I describe its weakest elements as design cowardice. A palpable, almost despicable timidity to make anything "too powerful", which more often than not kneecaps class design & creates huge gulfs in quality and level of creativity between most core options & classes/features designed w/ low-cowardice. - ThreadSky

mataramg.itch.io • 33 days ago

I describe its weakest elements as design cowardice. A palpable, almost despicable timidity to make anything "too powerful", which more often than not kneecaps class design & creates huge gulfs in quality and level of creativity between most core options & classes/features designed w/ low-cowardice.

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mataramg.itch.io•33 days ago

This timidity is most despicable to me because it does not help the game achieve balance, it just makes things bland or uninteresting, or fail to achieve the degree of satisfying Class Fantasy they could do.

Cleric is an insurmountable healer. No other class comes close to touching Divine Font.

mataramg.itch.io•33 days ago

The game has like 27 classes now. If the game had, like, 8 classes and they really wanted one of them to be "The Best Healer by a Huge Margin, But Others Can Be Okay Off-Healers", that would be okayish. But it's just insane to me how no one has a feature that comes close to 5 bonus maxed-out heals.

mataramg.itch.io•33 days ago

Tbc, I don't think Cleric is overpowered. Every other healer is underpowered. They had a good idea, gave Cleric a huge well of bonus healing, then decided no one else should ever have anything remotely like that. It's not just the best healer, it's the best class at fulfilling its role, period.

mataramg.itch.io•33 days ago

This is just a keystone, btw, it's one particularly heinous bugbear (ha-ha) that really typifies my general issue with *most* PF2e player-side design work.

The one I'm actually kinda mad about is Focus Points. A fantastic hook to hang all kinds of design on, almost never used to its potential.

binarystar.games•33 days ago

Legitimately when I was writing 36W one of my first priorities was absolutely stealing Focus Points because that's the one really good fucking idea they had that they just didn't go anywhere with.

thedevteam.itch.io•33 days ago

I think Pathfinder 2e is a system 100% meant to be used with adventures and the balancing makes most sense around that, in good ways and bad.

I’m sure the system is wonderful to write for, but its constraints sometimes feel arbitrary outside of that mindset.

tabletopcrow.bsky.social•33 days ago

This is incredibly on point. At every level I feel like I'm so close to making the different pieces I'm working with do something really cool, but no matter how much I move them around or test out different ideas, it never quite comes together.

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