Multiclassing had to DIE for characters to THRIVE in Pathfinder 2e (Rules Lawyer)

this is Ronald the rules lawyer I continue my law school Series where I teach different parts of the Pathfinder 2E system and talk about why I think it's awesome in the last part I did an overview of how characters are made in Pathfinder 2E in this video I'm going to talk about the design decisions that Pathfinder 2E made compare them to other systems especially D andd fifth edition why I think these were good decisions and this includes why I think multiclassing had to die in order for characters to thrive I am Ronald rules lawyer I a lawyer who has been gming Pathfinder first and second edition D andd fifth edition and starfinder for the last 13 years also taught an after school middle school class for tabletop role playing games so that's our glimpse into how you make a character in Pathfinder 2 e there are more steps and as you can see you can really customize your character in great detail but I would argue also that it's easier if you worry in other systems that your character build will underperform in a combat and I'm going to go into why that's true in this next part of the video where I analyze why I think character creation is awesome so Pathfinder 2E is trying to solve a set of problems that come from the previous edition of Pathfinder rooted in Third Edition D and D I did a video this was earlier in the law school Series where I covered a whole variety of issues that Pathfinder 2E tries to address from older addition it'll be good to look at that after this one but in Third Edition DND and Pathfinder first edition which continued Third Edition there was a lot of customization of characters however some would argue that the number of options was too many in first edition Pathfinder you had a huge number of Feats and I'm just going to scroll through uh the thousands of feets well some of the thousands of Feats you can get in Pathfinder first edition I'm going to use this slider here here uh they actually are different categories as well uh yeah that's a lot if you limited yourself with the core rule book and Pathfinder the number of choices you had to make was actually not that different from 5e until you got to the point of when you chose your first level feat and this is how many Feats were presented to you in the core rule book alone another problem accompanying this sheer amount of options was there was a pressure to study them all in order to keep up despite the appearance of many choices if you wanted to be an archer in first edition Pathfinder there was kind of the same set of feeds every Archer character got and I'm going to give viewers who are familiar with first edition Pathfinder a second to guess what I'm about to show on the screen you can pause if you want but here they are and yes you were right and also there were if you studied your options hard enough ways you could break the game there were ways to use Feats multiclass level dips spells to create broken combinations that the designers didn't plan for and not every player who wanted to play a role playing game would necessarily want to engage with this puzzle that was character creation it was very common for two players to arrive at the same table in the system and one person focused on optimization whereas another person uh was prioritizing expressing their character concept and the first player could outperform that player and maybe everyone else in the party put together DN 5 came out in 2014 5 years after first edition Pathfinder it was competing with first edition Pathfinder which actually became the leading ttrpg during the wind down of fourth edition and so it sought to address these problems people disaffected by these Tendencies within first edition Pathfinder so one thing it did was it borrowed Pathfinder one's idea of subclasses which were called archetypes in Pathfinder first edition so in that respect uh some more customization but it was basically not customization via choosing a feet here a feet there a multiclass level dip there it was through choosing a path which is kind of ironic because it was taken from Pathfinder outside of that character customization was streamlined considerably 5e brought fewer choices Feats were an optional Rule and even if your DM allows Feats they are optional because you forgo an ability score increase in order to get a feat it allows a player to not engage with the feat subsystem at all and not have to read a single feat they would just increase their ability scores 5e also has had a much smaller list of Feats which over the last 9 years now it's smaller than what the Pathfinder core wook gave but the Feats in 5 are also more powerful and obvious in their usefulness more user friendly when you are looking at the list what remains for car customization in 5e besides your race background and class is the subass you choose within your first three levels so this makes making a character much quicker in 5V the next thing they did was to make your numbers that matter less they wanted to remove the mini game of stacking bonuses to get your numbers as high as possible so they flattened the math with bounded accuracy they made proficiency bonus go from plus 2 to plus 6 they cut out a lot of the bonuses and penalties that were prevalent in Pathfinder 1 and Third Edition D and and largely replaced those with advantage and disadvantage they also made multiclassing an optional rule in 5V and for those tables that use multiclassing they disincentivize or try to disincentivize level dips by spreading the core features of every class over their first three levels instead of their first level this was supposed to discourage level dipping making you feel like you need to take three levels from a class in order to get the full benefits of that class 5's approach was to try to serve as a bridge for players of all previous D and D editions and that included