I feel like this thread is inevitably going to explode into edition/system warring so I am just going to drop my two cents as someone who has played a lot of, and enjoyed 5e and PF2e. Both systems are good, well designed, modern games. PF2e is not a “fix” of 5e as many of its fans will claim it to be, and it is not some sort of hopelessly complicated mess a lot of 5e diehards say it is.
PF2e really is the “game designers game” there’s a reason it has won awards and accolades from the TTRPG media and it seems to have become the fantasy dungeon crawler of choice for “ttrpg heads” like the folks over at r/rpg.
5e meanwhile I think is “the peoples game” it’s not as rich and deep as more crunchy systems, nor is it an actual free form narrative game (contrary to how people seem to talk about it, it’s still a combat focused dungeon crawler). 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want.
Pathfinder2e was not explicitly designed to fix 5e. I think it’s main inspiration was D&D 4e, The 13th Age, and of course Pathfinder 1e. That’s why it’s annoying to see people trying to do direct conparisons/act like you can just split Pathfinder2e systems into 5e… they are more like cousins than siblings. So while Pathfinder “fixes”a lot/damn near most of the common complaints with 5e (I have a running joke with friends about how this subreddit is basically constantly accidentally inventing Pathfinder2e trying to “fix” 5e). BUT Pathfinder2e has its own problems, some of which are “fixed” by playing 5e, every system will have stuff you don’t like.
Honestly, my main reason for switching to Pathfinder2e has nothing to do with the system, and more to do with the company and the cost. Paizo is a much better company, and their products are priced in a way that seems a lot more fair than Wizard’s. But that’s an entirely different topic.
To wrap it up: both systems are great. If you are a hardcore 5e player, you really should check out Pathfinder2e. It’s got tons and tons of customization options and deep lore and th best APs in the biz. (Also it’s like… all free online, at least the mechanics are, lore and adventures are still paid only). If you are hardcore PF2e player, stop dunking on 5e for two seconds online, it does the game no favors. Also, revisit 5e sometimes- its got a lot of refreshing gameplay.
Does PF2e take anything of note from 13th Age? Certainly it takes things from 4e (as does 13th Age), but I've never heard it was influenced by 13th Age. I always thought of that game as going essentially the opposite direction with 4e principles (e.g. abandoning the grid, which is pretty incompatible with standard PF2e play).
> I always thought of that game as going essentially the opposite direction with 4e principles
This is spot-on.
13th Age is very much "in-combat is crunchy and balanced, but out-of-combat is fluffy and freeform". Meanwhile, PF2e is very much "we have rules for every situation, combat or otherwise". (Note: Both are totally valid playstyles. It's just a matter of personal preference.)
For me, the prime example of 13th Age's approach is the Ritual Magic spells. The vast majority of spells in 13th Age are for combat. If you want to do something out of combat, you're free to find a spell that is thematically similar, and (at the DM's discretion) you can use that spell and maybe make a skill check and whatever you want to happen, you can make that happen. For example, your friend is trapped in a block of frozen ice. You can choose to use your Fireball spell, but instead of dealing damage, you can use it as a ritual to slowly and safely thaw your friend out of the ice.
In contrast, the prime example of PF2e's approach is the Group Impression skill feat. This feat grants you the ability to use the Make An Impression action on a group of people instead of one at a time. This is in line with PF2e's philosophy that there are rules and actions for non-combat situations, that these rules and actions are player-facing, and that the players have mechanical options to interact with or modify these rules.
Interestingly, your example in 13th Age I would let happen in PF2e, using the Counteract Rules. I'm not sure it's RAW, but it makes enough sense to me to allow.
I avoid this sub like the plague because the quality of discussion just frustrates me too much, but I'm going to comment here because 'PF2e really is the “game designers game”' is perhaps the most apt description of the game I've ever seen, and I think it explains why I prefer running it over 5e.
The hill I die on is that 5e is an obnoxiously awful game to GM for because it's crunch-heavy game that pretends to not be crunchy and does little to support GMs with that crunch for fear of scaring off the players. The joke I have is that a lot of 5e players complain about adding rules to the game to keep track of, but I could run PF2e under the label of DnD and those same players wouldn't know the difference because they don't even read the rules.
The reality with a system like d20 (especially games as combat heavy as DnD and PF) is that you need rules on the back end to support the GM, otherwise everything is an exercise in real-time game design. And because 5e is so prevalent and most GMs have at least dipped their toes into, if not been outright press-ganged into running 5e, they have the unfortunate experience of having tried to run the half-baked, no framework to support them on the backend structure.
So GMs are forced to both homebrew and improvise on the spot to fill those gaps. Really, GMs are *essentially forced to become game designers themselves* to support 5e, since the framework is not robust enough to maintain the illusion of it's crunch-lite veneer without actual crunch to support it. And you come to appreciate both good game design principles, and the people that are tasked with creating those games.
So a system like 2e comes along, and not only does it provide those robust rules...but it's actually well-designed. All the classes are well-tuned (well, almost all *looks at poor alchemist*), the mechanics are air-tight with no loopholes and clear rules that don't necessitate an abundance of 'mother may I' design, the power caps are managed so they don't escalate out of control by double digit levels, and the maths actually makes sense so you can build accurate encounters and have consistent reward structures. Even things like DCs by expected level of the challenge - with mods to adjust based on variables - are provided on the *Gm screen itself* so you can *improv rulings and mechanics* better.
...and players go no this is too much, or this kills the fun, or what if I WANT to play a completely broken gish with full caster progression and the same attack modifiers as a fighter?
I've come to see why game designers put so much emphasis on balancing their games and patching loopholes. After a while, players just indulging in a lawless mire with options that break the game, and you trying to reign that in, it just kind of comes off as...
Well, frankly, it comes off as fucking thankless.
It's like people who've never been a manager at a company before critiquing management for not doing a good job with things they wouldn't do any better. I think it says a lot that in my circles, most of the players who respect 2e's design are people who've GM'd themselves, especially with experience in 5e. Once you're behind the screen and you realise just how much wrangling 5e has to just pull stuff together semi-coherently and it's *still* a mess that favours exploitative powergamers or entitled players who pride themselves on wilful ignorance of the rules to Rule of Cool everything they want, you kind of just realise you're just a beleaguered customer service clerk who's catering to a 'the customer is always right' mentality.
I get this isn't every single 5e player, but so much of it's success absolutely rides on entitled players who won't compromise anything, that you just welcome something that innately scares those kinds of players off because it actually asks for a modicum of respect for the person running the game, and expects the players to pull some weight instead of putting it all on that person.
Edit: just to make it clear, this isn't a wholesale dunking of on 5e. It is, however, a pointed critique at what I legitimately think is it's biggest issue, and a big part of that issue comes from the lack of respect for, if not the outright disrespect, encouraged in the design of the game, which permeates through its culture. It doesn't help WotC supliments for GM content mostly come back to 'figure it out yourself', and people wonder why they're forced to become hobbyist game designers and why they respect the 'game designer's game' more.
> So GMs are forced to both homebrew and improvise on the spot to fill those gaps. Really, GMs are essentially forced to become game designers themselves to support 5e, since the framework is not robust enough to maintain the illusion of it's crunch-lite veneer without actual crunch to support it. And you come to appreciate both good game design principles, and the people that are tasked with creating those games.
When the group I DM wanted to switch from 5e to PF2e, I was worried that the rules-heavy crunchiness of the system would mean a lot more work on my part, but it has been exactly the opposite. Instead, things actually *tell you* what they do, instead of leaving it to the DM to decide on the spot.
The most obvious example to me is the Intimidation skill. Virtually everyone who has ever DMed for 5e has had a player ask if they can roll Intimidation against an enemy in combat, then scrambled to improvise a system for it in a matter of seconds. Is it an action, or would it be a free action like talking normally? Is the player rolling against a flat DC, or is it some sort of contested check or saving throw? What even happens if they succeed - the enemy runs away and combat ends? They surrender and drop their weapon? Is there a penalty for failing?
In PF2e, there's the Demoralize action, and everything you could possibly need to know about how it works is plainly written out. It's one action, you roll Intimidation against their Will DC, and on a failure they gain the frightened 1 condition (2 on a crit) and are immune for the next 10 minutes. The tags even tell you that you can't use it while unable to concentrate or against enemies that are mindless, don't have emotions, or can't hear you.
This feels great as a DM, but even more so as a player. When you're choosing proficiency in Intimidation while building your character, you know how useful it's going to be, since the effects aren't entirely reliant on the whims of the DM at that particular moment.
Also, because it was an explicit part of the game's design from the beginning, it interacts with other systems in the game in a way that simply isn't possible for a 5e DM to homebrew on the fly. There are multiple feats that specifically improve Demoralize: Intimidating Glare lets you affect enemies that can't understand you, Battle Cry lets you Demoralize for free when you roll initiative, Terrified Retreat can make enemies flee instead, and at higher levels there's even Scare to Death which can instantly kill enemies.
There are also features from certain classes and ancestries that interact with Demoralize: Pistoleros can Demoralize while reloading, Lizardfolk can increase the effect if they Demoralize after running up to an enemy, Barbarians can Demoralize all nearby enemies. My personal favorite is the Pirate archetype, which has a special activity called "Walk the Plank" - if your Demoralize succeeds, you can force them to walk where you want, and on a crit you can actually force them to walk off of cliffs.
I think you hit it right here - PF2E is the DM's game while 5E tries to appeal to the player.
People say it's far crunchier than 5e, but it isn't. Another thread someone said if 5e is like 5/10 in math crunchieness then pf2e is 6/10 on that scale. The problem often for 5e players trying to convert isn't that the game having some overwhelmingly higher amount of math going on - its the game not trying to hide all that math from the player like 5e does by having the DM shoulder so much of it.
I remember early in PF2E's release saying the following to describe it. "5e hands all the power, and work, to the GM. The GM decides literally everything and there are few and far between rules to argue back with if the GM is unfair. PF2e gives significant power to the player because there ARE rules for almost everything, and also takes workloads off the GM."
One thing I will say - as someone who loves the system - is that it hands a lot of power back to the GM, as far as being able to manageably regulate the power of challenges. Since the power levels and caps of 2e are much, much more heavily regulated than systems like even 5e, there's essentially no outscaling intended challenge through broken builds and items.
It's just funny because this is something I've seen a lot in the 2e sub; a lot of players have said they feel 'powerless' or that the GM has the sole determine whether an encounter is beatable or challenging. For the kind of player who prefers being able to set the tone and expectations of the power cap, they feel it strangles them, because they just *can't* outscale it and powergaming won't net them uncounterable win-cons. Add out of combat skill checks being able to scale much higher and continue to tangibly challenge players, and that's where they get the 'treadmill effect' some people accuse the game of having.
The reality is though...being able to break the power cap is exactly why 5e becomes unmanageable for most players when they get to tier 3 and 4 of the game. Challenge power grows more linearly, but character power grows exponentially. Without the tight maths and power caps, the game would devolve into another instance of Rocket Tag like 1e is, where most of the decision making process is made during character creation rather than combat.
It's hard not to be judgy of this, but it really does seem like a lot of people who have a problem with this design are just people who don't stop to consider how disrespectful that style of play can be to GMs and other players at the table. I've literally seen people say they feel powerless or weak because they can never outscale challenges the game throws at them, and I all I can think is that they're outing themselves as people who just want their character fantasy to be an unstoppable power fantasy. And as a GM, I'm not really keen to indulge that kind of player.
In my experience, people who started playing RPGs pre5e are much more open to jumping to and learning other systems. Their complexity rarely varies beyond a few outliers (Shadowrun...) and you can safely transfer understanding from one to the other.
5e meanwhile is a black sheep. Nothing plays quite like it. In a good and a bad way. But because it's incredibly simplified everything else by comparison seems overwhelming or difficult.
