I'm a forever 5e player that ultimately has enjoyed the system but has gotten pretty sick of certain elements of it's mechanics. The guy running the game I'm currently in feels the same and keeps wanting to try out pf2e. My opinion has generally been that if we are going to try something else we should try something totally different, but neither of us are really in the mood to do something that isn't d&d at the moment. Yes I've played other systems I've played 3.5, GURPS, a homebrew sci fi system my brother made, Lancer and idk probably some other shit, but I really want a mostly class/archetype oriented fantasy RPG and so does my friend. Not asking for a spoon feed but specifically on the topic of Pathfinder 2e: is it actually better? or is it just cope for forever-d&d people that d&d can be saved. What's actually better about it?
TL;DR
when people say "play Pathfinder 2e if you're sick of 5e" are they being legit or is it just more forever-d&d mentality what is good or bad about it
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The good thing is that its a team based strategic game.
The bad thing is that its a team based strategic game.
Personal experience as a GM is that after level 14 things die so painfully slow that the game becomes borderline unplayable, but that might have been just because I played with a party of 3 with giving the enemies a weak adjustment for there being less players than 4 and those players being champion cleric oracle and each of them being a healer with lay on hands from champion, and normal heals from cleric and oracle.
how do player resources work in comparison to 5e? I've noticed 5e characters have to do a ridiculous amount of fighting in a 24 hour period to run out of resources and then get them all back instantly the next day. Also hp inflation sometimes makes fights seem like just a battle between stat sheets instead of something that has any room for improvisation and creative problem solving.
>fights seem like just a battle between stat sheets instead of something that has any room for improvisation and creative problem solving
Ah, if that’s a problem for you, you don’t want anything that Paizo has ever touched.
Seconding this. Pathfinder (and Paizo games in general) are very much built in this way where like... you need feats/builds to do extremely basic shit. Pathfinder 1e you needed a whole chain of three feats to reliably trip someone in combat. Pathfinder 2e isn't quite THAT bad, but it's definitely not a system for "improvising" unless you have a really lax DM.
Well besides running out of biggest buffs of the day like heroism or haste it was in our party somehow even worse than 5e. With medicine you can heal around 10hp per person every hour at level 1 and with a champion they can get one lay on hands every 10 minutes by just praying.
fpbp and /thread
That's really all there is to it.
If that's the kind of game you are looking for, you'll probably have tons of fun.
You'll have a miserable time otherwise.
I do think that the game probably plays a lot better if you use the Proficiency without level variant rule.
Also, free archetype, obviously.
Unironically pic-related.
Also Casters suck horse dick in PF2E and it drives most 5e caster players into an autistic meltdown. It's a good thing.
If I had to describe PF2E in a few lines, it's a more developed, more balanced 5e, but goddamn does it suck to DM for, and it's a slog to play even if it's objectively a better "game" than 5e.
>crits on 10 above the DC
Last time I played, which was really really early on PF2e release, that killed my 2 monks. For a forced melee class it really sucks that literally everybody has it super easy to crit on you
All of this. Pathfinder 2e is a good GAME.
It's not a good ROLEPLAYING game.
these are all very insightful and kind of what I expected from it
this is both cool to me as a person who's had DM's allergic to diplomacy without explicit ruling but also extremely shocking and disheartening to me as a human being who knows how this would actually feel and be used at a table
And because the developers like to have options for impressing certain characters with other skills sometimes like doing an acrobatics check to make friends with the members of the circus leads to gems like "This guy is a thief right? Can I do a flip for him to become my friend?" And other nonsensical things.
3 action economy, calling races and racial variants ancestries, less actual combat mechanics but more combat filler rules are not positives (shields being the only exception on that front).
Thighs and boob window content tho is legit.
For all intents PF2e is paizo almost successfully fixing 4e (for resource use most core things are effectively at will and encounter powers, after 6th level small flat modifiers dont matter unless they are equal or greater to the rune bonus or you can heavily stack multiple, mostly due to level bonus to rolls, but is massive buff city in 1-5, bulk of initial monster calculation and gimmick features giving the reverse problem of 5e where instead of a int devourer or banshee being a danger to the unprepared, the monster is already likely a pushover without a gimmick free 1 action guaranteed damage or -2 to -4 to its rolls or chunks strikers if they dont know "oh this can smack me more than its regular amount of times and im within the "often doesnt account for reactions and another round of damage will drop me" due to how it didnt account for such features in monster calc and fricked that up by not understanding why full/standard/move/immediate/free split works for cleaner balance and player choice; after all if it costs you 1/4 of your encounter uses of something, why would you spend only 1 action to make a weaker base effect instead of 3 to get the full effect). What the other anons said about caster power also isnt that true, casters are about as strong as 5e if you account for the threadmill effect, but the player mentality needs heavy adjustment much like it does if someone moves to old wargames or systems where casting time is based on spells power, but they are the only ones on which the action economy fail goes from annoying to extremely obvious after combined with focus points.
Good side is, most of the flaws have slowly been ironed out short of 3AS as people like its 1-10 experience more than what it costs.
So as an outside observer, all my experience was with 3.5 and a splash of 5e.
There appear to still be all the same basic classes, same basic combat resolution, so on and so forth.
It looks like they've done a fair bit to spruce it up, but it's still just post-3 D&D, very clearly. So I'd say it's just forever-D&D mentality, though it looks like it might be a slightly more palatable flavor of it.
>So what to play instead?
To answer this pre-emptively, I moved to GURPS so I'm not the best person to ask. Especially if you want to stay within basic high fantasy as a genre.
After PF2E arrived I realized I had been wrong in everything I ever wanted in a new version of pathfinder. It fixed the caster supremacy, it was more balanced, it had no long feat trees that were mandatory for doing a grapple, it no longer was rocket tag where people suddenly explode out of nowhere, it has better balancing of the enemies. But dear god it is so boring compared to pathfinder 1e. I actually am glad that pathfinder 1e is now "complete" and it will stay like this forever, it is a mess, it is horrible in multiple ways, but it has soul compared to whatever PF2E is.
In my opinion, Pathfinder 2e doesn't feel boring because the power level is lower. It feels boring because all the changes they made to make the game more "balanced" also adds more things to keep track of and makes it slower to play. Fricking hell, combat in piss-baby simple 5e is already a slog, but combat in Pathfinder 2e is literally enough to make me tune out and start fricking around on my phone when it's not my turn, and I've never been that kind of player.
It also as a team game has less moments for singular characters to shine, everything is a group effort and you do debuff rotations just to keep the abilities working and people able to hit. You can't do a "I challenge you to an honorable combat" moment in pathfinder, it always assumes 4 players doing a debuff rotation to debuff the enemy and keep him in check.
Also the official adventure paths contain absolute insanity in terms of making things like roleplay absolutely mechanical and played as written will make people say things like "I diplomatize him" before doing a roll not even bothering to roleplay what they say.
I'd like to point out as GM of Pathfinder 2e for over a year that its fully possible to still run roleplay scenarios more free form and when people happen to do things as described in the stat block you run it behind the screen. Anytime a player tries to say something like "I roll diplomacy to make him my friend", I tell them no, tell me what your character is actually doing and I'll let you know what to roll. Absolutely does not need to be played stiffly and mechanically despite the way its written lending itself to that.
Ah yes, the same tired argument that 5e DnDrones constantly make: "The game is good if you just ignore it's rules and play it like a different game!"
TBF, that is the sum of both 2e and D&D5es social encounter content in the core books beyond basic attitude. 99% of the variance both interesting and bad are stuck in specific adventures.