Peasant Railgun

I think of a spectrum of RPG participants. At one end you have the mini-maxers, who want to squeeze every advantage possible out of the rules, and at the other end you have the story tellers, for whom the rules are a just framework to hang a story on. I've always been at the story teller end and while I appreciate the ingenuity in the peasant railgun I'm not very interested in playing a game where it features. If I'm going for slapstick I'd rather have a setting that explicitly encourages and handles it (e.g. Paranoia). OTOH, navigating different player desires is one of the big challenges of RPGs, and if people at the table really want to play a certain I think it has be allowed to an extent.

I'd argue in some ways it's a triangle, with RAW vs RAI being the third point. Someone can minmax either under RAW/taken to the extreme, or under RAI or they can do silly things under RAI or RAW/home brewed.

That's what session 0 is for.

Not exactly tabletop, but this is the issue I have with every Pathfinder build I see for Wrath of the Righteous. Everyone dips into these nonsensical combinations to get a better armor rating, etc. So then you get a Paladin that decided to become a witch for part of the campaign for “reasons”. You can roleplay something, sure, but it’s rather forced by the numbers.

It’s because those online guides are only relevant for people playing on unfair, yet those guides never/rarely mention that. Even on core I can do pure RP builds (with TB combat at least), all that minmaxing is only really important for the "I’d rather play a puzzle" difficulty.

I've only played a little bit of Pathfinder 2e, but it seems like a game explicitly aimed at min-maxers. There are so many various conditions, so many ways things interact, so many ways to build a character badly that you basically have to be a munchkin to build something playable.

If you're like noelwelsh or me, and prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.

(And better than D&D of course, but everyone knows how to play D&D. :/)

That's very funny, because I think it's the opposite. There's a ton of interactions, but those (in my view) are to encourage group tactics. Individual characters can definitely be built wrong, but so long as you have at least a +3 in your class's key attribute the difference in power between a vibes-based player and a hyperoptimizer isn't all that large. Feats in Pf2e mainly add versatility instead of power. Lots of first edition players hate it for that reason (first edition seems to be the hyperoptimizer's dream game).

> [If you] prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.

That's true in the sense that Pathfinder has far less support for the more modern style narrative-first play and most of its rules focus on tactics. I dislike the premise that story and tactics are opposing goals, though; in my view they're two separate goals a game may or may not have. Pathfinder 2e has both, though its story-support is very traditional. If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver, and it also features significant amounts of tactical combat. If you're just not into the combat, then there are totally far better games. If you like the modern narrative-first game approach to story, then it's also not the best. But I absolutely like storytelling and roleplaying, and I enjoy Pf2e quite a lot.

> If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver

That's how I feel about D&D - but only in the hands of a decently skilled DM. I think other games provide a lot more tools & framework for the storytelling aspect.

And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.

> And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.

It's very much about familiarity. I've played quite a lot of both (and D&D 3.5 and PF1 before them).

It's not wrong that PF2E has a harder and more demanding focus on mechanics and tactics, especially teamwork, which is for both better and worse. D&D5E doesn't just allow for the DM to define more outcomes through narrative-focused hand-waving, it _requires_ it by lacking rules or guidance and having imbalanced granularity in some rules or builds over others. PF2E is more demanding in both design and practice, but in exchange provides more tools out of the box that a GM doesn't need to invent on the fly when players invest time and effort into tactical cooperative play. 5E has the shallower difficulty curve, but experienced 5E players who get past 2E's steeper curve find it has a higher ceiling... _if_ combat is a heavy focus.

I had a rather contentious argument last year with a fellow freelance designer when I tried to suggest that PF2E is a roleplaying game. There's a significant cohort of PF2E players who play it almost exclusively for its combat. To me, that was telling in ways that I think the combat advocate didn't intend. Part of the allergy to D&D4E that players of D&D3E and earlier had when it came out was its narrowing of focus to combat. PF2E is likewise (and borderline ironically) a response to D&D5E's reduced focus on combat balance.

To put it more generally, adept improvisational DMs with players who don't care as much about combat balance or fidelity are better served by D&D5E (or a wide array of TTRPGs with even less focus on simulation in tactical combat over giving players difficult choices, like Powered by the Apocalypse games, Mork Borg and its OSR-adjacent or -derived family of short-lived character gantlets, or narrative playgrounds like Bastionland).

GMs who struggle to create fair mechanics for unusual circumstances mid-game and players who demand greater balance and fidelity in combat are better served by PF2E (or a smaller but still robust field of TTRPGs with more streamlined _or_ more extensive mechanics with similar goals, like 13th Age, the Warhammer family of games, or even D&D4E.)

Pathfinder 1e had so many books and character options for broken builds that my table came up with this rule: if you can't hold the books your character needs in one hand for a minute, you can't play that character. Gives me warm and fuzzy memories :D

Man that's mean for old Shadowrun. Base rulebook is huge, and then you have like 4 additional ones - because it's so old that stuff was not incorporated yet.

But I guess first of all the whole party uses the same 5 books and if we'd play a current version then just the base rule book would be ok.

> I think of a spectrum of RPG participants. At one end you have the mini-maxers, who want to squeeze every advantage possible out of the rules, and at the other end you have the story tellers, for whom the rules are a just framework to hang a story on.

I dunno, I've always been both? I've done damage output analysis in spreadsheets to choose the best feats or spells; and the DM was always surprised at how my different skill point bonuses added up to make massively improbable things probable. But I always thought massively improbable was the point of the game; and he always managed to turn it into a good story. I never would have suggested a peasant railgun, that's just kind of silly.

Sadly Owlcat outright seems to encourage that since many encounters in the game have such bizarrely min/maxed characters as well and even on normal difficulty you can get softlocked if you didn't make sure to get a spread of important spells/feats.

My biggest issue with their games really - they give you so many options so build characters and then take them away with combat design.