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Pathfinder vs linux (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by eerongal@ttrpg.network to c/rpgmemes@ttrpg.network

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[–] groet@feddit.de 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Dnd5e leaves to many things up to the gm, like magic items and encounter balancing. CR is notoriously inaccurate and running level appropriate fights can easily end up as unwinnable deadly or just a trivial steamroll. Especially once higher lvl magic comes into play with save or suck spells (cough polymorph cough). Yes legendary resistance can fix that, but that is not the system being stable, it is the system giving you tools to fix its unstableness. And even then, the fight ends after X presses of the "I win" button instead of one.

While there are a lot worse systems than dnd5e, when comparing it to pf2e it is objectively the system with more holes. No doubt, partly because pf2e could learn from dnds mistakes and is not produced by a company trying to milk its customers for every cent.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

D&D leaves a lot up to the GM to fill in that Pathfinder doesn't, but it's mostly in the subsystems. Pathfinder has all of the subsystems, to the point where many fans don't accept that you can swap them out for other ideas that might work better for their table.

But 5e doesn't leave core systems up to the GM. Magic items and encounter balancing are there as intended. They just intended magic items to be lame and bullshit, and encounters to be balanced around core rules.

But everyone plays with variant rules, classes are not balanced, or even particularly well thought out, and bounded accuracy breaks down completely around 10th level, because it's a half baked mechanic that stinks of "well, what if we didn't even try any more?"

The issue isn't that WotC leaves everything up to the GMs, it's that GMs have had to take everything on because they produced a broken game and released it to an audience that wanted to love it anyway, because it seemed like a mea culpa after everyone shat all over 4e.