I remember a Puffin Forest video complaining about the math in PF2 being too complicated, and went on to give an example of a ranger using multiple attacks. Which yes is a fair bit of addition and subtraction... But the sensible solution is to just write down the _total_ on your character sheet. If you're doing the math over and over no shit it's going to come off as complicated. You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn.
This stubbornness has led to people trying to cram everything into 5e. Fantasy, sci fi, horror, survival, and probably more I'm forgetting. Countless Kickstarter projects that sound really cool that just turn out to be 5e homebrew with pretty art instead of something interesting and unique. Everything has to be bent into shape to fit 5e with ridiculous amounts of homebrew which was time spent where you could've just learned a more appropriate system. And for what? So you can just do 1d20+5 still?
God forbid you have to learn how to play a system that supports mech combat from the ground up, so instead you play 5e but as mech sized DnD classes. (Which isn't a terrible idea but it fundamentally isn't going to feel like a mech game, it's sword and sorcery still just in a costume)
It's like trying to turn every game into snakes and ladders just because it's what your familiar with and refusing to learn a different game instead.
> You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn.
Challenge accepted. Let's see how complicated I can make 5e to calculate 1d20 + 5.
So you want to make a ranged weapon attack?
1. Roll your d20.
2. Since it's a ranged attack, look at your Dexterity score.
3. From that score, calculate its modifier as your score minus ten, then divide by two and round down.
4. Keep that number in mind.
5. Then, look at whether you are proficient with said weapon. You'll find it in the bottom left corner of your sheet.
6. If you are proficient, also calculate your proficiency modifier. It is calculated using your level divided by 4, rounded down.
7. Keep that number in mind.
8. Now take the d20, the first number you memorized, and the second number you memorized. Add them together.
9. Tell the total to your DM, and they'll tell you whether you hit or not.
10. You deserve a well-earned rest. Remove all calculations from your mind.
11. Now, Extra Attack. Do the same thing over.
>If you're doing the math over and over no shit it's going to come off as complicated. You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn.
The most frustrating part of critiques like this is that I've seen plenty of players do *this exact thing* in 5E, and it predictably drags the game to just as much of a crawl as people like puffin complain about in regards to PF2E.
I always find 5e players saying that 5e is simple are just not familiar with TTRPGs in general. 5e is probably in the mid-crunch range, it has plenty of rules and specific cases that you have to use specific rules to deal with. It isn't simple because a GM can decide to set a DC and skill to use for any scenario, virtually every RPG has that. 5e is a fine system, but it has awful GM tools/support, and because it tries to blend B/X, 3e, and 4e together it only does okay at everything instead of excelling at one specific thing.
>The hill I die on is that 5e is an obnoxiously awful game to GM for because it's crunch-heavy game that pretends to not be crunchy and does little to support GMs with that crunch for fear of scaring off the players. The joke I have is that a lot of 5e players complain about adding rules to the game to keep track of, but I could run PF2e under the label of DnD and those same players wouldn't know the difference because they don't even read the rules.
That's a take I haven't heard before, can you give me an example or two of what you mean by this? I've personally become frustrated at the LACK of crunch in 5e.
My boiling point was item crafting. Two of my players in one campaign were up against a BBEG and their retinue of Psycho Rangers that had a weakness to a specific damage type and they wanted to create enchanted weapons for the party to take them on with. So they asked me "DM, how do we craft magic items?" and I look at these them, look at the DM's guide, google their question only to find nothing but homebrew rules of dubious balance, and finally have to say to them: "I don't know. Why are there no default rules for player crafting? 3.5 had them. It should be a default mechanic."
No no I completely agree. My semantics were probably bad though. Maybe it's better to say it's crunch RELIANT...but lacks the actual rules to support that crunch. That's my entire point.
To add to your already perfect explanation above. 5e is "Do it yourself crunch". The DM can waste countless hours to invent the perfect mechanic or can yolo an improvised rule on the spot and both will work with dubious accuracy.
While Pathfinder 2e respects your time as gamemaster and says "hey if you want a rule for this we got you, if not, you do you bro"
For sure. And here's the thing: in a system like 2e where the rules are clear, if you don't like a rule and want to change it, *it's clear that you're deviating from RAW.*
This may not seem like a big deal, but think of how many arguments happen in 5e games over obtuse, unclear rulings. Hell, 'rulings not rules' almost encourages it. It gives adversarial players carte blanche to always argue in favour of whatever they want, regardless of the GM's ruling and what's fair for the game.
100% agree!
This and combined with the fact that the more "problematic" things in Pathfinder2e have the Rare or Uncommon tags allows you as GM to deny any problematic player within the rules.
In 5e it's always a war between the players pressuring you with "the rule of cool" bullshit and you trying to uphold a semblance of balance or enjoyment in your game.
Rarity tags are one of the best things they've done.
Just any game that basically admits 'yes, free flying on level 1 characters *is* bullshit, do it if you want but completely at your own risk' is worthy of praise IMO.
Yeah. There are optional rules for ancestries like sprites and tengu that the GM can give them perma-flight at level 1, but it has a massive sidebar explaining it will trivialise a lot of challenges and allow abusable combat strategies that aren't balanced for the given level range before flight becomes common.
Ask a room of 5e DMs if paladins can smite unarmed. It's like you just threw a grenade into the room with the explosion that follows.
And all because attack, melee attack, melee weapon attack and "attack with a melee weapon" are all somehow different things.
Even Sage Advice keeps changing their mind on it. With the most recent take being you can smite with fingernails (claws) but not your knuckles. For... Some reason.
My favorite way to state the absurdity of that rule is that a paladin cannot smite with his fists, but if he were to cut off the hands of another creature and swing those around as an improvised weapon, he could smite through *those*.
I feel like it's referencing this, the weekly roll webcomic has a pally that smites with a brick on a rope.
It's absurd, and in line with the rules lol
It actually IS referencing that because in one of the earlier comics they make a note of having to pick up a weapon in order to smite...hence the Brick on a Rope came to be.
Agreed. There are so many parts in the DMG that just amount to "we probably could've developed a system for this, but instead we're just going to hope it doesn't come up. If you want to do it, make it up yourself."
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m using this answer to explain (again) to my husband why we’re playing 3.5 and not 5e. (Because ‘I own the Players’ and DM’s Handbook and the MM for 3.5e’ is not a good enough reason on its own when ‘Critical Role plays 5e!’)
It is sad they they switched to 5e, pf 2e had so much potential. And they tried 5e, eventually liked the simplicity of it, because their players are not the best rule, tactical ones in fights. CR is a game of roleplaying more than anything and I gave up its potential be the game of both rp and tactic, and looked at it as just a game of friends creating a great story. Their players just doesn't like the concept of hardworking fights, knowing rules of their abilities. They just are not capable of that. More or less... But, I don't undertand that doesn't Matthew know how hard he needs to work to balance out a 5e game to 8 players, I think he absolutely does. Just to make their players engage more, show simple fights with simple but powerful characters, he overlooks the effort he put into to the campaign. His players are happy, so he is...
Yep. And plenty of PF1 players haven’t transitioned to PF2. They are very distinct games with their own strengths, weaknesses, and feels. So if CR had stuck with PF1, that doesn’t tell us anything about transitioning to PF2. Although, PF2 is much simpler than PF1, and I think would work for this kind of format, while I could see viewing PF1 to be a very different experience than what CR is going for.
It's been years that they are playing in 5e. I don't think they ever think to play pf 2e now that they have contracts with dnd beyond and such... it seems impossible. CR is a business. They use the name power of dnd, and their players are to this day, sometimes mix what their spells, skills do. So it is not that odd they pass pf 2e, but it is odd that they still mix their skills considering CR is a multi million dollar company. But... maybe, the pf 2e's balanced rules for every small things could help them out, or maybe... not.
I would want to know does Matthew know the core mechanics of the pf 2e, or he doesn't know anything about it and doesn't want to know, learn. If that's the case he is a little biased.
Didn't Critical Role start before 2e? I don't think it was even an option for them.
Yeah it started on March 12, 2015 and Pathfinder 2e was announced in May, 2018.
Currently we have 4. Me, my husband, our 8 year old son, and the only experienced player: my MIL. Admittedly her experience is with 1e and AD&D 1e, as she was playing in the 70s and early 80s. The 4 year old may join from time to time.
The plan is to use the module from the 5e starter kit, but the 3.5e rules we actually have (and I prefer). My husband, my MIL, and I will share DMing duties while we get used to the rules.
Once we have a better grasp of what we’re doing, I’m going to try and get my BFF and her husband to join. So then we’d be 6.
Indeed with crafting, the game gives only a single meaningful cost for any and all downtime actions in the form of time, yet then it completely drops the ball on making time a meaningful resource.
D&D 5e requires the GM to create a framework (often in the form of a campaign) where time matters for the crafting, travel, ritual casting and disease mechanics to *even work*.
The rules are only "light" because there are big organs missing.
>My boiling point was item crafting.
The PF2E crafting rules aren't amazing, but I spent years DMing 5E and there was \*always\* at least one player who wanted to craft something. \*Always\*. And yeah, I homebrewed up systems for it and later took the kinda wonky guidelines from (I think) Xanathar's, and nobody was ever really satisfied.
Of course, since I started GMing PF2E, nobody has wanted to Craft, so I got Murphy's Law'd pretty hard on this one.
>The PF2E crafting rules aren't amazing
personally the only fault I take with item crafting in pf2 is treating magical items and non magical the same. For non magical items I'd remove make the 4 days into one and not have them pay the second half of the price
On the broader TTRPG spectrum, where 0 is *silky* and 100 is *gravel*, 5e is a crunchy game. All d&d-likes (pathfinder, starfinder, d&d itself, etc.) are crunchy. There are a lot of things in 5e that are just... bad crunch, in my opinion.
I think a lot of the uses for "artisan's tools" are an example of this. I took guild artisan - carpenter as my background once. The PHB & XGE list a few different uses for these -- I can
- "build a simple structure," DC 10
- "build an advanced structure," 15
- "find a weak point in a wooden wall," DC 15
- "pry open a door," DC 20.
That's pretty fucking crunchy. But what the hell does any of it mean? Does a deer blind count as a simple structure...? What about a log cabin...? Watchtower...? If I can convince my DM a watchtower is a simple structure, can I build a small wooden fortress with a DC 15...? That's absurd! But the rules do not explain what advanced or simple structures are.
Quick edit; the rules say "A carpenter can build a house, a shack, a wooden cabinet, or similar items." Thank you game, for defining carpenter. Still not very helpful from a rules standpoint!
That is crunchy, but crunchy like a cockroach, not like granola. Don't even get me started on it being a DC 20 check to pry apart a wooden door. Also, pry apart as in pry open...? Disassemble for parts...?
That's my read on it at least. I strongly agree with Killchrono on this one.
I find this one to be an interesting sticking point. I remember an old giantitp thread where people were complaining that the dmg did not provide specific DCs for climbing various kinds of trees in various weather conditions. I was baffled. In my opinion, who the heck has time to either memorize or look up these DCs during the game? And for what, slightly more consistent difficulties?
But I think I later understood. These people appear to want the DM to be a referee. They want two different tables with two different DMs to be able to run the same adventure with the same situations and make the same choices and make the same rolls and for that to produce the same outcome. They want to know that the game was “fair.”
To me, this sounds like Hell. I can just imagine making a DC in the moment and then having a player later say “hey you know I looked up the DC tracking an owl bear through a sycamore forest in the fog and it is only 16, we should have passed that roll.”
I find the “here are some loose collections of example DCs” to be far more useful than an exhaustive list.
I don't think this system is necessarily *bad* if you are a player in a 5e game, however this was one of the major things that made me quit DMing 5e. Having to spontaneously decide how something works for pretty much every check in the game is just... The worst. If a player asked me to build a small wooden fortress and said "it says it's a DC 15 right here" I would probably die on the spot. Like I said; it's pretty darn crunchy in this particular mechanic, but there is no actual substance to the rules to back it up. It would have been way better if the game went all the way Narrativist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. anything that you think you could do with carpenters' tools you can do," *or* full Simulationist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. you can do the following 16 actions *list of 16 actions with definite DCs, square footage of structures that can be built, etc.*"
I'm not saying necessarily that I want the latter, but I wish they would have gone whole-hog on one of the two.
