Attack: Make an attack roll with a weapon you're holding (can make additional attacks if you have the extra attack...

>Attack: Make an attack roll with a weapon you're holding (can make additional attacks if you have the extra attack feature).
>Cast a Spell: Cast a spell that you've prepared from your spell list by spending a spell slot.
>Dash: Run double your movement speed.
>Disengage: Movement doesn't provoke attack of opportunity.
>Dodge: All attacks made against you until the start of your next turn have disadvantage.
>Help: You may grant an ally advantage on a roll that they're making, provided they make the roll before your next turn. You may also grant advantage on an ally's attack roll if you're within 5 ft. of them.
>Hide: Make a Dexterity (Stealth) roll.
>Ready: Prepare an action that will cost a reaction once a trigger is activated (ex: I prepare to attack if they come within 5ft. of me.)
>Search:Make a Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation) roll.
>Use item: Interact with an object.
Why do people say 5e lacks options? This is just the basic shit every character can perform.

Spoken like a true 5e fag.

When they say 5e lacks options they mean customization options in relation to other games

How many "customization options" do you really need though? Between the CRB, supplements, and Unearthed Arcana, there's already a bunch of character options you could choose from, and that's before getting into multiclassing options as well.

Not every game needs to be 3.PF, 5e works just fine the way it is.

Except it's a simple piece of shit, if you ever play a real tabletop game you'll know what I mean

...

>real tabletop game
>the only choice you have is the color of your minifig
>or race to command
>or what the currently released set of cards provides
(you)

It's just the faggots who need to lean on rules for a crutch instead of roleplaying that say this
>"I don't have a kit for this specific type I want and refuse to use one of the existing ones and just roleplay out the difference"

inb4 some pathfinder fag comes in here to wank his kitsune wizard build

It may not be as complex as some of the games I've played but that doesn't mean it's a bad game.

Nice argument.

It's too complex while not being complex enough. As in it is too deep into being a definitively crunchy game to be 'rules-lite' while also not providing enough granularity in the options for characters. Obviously this is a matter of taste but this is what people are talking about.

>attack
>cast a spell
These are standard fucking actions. These are the base action of the goddamn class. And wizards have access to hundreds of spells. Fighters do not.
>Dash
Double moving has been part of the game since movement rules were added.
>Disengage
Withdraw action for retreating. Situational and reactionary.
>Dodge
Fighting defensively. Pretty shit in some ways but it's good in the right circumstances. Anyway, 3.X had this too.
>Help
Usually a shit idea. Plus since advantage doesn't stack in 5e and loads of things grant advantage (like battle master maneuvers and such) this is usually a shit idea.
>Hide
Okay? You can hide in other games as well. This isn't even a combat action this is just something you do.
>Ready
Delaying your turn / readied actions has long been a part of the game you fucking idiot. It'd be retarded if 5e DIDN'T have it. At least they removed delayed turns.
>Search
No one does this and it has no effect on combat.
>Use item
So opening a door and shit. Wow. So exciting.

The options they are looking for are shit like disarm and bullrush and trip. Most of which are shitty and stupid and uncinematic by the way. They are just shilled for by martialcucks who are bored by the game yet refuse to play casters so they whine that their fighter should be able to move 100 feet per round and bull rush a dragon even though it weighs tens of thousands of pounds, because "w-w-w-w-well spellcasters can do spells."

5e combat rules are fine, probably among the best for D&D. Certainly better than 3e or 4e. The problem is that character building is dull and unmodular and is basically "pick this pregenerated archetype, and, if you're a fighter or ranger or pally, this combat style."

>CRB
Has basically no options, it's the core book for a reason.
>Supplements
Most of them are lore. SCAG is a fucking disgusting waste of money, Volo's has fuck all except more snowflake races for mongoloids who are too special to play a human, and UA is mostly unapproved shit and it's again mostly linear, boring, basic bullshit archetypes.
>multiclassing options
LOL you mean retards who still do Fighter dips like back in 3.5 because the multiclass rules are fucking retarded? Yeah, more of that gay minmax shit. Spoon it out for me daddy I love that stuff. No. Multiclassing is gay as hell.
>Not every game needs to be 3.PF, 5e works just fine the way it is.
It "works" fine, the rules are good, but the character building is a fucking mess. Also the way ability scores are handled are so pants-on-head fucking retarded that you literally cannot roll for stats anymore without completely unbalancing the game.

