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ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 months agoI’ve played Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Planescape: Torment on 2nd edition rules. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 on 5th edition rules and started playing tabletop 5th edition. I’ve played Pillars of Eternity 1, as I understand it largely inspired by 3.5 edition rules, and the first 10 hours of Pillars of Eternity 2, which I assume is now iterating on its own offshoot. I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. If that’s the case, and it’s in the ballpark of what Pillars of Eternity 1 is, I’ll take 5th edition any day of the week, but if you’d like to explain to me briefly why I might be wrong, I’m listening. Compared to how the 2e games and the Pillars games handle spells of different levels, 5e’s upcasting seems like a godsend, for instance.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
One if the best changes for Pathfinder 2E is how actions work. D&D 5e has its a weird system of movement, action, bonus action, and then abilities that can add actions, but you can only cast one spell per turn regardless of if you have actions to use, except in some situations, and you can only use actions for some things sometimes, sometimes only once per turn. It’s just filled with exceptions because that’s not the original design intent but it’s tons of patches to make things function halfway decently.
Pathfinder 2E you have three actions per turn. Those can be used for anything always without exception. Every ability has a cost. For example moving is 1 action and can be done multiple times per turn, which makes things that displace enemies useful as they have to consume actions to get back into melee. Some spells may cost multiple actions, some very large ones can even require channeling multiple actions over several turns. It’s a very simple and intuitive system and you don’t need to remember thousands of exceptions like D&D5e.
Almost everything in Pathfinder 2E works like this. Things may be more complex to start with (which allows for choice), but you don’t need to remember tons of exceptions, so in total it’s simpler.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It doesn’t feel like a bunch of exceptions to me. It feels like you have a bonus action that’s basically always class-related, and everything else is an action. What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of. I don’t really find 5e to be unintuitive thus far such that I’m looking for another system to remedy it, I guess.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
The issue in D&D5e is that they are dependent on a bunch of other circumstances. In Pathfinder 2e it’s only dependent on if you have enough actions. It’s clearly listed how many actions anything you can do takes.
For example, here’s magic missile. The “Cast:” is the action cost. The squares are how many it takes. It can take anywhere between one to all three of your turn. Each action spent is another missile. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already cast a spell that turn or done anything else. As long as you have the actions available you can spend them on anything you want.
I started playing TTRPGs on Pathfinder 1e, but the vast majority of what I played is D&D5e. I never had too much issue with it, because I never saw a better option, but after seeing how Pathfinder 2e works it’s so much cleaner. Learning about how the action system came to be in 5e it’s pretty clear it wasn’t meant to be the way it is today. Because of that there’s stipulations to almost everything. I didn’t notice the issues until I was made aware of them, then you see them everywhere. For example, the Critical Role cast constantly fuck things up despite having played the game professionally for however many years it’s been now. If the rules were intuitive that wouldn’t happen, at least not as often.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’m a recent convert to Critical Role as well, and even moments ago, I witnessed one of those fuck-ups (I’m still a long ways from catching up on campaign 3, so it’s an old episode), but I can’t seem to recall it having much to do with what’s an action or not an action and instead more about what the range of a thing is or what type of creature it can be cast on. I don’t know if there’s some equivalent solution to that in Pathfinder, but that would strike me as a harder problem to solve via systems changes to make more intuitive.
Another thing I respect about what 5e does compared to other D&D or adjacent games I listed above: they rebalanced the hell out of magic. In those other games, someone casts a spell that paralyzes your entire party with an AoE or massive cone, and you just have to watch with no recourse as everyone dies. In 5e, the equivalent spell has a finite number of targets, they scale intuitively with spell level by adding one extra target per level, and if it has an ongoing effect, it would require concentration so the person can’t steamroll by casting a bunch of them concurrently. Again, I haven’t played Pathfinder, so I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible), but 5e isn’t the first RPG system I’ve played. It solved tons of problems with ones that I’ve played before. Advantage rolls another D20. Upcasting adds another die or another target. You get to move, and you get an action; everything else is an action, but your class gives you bonus action options. Resistances and weaknesses are simple halves and doubles. Armor affects your ability to hit or not, with no extra junk slowing down the calculations. That sort of thing. They’re all very smart changes. If I was going to nitpick things about 5e, it would be like how your ability scores are all out of 20, but your modifiers are every other level; and that’s something I seem to recall hearing through the grapevine that Pathfinder 2e does address, correct me if I’m wrong.