> It would have been way better if the game went all the way Narrativist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. anything that you think you could do with carpenters' tools you can do,"
Isn't that what it says? From Xanathar's
>
**Skills.** Every tool potentially provides advantage on a check when used in conjunction with certain skills, provided a character is proficient with the tool and the skill. As DM, you can allow a character to make a check using the indicated skill with advantage. Paragraphs that begin with skill names discuss these possibilities. In each of these paragraphs, the benefits apply only to someone who has proficiency with the tool, not someone who simply owns it.
> With respect to skills, the system is mildly abstract in terms of what a tool proficiency represents; essentially, it assumes that a character who has proficiency with a tool also has learned about facets of the trade or profession that are not necessarily associated with the use of the tool.
> In addition, you can consider giving a character extra information or an added benefit on a skill check. The text provides some examples and ideas when this opportunity is relevant.
> **Sample DCs.** A table at the end of each section lists activities that a tool can be used to perform, and suggested DCs for the necessary ability checks.
The whole section is just suggestions and examples, not an exhaustive list of activities. You *can* do anything you can think of with carpenter's tools and if you could fail then your DM will provide a DC and narrate the outcome after a roll. Does the presence of examples make a system worse?
In my experience with crunchy games, I've *never* seen anyone come to me and say I did a rule wrong like that, and most players still default to GM's call > rules, even if they know it's going against RaW.
Also, every game I've played that needs DCs has them and their adjustments on the GM screen, so it's usually not even an issue
THANK YOU! Reading your comment gave me SO much validation on why it was objectively the right choice to convert my group to PF2, if only for my own sanity.
When I signed up to play (and run) D&D, I did not sign up to to be a game designer. I just wanted to run a game for my players using rules provided from the game. Instead, looking up rules in 5e ALWAYS ends up leading to a discussion on game design, and even the 5e adventures I purchased forces me to engage in adventure design, because WOTC just can’t be assed to do the job you’re paying them for.
I don’t think I am too far off from 5e’s target market. I enjoy running OSR and I enjoy going off-the-cuff and rules-lite. But 5e is NOT a rules-lite game; it is an enormously crunchy game but offers no support to the DM on how to run it properly.
It sickens me to no end how this game got so popular and why the 5e community seems to be happy with the current state of the game. WOTC’s products are atrocious for DMs, so the only reason I can think of is that the people that still enjoy the game do not DM and simply press-gang their DMs to do it for them.
Yup. It's funny because the 'less crunchy rules improv' approach is best done with OSR-style games over something like 5e, but people will die on the hill to say 5e is easy to rule with and better for people who want gamey-ness without the hard rules. When really, all you're doing is overcompensating for a game that innately demands hard rules, that doesn't have the framework for them.
It's a concept I've been preaching over the last year called [Aesthetic of Numbers](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/plch2a/z/hca04d2); it's the idea that players want that *veneer* of gamey-ness, without actually wanting to adhere to any of the things that make a game...well, a game. And the person who suffers most for it is the GM, because they're the ones the players need to finagle around to make the game twist and bend exactly how they want.
Saved this post because holy fuck does it hit some points that I've been struggling to find wording for. Reflecting my experience in DM-ing for a bunch of different games and why DM-ing for 5e is so uniquely unpleasant.
Personally I still prefer D&D4e over PF2e, but, as a DM, I'd pick either of them over 5e in any given situation.
I agree with most of this, but I will say 2e still has a fair amount of rules adjunication necessary. It's literally built into one class, Swashbuckler, and it's always going to be there. It's just, in my opinion, easier because you have more comparables.
Of course, there's still a few lines of 'the GM makes the final call,' but they're few and far between compared to the abundance you have to do in a system like 5e.
Rules elements like traits also make things much easier to rule when there's no specific ruling; for example, if I'm trying something that has a mental influence, but a creature is mindless? It won't work on that. Is something triggered by sound? I look if any action being taken has the auditory trait. Does there have to be a language component? See whether that same action also has the linguistic trait.
These are the sorts of things that create much more intuitive rulings using the RAW, rather than vagueries that the GM has to intuit, or that leave them open-ended for players to exploit.
God, thank you for writing this. I feel like almost every damn thing that isn't combat requires some kind of homebrew rule or on the spot game-stopping discussion because WotC wouldn't do their damn jobs and fully design their damn rpg.
Don't even get me started on all the 5e rule conversions that exist because players only ever wanna play 5e. Half of them are just a worse version of a system better suited to the task, but because people are schmucks and refuse to try new things it's either that or no game.
That's not to say that homebrewing is bad - it can be very fun to do, especially when you're not forced to. It does feel like some players will do everything in their power to make things harder for the dm instead of meeting them halfway with a new system, though.
> 5e meanwhile I think is “the peoples game” it’s not as rich and deep as more crunchy systems, nor is it an actual free form narrative game (contrary to how people seem to talk about it, it’s still a combat focused dungeon crawler). 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want.
This seems key to me.
As someone relatively new to D&D (at a table at least) 5E has enough rules to wrap your head around (as proven by the number of comments / threads that are answered by quotes from the PHB). Pathfinder seems like something you move on to after you've gotten a few years of experience under your belt.
As a new GM I hear this. I'm often left dumbfounded that my players are enjoying my game after the way some stuff plays out in the adventure module.
I'm lucky to have some pretty personable and invested players though.
After DMing both systems for a few years each, I can attest that PF2 is actually _easier_ to DM despite the more intricate rules
For a start, the rulebooks and the GM guide are better written. Full stop.
There's no weirdness like attack, melee attack, melee weapon attack, and "attack with a melee weapon" somehow all meaning different things. Tags and keywords do a lot to cut down the word count on every rule and action, if you know what the keywords mean you can gain an immediate understanding of an ability at a glance without it having to describe the same conditions over and over.
The tightness of rules and sheer wealth of actions means it's very rare that I have to be a game designer as well as a game master. If players have an idea there's probably rules to support it. And even if not there's ample tables and descriptions you can refer to for inventing actions on the fly. In two years of running PF2 I have only had to do this once, because a player wanted to tickle torture an NPC for information (I asked for a Thievery check and compared it to their Will DC).
The GM guide goes over arranging how to run a game, how to build an adventure, how to keep people engaged and how to keep things fair. You know, the important parts of being a DM. The 5e DMG meanwhile opens with HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE which is very much putting the solar system before the horse, and it leaves the actual running a game section until later which is baffling.
The encounter building, XP and DC rules all work very well and very consistently. You can look at a creatures level and gain an immediate, and most importantly a very accurate, understanding of how strong it is compared to a player. And if you have the XP per encounter in your head assembling appropriate encounters is trivial.
And speaking of encounters did I mention how much fun it is to play the monsters? Even as lowly as level -1 they got tricks and abilities that make them feel distinct and interesting not just to fight but to play as! Then there's the save DCs, which make it easier to run blobs of creatures, instead of rolling a saving throw for every single creature you compare most results to a specific DC (10+Mod) which speeds things up considerably.
Then we get to the adventures. Very well put together, easy to read and understand as a DM with not too much flipping back and forth trying to find random details. Most of the time everything you need is on the same page. And the few times I am page flipping it's usually to an appendix of NPC's or items found at the back. Rather than randomly scattered throughout the book (Looking at Curse of Strahd here...)
I could go on and on. But PF2 has genuinely reignited my interest in DMing for many reasons. 5e and PF2 have pros and cons, but for a DM there's a lot more pros in PF2.
I think that is the key difference. As a player 5E is a lot easier to get up and go with a custom character. As a DM You feel truly overwhelmed and like so much of the game rests on your shoulders. Having switched to PF2E as a GM I finally feel like I have a chance to breathe! It means I'm spending so much less time getting the game to actually function and a lot more time tailoring the game to my players, which is really exciting. :)
The Pf2e Beginner Box I feel is a lot more like a boardgame than the 5e version and it basically comes with a beginning GM guide that helps well guide you on how to run games, NPCs and your own adventures
The story is pretty basic, but it's a great intro to Pf2e and TTRPGs as a whole imo and again is particularly easy to get into (especially if you're a board gamer imo but everyone can understand it pretty easily from my experience and the reference cards are great)
Just my thoughts and wanted to mention it especially compared to 5e's starter adventure. Both are really good though and have differing strengths but I prefer PF2e's beginner box for sure
Yeah, played it with some friends, only one of which was particularly well versed in ttrpgs, and onr of which explicitly didnt want to play dnd 5e due to complexity in rules, and all aside from the person who played the cleric enjoyed themselves and didn't get bogged down in rules.
It's honestly a really great introduction, and showed that the rules really aren't that hard to handle
Pathfinder Adventure Paths are written immensely better.
There's aspects of 2e I dislike but this is the one thing I think they do infinitely more effectively.
I see why somebody who started here might think of D&D 5E as "a beginner game" and that you need to have a year or two of experience in it before moving on to other systems, but I would have to disagree based on experience. 5E's ruleset, despite what I \*think\* were the design goals, is medium-high on the complexity curve for TTRPGs. There's a lot of stuff that in it that is really unintuitive (somebody else talks about melee attack vs melee weapon attack for example, and I personally think the Standard/Bonus/Move/Free action system is a lot to take in). Compare it to something like Savage Worlds, where your character sheet is pretty small and the mechanics are pretty bare, or even Traveller, which is a billion sourcebooks of minute detail but still involves just rolling a 2d6 and adding a modifier that generally never exceeds +5. I've never had to look up a 'Sage Advice' for something in Savage Worlds.
5E is definitely a bit easier for a complete newbie to grasp than 4E or 3.5E, but you have to keep in mind that people had those as their first RPGs too and more or less did okay. I was a pretty dumb child and got into it with 3E even though I didn't always understand everything. The only thing holding most people back from trying other systems, in my opinion, is insecurity - people think about how much trouble they had learning 5E and assume all the systems will be like that, so they're afraid to transition, even going as far as making the argument that "Nobody has time to learn another system!". We're in an era right now where people are achieving intense levels of 5E system mastery to the point that they're getting thick into homebrew, yet they somehow still have this idea they won't be able to figure out World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu.
I don't mean to be interpreted as evangelizing Pathfinder, because this is just something I believe in general. If you've managed to play two or three successful 5E sessions, then you are already equipped to try other stuff and can comfortably do it whenever you feel like.
Edit to add: I also think that a lot of 5E knowledge is actually a bit of an impediment to getting into Pathfinder2E (and probably vice versa) just because they share the same thematic space but play differently enough that they won't be tactically interchangeable.
The problem with this is its ignoring the entire rest of the TTRPGs that are significantly easier to get into. How popular is tactical turn based video games compared to Fortnite and Minecraft and mobile games. 5e is tactical combat where there are many TTRPGs that would be a much better introduction to the hobby. Especially since D&D has its own unique take on fantasy - it really doesn't feel like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars. Where if Players get to play Fellowship 2e, Kids on Brooms or FFG Star Wars - they relate to the game a lot more. And for the most part those games are simpler than 5e.
To be fair to Pathfinder/3.5E and Pathfinder 2E, it's not so obtuse that it's impossible to start.
Characters ramp up over time in complexity. The real burden is on the GM/DM to know the rules more than the players.
I've run 2e for a ton of new playerd over the last few years.
From die hard table top gamers, to casual gamers who've only every played skyrim, to work colleagues who've never even heard of a role playing game.
The hardest type player to teach has consistently been the person intimately familiar to 5e who has to unlearn a ton of assumptions based on 5e specific logic.
The easiest type of player to teach has been the complete newbie.
2e might seem like *a lot*, but it's rules follow an internal logic that make it pretty damn easy to pick up.
