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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8182975" data-attributes="member: 12731">Pathfinder 2 is definitely and massively more complicated than 5th edition.That's not the problem - in fact, in part it's a feature and not a bug.The problem is instead that Pathfinder 2 is extremely cluttery. For all of its talk of a cleaned up ruleset... yeah, no. It's completely filled with the brim with exceptions and rules that seem like they should work identically, but actually vary slightly. And there are several rules subsystems that have a large impact on the game (and so you don't easily decide to skip them) but are massively over-engineered. Paizo really likes to use a thousand words when a hundred would be straight up superior.And that's not even talking about the literally thousands of feats. The game would be straight up much better if half of them were just plain removed, disappeared into nothing. Sure plenty of feats are harmless in that they don't impact games that don't feature them. But the way Paizo decided to claim every single last square inch of design space with their feats make it very hard to gamesmaster. It utterly wrecks the "yes, but" GM paradigm. Whenever you as the GM gets asked if a hero can do this or that a little faster or better than what the rules allow - greasing the wheels as it were - you're immediately brought to a full stop since if you say "yes, but..." there's far too often a feat that allows that exact shortcut. The game is explicitly designed not to give any power to the GM because Paizo has taken the right away in order to sell more feats. (This is the exact opposite of "giving the power to the GM" which is what the game boasted as an advantage over PF1, by the way)And it's a game with loads and LOADS of little pesky modifiers, often conditional ones with easily forgotten criteria. If you can't do numbers like 3d12+1d6+1d6+18+7+15-10-5=? in your head quickly and effortlessly, even hours into a play session, don't bother. And no, that wasn't some extremely niche corner case either. I'm saying that 3d12+1d6+1d6+18+7+15-10-5= can and will happen a dozen times each and every combat round (at high levels), maybe not in every combat, but likely some combats of every play session. And that's after hitting, which might involve d20+27+2-1-1+1-4 this attack, but d20+27-1-1+1 the previous attack. Every time you roll the dice, something will have changed, so you can never precalculate what you will be adding to the d20 or the 3d12.A greater striking greataxe does 3d12 damage. Add two elemental runes like Fire and Lightning for the 2d6. Then add your static bonus, plus some modifier. Then add 15 for the monster's vulnerability to fire and subtract 10 for hardness or slashing resistance. Finally subtract 5 for lightning resistance. As for the lethality, it's not necessarily built into the rules. Any GM worth his salt can easily write an adventure that even newbies find easy (combat-wise).It's the official adventures. PF2 definitely doubles down on the combat-as-sport paradigm. All three official APs to date start off with shockingly difficult fights. The only reason things get better at double-digit levels is because the game is inherently balanced to slowly tilt in the favor of heroes.But there are definitely aspects of it that have to do with the rules. PF2 is going all in on the idea that combat is balanced for the individual encounter. Everything in the game is geared towards the expectation characters enter each and every fight at full HP. (Actually, that's one of the optional variants that should have been in the GMG - a section on how to rejig the game into allowing resource-management since it's not immediately obvious what you need to do to have it back in your game)It's a hard game to love. There's simply so many aspects of it that chafe. I do love its combat, or rather, I love the monsters. Stat blocks are reasonably clean so I don't have to read up on them beforehand, yet feature individual powers that make different monsters look and act differently.In our group of five people, three have stated that in hindsight they prefer 5E (even though we're definitely in the market for something more crunchy than 5E), with one being neutral and only one actively preferring it (finding its downsides preferable to the downsides of 5E). Myself, I'm the GM (or DM), so I'm mostly disappointed if I don't get more mileage out of the considerable investment (not the economical investment, but the mental investment of mastering its rules) before shelving it.I don't have high hopes for the long-term success of Pathfinder 2. It desperately needed a senior designer remembering the KISS principle, with the power to kill people's darlings.In summary: I can definitely play PF2, but I am deeply disappointed Pathfinder 2 reads and plays like it was written by a dev team entirely unawares of the great improvements 5th edition has brought to the D&D hobby. Why couldn't at least one Paizo employee swallow her pride and go look over the fence to see what 5E was up to. (5E did come out several years before publication of PF2!)PF2 is so... very 2010. Pathfinder 2 would have been lauded as a great game if it competed against 3rd edition or 4th edition. In fact, in too many ways PF2 comes across as a superior 4E product. (That's not meant as a good thing).Now in 2020 it just comes across as quaint and unfriendly and bloated and dated.</blockquote>

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