MAP = Multi-attack penalty, I think?

Correct.

Oh, I thought this was somehow about MapReduce

holy shit I hate that this works

I’m sure this means something to someone

And while we’re at it, what’s an Action Compressor?

I mean, there’s a certain kind of MAPs that could be reduced…

In Pathfinder 2e, you have 3 actions to take on a given turn. These might be Stride (to get closer to an enemy), Interact (to draw your weapon), and then Strike (to attack that enemy with that weapon).

An Action Compressor is an action that allows you to do more things for less action cost. Two examples would be Sudden Charge, which allows you to Stride, Stride, then Strike (3 actions) for the cost of 2 actions, or Quick Draw which allows you to Interact and Strike (2 actions) for the cost of 1 action.

Edited, typo

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.

This comes down to the fact that a well balanced game with a lot of options is going to have to do some magic tricks to misdirect you from the fact that they’re only really balancing a handful of major mechanical effects and a lot of minor mechanical effects.

3.x/PF1 treated balance as a nice to have at best (3.0 intentionally included trap options to be more like mtg) but wanted a lot of freedom.

D&d 4e didn’t misdirect you from the balance very well at all. This meant they were able ro give you a ton of well balanced options that didn’t feel different enough for many people

5e cut down the options and left some slack on the balance in an attempt to create something that’s mostly balanced but doesn’t feel samey.

PF2 uses misdirection to try to get good balance with a ton of options without reducing classes down to flavor+role with at will, encounter, and daily powers like 4e

My wife will rant about this a lot lol

I feel like this misses the importance of space in PF2E. There’s a lot to be said for using good positioning during an encounter, unlike a lot of other RPGs where you get one big central clusterfuck for most fights.

Unless you want to call striding away from an enemy an inverse action compressor…

I spent embarrassingly long time thinking this was some programming joke I didn’t understand

I think the Venn diagram of non-D&D TTRPG players and programmers is a circle.