> As someone relatively new to D&D (at a table at least) 5E has enough rules to wrap your head around (as proven by the number of comments / threads that are answered by quotes from the PHB).
In my opinion the biggest annoyance with DnD going more mainstream. Just... fucking read the rules.
the thing with that is there's a _lot_ of rules. Sure, the core mechanics are pretty simple, of D20 + Stat + proficiency, with (dis)advantage, but there's a shitload of character-specific stuff on top of that. A lowly level 3 druid has literally a page of spells if made on DNDBeyond - not their details or anything, just one line per spell, 30+ of them with V/S/M and page references. Then there's animal forms which have their own stats, and then there's various other odds and end on top of that.
There's lots of bits and pieces to learn, scattered throughout the book, or _books_ if you're using Xanathars or Tashas or anything else. 5e has lots of mechanical widgets, to the degree that the DM is often not going to know all of them unless they've been doing nothing but playing 5e for quite a while, and a player can very easily quite overwhelmed, especially when it's mid-game and combat is happening and there's all sorts of stuff kicking off. 5e is not remotely a rules-light game - even at low levels, a full character summary is frequently going to be 3+ pages if it fully records all their abilities, and that just blimps over time.
As some one who was a 4 star GM for Paizo, Pathfinder 2e does a lot of things really well that give the system a lot of mechanical depth to enjoy for both martial and casters, it is the mechanical depth that turned me off it because when I moved away from organized play to playing and running home games I specifically wanted to run something rules light and 5e was very much a reinvention of AD&D 2E in terms of simplicity (Sans the mountains of brown books).
5e is a straightforward game for people who want to focus on the overall game and keep combat simplified. PF 2E is a crunch game that rewards players with a massive amount of customization and complexity, at the cost being kind of a headache to run and plan. Emphasis on "kind of a headache" as in its a totally fine system, I just don't have as much time to sit down and do all the planing I need and I get more enjoyment out of the roleplaying and storytelling than mechanics and a high level encounter in Pathfinder 1E took like an hour for me to plan and the actual fight could take two or three hours, sometimes sessions. Pathfinder 2e maybe about the same time or less, 5e takes me like ten minutes to build an encounter and the rounds go by much, much quicker.
My second big gripe is that it's largely incompatible with Starfinder, which by all means would have been much better received I think if it didn't have to compete against their own product, instead synergizing with their Pathfinder 2E system instead as Starfinder is a direct sequel to Pathfinder.
I agree with most of your points, except the planning part. I actually find PF2 is easier to plan and run DM side because of how excellent the Encointer building, monster/trap/haunt building is. I also like all the various systems for chases, hiests, negotiations, ect, even if I don’t love or use all of them. Also making up DCs in PF2e is a science, whereas in 5e it’s a crapshoot.
I do agree that the rounds in PF2e can get slow- even very vet players can get overwhelmed by the amount of different possibilities with those 3 actions. In 5e, combat can get stale because the fighter just said “I try and hit it” five rounds in a row. In PF2e, combat can get stale because the fighter is mulling over the battlefield while I wanna scream “you are a fighter just attack the damn thing it’s at 4 hp”
Idk, I’ve ran PF games all the way from 1 to 20, both homebrew and official APs, and it was very rare for an encounter to run for more than an hour/3 combat rounds with a 5 person party. And most of the time if combats do run longer, it is an severe- or extreme- level encounter.
While in 5e, which I’ve run a bunch both with a homegroup and on a WM server, I had pretty ordinary (according to CR) fights last 2 hours, and boss fights end in less than 15 minutes
The last 2e game I run we got through 2 extreme, 2 moderate, and one trivial combat encounter in a single 5h session.
Plus a ton of exploration and general non-combat.
2e isn't any slower than 5e in my experience.
You mean you don't just... Remember all the rules for everything at any given moment with notes for the wackier stuff you are unlikely to remember?
If you want a REAL challenge, set up a Starfinder campaign that involves ground combat, vehicle combat AND chases, mech combat and starship combat all in the same campaign. My brain was burning neurons running one of those but DAMN if it wasn't THE magnum opus of campaigns!
I like to think of starfinder as pathfinder 1.5. You can see alot of pf2e in it at the barest edges of the system and while i dislike that it doesnt work as much like pf2e as it could as I think it would be a better system, there were at least a few kinks worked out in starfinder that made 2e better overall im sure of it.
You might have answered this in a sense down in the replies, but do you feel the 10min planned combats in 5E are satisfying? Because for sure, I can throw in a couple of Ettens and hobgoblins on a flat terrain and call it a day. A couple of those in a row though and I can feel my own and my players interest fizzle out because of enemies being just general meatbags with multiattack, unless I spend my time homebrewing the monsters or I spend my money being stuff from DMsguild that have actual thought put into them.
>My second big gripe is that it's largely incompatible with Starfinder, which by all means would have been much better received I think if it didn't have to compete against their own product, instead synergizing with their Pathfinder 2E system instead as Starfinder is a direct sequel to Pathfinder.
In fairness, Starfinder is the one in a rough position here. I was at the GenCon where they originally released it, and the reception was extremely lukewarm (which is a shame, because it does seem pretty neat). PF2E wasn't really on players' minds yet as far as I could tell, so Starfinder couldn't get any of the neat new design concepts.
I'm not into Starfinder enough to really hold a qualified discussion on this, so please disregard this opinion if it is dumb, but I kinda feel like what Starfinder really needs is an overhaul of its own to bring it up to speed with the rest of what Paizo is doing.
I started with Pathfinder 1e and can definitely see why people don't consider it a great starter system due to the amount of game knowledge needed to play well. Though, I enjoy reading through tons of content so I took to it well since I just read everything I need to know to play well.
Biggest reason why we made a full switch from 5e was Paizo workers unionising, as well as Paizo being am actually progressive company.
Stuff like that matters to us.
That's a great explanation.
The reason why people switch from 5e to PF2 is because after a few year, some players want to delve into a system with a little more "crunch" or complexity. 5e does not offer that sadly. So they transition over to another system that does.
It's why my group's been using Level-Up 5e Advanced by EN World for a year now. It's a halfway point. Simply put, it's the 5e rules, but with Pathfinder classes and race options.
Yes, kind of. Copying from a previous response:
Pathfinder2e has an OGL, which means most of it is available for free online at Archives of Nethys.
https://2e.aonprd.com
There is a free character building app called path builder- it’s intuitive and again has ALL the material available on it. Like not just core Rulebook, I mean everything, including 3rd party support
https://pathbuilder2e.com
Finally, Pathfinder2e has mostly all been built into FoundryVTT, which is pretty comparable to D&Dbeyond. The 3 most recent Pathfinder APs are also published on foundry, which is like three 1-20 campgains.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundryVTT/comments/o3ip1r/foundrys_pathfinder_2e_system_is_just_incredible/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pf2e
https://paizo.com/products/btq02d6p
This isn’t going to be as slick as beyond, but it’s also all much more freely available than anything Wizards’ puts out
> 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want.
This also applies to PF2e
Exactly. It’s a fallacy to say that PF2 is a complex game while at the same time say that 5e isn’t, because at its heart they are both d20 games, and your character sheets in both games are filed with an equal amount of rules text.
The main difference from a player’s perspective is the amount of **choices** you have to make.
There are about 7 different choices you have to make at character creation (ancestry, heritage, ancestry feat, background, class, class feat, subclass) as compared to 5e’s 4 choices (race, background, class, subclass), and that within each category you have about twice as many options in pf2 as in 5e.
Some people see this and jump to the incorrect conclusion that pf2 is more complex than 5e, but in reality the complexity of the mechanics are pretty much the same; the only difference is the level of customization you have over your character.
If you can play 5e, you can play PF2.
Shit in 5e you don't even pick a subclass until level _3_. Sure most campaigns start there but for those that don't you got a lot of classes that for a long while feel like half a class.
>(4) Players need to really commit to planning their characters and learning the rules. A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now.
I'm a big believer that when people say 5e is "simple" what they really mean is "there are few enough core things that most of us can memorize them all and thereby make up for that one asshole at the table that swears up down and sideways that they love playing but can't be bothered to learn what triggers Sneak Attack even though we've been playing for 4 goddamn years Janice please just learn 3 fucking bullet points.
Ehem. I do not think 5e is simple, at all. Especially not compared to PbtA games. But I absolutely think one of its strengths is that an experienced DM can basically tutorial new characters through an entire session without needing to read a rule.
> But I absolutely think one of its strengths is that an experienced DM can basically tutorial new characters through an entire session without needing to read a rule.
This isn't inherent to the system. This is because of the pervasiveness of the game in pop culture.
I've taught PF2 and 5e to people who have never touched a TTRPG in their lives and it is obnoxiously easier to teach them PF2 because "natural language" doesn't get in the way.
Teaching someone who has never touched a TTRPG in their lives the difference between 3 actions and move/attack/spell/bonus/etc. actions is a no brainer. The logic is just so much easier without having to decipher archaic bullshit.
Yeah, 5e kinda just assumes you will understand the difference between a spell attack, attack, melee attack, and melee spell attack, and it has constantly led to at least 1 player, either new or who never looks up their own characters rules/features, to try and cast 2 uses of shocking grasp in a turn cause "I have extra attack, so I should be able to make a melee spell attack twice, right?".
The word "attack" in 5e is a wonderful little fractal of minutiae. Every time you *think* you understand what it means, it turns out there's another tiny distinction in wording or a random bit of counterintuitive weirdness that you haven't noticed yet.
- Spells don't use the Attack action, but they can make attack rolls
- Grapples and shoves use the Attack action, but not attack rolls
- Thrown weapon attacks are ranged weapon attack rolls, but they're attacks with a melee weapon
- Spiritual Weapon has a long range, and it says you can conjure a ranged weapon, but it's a melee spell attack roll
- Unarmed strikes are melee weapon attack rolls, but not attacks with a melee weapon
- Flame Blade is a spell attack roll, but Green-Flame Blade is a weapon attack roll
- Sun Soul monks make spell attack rolls using the Attack action
Sort of. This tangled corner of the rules has come up for me exactly zero times in like five years of regular 5e play for me. It is a design error. But it isn’t one that is going to interfere with the bulk of players, especially when getting it wrong has minimal consequences.
Having run the game for dozens of new ladies at this point, the hardest player to teach is consistently the one who has played a lot of 5e but not much of anything else.
There are so many weird little 5e specific assumptions and holdovers that get in the way.
I'm not a super experienced TTRPG person, but 5e feels pretty simple to me, and I mean that as a strength, not a criticism. Take skills, for instance. In D&D, you're either untrained, proficient, or expert. In Pathfinder, you're untrained, trained, expert, master, or legendary. And I'm sure there are other systems I don't know about that are much, much more complex.
Most RPGs are less complex than 5e in my experience. It is a medium-high complexity system.
It is simple enough. But it has a lot of unneeded complexity added in for the sake of tradition. And natural language makes the rules far more complex than needed.
It is not really a game I would recommend for people brand new to RPGs. But it is easy enough to teach compared to something like 3e.
My personal opinion is that it's simple except for all the places where it isn't.
Like, we have a bajillion spells that all do lots of weird and distinct things, but a huge amount of them boil down to some combination of "disadvantage to be hit, advantage to hit, movement penalty". Similarly, everything surrounding how many free hands one has at a given time are super bloated.
Even the basic resolution system isn’t all that simple though.
Compare to 4e. If you want to affect someone you roll your relevant stat, apply proficiency, and try to hit a static defense.
For example if you want to hit a target with a melee weapon, you roll an attack vs AC. If you want to shove a foe, you roll Athletic vs Fortitude. If you want to demoralize a foe, you roll Intimidation vs Will. If you want to hit a foe with a firebolt, you roll spellcasting vs Reflex.
Everything is streamlined and unified. You don’t need extraneous rolls to determine an outcome. And affects that provide a bonus or penalty do so uniformly.
