Pathfinder 2E I played my first PF2e game this week. Here's why I'm less inclined to play again.

[Thomas Shey]

Your groups of people obsessed with PF2 all of them having spent/wasted 100+ hours reading about the system?

Most of the people I've played PF2e learned-by-doing. They aren't experts in the system by any means. Heck, I'm not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Same. My only gripe with the system is the same one I had with 5e; combat takes too long at higher levels. Beyond that, no one in my group, including the GM (me), spent hundreds of hours doing anything but actually playing the game at this point. We largely learned as we went along once we had the basics. We probably made mistakes which didn’t matter because we had fun.

You can run into one problem I saw with D&D4e, 13th Age or Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard; characters over time can end up accumulating enough options its hard to keep track of them. That tends to be a high-ish level problem though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most people playing RPGs never did read the rules of those RPGs because they were just explained to them. Exactly what I mean. You are people who read rules, and this is required in PF2, while in 5E almost no one reads the rules, because its not necessarily.


Thats why you dont see the difference because you do the extensive work also for other RPGs where its not needed.

This is a really weird critique. I've seen plenty of people learn relatively complex system by doing, just like any number of other skills; I fail to see why it'd be less true of PF2e.

The biggest problem with PF2e is one common in the D&D-sphere; any time you get outside of the simplest characters, the special casing can eat you alive. But just the spell system does that to anyone playing most D&D sphere games before any other mechanics.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Your groups of people obsessed with PF2 all of them having spent/wasted 100+ hours reading about the system?

PF2 tends to draw in more people who like to spend many hours reading about the system and because they do the same thing with other systems (where this is not necessarily) they underestimate how much more time is needed for pf2 than to other systems.


Its not impossible to run, but it has far more rules and nitpicks and restraints etc. Which you NEED to know.

I feel like you really have no understanding of the system, largely because I've run this with people who haven't played TTRPGs before and they had no problem understanding the system. I think most of my players have found it more intuitive than something like 5E, largely because the system is fairly robust and consistent in its design.

I get that you don't like the system, clearly, but when you say stuff like this I get the impression that you've never really played the system and only know of it through angry Reddit posts.

 

[Justice and Rule]

This is a really weird critique. I've seen plenty of people learn relatively complex system by doing, just like any number of other skills; I fail to see why it'd be less true of PF2e.

Honestly it's not as complex as it is broad-scoped, even: the rules mechanics are fairly consistent, so you generally know what levers do what things. There are special interactions, but a lot of those don't come up if you don't choose to have them, so you don't need to know about them to play. A fighter doesn't need to know about gunslinger's reload any more than the gunslinger needs to know about a fighter's double slice.

The biggest problem with PF2e is one common in the D&D-sphere; any time you get outside of the simplest characters, the special casing can eat you alive. But just the spell system does that to anyone playing most D&D sphere games before any other mechanics.

I've found most players grasp spells. What gets a lot of newer people (or people who largely learned through 5E) is the return to old school "Choose your spells for the day" casting. That, or if they are coming from 5E, concepts that share names but have different effects; Concentration/Concentrate are things that sound similar, but do not act the same way in both systems. That sort of "similar but different" crossover has had more problems, like reminding my players that most things no longer have Attacks of Opportunity/Reactive Attacks.

 

[Velderan]

That, or if they are coming from 5E, concepts that share names but have different effects; Concentration/Concentrate are things that sound similar, but do not act the same way in both systems. That sort of "similar but different" crossover has had more problems, like reminding my players that most things no longer have Attacks of Opportunity/Reactive Attacks.

Despite us having played PF2e for a couple years now, the concentrate trait still confuses people I play with since we played 5e before switching. Unlearning 5e-isms is really the hardest part of learning PF2e. We had a much easier time with other games I have run for the same group because they aren’t D&D-adjacent so there’s less preconceived notions of how things should work.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Despite us having played PF2e for a couple years now, the concentrate trait still confuses people I play with since we played 5e before switching. Unlearning 5e-isms is really the hardest part of learning PF2e. We had a much easier time with other games I have run for the same group because they aren’t D&D-adjacent so there’s less preconceived notions of how things should work.

Exactly. The biggest problems when it comes to learning PF2 are largely from games that are similar and use similar vocabulary/mechanics.

But the mechanics themselves are more clear by comparison, and added complexity helps create added flavor and distinction; the immediate example that comes to mind for me are the levels of detection. Outside of the problem that "Undetected" and "Unnoticed" just sound too similar, the levels really work well at showing different levels of detection and allowing you to play with them, and it makes stuff like invisibility a properly powerful thing (with caveats that are given examples within the text of the rules themselves).

 

[Velderan]

Exactly. The biggest problems when it comes to learning PF2 are largely from games that are similar and use similar vocabulary/mechanics.

But the mechanics themselves are more clear by comparison, and added complexity helps create added flavor and distinction; the immediate example that comes to mind for me are the levels of detection. Outside of the problem that "Undetected" and "Unnoticed" just sound too similar, the levels really work well at showing different levels of detection and allowing you to play with them, and it makes stuff like invisibility a properly powerful thing (with caveats that are given examples within the text of the rules themselves).

For the most part I'd agree. The one mechanic I think they missed the mark in making something clear and simple to use is counteracting. I'm willing to admit this might just be a me issue that I can read it a couple times, feel like I understand it, and then draw a blank when the mechanic actually comes up in play because it's infrequent enough that it's not fresh in my head. Thankfully someone made an online tool to handle it, but to me it's existence is more proof enough people feel there's an unneeded complexity there if a tool exists to automate resolving the mechanic. I wish they had come up with something else in the remaster.

For the record, I get why they didn't just stick with a simple DC check to resolve it. They didn't want people to be able to use cheap low level items to counteract high level afflictions. I also don't really have a better solution, I just don't particularly like where they landed to solve the problem they saw.