using the base chassis of characters from Third Edition including the ability to stack levels from different classes on top of each other then from that they cut things off they locked things off while bringing in sub classes from Pathfinder now did they succeed at addressing the problems of Third Edition character creation well partially first there is less imbalance between characters however there still is imbalance between characters the Marshall Caster disparity is often talked about in 5D circles but also one can produce a lot more damage if one takes Feats compared to someone else who does not also it's a common complaint in 5e circles that there's not enough choices that you get to make and and that after the first three levels there isn't much to look forward to in terms of advancing your character that characters of the same race and class tend to be copies of each other there's a desire for more customization and also the imbalance between characters uh means that it's harder to express a concept you can start with a Nifty idea for your character however it's like juggling two plates there's your concept on one plate and then making your character viable in combat on the other plate often the two things are at war with each other so what does Pathfinder 2E do well first its goal was to have the same level of customization that you see in Third Edition DND and first edition Pathfinder while streamlining the process making it more user friendly and evening out the power disparities between characters now how is this possible doesn't more options by itself mean there will be more brok broken things introduced into the system that the designers don't account for well that would seem to be true and I think what Pathfinder 2E is pretty Innovative and eye openening for designers and is worth looking into so I have a few observations to make here the first is that I couldn't find a more articulate way to express this but I think it's maybe the plainest way there are many things you get but there are ceilings on how high you can go with those things so the first thing the very first thing we saw earlier was how attributes are determined you get a lot of bonuses nine of them however you can only stack them so high every step of this process each column only allowed you to put one bonus into any given attribute if you are like most players and this is definitely true for most character builds in Pathfinder 2E you'll want to get a maximum score score in your class's key ability score and the game kind of empowers you to get a plus4 into that score however it forces you to spread those boosts out to other scores also note that you get four boosts at this last step and the first three attributes are all can be characterized as physical attributes whereas the second set are all mental and so every character is forced to Branch out horizontally so imagine a ceiling you have all these blocks and you're stacking them up but you can only set them so high and because you cannot stack them higher in your key attribute you got to spread them out you have to grow wide we also see this with skill increases at third level you can only increase one of your skills to expert and at fifth level when you get your next increase you can only increase skills up to expert so let's say Drew wants to be really good at preaching religion and knowing about religious subjects and wants to be expert and so increases his religion skill to expert at level three at level five he cannot bring it up to master he can't do that yet until seventh level so that forces him to go wide and be expert in another skill he's going to be expert in nature which lets him train more Goblin dogs and also identify natural phenomena and Primal magic and the abilities of wild beasts then at seventh level he'll become a master in religion however at Ninth level 11th level and 13th level he won't be able to increase that religion to Legendary that requires 15th level so he's going to put those skill boosts into other skills this is very different from what other additions of D and and Pathfinder do let's contrast how Pathfinder and dn5 approach Rogues now Rogues are supposed to be the masters of skills in the game and the way Pathfinder expresses that is by letting Rogues get a skill increase not at third level and every two levels after that but at second level and every single level after that they get 19 skill increases over the course of 1 to 20 also not listed here is that they get a skill feat at every single level starting at first level up through 20 whereas in D and 5e you get some more skill proficiencies than other classes do but on top of that you get to double your proficiency bonus for some of your skills which lets you shoot through that ceiling if you're at level 17 your proficiency bonus doubles to plus 12 and they get to add that to a skill of your choice it means that you can be better in some skills like Athletics than the Barbarian ever can be despite 5e being the system that says it has bounded accuracy it has much less control over its math it's not necessarily a flaw of 5e it's the Legacy it got from other additions but in comparison to Pathfinder 2E it's less bounded we further see how a Pathfinder gives you lots of things but imposes ceilings through how you get attribute increases at fifth level Drew gets to put four more boosts let's say he puts them in the same attributes that he did at first level well we have this caveat now this is written before the remaster takes place but the effect is going to be the same after the remaster which is that you'll need to put two boosts into a score that you already have a plus4 in in order to get that up to a plus five and you can't do that at level five because remember they have to go into different attributes so it's going to be 10th level before droo gets to raise his wisdom up to a plus five this effectively gives diminishing