In other words, what’s an official rule or interaction between different rules in Pathfinder 2e that you think is dumb?
The mechanical importance of the pantheon. My campaign is based off of Hyrule and the three goddesses. The party’s Champion isn’t worshipping any god, my finacee’s Oracle is a priestess of all three, collectively, and I don’t have the time of day for the restrictions imposed by having domains limited to certain gods.
Divine players can choose whichever domains they want, as far as I care.
I’m also not a purist of tracking hands, or even bulk. Having to spend actions to grab things out of your backpack is a straight up feel bad for most players.
But I don’t know that I consider either of these “dumb”, though. They’re just not for every table.
What I do find dumb is the attitude that seems to permeate r/ that the published rules are somehow something more than recommendations from the design team.
The rules are just what the designers believed worked best with the system’s core features, given their restraints (time, pages, money). They’re not some unerring holynl text, and one table trying some perhaps unbalanced homebrew doesn’t affect anyone not sitting at it.
The crafting rules. You spend at least 4 days to make an item for the same price you could have bought it for.
Oh, you can spend additional time to get the cost down to half, with the same rules as earn income? Well, you could also earn income the whole time, just buy the item and still have more money left than if you made it yourself.
I get that the rules are that way to prevent players from taking item balancing completely out of the GMs control with huge discounts. But it just feels bad for a player to invest into crafting only to be “allowed” to waste 4 extra days to essentially buy an item.
It tends to make more sense in mid-to-low magic campaigns where the item you want might not be readily available, but 5e’s rules around magic items are notoriously underbaked. The reason they gave is that 5e is built around not needing magic items, but I’ve never played a game that doesn’t use them.
Man, I don’t think any system has ever really gotten crafting right. Certainly not any D&D-like system, anyway.
In PF2e, everything you said is correct, but then on top of that, there’s also the fact that you can only make something if you have the recipe anyway (which you in many cases might have to buy, or which might take the place of some other more immediately valuable treasure your GM might choose to give you), which essentially restricts you to only being able to make things your GM has specifically decided they want you to be able to make.
The alt crafting rules from Pathfinder Unchained ruled. No one wanted to use them because they were so involved, but they were thematic, allowed different player builds to shine, and had the possibility to be faster and/or cheaper, if you got lucky.
Honestly, I think the crafting times are a bit much, but…
Oh, you can spend additional time to get the cost down to half, with the same rules as earn income? Well, you could also earn income the whole time, just buy the item and still have more money left than if you made it yourself.
… is just the way that, you know, economies work. It really is often more efficient to buy something than it is to make it.
It really is often more efficient to buy something than it is to make it
Not if you’re someone specialised in producing that thing. By definition, for a person specialised, it must be more efficient to produce than what they sell it for.
For a player who wants to craft things and has the relevant skill trained, part of the fantasy of the game is that they should be that person specialised in producing things, just like a player trained in thievery expects they should be able to pickpocket.
I recently handwaved the exact number of in-game days needed to retrain a feat because the player was feeling frustrated and had only used that feat maybe once in the entire campaign
The whole downtime rules seem really weird to me. I like the fact that they exist, in theory, but they’re just so different from how I’ve always played I couldn’t see myself use them.
I, and my players, tend to like actually role-playing what their characters do. Not just saying “I’m gonna schmooze” and rolling a die to see the result.
But also, I’ve never had large amounts of dedicated downtime. I play large campaigns. The PCs have shit to do, and the BBEG isn’t gonna wait around for a month while they craft.
The downtime rules seem like they’re made for a very old-school type of play where you go out and raid a dungeon and head back to town until you next decide to raid a dungeon, without as much of an overarching plot. And that’s just not how I’ve ever played.
I like PF2’s downtime stuff, but I don’t like how many activities have a minimum duration of >2 days. In my experience, neither players nor the adventure will tolerate that much time spent not adventuring.
I, and my players, tend to like actually role-playing what their characters do. Not just saying “I’m gonna schmooze” and rolling a die to see the result.
I see people talk about running downtime like this,and exploration like this, too, and I scratch my head.
It’s always been pretty clear to me that these sections of the book are for the GM, to give them tools to consistently adjudicate player choices, not to give players a value menu to order from
So, you do your roleplay, the GM sees what you’re doing and maps it on to some Activity, and the Activity tells them how to decide how effective you were, mechanically.
Like, if a player ever told me that they were going to “use Avoid Notice”, I’d just tilt my head at them and ask them again what their character was doing, and that I’ll figure out what that means, mechanically. Because maybe they don’t get to Avoid Notice because they’ve tailed for the last 20 miles by someone they themselves didn’t notice.
This was maybe one of the bigger downsides to having both player and GM facing material in the same book, I think.
The way it’s presented in the Core Rulebook pretty strongly implies to me that it is meant to be used that way by players. But I agree, regardless of what the designers intended, a better way to do it is for the GM to make a ruling based on the players’ descriptive actions.
The problem for me is that actually, even if you do that, the downtime rules aren’t very useful. Downtime activities have specific requirements for time spent to count as that activity, usually measured in days. But I’ve never had a situation where I have multiple days of downtime. My players and I don’t say “I want to spend 2 days making money by sneaking into places and robbing them”. More normal would be for the rogue to describe themselves sneaking into one specific house and asking what they find. The way they describe what actions they want to do is on the order of something that lasts a couple of minutes at a time. It’s just far more fine-grained than the Activities listed in the Downtime section of the CRB is designed for.
I specifically ignore the “familiars cannot activate items” clarification. If a monkey can pull out a scroll from your case and put it in your hand, it can absolutely pull out a potion and feed it to you, too.
Literally everything that Jeremy Crawford said on Twitter. His ruling embody corporate ideology double speak and PR statements.
(Psst. Check which community you’re in!)
But yeah, as a former 5e player, a lot of Crawford’s rulings were dumb af. Dragon’s breath can’t be twinned because the person can use it to attack multiple targets? Huh? That’s not the spell itself.
Oh my bad. I missed it when I saw the post.