Come on. At least TRY to explain your views. I know itll hurt your brain a little but still.

Just because you're not creative enough to do cool shit with the options at your disposal doesn't mean that it's actually boring.

For instance, did you know that you could take a dodge action before moving through hostile squares in order to give each opportunity attack disadvantage against you?

Or that you can replace any attack with a grapple or shove action, which grants any subsequent attacks advantage if they hit?

I mean, it's not like 3.PF where doing something besides attacking puts you at a mark disadvantage. IIRC, the only way to trigger an opportunity attack is if you willing move out of a square that an enemy is threatening, and even that is situational.

...

Most people will just use attack/spellcast in combat though

like what? im honestly curious here, what customization options are you missing in 5e versus other systems?

And whose fault is that? Doesn't mean that the options aren't there.

Very true. I feel like if other options could be used as bonus actions, they'd see more use. I know it's a feature with some classes already though.

I saw this dude multiple times already. judging by his obsession with cuckold fetish. I agree with the first part of his post.
But why does he insist on verisimilitude for martials in a setting where even a common soldier can field dash wearing a full plate in a matter of seconds and where cold steel weapons weight like a wooden toys?
>They are just shilled for by martialcucks who are bored by the game yet refuse to play casters so they whine that their fighter should be able to move 100 feet per round and bull rush a dragon even though it weighs tens of thousands of pounds, because "w-w-w-w-well spellcasters can do spells."
This is basically what dudes on paizo forums would've said.

>they mean customization options in relation to other games
Oh no, your obscure martial weapon doesn't have its own statblock anymore and you're forced to just fluff it off another weapon. This is definitely a major flaw of 5e and not a nonissue that every other kind of game already does.

Generally when people gripe about options, they're taking about the lack of options during chargen. Though I would say that 5e is, for the most part, going for a quality over quantity approach.

It's not free of shit, but it doesn't have as much shit as 3.P.

>I mean, it's not like 3.PF where doing something besides attacking puts you at a mark disadvantage
That's exactly what it's like. It may not be as blatant as enemies literally getting free attacks that cancel your maneuver if you didn't take several feats, but it's still there.

I can go pick up Mutants & Masterminds and make nearly anything I can imagine without even touching houserules.

>Generally when people gripe about options, they're taking about the lack of options during chargen.
I still cannot understand why people bitch about chargen. Chargen should be the most boring part of the game just so you can get to the actual game as fast as possible.
>That's exactly what it's like. It may not be as blatant as enemies literally getting free attacks that cancel your maneuver if you didn't take several feats, but it's still there.
I disagree. Most of the actions you can take have their own purposes that make them invaluable to use during combat, it's just that most people played during the 3.PF era of tabletop, so they're used to not being able to do anything that isn't spelled out for them.

Different roles? How quaint. Everyone should be able to do everything! They might drive away retards with money like yourself otherwise. That's alright tho, you do you, you retarded faggot, you.

Okay, go ahead and shove without Athletics proficiency, let me know how that works out for you, and I'm deliberately disregarding that Fighter and Monk are the two classes with enough volume of attacks that they're the only ones that can really replace their attacks with them and not care.

don't forget shove, and grapple.

Has anyone ran a dungeon crawler game in this system?

>Okay, go ahead and shove without Athletics proficiency, let me know how that works out for you,
One time I grappled a dude before blasting him at close range with my dragonborn's breath weapon. For the most part it worked out alright, especially since I was playing a sorcerer at the time.
>I'm deliberately disregarding that Fighter and Monk are the two classes with enough volume of attacks that they're the only ones that can really replace their attacks with them and not care.
As long as you have at least two attacks, you're basically good user. People underestimate just how devastating being grappled or knocked prone is, especially when you have allies who can lay on fat stacks of damage.

Hell, having advantage is stronger than having proficiency in most cases.

Probably.

Eh, I get it even if that's not how I usually enjoy pen and paper RPGs.
That's how they conceive of and define their characters, and how they become attached. It's just that their loop for putting together a character is ran through the array mechanical fiddly bits rather than how 5e handles it with Backgrounds and its character trait system, or skill proficiencies in general.

In choosing the parts that become part of their character they think about what their character has done and will go on to do, step by step, so they reassess their adventures and reassure themselves about their choices for how they characterize their PC.

Or probably more likely they just want to play with it like numerical tinker toys and don't give much of a damn about character or the campaign, but that's valid too so long as they're not spoiling the rest of the group's fun by being a wet blanket when character-driven stuff ends up happening.

