So many people hate secret rolls. So many people feel like they remove agency from them.

But that's what the dice do. They're agency-revoking machines.

His name translates to Ubermensch!

No, you're not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It's just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.

Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It's a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don't like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.

So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They'll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.

You guys play D&D? I thought people only ever played the Scheduling Conflict game.

[email protected] No. But you should binge season 1 ASAP before people start telling you why it doesn't.

The wizard should have been doing that while the Warlock was arguing with the GM about the number of spell slots they had left.

I bet you could build something off of Starfinder.

I don't see much value in providing storage and bandwidth for things that people didn't put enough of themselves into to bother lifting a pencil. There are enough boosters for that sort of thing out there already that they can do the job of supporting them with material resources.

The bestiary is also really good (and free!). There are thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature. And the they're balanced to the same levels as players, so encounter power budgets are very intuitive.

The game gets a bit of a bad rap for having "nitpicky" rules, but people often seem to fail to recognize that the rules are spelling out how people already usually resolve things, rather than introducing something novel. It's written in a very systematized way, and people aren't used to reading about their intuitive experiences in systematized language.

The game's broader community's obsession with rules orthodoxy doesn't help...

I've become increasingly convinced that people don't want to play low level characters. Level 1 characters are neophyte adventurers. Their backstory shouldn't include significant a mounts of adventure, combat, or heroics, because it introduces a significant amount of ludo-narrative dissonance into the campaign.

Unless there's a reason they've been de-leveled.

Yes! Exactly! And some of the aliens in those caves might be somewhat monstrous!

My players have yet to discover any paths. They just keep following the ones that are readily visible on the map!

[email protected] There's a vast, vast gulf between "life is not imbued with inherent meaning" and "I just don't see the point in anything". Nihilism, as a world view, isn't generally crippling. It just boils down to "this is what this is, and nothing more".

You don't sound like a nihilist, you sound deeply depressed. You can be a nihilist and depressed, but what you're expression sounds much more like depression rather than nihilism.

[email protected] I was going to do this to my table. We only have 2 PCs currently (my wife and stepson), so I gave them a GMPC guide who was supposed to be the BBEG in disguise.

But they came to love the GMPC, and I can't do that to them, so now he's just their pet human.

Yes, exactly. Consistency is important, because it builds and reinforces trust. The GM just saying "nah" is the other side of the player showing up with a homebrew bullshit build.

I get a lot of pushback from the Pathfinder 2e subreddit for promoting the idea that the system is really great for character-driven, fiction-first tables, because everyone just looks at the number of rules and goes "it's so obviously a gameist system, why would you ever try to run it as anything else?", and the answer is it's a fantastic physics system. The rules provide clarity and consistency where it's really useful or important, and are easily ignorable where it doesn't matter.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

* Kichae has a stroke.

LotR is running Pathfinder 2e under the hood, by the sounds of it, using Proficiency Without Level.

People are very bad at explaining what they like about things, because usually they like things in contrast to things they don't like. And people who do identify what they like positively often just get told that their input isn't welcome, either.

The problem isn't whether someone is focusing on negative aspects of what you're playing or the positive aspects of what they are, it's that discussions about minority systems are often just puked up onto people who weren't asking. The conversation is often:

"Hey, how can I do [thing] in [game I'm playing]?"

"[Game you're playing] sucks at [thing]/isn't designed for [thing]. You should play [something else]."

"But I like [game I'm playing], and don't want to convert to a whole new system."

This means not only is the asker's question being totally ignored, but they're being hit with -- sometimes even bombarded by -- value judgements they weren't interested in.

You were a fan of Larry, well here is his cousin Darryl, and his other cousin Darrey.

That's pretty good! I've used larger -- not counting elephant garlic -- but that one's up there among some of the greats!