CapnZapp
Legend
To add to the already loong list of flaws and annoyances exhibited by the Pathfinder 2 ruleset, let's discuss its ability to support other ways of playing the game than Adventure Paths and Pathfinder Society play.
I find the game entirely unsuitable for modding of this kind. Not only does the official support for variants (mostly provided by the Gamesmastery Guide) not really widen the base, it is very difficult to tweak the game yourself, since the ruleset features a myriad of interlocking subsystems. Let's discuss a couple of common use cases. If your reaction is "use another game for that", this only proves my point.
- old-school sandbox play. This playing style features much more randomness in encounters. That is, if you walk up to the red dragon, you simply will face a monster eight levels above you. Pathfinder 2 simply cannot handle this as written. You might say, "but there is a variant for proficiency without level". Yes, but that still requires you to recalculate every stat on the spot, all the time.
And still, this style of play also features something Paizo decidedly does not provide support for: resource management. Does the GMG offer a variant to make every healing potion or Cure Wounds spell count? No. Can you do it yourself? Well, you need to scour the rulebooks for every renewable no-cost healing resource. Sure Medicine and Lay on Hands might be simple to identify, but lurking among the thousands of feats and spells there are many other you need to be aware of. An official variant explaining exactly what you need to restrict would have been VERY welcome, but we're sold out of luck.
- tweaks to available equipment. Say you want to set your game in ancient greece or something. You will find it incredibly hard to remove, say, heavy armor from the game, or things like greatswords. This impacts different classes unequally, and I would say it is next to impossible to predict where the impact will fall. Sure you can easily disallow entire classes, but that's usually considered far too inflexible. But scouring through the hundreds and hundreds of class feats is a huge job; much more work-intensive that for, say, D&D 5E.
For example, Xoth has created Players' Guides to support a Sword & Sorcery setting in Pathfinder 1 and 5th Edition. I can't imagine the work needed to pull this off in Pathfinder 2. I mean, it would require LOADS more work to recalibrate the game to support a subset of spells and weaponry. Creating a new PF2 class (like Courtier or Cultist) is simply too much work to ask of a small independent publisher. It would involve creating a hundred new feats, and balancing them against the already existing 2000+ feats.
Which is why I'm adding "extremely inflexible" and "poor modding support" to the list of things Pathfinder 2 does badly.
tl;dr: either run PF2 as is, or don't use the game at all.
PS: Just look at Paizo's botched attempt with the recent Adventure Path Agents of Edgewatch to see how Paizo themselves was caught up by this issue. (As a very brief recap - their adventure path lets players play law enforcement heroes. But the official attempt by Paizo to support this while still avoiding criticism for heroes killing and looting criminals involved them simply stating "no hero attack causes lethal damage", meaning the game works as normal, except no bad guy will ever die. In my opinion, this is a glaring admission of the ruleset's inability to be meaningfully tweaked.*)
*) I do NOT mind them trying to address police brutality issues; this is entirely looking at it from a game-design perspective.
I find the game entirely unsuitable for modding of this kind. Not only does the official support for variants (mostly provided by the Gamesmastery Guide) not really widen the base, it is very difficult to tweak the game yourself, since the ruleset features a myriad of interlocking subsystems. Let's discuss a couple of common use cases. If your reaction is "use another game for that", this only proves my point.
- old-school sandbox play. This playing style features much more randomness in encounters. That is, if you walk up to the red dragon, you simply will face a monster eight levels above you. Pathfinder 2 simply cannot handle this as written. You might say, "but there is a variant for proficiency without level". Yes, but that still requires you to recalculate every stat on the spot, all the time.
And still, this style of play also features something Paizo decidedly does not provide support for: resource management. Does the GMG offer a variant to make every healing potion or Cure Wounds spell count? No. Can you do it yourself? Well, you need to scour the rulebooks for every renewable no-cost healing resource. Sure Medicine and Lay on Hands might be simple to identify, but lurking among the thousands of feats and spells there are many other you need to be aware of. An official variant explaining exactly what you need to restrict would have been VERY welcome, but we're sold out of luck.
- tweaks to available equipment. Say you want to set your game in ancient greece or something. You will find it incredibly hard to remove, say, heavy armor from the game, or things like greatswords. This impacts different classes unequally, and I would say it is next to impossible to predict where the impact will fall. Sure you can easily disallow entire classes, but that's usually considered far too inflexible. But scouring through the hundreds and hundreds of class feats is a huge job; much more work-intensive that for, say, D&D 5E.
For example, Xoth has created Players' Guides to support a Sword & Sorcery setting in Pathfinder 1 and 5th Edition. I can't imagine the work needed to pull this off in Pathfinder 2. I mean, it would require LOADS more work to recalibrate the game to support a subset of spells and weaponry. Creating a new PF2 class (like Courtier or Cultist) is simply too much work to ask of a small independent publisher. It would involve creating a hundred new feats, and balancing them against the already existing 2000+ feats.
Which is why I'm adding "extremely inflexible" and "poor modding support" to the list of things Pathfinder 2 does badly.
tl;dr: either run PF2 as is, or don't use the game at all.
PS: Just look at Paizo's botched attempt with the recent Adventure Path Agents of Edgewatch to see how Paizo themselves was caught up by this issue. (As a very brief recap - their adventure path lets players play law enforcement heroes. But the official attempt by Paizo to support this while still avoiding criticism for heroes killing and looting criminals involved them simply stating "no hero attack causes lethal damage", meaning the game works as normal, except no bad guy will ever die. In my opinion, this is a glaring admission of the ruleset's inability to be meaningfully tweaked.*)
*) I do NOT mind them trying to address police brutality issues; this is entirely looking at it from a game-design perspective.