Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2025

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  • No, it’s also better if you want an internally consistent system built on top of sensible principles. Or a system with reliable baseline for power scaling. Or if you want to invite an optimizer or a newbie to your table.

    It’s not a “tactical combat RPG”. That’s a wild misconception propagated by both tactical combat fans and people who have looked over the hedge and been scared away by somethings being different. It is, instead, a well crafted systemic RPG, designed with reliability at its centre.

    Reliability enables tactical combat, which is why TC fans flocked to the system, but it enables a hell of a lot more, too.

    It’s also better if you want a steady stream of new content without paying Hasbro or relying on randos.


  • See, I don’t think that 20 does make up for that 1, any more than your 20 on an attack roll lets me roll damage on my 1.

    The party isn’t some cohesive, singular unit that catches or avoids attention based on some average of the total behaviour. It’s instead a cloud of actors that are only as strong as its weakest member.

    Like, if they were 4 kids sneaking cookies from the cookie jar, and the youngest knocked the jar off the counter, it really doesn’t matter how quiet the other 3 were, the shattering of the jar is going to get them all caught.



  • No, you’re not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It’s just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.

    Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It’s a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don’t like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.

    So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They’ll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.



  • Aye. And there are things the player can do that lets them take 2 attacks for one action, but you get a normal Multiple-Attack-Penalty progression between each attack, and there are things that let them take 2 attacks for 2 actions – as would be normal – but which do not progress the MAP until after the second attack is done. And there are a lot of each. Or rather, there’s functionally 1 of each, but it’s often named different things for different classes.

    The single-action variety can be seen, in-world, as being very fast, taking multiple individual attacks in very quick succession, like with Flurry of Blows. The two-action variety can be seen as hitting someone with two different weapons at the same time, as with Double Slice.

    It does bother me that both let/make you pool your damage for dealing with resistances/weaknesses. Given the choice, I’d probably have the two-action varieties pool damage, and the single-action ones count as multiple instances. But nobody asked me.









  • Bingo. Especially when what they’ve done to trigger the comments telllimf them to “play something else” is ask how to extend the thing they already like, or to replace some subsystem that is so clealy not core to the game.

    But with 5e, there are also just so many third party releases that you can also replace core systems, like magic, with little difficulty, and people know it.

    They don’t want to play something else. They’re not ready to try something else. They want to keep their dragon ampersand and their dis/advantage rolls, and telling them they’re doing something wrong by holding on to that isn’t convincing. It just communicates that other games are played by fucking assholes with boundary issues.





  • alexanderthedead@lemmy.world said in A lesson so many need to learn: > Anyone who wants to make the claim that the system is bad will have bang their subjective arguments against the steel wall that is its popularity.

    Yes, but this is a thing that people want to do. They want to try and dent that popularity, and they want to shift some of it towards their own preferences. It doesn’t matter that it’s a subjective opinion on what is better or what is bad, it doesn’t feel subjective to the person interjecting.

    They believe their preferred game is better, they probably have had this discussion numerous times with people who have ignored them or chewed them out for trying to evangelize, and they are infinitely frustrated that others won’t see the light.

    People who leave popular things behind for niche things often just have this habit of having to bury the thing they left behind. It can’t be good. The new thing is better, but the new thing is better both because it is better, and also because the old thing was just objectively bad.

    People do this with a lot of things. TV shows, ice cream flavours, toys they used to play with as kids. There’s a sense of shame attached to having liked the old thing, not just a sense of joy of having found the new one. It’s one of the reasons the people they evangelize to get so defensive: They can sense that they are being judged.