returns if you try to specialize in your key ability score and also maybe a secondary ability score it gives incentive to the player to spread out their ability boosts more widely this is key to how players often feel the freedom to Branch out from their stereotypical Niche our Barbarian who definitely wants to max out their strength can without much opportunity cost get a good wisdom score so that they can be good at healing allies in combat with the battle medicine skill feet you can have a marshall who is one of your primary in combat healers in this game because the system is designed to have you spread out Beyond one thing that you're good at and our fighter who wants to hit things hard be hard to hit and have a lot of hit points can put some boosts into Charisma and there are mechanical ways through the rules you can make that Charisma useful to you in combat you can demoralize and debuff enemies insult them with a bon Moss skill feet and when you're legendary in intimidation your fighter can scare enemies to death so by preventing how tall you can grow your character let's say and specialize in any one thing and forcing you to grow wide you remove the opportunity cost of spreading wide you make it cost nothing in order to have a diversity of abilities that are outside your stereotypical Niche all right so what's another thing Pathfinder does well Pathfinder puts your choices into buckets so instead of our ungodly list from Pathfinder first edition of having over 3,000 fats to choose from what we had was a set of decisions to make at first level where at least if you're confining yourself to the core rule book you don't have more than several choices to make at each step there were six ancestries to choose from from the core rule book and then five heritages for the Goblin and then maybe eight Feats that could be chosen for the goblin now drugo had a bigger list to choose from only because he decided to have the asamar versital Heritage unlocking another list of about five or seven fats then at second level duwo had to choose well from a not tiny number of class Feats these are the first level class Feats from the cor r book and there are these other Feats at second level now if droo wants to delve deeper and Shop among the archetypes yeah that's a list of things to look at but if he starts with his concept that should narrow down the choices and in this case with blessed one once he chose blessed one dedication it doesn't really add a whole lot of other Feats for him to read through there's only one one more feat that is available at fourth level and this list grows gradually as he levels up now Drew gets second level also gets a skill feet and there's a lot of skill Feats in the game however again if he's limiting himself to the core rule book it's not a huge overwhelming number listed here are the general skill feeds skill feeds that are not tied to any one's skill and they all have their own prerequisites and he can scan this chart to see what he qualifies for what many players do is when they are able to choose the skill feed is think of two maybe three skills they really want to advance and just look at the subset of skill feeds for that one so let's say Drew wants to be really good at lying so he'll look at the core W book list and see the skill feeds for that so granted this is more things to choose from and look through than you would have in D and D 5ifth Edition however it is less than the 3,000 plus you had in first edition Pathfinder and Third Edition DND it's a controlled size of options but all of these choices and things you have to look through the analysis paralysis is mitigated by the next thing Pathfinder does which is that the math is tight the math is quote decided for you Pathfinder controls your numbers we've seen some of that earlier and in all of the feeds we looked at earlier a lot of them are not giving you strict numerical bonuses there are some that do but those are pretty situational and not must picks again although d boasts having bounded accuracy Pathfinder is much stricter when it comes to binding its numbers Pathfinder achieves balance by controlling your numbers and your choices have a relatively small effect on those numbers there's a saying in the Pathfinder community that I helped popularize that every plus one matters because of the way Pathfinders 4 degrees of success system works whenever your check exceeds the number you're trying to reach by 10 or more you critically succeed on that check this works throughout the game conversely if you fail by 10 or more you critically fail so you feel every plus one in this game very intensely and we saw how Pathfinder controlled the math but by how they did attribute scores they knew that duoo almost certainly was going to get a plus4 in his wisdom and the designers did that deliberately so that they would know what your bonus likely would be and so the monster statistics and the different numbers you have to meet and beat in this game have a set of Base mathematical assumptions of where the characters numbers are based on their level and we saw as duw levels up his reflex save will become expert at fifth level just like every Druid his spellcasting will be expert at seventh level just like every Druid the designers also have controlled and know when you're going to be expert at your best skills master and legendary and also where your attributes are going to be Duo's wisdom is going to be a plus five at 10th level the fact that you can improve your attributes in Pathfinder and gain Feats simultaneously is not simply out of generosity to players but so that the designers know what your scores are going to be also the numerical bonuses to your magic items are going to be predicted by the designers because of how expensive they made a plus one then a plus two then a plus three weapon you are not going to be able to afford a plus two weapon at level two and