>without even touching houserules
I'm not sure that's ever technically true in M&M, considering how literally every application of mechanics is explicitly permission-based.

Grappling only reduces speed to 0. It doesn't give advantage, that's prone.

Correct. Or at least, it doesn't guarantee advantage, but I think a lot of GMs would have it grant advantage for many sorts of attacks. Like, Cause Wounds would be pretty easy to hit someone with when the guy's already got persistent physical contact going on.

>Or probably more likely they just want to play with it like numerical tinker toys and don't give much of a damn about character or the campaign, but that's valid too so long as they're not spoiling the rest of the group's fun by being a wet blanket when character-driven stuff ends up happening.
We both know that that's not how that goes down user.

Besides, the most life affirming times of a character's life should be the things that happen at the table, because that's when the GM can throw you into precarious situations and see how your character reacts to the things happening around them.

If all the most interesting parts of your character's life happened in their backstory, it raises the question of why they're even there in the first place.

It depends on the table mostly. Like if you got a guy grappled and you're using a touch spell like Shocking Grasp, most DM's aren't going to treat it as a normal attack since you already have your hands on the target.

Either way, if you're pinned, I'm pretty sure it counts as restrained, which would grant advantage.

>We both know that that's not how that goes down user.
Hey, you'd be surprised. One of my lifelong friends used to be a mechanics-only sorta guy, but after a few sessions with me and a few mythology-nerd/drama-club friends he ended up getting a lot more into weaving story into it as well.

I don't think pinning exists in 5E and I automatically question the effectiveness of anything that takes a full round of setup like that to begin with.

Again, if you have one guy restrained while everyone else piles on the damage, it becomes incredibly useful.

Hell, during a Curse of Strahd campaign we had a year or so ago, our resident Druid became the MVP simply by turning into a Constrictor Snake, restraining the biggest problem in the fight, while the rest of the party just pelted the creature with as much as we could since every attack we made had advantage and a lot of people in the party were high damage dealers.

Granted, as a single person, he could only do so much, but that's also why we were a party in the first place.

>explicitly permission-based.
Because playing "Mother May I" and pushing the GM's patience is so much fun, and so much better than having a stable set of rules.

You can do pinning in 5E. You can also dis-arm.
Counter-intuitively, those rules are in the DMG, not the PHB, where the other Attack Actions are.

What does a Druid using a special wildshape form have to do with the basic grappling rules? I also have trouble imagining any real threat having trouble getting through their whole 12 AC and 13 HP on top of it taking two rounds to set up because wildshape eats an action.

>Because playing "Mother May I" and pushing the GM's patience is so much fun
Unless you're trying to push some meme build or trying to argue that you got advantage for something stupid, I don't see why the GM's patience would be tested.

>What does a Druid using a special wildshape form have to do with the basic grappling rules?
To show that the grappling rules can work if properly set up with the rest of the party.
> I also have trouble imagining any real threat having trouble getting through their whole 12 AC and 13 HP on top of it taking two rounds to set up because wildshape eats an action.
When you're in a party comprised of a Revised Ranger, Cleric, and a Paladin, most threats won't survive long enough to get their turn. Besides, Circle of the Moon Druids can wildshape as a bonus action.

I haven't played that specific ruleset myself, but a GM hacked another system to do something like M&M, and while it was fun, the core rules were left untouched, so it ended up being a little messy. That's probably not a problem with a rules system made around free form rules, but that presents it's own possible flaws too, such as two seperate games run by two different people using the very same system not allowing the same characters. The chances are, one probably isn't going to have more than one DM/GM for any given system, as that's just how it goes. As games, they're each and all an investment to all players and GMs, and each GM has their system preferences on top of that. It really does depend on how fast one blazes through campaigns and how popular a system is within your group to warrant more than one campaign run by more than one person using the same system.

All you're doing is selling me on Druids having a highly specific grappling option if they're based around wildshaping in a situation where the Druid's never targeted despite the form being more fragile than a level 1 character, not grappling being fine in general. Other characters don't have access to round 1 restrains like that.

