Pathfinder 2E PF2: Second Attempt Post Mortem

[prosfilaes]

FATE and PbtA games don't work for me, and I'll sometimes mention that and why if it comes up, but I don't usually post in threads here or elsewhere that are dedicated to those systems or individual games based on them, because people have a right to like what they like and that they don't suit me doesn't change that.)

Except that you weren't happy with FATE with a subscription of support material when they changed to a new system, and you aren't half-way through an adventure path in FATE2e with your friends that means you're likely to be running FATE2e for the rest of the year. It's not really comparable to what I'm dealing with, or what any Pathfinder player who doesn't like PF2 and would just like things to go back to the way they were is dealing with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Except that you weren't happy with FATE with a subscription of support material when they changed to a new system, and you aren't half-way through an adventure path in FATE2e with your friends that means you're likely to be running FATE2e for the rest of the year. It's not really comparable to what I'm dealing with, or what any Pathfinder player who doesn't like PF2 and would just like things to go back to the way they were is dealing with.

Cancel your subscription and change games. Just because you have a prior investment still does not give someone a right to incessant negativity, especially when its abundantly clear at this point that bitching about it is all they're going to get out of it. Walk away.

I've absolutely had games I liked in the past that changed in ways that were unacceptable. I didn't like it either but I let it go.

 

[Aldarc]

Cancel your subscription and change games. Just because you have a prior investment still does not give someone a right to incessant negativity, especially when its abundantly clear at this point that bitching about it is all they're going to get out of it. Walk away.

I've absolutely had games I liked in the past that changed in ways that were unacceptable. I didn't like it either but I let it go.

Don't complicate things with your obvious solutions!

 

[Philip Benz]

There are so many games out there, that anyone can find one that suits their own particular predilections.

If some folks prefer DD5, more power to 'em! I understand there are also new modmods arriving on the scene that take DD5 to a new level. That's great!

Some folks like the old DD3.5 vibe, or the spin that PF1 put onto it (sometimes refered to as DD3.75). That's great too! There is so much PF1 material out there that you can play PF1 for years and years without ever running out, not to mention homebrew games.

Personally, I really prefer PF2. After years of playing DD3.5 and then PF1, PF2 comes along and solves many of the gripes I had with PF1. Sure, it's not perfect. Sure, there are problems with many of the published APs, which have pre-programmed challenges that are on the cutting edge of TPK territory. But a clever DM can adapt those edgy situation, or simply run homebrew campaigns like I do, and the game systems works really well, giving more power to martials and reining in the worst excesses of the power of PF1/DD3.5 spellcasters. You can say what you want about the way PF2 has taken a nerfbat to spellcasters of all stripes, but I see it as a much-needed and long-overdue solution to a known problem.

I love our shared RPG hobby, and it pains me to see folks badmouthing any game, especially PF2, which is my current favorite, until something else new and shiny comes along. So play whatever game fills your RPG void, and let's talk constructively about the features of the game this forum is dedicated to, rather than focusing on the warts and blemishes that any game is likely to suffer from.

FWIW, there's a whole lot of new and cool content coming out of Paizo these days. The big Mwangi book was awe-inspiring in depth, and the recently released Secrets of Magic book was simply brilliant. We're still waiting on Guns and Gears, the Grand Bazaar, and the big Absalom book (which appears to have been further delayed) so there is no shortage of new and intriguing material coming out.

 

[!DWolf]

I guess my "bad mark against it" might originate from my DM/GM ego. I'm very confident in my ability to run a solid D&D-style TTRPG, and I'm aware that's also one of my limitations. I've been running these types of games since the late 1980s, and very familiar with the d20 system since its creation in the early 2000s with 3.0. When a system crashes and burns for a couple of groups that I've GMed for as spectacularly as PF2 has - under a variety of circumstances - I look for a common denominator.
It's true that I am a common denominator. Maybe I'm just not good at running PF2, but I'm fine at running 3.x, D&D 4e, 5e, 13th Age, PF1, etc. I wanted the Abomination Vaults campaign I ran to be proof that I could challenge myself to run a good PF2 game. So I have to look at a) maybe I'm a bad GM; b) maybe the adventure was set up to be not good; or c) there is a flaw in the system.

There are more possibilities: perhaps you are using the wrong gamemaster “tools”/skillset with pathfinder 2e? If other dnd derived games may be successful run with skillsets A, B, and C and Pf2e may be successful run with skillsets B, C, and D, you may have trouble running pf2e despite being a very good gm if you primarily use skillset A (or think that you should be using skillset A instead of a more appropriate skillset).

To further elaborate:
Based on your postings (and these things can be very hard to judge without having session recordings available), you seem to run a pf2e “game loop” similar to:

1. The party enters the room
2. Combat
3. Loot, heal, refocus, and otherwise reset for combat
4. Find the next room
5. Repeat from 1

With the main emphasis being on step number 2. Thus your games are basically endless streams of combats with any plot, story, roleplay, etc. that would take place out of combat squeezed into step 4 because you want to make more time for step 2. In other words (from my perspective at least) you are running (as FrozenNorth said) exploration as a mini-game with combat as the main game.

In contrast: most horror rpgs will use a different loop (because combat is usually EXTREMELY deadly). The loop varies by game of course but an example (and specifically the structure I use) is:

1. Declaration: everyone declares what they are doing.
2. Resolution: the actions of each character or groups of characters are resolved either offscreen (you do that) or as a scene (which of course has its own declarations and resolutions). Combat may occur here. Some game masters can get a lot of mileage out of cutting from one group to another to maintain tension (see Seth Skorkowski’s video here at 10:00 in for an example) but I use dramatic cuts rarely.
3. Update World: the state of the world changes in response to the players. This is done somewhat in tandem with 2 but this is the step where NPCs move around, time based events process, etc. Sometimes this triggers events in the narration (they hear the monster moving for instance).
4. Repeat from 1.

