Here's my comment on the Reddit post: --- "Balance" is a really awful word for it. Everyone has an internal sense of what "balance" means, while in game design it's usually used in a different way. And the discourse around balance, whether it's fun or not, why it's fun or not, very often completely misses what balance is. Balance is a tool. Full disclosure, I am not a game designer, but I work with game designers in the video game industry, and one of my jobs is to assess balance in their designs using empirical data. And the way designers design for balance, and the way I asses it, is to have standard entities (enemies, player-characters, weapons, consumables... whatever the categories of entities are in your game) and assign that a rating -- usually 1, or 100, or 1000, or some other meaningful but easily divisible number -- and then compare your other designs to these standards. In a leveled game like Pathfinder, we would have one such standard per category at each level. In something like, say, Rainbow Six Siege, there'd just be one for each category. For the most part, these are used for helping to generate ELO scores for matchmaking, but for something like PF2, it'd be used to test designs and make sure things weren't too over- or under-tuned for their level, or for assigning level to a creature or item based on its design (knowing the power scaling for the game, if a Level 1 item has a power rating of 1000, and my item has a power rating of 2500, it would get slotted into Level 3 or Level 4, depending on other factors). In this respect, balance is a tool for creating predictable or consistent outcomes, something that's very important to module writers. But it flows both ways. Just as I can try to design an item with a power rating of 4000, so that it is Level 5, I can also (as mentioned above) just design whatever I want, and then see where it lands on the power scale, and assign it its appropriate level. I can choose to make 120 XP encounters, or I can make the encounters I think make sense, and then know that they are 240 XP, and that the party is either going to need some help getting through it, or that I will need to provide fair warning and possible dissuasion should they try to engage. I can choose to only give players on-level items, or I can super-charge them with PL+3 weapons and have a really good sense of how they will impact the game. The problem is, not everyone seems to see the B-side to balance. They just see the game as demanding, because guidance is apparently something you can never say "no, thank you" to. And they see a sea of people talking about how great balance is, and see people confusing balance with rigid constraint while celebrating it. People who tell them that "the game expects" them to play it in a certain way (while the actual lead designers are out there championing the flexibility of the system), and in all of that, the very concept of what "balance" is gets completely and totally beaten down into a pulp. I play this game because I love saying "no" to guidance, and still getting to feel very confident in how things will unfold. Because I get to do things that make my players feel like bosses without it fucking up my whole campaign. Because it provides me a whole toolbox full of tools that I can use whenever I need them, and everything I need to manufacture tools of my own. I'm glad it provides other people the constrained puzzle box that they are looking for, but hot damn am I tired of people shouting to the world that that's all the game is. Because it is so, so, so much more.

And [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1o7fvbw/comment/njp1p8m/) is u/Killchrono's reply, which I think is must-read: --- So there's a line of thought that's come to make me realize why a lot of the discussions surrounding PF2e seem so needlessly antagonistic, and a big part of it comes down to a weird quirk and hypocrisy I've noticed in discussions about it over the years. Back before Remaster, there was a tonne of discussion about how the online community about the game is hostile to homebrew and house rules. Obviously there still is, but after the Remaster came out (particularly PC2, where a lot of the more controversial changes were made like the orcale rework), there was a notable shift in tone towards saying things like 'use the old rules' and 'just change it if you don't like it' was poo-poo'd. Now you'd think it would be the people who were 'enforcing' the so-called RAW purity who were doing this, or it was just a plain old Goomba Fallacy where the people complaining about the changes weren't the same as the ones who were complaining about the rules purity...except they were, because even barring the fact I'm a chronically online pedant who knows too many of the regular usernames around here and I recognized a lot of the same ones popping up in those discussions, it was clear it was the people who were already dissatisfied with the game who were making complaints about the changes like the oracle rework, or cantrips or poisons being nerfed, or the mistaken changes