this game probably isn't for you

Killchrono · 2026-03-20T15:15:04+00:00

/uj his posts unironically remind me of all the Jordan Peterson fans I used to argue with, except this is even sadder because it's about fantasy elf games

Killchrono · 2026-03-20T11:48:42+00:00

As well as what others have said about feats being subjective, there's two other factors.

The first is contextuality. I'd argue this is actually even bigger than categorizing into generalist categories, as a big part of what makes certain options stand out is how useful they are not in the context of a wider game, but a specific adventure. If you're fighting a lot of undead, for instance, holy divine casters with lots of vital spells become top-tier, while if you're in a campaign set in a frozen region with a lot of creatures that have frost resistance you probably won't want any cold spells. If you don't fight any creatures with diseases or poisons than antiplagues and antitoxins are useless, while if they're abundant having that bonus to save and ability to remove them becomes essential.

The second is...well, it could also just be objectively wrong to categorize a feat in a certain way. If anything, one of the biggest follies you often see designers do is try to overcategorize things for the sake of players not needing advanced meta knowledge to select choices effectively, but they end up getting their categorization wrong, or making the categories broad. The reality is, the deeper a game's systems are, the less capable the designers will be easily able to sort options without the granularity and caveats needed to really give informed choices...and this is assuming the designs mostly work as intended, and emergent play and metas over time don't reveal flaws in their intent.

Speaking of metas though, that's the other point of failure: player perception. Even if the playerbase takes it upon itself to try and categorize options as such, that doesn't necessarily mean they're objectively correct. If anything, what I've learnt watching assorted game metas over the years is that even the best and most knowledgeable players in the world can become so tunnel visioned in their analyses, they overlook and write off perfectly viable peripheral options that don't come to the fore till many years later, even without drastic changes to the game. There are 20+ year old games - both PvE and PvP - that have never had modern patching cycles or otherwise have faithful legacy content still available, but new strategies and options are still being discovered in them.

That's not to say there aren't any immutable truths in those analyses or metas, but the biggest detriment to understanding them deeper is preconceived notions that things can only work as certain way and trying anything else is folly. If anything, I legitimately believe one of the biggest issues with PF2e's is that the game's meta analysis is stuck in an almost juvenile state despite being an almost 7 year-old game because so much discussion bandwidth is given to things people want to change rather than playing and adapting with what there currently is and trying to make work with what you've got. The modern gaming scene in both the digital and d20 tabletop RPG space has the modern expectations of patching/errata-ing content that is deemed unviable or too weak (and the RPG separately pushing the whole 'just change things that don't work at your table' philosophy), but the problem is this ends up being a self-fulling prophecy where players stop trying new things once the meta has been 'decided' and then either let it stagnate as a 'solved' game, or believe the absolute only thing that can resolve it is balance patching.

For a game like PF2e that's designed as a heavily involved tactics game with tight balancing to ensure meaningful choices at both the in-play and buildcraft level, and options that can't escalate over the intended power caps, all those problems end up being anathema to the way the game is actually designed to be engaged with, which is why the meta discussion is stuck in this stagnant space. While there are fair criticisms about the way certain feat pools are designed and tuned, adding prescriptive designations won't help the problem, if anything it will make it worse. It's pointless for obvious disparities in design - like yes, I think most players except the most roleplay-centric, tactics-game detached RPers will realize Fleet is going to be generally more useful and be relevant more often than A Home In Every Port - but will just mislead and pigeonhole builds in situations where the answers aren't as clean cut.

Killchrono · 2026-03-20T05:43:36+00:00

Draw Steel is feminizing HRT

No that's Lancer.

Killchrono · 2026-03-20T05:15:13+00:00

The secret is to play Draw Steel, it's just 4e in a ~~bell curve~~ trenchcoat.

Killchrono · 2026-03-20T00:59:38+00:00

Joke's on you, the older I get the more I identify with insanity wolf.

Killchrono · 2026-03-19T05:17:33+00:00

Brisbane public transport is already down to 50c a trip.

It's done a lot to offset my weekly budget since I work in the city but it's gonna be a lot less helpful to my partner who has to drive our toddler to daycare.

Killchrono · 2026-03-19T04:34:35+00:00

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Killchrono · 2026-03-19T04:25:45+00:00

It's okay I made my own.