> I don't see why the GM's patience would be tested.
Then you don't play that much or play with various forms of jellyfish. Seriously any game that stops for 10 minutes of a player probing how much they'll get punished for an action by asking to do something then switching to what they really want to do in some sort of mind game sense is just annoying
>That cloak thing is probably magical I want to tear it off.
>You're going to have to roll that at disadvantage
>Its a fucking cloak its a miracle he isn't tripping over it
>It's tied to him Still take disadvantage
>didn't you say his hat glowed with some gems?
>Yeah, glowed with fire when he cast stuff
>I want to knock the hat off that'll be easier right?
>Fine just roll strength against his reflex and get this over with.
Shortened for brevity, there's bonus points when these sort of fucks ask another player to stand up so they can think of stupid maneuvers and prove it's just as easy to lightning bolt the legs as it is to hit the torso. Worst is most of the time it does fucking shit cause it'll eventually get the GM being passive aggressive and just have it do fucking nothing while wasting everyone time but it seems "cool and makes sense with all the descriptions" right?

Granted its a self correcting problem because people will just default to the most boring min maxing rules as written once they find out doing "fun" actions is a minefield that ends up doing nothing so no one wins in this fucking debate.

Any character can perform a pin, which would grant you the same benefits as the example I mentioned earlier.

The druid was an example of how devastating it could be in the right group but it's certainly not the only way to utilize it.

Grappling doesn't grand advantage in 5e. I know, I had to look it up myself because I was so convinced it did. Party rules lawyer made a fool of me with this one.

All that sounds like a personal problem with you playing in a shitty group user, not an issue with the concept of people asking questions.

>Any character can perform a pin
You need the Grappler feat to do it and it still takes 2 rounds.

There are rules for pining without the feat, it's just in the DMG instead of the PHB for some reason.

There's a difference between being a clever dick and being creative for sure.

I think it's fine so long as everybody understands the nature of it and makes characters in good faith.

That said, there are other 'make whatever (within reason)' systems think I would probably hit up first before I'd commit to Mutants & Masterminds' substantial beefiness. You're already needing someone's mechanical and storytelling sense to double-check stuff to see if it's okay for one reason or another, so at that point all that crunch just sorta starts to just get in the way.

Then why does the feat exist?

I believe the regular grapple replaces one of your attacks like shove does; dealing no damage.

I will have to check the feat again, but I think it allows you to deal damage as you do the grapple as well.

Grappler gives you advantage against anything you grapple, except that's pointless when shove into grapple exists and there are feats that make that better, and lets you pin with an action that you can't substitute for an attack.

It's a pretty terrible feat. If you want to be better at grappling you'd be better off taking Tavern Brawler, which lets you Grapple at them for a bonus action after hitting them on top of its other benefits.

You're just being a nit picky faggot. We get it you're not as creative or as quick to pick up on things it's okayZ

>Though I would say that 5e is, for the most part, going for a quality over quantity approach.
Shame about the quality.

Ah, yes, because you really need such a great options as Truenamer.

Disregard, you're actually right. Kind of. We were more wrong though.

Pinning is absolute disable in this case, so it makes a bit more sense, but you're right. Grappling is a lesser form of pinning (called Restrained in the feat), but grappling still reduces the speed of the grappled creature to 0, while still allowing the grappler to move at half speed, drag, carry, attack, etc.

The main difference is that restrained adds advantage to attacking the restrained creature and said creature has disadvantage to attack rolls. Grappling is still effectively a pin, but it's not as effective a pin as the grappler feat allows.

Arguable.
I like how classes branch out.
I don't like how shield bash isn't a thing anymore.

Shield bashing exists in 5e user.

But the weapon table doesn’t list shields, user! :^)

5e is not an interesting system. It's was a design goal to make it as simplistic as possible and minimize the amount of options both on your turn and when building a character.

It's a lot more normies and nat-twenties than it is dungeons and dragons. If you want be interesting and special then that's gonna be on you.

Most people playing 5e aren't under the illusion that it's a simulationist system without huge limitations. Soccer would be a lot more robust of a game if you could pick up the ball and carry it, but for some reason the rules forbid it. If you're butthurt about it just might be that you're a weak roleplayer who needs to be hand-held by the rules into a special snowflake specialization.

Better yet, if you aren't having fun, play something else. Responding to a bait thread claiming that 5e is as varied as other systems isn't going to make the OP get horny to play more complicated games if he's already drowning between attack and disengage.

Nobody actually takes the feat. If you want to grapple, you just grab people and knock them prone. Being grappled prevents them from standing up, and being prone gives you advantage on attacks against them

There are only one or two changes I'd expect to be made in the case of a 5.5e, and that's definitely one of them.