And I have found that this exact same structure also works excellently for running pf2e “out of the box” because it is explicitly supported (and this is in fact why I like the game so much: it’s a hybrid of everything I like about horror game structure with high fantasy action).

So you may be having problems with a sort of tunnel vision: you may be locked on to the “correct way” to play based on a) what works for you in other dnd derived high fantasy games, b) what you are expecting the core loop to be based on what you have read on the internet, c) what your previous players wanted out of the game, or d) a combination of all three. But that way maybe serving you poorly with pf2e which is a bit of a departure from the mold.

So, my advice if you do want to run a pf2e game successfully, as someone who has run it successfully and reflects a lot on what makes their game work, is to: a) record your session and then listen to them to figure out what exactly is going on and b) find and run/play/at-least-listen-to a bunch of preferably non-fantasy horror/investigation games that speak to you and pay attention to how they work and why you like them (from a game perspective of course), then come back in a few years and use that knowledge to try and run pf2e again.

 

[dave2008]

1. Declaration: everyone declares what they are doing.
2. Resolution: the actions of each character or groups of characters are resolved either offscreen (you do that) or as a scene (which of course has its own declarations and resolutions). Combat may occur here. Some game masters can get a lot of mileage out of cutting from one group to another to maintain tension (see Seth Skorkowski’s video here at 10:00 in for an example) but I use dramatic cuts rarely.
3. Update World: the state of the world changes in response to the players. This is done somewhat in tandem with 2 but this is the step where NPCs move around, time based events process, etc. Sometimes this triggers events in the narration (they hear the monster moving for instance).
4. Repeat from 1.

Isn't that how all D&D / PF type games are run? I mean that is what I have been doing with every edition of D&D since 1e / BECMI. I guess everyone does it differently, but that seems like RPG 101 to me.

 

[Retreater]

So, my advice if you do want to run a pf2e game successfully, as someone who has run it successfully and reflects a lot on what makes their game work, is to: a) record your session and then listen to them to figure out what exactly is going on and b) find and run/play/at-least-listen-to a bunch of preferably non-fantasy horror/investigation games that speak to you and pay attention to how they work and why you like them (from a game perspective of course), then come back in a few years and use that knowledge to try and run pf2e again.

I think part of my disconnect with PF2 has been the APs. They feel like a straightjacket in a lot of ways (so do some of the 5e mega-campaigns to me too). I do better running my own material that I can tailor to my players' interest in a dynamic, living world. With PF2 I feel it's a new system that relies on balance. My safeguard against messing it up is to use the official adventures, and I don't like straying from the specific tracks placed by the designers because that defeats the point of using them and gives me just another way of messing it up.
I've run successful Call of Cthulhu campaigns, as well as adventures in OSR systems that require a lot of exploration to survive.
The Pathfinder 2E APs that I've seen so far (Age of Ashes and Abomination Vaults) just don't utilize that exploration pillar well enough.

 

[kenada]

The safeguard against messing things up in PF2 is the system’s structures for that. The encounter-building guidelines work. Once you understand where your players fall (e.g., mine suck at tactics, so I have to keep things down a notch), you can rely on them to tell you whether things are getting too dangerous and if you need to signal accordingly.

For example, if the PCs are fighting a group, and they flee, you can look at the consequences should they return with help. Maybe it will be an extreme-threat (or worse) encounter, which will almost certainly kill the party. Describe what the PCs hear as the enemy forces approach, and be frank with them: you can stay, but it will be really nasty. If they want to do that, set up racing clocks a VP subsystem thing for them to make ready against the reinforcements. This is all just taking advantage of the tools the game provides to improvise once a situation goes sideways.

I haven’t run PF2 APs, but I’ve run several PF1 ones. Setting aside growing pains with a new system (e.g., possibly wonky Fall of Plaguestone and Age of Ashes tuning), Paizo is pretty consistent with their adventures (for good and ill), so I expect my experience is still applicable. APs are tools. Running them by the book is a style, but that’s not the only way to get value out of them. If they help you save on one of the harder parts of adventure design (such as coming up with ideas and putting those ideas to paper), then that seems like great value to me.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Personally, I tend to heavily mod any AP (in both 5e and PF2) that I run. I generally feel that by doing so, I get the most value of the AP for myself and my group. I also feel that I still get value for money notwithstanding the changes to the AP (on occasion, it has its guts completely ripped out until just the skeleton remains).

That being said, I understand/agree with @Retreater . There are many entirely legitimate reasons why you may have to/prefer to run APs as is, including:

• not feeling confident enough in the system at the time you play it to heavily mod it;
• not having time to mod it because other obligations/running other games;
• not enjoying modding adventures;
• finding the tools to mod adventures unhelpful/annoying/complicated to use/more trouble than they’re worth.

 

[payn]

Folks sometimes think the APs run themselves, and that is certainly not the case. There is a time investment into understanding the material to be able to bring it to life. If Golarion isnt interesting to you, particularly the adventure the AP centers on, you are going to have a hard time making it a specific run of the mill dungeon romp or whatever your conventional RPG intentions are. That obviously is going to limit their value to certain GMs.

The Paizo sub-forums for the APs are a wealth of info and advice on running them. At least during the PF1 era, the forums over at Paizo seemed to be on life support now (everybody on reddit, discord, etc..?). Anyways, I always made sure to frequent them while running an AP to get ideas to incorporate into my campaign and to look out for any potential pitfalls in the material. Its a time consuming task to make an AP sing, but its labor of love for me. I can see it being a chore for others.