MindWanderer
Explorer
To begin with: I'm a D&D veteran of decades, having played every edition of D&D except 5.0 and the white paper, when each was the most recent version of the game. I had read the rules for PF1e and PF2e (thanks, Humble Bundle) and found them promising, plus people rave over PF, so I was eager to play a demo at GalaxyCon last weekend.
The long and the short of it is, that while it does have a few strengths over D&D, I came out of it less interested in PF than I was beforehand.
In the first game, I played an Investigator. This just sort of... didn't work. A level 1 Investigator seems to be flatly worse than every other class. If there's a mystery of some sort involved, and if you have the opportunity to prep with some investigation, then you can use your Int for attack rolls... making you still worse than any other class that gets their prime attribute to attack and damage with no preparation. At best, you can set up a +1 bonus to use against 1 enemy, which is, over the course of a typical battle, not going to be as good as just attacking them one time. One of the other players at the table had to explain how an Investigator gets more usable at higher levels, but I didn't get to experience it myself.
But the bigger problem was that the adventure wasn't a mystery, until suddenly it was and we're rolling initiative. The DM apologized for not realizing I was an Investigator and needed some additional prep opportunity baked into the game, but he shouldn't have had to. Especially in organized play, that shouldn't be an extra job he has to do.
In the second game, I was an Inventor. This worked better, because I could spend one action to both move and attack with my robot buddy. But I also needed an action to power myself up for a damage bonus, and in a battle that only lasts 2-3 rounds, it's not worth trading an attack now for a small damage boost later. So basically the whole setup was a more complicated way to get two attacks, sometimes, maybe.
Which brings us to the 3-action economy. I just really don't like it. D&D baking minor actions like drawing weapons into their move+action economy works much better. You should be able to take some kind of heroic action every round, and when you have to burn actions to draw weapons, sheathe weapons, raise shields, etc. then you run out of the actions you need to use your class features and also do something cool.
Finally, complexity. A demo D&D character sheet is one piece of paper, single-sided; maybe two if you're a spellcaster. Every PF character sheet was two pieces of paper, at least the first of which was double-sided. And the class features are dense. I had to read both of them very carefully (while the game was going on) to figure out how all the pieces interlocked. Now, granted, that's because a level 1 PF2e character is comparable in stats and complexity to a level 3 D&D5.x character. But even then, a D&D character's abilities are easier to grok.
I was absolutely the target audience for PF walking into the event, so the fact that I'm now turned off of it seems like a big miss. Maybe the characters I chose were poor examples (in which case, taking them out of the stack of the dozen pregens we were handed might have been a good idea). But with my lack of experience, I can't tell the difference between a lacking demo and a lacking game.
The long and the short of it is, that while it does have a few strengths over D&D, I came out of it less interested in PF than I was beforehand.
In the first game, I played an Investigator. This just sort of... didn't work. A level 1 Investigator seems to be flatly worse than every other class. If there's a mystery of some sort involved, and if you have the opportunity to prep with some investigation, then you can use your Int for attack rolls... making you still worse than any other class that gets their prime attribute to attack and damage with no preparation. At best, you can set up a +1 bonus to use against 1 enemy, which is, over the course of a typical battle, not going to be as good as just attacking them one time. One of the other players at the table had to explain how an Investigator gets more usable at higher levels, but I didn't get to experience it myself.
But the bigger problem was that the adventure wasn't a mystery, until suddenly it was and we're rolling initiative. The DM apologized for not realizing I was an Investigator and needed some additional prep opportunity baked into the game, but he shouldn't have had to. Especially in organized play, that shouldn't be an extra job he has to do.
In the second game, I was an Inventor. This worked better, because I could spend one action to both move and attack with my robot buddy. But I also needed an action to power myself up for a damage bonus, and in a battle that only lasts 2-3 rounds, it's not worth trading an attack now for a small damage boost later. So basically the whole setup was a more complicated way to get two attacks, sometimes, maybe.
Which brings us to the 3-action economy. I just really don't like it. D&D baking minor actions like drawing weapons into their move+action economy works much better. You should be able to take some kind of heroic action every round, and when you have to burn actions to draw weapons, sheathe weapons, raise shields, etc. then you run out of the actions you need to use your class features and also do something cool.
Finally, complexity. A demo D&D character sheet is one piece of paper, single-sided; maybe two if you're a spellcaster. Every PF character sheet was two pieces of paper, at least the first of which was double-sided. And the class features are dense. I had to read both of them very carefully (while the game was going on) to figure out how all the pieces interlocked. Now, granted, that's because a level 1 PF2e character is comparable in stats and complexity to a level 3 D&D5.x character. But even then, a D&D character's abilities are easier to grok.
I was absolutely the target audience for PF walking into the event, so the fact that I'm now turned off of it seems like a big miss. Maybe the characters I chose were poor examples (in which case, taking them out of the stack of the dozen pregens we were handed might have been a good idea). But with my lack of experience, I can't tell the difference between a lacking demo and a lacking game.
