Thread by @djrhutton

One of the biggest hurdles I notice a lot of #dnd players seem to struggle with about #pathfinder2e is the concept of an actually accurate encounter building system and I think we need to talk about this because this seems like the biggest cope-cross-Stockholm Syndrome in RPGs🧵

Probably the biggest reason I switched from running 5e to 2e is because of encounter building. The encounter budget and CL (creature level) system in 2e WORKS. Every counter is as easy or difficult as I intend it to be, and creatures are as threatening as I want them narratively

Almost every single 5e DM I speak to says their number one problem is the CR system makes no sense and ends with difficult monsters being trivially easy, and encounters they expect to be cakewalks leading to character deaths if not full-blown TPKs.

But at the suggestion 2e fixes this major, recurring complaint, people get cold feet. A lot of it seems to be not wanting the tradeoff for a more complicated crunchy system, but excuses about the virtues of 5e's design always seem to come out of the woodwork in these discussions

The one that always seems to crop up is that 5e's system of bounded accuracy is 'more realistic' than something like 2e's scaling stats. And what always seems to piggyback off that is that an accurate CR system is not only overrated, but that a bad one should be *accepted*

People treat inaccurate encounter balancing as if it's something that needs to be embraced with the improvisation of your game; the randomness of the inaccuracy and unpredictability is just another element you have to work around, like dice rolls, or player-made curveballs.

At it's absolute worst, wanting an accurate encounter system makes you a bad, anal-retentive GM who can't deal with their games going off the rails. If you can't adapt to imperfect encounter design, it just betrays your incompetence on YOUR part, not a fault of the game system's.

This is usually conflated by GMs (particularly OSR preferencing ones, in my experience) who think that wanting an accurate encounter system is some of betrayal of system immersion, as if it somehow breaks the verisimilitude of the world and makes it too artificial.

There's a lot I realise between game systems that is just preference, but a lot of the excuses done to defend poor encounter design systems has begun to come off to me as pure copium.

It feels like veteran GMs have become so used to being disappointed by botched encounter design systems, that we've started making excuses to justify their fallibility and we've enshrined them as virtues. 'Encounter systems are just inaccurate; it's the way it's always been.'

This is the kind of boomer-esque rhetoric that makes excuses for what is, ultimately, incompetent game design. And it's excuses that many GMs - myself included - are forced to foot for the sake of arbitrary verisimilitude that satisfies only a very specific kind of player.

In the end, many of these ideas come from people who see systems like PF2e's as too 'gamey.' But the thing I don't get is...IT *IS* A GAME. Literally everything is ropes and pulleys designed to make a system work. And in the case of d20 systems, that's the raw maths behind it.

In the end, a system is something that should be in service to the person using it, not something we have to wrangle to get the intended result. Maybe you're fine wrangling a janky encounter system to make it work the way you want, but I'm not.

I'm not a numbers person. I'm a narrative and gameplay person first. I love what the maths of a game system can enable, but am not good enough with it nor enjoy developing it enough to bother figuring it out myself. I want it to work out of the box. That isn't a crime.

And I cannot emphasise the freedom PF2e has given me as a system to actually have encounters work the way I've intended. I can run a BBEG and know they'll be terrifying to face. I don't have to stress if my chaff swarm of goblins or skeletons will accidentally TPK them.

This is good not because of some anal-retentive desire for control or inability to deal with curve-balls. It's because I'm telling a story, and I want the adversaries in that story to match the strength the narrative paints them, be they terrifying dark lords or chaff mooks.

And here's the thing: even if you don't like PF2e as a complete package, it has proven that there is a way, undoubtedly, to make an accurate encounter system. Meanwhile, WotC has revamped the CR system for 5e TWICE now, AND IT STILL DOESN'T WORK.

(to be fair, 5e would need a MASSIVE overhaul of systems and it's class balance to make this work, but the fact the new edition seems to be teased as a 5.5-style midquel system is not getting my hopes up that these issues will be fixed in it)

I wouldn't be bothered by this and just be happy in my corner running PF2e if it wasn't for the fact that so many people seem to treat GMs who desire these kinds of systems as if they're awful, incompetent plebs who need a game system to hold their hand.

