Pathfinder 2E I think I am giving up on PF2ER

[Thomas Shey]

You'd think that, but PF2 has grown the playerbase. Paizo selling more than ever. I think they owe a good deal of that to the explosion of 5E and community overall growth than any secret PF2 sauce.

There are elements of PF2e that certainly would attract people who otherwise wouldn't be bothering. How many of us there are, I wouldn't care to speculate.

 

[payn]

What is F20?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was the GM running moderate encounters at best - I never ran a hard encounter. Internally I know that the +1s matter, but to the players, they don't feel like they matter. For what it's worth, I was also playing the game face-to-face so it was extra fiddly.

I can see how players who don't internalize that would feel that way. I think its more noticeable if you're fighting a lot of things at or below your level (where the crit chances can become pretty noticeable), but you have to actively pay attention to it.

 

[Alzrius]

Not like there was much point in just doing the same-old-same-old again. There was enough PF1e material that was probably going to leave a lot of people asking why they'd bother.

Have you seen the stuff that the third-party PF1 community has produced? They're still breaking new ground!

 

[Thomas Shey]

I wonder if I had encountered PF1 under the same circumstances as PF2, if I'd see it the same way. Like if I was in my 40s with limited time to study the rules, if there was a robust computer program to handle the rules, if there was a global pandemic that forced me to play online for years.
I think I'm a system hopper because I get burned out easily. I get overwhelmed with crunchy systems, bored with rules lite systems. And medium complexity doesn't really satisfy either need.

The question is more general, if you'd felt that way about D&D3e. PF1e and D&D3e have much of the same issues with actually learning the rules and keeping track of them as PF2e. Maybe even worse. There are places where PF1e and PF2e differ significantly, but that's not actually one of them. (Note, this, to make it clear, does not mean if you'd already internalized PF1e that going to PF2e could not have been a challenge; as I note above, sometimes its actually hard to learn a game you know a similar, but significantly different game than it is to learn it from the ground up).

Edit Missed your last part. Its a thing. I'm very much in that weird space with superhero games these days. Something like Hero is more than I really feel the need for, but light games don't do it for me, and compromises end up just being vaguely unsatisfying. I found this pretty visible over time when I was running my last one using BASH UE). All too often in general in the last decade, I've had campaigns that worked despite the system, not really because of it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Have you seen the stuff that the third-party PF1 community has produced? They're still breaking new ground!

They don't have to sell the volume Paizo does to be viable.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What is F20?

Its a term I picked up in the 13th Age community, referring to D&D related games that are outside the technical D20 community (or rather including them and the D20 community) including a lot of serious OSR offshoots and the like. I think it was developed when D20 as a reference to system had a relatively narrow reference to the 3e era material derived from the OGL fairly straight.

 

[payn]

Its a term I picked up in the 13th Age community, referring to D&D related games that are outside the technical D20 community (or rather including them and the D20 community) including a lot of serious OSR offshoots and the like. I think it was developed when D20 as a reference to system had a relatively narrow reference to the 3e era material derived from the OGL fairly straight.

Gotcha, nobody i've seen here but you uses it.

 

[TwoSix]

I think I'm a system hopper because I get burned out easily. I get overwhelmed with crunchy systems, bored with rules lite systems. And medium complexity doesn't really satisfy either need.

I feel you, man. I feel like my desired system right now would be something like a cleaned up B/X, but with 25 classes, AD&D multiclassing, and prestige classes. Tons of options, but the options are self-contained to just that character and the actual implementation of the options is lightweight at the table.

 

[Alzrius]

They don't have to sell the volume Paizo does to be viable.

I suspect that if it was Paizo selling that same content, its volume would be viable. Subscription plans, amirite?