remember everything you're proficience in as your level so the game has an idea of where you are numerically based on your level at seventh level the game will know that you're going to be an expert in your reflex saves while knowing that a rogue will be a master in her reflex saves and have evasion basically your level plus your training bonus and your attribute score in something is often the least important thing is the universal way all of your stats are determined in Pathfinder 2B your attack bonuses your spell attacks your spell DCS your saving throw bonuses your armor class and because every plus one matters so intensely every level up gives you so much more power vertically your Feats when placed next to your numerical increases are relatively minor in effect they give you a horizontal progression and while there's a lot of Feats and Pathfinder it the designers have placed constraints on what Feats can give you let's contrast what a feat in 5e might look like so here's a 5e feed great weapon Master it gives you the option to take a minus5 penalty to your attack roll with a heavy weapon in order to get plus 10 to your damage this is consider considered an essential feat for many Marshall characters because that plus 10 bonus to damage is so good and many monsters don't have very high armor classes and you can still relatively reliably hit them even with the minus5 penalty and in many instances you can automatically assume you have great weapon master in effect it becomes a math enhancer overall for your Marshall character well the closest analog to this feat that we see in pathf 2 E I think is the feet Power Attack that Fighters can take at level one it gives you that bonus damage it adds an extra die of weapon damage to your attack however it comes at the cost of spending two actions to use it you have three actions per turn in Pathfinder and this means you're doing Power Attack instead of attacking two times however you might want to use Power Attack when you're facing a very hard to hit Foe and that second attack will almost certainly miss that second attack is going to suffer from the multiple attack penalty or if you're facing an enemy that has some kind of damage resistance let's say a Golem that resists the first 10 points of physical damage you inflict in that case you want to focus a lot of your uh damage into a single hard-hitting blow this is actually one of the few Feats that give an obvious mathematical enhancement to one of your attacks but it is situational and it gives you a choice to make it comes at the cost of more actions we also see that feets in Pathfinder often are themselves defined actions think Battle Master Maneuvers that you cannot do simultaneously with each other they're competing for your actions given this you could say that the power increase of your character that 90% of it is simply in your math improving as you level up and what Feats provide you are ribbon abilities things that accompany that more important vertical progression and one interesting effect of this is that it makes the math so stable that one of the popular variant rules in Pathfinder free archetype which gives you a bonus feat every even numbered level to take an archetype feat doesn't terribly imbalance the game it basically doesn't matter the sheer number of Feats you have because the math the basic math is so impactful now this is a controversial Viewpoint many people who are fans of Third Edition D and and first edition Pathfinder see the bounded math of Pathfinder 2E as constraining it prevents them from building unique characters in their view now my view on the matter is that having players still have that ability to break the math of the game prevalent in those additions and to some degree in 5e makes it harder to balance encounters to meaningfully challenge parties and it also creates those diverging pressures when you make a character of expressing your concept on the one hand and optimizing your character on the other hand lastly I prefer this edition's approach to having your players win by the decisions they make during combat and working together as a team rather than what each individual did while creating their character at home also one could argue that the many choices you have the thousands of Feats provided an illusion of choices because a lot of those things were just chaff our example of the Archer earlier if you were an Archer who did not take one of those four Feats that I showed earlier you're not being a good Archer the next thing Pathfinder does is use level to great effect and impose quality control on what player can get at certain levels for good or ill you will not find An ancestry like asamar in this game that lets you fly at level one Pathfinder consciously Gates certain abilities to certain levels so duoo our Druid who is divinely inspired and is part Asmar somehow cannot fly until a level 9 ancestry feat that furthermore only lets him fly once per day for 10 minutes if he wants that to be an at will ability no daily limit he needs to take a level 17 ft meanwhile having flight at level 9 comes later than when parties can access the fly spell which by the way is a spell that he as a druid can cast as a fourth rank spell he can cast that at seventh level this choice is deliberate also any character can get the Winged Rune applied to their armor armor and weapons get magical abilities conferred on them via runes which can be transer trans erred back and forth and the winged Rune lets someone once per hour fly but it's a 13th level item this means that the fly spell and an Asmar who is able to fly once per day at Ninth level are able to do something that's unique and not generally available to other players for several levels that too was a conscious Choice by the designers and monster design in Pathfinder also takes into account at what levels party members are able to fly as well basically in Pathfinder you