No, I don't care that 'it's more book keeping'; when 5e has kineticists, then we can talk.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I don't love Pathfinder's "a class for everything" design, but I think I like 5e's "barely any choices to make" less.
I recently came to understand that 5e's shallowness is a strength. It's hard to make a bad character in 5e. But it's also hard to make a mechanically strong one. There just aren't enough choices to make. But that's really good for a lot of players who aren't going to develop any system mastery, and many of them frankly don't want to. They just want to sit down and play, and don't want to worry about "I need 13 Dex so I can take combat reflexes so I can take improved feint at 5th level" or whatever.
I dunno. When I was reading through PF2e, at a certain point it clicked for me that a lot of the rules actually make it easier to play a character by ear.
Take feats. There are tons, of different kinds, with different levels, sometimes with prerequisites. It seems like a lot of rules overhead, but that also means that you're not picking from the whole list every time you get one. If a player doesn't want to make a ton of choices, they can just pick one of the highest level feats they qualify for and have a pretty decent build. Maybe not optimized, but if they don't want to dig into the nitty gritty, that wasn't a priority anyway.
Plus, if a player wants to change their mind, the rules explicitly say you can swap things around. I know that works in 5e anyway by DM fiat, but still, it's nice to have a "don't worry too much" clause written in the books.
Ultimately a matter of personal preference, of course. I just think PF2e actually scales pretty well with player investment in the system, whether someone's really into character builds or just wants to follow some steps and get into the action.
I just wish pf2e wasn't so scared of certain things, I miss my melee monster alchemists