Pathfinder 2E So I Played Pathfinder 2nd Edition! Plus UKGE Back To #3!

This past weekend I was at UK Games Expo in Birmingham. The main reason for my visit was to try out this newfangled Pathfinder 2 thing... and I'm glad I did! Here's my report!

UK Games Expo seemed to me to be much larger than it was last year. Two trade halls teeming with people on a hot, muggy afternoon with little to no air conditioning made for an uncomfortable experience, but we adventurers brush aside such minor inconveniences. The convention also boasted multiple open play areas, seminar rooms, and more. Last year, UKGE had a turnstile attendance of 31,000 (16,500 uniques), briefly putting it as the third largest dedicated tabletop RPG convention in the world before Origins reclaimed third place shortly thereafter; this year was higher with 39,000 turnstile and 21,700 uniques. That puts UKGE back in third place for dedicated tabletop gaming conventions, at least until Origins in two weeks!*

The Paizo stand (in the UK they're called stands; in the US they're called booths) was easy to spot. Its distinctive black and purple checked carpet will be familiar to anybody who has seen Paizo at other conventions. As you can see from the image above, it was packed with folks playing Starfinder and Pathfinder 2 demos.

I signed up for my 1.30pm slot and then wandered the trade hall some more, saying hello to a few people I knew as I randomly bumped into them. I considered lunch, but the queues for food were pretty insane, so I settled for a Twix and an orange juice from a newsagent in the N.E.C.

1.30pm came around, and I returned to the Paizo booth. I want to say that the Paizo staff are super warm and friendly. Speaking with them has always been a pleasure. I was assigned a seat at a table in the corner with a group of four friends, and a GM whose name I sadly forgot to note! He was great, though, and quickly introduced himself, and went round the table breaking the ice quickly and with ease. He asked whether we'd played Pathfinder before, and what games we'd played (the four gamers I was seated with had come from D&D 5E; I think only one had played Pathfinder before, but I'm not sure). We then rolled off for choice of characters; I ended up with Valeros, the fighter.

And then off we went! The GM introduced a short encounter about kidnappers and a bandit encampment in the woods, and we began the adventure (it was only an hour demo, including introductions and explanations, etc.) at the edge of a small clearing in which we could see four cloaked figures around a campfire.

I won't go into the rules here, as I've covered Paizo's previews of Pathfinder 2 in so much detail over the past weeks. There were no surprises - if you've been following the previews, you pretty much know everything I noticed. If there were any major differences, they didn't jump out at me. I'll give my overall impression though.

First, and probably the most important, it still really feels like Pathfinder. While the details may have changed, the overall picture is still the same. If you're a Pathfinder 1st Edition fan and are worried about the changes, I would suggest that it's still the same experience. It looks like Pathfinder, feels like Pathfinder, smells like .... no, that was just the lack of air conditioning. Pathfinder feels different to, say, D&D 5E.

This encounter was basically a fight with two skeletons and two zombies, plus what I assume was a cleric who came out of a nearby cave after the first round. It was an easy fight, although our rogue was knocked unconscious (and we saw how the death/dying rules worked in play - four stages, when you reach stage 4 you're dead; no negative HP - you stop at zero; though we were told these rules were still in flux). The new initiative system, which has been covered before, seemed to work well - two characters rolled stealth, while the others rolled perception.

No pictures were allowed, and I only really saw the fighter's character sheet in detail. The wizard took out the cleric with three magic missiles; the rogue felt very roguey when she rolled a zillion damage dice for a flanking sneak attack; the goblin alchemy threw alchemist's fire and acid, and wielded a dog-slicer. As the fighter, I charged into combat (double move and attack for the cost of two actions) and raised my shield as my third (which you have to do to gain its AC bonus), and used a reaction to absorb 5 points of damage with my shield at a cost of one of its two "dent" points.

It was fun. In the hour we only played three rounds of combat (which was the entire combat), but the fight didn't start till at least 20 minutes in after introductions and character selections and things, and we stopped frequently for explanations of Pathfinder 2, and so on. I'd say it felt faster than Pathfinder 1, but it's hard to tell, and 1st-level characters aren't really the best tools to judge that sort of thing. I'd be intrigued to see how it flows at higher levels.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I last played Pathfinder a couple of years ago. I've since run Curse of Strahd for 5E, played a bunch of Call of Cthulhu, and some of my own game. So I'm a couple of years out of practice on Pathfinder, but it felt easy to get back into. The game is pitched at about the complexity level I like, I think. Again, hard to tell with an hour's demo of 1st-level characters, but Pathfinder 1st Edition did feel too voluminous to me after years of new hardcover rulebooks, so I have hopes that this will hit my sweet spot. I feel like it will be somewhere in between Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 5th Edition in terms of complexity. Time will tell -- I have the playtest hardcover on pre-order, and I'll be picking up the final rules for sure.

From a "reporting" perspective, this launch feels a lot like 1999 running up to the launch of D&D 3E. I'm feeling that sense of anticipation again. C'mon August!

*Conventions which don't focus exclusively on tabletop games tend to be bigger, especially those which include comic books (Italy's Lucca Comics & Games dwarfs all of these).