RPGMemes

Pf2e is very well made in that optimisation generally adds up to a few points of damage difference in a white room, while good tactics on the battlefield can make for literally hundreds of points of damage difference. It really frees you up to take feats because you think they'll be interesting or add to your character, instead of being pigeonholed by optimal choices.

I just wish pf2e wasn't so scared of certain things, I miss my melee monster alchemists

More choices could allow you to make a mechanically strong character even with bounded accuracy. You could, off the top of my head, do more with the advantage system. It's real close to being a dice pool system, so you could just give that a nudge. You could give players choices that result in "roll X times and take the best result" to make them more effective without breaking the bounds. Elven Accuracy already sets precedent for this.

You could also do more with action economy. Have choices that result in extra reactions. Have choices that give players legendary actions.

You could tinker with damage, because that's not constrained by bounded accuracy. Give more options to change damage types, to exploit weaknesses, or just "reroll and take better"

Just off the top of my head. There's a lot of ways to increase character power and competence without giving bigger bonuses to the d20 check.

However, I think they want to keep the game very simple because a lot of players aren't, well, very good at rules.

Oh I 100% believe that the majority of D&D 5e players would be happier with a different game. For many different reasons. Some because they want more crunch, some because they want less. Some because they don't actually want to play a resource management dungeon crawl game at all. I mean, just look at how many players do one-fight-per-rest, and how many people cram social conflict into D&D despite the threadbare rules for it.

Unfortunately, D&D is such a big brand it just sucks all the air out of the room. Other games don't have the community or branding.

I mean, there's Pathfinder, but that's kind of the blues brothers "we've got both kinds of music: country and western" situation. It's very similar to D&D. I guess the next biggest is Vampire? And then way down at the end of the long tail there's like Fate, Gurps, shadowrun. I guess PbtA and Blades games are gaining some currency lately, too.

The differences between a weak and strong character in 5e are pretty small.

The core resolution is 1d20+stuff. The random factor is the biggest factor. A fighter who has 14 strength will roll 1d20+2. An "optimized" fighter at 16 will roll 1d20+3. That is a tiny difference. The die roll is a bigger factor than your stats and other choices you made. Even at higher levels, the guy who went 14 str 14 int and took the 'actor' feat on their fighter for fun instead of a strength ASI isn't really that far behind. They'll still hit a good amount of the time, especially because the target numbers are constrained pretty tightly via Bounded Accuracy. A casual player probably won't even realize their character would have hit on that 12 if it had been built "better".

So if you don't max out your main stat you'll possibly have a "bad" character as far as 5e optimization goes, but that doesn't go very far. The actual difference is tiny.

Conversely, there's not really a lot of ways to make a character more effective. 3e had Feats as the main way to differentiate your character, but those are sparse in 5e. Like if you want to make a rogue that's better at sneak attacks, there's not really a mechanism there beyond "level up". In 3e, for example, there were more feats and also prestige classes. You could prestige into Assassin for death attacks, or Shadowdancer for hide-in-plain-sight, or whatever. 5e has multiclassing, but that's often a huge opportunity cost compared to prestige classes.

Many characters on leveling up in 5e don't receive many choices. Some levels have zero choices. Rogue, for example, has no choices to make at all for 2nd, 5th, and 7th level. 6th lets you pick where to put expertise, which is a pretty small choice.

5e is legit a great casual system to just sit down and go. i do not mean this in a bad way - it’s a great introductory system for casuals or rp’ers who don’t wanna be a stat nerd

Strong disagree that it's actually a great introductory system. It is overflowing with idiosyncratic stuff (such as a 14 being a +2 bonus). It is geared largely towards "resource management combat game", and the further you move from that concept the more it breaks down.

Fate or a PbtA game are probably much better introductions for people who want to play a casual roleplaying game together. Fate IMO is actually closer to how someone who hasn't played RPGs would intuit them working.

However, the simplicity of the system is a strength of it. If it had more choices and depth, some players would bounce off. I don't know if it's possible to make a system that has both depth and appeals to "Bobby doesn't read or remember rules" archetypes.

For the best of both worlds try getting your hands on a copy of The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge 5. Edition for the original German version). On the surface it has a ton of classes but in reality those are just suggested presets on top of a classless system and you can freely mix and match almost anything with very few restrictions.

For some reason TDE hasn’t really taken off internationally but it has been the most popular TTRPG in Germany for over 30 years, beating even D&D. 5th edition is available in at least English and I think some other languages as well. The focus is on a rich fantasy world that has consistently evolved since the 80s and a rule system that is a bit less combat-centric than D&D.

Try Divinity Original Sin 2 (video game from BG3 creators). I wished there was a TTRPG like that

They don't for me, tbh. Part of what was fun about prestige classes for me was that there was multiple ways to get to them. It was something a character, theoretically any character in most cases, could work towards regardless of where they started. Like a Bladesinger may have started as a fighter, a bard, a wizard, or more. It felt like a whole world of character possibilities. Archetypes feel more like a doctor picking their specialty of study, at least to me

My group's been together since highschool and we're in our mid 20's now. Chances of our group falling apart are slim to none luckily.

Oh I'm so lifting this as a house rule for my PF tables.

It finally clicked for me why I love 5e's combat so much (as the only TTRPG I've played - still a newbie!), while other people always criticize it. It's because my DM is awesome and keeps including visual aids, descriptions, and ways to make the combat dynamic such as using the environment either against the players or against the enemies!

I appreciate that kind of stuff when its there. I also really like codified abilities and techniques I can pull off independent of the GM's current narration. I've got a little hedgehog dude in pf2e I'm playing with explicit benefits from doing cool and varied moves in battle. With strong reasons to swap between weapons, taunt, feint, spindash around and generally style on enemies, I find i've always really nice tools to keep combat engaging and to ratchet up the drama and tension from the player's side.

It is oooold. Uses a d100 system. fooking glorious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing