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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JThursby" data-source="post: 8630928" data-attributes="member: 7025596">This doesn't sound negative at all, I had the same skepticism of the game's changes during it's playtest.  Now it's my game of choice, I run it every week.  I'll address the points you brought up, then share my experience with running the game in a practical sense.Small Bonuses - Welcome to Crit TownIn the game's <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497" target="_blank">encounter building rules</a> you'll notice that it treats two monsters of level X as worth half the xp and threat as one monster of X+2. What does the monster that's two levels higher have that makes it literally twice as threatening? It has slightly more hp and might deal more damage, but it also has +2 to it's AC, Saves, DCs, Attack rolls, etc. So a +2 across the board is roughly considered to be doubling the effectiveness of a creature. That should give you an idea of how impactful these numerical bonuses are.This is due to the 4 degrees of success system. All checks can get a critical failure or critical success with either nat1/nat20 result on the die or the result of the check being 10 bellow/10 above the DC.  While you might be used to +1's being a 5% increase in accuracy, in this system if you're already good at something each +1 is adding critical results into the mix, which are generally 10% better or more.  This even applies to skill checks and saving throws, which can have dramatic effects on critical results.Iterative Attacks - Incentivizing Better TurnsThe multi attack penalty (MAP) exists to prevent the game from turning into a slap fight.  If you are looking to do weapon attacks, you have to do one of two things: find a way to conquer the MAP in your feats and class kit, or find something better to do with your actions that gives you more value than a very inaccurate attack.This applies to enemies as well. The days of sack-of-hp slapstick enemies are over. Any enemy worth killing has something to do to give it an advantage in a fight that the PCs have to account for. Take the humble <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=402" target="_blank">Warg</a>. It has a reaction that lets it retaliate for attacking it's allies, it has the Grab ability on it's jaws attack which lets it spend 1 action after hitting with the attack to grapple it's victim automatically, and it has Swallow Whole, which lets it attempt to gulp down a creature within it's size limit (in this case Small). This level 2 enemy already comes with a small suite of abilities that make it a menace to low level parties. If it start's it's turn next to a player, instead of making 3 attacks you can expect it to attack, grab, and then swallow whole. Smart players will realize they can keep their distance to not be swallowed in the same turn as being grabbed because it only has 3 actions to spend. Having this kind of threat is what gives PCs a memorable time: enemies that spam attack after attack will not be remembered, the ones that deploy disruptive and dramatic abilities will be burned into their memory.Resources - Archives of NethysAll of the rules content of the game, without exception, is posted for free on <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/" target="_blank">Archives of Nethys.</a>  It's the official digital rules compendium for the game, and it has everything you could want.  It's essentially D&D beyond without a character sheet, except free.  If you want a character sheet there's <a href="https://pathbuilder2e.com/" target="_blank">Pathbuilder</a> which is mostly free but has a paid version that allows exporting or something.  For playing online there's the ludicrously expansive implementation of the game on <a href="https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pf2e" target="_blank">Foundry Virtual Tabletop</a>.My ExperienceThis all sounds pretty alright on it's own without the context of actual play.  Having run the game a bunch, it works out better than it sounds.  I run the game in 3 hour sessions and each one averages 5 combats with lots of room for exploration or roleplaying, depending on the adventure.  I run it on Foundry, and the pace of combat is incredibly brisk.  Turns typically take a minute or less per player because the system has a way to automatically compare roll results against DCs, letting the player simply declare what they're gonna do, roll it, and have a resolution automatically presented.  Every single spell, item, feat, ability in the game is in Foundry, so the speed of information retrieval is almost instantaneous.  Very little bogs us down, the only thing that will do it sometimes is waiting a minute to load a new area for every player.  From everything I had read from the game, speed of play this insanely fast is not something I was expecting.  For comparison, I run 5e for a local game store and in the same span of time we're lucky to do 2 combats per session.  I am struggling to go back to 5e, I have become accustom to PF2e's new normal of game speed.</blockquote>

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