Pathfinder 2E PF2E Gurus teach me! +

[Yaarel]

Is Golarion a setting that actively welcomes people to add to it and modify it? Or is it more like a Forgotten Realms canon, whose official lore is zealously guarded?

 

[Justice and Rule]

Is Golarion a setting that actively welcomes people to add to it and modify it? Or is it more like a Forgotten Realms canon, whose official lore is zealously guarded?

Do you mean like in a content-creation way for Pathfinder Infinite, or just as a community in general?

 

[Retreater]

At least Pathfinder 2 can be a fresh start for how to portray cultural identities generally, especially if the "other". Seeing the culture from the point of view of an "insider" always helps, and when modeling a reallife culture then one requires a reallife insider. There needs to be an effort to find ways to value and appreciate any differences − sometimes even by the insider oneself. Many aspects are shared in common and taken for granted − but can be important to portray a culture with more weight, depth, and realism.

I think you can see a good example of that in the recent Lost Omens: Mwangi Expanse release.

paizo.com - Pathfinder Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse

If you're curious about the bios of the writers, here's a link. It's a pretty diverse pool, at least by the old time RPG standards.

Paizo Publishing - Meet The Mwangi Expanse Authors!

Meet The Mwangi Expanse Authors! Tuesday, July 13, 2021 While the writers of our Paizo products are always credited in the front and back of the books, a simple name in a byline doesn’t give readers much information on the people who work to bring the setting to life! I know some of you have...

forum.rpg.net

 

[Yaarel]

Do you mean like in a content-creation way for Pathfinder Infinite, or just as a community in general?

Kinda both.

Pathfinder Infinite is cool as a place to put homebrew.

At the same time, generally, do Golarion players typically modify the setting and rules, or do they tend to go by the book?

For example, most 5e players dont use the FR setting, or if they do use it loosely. But the players who are dedicated to the FR setting specifically tend to accumulate canon. (Altho FR setting users are a minority, there are more for FR than any other official setting.)


I guess what I am asking. If I am creating new setting content, should I make an effort to make this content available for Golarion for other players who want to import it? Or should I just start my own setting from scratch?

 

[payn]

Kinda both.

Pathfinder Infinite is cool as a place to put homebrew.

At the same time, generally, do Golarion players typically modify the setting and rules, or do they tend to go by the book?

For example, most 5e players dont use the FR setting, or if they do use it loosely. But the players who are dedicated to the FR setting specifically tend to accumulate canon. (Altho FR setting users are a minority, there are more for FR than any other official setting.)


I guess what I am asking. If I am creating new setting content, should I make an effort to make this content available for Golarion for other players who want to import it? Or should I just start my own setting from scratch?

My experience is that PF fans tend to be a lot more into Golarion than D&D players are in the variety of settings there. I believe its because of that variety that D&D tends to be a lot more do what ya feel. Also, Golarion has a ton of adventure paths, PFS scenarios, etc.. It's a lot more concentrated than its D&D counterparts.

The lazy take a foundation and make it really something style in me says go for Golarion. Though, if you are not so lacking in creativity as me, and can make your own deal out of whole cloth, go for it!

 

[Thomas Shey]

My own suspicion is that on the macro scale (i.e. the countries and cultures) most PF2e players and GMs just figure there's probably some area they can get what they want out of as-is without doing the heavy lifting. That said, if I'm recalling correctly there's one area that's deliberately underdeveloped to let GMs who want to do more of a ground-up approach do so while still using the rest of it.

I'll be upfront here; while PF2e is one of my favorites in the D&D-sphere, I'm prone to want to do my own worlds all the way, and I find adapting PF2e to that more than a little intimidating. But then, when of that mood, I'm not particularly likely to use something D&D-ish anyway.

 

[fjw70]

My own suspicion is that on the macro scale (i.e. the countries and cultures) most PF2e players and GMs just figure there's probably some area they can get what they want out of as-is without doing the heavy lifting. That said, if I'm recalling correctly there's one area that's deliberately underdeveloped to let GMs who want to do more of a ground-up approach do so while still using the rest of it.