get the sense that the designers had some kind of design document and said some abilities will be available at this level and others at that level and that this was planned from Level 1 to 20 and you get a sense with every new source book that comes out that more than one set of eyes looked at something that was written to make sure it fit within those broader parameters meanwhile level becomes our measure of how strong something should be be most archetypes give you the dedication feat at second level and we'll remember that Drew's dedication feat gave him a spell that's available to first level Champions and if we were to compare it to other level two class feeds drugo could have taken they are roughly of equal weight to what this level two feet is giving him the wild shaped Focus spell for example compared to the lay on hands Focus spell character level basically functions as a universal currency uh a measure of how to assess things and to control when abilities become available to player characters and also protect niches for example uh the blessed one archetype gives abilities that are exclusive to Champions by unlocking these Champion Feats however if one were to look up these Feats the blessed one gets each of them at a later or higher level level than when the champion could get it this protects the champion as the premier Layon hands character basically Pathfinder put work and Care into balancing the game the market leader um has plus one weapons um that are simply classified as uncommon there's little guidance on when that becomes available and when the dungeon master should make that available to player characters and anyone who plays 5 enough or sees the monster manual knows that whether you have a magic weapon is hugely impactful in assessing the threat of various monsters that have resistance to non-magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage winged boots are similarly called uncommon but basically give you 2 hours of flying per day that can be used in one minute increments for many that's at will flying if they're not traveling over land this too is simply called an uncommon item so what's happening is that in instead of the designers planning for when various Things become available to the characters and then the game master able to use those decisions as um jumping off points to make their own decisions the design of plus one weapons and Wing boots leaves it entirely up to the DM and these are impactful decisions the DM is balancing the game on the fly when deciding whether to give a plus one weapon to a fighter and werewolves and other lycanthropes who are immune to non-magical damage this has a huge effect on encounter balancing and overall Adventure balancing another effect of this um quality control and organizing things by level is that it's less rewarding for players to study all the options that are available to them at a certain level because there's going to be fewer broken things or overpowered things for them to choose from and find now some players want to find such things and this lessens the time needed to study all of the options uh because there's been this care and work put into balancing the game the last thing that Pathfinder 2E does is a big one no multiclassing um in Third Edition Pathfinder first edition and fifth edition you stack levels from different classes like building blocks and when you take a first level from another class you get a whole set of things from that class this was more of an issue in Third Edition and first edition Pathfinder where you simply got everything in that row um let's say drug were to take a level of Paladin he would then be able to Smite evil once per day and get all of these mathematical bonuses and if he gets a second level he gets to add his Charisma to all of his saving throws and get lay on hands also this style of multiclassing meant you stopped your progression in your initial class so duoo would not be gaining any new spell slots or unlocking Druid spell levels from Druid this meant that it was possible to make suboptimal decisions especially if your main class is spellcaster any level you take in another class is going to slow down your progression in your main ability spellcasting at the same time there are many tricks you could find if you searched for them that benefit you greatly by taking one or sometimes two levels from from another class so in Pathfinder first edition and Third Edition D and D A lot of the strongest builds were Franken characters that took levels from three four sometimes more classes fifth edition made a conscious effort to make poor choices less punishing and good choices less broken first your spell slots progressed in a uniform manner if you started as a wizard taking a level in cleric meant your number of spell slots and the spell levels of those spell spell slots progressed at a comparable rate more so if you took levels in full spellcasting classes another thing 5V did was to spread core features over the first three levels there was less to Nick to steal from the first level of other classes however now in hindsight after 9 years of this addition The Meta has developed where there still are trap options things you do not want to do and broken options power things that you can do via multiclassing in 5e The Meta agrees that certain dips level dips are very powerful uh taking one level in cleric taking two levels in Fighter for Action surge taking one level in HEX blade warlock this retains that same issue of rewarding optimizers and a specific reward for studying the entire breadth of options creating that tension between expressing your character concept and optim imization so Pathfinder abandons multiclassing the class you have at level one is your class all the way up to level 20 you don't stack levels anymore this is not original with Pathfinder second edition this actually was what fourth edition D and D did also