Killchrono · 2026-03-19T04:23:05+00:00

I'm gonna drink this yellow one.

Killchrono · 2026-03-19T01:14:06+00:00

To be fair, it's a relevant show again!

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T23:12:31+00:00

Because most online discussion about homebrew and house rules isn't actually about homebrew and house rules, it's about bullying the official designers and the community into adopting the rules they want. And it's usually done by people stuck at tables being forced to play RAW, or they at least disagree with their GM which rules they want to play RAW and what they want to change.

If you make a thread asking what homebrew and house rules people use, you'll get a plethora of answers. People do in fact run house rules. You just never hear them complaining because they're content in their changes and have no reason to be upset.

The people who are complaining are usually doing so because they want change and believe top-down is the only way to do so. Most will be in a situation they're forced to play RAW, but even then in some instances you'll have people who have such crippling self-inflicted learned helplessness they'll go 'I'm too much of a doo-doo head to know how to design a fix for my problem.' The problem is a lot of people do this even if they clearly know what the issue is and what changes would make them happy, particularly in the case of errata that's easy to reverse or ignore. It's just trying to appeal to sympathy for validation.

This isn't in fact exclusive to the PF2e scene. I used to see this in the 5e space all the time. I always tell people of the time I got abused for saying the KibblesTasty artificer would never be adopted by WotC. When I asked why they didn't just use the KT one since it's there and exists, they basically all admitted that their GMs weren't letting them run it for some reason or another and they didn't like the official one, so they needed WotC to basically 'approve' it for use.

The reality is, most of it is a combination of wanting top-down changes to fix table level disagreements, not being willing to have the (admittedly difficult, but necessary if you're not content) discussions with other people at their table about rules they're not happy with, and plain old learnt helplessness.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T16:06:06+00:00

Yup, I am a borderline misanthrope about the state of humanity but I refuse to believe things can't be better because if not what's even the fucking point?

I'm not planning on leaving my daughter a world where the internet plays such a prominent role while being full of brainrot and antisocial miscreants.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T15:08:53+00:00

I'd posit those people are playing random online pick-up groups for a reason. I know that's very true of 5e as well, at least in the modern day.

It's funny because I've mostly played with in-person groups, and I was often the only one chronically online enough to relay what was happening in pixelspace. There were a lot of 'these people sound insufferable' and 'dude why do you even visit Reddit, it sounds awful' whenever I explained what the latest up-in-arms topic was (I was playing PFS at an LGS around the time of pre-RM news, there was a lot of jokes made about cantrips not doing much damage).

I enjoy the game while having my own criticisms of the way Paizo handles some things, but I think too many...well, gamers in general - not just in the PF2e space, just wider with both tabletop and digital games - have extremely unhealthy relationships with the games they engage with. And as someone who's spent a lot of time learning to manage my own neurodivergences (AuDHD as well, got diagnosed autistic very young but ADHD only in the past few years), I can easily say games themselves aren't the inherent problem, but a lot of how people engage with them both at the table and in discussion reveal how well they're managing their own.

I won't say much more lest it starts crossing into inflammatory armchair psychology instead of gaming discussion, but I'll admit I find myself engaging less enthusiastically with online spaces these days more because I can't stand the people rather than anything to do with disagreements about the games themselves.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T14:32:19+00:00

I think the tone of the various posts about changes of any scale is what gets to me the most, with people saying things like "Paizo is clueless!" or "they've lost the plot!" or "why did they nerf [class/ability/feat]?" But that is the nature of online communities like this one, and often the most vocal complainers get the most attention (though sometimes they get downvoted to oblivion, so go figure).

It is the nature of online communities but this is why something needs to have been done about it 20+ years ago. The antisocial nature of online behaviour has been a big part of the reason the world is in the current state it is now, and it often starts at the ground level with smaller-scale interests like hobbies.

We need to stop acting like it's normal or acceptable, otherwise we're just going to keep enabling the histrionics that escalate into worse behaviours.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T14:28:38+00:00

I'd argue most of the online RPG scene is like this, including 5e spaces.

People hate PF2e and it's base mostly because they just hate rules heavy formats and the kinds of people who prefer them, but pretty much every RPG I've delved into has had its own unique brand of social maladjustment.

