https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw3UoN6ZWu4
Utkarsh posted this video to his Patreon last week, and I've been looking forward to folks' responses to it since. It's good stuff! Give it a watch.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the balance mandate in Pathfinder 2e -- thoughts and feelings that seem to go against a trend in the discourse around the game. Thoughts that often get me labelled an unquestioning white knight of a fanboy.
I've gotten to actually play very little PF2e, as a player. Like 90% of my experience with the game has been as a GM -- originally a trepidatious and uneasy GM, unilaterally pulling my table away from 5e after the OGL nonsense a few years ago -- so I have to admit that my pain points have been very different from many players.
But I've come to identify those players' pain points not as the system, but as their GMs. At least for the ones who I think have valid frustrations. I've come to understand that a significant number (a minority, I hope) of Pathfinder 2e GMs functionally run the game as if they are just a computer code interpreter. Too many people are seeing the robust support the system gives them and, apparently, deciding that they don't have to do any actual thinking.
"The spell/feat/action does what the spell/feat/action does, no more, no less" is a common thing I see said, as I look on in horror and disappointment, realizing that a lot of my peers in this space -- both GMs and players alike -- get their fun from bureaucratic middle-managment. And while their fun is valid (as is yours), they seem to think that I should be getting my fun from the same thing, and worse, that pages spent on anyone else's fun are just "bloat".
But what came out of this video -- or, at least, the comments on the promo post on Reddit -- is that a lot of vocal complainers are really just feeling aggrieved because they want to be more powerful than the other creatures at the table, players and enemies alike.
u/Killchrono put together a really good response about the bitter feelings that opened my mind to some folks' feelings about player-dictated power scaling. Or, rather, the lack of it in the system.
I get that this is a big part of what power-gaming was in 3e (and therefore in PF1), and to an extent what it is in 5e, but I have always found this element of the games to be kind of gauche. I mean, I totally get it from a theorycrafting perspective -- I like puzzles, and build optimization is a kind of puzzle -- but bringing this kind of thing to an actual live table says a whole lot about someone as a person (assuming, of course, it's not an explicitly gonzo table). So the fact that the designers decided that Level was going to be the measure of character power in PF2, and that that measure was going to be as accurate as possible has been a huge gift to me. Theory-crafters get to keep their lane, but their monster trucks don't get to squish my little Honda Civic, as it were.
For a while now, I've had this feeling that a lot of complaints about "balance" were coming from a place of players being used to break the level curve, but not being able to be honest with themselves that they are, in practice, playing a character that is 2-3 levels higher than everyone else around them. This is not a popular opinion among those who feel held back by the game's guardrails, of course, but the hollowness of their push-back has kind of solidified my feelings on the issue.
But I was not at all prepared to see people crawl out of the shadows to say, out and proud, that they resented not being able to be more powerful than others at the table. And, while it was only a handful of people being so brash and mask-off about it all, they came fast, and hard, and kind of all over the place.
To plagiarize myself from elsewhere: I was totally blindsided by some people popping in to say the quiet part loud: that they should be allowed to be the main character if they know the magic cheat codes.
It's going to take me a little bit to shake that one off.
