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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8883927" data-attributes="member: 907">Within the domain of D&D-like games, PF2 is quite different from 5e. There's a family resemblance, but they're more like cousins than siblings. Other than the action economy, which has been mentioned, the main thing about it is Very Tight Math.Your most-relevant numbers are very strongly correlated to your level. You can make bad choices and fall below the curve (e.g. a rogue putting a low stat in Dexterity), but you kind of have to make that an active choice. It is pretty much impossible to go above the curve, at least with combat stats.There's also a crit system, where a success/failure by 10 or more is a critical success/failure. A natural 20/1 also upgrades the result one step, making it almost always a crit (unless something is so easy/hard you really shouldn't be rolling). This means that small differences in numbers have a stronger impact, as they not only increase/decrease the chance of success, they also affect the chances of one of the crits. This in turn means that level differentials are felt a whole lot more in Pathfinder. Fighting a creature that's 2 levels higher than you in PF2 feels really hard. You're probably only hitting like a third of your first attacks (and shouldn't bother making second or third attacks, do something useful with those actions instead), and forget about critting. Meanwhile, they'll be hitting like three attacks out of four, and in addition to having a somewhat higher base damage for being higher level, a fairly large portion of those attacks will be crits which means they hit like a frickin' truck. But relatively small situational modifiers can compensate for that. That makes PF2 a very tactical game, where you look for opportunities to change those odds in your favor.Meanwhile, 5e is a game where bounded accuracy means that the difference between a level 7 and a level 9 monster isn't so big. I remember a fight where a bunch of relatively low level PCs (maybe 6th level?) drove off a lich. Mind you, that was with a lot of luck (two crit smites from the paladin, and the cleric managing to dispel the lich's cloudkill spell), and the lich originally mostly wanting to drive the PCs off, but still. There's no way that would have happened in PF2.Pathfinder also has a lot more customization than 5e. For most classes in 5e, once you have made your subclass choice at level 1-3, your character is pretty much on rails mechanically other than choosing stat bonuses/feats every 4 levels. In PF2, you're probably making two or more choices with every level: ancestry/general/skill/class feat, skill increases, and maybe other things as well. These tend not to increase your Main Numbers (except maybe bringing things below the curve up to the curve), but rather add options, improve your action economy, and the like.</blockquote>

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