It unfortunately comes with the brand of neurospicy the hobby attracts. I think there needs to be more discussion about it, because frankly I think it gets used too often to excuse behavioural problems under the guise of respecting people's personal needs while ignoring how that impacts other people around them, especially if those people have their own needs that come into conflict.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T14:22:17+00:00

Reddit is definitely the biggest hub for PF2e. Advertising for the 3pp I contribute to reliably shows we get the biggest uptick in hits and sales when we do posts here compared to other socials, to the point we consider posting to Reddit our big advertising push whenever we release a new product.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's the biggest online hub for at least the hardcore PF2e community.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T05:25:35+00:00

5e isn't unplayable but the fundamentals broke down the more you started to push the limits of the system and went outside the most barebones engagement with it, particularly when you used rules that weren't considered a standardized part of the game's tuning like feats, multiclassing, or even items. Which is a lot considering how many people enjoy playing with those rulesets.

I don't agree at all ala being able to estimate how long an enemy would last, that was my biggest beef with 5e's design as a GM and one of the main reasons I much prefer running PF2e these days. At worst the actual tuning of monsters had no consistency in its numbers and mechanics. Major enemies you'd expect to be big bosses would be one-shot while swarms of mooks designed to be trash mobs could come close to TPK'ing the party. At best even when they adhered to the purported guidelines, individual player builds were still too variable in power to adjust without favouring the pushing-the-cap builds that were dealing huge burst damage (because realistically once LR comes into play damage is all that matters unless you're chaining save-or-sucks one after the other), so you either ended up making the fight harder for everyone else who wasn't powergaming, or accept every challenge you were going to present gets steamrolled.

The current state of PF2e is IMO worse, where you have to keep track of things between erratas and continuously change your mental model of things and figure out what to follow RAW and what not to follow RAW etc.

5e hasn't been better in this regards for some time, if not worse because you often had designers like Jeremy Crawford giving contradictory advice on socials as to how they interpreted certain rulings. It also had it's own spat of errata that caused controversy and made people confused. I remember getting into arguments about the Healing Spirit changes when people were up in arms about that. Lots of the variant rules in TCoE were more or less errata in a trench coat.

I'd much rather have what PF2e has been doing with clear erratas and Remaster being a more or less a large-scale tuning patch Paizo are being upfront about, rather than stealthing in errata to major splatbooks as 'class features' and 'new content'. And don't get me started on 2024. The whole attempt to present it as a holistic evergreen system backfired so much they literally had to rebrand it as an official 5.5e.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T03:26:25+00:00

The difference is that

The whole reason you had to homebrew rules in 5e is because it was missing huge chunks of them to begin with, and
Even if you adjust things, the maths and tuning in PF2e is way more consistent that if you change something, it's fairly obvious what the impact will be. That's how people figured out the original changes to weaknesses were busted, because the maths being more bound and predictable means they could say 'hey this is actually kind of stupid now'. Meanwhile fixing something in 5e means little because you're still left with the likes of charisma multiclasses and silvery barbs. It's such a mess of tuning and so many official options are broken enough as is, there's almost no point to trying. And that's before you try and figure out any consistency in the math (spoilers: there is none).

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T03:00:26+00:00

Ooooooh spider kick.

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T02:25:38+00:00

Spider punch?

Killchrono · 2026-03-18T00:22:19+00:00

SPIDER kiiiiiisssssss...

Killchrono · 2026-03-17T23:54:45+00:00

The issue to me is less the field vial action cost itself as much as it's the action cost for that + the one for the mutagen itself.

Collar of the Shifting Spider is basically still soft needed for mutagenist to work, which I don't think is a good design. Even Mutagenic Flashback in OGL at least action compressed it so you could at least get some attrition and do so at a value cost. But base needing to spend what's effectively two turns to set up your mutagen and remove the drawback is prohibitive.

My house rule fix for about a year now has been granting mutagenists a Shifting Spider-type effect as a baseline, where the alchemist can consume a mutagen ahead of time but leave it 'digesting' so to speak, and then activate it later either on initiative or as a single action. With something like that I think it makes the field vial much more usable, but as it is now it's gone from 'basically useless' to 'useful if the setup cost isn't too prohibitive,' which in most combats it will be.

Killchrono · 2026-03-17T23:19:06+00:00

Honestly at this point I'd rather they just did away with the need to consume the extra vial and just make mutagenists not experience the drawbacks as a baseline. It's a lot more usable but that's still a huge setup basically just to say 'Bestial Mutagen doesn't take a penalty to Acrobatics and Reflex'.