Spoilers: I do. I'm not a game designer. That's why I pay someone else to make a system for me to run, not design it myself. I want someone else to make the maths work so I can focus on the story and session design, not spend half the time wrangling the system itself to work.

Yet when I bring up these complaints, I'm assaulted by both players - players not even from my own games, btw - asking why I need to 'force' mine to use a different system for my benefit, and smug GMs who think the unwillingness to deal with these issues makes me a bad GM.

The combination of unmitigated player entitlement, obtuse GM gatekeeping, and the defence of these absolutely awful designs in products we're paying for has worn me down to a point where I just don't have any desire to be nice about the frustrations in my favourite hobby anymore.

Systems like 5e burn out DMs from lack of workable systems and back-end support, and then people wonder why people like me shill PF2e so hard.

Maybe it's because having systems that work as advertised is good and we should be encouraging designers to make good systems.

Until the popular system gets their shit together and makes mechanics that work, I'll keep running and shilling the underdog one with mechanics that do. Because I think it's fair working products should be rewarded and ones with glaring flaws should be deservedly critiqued.

And finally - finally - maybe we shouldn't put up with smug veteran GMs putting down others because we don't have to walk 10 feet in the snow to make a monster work as intended. Just because you had to put up with bad design excused as being charmingly janky doesn't mean I should

To piggyback now this has gained traction, I want quickly address how a few people have asked for examples, and while I don't want to pull a 'trust me bro, it just is,' I also don't want to spend hours nitpicking every example of a poorly balanced 5e encounter I've seen.

I could bring up my 5e party beating a CR 21 and CR 14 black dragon, in the same encounter, with mooks, at level 10. I could bring up numerous examples of low level encounters that wiped because action economy volume and hordes are more deadly than single monsters.

I'm sure others could add their own stories, and that's kind of the issue; these complaints are widespread enough that they can't just be dismissed as edge cases.

But the reason it's kind of pointless is it comes back to a fundamental issue with 5e in particular: everyone runs it differently on a mechanical level, which is encouraged by the culture and design of the game. So ultimately the accuracy of the system will be subjective.

Most guides to make CR work in 5e usually involve a metric tonne of caveats; they're balanced around 6 to 8 encounters a day. Magic items break the maths and aren't account for. It's measured by raw DPR. You have to bend backwards and suck your own dick to make it work, etc.

That's not to say a system like PF2e doesn't have guidelines, but most of those guidelines are baked into the intended progression of the game, such as items and gold resources having an expected progression at each level, player power being more heavily capped and measured, etc.

Some people may find those guidelines and game design decisions stifling, but the reason the maths works is because those guidelines and balance are there. Any semblance 5e has of either are not clear at a base level, and are just dismissed once you deviate from them.

Yet this unto itself is indicative of a greater problem with the culture surrounding 5e; because 5e has created a myth the game is 'adaptable', yet it breaks the moment you try to add things that seem like they'd be baseline, like magic items, multiclassing, or feats.

But people unreasonably expect the back end to still function when you add those deviant elements to the game. They want to have their cake and eat it; a freeform gameplay style you can make whatever you want, while still having the encounter building guidelines work for them all

But you can't. It's just not reasonable or feasible. You can't expect designers to add variables to monster design to adjust for when you add magic items, or feats, or varying balance between characters. You can't have a one size fits all for a game that encourages wild deviance.

This is why examples are ultimately fruitless; because in the end, it comes back to that core issue that everyone runs 5e different, and thus to figure out why it works or doesn't for some people, we'd have to dissect every variant deviation a game is using to figure out why.

And even if it was possible to do so, the point is both that how to do so is not overtly clear, and has to be done by me personally as the DM. I have to spend my prep time kitbashing together a working system, instead of just planning my sessions.

Obviously this discourse is not just limited to 5e, but since 5e is the dominant system and many players who don't even like it use it as a baseline for their own adaptations and homebrew, it's important to address this, as it apply holistically to the RPG sphere in general