Question for people who have many games under their belt. Is grappling and throwing monsters around common in your campaigns?
In my PF2 game, a player grappled a monster and move them to a more advantageous position. I couldn't find the rule so made something up. I looked it up after the fact, and turns out grappling was nerfed in PF2, so much so that you can't do it unless you take feats that allow you to do it. According to the internet, the designers did this because many games become a grappling nightmare as throwing monsters into lava or off cliffs was an OP strat. I've not seen that happen in my games.
Excuse me if I go on autistic rant, but your post so reminded me why PF2 was a turd and Paizo generally made the game worse, the farther their ideas got from "just copying 3.5".
The thing is, in 3.5, grappling was decently good, if you maximized and took unconventional approaches. Not OP by any means, because a third of the Monster Manual still consisted of things you could not grapple or never ever wanted to touch, and you still needed to get into melee range, and you had problems if enemies outnumbered you. But you could, with above-mentioned effort, set your grapple check to "I win" and then have a field day whenever you happened to meet an opponent against whom your tactic was super effective. Now, this still somewhat sucked, because non-specialists were way too hopeless in what realistically most physically tough characters should have been at least passable at, but at least you could do something awesome at times.
In PF1 grappling was nerfed, like, by the way, pretty much every combat maneuver. Not completely into the ground, but badly enough that very few characters could use it reliably enough, except against humanoid NPCs - already the easiest opponents in Paizo's own adventures. (I also would like to reminder that Paizo's own adventures pretty rarely offered burning lava or bottomless chasms to throw enemies into). Or against humanoid monsters/monsters smaller than Medium, which grew sparce pretty quickly as you advanced in levels. You could at times still do something awesome with it, but you had to struggle against the mechanics more than before for that.
But for Paizo that was not enough. So in 2E grappling might as well not exist. It is pretty clear that Paizo does not like awesomeness. Or options. They not just aren't competent enough to create a vehicle for playing fun fantasy adventures, where you can do things like throwing enemies into natural hazards, they don't like the very idea. They seem to actively strive to remove reasons to play their game with pen and paper, instead of, you know, booting up Owlcat's superior versions of their adventures and trying for a new playthrough.
/rant mode off And no, grappling was not remotely common in the last twenty years or so, because no one wanted to play Turbo Grappler 9000, and it was a bad idea to grapple without specializing for it. Mostly it just took shape of PCs trying to wriggle out of the clutches of various grabby monsters.