and you got abilities from other classes through Feats you can take abilities from other classes through archetypes but archetypes are just glorified feet trees they might give you the abilities of another class but it's only because that feet tells you you get X also another restriction I didn't go over is that every archetype dedication feat you get requires you to take a total of three Feats in that archetype before you take a dedication feed of another archetype so this prevents shopping around and archetype dipping from a whole variety of archetypes so let's see how this plays out in practice duoo at level two 4 and six is going to take different blessed one Feats then he takes another archetype at level eight he wants to be a Marshall and Lead his tribe on the battlefield the Marshall lets him give commands orders to others and Inspire them and make them less afraid he can take these Feats at 8 10 and 12 meanwhile his spellcasting as a druid is unchanged at level 12 he's still going to be able to cast sixth rank spells and his proficiency as a druid spellcaster is still going to progress the way his class features list says he's going to progress he's still going to be an expert at druid's spellcasting the math is going to be the same his wisdom is going to be at a plus five at this point the effectiveness of casting chain lightning as a druid is going to be the same as compared to if he were to take purely Druid Feats up to this point also the animal companion his Goblin dog its math is going to be progressing as well it adds drw's character level to its statistics this entire time however he can't Advance it give it a nudge by taking Feats that Advance his animal companion and there's three more Feats that he could take that improve its basic math over the course of level 1 to 20 his numbers are going up the same um no matter whether he's taking archetype Feats or Dr Feats his class features are progressing his will saves the same his weapon proficiency his armor AC proficiency and no matter what at level 19 he's going to be legendary in his Druid spellcasting so by fixing the math controlling his math deciding his math for him it's actually giving him more freedom to make more choices about how to express his character concept this is all made possible because there is no multiclassing and this has a number of advantages first it allows characters to be overall more more balanced the archetypes are not giving you levels in another class but the designers now have the ability to give you what a level two class feet would give you they're able to control the amount of power make sure it's not too big and also make sure it's not too little what that archetype dedication feat will give you so the the introductory feet should be comparable to a level two Druid feet or level two Rogue feet for that matter the designers can Cali at what these Feats give you using the universal measure of level so the level two fighter dedication first you have to have a good strength and dexterity what it gives you is only a subset a small subset of what a level one fighter gets it gives you trained Proficiency in simple weapons and Marshall weapons in Pathfinder when you're a level one fighter you become expert in simple weapons and Marshall weapons you're also not getting everything else a first level fighter gets uh being trained in advanced weapons training in all armor types attack of opportunity reaction The Shield block reaction and the first level fighter class feed you're not getting any of those things in fact if you're already proficient with Marshall weapons this doesn't get you anything at all this is simply unlocking this feet tree for you that's the benefit it gives you but maybe you want to get attack of opportunity at level four you also get fighter Feats at relatively half your character level by first taking basic maneuver and later taking Advanced maneuver another example is the monk in Pathfinder at first level you get the very powerful Flurry of Blows action once per turn you can spend one action to make two attacks now if that were made available to anybody with a level two monk dedication feat that would be too powerful and so it's actually available as a 10th level feat under the monk archetype spellcasting all of the archetypes that let you multiclass quote unquote into a spellcasting class have a uniform set of Feats called basic spellcasting expert spell casting and master spell casting which give you certain um leveled spell slots that scale with your character level and you unlock higher leveled spell slots with more Feats they're going to be called ranks however in the remaster to prevent confusion with other uses of the word but yes if drugo were to delve into Wizardry and and spend four Feats on the wizard archetype he can get master spellcasting which at 20th level would allow him to get an at most an eighth rank spell slot so it's a couple of spell ranks behind what a pure wizard would get access to under the Arcane spell tradition basically these will not exceed what somebody who actually has that class will be able to do with spellcasting note that these Feats may be revised in the remaster but but they're still useful to make this point another advantage of no multiclassing is that you can have class defining abilities at level one again without fear that it's going to be stolen by a level dip a lot of D and 5 tables start their campaigns at third level because the first couple of levels in addition to characters being too squishy for many tables tastes only give a subset of their class defining abilities so that fighter can have all of those awesome abilities for fighting attack of opportunity being more accurate than anybody else heavy armor without the fear that anybody will take a level in fighter it allows the designers to make you feel like a veteran Adventurer of your class from the GetGo and also give you those