Pathfinder 2E How is Pathfinder doing?

[Jaeger]

The Pathfinder community splitting between those staying with Pathfinder 1e, those switching to Pathfinder 2e, and people new to Pathfinder coming in. There does not seem to be the same exodus as there was from 4e to 5e for a wide variety of reasons, so Pathfinder 2e needed to wait longer to attract enough word of mouth and a base to start expanding.

Any new edition will split the fanbase to some degree.

5e had the benefit of coming on the heels of an edition that really split the fanbase, so it could specifically target design elements to bring that fanbase back together...

PF2 has more of an uphill road because PF1/3.x D&D had basically run its course when 5e hit.

The PF1 fans that stuck with Pazio were of a more 'die hard' 3.x. fan type less likely to readily move over to any "new" edition. Which worked against Pazio as the time to release PF2 was a year after 5e hit... But their fans would not have followed so soon.

And Pazio had to wait because they are not WotC, and could not afford to just quit a still profitable game line to develop a new one at the drop of a hat.

Also like I said earlier; PF1 fans are a bit more 'new edition' resistant than your normal RPG groups. If I had to bet, not as many as Pazio would have liked made the switch to PF2 right away...

Now it seems PF2 is winning converts, but like I said earlier; PF2 is finding its natural level in a 5e world. The 4e era PF1 glory days will not return for a variety of reasons.

... Marginal increases in brand awareness among the now huge 5e player base would have a dispraportionately large increase in Paizo's revenue.

I don't know where Pazio would get the funds, but I agree.

I'm not suggesting 5e players should be Paizo's target audience, but there are a lot of 5e players who could be interested in PF2.

5e players absolutely should be PF2's target audience. They should make every effort to sell themselves as the AD&D to WotC's 5e basic D&D.

PF2 is not an entry level RPG. And it should not pretend to be. That would just lead to a clash of expectations.

Like I suggested early in the life cycle of the system, they should make a "beginner's adventure path" that teaches how to play the game and how to run it.

This is 100% the right move for a game with the tight math that PF2 has. Most other RPG's rely on a degree of 'handwavium' to smooth things over, and PF2 explicitly does not do that!

It's still very much 'D&D', but it does represent a shift in playstyle that needs to be adjusted to.

 

[Retreater]

Well, besides a lot of lesser issues, as I reference above, one of the things that becomes abundantly clear with playing PF2e is that you have actually engage with the game in a somewhat focused way for it to work for you if used at the difficulty levels described.

My issue is that you basically have to be "on your game" for 58% of the encounters and "exceed expectations" for 17% of the encounters (using the encounter math from the first volume of Extinction Curse). That's a full 75% of 49 encounters where there's a real chance of character death (if not TPKs) ... in the first volume of the second Adventure Path Paizo published.
I don't know about your groups, but I think this level of engagement for 75% of all fights is a superhuman task. People forget synergies, make bad decisions (sometimes "in character"), aren't 100% focused because of exhaustion/work/family/etc., are new players unfamiliar with best practices, etc.
The lack of wiggle room is perplexing. If you don't play perfectly, your party is likely going to die in 17% of the encounters. In the first volume of the Adventure Path, where it's expected new players are learning how to play with their new characters.
If you're a game designer, do you know where you should put Severe encounters? You should put one in an area that is telegraphed in advance and easily avoided. Then you put one at the climactic encounter of the volume, again telegraphed way in advance with the party able to get important tactical information.
So I'm saying the proper rate should be 4% (2 out of 49) Severe encounters in the first volume of an AP - and that's even higher than the rate they used with Trivial encounters (which was 1% in the adventure but should probably be 4% or higher).
When you have so many encounters (many of them unimportant), why do you want such a high rate of Severe?

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is compounded by dms coming from other systems where on-level combats are too easy to be worth running. So playes are never in combats where Incapacitation doesn’t mean “useless” which feels stupid.

That gets back to the whole thing that 3e D&D (and PF1e) had CR systems that were broken, and showed it more over time. It meant a lot of people familiar with both reflexively upgrade opponents because that's what they had to do in the past. But when PF2e tells you an encounter is on-level for a group of PCs, generally speaking it isn't kidding. The players will not have managed over time to cook up their characters to the point where on-level encounters are a joke. Further, even that on-level calculation assumes the players are paying attention, working together, and behaving tactically; if they're just bulling through and doing whatever they want, they're going to do poorly with that on-level encounter (its also possible for some specific party compositions to hit this, but they're generally compositions that would have been a problem in most incarnations of D&D or its offshoots--if you have a party that's all spellcasters and ranged attackers, you'd better both be pretty mobile and avoid any close quarter encounter situations, but that's been true since forever).