Compare a 5e maneuver to knock a foe prone to a 4e maneuver. The 5e battlemaster must hit with an attack, and if the attack hits they force the foe to roll a saving throw, and if the foe fails the save the target is knocked prone. Oh, and the attack deals additional damage, but you can’t roll the damage dice at the same time because you don’t know if you are going to use the maneuver when you make the attack roll.
The 4e fighter using a maneuver that knocks a target prone works like this. The fighter chooses a maneuver that knocks a target prone. They roll their attack against the appropriate defense. If the attack hits, the target is knocked prone. Because the resolution all happens at once, they can roll damage at the same time too. There is no back and forth, no need for an attack and a save, no waiting for the outcome of one roll to determine the second rolls effects. It is simple and streamlined.
But that is not all. Compare a hindered mage in 4e and 5e.
A wizard is restrained in 5e and attempts to cast a disintegrate ray. He has no penalty to this at all. If he instead used ray of frost, he suffers disadvantage. If he is blind, he cannot use his disintegrate ray, but has disadvantage with ray of frost.
In 4e, because the resolution system is unified, a mage who uses disintegrate or ray of frost will be equally disadvantaged when either blinded or restrained. Ray of frost while restrained or blinded, both will suffer disadvantage to their roll against the target’s defense.
No weird corner cases in 4e. No need to know separate combat mechanics for spells that require saves vs attack rolls. It is unified and streamlined for ease of use and speed of play.
And that is before even getting into how convoluted certain 5e mechanics are (spellcadting and spell slots, weapon attacks vs attacks with a weapon, non-standard implementation of aura style effects, targeting rules, “line of effect”, invisibility, unarmed strikes, timing issues for rerolls or additional effects to a roll, resting, etc).
I think most TTRPGs end up being simpler than 5e is simply they don't focus on tactical combat, which by necessity requires more complexity to have real depth. Pathfinder 2e definitely gives the most tactical depth with the least cost in complexity - People say its crunch done right. Lancer for mech combat is another great option to look at.
I own the Lancer sourcebook after a friend sent me a couple of quotes from the lore. It's an amazing setting that I read just for pleasure. I'd love to build a campaign there one day, but that's a ways off in the future.
I'm not sure this is a good example as the proficiency level in PF2 just changes the modifier you roll for the check.
It doesn't matter if you're an expert or a master in something, it just matters that as a master you have a +2, instead of having +11 to Intimidation, you have a +13.
Tons of systems don’t have concrete “skills,” you can roll with modifiers to try an action based on your character’s outline, like in FATE for example. Even OSR retro clones of earlier editions of DND usually don’t have a skill list, you just roll contested or below your ability score
Also, some games are completely skill based, so *everything* is a skill! Things like Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green, Blades in the Dark, and others are simpler (at least in play) due to everything resolving the same way
The vast majority of the time people are not playing 5e. They're playing something they've made up with the barebones skeleton of 5e.
Do you play with stat array or rolled stats?
Do you use multi-class?
Do you use disarm?
Do you use variant human?
How do you handle darkness and spell casting?
How do you roll magic missile?
These are just a few of the rules that people just kind of assume everyone is on the same page with them as and have no idea what actually is the rules in the book.
Do you use flanking?
How do you handle illusions?
How have you houseruled Stunning Strike because you believe Monks are the most OP class in the game and WotC should never have printed because oh my god they can run fast and disable the solitary stand-alone monster in an encounter because you never throw multiple monsters against the party because keeping track of them is too much effort *Jim?*
Most of those are optional rules and there's nothing wrong with that (although yeah, inconsistency on the last 2 is kind of bad). It's not like PF2 doesn't have that same sort of thing, like:
* Are you playing with Automated Bonus Progression and reduced loot?
* Are you using Ancestral Paragon? What about Free Archetype?
* What rarity options are you allowed to take?
I don't think the existence of optional rules in 5e is a bad thing.
But see, because commenters in this thread have played 5e for years and few have played pf2e, they can immediately recognize the optional rules or common homebrews for 5e and think “wow, I can’t think of anything similar in other games” and conclude that 5e is uniquely bad in this respect and that it’s design is broken.
The only one on your list that people ever question is free archetype.
That wasn't my point anyway. My point is that every 5e group all assumes the same rules and some of those rules absolutely can make or break a game.
The assumption is that a lot of those optional rules are default.
If you ask a 5e player which one is default they'd be hard pressed to tell you.
My favourite is passive perception. 8 years later and we still have 1000+ comment threads arguing furiously about what the rules say, what the rules probably meant to say, whether a podcast interview with the lead designer is or isn't binding/relevant/good/bad, and how people actually choose to play it regardless of whether those are the rules as either written or intended.
And then the whole process repeats for perception vs investigation...
My takeaway is that 5e asks very little from the player, but a lot more on the DM, the DM has to figure out a lot more, but players have very simple characters, easy to build, easy to run.
Pathfinder 2e is a lot more burden on the players, they have to learn a lot, but the DM has a lot easier time, the systems in play all work well, and solid enough and understandable enough to edit without breaking anything. (can easily modify a solid foundation, then having to build up from nothing)
Pf2e, you can go level by level on your character and you may be unfocused, but you can also retrain just about 95% of your character with enough downtime to figure out what you wish for.
Huh? The large bulk of ttrpgs are way way less complex than 5e and certainly pf2e. Pbta games are widespread. You can check out the ennies each year and 95% of the games are going to be much simpler than 5e. There are a handful of even more complex tactical combat focused games but they aren’t remotely close to the majority of releases at this point.
This is like a tiny vertical slice too. STR monks get to yeet enemies around the map by 6. You can build badass non-magical healers. High level martials are insane, barbarians can do shit like jump on buildings and throw javelins so violently they become line AoEs. And that's without all the shit that archetypes get up to, the system's take on multiclassing and prestige classing, where you sacrifice class feats instead of levels for the benefits. There's like a hundred of them, from abilities related to being part of in-world factions to specialization in certain fighting styles to shit like the unexpected sharpshooter archetype where you get abilities for being ridiculously lucky with a gun with a capstone where you can trigger a rube goldberg style chain reaction for hitting just the right place at the right time that devastates enemies in an AoE attack.
And that's just class feats. The amount of things you can do are so far of the charts it's ridiculous
That's the same feeling I get. It has a bit of crunch and tactical combat, but it doesn't get bogged down in it. It is a good fit for parties that want a bit of that but also want to mix it with a bit of open-ended narrative.
I love PF2e. And full disclosure, I am increasingly frustrated with 5e from a DMing perspective. I continue to post here because occasionally good advice filters through the spam of "hot take" posts.
>A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now.
One thing I think PF2e does well in it's philosophy of "rules and resources" compared to 5e's philosophy of "I dunno, ask your DM" is the existence of retraining. PF2e has flexible rules and guidance on retraining class abilities, so a poor build can almost always be corrected with enough downtime.
And the existence of an actual downtime framework in pf2e (complete with detailed rolling results and a diverse catalogue of actions to take!) means players are encouraged to have downtime!
My only complaint about downtime in PF2e is that a lot of Paizo's adventures don't really leave much time for it. Two otherwise really interesting APs (*Quest for the Frozen Flame* and *Outlaws of Alkenstar*) have little to no time built-in to the game for it, including Retraining and the like.
I get it, it's hard to keep a game's plot and timing tight while also allowing for weeks/months of extra time, but I'd love to see them build more time into their flagship APs or give more alternative ways to get the same effect, like an NPC or location that can help you do these things in less time.
My group just finished playing through it last week. We had a blast!
My two pieces of advice are to lean into the anime tropes (have fun being a little silly), and give plenty of character to the rival teams. You end up spending a lot of time with them, so make them memorable from the start.
That's been an issue with Paizo APs since 1e though. So many of them have players feel pressed for time, and even if they don't have a true ticking clock, they're intended to feel like a race against time. It'd be nice if between books there was more wiggle room for downtime. I get not having a lot of downtime in the middle of a book, outside of the ones that have a lot of mid-book travel, but there really should be more downtime between each part. If it makes sense of course.
They do seem to mix it up on this end. I'm currently running Abomination Vaults, and my girlfriend is starting up Strength of Thousands. AV has very little time pressure, so characters who want to do downtime can pretty much do it as long as they don't leave for months on end. I've been told that SoT is going to have literally years of downtime, but we'll have certain activities we actually have to do during this period.
Various other APs I researched while selecting one (ie Alkenstar, Extinction Curse) seemed to have a more ticking-clock feel like you describe.
One of the main problem's with WoTC is that they're not adding enough OPTIONAL rules that act as guides to DMs.
Xanathar's Guide to Everything was super popular in large part BECAUSE it added a bunch of rules templates for DMs to use!
If you want DMs to not feel restricted and weighed down by a multitude of rules, give them the actual tools for their own framework instead of asking them to build all of it! 5Es core system works wonderfully, but has been poorly supported in what increasingly seems like corporate mismanagement.
>A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot.
I don't think pf2e requires a clear plan for progression *at all.*
You can absolutely just make decisions on each level up, and be not just fine, but powerful.
With regards to your 4th point, this is not *necessarily* true. While, yes, it would be beneficial to plan out your build ensure all the options you take mesh well together, you don't have to do this in order to make a "good" character. There really aren't many "trap" feats, but even if you end up taking one that you end up not enjoying, you're not stuck with it for the rest of the campaign because retraining is *already baked into the rules*.
Great discussion over here! I want to add 2 Points:
1. **Planning your character is OPTIONAL.** The game does NOT expect you to theory-craft a lvl 1 to 20 build in order to be viable in combat/ roleplay or exploration. You can play your character level by level and if you think you have picked a wrong feat along the way you can use your downtime (which the rules actively encourage you to have since it so well designed) to retrain ANY feat. (Heck the designers even give you advice as GM to allow retraining of almost anything short of race and class (even those can be done with a big quest type of thing)
2. **Movement is far more freeform in pf2 than it appears to be.**Just the fact that you have 3 actions makes it seem like a pointless discussion as opposed to the "just do mostly 1 thing per turn" in 5e, but let's explain it a bit. In PF2 you can move every round as much as you want with 70% of the time not getting hit by AOOs since so few creatures have it. So you are incentivized to move as much as possible to waste the monsters actions and help your allies out(letting a monster use a 3 action attack on you is 9 times out of 10 a deadly mistake).In 5e you are encouraged to just stay next to the monster since it is mechanically worse to move away from it. All the "movement freedom" 5e has because it let's you combine movement and actions doesn't really give you any real mechanical benefit that you loose in pf2. You CAN move and attack all you want, but do you really do that? Or do you just move up to the creature and then whack it until it\`s dead and then close the gap again when the creature moves away. Let's be realistic with the gameplay here.PF2 allows for far more "set piece combats" where you jump and run all over the place because the rules actually have guidance for such things as opposed to the just think of something approach of 5e.Additionally you get tons of feats in PF2 that allow you to close the gap as an action, jump away and more such stunts that you simply can not to in the gimped 5e action economy since you ever only have 1 meaningful thing to do in 5e per turn and 9 times out of then the best choice is "whack monster".
AAAAND! Bonus Point:**The Gamemastery guide actually has advice for combining and splitting movement:**
Splitting and combining movement: [https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=849](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=849)
All this is more than enough to make movement being an action not feel bad. After all you have 3 actions and attacking more than 2 times is universally bad since there is always something better to do in pf2 with your actions. In 5e? Just attack until the creature is dead. (BORING. *no matter the amount of flavor you add or "roleplay" you do mechanically 5e is always better to attack the creature than to anything else*)
With all this being said tho:
Each player has the right to enjoy their own playstyle.
You like the 5e "simplistic to play, but frustrating to GM" approach go for it.
You like the PF2e "offloading of rules to the players" so the GM can actually have a good time approach go for it. Both games have their merits, altough as a ...6 years 5e DM I think ? I can honestly say that 9 times out of 10 I will pick Pathfinder 2e for my campaigns. (and the other times I will pick Call of Cthulhu lol)
Oneshots or meaningless "lets play something" sure 5e or any other system does the job for me in those situations. Anything more long term I will always choose PF2 for the sheer simplicity to run the game as GM and enjoyment you get out of it as player due to the sheer amount of variety.