class defining features that your level one and level two class feeds can key off of from the Geto as well another advantage of no multiclassing is that archetypes are not limited by classes there's a lot of archetypes in this game and not all of them give you abilities from another class there's a whole variety of things and that means you can get an archetype that's focused not on everything that class would give you but on something specific something more focused so let's say you're a fighter and you want to have an animal companion maybe a large one that you can ride and battle like a horse well you can take the Beast Master archetype at level two which gives you a whole whole set of Feats that let you advance your animal companion and improve your ability to fight in tandem with that animal now one could theoretically take the Druid archetype and gain animal companion Feats through that but you'd be limited to taking Druid feeds up to half of your level some of those higher level Druid feeds that really Advance your animal companion would not be available if you were to take the Druid archetyp and maybe you don't want any spellcasting ability well the the Beast Master is there for you and the design space is open to meet your specific need the design space is also open for other archetypes that are just cool Concepts that don't fit into a class per se the Shadow Dancer is one of the uh more exclusive archetypes because look its dedication feed is available at level eight but that means it could be designed to give you some more powerful abilities from the get-go in this case you get greater dark vision you can even see through areas of deeper darkness in Pathfinder 2 and a level 10 ft lets you teleport from one shadowy area to another more Feats let you gain sneak attack damage when they are off guard to you or become invisible when you teleport from Shadow to Shadow another advantage to no multiclassing is that there's an exponential growth every time new options come out in first edition Pathfinder splatbooks books with more options would come out with more archetypes for each class in 5e cycle we've seen books that give you more subclasses which similarly are confined to a specific class it means that in both systems you might see a similar concept like pirate or swashbuckler being expressed through similar subclasses or archetypes being expressed multiple times over more than one class however in Pathfinder 2E every single option the Shadow Dancer we just saw can be applied to every single class in the game so the beastmas archetype we just saw maybe the fire wants to get that to ride a horse into battle or a wizard wants to get that to have a tiger companion the Shadow Dancer archetype goes well with the Rogue but also maybe a spellcaster who creates magical Shadows would want to take that also unlike with these other additions every archetype that gets published in Pathfinder and any new class that comes with a multiclass archetype leads to an exponential growth of the number of options that characters can have and on top of that you can take multiple archetypes on your character and not only are all of these combinations possible but they're feasible duoo can be a Beastmaster Shadow Dancer Marshall and still be able to cast 10th level Druid spells so that's my case and I think Pathfinder 2 e by making these choices provides the following strengths to character creation you get a greater variety of choices that's still retained from from Third Edition d and d and first edition Pathfinder it's also not necessarily harder to peruse those choices and to commit to the decisions you eventually commit to because there's work and Care put in making them balanced and providing a mathematical Foundation to make sure that your choices are horizontal and not affecting the basic math this means you can just have your character concept and pick options that Express that concept and you're not going to fall behind so we retain the more choices from previous editions but you get more genuine freedom of choice we can illustrate this conceptually because Pathfinder 2E fixes your vertical progression as you level up you have more freedom to grow horizontally and those choices you make via Feats for your character are not inconsequential there is a difference between droo being able to heal people with Layon hands and transforming wild shaping into animals the difference between his blessed one archetype and taking a druid feet what Pathfinder succeeds at doing I think is important for other crunchy tactical RPGs to consider right now Wizards of the Coast is in the process of Designing the next edition of DnD and one of the design challenges that the designers have is to make levels 1 and two more interesting because many tables start at level three because of what I explained earlier so to address that Wizards has put out play tests that seek sometimes seek to make levels one and two more interesting there was an early play test that gave the ranger for example a lot of powerful abilities at level one however because multiclassing is staying in the game as far as we can tell it means that every time Wizards puts more interesting abilities at levels 1 and two it makes that class more attractive as a level dip so in a recent play test document they put out a draft warlock that lets the Warlock take an invocation at level one and one of those invocations is packed of the blade which is kind of a adaptation of hex blade warlock from 5e as a bonus action the Warlock can conjure a marshall melee weapon of their choice apply their Charisma modifier to the attack and damage roles have the option of dealing necrotic psychic or radiant damage and gain the Mastery property of that weapon Mastery properties are extra abilities that Marshall characters can apply to weapons that Wizards of the Coast created in order to give a buff to Marshall characters however