Non-Combat Subsystems in PF2e Come So Close to Being Meaningful (Spirit Bell Games)

[Kichae]

Victory Points systems often feel disconnected from the core game experience. SBG discusses some possible reasons why.

[Kichae]

Including my comment on the video here:

Pathfinder 2e gets hit with the “rules-heavy” label a lot, and I find that that is a term that predispositions people to see a lot of what’s written in the source books as hard-and-fast rules that are specific to the game. Now, I’m by no means going to argue that PF2e is rules light*, but rules-heavy getting thrown around as the antonym of rules-light style gaming introduces something of an unfair and *unhelpful bias.

From where I sit, Pathfinder 2e is a systemic game, rather than a “rules-heavy” one. Aren’t all rules-heavy games systemic in nature? I don’t know, I haven’t played them all, but of those that I have, yes. But some of these games have a thousand bespoke systems that interact poorly; others have a significant number of highly detailed and complicated systems that don’t share DNA; and some have a small number of fairly simple systems that interact well to create complexity at the table.

PF2e sits closer to the latter, without quite reaching the mark.

Here’s the thing that often gets overlooked when people discuss PF2e’s rules, in no small part because so much discussion about the rules boil down to “this is what this particular rule says, the rules mean what they say, and you should follow the rules”. Everyone keeps focusing on the tree bark; they’re several steps away from seeing the forest: The overwhelming majority of “rules” in the various xCore books are just codifying how people have been running d20 games since 3e launched, if not earlier. They’re not novel, and they’re not particular to the game, they’re just written down using systemic language, while guarding against bad-faith rules-lawyering. That’s it. They gave that CHA check everyone rolls while trying to charm someone a name, and included some guidance on how to come up with a DC in a systemic way, and everyone lost their damn mind.

The various Victory Point systems are no different. They’re just clocks. They’re just reputation points. They’re just ways of abstracting away named actions. They’re things GMs have been doing for 25 years now, written up with a little bit of structure and formalism, using a style guide that a lot of the audience finds intimidating or alien. And, unfortunately, the fact that a lot of the stuff that’s hung off of the game’s core pillars (level standardization, 4 degrees of success, DCs from bonuses/no opposed rolls, multi-tiered proficiency, and modular character design) are just codified community tradition means that they don’t always interact meaningfully with the core systems.

It doesn’t help that a significant fraction of the game’s audience really does just seem to be here for combat, though. I mentioned on [SBG’s] Patreon how people complaining about niche skill feats grind my gears because so many of the complaints boil down to “but the designers are supporting somebody else’s play!!!”, and we can say the same thing here, too. It’s just that here, that support kind of boils down to some pocket game modes that haven’t been properly tied into the core.