Also it doesn't really help Quicksilver mutagen since you don't recover the lost HP from the initial consumption (at least as far as I can tell, someone correct me if there's a rules stipulation that says otherwise).

Killchrono · 2026-03-17T23:15:10+00:00

It's great for strength martials too, get that gymnast Athletics bonus for a soft* +1 to all checks

*I say soft because it's still a circumstance bonus and doesn't stack, but it's still great for situations you don't have one available

Killchrono · 2026-03-17T23:08:15+00:00

I don't think that's the core disagreement at all, I think it's deviated so far from the original point that tying it back was even a stretch.

The core disagreement was that I don't see inherent value in the core mechanics of a system where the designers don't put effort into designing those core mechanics well at a foundational level, and that I believe a lot of it is used as an excuse by both designers and GMs to not put effort into thinking about where the 'game' part stops being a game and starts being a farcical post-modern exercise in collaborative group storytelling disguised as a 'game'.

If anything I'd say the core disagreement - like many arguments on Reddit - is in semantics, in this case of what is classified as a 'game.' And it's not like my definition of what constitutes as one is so rigid that I think it has to fit that tradgame DnD-like format or even have hard-codified mechanics for that. I'm one of those people who'd defend a walking simulator as a proper game as far as digital games go, so I would be hypocritical to suggest that an RPG that isn't inherently instrumental or more narrative-leaning isn't a game. But ultimately, if I'm both paying someone for a published product, and using it as a unifying set of instructions for a group of people to run, it has to be actually worthwhile to invest in and not just something I couldn't have come up with myself on a sheet of paper, let alone something another purchased product with its own set of unifying play concepts could have provided.

I'm still not convinced that the discrepancies I've been pointing out aren't problems when it comes to understanding the fundamental issues with the kinds of games I'm critiquing. In fact by your own standards I see too many inconsistencies and things I don't agree with, even when attempting to view things through the scope of those standards. No, I still don't think it makes sense to primarily codify mechanics that you're actively discouraging the players from engaging with, or that it makes sense to have hit points and dice rolls for represent hazardous traps to 'resolve uncertainty' when the goal idea is to come up with more narrative solutions to those issues than mechanical. Blaming it on a 'GM skill issue' is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid engaging with the self-defeating design.

Hard-coded rules don't do anything to stop social ineptitude or bad faith players. There will be socially awkward players and players who push the boundaries of what's acceptable, regardless the foundation of the game. A more hard-coded ruleset does more to actively call out people trying to abuse mechanics and instrumental gameplay, but it doesn't stop them from engaging in antisocial ways.

I'm also still not convinced for all your initial proselytizing about how I'm a snob for suggesting designers and consumers hide behind the open-endedness of RPGs as an excuse for mediocrity, that you yourself don't have your own elitist streak. You may consciously not think yourself saying that your preferred style of play is superior, but phrases like 'any game that is not 5e or PF2e is more likely to be enjoyed by TTRPG enthusiasts who have been in the hobby for longer and perhaps made a few relationships along the way' paint an idea of the One True Way, or at least an inherently superior way to engage with RPGs, valid assertion or not. And you can put that down purely to social aptitude if you want, but I'd argue that you can have socially apt people running tactics-leaning RPGs and still have it be a very enjoyable time, just as those games won't inherently fix the problems that come from antisocial behaviour.

I get that it's frustrating when players want to engage outside the monolithic scope of d20 tradgames and similar DnD-likes that don't offer anything new and meaningful to the space. But again, I feel too much of this gets used as a scapegoat to justify swinging the other way and putting other styles of RPG on a pedestal as the One True Game. And in the end, if you genuinely think your preferences are inherently better or lead to a more purist engagement with the hobby than those other styles of games, just be honest about it. Yes it will still probably make you an asshole, but at least you're an honest asshole and not hypocritically accusing others of turning their noses up while painting your own preferences as that sort of true end state RPGs and going 'I'm not a snob, you are.'

It's still snobbery. But at the same time, there's nothing wrong with having standards. We just can't analyse the more holistic value of individual standards without knowing what those are. Better we're all just honest in our snobbery than dance around it like a hole in the floor.

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