Pathfinder 2e House Rules (and Homebrew) in 7 Minutes or Less

house ruling is an important part of ttrpgs one of the pillars you can't do in video games some systems are made to be house ruled look at old school Essentials a remake of old DND attack rolls saving throws listening checks and initiative all use completely different systems that means if you have a better idea on how to do initiative roles you can just take it out and put your own system in but Pathfinder 2E is a very robust detailed system that emphasizes balance like a skyscraper you wouldn't just randomly pull out a beam from a Skys scraper right it might fall down but that doesn't mean you can't house rule Pathfinder as long as you maintain the frame there's still a lot to switch and swap around that's because the robust frame primarily supports the vertical progression in Pathfinder while a lot of the game and customization occurs in the horizontal progression what's vertical progression Pathfinder 2 is a game about fighting monsters there's more to it than that but that's generally how players judge their usefulness that means ultimately the only thing that matters is how fast you can reduce the enemy's hit points versus how fast they can reduce your hit points it's a competition of damage output however each side's damage output is heavily controlled first each character only gets three actions and that very rarely changes meaning there's a bottleneck of damage output since each action can only do a given amount each action also has a check often a hit bonus versus AC check that is effectively the percent chance that a given action will do damage you can think of it like a pipe the diameter of the pipe is how many actions you get the volume of water is the damage while the amount you open a valve is your hit bonus versus ac% chance the primary dial you have to control that valve so your hit bonus and the enemy's AC controls your party's damage output let's say you're an average level one character with a plus seven to hit your plus seven is made up of a plus4 key attribute a plus two trained proficiency and a plus one from your level if you fight a monster with a with a 17 AC your chance to hit at all will be 55% and your chance to crit will be 5% but now you leveled up you progressed vertically along the only axis that matters now you have a plus 8 to hit if you were still fighting that Goblin with an AC of 17 you would have a 60% chance to hit and a 10% chance to crit but you're not you leveled up now you're fighting more powerful enemies with an AC of 18 so your chance to hit and chance to crit stays basically the same this happens continuously as you level up you get stronger but so do the enemies so the actual percent chance which controls damage output stays relatively the same in theory this is why your proficiency is so important if your proficiency goes from trained to expert you get an extra plus two over the enemies at your level however this is only true for some classes like Fighters otherwise the enemy's proficiency also usually goes up at the same rate as yours in fact it goes even further As You Adventure you gain magic items and runes which might give you a plus one to your weapons however the system expects you to have a certain number of magic items by a specific level and the enemies again will get correspondingly stronger at that level again the actual hit chance stays the same this is the robust core of Pathfinder 2E that's why certain aspects of the game are heavily discouraged Ed from altering certain variables like the number of actions you get or how many actions things cost the multiple attack penalty and the weapon balance are generally fixed throughout the game and keep the damage output bottlenecked and easily controlled other variables like your level key attribute proficiencies runes damage and the rank of your spells change throughout the game but at a very controlled rate so can you house rule any of these variables well it's not recommended but it is possible the important part is understanding how things work together let's say you have an attack bonus of plus s and the enemy has an AC of 17 the chance to hit and crit will be 55 and 5% respectively if your attack Bonus Goes to Plus 8 then the chance to hit and the chance to crit will go up by 5% you could also consider that to be a total of 10% chance to do 100% more damage in other words every plus one to attack is about equal to 10% more damage removing a multiple attack penalty or a minus5 penalty that's 50% more damage making an opponent off guard they take 20% more damage taking away an action or adding an action could be equal to losing or adding up to to 150% damage depending on what you were planning to do that turn for comparison increasing a weapon die a size is usually about one extra damage and adding another weapon die is usually about 50% extra as an example let's imagine a house rule that makes it so you can do an extra stride without using an action if you didn't use up all your move speed from a previous action also known as breaking up your movement a common strategy in Pathfinder is to stride up to an enemy strike and then stride away again for defensive purposes if you could break up your movement you're basically giving yourself an extra action you could move up to to the opponent attack twice and then stride away in other words that house rule would give melee characters but only melee characters 50% more damage while ranged characters would be sad it's generally safer to utilize horizontal progression which doesn't make characters explicitly more powerful but gives them more options let's say you were a fighter with the vicious strike class feet and were given a magic item that somehow gave you the equivalent of the gouging claw cantrip giving a fighter a magic spell seems overpowered but vicious strike lets you strike for 2 D12 damage plus 4 with a great sword gouging claw even with the same attack bonus only does 2 D6 plus two so in most cases there would be no reason to ever use gouging claw more options but you didn't change the balance of the core Loop most Heritage benefits General Feats and ancestry Feats utilize horizontal progression for example increasing move speed slightly gaining access to another ancestry Feats gaining cant trips becoming trained in a skill not expert just trained Shield block a minor bonus to initiative changing damage type or learning new languages it's not to say that it doesn't make more powerful but it's a lot more situational than explicit vertical progression house rules like removing General feed so you have to earn them in Universe giving all characters a magic device that gives them the message can trip giving all characters the Assurance feat or giving all characters the vampire archetype are fun and A- okay but a house rule like making trip not use the multiple attack penalty making interact not cast an action or giving all characters a plus one in their key attribute are not recommend it giving a plus two bonus when attacking from above is pretty situational enough that it's probably okay look at the official variant rules as an example if you don't like adding level to every D20 rule that's okay but you need to do it with the enemies as well like the proficiency without level rule if you don't like fundamental rules you don't have to give them to your players but make sure you make up for it with an automatic bonus progression likewise ancestry Paragon simplified ancestries free archetype and simplified skill Feats are a good example of variant rules that utilize horizontal progression with these principles in mind there's a lot of Pathfinder Tui you can house rule if you want you could replace level with proficiency without level and fundamental runes with automatic bonus progression you could make all D20 roles done by the players by converting players AC and spell DC into a bonus by subtracting 11 you could get rid of damage dice by replacing them all with the average damage you could get rid of all non-class Feats and award them as prizes in game you could mandate your players need to shout the attacker spell name every time their character uses it with this many house rules why even play Pathfinder 2E well maybe I want to be a psychic lushy with an Elven inventure wizard friend

Channel: KingOogaTonTon

Views: 6,421

Keywords:

Id: MxQfLlg1NdY

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024