With Hackmaster 5. The balance point of play is on health and equipment. This creates a long term dynamic instead of an encounter or “adventuring day” balancing act. Added with penetrating (exploding) dice and thresholds of pain (ToP) this makes even easy combats dangerous. So there is very little pressure on balancing a fight to make a challenge, every fight is dangerous. This is honestly the biggest flaw with GMing D&D 5e and PF2e, because there isn’t really a longterm balance point. And giving players a little extra healing (bonus action healing potions) or a night of sleep makes it much harder to challenge them without a TPK. Which is a consequence of the mechanics fighting logic in the game.

Thanks to Hackmaster’s longterm framework equipment can be very impactful on play encouraging exploration. And giving a powerful item doesn’t create a future problem for me. I can just roll for items and it’s fine. I also don’t worry about mixed level parties, weak characters or broken abilities.

Hackmaster Monsters are well designed with lots of supporting information that help inform my choices and provide easy answers. Stuff like sleep cycles and spell components are clearly listed.

For WFRP and CoC, the d100 universal resolution system and simplicity of rules makes it very easy to arbitrate. Effectively there are few rules questions.

Cthulhu also follows a particular flow of dread, terror, gore/horror that push the game forward. But it does typically work best with one shots.

Did you note that I included encumbrance. Magic bags are a huge problem for trivializing the concerns of your character.

There are systems that make it not purely accounting, like resource dice.

What you described is barely a timer system, reset on combat end doesn’t really ever matter to a game. I’m addressing longer time frame resource drain benefiting the game by creating risk and promoting choice. There isn’t really a point if arrows aren’t lost and broken.

Timer systems like arrow counting, rations and encumbrance are good for game flow. Removing them tends to diminish the level of emotional investment and roleplaying in the game.

It’s a jab at players for being overly attached to the system. Basically that pf2 players are wearing rose colored glasses.

Understanding the market is not understanding the medium. Why is everyone putting words in my mouth. I am not advocating for some crazy free form improv without rolls or some other ruleless non-sense.

I’m saying that 5e and PF2 are not well-defined systems. You can have a different opinion, of course you will. And specifically that GMs burn out in these systems because they are not fun for GMs longterm.

Why is everyone here so bad at reading? I specifically am calling out PF2 for being designed as if it was a video game. I am saying Paizo doesn’t understand the medium of RPGs, because they don’t.

Where did I say I don’t like dice or crunch? I literally run Hackmaster. You don’t even know Hackmaster do you? Sure I don’t like bloated player options that cause power creep and slow the game down. But that doesn’t mean I do sloppy improv or storytell railroads like Critical Role or Dimension 20.

I’ve only been running rpgs 20 years. Has it occurred to you that you don’t like rpgs if you just play 5e or PF2. Are you even a gamemaster?

No, I dislike games like pf2 because the MDA framework they have designed is detrimental to the medium of roleplaying games. Because the mechanics encourage players to use PC in non-diegetic dynamics crippling the aesthetics of any setting or genre.

Yes, I’ve played it. And a lot of other games. PF2 balance is only okay and they had to do several annoying things to do it. Like how do you balance a mixed level party in pf2? The system really doesn’t like that, because of it’s number inflation.

Well they could stop gamifying RP and exploration so players actually get into character instead of just rolling dice. But that’s a pretty fundamental shift, so they won’t do it.

Nope, I know both. They both suck because of the required over optimization. But pf1 at least didn’t have characters constantly at full hp, which is one of the biggest balance issues.

This is entirely correct. Balance does not matter in most games, because most games have resources that are depleted over a long term. You don’t need balance when healing takes weeks or difficult to replace resources.

For games like 5e and pf2, where characters constantly are at full health, spells and equipment, combat needs to almost kill the party every time to be worth rolling dice.

PF2 is certainly easier to run. But tell me when it becomes a RPG, it’s basically a video game system ported to tabletop. Everything is about the builds, not the characters.

PF2e is a joke. It requires reading the whole rules and planning out a character for multiple levels before making your first character. It gatekeeps the hobby worse than FATAL.

Yeah, PF1 and 3.5e are bloated as hell. But you didn’t need to read all the feats for all the races before picking human fighter. Plus the people still playing those never used everything that was published.

Clue tokens.

Mega-dungeons are great. I’m running one now and I basically have zero prep, I made the dungeon and just see where they go. They go in the dungeon and explore, get into some trouble and grab some loot. It’s honestly so nice to have them dungeon crawling. My last game I was juggling plot lines across 5 cities and making custom content constantly in prep. I was burning out between 5e and building content every week.

5e Undermountain is a very poor megadungeon.