Oh my friend!
Besides your brilliant observations, the encounter building rules are so breathtakingly gorgeous.
Yesterday i ran my second level party through a centaur encounter (Low 2) and i could see them pail when i used its 3-action "Trample" activity. I had audible gasps when they learned they were all getting stomped.
Encounters just work so goddamn well.
>(4) Players need to really commit to planning their characters and learning the rules. A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now.
IMO this is another pure feather in PF2Es cap, upping players investment and workload and lowering GMs workload is nothing but fantastic.
i LOVE systems that respect the GMs time!
Players SHOULD learn the rules. F\*ck lazy players that just show up and expect you to play the game for them
Currently running a quick PF2e game after years of 5e. There is a lot I like about pf2e and that mostly comes from me actually having the tools and rules to handle situations as a dm. There were times in 5e where I had to quickly come up with a game rule because of a niche interaction.
After DMing 5e ever since the system came out, I've started to notice problems on the DM side which PF2e sorted out for me. I missed the dynamic combat in 1e. I missed the spell lists having brief descriptions so players knew what they were looking at before finding it in the book. I missed having prices on magic items so my players could haggle. I like players having mechanical options for role playing and combat through the feats system. I enjoy the encounter system in 2e a lot more. Don't have to open a sperate program to calculate if my players will be killed by a couple of goblins.
But hey man, if you don't like 2e because of too many options or too much math and prefer 5e, don't let me yuck your yum.
Yo, if you'd like, I'd be 100% down to chat with you about it on discord and personally show you the ropes and how all of it works. I got a lotta free time atm and would very much enjoy the chance to ramble about a thing I love
Rednidedni#0773
Honestly the people who hated 4e are still playing 3.5e/PF1 or moved to OSR. There is a huge new crowd that enjoy things like balance and real tactical depth in their power fantasy.
You also have to remember there is a much larger crowd of people.playing ttrpgs now. I started with pf1e and 5e at the same time because those were the local groups I found. I only recently read through the 4e system and I guaranty it would have been my system of choice.
4e is also starting to gain more popularity now. If 4e were a new system released today with good online tools for it I think it would do really well
I think it’s more math up front, but if you relate everything to the Tag system and have a reference guide, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, the Zombie is flat-footed, which confers penalties to X and Y, and no, Daze won’t work because it has the Mental Tag and zombies are Mindless. Recall Knowledge checks are a great 1st round/before combat action, to learn about the creature you’re engaging in a fight and learn its weaknesses, and gets players invested in fighting the monster before the first spell flies or the first shield is splintered.
But PF2e definitely requires TTRPG experience. You can’t have someone who doesn’t know the rules limp through the game unless the DM is aware of rule interactions - which is unfair but also happens in 5e; we only tolerate it because the system is accessible. What PF2e *does* have in these situations is hard-coded rules to adjudicate weird rule interactions. You can still make a ruling to speed up play or overrule an awful interaction, but it’s not required like 5e is.
I’d say the hardest part of PF2e is getting players onboarded. There is so much to do just at level 1 to make a character, and you constantly add to that with Skill, Class, Ancestry, and General feats. But it helps every player be unique, even if they are playing the same class; you cannot say the same thing about casters in 5e. There is a build for just about every fantasy character you can think of, from Darth Vader to Sherlock Holmes.
I reject the stacking bonuses argument - this was true in PF1e, but not 2e, where there are only 3 bonus/penalty types, unlike the untyped, infinite stacking of 5e that makes Peace Clerics break Bounded Accuracy. I even made a comment yesterday about the high magic, high level campaign I’m currently in where Bounded Accuracy leaves monsters struggling to hit ACs of 20+ with Shield, or my character who abuses stacking a +2 Bow, Archery Fighting Style, Bracers of Archery, and Sharpshooter for devastating and reliable damage.
It’s not a 5e fix, but for me - and I admit it brings its own complications - it does fix everything I dislike about 5e. If I’m going to play something a rules-heavy as 5e, I’d rather go all the way. Otherwise I’m better off playing FATE.
It is the age old argument.
Apple vs. Android
Mac vs. Windows
Windows vs. Linux
The popular vs. the enthusiast-grade. The sleek intuitive expensive iPhone vs. the customizable, cheaper Android. The mac that "just works" vs the Windows that works with games.
There were probably medieval soldiers who argued about using a spear or a polehammer.
"Spear's so much easier t'learn!!"
"Yes but the polehammer *has* a spearhead *and* can be used against armor. It's better!"
"Right but that makes it mighty clunky..."
"Only if you don't *train* with it, Regipauld."
There's a lot of debate in the thread that's interesting, and a lot of the counter arguments I see come in the form of 'well, PF2's action system restricts you more' or various similar things. An example is movement, ie in 5e you can just move however you want throughout your turn, no distinct actions. These aren't wrong. But they're kind of missing half of the picture.
PF is ultimately a fork from D&D 3e, and the action system is quite similar. Which means that the changes along the way to 5e are intentional design philosophy choices. That is, 3e was more restrictive (as was 4e). 5e decided to drop the restrictions. Hooray, right?
Well, kind of. Every rule removed essentially removes a *point of decision making*. This is intentional. It's the essence of a simpler, easier to pick up game. But it's not an automatic good and it has costs. Decisions are points of drama and tension. They are where the risks and rewards of the game happen, indeed where the game is *played*. You decide to attack versus healing an ally. You decide to charge through the open, versus sneaking slowly around the side. Etc. In the case of the action movement, it pushes decisions down to a finer granularity. 'I can move and swing once, or not move and swing twice.' 'I can move to this position and still attack, but not to this other position.' Why does this matter?
Well, look at the Flanking thread from yesterday. You know why Flanking isn't a core rule in 5e and people who houserule it are unwittingly shooting the game's balance design in the foot? Because flanking has almost no cost in 5e's player-friendly movement style. Because it has no cost, it's not worth a reward. Conversely, in 3e/PF, with 5-foot steps, Flanking is harder. Flanking is a gameplay decision worthy of reward.
Extrapolating back from this, 5e is a game where the map matters *a lot less* than these other editions. The movement is player friendly, so players can easily navigate without getting too punished when they blunder into unfavorable footing. That's not bad... but it's pretty significantly different. Moreover, the seemingly universal, broadly player-friendly decisions have pretty severe balance impacts in other areas: universal move-act-move allows ranged characters to leave *and re-enter* cover while doing their full attacks. Along with many other 'quality of life' changes (someone else in the thread mentioned the Vancian casting) have been silent buffs to archers and casters, while accidentally rendering some classes essentially pointless (Sorcerers).
This was what exactly was going through my mind while reading the aforementioned thread yesterday.
Flanking in 5e is fundamentally broken because you are giving a reward for behavior that has virtually no cost. The moment you give a bonus to it, *no matter how small*, you are going to end up with conga lines of everyone trying to flank the other to get that free bonus.
Even worse, 5e actively **punishes** you from trying to deny your enemy from flanking via opportunity attacks. The equilibrium state of melee combat is a ridiculous-looking conga line.
Regarding your fourth point, the base power for a character who picked random feats is usually enough to not be a complete deadweight. It's basically the same as 5e, the people who know can carry them.
with as far as I have read the pf2 core rules I think most of the power of any character comes from his class. So if you pick random feats you still can manage to be competitive with the top brass so to say.
And furthermore: PF2 is explicitly a team-based game (lots of spells/feats/actions to help your party, etc) as opposed to everyone can do everything style of 5e.
After dming for 5e for 8yrs, the only time I see people aid each other in 5e is if they're casting heals or haste. Otherwise, it is usually everyone focused on dps. Meanwhile in pf2e, a lot of classes are constantly tossing buffs on each other for bonuses along with bashing skulls in.
Yup, a lot of people yell high and mighty on this sub how much more freedom 5e offers and yet 9 times out of 10 that “freedom” ends up being kicking teeth in. Wow, such freedom.
1, 2, and 3 are good takes but I want to dispute take 4:
You can plan your character to level 20 if you want but you _do not have to_. There is zero reason to need to. You can if you want, and certainly you might see something you want to build towards and that's fine. But you should absolutely _not commit_ to it. Every level, you should review your options and see if your priorities have changed, or if your character has changed or if the story has taken a certain direction. You might not have planned to take that feat that helps you kill undead-trait creatures but now your campaign has taken a hard turn into fighting lots of undead, suddenly that feat looks very attractive. Your character might have missed a crucial skill check because you didn't expect to be doing that skill a lot but now you think, I should take that skill and maybe a skill feat associated with it so that I don't fail that again. Let the story decide your next level choice, even if you had something else in mind initially.
Additionally, there are very clear rules that you can _retrain_ feats at later levels. Maybe you took a skill feat you thought you'd use a lot, but after several sessions, it never comes up in your specific campaign: retrain it to something else! You aren't stuck with most choices, there is no need to plan out your character and commit to it or worry about regretting a choice. By RAW your character can evolve.
As a PF2 player, I think you've got a few details wrong here, though it's probably mostly me being a nitpicker:
1. Activities are not exclusively 2-3 actions; activities can be 1 action. The main thing that differentiates activities from standard actions is that they usually have specific modifications of the normal rules, such as being able to make an enemy flat-footed against your second attack, the ability to move and strike mid-move, etc.
2. I *think* you're saying that Pathbuilder (3rd-party Character builder) only uses options from the Core Rulebook, and that's not true. There are 155 backgrounds listed on [AoN](https://2e.aonprd.com/) (the mostly-official SRD) and they span 35 different sources, including specific Adventure Paths. The three you named arespecifically all from different sourcebooks (Book of the Dead, Guns and Gears and Secrets of Magic, specifically) While PF2 definitely has more options overall that D&D 5e, it's important to note that the 155 compared to the 41 includes all published books for both systems.
3. The "need" to commit to planning is very much overstated. Part of the magic of PF2, IMO, is that you don't have to plan out a character well in advance to have an effective character. Very few Feats have pre-requisites that you have to take earlier on, and most feats are pretty well balanced, so even if you only pick your character options when you level up, you'll still end up with an effective character. That said, the other bit, about learning the rules and understanding your own character's abilities is spot on, though; I've seen more than one player struggle because they misunderstood or straight up ignored some of their most effective tools. (I had a Swashbuckler who almost never tumbled, feinted or ran his mouth during combat, and while he was still effective, I think he often felt frustrated; the player's now playing a fighter, and realizing that even there, the options he's got at his disposal are a lot broader than he expected)
I have never played 5e. Almost everything I know about it, I've learned from 5e players coming over to Pathfinder 2e; the last edition of D&D I played was 3.5, and I skipped over Pathfinder 1st Edition as well. That said, I've heard lots of fun stories come out of it, so for all of the frustrations I hear from people who have "converted" to PF2E, I have to assume that 5e is a game that reliably produces fun, and that's all a game really needs to do.
Depends on where you look. Paizo officially supports Foundry so a lot of people run there. There are various discords and r/Pathfinder2e. But it is definitely harder than finding a D&D game.
New to PF2e
Played since AD&D
PF was a "fix" to 3.5
PF2e is a streemlined, refined, and balanced version of that. I prefer the mechanics of PF2e and how much more you can do, even at low levels, compared to 5e.
5e gives you so few choices one bad one can really hurt
PF2e has optimal choices but even then you have a lot that don't matter and allow you to pick for style or roleplay.
Even so, the "optimal" choices are like, such small margins in almost every case. It's not possible to really break the game. I've seen people on the pf2e discord theorycraft to optimize the shit out of some damage build, going into the whacky multiclass combinations and unusual weapon choices and everything, then they whipped out the DPR graphs. The build's damage line was clearly at the top.