 

[Thomas Shey]

My issue is that you basically have to be "on your game" for 58% of the encounters and "exceed expectations" for 17% of the encounters (using the encounter math from the first volume of Extinction Curse). That's a full 75% of 49 encounters where there's a real chance of character death (if not TPKs) ... in the first volume of the second Adventure Path Paizo published.

I'm not going to speak of Extinction Curse, but I'll agree PF2e expects you to be "on your game" with most encounters of any seriousness.

I don't know about your groups, but I think this level of engagement for 75% of all fights is a superhuman task. People forget synergies, make bad decisions (sometimes "in character"), aren't 100% focused because of exhaustion/work/family/etc., are new players unfamiliar with best practices, etc.

I don't think its as bad as you're painting it. To be honest, I'm old, frequently distracted, and sometimes not really with the process--but I managed to play all the way through AoA. Admittedly, we were playing hybrids which helps, but having played a pure fighter in a prior short campaign, not as much as you'd think, really (it probably helped my wife's Fighter/Rogue hybrid most, and the Sorcerer/Oracle hybrid least, with my Champion/Bard and the fourth player's Investigator/Witch in the middle). I suspect, honestly, that the people you tried to GM for were rarely "on their game" at all, because, bluntly, a lot of editions of D&D in recent years (both 3e and 5e) didn't really train you for that to be necessary unless you were playing with a GM who was playing notoriously hardball.

I mean, seriously, three of the five of us participating in that campaign are in our 60's. We're just not that focused, but we got by.

The lack of wiggle room is perplexing. If you don't play perfectly, your party is likely going to die in 17% of the encounters. In the first volume of the Adventure Path, where it's expected new players are learning how to play with their new characters.
If you're a game designer, do you know where you should put Severe encounters? You should put one in an area that is telegraphed in advance and easily avoided. Then you put one at the climactic encounter of the volume, again telegraphed way in advance with the party able to get important tactical information.
So I'm saying the proper rate should be 4% (2 out of 49) Severe encounters in the first volume of an AP - and that's even higher than the rate they used with Trivial encounters (which was 1% in the adventure but should probably be 4% or higher).
When you have so many encounters (many of them unimportant), why do you want such a high rate of Severe?

Well, you'll note I haven't defended some of the AP's tendency for too many Severe encounters. I just don't think the situation is quite as bad as you're painting it.

 

[Staffan]

Even there I don't think all of those can be +3's.

Almost certainly not, no. I was/am a player in Age of Ashes so I didn't get a look at the machinery so to speak, but it definitely leaned toward single tough encounters – but not that tough.

Genuinely wonder how much of that is down to a combination of:

1) Early AP issues. Age of Ashes is notorious now for its difficulty. Having your first major adventure be so difficult was probably not a wise decision, especially when the game requires a more tactical mind than the main competition. It would have been wiser to be much more of an ease in campaign.

From what I understand, Extinction Curse did not have quite the same issues, but it might have somewhat gotten off theme a bit too quickly, and it is a less universal theme than soemthing like Age of Ashes.

Another problem is the mandate from On High that a 6-volume AP should take a group of PCs from level 1 to 20, as well as stick around for a while at level 20 (so you'll actually play at 20th). This is to be done in 6 volumes of ~64 pages (APs are 96 pages, but about a third are monster stats, magic items, articles, and such). That means 3-4 levels per volume, and 4 levels in 64 pages only leaves about 16 pages per level. Since the default leveling method is XP mainly for encounters, that means you need a lot of encounters, and more difficult encounters mean more XP per page. (Combat encounters are also a convenient way of stuffing more XP into the adventure, because "4 dire wolves, see Bestiary page 300something" doesn't take up much room).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Another problem is the mandate from On High that a 6-volume AP should take a group of PCs from level 1 to 20, as well as stick around for a while at level 20 (so you'll actually play at 20th). This is to be done in 6 volumes of ~64 pages (APs are 96 pages, but about a third are monster stats, magic items, articles, and such). That means 3-4 levels per volume, and 4 levels in 64 pages only leaves about 16 pages per level. Since the default leveling method is XP mainly for encounters, that means you need a lot of encounters, and more difficult encounters mean more XP per page. (Combat encounters are also a convenient way of stuffing more XP into the adventure, because "4 dire wolves, see Bestiary page 300something" doesn't take up much room).

