Pathfinder 2E Biggest Confusions Moving from 1e to 2e?

[Fauchard1520]

My 1e campaigns are wrapping up, and I'm finally preparing to jump into Society and figure out how this 2e thing works. All the cool kids are talking about it, and I'm ready to get a piece.

Help me out though: I don't want to be the guy at the table saying "that's not how it worked in 1e" every five seconds. What are the biggest confusions you've seen for people moving into the new edition? What should I study up on first?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

 

[MerricB]

Attacks of Opportunity no longer exist.
Initiative is based on Perception, Stealth or whatever the DM considers appropriate.
Spells and skill checks have critical hits and misses.
Five-foot-step is a full action.

 

[RangerWickett]

My big hurdle is that character creation is just so wildly different. It feels so much like D&D 4E, which was weird to have coming from PF1.

It felt confining to me. Like, because you get one 'thing' at a level, and that 'thing' is kind of boring and mechanical rather than dramatic and flavorful, it imposed upon me the feeling that I am not supposed to do dramatic and flavorful things. The rules dictate what I can do, and that list is very short.

 

[CapnZapp]

Attacks of Opportunity no longer exist.

Attacks of Opportunity as a general rule - a reaction available to everyone - doesn't exist.

The rule is still there; only confined to fighters, as a class option for some classes and select monsters.

What the big shift really is, is that players are taught not to expect/assume them (and likewise for the GM's monsters). This way, when a creature does take an attack of opportunity, that's a surprise - an exception, not the rule.

Initiative is based on Perception, Stealth or whatever the DM considers appropriate.

And Perception isn't a skill. It's just a secondary statistic.

Spells and skill checks have critical hits and misses.

More generally, the way you score a critical has changed - big time. Now crits can happen more often than just 1-in-20.

And they are scary.

Five-foot-step is a full action.

Yes, but since the game uses a three-action round the cost is not nearly as big as it sounds from a 1E angle.

Not only the basic fact it costs you a third of your action(s), but that it often costs you your least valuable third of your action(s).

 

[zztong]

Over our 18 month trial of 2e...

Spell descriptions were a frequent trip-up for us. Not only would we confuse 1e and 2e spells, but we would confuse 2e spells with other 2e spells. The spells are going to have the same names as before, but not act the same.

You're going to be facing a whole lot of unfamiliar 2e Feats, sometimes with names that will sound like 1e feats, but with exacting and non-obvious interactions with other parts of the system.

In the short term...

We had some players get frustrated when they assumed their favorite classes would be similar to 1e, but found either large or subtle differences that kind of disappointed them. For instance, I love the 1e Ranger, but hated the 2e Ranger. Another player came to the same conclusion with the Sorcerer. One player bailed on a Druid. Yet another player bailed on the Alchemist. Folks eventually settled on other classes. I, for instance, spent a lot of time exploring multiclass concepts to varied degrees of success. Wizard (Fighter) was cool under 2e, Sorcerer (Rogue) flopped pretty bad (or maybe it was Rogue (Sorcerer) -- I forget now), and Ranger (Druid) didn't lead to a classic Ranger so while it was functional I still wasn't happy because I felt I couldn't make the character I wanted.

 

[Porridge]

There's a helpful thread here describing common mistakes made by people moving from PF1 to PF2. (At least I found it helpful!)

 

[Fauchard1520]

There's a helpful thread here describing common mistakes made by people moving from PF1 to PF2. (At least I found it helpful!)

Ugh. My google-fu sucks. Thank you for the link! It's exactly what I was looking for.