Sadly, PF2 boils down to 2-3 different arrays despite all the hullabaloo about generating them via A,B,C. A nice sidebar that just says use them instead would be great.For me it has as much, maybe more, to do with how the rule books are written and laid out. I bounced off PF2 trying to get through the explanation of how stat bumps are assigned in character creation. Oh, I got the concept immediately. But several pages of dense text left me no wiser as to what the actual bonuses for different backgrounds, etc. were.
Fast forward a couple of years, to last month or so. I tried again. The online SRD made it a bit easier. But it was only random chance that I discovered you also get some free stat bumps. And I get the feeling that characters get 2 hit dice at level 1: 1 class, 1 ancestry. But I'm not sure.
Layout, Paizo! Bloody layout!
For me it has as much, maybe more, to do with how the rule books are written and laid out. I bounced off PF2 trying to get through the explanation of how stat bumps are assigned in character creation. Oh, I got the concept immediately. But several pages of dense text left me no wiser as to what the actual bonuses for different backgrounds, etc. were.
Fast forward a couple of years, to last month or so. I tried again. The online SRD made it a bit easier. But it was only random chance that I discovered you also get some free stat bumps. And I get the feeling that characters get 2 hit dice at level 1: 1 class, 1 ancestry. But I'm not sure.
Layout, Paizo! Bloody layout!
Sadly, PF2 boils down to 2-3 different arrays despite all the hullabaloo about generating them via A,B,C. A nice sidebar that just says use them instead would be great.
The PF2 Core Rulebook is a great example of what I alluded to re: poor content editing. Specifically with regard to character creation. The first time my friends and I created characters for PF2, three of the four of us missed some vital mechanical bits due to poor organization (there was some stuff that was shuffled away under another heading, IIRC, rather than being presented inline with like content).
I think the key here is you joined a club of folks already interested in new games.So my own experience is this. In the last year at the TTRPG club I’ve joined I’ve played maybe a dozen new games. Mainly rules light stuff — Blades in the Dark, Delta Green, Savage Worlds, etc — so picking up the rules was a few minutes intro by the GM and then we picked it up as we went, which was pretty easy. By the end of the first session, we had a full handle on those games.
I guess we were all lucky as the time sink ‘learning a new game’ part was like 5 minutes all those times. At no point did we have to learn a 300 page hardcover.
I guess D&D might take a little longer? But most games don’t. And Pathfinder is obviously comparable to D&D in complexity. But 99% of RPGs take a few minutes to learn.
Im curious about how much time and difficulty folks perceive trying a different game is?
(Obviously games vary in complexity: I’m just asking as a generality.)