Pathfinder is shit. But that doesn't excuse 5e for not learning from its mistakes and making an actually good game.

>reddit spacing
Using basic maneuvers the game provides isn't "creative," its basic tactics. Not using those maneuvers except in the very few cases that they are useful, is also basic tactics. Sorry if you're retarded. Pushing over a bookshelf onto an enemy as an action is the barest lowest bar I could see as "creative" but using the dodge action to avoid AoOs hitting you? Fuck no.

You're a dumb fuck. Real-life swords are not that heavy. Have you ever held one? Or have you just thought about it while sitting on your computer chair wondering what things are like outdoors? Also the only reason you can "dash" in full plate armor is because they fucked the rules where it used to reduce speed because that wasn't "fun." Well, fine, but that's another point in favor of martials. And I don't know what the fuck you mean by versimilitude, perhaps you meant versatility? Fighters have versatility.
>This is basically what dudes on paizo forums would've said.
That doesn't make it false. Explain, logically, why you should be able to easily bull rush a dragon. And at the same time please cite 5 separate times in popular fantasy fiction that a warrior character bull-rushed a dragon. You won't find that. Why? Because it's fucking stupid. We're not going to turn the game into a fucking stupid shithouse of a joke, like some faggot Nip anime, just because YOU think playing a fighter is boring. YOU, and the other martialcucks, are the only ones who have a problem with Battlemaster. You're getting asshurt because you don't actually want to be a fighter, you want to be a caster and have tons of utility shit, but still be a muscley fighter. You want the best of both worlds. Play a fucking 3.5 Duskblade and alter the spell list so that you can access all the wizard spells, then, and quit being such a lying twat about what you want. Because what you want, is complete control.

When I say something like this, it's because I dont like D20 systems in general, and prefer games where you actually have to make up something original to play as instead of going "uhhh... Wizard!"
Good fantasy games for this that I've played: Agone (my all time favorite), SIFRP (a but less nuanced, but still pretty fun), and 7th sea (this one is superb as far as character options goes, I'd somewhat limited by lack disadvantages)

>pick this pregenerated archetype
Excuse my bias, but isn't this literally every D20 rpg in a nutshell?

Geeze this whole thread is literally a meme. It is actual the meme of its self below. And its sad.

>have you tried not playing dnd.

>Cast a Spell: Cast a spell that you've prepared from your spell list by spending a spell slot.
>every character
>Cast a Spell

Options are worth their usefulness.

"Cast a spell" is very damn useful since it covers like 30 pages worth of effects, for example.

Which is why casters have more options and are generally more fun than hurr durr fighters/rogues/barbarians

So your options are basically
>Use stick
>Walk

Unless you are a spellcaster, then you have a bunch of actual choices with different outcomes.

And you don't see the problem with this.

not the op but this is my main gripe with 5e. Anything else falls squarely into "mother may I" territory and will result in advantage or disadvanatge depending on a mostly superfluous skill check most likely

Last time they tried to learn from their mistakes, we got the most underated DnD edition ever
It was so underated they killed it with a reboot and announced 5e

The thing is, classes don't offer more customization in the first place.
The first thing chooses do is severely limiting it.
Let's take a look at Heroquest, here we have a pet simple system and the number of possible characters is pretty much infinity.
It does away with classes, it does away with attributes and it does away with standardized skills, also it lets you start with magic items and more.
So any character you build is pretty much one of a kind.
Where as in a class system we usually got "fighty dude" "sneaky dude" and "magic dude" where everything is some is a variation of those three.
Also defined options also usually have their advantages laid out clearly which leads to BS like "gain +2 damage against goblins" or "get +1 to attack" and because decisions are limited people don't want to spend the few resources they have on some suboptimal gimmick.
It encourages minmaxing.

Spoken like someone who hasn't played a battlemaster and generally can't play martials for shit.

being able to successfully suck your DM's dick off to let your limited options do more than hit-good in different ways doesn't mean actual options exist.

I've been That Guy like four separate times now because I had a grapple build once and could never make it work, so I try to take the wind out of people's sails about Grapple before they fuck their character into oblivion like I did.
Shove is great with a big bruiser nearby though.

Fighting maneuvers are presented in the dmg, as well as many other optional rules and homebrew tools. Not that anyone who needs to complain about how the game is wrong and bad on Veeky Forums has made the effort to read the books first

BTW, before 5e-fags sperg out on me, I've run Hoard to the end before making up my mind on 5e.

