of the most hardcore complaints about PF2e are supremely and unnecessarily aggressive and vindictive towards people who like it. The former type are people who think they’ve done nothing wrong, assuming they’ve done nothing wrong, and legitimately don’t see why what they were doing before was a problem. The latter are the exact kinds of problem players PF2e is setting out to stop, so of course they’ll react in the exact way a toxic person reacts when someone puts reasonable boundaries on their behaviour that affects everyone else.