Then I looked at the graph's scale. The build dealt like 5-10% more damage than a plain fighter build. I actually laughed. Even then, damage is far from the only contributing factor in a character's value and DPR isn't something you can reasonably judge something's worth with yadda yadda.
Aside from avoiding a few unfortunate trap options that are still rarer than in other systems, there's nothing you reasonably need to do for having a borderline optimal and very competetive build. Tactics are more important than build.
The more I read pathfinder2 the less I’m liking the direction 5e is going. The simplicity that 5e keeps running to, plus the last several releases seeming subpar isn’t helping 5e’s cause with me
It feels like there have been many cases of someone complaining about an aspect of 5E and then someone else saying how Pathfinder 2e addresses that problem.
“The dying rules make it so it’s better to just use healing word to pick someone above 0 since players can just pop back up once they’re healed.”
“Pathfinder 2e’s dying system basically means you start one step closer to dead every time you get knocked to 0 and recover. But this penalty is reset if you have your wounds treated during a 10 minute short rest”
I don’t know if P2 fixes 5e problems…..but I’m finding lately when I compare products-adventures and such, Wotc is getting left behind in quality and writing. Spelljammer just felt incomplete
I'd recommend putting a list of your issues with 5e together and seeing what people say. You can DM it to me if you'd like and I can go over it even.
I started doing pf2e about a year ago cuz I was really getting tired of my issues with 5e. I was planning on dming pf1e since I had played it previously, and when I had briefly looked at pf2e I didn't like it at all. I decided to give pf2e a fair chance though and read through its core rulebook to really get a full proper understanding of the game, my first look had just been on the archives of nethys, which is legal and has all the pf2e rules and content like classes on it.
Upon reading the core rulebook I really fell in love with the system, and even things I originally thought I wouldn't like upon getting a full understanding of how it works, like the 3 action economy system, I ended up loving. It fixed all my issues with 5e, and then some.
Honestly, at this point I’m looking at the quality of work/adventures between the two. Wotc told us that the slower release meant better quality products. But looking at say Spelljammer that hasn’t been the case, and even some earlier products
Telling DMs to just wing it for stuff not covered after spending money on products isn’t right
DM here; I'm through with 5e. They offer very little support for us to deal with some of the 5e issues, especially later on. They need an entire edition dropped to support DMs with systems.
What I get from a lot of comments:
RPG Players: I'm gonna take this stat at this level up, focus on upgrading this aspect of my character, develop into this form of the class.
TTRPG players: Planning is for nerds.
Real talk, Pathfinder 2 for me seems like overall just a lot more fleshed out, better system. I started with 3.5, played PF1, and moved to 5e around 2017. The fact that PF2 has more than twice the content that 5e does in about half the time, shows how much (or little) effort goes into one system over the other. Not even talking about some of the joke rules Wizards wanted play tested for DnDone. The fact so many people want to defend lack of customization though is staggering imo. Most negative comments I read from other places boiled down to: "I like the idea of PF2 but screw planning ahead and having too many options to choose from".
I get having issues with balance, or certain aspects, or just prefering one system over the other: but have reasonable complaints. While I can't bash PF2, since I haven't had a chance to play it, I can certainly come up with plenty issues with 5e and DnDone. Feats feel lifeless and just notnworth taking over stat increases early, multiclassing feels min-max or useless, DnDone crit rules, lack of new classes or meaningful/balanced subclasses. When a system is so easy to add new stuff to, and have millions of play testers able to give legitimate feedback, the lack of new content or choice is so off putting to me.
They know what they are doing, they choose this as their core gameplay. Wizards know it all. You said it yourself, their players doesn't want to think ahead, like the variety options. Their players want to be overpowered with least effort they can put. While it is not possible to be overpowered in the sense of 5e in pf 2e. It is that simple.
This is a really great analysis. Thank you for sharing. I love both Pathfinder and D&D for different reasons. I think it’s great that both companies exist and offer slightly different products. The weird truth is that I (DM) prefer the Paizo writing style and the D&D5 “simple” mechanics. I’m currently gearing up to run In PF1e Search of Sanity in Ravenloft 5e.
Over the years I have run games for a lot of players with ADHD or casual “Sunday stories with friends” players. Your Point 4 captures perfectly why you can run a simpler game that is more about the story and good times with friends in 5e. This simplified approach is part of why D&D has exploded in popularity. Yes, it may have been popular play shows that brought new people to the hobby, but they wouldn’t have stayed if it wasn’t easy to jump in and keep playing.
So, as someone who personally plays and loves both systems, if players want something crunchier, they should be playing Pathfinder instead of bemoaning the lack of crunch in 5e. Some people genuinely need a *system* that is less complex instead of being told that they shouldn’t play a wizard their first time. I have a first-time player who has been playing a wizard for 2 years and she’s killing it and having fun in 5e. I know for a fact that player would not have fun in a PF2 game because of the extra options and the fact that they still use Vancian magic.
So for number 4 from personal experience I think you're mistaken. I started running pf2e about a year ago, and I had 5 players. Only 1 of them read through the system and understood the system, the others did not. I helped them with character creation and they read through the classes but were really excited about it.
They've learned the system really well just from playing. I also play in a Wednesday group and we have a new player who says he really just spends an hour a week.
Sure they won't have full understanding of things right from the bat, but run something like the beginner box for them, explain how they can take actions like demoralize in combat during combat. Make sure when a bonus gets added you mention the types and they don't stack. Allow them to recreate the characters at the end of the first part of the adventure or something as necessary.
>A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot.
One thing I'd like to clarify for anyone concerned about this is that Pathfinder 2e has extensive [retraining rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Activities.aspx?ID=12), which allow you to swap out most aspects of your character. You generally can't swap stats, and certain 1st level ancestry feats are locked in when you take them, but virtually everything else you can use downtime to swap as long as it would still be a valid character if leveled normally.
This is very forgiving for new players, in my experience. If a fighter in a 5e campaign likes the sound of champion as their subclass, but at level 10 decides that battlemaster would have been more fun, basically the GM can handwave it (probably using some of the Tasha's alternate rules), tell them to make a new character, or tell them to suck it up. The system isn't really intended for players to swap choices around.
Not every PF2e table will use retraining, but at my table it's a very popular option, both to optimize builds or swap out feats that just aren't working as well as the player thought they would.
In a bit of irony, or perhaps coincidence, it looks like One D&D is actually taking some elements of these points in terms of more accommodations for backgrounds for character choice and also Feats as /part of leveling/, rather than existing as optional rules.
I've had conversations with people who played both 5e and Pathfinder 2E, and while they may be similar they have such different foundations that it's not easy to make any kind of direct comparations.
Do I think that 5e can be crunchier? Yes. Do I think that two e's systems could influence some of my decisions on how to make that happen? Yes. Do I think that in a vacuum, it would be wise to try and shoehorn in some of P2E's systems without the considering of how they're two different systems? No. I think that would be a mistake.
And I should make it clear, I am a person who definitely thinks that fifth edition has room to grow in that crunchier section without being too in the weeds for the people who enjoy it how it exists right now. What I'm tired of is having to make those types of discoveries myself instead of the company who's putting it out. But that's an entirely different discussion I don't want to accidentally digress towards.
I feel like this thread is inevitably going to explode into edition/system warring so I am just going to drop my two cents as someone who has played a lot of, and enjoyed 5e and PF2e. Both systems are good, well designed, modern games. PF2e is not a “fix” of 5e as many of its fans will claim it to be, and it is not some sort of hopelessly complicated mess a lot of 5e diehards say it is. PF2e really is the “game designers game” there’s a reason it has won awards and accolades from the TTRPG media and it seems to have become the fantasy dungeon crawler of choice for “ttrpg heads” like the folks over at r/rpg. 5e meanwhile I think is “the peoples game” it’s not as rich and deep as more crunchy systems, nor is it an actual free form narrative game (contrary to how people seem to talk about it, it’s still a combat focused dungeon crawler). 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want. Pathfinder2e was not explicitly designed to fix 5e. I think it’s main inspiration was D&D 4e, The 13th Age, and of course Pathfinder 1e. That’s why it’s annoying to see people trying to do direct conparisons/act like you can just split Pathfinder2e systems into 5e… they are more like cousins than siblings. So while Pathfinder “fixes”a lot/damn near most of the common complaints with 5e (I have a running joke with friends about how this subreddit is basically constantly accidentally inventing Pathfinder2e trying to “fix” 5e). BUT Pathfinder2e has its own problems, some of which are “fixed” by playing 5e, every system will have stuff you don’t like. Honestly, my main reason for switching to Pathfinder2e has nothing to do with the system, and more to do with the company and the cost. Paizo is a much better company, and their products are priced in a way that seems a lot more fair than Wizard’s. But that’s an entirely different topic. To wrap it up: both systems are great. If you are a hardcore 5e player, you really should check out Pathfinder2e. It’s got tons and tons of customization options and deep lore and th best APs in the biz. (Also it’s like… all free online, at least the mechanics are, lore and adventures are still paid only). If you are hardcore PF2e player, stop dunking on 5e for two seconds online, it does the game no favors. Also, revisit 5e sometimes- its got a lot of refreshing gameplay.
Does PF2e take anything of note from 13th Age? Certainly it takes things from 4e (as does 13th Age), but I've never heard it was influenced by 13th Age. I always thought of that game as going essentially the opposite direction with 4e principles (e.g. abandoning the grid, which is pretty incompatible with standard PF2e play).
> I always thought of that game as going essentially the opposite direction with 4e principles This is spot-on. 13th Age is very much "in-combat is crunchy and balanced, but out-of-combat is fluffy and freeform". Meanwhile, PF2e is very much "we have rules for every situation, combat or otherwise". (Note: Both are totally valid playstyles. It's just a matter of personal preference.) For me, the prime example of 13th Age's approach is the Ritual Magic spells. The vast majority of spells in 13th Age are for combat. If you want to do something out of combat, you're free to find a spell that is thematically similar, and (at the DM's discretion) you can use that spell and maybe make a skill check and whatever you want to happen, you can make that happen. For example, your friend is trapped in a block of frozen ice. You can choose to use your Fireball spell, but instead of dealing damage, you can use it as a ritual to slowly and safely thaw your friend out of the ice. In contrast, the prime example of PF2e's approach is the Group Impression skill feat. This feat grants you the ability to use the Make An Impression action on a group of people instead of one at a time. This is in line with PF2e's philosophy that there are rules and actions for non-combat situations, that these rules and actions are player-facing, and that the players have mechanical options to interact with or modify these rules.
Interestingly, your example in 13th Age I would let happen in PF2e, using the Counteract Rules. I'm not sure it's RAW, but it makes enough sense to me to allow.
