Pathfinder 2E I think I am giving up on PF2ER

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know much of anything about 13th Age, but I imagine it would be yet another game I would have to relearn the meanings of the same terminology we have been using for decades at this point.

As someone who has been running a 13th Age game for about four sessions now, its relatively easy to get into. There were three factors that took some getting used to:

1. It uses 4e style defenses rather than traditional saves; what it calls saves are like PF2e flat checks.
2. Its very loosey-goosey with range, movement and areas, but does want you to pay attention to engagement. (This was part of the reason I chose to run it, because I have one vision-impaired player, and I figured it'd be a nice break for her to be able to play without as much detailed description and help moving as you need in most games that are serious about distance).
3. Learning to manage Icon relationships was a whole new beast, and we're still working with that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Arguably the PF2 remaster actually is this kind of iterative small update and I'm just bitter because I really don't care for PF2.

There are things that someone can legitimately dislike about PF2e if you liked PF1e. I just have to shrug because one of them is something I consider a necessary tradeoff for elements of the former I much prefer, and another is something I don't find altogether reasonable--but people want what they want.

 

[Reynard]

You don't need to know everything starting out - internalize the most important items and start playing. There's no shame in quickly looking things up as you go.

You shouldn't have to learn everything on your own. Your players should be putting in equivalent effort to learn to play rather than relying on you to know everything.

I recommend playing the beginner box as your introduction if you aren't doing that.

The Beginner box isn't really set up to solve the issues I am having, which is making sure all the tags interact correctly, and making sure we know how X is different in PF2ER than it is in 5E or PF1E, etc... I am not concerned about the basics of running the game, I am intentionally concerned about the minutia, because the whole point of the exercise is to determine whether the extra crunch adds enough fun to make it worth it.

I am coming to the conclusion that I don't think it does. It might do, once I got really proficient with PF2 in the same way I am proficient with 5E, but is getting there worth the effort? I am not sure, especially since lots of people seem to suggest that even being proficient doesn't necessarily mean you can play fast and loose with the system.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The Beginner box isn't really set up to solve the issues I am having, which is making sure all the tags interact correctly, and making sure we know how X is different in PF2ER than it is in 5E or PF1E, etc... I am not concerned about the basics of running the game, I am intentionally concerned about the minutia, because the whole point of the exercise is to determine whether the extra crunch adds enough fun to make it worth it.

I am coming to the conclusion that I don't think it does. It might do, once I got really proficient with PF2 in the same way I am proficient with 5E, but is getting there worth the effort? I am not sure, especially since lots of people seem to suggest that even being proficient doesn't necessarily mean you can play fast and loose with the system.

I'm about as fond of PF2e as its possible for me to be with a D&D-adjacent, but I have to say its probably not a system that's going to go well with being fast and loose; I can't help but think its going to be too easy for either some players to find their character is being marginalized because you're not paying enough attention to things some of their abilities rotate around, or you end up making encounters that are too tough by accident because ignoring the encounter math in PF2e can be unforgiving.

It kind of depends on what you mean by fast and loose, though.

 

[TwoSix]

For clarity, I mean my preference would be for me to get to run a game with the same ease and improv as I run shadowdark at the same time that from their end they are playing with the complexity of A5E (and I only picked those two because they are both 5E variations and therefore ostensibly compatible).

I mean, you CAN do that, but you have to be extremely comfortable with fast and VERY loose NPC improv while maintaining a veneer of officialness.

That's how I ran high level 3.5 and PF1 with virtually no prep.

 

[Alzrius]

I believe they had stated as such with the release of PF2, saying that they could see the writing on the wall if they didn't do something different because sales were starting to trail off. I can't find it right now because Google sucks, but I know they have basically stated so in the past.

Let me know when you find the citation.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

What do you mean by 'play fast and loose'?

 

[Reynard]

What do you mean by 'play fast and loose'?

Low to no prep; encounters and other nonsense on the fly; making up creature abilities or spells or magic items on the fly; eyeballing DCs for tasks and eyeballing difficulty for encounters; generally relying on improv and table temperature to guide rulings; lots of randomness, both in results and in generating forward momentum.

 

[Eric V]

Low to no prep; encounters and other nonsense on the fly; making up creature abilities or spells or magic items on the fly; eyeballing DCs for tasks and eyeballing difficulty for encounters; generally relying on improv and table temperature to guide rulings; lots of randomness, both in results and in generating forward momentum.

13th Age might be worth the work, then.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Low to no prep

Very unlikely you'll get a satisfying game doing this with any d20 game, honestly.

encounters and other nonsense on the fly; making up creature abilities or spells or magic items on the fly;

These are easy to make but I wouldn't recommend doing them at the table. There are charts which you can easily derive values from as long as you know what level you want the monster/item to be. Only takes a couple minutes to do.

eyeballing DCs for tasks

Easily done, just use simple DCs for everything.

eyeballing difficulty for encounters

Unfortunately, the encounter building rules work in PF2 and "hard" encounters are actually really hard, compared to 5e where the hardest encounter still has nearly a 0% chance the party will lose, or Shadowdark where every fight is a probable TPK. Its important to actually build encounters towards the difficulty you want. That said, the process of doing so takes like 2 minutes.

generally relying on improv and table temperature to guide rulings;

You can get very far by just using simple DCs for everything and giving +2 whenever players have good ideas.

lots of randomness, both in results and in generating forward momentum.

The 4 degrees of success tend to give a wider range of results to actions.