Owlcat made a couple of good games based on PF1 APs (Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous). It’s a shame the new licensee isn’t making Pathfinder games but just games using the Pathfinder setting IP.
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Grade the Pathfinder 2E Game System
- Thread starter CleverNickName
- Start date
Yeah, I just want to see all the crunchy system details of PF2 brought to life.
Hopefully this is not another way PF2 ends up being similar to 4e (i.e., no video games released using the actual RPG rules).
The glossary does a good job of helping find stuff, but yeah, sometimes it gets annoying having to flip between 3 sections of the book on initial reading of a rule to get the full context of how it's applied. Archives of Nethys helps a lot with this, but you shouldn't need that.
Corinnguard
Hero
I've never played PF2, but one thing I liked about this TTRPG were the versatile heritages. They were sort of like templates in that you could apply them to any ancestry in place of one of that ancestry's list of heritages. As a result, you could have two Oreads from two different ancestries (ex. human and dwarf) and have them not possessing the same set of traits (like they did in PF1). You could also pick feats from your ancestry and/or your versatile heritage.
Bacon Bits
Hero
I haven't played it but I have read it extensively, and built a few characters.
It's a good game, but absolutely not for me. Fifteen years ago I was definitely the kind of player that would love a game system like PF2e, but I just have no interest in a system this heavy.
What I like:
It's a good game, but absolutely not for me. Fifteen years ago I was definitely the kind of player that would love a game system like PF2e, but I just have no interest in a system this heavy.
What I like:
- General class balance
- Overall presentation
- Top notch adventure paths
- Everything is a feat. This is a short way of saying I hate the general character progression. I really don't want to play the game for several levels before I feel like I have a fleshed out character. I hate it in 5e D&D, and PF2e makes it worse. In 5e I feel like I have to wait until level 3-4 before I get a character. In PF2e, I built about half a dozen characters and they didn't feel complete to me until level 8 at the earliest. That's how the game felt in 3e D&D, and I hated it. Just let the game be fun at level 1!
- The attempted comprehensive rules. I think we had 3e D&D long enough to understand why this doesn't work and isn't good. It discourages playing the game and encourages executing the rules. If I wanted to do that, I'd just play Gloomhaven. Overall I think PF2e is a game that is overwrought, which is part of the system just being too heavy. There's too many keywords and defined terms. Too many categories and magic icons. My breaking point was looking at the Athletics skill description and this is everything I don't want. Words cannot express how reading that page completely exhausts me.
- The three action economy system. As a game mechanic it's fine, but it's so fiddley and detailed. I just don't want to have to care.
- The game has too much stuff. There's too many options. Too many buttons and dials. Too many classes. Too many feats. Too many ancestries. The game clearly puts most of it's effort into the character-building subgame, which means that the game is very likely to over-reward system mastery. I don't want a game about building characters, populating their paper doll, and optimizing them. I want a game about playing characters in an imaginary world.
Corinnguard
Hero
This is how PF2 earned the nickname, Featfinder.
I find it so much better than D&D 5th edition in terms of character flexibility, crunch, meaningful progression, system design and overall versatility, that it saddens me that D&D is still so much bigger. For me, it shows what D&D has failed to do since the end of 4th edition (which was a good edition, even if the 3rd -> 4th edition was a spectacular failure on so many levels).
I do think Pathfinder is slightly too closely linked to Golarion, but I suspect it simply isn't commercially feasible to separate the setting and the system with the current size of the playerbase in mind. I think that's a shame - the system is good enough to work for homebrew and "ported" settings.
Of particular note is that the Pathfinder designers are less hesitant to add more classes than the D&D designers. I like this. It's ok that some classes overlap. As long as the core classes are good, it's fine to have tables opt in and out of the additional classes.
As for the setting, I think it's good. Not perfect, but good. I wish it didn't have the sci-fi elements (androids, crashed spaceships, Alkenstar, etc.) but one can always play in a different part of the world and/or homebrew those elements out of the setting if everyone in a group agrees.
I do think Pathfinder is slightly too closely linked to Golarion, but I suspect it simply isn't commercially feasible to separate the setting and the system with the current size of the playerbase in mind. I think that's a shame - the system is good enough to work for homebrew and "ported" settings.
Of particular note is that the Pathfinder designers are less hesitant to add more classes than the D&D designers. I like this. It's ok that some classes overlap. As long as the core classes are good, it's fine to have tables opt in and out of the additional classes.
As for the setting, I think it's good. Not perfect, but good. I wish it didn't have the sci-fi elements (androids, crashed spaceships, Alkenstar, etc.) but one can always play in a different part of the world and/or homebrew those elements out of the setting if everyone in a group agrees.
MuhVerisimilitude
Hero
It's funny because that's what I really like about it. It avoids the problem that 5e has, where skills are kinda useless because you don't know what you can actually use them for.
Bacon Bits
Hero
Oh, I know some people love it for that. Most of the things I don't like are things that attract people to the system. Like I said, 15 years ago, it would've been everything I wanted in a system. I do not think it's a bad game. I just find it viscerally repulsive now. My tastes have changed.