this play test Warlock the Warlock has can cast ninth level spells eventually with the same ability as their spell casting modifier Charisma use weapons and the Marshall classes are limited to a handful of uh weapon masteries whereas this warlock can conjure any weapon and gain its Mastery property this is a very attractive level dip and they also get eldrich blast which scales to your character level not your warlock level and is maybe the strongest damage dealing cantrip in the game so there's clearly an effort to make a level one weapon fighting warlock viable but it has the danger now of being a very attractive level dip uh for other classes especially esally those that use Charisma as their one of their better stats we have two competing design goals making levels one and two interesting and mitigating the the exploits made possible by multiclassing so what do the designers do to address this issue they make and continue to say that multiclassing is an optional Rule and when I post a criticism of this pack of the blade ability on Twitter one of the responses was well this is not a warlock problem it's a problem with multiclassing and if that's a problem then talk to your players about it and so basically remove multiclassing if you think it's a problem the problem is many people like multiclassing like to customize their characters like to have that ability the GM is put in the position of being a bad guy in order to have more balance in the game you have to sacrifice customization and if you keep that customization the DM and the players have to deal with the consequences of that decision like with the plus one magical weapons and with wi Boots the designers are leaving it to the dungeon Masters to figure out the balance of the game and it becomes kind of a sefian task to balance the game everything you do every decision you make creates new problems Pathfinder by putting people on Rails and limiting people's ability to multiclass gets to avoid this problem and it's possible to start at level one feeling like your class the fighter can have expert weapon proficiency proficiency with all armor attack of opportunity Shield block and a first level class feed the monk can have Flurry of Blows as a level one ability it's also possible to give classes abilities that are impossible for other classes to get some Rogues who choose the thief subass can get dexterity added to certain weapon damage which is not possible otherwise uh Rangers can get the very powerful Hunter's Edge ability AB ility to mitigate the multiple attack penalty or get bonus damage or get unattainable bonuses to their skill checks and AC to monsters that they focus on the design space is opened up to give powerful abilities to classes that cannot be taken otherwise our Goblin Druid through his choice of order can heal his animal once per battle if there's 10 minutes between each battle to refocus with the heal animal order spell and other Druids need a four level Druid feet to get that the structure of characters and using level as a measure and restricting when people can get what makes it possible to give these goodies early on at level one for characters everything goes back to the initial point I made and said in a weird way which is that you get many things but there are ceilings controlling how high you can raise those things so if we look at a chart of what duwo will get at the first four levels we see that's quite a lot of things the reason why characters can be very different from each other and be balanced is because of that sheer number of things duoo can be different from other Druids because he can choose one order meanwhile he gets his own unique ancestry feet whereas another Druid will get a different ancestry feet so duoo can be different from other druid IDs because of this High features budget all of these things he can get he gets a lot of choices and they are horizontal and relatively balanced with each other so at level two he gets yet more things he gets things at every level and he can Branch out horizontally and get the ability to heal people with lay on hands and later he can choose to Wild shape whereas another Druid might want to Wild shape at level two meanwhile our fighter who hits really hard has enough of a features budget left over to put attribute boosts and skill increases into medicine so that he can be a great healer in battle as well or put those points into intimidation so that eventually he can scare monsters to death Pathfinder basically achieves its ability to customize and its ease of use by the fact that it gives you so many things to choose and work and Care are put into balancing those choices so that's it if you enjoyed this video I recommend check out uh one of my other law school videos in which I talk about how Pathfinder 2E fixes issues in 1e and D andd not just character creation and if you want a walk through on actually making a character um you might enjoy something I made really early in my channel before I learned a lot of things I know now but it's more Hands-On and goes through making a character with a paper character sheet if you enjoyed this video like And subscribe and also ring the bell to be notified about the future Law School courses when they come out and also join my Discord where we are now over 4,000 people talking Pathfinder other games you can also play Pathfinder 2 e because of the dropin play System we have for the system also support my patreon if you want early access to rules lawyer videos and get exclusive access to a number of videos including me teaching and running Pathfinder 2E for D and YouTubers so that's it I've been Ronald the rules lawyer I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Rules Lawyer

Views: 39,881

Keywords: rules lawyer, rpg, dnd, d&d, pathfinder, pathfinder 2e, pf2, pf2e

Id: mPXWbHe1F9M

Length: 52min 42sec (3162 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023