DND writes its rules to be as quick to read and apply to basic situations, but then becomes unwieldy in many if the non-standard cases because they didn’t take the word count to fine tune the rules work as you necessarily would expect, and thus they become confusing.
Something like PF2E (while not perfect in clarity, but much better) has much more verbose rules, but they do a better job of making them apply to non-standard situations closer to how you expect more often.
You definitely can screw yourself a lot with uninformed choices, but they are less impactful per choice, and the base kit of classes are good enough that bad feat picks won’t make you useless.
The biggest exception here is spell selection, shit spell selection can feel really bad, and there are a decent amount of “trap” spells (not that the spells are bad, but it’s easy to misunderstand the intended purpose).
Pathfinder 2e in particular is very good at making combat feel cinematic and role-playee, where teamwork matters, so players interact with each other a lot more. Having a combat heavy system doesn’t make it a bad system, it just means it’s a good RPG system for heavy combat role-playing. It also allows the “g” part in “rpg” to be more present as well.
Depends on how strong the potion is. In 5e, healing is kinda weak, so bonus action makes sense. In PF2E, potions are stronger, so 2 actions (or more depending on what you got in hand) to draw and drink makes sense.
Single race party (diyrpg.org)
Hot Take: 5e is too bloated with unnecessary rules and should be simplified (ttrpg.network)
I recommend this video to look more into OSR philosophy regarding the rules: www.youtube.com/live/bCxZ3TivVUM?si=aZ-y2U_AVjn9a…
No one really understands our struggle (lemmy.world)
Kinda hard to stay realistic when literal magic exists, no? (ttrpg.network)