Spend almost any amount of time below the fold of the Internet and you’re likely to come across someone smugly repeating their junior high grammar lessons in front of the whole of humanity. They’re telling someone they shouldn’t’ve used “should of”, that it’s not OK to use “its”, and that they’re nauseated by people claiming to feel nauseous. Or that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, even!
Large scale social media tends towards competitive spaces, where participants are jockeying for likes, shares, up-votes, or some other form of passive micro-validation just in order to get eyeballs on what they have to say and to feel heard. Ironically, this tends to limit what someone can say, boiling a discussion down to a few choice strategies for gaining social approval.
One of these strategies is flexing their intelligence by being technically correct, something that leads to engage in prescriptive rhetoric, like such as over-correcting someone’s grammar, even when everyone around understood what the original speaker was trying to say.
TTRPG discussion tends towards prescriptivism as a mater of course, since rule sets are, well, prescriptions for playing the game. Rules also – generally speaking at least – have a singularly defined intent behind their existence, which while sometimes debatable, are not usually meant to be open to interpretation. Or, at least, this is the common conceit of spaces dedicated to discussing said rules. As a “crunchy” rule set with a specific focus on balance – and therefore on math and numerics – Pathfinder Second Edition discussions are especially prone to this kind of thing.
I mean, it makes sense, right? The game has a lot of rules! Clearly it wants to be viewed through a prescriptivist, mechanics-first lens!
Right?
But what if it doesn’t?
What if the more natural lens to view the game through is not the one that low-key paints it out to be an overly-needy and insufferable pedant? What if, instead, the designers knew they were making an imagination game built for co-operative storytelling, and not just Lord of the Rings X-COM with an atrocious frame rate? How might we interpret the the rules then?
While the prescriptive view of the rules leads to a mechanics-first understanding of the game, a descriptive view supports a fiction-first one, and smooths over a lot of the rough edges that new players who are more accustomed to a less rigid form of play experience when trying out the game for the first time. For instance, many players coming from 3.5 or 5e take issue with the game’s ‘Action’ framework, where every thing that characters do in the game is filtered through pre-defined Actions such as Strike, Trip, Shove, Sense Motive, Seek, Take Cover, etc. They come across the fairly long list of basic Actions and see them as meaning that the game is finicky, and even demanding. Some even end up feeling that players are confined to only do things that are ‘pre-approved’ by the list.
You know, because game rules are ‘supposed’ to tell you what players are supposed to, or allowed to, do.
The descriptive interpretation of Basic Actions, though, is that they are describing typical play, and act as examples to the GM about how to handle rulings for the most common or useful cases, providing a framework for improvising actions in the process. Anyone familiar with other d20 fantasy games should quickly recognize that most Actions are just descriptions of skill checks, anyway, sometimes with a little rider or critical success/failure effect.
The prescriptive, mechanics-first lens, then, has this tendency to make play sound very clinical, e.g.:
Player 1: “I use the Stride Action to approach the enemy, the Trip Action, and the Strike Action with my longsword.”
Player 2: I use the Cast a Spell Activity to cast Fireball, and then use the Cast a Spell Activity to cast Shield.
even though this would sound totally bizarre and foreign to even most tactically invested tables. The fiction-first approach, though, sounds more natural (and also doesn’t require the player to remember the specific names of the various Actions):
Player 1: “I charge the enemy, trying to knock him to the ground before attacking with my longsword!”
Player 2: I cast Fireball, and then… umm… cast Shield.
Here, it’s up to the GM to decide what “knocking the enemy to the ground” means, but the most common ruling for this is going to end up being “roll Athletics against Reflex” or “roll Athletics against Fortitude”. The game defines Trip by the former, and Reflex is, in fact, the save that makes the most sense if you’re trying to describe the reality of getting knocked off your feet – keeping yourself on your feet is usually more a feat of dexterity than it is of whatever “constitution” is!
“But what if the GM picks Fortitude, like a stupid, uneducated philistine?," I hear you ask. "Doesn’t that break the tactical element of the game?” And yes, it kind of does! It would buff the defences of low Ref monsters, potentially considerably. If your table is concerned about maintaining good tactical hygiene, it’s important for GMs to either remember that Trip is Ref and Shove is Fort, or have a strong enough understanding of hand-to-hand combat to intuitively know what is a DEX-based save and what is a CON-based one. But if your table isn’t concerned about tactical hygiene?
Then it probably doesn’t matter.
And if your table is concerned about it, but it’s somebody else’s table that’s running it that way, it definitely doesn’t matter to you.
I know this all sounds pretty pedantic so far. Really, what’s the big difference between being more formal and stiff with describing your turn vs being more fluid and narrative? At the end of the day, the math is all the same, and the game ends up playing the same way, right?
Well, things start to diverge pretty quickly once you start pointing your descriptive lens at various elements of the game.
The Game Expects…
It is sometimes shocking how demanding some people believe the game to be. Every time I turn around, it feels like someone is telling a new player or a struggling GM that “the game expects” this, and “the game expects” that, and every time I see it I’m left wondering if people bought very different books than I did, or if the Archives of Nethys are serving up very different pages to me, for it seems like they’re playing a very different game than the one I engage in each week.
“The game expects" is, of course, the catchphrase of prescriptivism.
The most common topics subject to this line of thinking are things like:
All of these statements regularly bring the system into conflict with new players and GMs – particularly those coming from 5e – and, importantly, literally none of them are true. But at this point, they’re all practically dogma to the most vocal parts of the online Pathfinder 2e community.