to the death rules before they were clarified in errata. So the line of questioning becomes, why not use the old rules? Simply put, it was a combination of people who felt fatalistic about being unable to negotiate or change things about the game they perceived they had no power over, and online pedants who were just trying to score one-ups on people who were defending the changes by enforcing an arbitrary Oberoni Fallacy to discuss it in the most RAW-enforced way possible. Now the latter in this case can be summarily dismissed because that's the kind of toxic, self-important point-scoring that leads to unproductive discussions, but it's the former here is what I'm interested in. Changing rules at the table really is an insular decision that should be made within your group. Why does it matter what Reddit thinks? Why do you need Reddit's permission to discuss that with your GM, let alone feel the need to change the RAW entirely to what you want to get what you want? Simply put: the GM isn't letting you under the auspices that they're sticking to the rules, because clearly Paizo knows better and if the rules are designed that way, that's the way the game should be run. So the only way to change your table's experience, is to change the official rules. Now let's be clear about something: this train of thought is not entirely unfounded. It's why people care so much about releases like Remaster or DnD 2024. The RPG zeitgeist has a more direct influence on people's decision making than the online discourse would have you believe, and most of the time it gives this disproportionate deference to official releases as being the Source of Truth for what the most up to date and polished version of the game is, while completely undermining the wider sentiment that the RPG space is this self-determinate bastion of free thought where you can make the game whatever you want. And there are definitely 'sheeple GMs', for lack of a less crass phrase - that go by what the official sentiment is and stick to RAW as rigidly as possible, not allowing house rules, homebrew, 3pp, etc. even going so far as to assume the official designers inherently know better how to design and tune their own game, even if they've proven they can't. Simultaneously and non-contradictorily, none of this changes the fact that yes, in the end it really is between you and your GM how you decide to handle rules at your own table. Just because the game 'expects' something as a baseline, doesn't mean you have to abide by it. This comes down to a more important question I also think gets overlooked here: has your GM not thought about this? Or do you simply disagree with your GM? This got me thinking about why these sorts of complaints are less prevalent in the more 'popular' d20s over the past few decades like 3.5/1e and 5e, and it was discussing a completely different topic related to what you're discussing here. I'd regularly point out, having overpowered options in 3.5/1e or 5e was no different to comparing the modifiers, DCs, and wider scaling abilities of lower level creatures in PF2e. What the math is more or less exactly the same, what is the breakpoint? The thing that gets regularly pointed out is that in 3.5/1e (less so 5e since feats and magic items are technically optional rules, but more so in terms of how they're generally tuned), is that in those systems, that power scale is determined by the player's available RAW choices, not by the GM adjusting the challenges or going out of band of the expected power band each level to grant it. In PF2e, the maths is so tight and foolproof, the baseline is more or less 'normal difficulty' at best. In 3.5/1e and 5e, you can game it so you are superlative to any assumed baselines. And that's when it hit me: it's about being the determiner of the power cap. In 3.5/1e and 5e, it's very easy for a player running with a sheeple/Abed-type GM who runs perfectly neutrally and says 'well it's in the rules so I'll allow it' to set their own power caps, because the rules permissively allow it. You can't do that in PF2e. In PF2e, it is entirely dependent on the GM to be permissive to those power spikes, because the 'expected baseline' is a more level power cap. This results in two kinds of players who are dissatisfied: those who are not being selfish or malicious just used to the mechanical permissiveness of those other systems suddenly feeling stifled, and those who's need for enjoyment relies on (if not is entirely dependent on) feeling superior to other people at the table. That's why a lot of the most hardcore complaints about PF2e are supremely and unnecessarily aggressive and vindictive towards people who like it. The former type are people who think they've done nothing wrong, assuming they've done nothing wrong, and legitimately don't see why what they were doing before was a problem. The latter are the exact kinds of problem players PF2e is setting out to stop, so of course they'll react in the exact way a toxic person reacts when someone puts reasonable boundaries on their behaviour that affects everyone else.