I'll be upfront here; while PF2e is one of my favorites in the D&D-sphere, I'm prone to want to do my own worlds all the way, and I find adapting PF2e to that more than a little intimidating. But then, when of that mood, I'm not particularly likely to use something D&D-ish anyway.

I am curious what find intimidating about adapting PF2 to other setting.

 

[kenada]

I am curious what find intimidating about adapting PF2 to other setting.

I ran PF2 in a homebrew setting and ran into a few issues. A lot of these are due to the nature of my setting, so others may have different or less severe experiences than I did.

My homebrew setting does not have any of the common D&D ancestries. The two closest (elven and yuma, which are humans renamed to avoid confusion by players) are still different enough that I did not want to use human as written in the book. I wanted humans to be another kind of monster (setting eschews humanocentrism). That meant I had to devise new ancestries for my six core ancestries, and I had to create ancestry feats for them. There were far fewer ancestries at the time, so there were fewer feats to repurpose or use as a benchmark when designing my own. If you can get by with the core races or taking some of the published ones and tweaking them, that will make things a lot easier.

A cleric gets a lot of functionality from their deity in PF2. There are still domains, but every deity has edicts and anathema. The latter is important because clerics are obligated to follow it. My setting has religion but no actual deities (powerful creatures that are worshiped don’t grant powers or anything). I also don’t like the way D&D has traditionally approached religion, so that meant I had to come up with a bunch of cleric stuff to replace the core deities. That never really happened except in the case of one player, and (at the time) it was fortuitous that I could use Sarenrae as an angel that was worshiped. Most people won’t have the problems I did, especially if they can reflavor the core deities or adapt them to other settings that work similarly.

I don’t like the champion class. I thought the paladin in PF1 was more interesting because its powers came from belief in its righteousness than being an emissary of a deity. That meant you could have thematically interesting situations like a paladin of Asmodeus. That’s not the case nor possible in PF2. I made some attempts to hack up the champion to be oath-based, but if I ran PF2 again, I’d just ban the class. It was a lot of effort, and it worked really poorly with the tools at the time (Hero Lab Online) because its support for homebrew was pretty poor (especially compared to Hero Lab Classic). This is related to the above in that if you have a more traditional D&D approach to religion/deities, the champion is probably fine.

A more practical issue is the PF1 Player’s Companion line got combined with the Campaign Setting line in PF2, so a lot of new material is published in the Lost Omens line. If you want to use it, you’ll have to adapt some of it to your setting. I categorically disallowed it because I was not willing to do that work (on top of everything else). I’d also add I liked some aspects of Golarion more before it was changed in PF2. I actually liked having a functioning Evil civilization. I think that’s more interesting than where things seemed to be heading towards the end of PF1 and into PF2. I also liked that Good people and factions did some seemingly awful things, and those were not necessarily against their alignments. I think alignment is more interesting when it’s not just the clearly good versus the clearly bad.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am curious what find intimidating about adapting PF2 to other setting.

One of the things about PF2e is that it is, for the D&D sphere, shockingly well-balanced. This doesn't mean there aren't a few problem children here and there, but you can play for quite some time without running into them. One of the reasons for this is that there's been great care taken with class, archetype and ancestry feats.

But the latter is the rub here. When I do a fantasy setting from the ground up, its quite likely to want to do a number of either original or heavily modified ancestries and archetypes. And I have remarkable little faith in my ability to consistently get them balanced properly against each other and the extent material.

This is a fundamental problem with games in the D&D-sphere to me: everything is, at the end of the day, ad-hoc. That's true of feats, spells, magic items and pretty much almost everything above the most basic level.

Edit: Keneda's post above, though having problems in different areas, illustrates the kind of problems I'm talking about.

 

[fjw70]

I see. When I use a game (like Pathfinder) for other setting I don’t create new races/ancestries and backgrounds. I typically just reskin things. I can see that creating issues.