At the end (8th level) the state of the party was:

Barbarian
>Hit
>Rage, maybe frenzy
>Walk (because fucking charging needs a feat)

Rogue
>Hide
>Shoot bow

Ranger
>Shoot bow
>throw item (I had to backport 3.5 alchemicals)

Warlock
>Eldtrich blast
>cast one of the two spells I can this hour
1 hour short rests were a mistake

Sorcerer
>fuck everything I'm a caster

Having a fucking half page of optional combat maneuvers in the DMG isn't going to do shit in this poor excuse of a game. I'd rather play Fate where at least "mother may I" has some weight behind.

>Homebrewing? Rule 0? What are those?

>buy a game
>try it
>doesn't do what I want
>well just homebrew/dm fiat it

Yeah, nah. I can just go play a good game with less effort.

You know they sell *other* games that aren't D&D 5e, right? That playing 5e is not compulsory?

>the game system is not shit because you can always just change the rules
what do you even like about D&D then?

I like 5e and I'm not the guy responding to you but saying "YOU CANT CRITICIZE IF I CAN TAKE IT OUT" is fucking retarded

I didn't say otherwise
But you could still homebrew it for the duration of the campaign (then throw it in the bin where it belongs)

I don't even like 5e, I play other games because they can do what I want well

The fact that the rules cover every important point and the less important rulings are easy to improvise

Oh there was a lot of rule-zero going on while we were playing.
The game itself didn't deserve to be picked up again after the campaign though.

Played a rogue until... 8? 9? I don't even remember.

I had 0 reason to not just hide/plink with my bow until SCAG came out, and not for lack of trying. Used mage hand for all sorts of shit it wasn't meant to (dragging curtains over enemies, untying ropes, igniting barrels of flammable liquid with a piece of still burning coal, etc.), but 5e improvised actions have just about no proper guidelines that help them stay competitive, and hence massively fall off after the first few levels.

Battlemaster sucks, stop hyping it up.

Why do so many people ITT have an issue with rule 0 and asking the GM for rulings.

That kinda shit has been a staple of tabletop games since Gygax was at the helm, so why is it suddenly taboo to ask "hey GM, can I use this action in this way?"

Because games exist where doing that gets you fucked, not all games have good guidelines for improvised actions, and there are plenty of GMs who will shit the bed when it comes to them.

Care to give an example? I dont understand what youre lacking

If you google it, there's multiple sites/blogposts/forum threads talking about how they fixed D&D by playing M&M instead.

>Because games exist where doing that gets you fucked, not all games have good guidelines for improvised actions, and there are plenty of GMs who will shit the bed when it comes to them.
Are you sure about that? Because the only game where I saw that as being an issue was 3.PF and even that was due to how the rules tried to tackle practically everything you could do while hiding it behind a feat or something.

In either case, I don't see why it's suddenly an issue here, when 5e is designed to be simple and allow for improvised actions to occur more frequently without bogging shit down with worthless complexity.

>In either case, I don't see why it's suddenly an issue here, when 5e is designed to be simple and allow for improvised actions to occur more frequently without bogging shit down with worthless complexity.

But it doesn't. The only things 5e has going on for it are ability checks and advantage/disadvantage. That or just making shit up with no benchmarks to base things on. ANd all this goes into a system that's really very detailed but only on combat actions.

In one system, I can make anything from a random SWAT member to Conan, Optimus Prime, Batman, Superman, Goku, or Dr. Strange, and have them fine-tuned down to the smallest details on every one of their abilities, skills, and stats, while in the other I get to pick from race/class/subclass and have everything fall into place from there.

>The only things 5e has going on for it are ability checks and advantage/disadvantage.
And sometimes that's really all you need and the premise has been a thing since D&D was first created. I still don't see the issue here.
>That or just making shit up with no benchmarks to base things on.
We already have DC's available which gives a pretty simple benchmark based on how difficult the thing they're doing is. Even then, every game of D&D followed the same basic premise for deciding how difficult something is, so I still don't see the issue.
>ANd all this goes into a system that's really very detailed but only on combat actions.
It only seems detailed because there are a lot of effects. Actually going through and reading each individual effect and you'll see that it still follows the K.I.S.S. principle.

It honestly sounds to me like you started with 3.PF and thought that every system is going to share its flaws when it's really just a 3.PF issue.