Quote Originally Posted by Kurald Galain View Post
Your post provides some great examples of how PF2 is much less tactical, because putting out effects like "chance of -10' speed" or "-1 to attacks" are not crowd control.

Rather, that's throwing around little fiddly modifiers that in practice don't make a difference. Your choices (both in build and in gameplay) in 4E have a much greater impact than in PF2; and that's why the latter is much less tactical.
They're crowd control at a power level that is appropriate to the system. But my main disagreement is with your second comment. I don't agree with the implied assumption that game options with higher impact inherently promote tactical play. The extremely high impact level of many 3.5 and 5e spells is a primary factor in making those editions less tactical--because in those cases the power level has been pushed to the point where a single spell can be an "I win this combat" button for most combats.

Individual decision points (whether in build or in play) in PF2E tend to have less impact per decision than 4E's decision points, but PF2E also tends to have more opportunities for those decisions to meaningfully influence a combat. That's inherent to the core features of PF2E: the three action system evens out cost of various actions (which for example increases the inherent value of a decision of whether or not to move on any given turn because the opportunity cost of moving is higher vs. a system where movement is an assumed part of a standard turn) while limiting how much impact any given action can have (because other single actions need to have a value similar to that of moving in at least some situations, whereas standard actions in 4E can be much stronger than the value of 4E movement), the four degrees of success system increases the impact of small bonuses and penalties which keeps smaller decisions relevant, and the four degrees of proficiency system provides more granularity to character build decisions--e.g. 4E skills have 2 degrees of proficiency beyond untrained: trained (largely one set of decisions at character creation), and focused (a relatively low power option in the feat pool), and the gap between untrained and trained is quite large at +5. PF2E skills get a bunch of trained selections (+1 for level +2 for trained) at creation but then have up to three more proficiency increments that each add +2 more, with most characters getting to increment a skill at every odd level--and then the level of proficiency in a skill has further ramifications for which skill feats you might grab, which are a separate resource to class feats, and each feat pool has you picking new feats as often as 4E has you picking feats. Add in ancestry and general feats and you're picking roughly 3x as many feats per level in PF2E as in 4E while still gaining other class features. For martials those other features are fewer and of less impact than 4E powers so PF2E class feat selection and 4E power selection kind of overlap leaving PF2E martials making roughly 2x the number of build decisions as 4E characters. PF2E casters meanwhile are making well over 3x the build decisions since they're advancing spellcasting and new spell selection alongside their feats.

If we made a 2 axis plot where one is the number of decisions/unit of game time and the other is the impact of each individual decision, I think we can agree that the "few decisions with low impact" quadrant is much less tactical than the "many decisions with high impact" quadrant. But the "fewer decisions with higher impact" and "more decisions with lower impact" quadrants are much harder to quantify--the extremes of each quadrant (very few decisions with extremely high impact, or very many decisions of very low impact) are not very tactical, but things definitely get more tactical as you start from one extreme and increase one parameter while lowering the other--until you pass a tipping point and start becoming less tactical as you head towards the other extreme. My play experience with both systems (referenced to my extensive gaming background) suggests to me that they are on roughly similar tier levels in terms of how tactical they are, but it's hard to draw that comparison since they reside in opposite quadrants of the decisions vs impact level plot.