The descriptive lens on these elements are that these are mostly – the first three, in particular – just signposts, or marked gradations that are useful for reference: If you build an 80 XP encounter, it will present a Moderate threat to a party of 4 who are at full HP; if your encounter has 120 HP, it will use significant party resources, and may even turn deadly, for a party of 4 at full health; etc. If your party is at half their max HP, however, the counters could end up being much more difficult! If you build a 100 XP encounter, it will be more dangerous than an 80 XP fight!
Importantly, you do not need to decide on the difficulty of the encounter before you build it. You can, instead, decide that there’s a Goblin raiding camp over this hill, and it just so happens to have 5 Goblin Commandos, 2 Goblin Pyros, and 20 Goblin Warriors in it, just come back from a successful raid. For a party of 4 Level 3 adventurers, this camp represents a 100 + 40 + 200 = 340 XP encounter, which is more than twice the power budget of an Extreme encounter. As a GM, you know that this camp is a problem for your party.
But the game is about finding solutions to problems, is it not?
The prescriptive lens says that this encounter is illegal – outside the bounds of the rules – since the encounter barometer caps off at 160 XP, but the descriptive lens just says “sounds like the party’s going to get messed up right some good”.
A similar thing plays out if we look at the Treasure by Level table. The prescriptivist view is that players must get 3 Level 1 consumables, 2 Level 2 consumables, 2 permanent items of both Level 1 and Level 2, plus 40 gold in coin and disposable treasure over the span of Level 1. They shall not receive less, and they should not receive more (within reason)! If the GM does not give them their allotted entitlement, then that GM is starving the PCs and depriving their players of the Proper Pathfinder Experience! And they’re just running the game wrong!
But the thing is, this requires GMs to craft encounters that have just the right loot buried in them, or to create environments that have just the right amount of treasure for reasons beyond reasonable explanation. Shouldn’t the environment the players find themselves in dictate how much loot, and of what kind, the players find? Shouldn’t the amount of effort players put into actually looking for loot matter? The descriptivist GM would say so, but the (strawman) prescriptiveist would say that their Level 1 players find 40 gp and some healing potions for robbing a bank, and in the process they might only come across a couple of guards, throwing themselves at them black ninja style.
Through the descriptivist lens, the Treasure by Level table just tells us where the sweet spot in the power curve is. At each level, a certain amount of the player’s power budget is taken up by items and gear, and the Treasure by Level table marks off where the standard is for each level. A player who has significantly less than listed will be less powerful than the ‘Standard’ character of their level, and the one who has significantly more than what’s listed will be more powerful. But being below or above the curve isn’t a problem through this lens, it’s just a description of the current state of the game. If players are under the curve, they may find 80 XP encounters a little harder than the ‘Moderate’ description, and if they’re over it, they’ll find them a little easier.
And that’s OK.
The Prescriptive Lens and Tactical Power Gaming
Things like battle budgets and treasure tables make sense as things people would see as dictated by the game, since they are directly part of the text of the rule books. Even though the game text does not come out and directly use the word “should” when discussing these topics, it’s totally logical that a new GM is going to look at them and say “this is what the game recommends”. And for a new table, these do a huge amount of the heavy lifting with respect to providing predictable combat encounters, which are touted as one of the major selling points of the system.
But where do these ideas around players being ‘expected’ to have full health, or ‘needing’ to have a +4 in their key attribute come from? They’re not found in any of the rule books! At least, not explicitly. And they’re not things that new players or GMs would necessarily intuit from reading the text.
Many argue that the the received wisdom of always having full health is a corollary of the encounter building system, since fights are bigger threats than advertised if players are significantly lacking in resources. For some reason, however, the only resource people seem to insist that players should not be lacking is HP, even though the designers will specifically call out Spell Slots, Focus Points, and even consumables when discussing the topic. The idea that player are entitled to full spell slots, free potions, or a flight of Alchemist’s Fire just never seems to come up.
The real clue is in the rhetoric around the key ability modifier. Again, not something that comes up anywhere in the system’s library, the received wisdom to maximize this value comes from the fact that it optimizes damage. And if you spend time observing the community’s attitudes towards sub-optimal play, things really start to snap into focus.
The majority of online discussions about Pathfinder 2e are quietly, almost secretly, power gaming or optimization discussions, regardless of whether the people initiating the discussion are seeking optimization advice. Some fans have even argued that the expectation of optimization is baked into the game’s core, built on top of the assumption that the game is really a tactical combat game wearing the skin of a roleplaying game. Power gamers and tactical combat game fans both love rigid systems and predictable math, and Pathfinder 2e provides plenty of the latter. The game can easily and much more reliably present what these groups are looking for than many other systems out there, especially if they also want in on that d20 fantasy lifestyle. But the idea that it’s a roleplaying game second?
This is a thesis that I, personally, vigorously and wholeheartedly reject.
The game can be a rigid, tactical power game, if that’s how you want to utilize the the tools in its toolbox. And if it is, more power to you. I’m really quite incredibly glad the game can be played in that way, both because I like a big tent, and also because I like the occasional tactical combat game (Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is by far my favourite game I got from Ubisoft during my tenure with the company), but it can also be a lot of other things, depending on how you utilize those tools.
Because that’s what the rules are: Tools to help you craft a gaming experience tailored to your table. And these tools work just as well, and make just as much sense – if not more – if viewed through a descriptive, fiction-first lens. And playing the game in a fiction-first way quickly highlights that Pathfinder 2e is a very flexible, kitchen-sink fantasy RPG that is just as good at being a collective storytelling engine as it is at being a crunchy, mechanics-first tactical sword and sorcery game.
It doesn’t get nearly as much credit or attention for this as it deserves.