There's probably something to that, though I personally enjoyed the opportunity to actually play a character at those upper levels and have it not break. Its ironic; I'm not a big fan of level-based games, but if they're going to be there I kind of want to use them all...

 

[Retreater]

To be honest, I'm old, frequently distracted, and sometimes not really with the process--but I managed to play all the way through AoA.

Did you get through AoA - like without a TPK? Or character death?

Well, you'll note I haven't defended some of the AP's tendency for too many Severe encounters. I just don't think the situation is quite as bad as you're painting it.

The 58% Moderate encounters probably aren't "TPK" level, but many of them prove to be challenging enough where at least one character drops and gets close to dying and plenty of resources need to be spent - and that further weakens the party for the next Moderate (or Severe encounter).
The 17% seems to check out that about every three sessions I have had a TPK in this system.

The only solution I see is if I ever get a group that would like to try PF2 is to avoid all published adventures and write something more aligned with the challenge I feel comfortable running. Which would be predominantly Low and Moderate encounters with an equal split Trivial and Severe.

 

[Retreater]

Another problem is the mandate from On High that a 6-volume AP should take a group of PCs from level 1 to 20, as well as stick around for a while at level 20 (so you'll actually play at 20th). This is to be done in 6 volumes of ~64 pages (APs are 96 pages, but about a third are monster stats, magic items, articles, and such). That means 3-4 levels per volume, and 4 levels in 64 pages only leaves about 16 pages per level. Since the default leveling method is XP mainly for encounters, that means you need a lot of encounters, and more difficult encounters mean more XP per page. (Combat encounters are also a convenient way of stuffing more XP into the adventure, because "4 dire wolves, see Bestiary page 300something" doesn't take up much room).

That level-up math forcing to stuff XP into certain page counts to get to X Level by Y Page is a terrible disservice to the game. If you're running an AP, you should just use Milestone XP, have more meaningful encounters.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Did you get through AoA - like without a TPK? Or character death?

Yup. We got a bit close a couple times to the latter (with my own character in fact, but the fact he was the guy out there deliberately attracting the hits was going to make him the most likely to skate near that than anyone else). I've actually expressed the opinion that in general its probably proportionately easier to get a TPK than an individual death in PF2e because of how death is handled; there are a few types of opponents that do odd things, but unless the opponents are actively executing the downed rather than, you know, dealing with the people actually throwing trouble at them, a downed character isn't particularly likely to die. But of course if everyone goes down, well...but we never even got close to that. I'd guess it was just the fact we had two healers in the part that could do things tactically in that regard (and one wasn't even doing so spell-based).

The 58% Moderate encounters probably aren't "TPK" level, but many of them prove to be challenging enough where at least one character drops and gets close to dying and plenty of resources need to be spent - and that further weakens the party for the next Moderate (or Severe encounter).
The 17% seems to check out that about every three sessions I have had a TPK in this system.

The only solution I see is if I ever get a group that would like to try PF2 is to avoid all published adventures and write something more aligned with the challenge I feel comfortable running. Which would be predominantly Low and Moderate encounters with an equal split Trivial and Severe.

That honestly seems an excellent idea. A friend of mine was running PF2e for another group we play with, and they really didn't like it, and a big part of it was the thing I referenced in design--he was throwing a whole lot of +2 and +3 level encounters at them with a few +1s, and I suspect its because his instinct was till lodged in the D&D3e days (though that group did a lot of 4e, which was probably the D&D edition closest to PF2e in that the encounter math mostly also worked there). He's outright admitted their bad experience was probably his fault.

My own feeling is that I'd probably try to do a curve with most being in the -1 to +1 range with occasional gusts to higher or lower (though this is difficult at the bottom because there's just not that many level -2 encounters available to throw at first level characters).

 

[Thomas Shey]

That level-up math forcing to stuff XP into certain page counts to get to X Level by Y Page is a terrible disservice to the game. If you're running an AP, you should just use Milestone XP, have more meaningful encounters.

Honestly, D&D style experience is kind of archaic these days anyway. Even games that still use experience rather than Milestones don't usually go that route.