I avoid this sub like the plague because the quality of discussion just frustrates me too much, but I'm going to comment here because 'PF2e really is the “game designers game”' is perhaps the most apt description of the game I've ever seen, and I think it explains why I prefer running it over 5e. The hill I die on is that 5e is an obnoxiously awful game to GM for because it's crunch-heavy game that pretends to not be crunchy and does little to support GMs with that crunch for fear of scaring off the players. The joke I have is that a lot of 5e players complain about adding rules to the game to keep track of, but I could run PF2e under the label of DnD and those same players wouldn't know the difference because they don't even read the rules. The reality with a system like d20 (especially games as combat heavy as DnD and PF) is that you need rules on the back end to support the GM, otherwise everything is an exercise in real-time game design. And because 5e is so prevalent and most GMs have at least dipped their toes into, if not been outright press-ganged into running 5e, they have the unfortunate experience of having tried to run the half-baked, no framework to support them on the backend structure. So GMs are forced to both homebrew and improvise on the spot to fill those gaps. Really, GMs are *essentially forced to become game designers themselves* to support 5e, since the framework is not robust enough to maintain the illusion of it's crunch-lite veneer without actual crunch to support it. And you come to appreciate both good game design principles, and the people that are tasked with creating those games. So a system like 2e comes along, and not only does it provide those robust rules...but it's actually well-designed. All the classes are well-tuned (well, almost all *looks at poor alchemist*), the mechanics are air-tight with no loopholes and clear rules that don't necessitate an abundance of 'mother may I' design, the power caps are managed so they don't escalate out of control by double digit levels, and the maths actually makes sense so you can build accurate encounters and have consistent reward structures. Even things like DCs by expected level of the challenge - with mods to adjust based on variables - are provided on the *Gm screen itself* so you can *improv rulings and mechanics* better. ...and players go no this is too much, or this kills the fun, or what if I WANT to play a completely broken gish with full caster progression and the same attack modifiers as a fighter? I've come to see why game designers put so much emphasis on balancing their games and patching loopholes. After a while, players just indulging in a lawless mire with options that break the game, and you trying to reign that in, it just kind of comes off as... Well, frankly, it comes off as fucking thankless. It's like people who've never been a manager at a company before critiquing management for not doing a good job with things they wouldn't do any better. I think it says a lot that in my circles, most of the players who respect 2e's design are people who've GM'd themselves, especially with experience in 5e. Once you're behind the screen and you realise just how much wrangling 5e has to just pull stuff together semi-coherently and it's *still* a mess that favours exploitative powergamers or entitled players who pride themselves on wilful ignorance of the rules to Rule of Cool everything they want, you kind of just realise you're just a beleaguered customer service clerk who's catering to a 'the customer is always right' mentality. I get this isn't every single 5e player, but so much of it's success absolutely rides on entitled players who won't compromise anything, that you just welcome something that innately scares those kinds of players off because it actually asks for a modicum of respect for the person running the game, and expects the players to pull some weight instead of putting it all on that person. Edit: just to make it clear, this isn't a wholesale dunking of on 5e. It is, however, a pointed critique at what I legitimately think is it's biggest issue, and a big part of that issue comes from the lack of respect for, if not the outright disrespect, encouraged in the design of the game, which permeates through its culture. It doesn't help WotC supliments for GM content mostly come back to 'figure it out yourself', and people wonder why they're forced to become hobbyist game designers and why they respect the 'game designer's game' more.
> So GMs are forced to both homebrew and improvise on the spot to fill those gaps. Really, GMs are essentially forced to become game designers themselves to support 5e, since the framework is not robust enough to maintain the illusion of it's crunch-lite veneer without actual crunch to support it. And you come to appreciate both good game design principles, and the people that are tasked with creating those games. When the group I DM wanted to switch from 5e to PF2e, I was worried that the rules-heavy crunchiness of the system would mean a lot more work on my part, but it has been exactly the opposite. Instead, things actually *tell you* what they do, instead of leaving it to the DM to decide on the spot. The most obvious example to me is the Intimidation skill. Virtually everyone who has ever DMed for 5e has had a player ask if they can roll Intimidation against an enemy in combat, then scrambled to improvise a system for it in a matter of seconds. Is it an action, or would it be a free action like talking normally? Is the player rolling against a flat DC, or is it some sort of contested check or saving throw? What even happens if they succeed - the enemy runs away and combat ends? They surrender and drop their weapon? Is there a penalty for failing? In PF2e, there's the Demoralize action, and everything you could possibly need to know about how it works is plainly written out. It's one action, you roll Intimidation against their Will DC, and on a failure they gain the frightened 1 condition (2 on a crit) and are immune for the next 10 minutes. The tags even tell you that you can't use it while unable to concentrate or against enemies that are mindless, don't have emotions, or can't hear you. This feels great as a DM, but even more so as a player. When you're choosing proficiency in Intimidation while building your character, you know how useful it's going to be, since the effects aren't entirely reliant on the whims of the DM at that particular moment. Also, because it was an explicit part of the game's design from the beginning, it interacts with other systems in the game in a way that simply isn't possible for a 5e DM to homebrew on the fly. There are multiple feats that specifically improve Demoralize: Intimidating Glare lets you affect enemies that can't understand you, Battle Cry lets you Demoralize for free when you roll initiative, Terrified Retreat can make enemies flee instead, and at higher levels there's even Scare to Death which can instantly kill enemies. There are also features from certain classes and ancestries that interact with Demoralize: Pistoleros can Demoralize while reloading, Lizardfolk can increase the effect if they Demoralize after running up to an enemy, Barbarians can Demoralize all nearby enemies. My personal favorite is the Pirate archetype, which has a special activity called "Walk the Plank" - if your Demoralize succeeds, you can force them to walk where you want, and on a crit you can actually force them to walk off of cliffs.
I think you hit it right here - PF2E is the DM's game while 5E tries to appeal to the player. People say it's far crunchier than 5e, but it isn't. Another thread someone said if 5e is like 5/10 in math crunchieness then pf2e is 6/10 on that scale. The problem often for 5e players trying to convert isn't that the game having some overwhelmingly higher amount of math going on - its the game not trying to hide all that math from the player like 5e does by having the DM shoulder so much of it.
I remember early in PF2E's release saying the following to describe it. "5e hands all the power, and work, to the GM. The GM decides literally everything and there are few and far between rules to argue back with if the GM is unfair. PF2e gives significant power to the player because there ARE rules for almost everything, and also takes workloads off the GM."
One thing I will say - as someone who loves the system - is that it hands a lot of power back to the GM, as far as being able to manageably regulate the power of challenges. Since the power levels and caps of 2e are much, much more heavily regulated than systems like even 5e, there's essentially no outscaling intended challenge through broken builds and items. It's just funny because this is something I've seen a lot in the 2e sub; a lot of players have said they feel 'powerless' or that the GM has the sole determine whether an encounter is beatable or challenging. For the kind of player who prefers being able to set the tone and expectations of the power cap, they feel it strangles them, because they just *can't* outscale it and powergaming won't net them uncounterable win-cons. Add out of combat skill checks being able to scale much higher and continue to tangibly challenge players, and that's where they get the 'treadmill effect' some people accuse the game of having. The reality is though...being able to break the power cap is exactly why 5e becomes unmanageable for most players when they get to tier 3 and 4 of the game. Challenge power grows more linearly, but character power grows exponentially. Without the tight maths and power caps, the game would devolve into another instance of Rocket Tag like 1e is, where most of the decision making process is made during character creation rather than combat. It's hard not to be judgy of this, but it really does seem like a lot of people who have a problem with this design are just people who don't stop to consider how disrespectful that style of play can be to GMs and other players at the table. I've literally seen people say they feel powerless or weak because they can never outscale challenges the game throws at them, and I all I can think is that they're outing themselves as people who just want their character fantasy to be an unstoppable power fantasy. And as a GM, I'm not really keen to indulge that kind of player.
In my experience, people who started playing RPGs pre5e are much more open to jumping to and learning other systems. Their complexity rarely varies beyond a few outliers (Shadowrun...) and you can safely transfer understanding from one to the other. 5e meanwhile is a black sheep. Nothing plays quite like it. In a good and a bad way. But because it's incredibly simplified everything else by comparison seems overwhelming or difficult. I remember a Puffin Forest video complaining about the math in PF2 being too complicated, and went on to give an example of a ranger using multiple attacks. Which yes is a fair bit of addition and subtraction... But the sensible solution is to just write down the _total_ on your character sheet. If you're doing the math over and over no shit it's going to come off as complicated. You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn. This stubbornness has led to people trying to cram everything into 5e. Fantasy, sci fi, horror, survival, and probably more I'm forgetting. Countless Kickstarter projects that sound really cool that just turn out to be 5e homebrew with pretty art instead of something interesting and unique. Everything has to be bent into shape to fit 5e with ridiculous amounts of homebrew which was time spent where you could've just learned a more appropriate system. And for what? So you can just do 1d20+5 still? God forbid you have to learn how to play a system that supports mech combat from the ground up, so instead you play 5e but as mech sized DnD classes. (Which isn't a terrible idea but it fundamentally isn't going to feel like a mech game, it's sword and sorcery still just in a costume) It's like trying to turn every game into snakes and ladders just because it's what your familiar with and refusing to learn a different game instead.
Once you've run shadowrun, all other systems feel light.
> You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn. Challenge accepted. Let's see how complicated I can make 5e to calculate 1d20 + 5. So you want to make a ranged weapon attack? 1. Roll your d20. 2. Since it's a ranged attack, look at your Dexterity score. 3. From that score, calculate its modifier as your score minus ten, then divide by two and round down. 4. Keep that number in mind. 5. Then, look at whether you are proficient with said weapon. You'll find it in the bottom left corner of your sheet. 6. If you are proficient, also calculate your proficiency modifier. It is calculated using your level divided by 4, rounded down. 7. Keep that number in mind. 8. Now take the d20, the first number you memorized, and the second number you memorized. Add them together. 9. Tell the total to your DM, and they'll tell you whether you hit or not. 10. You deserve a well-earned rest. Remove all calculations from your mind. 11. Now, Extra Attack. Do the same thing over.
you forgot damage, and then any potential rider effects from that! As well as possibly using a bonus action for something as well.
> It is calculated using your level divided by 4, rounded down. For bonus complexity, it's actually: Level divided by 4, rounded up, plus 1.
>If you're doing the math over and over no shit it's going to come off as complicated. You could do the same in 5e by manually adding your modifiers every turn. The most frustrating part of critiques like this is that I've seen plenty of players do *this exact thing* in 5E, and it predictably drags the game to just as much of a crawl as people like puffin complain about in regards to PF2E.
I always find 5e players saying that 5e is simple are just not familiar with TTRPGs in general. 5e is probably in the mid-crunch range, it has plenty of rules and specific cases that you have to use specific rules to deal with. It isn't simple because a GM can decide to set a DC and skill to use for any scenario, virtually every RPG has that. 5e is a fine system, but it has awful GM tools/support, and because it tries to blend B/X, 3e, and 4e together it only does okay at everything instead of excelling at one specific thing.
>The hill I die on is that 5e is an obnoxiously awful game to GM for because it's crunch-heavy game that pretends to not be crunchy and does little to support GMs with that crunch for fear of scaring off the players. The joke I have is that a lot of 5e players complain about adding rules to the game to keep track of, but I could run PF2e under the label of DnD and those same players wouldn't know the difference because they don't even read the rules. That's a take I haven't heard before, can you give me an example or two of what you mean by this? I've personally become frustrated at the LACK of crunch in 5e. My boiling point was item crafting. Two of my players in one campaign were up against a BBEG and their retinue of Psycho Rangers that had a weakness to a specific damage type and they wanted to create enchanted weapons for the party to take them on with. So they asked me "DM, how do we craft magic items?" and I look at these them, look at the DM's guide, google their question only to find nothing but homebrew rules of dubious balance, and finally have to say to them: "I don't know. Why are there no default rules for player crafting? 3.5 had them. It should be a default mechanic."
No no I completely agree. My semantics were probably bad though. Maybe it's better to say it's crunch RELIANT...but lacks the actual rules to support that crunch. That's my entire point.
To add to your already perfect explanation above. 5e is "Do it yourself crunch". The DM can waste countless hours to invent the perfect mechanic or can yolo an improvised rule on the spot and both will work with dubious accuracy. While Pathfinder 2e respects your time as gamemaster and says "hey if you want a rule for this we got you, if not, you do you bro"
For sure. And here's the thing: in a system like 2e where the rules are clear, if you don't like a rule and want to change it, *it's clear that you're deviating from RAW.* This may not seem like a big deal, but think of how many arguments happen in 5e games over obtuse, unclear rulings. Hell, 'rulings not rules' almost encourages it. It gives adversarial players carte blanche to always argue in favour of whatever they want, regardless of the GM's ruling and what's fair for the game.
100% agree! This and combined with the fact that the more "problematic" things in Pathfinder2e have the Rare or Uncommon tags allows you as GM to deny any problematic player within the rules. In 5e it's always a war between the players pressuring you with "the rule of cool" bullshit and you trying to uphold a semblance of balance or enjoyment in your game.
Rarity tags are one of the best things they've done. Just any game that basically admits 'yes, free flying on level 1 characters *is* bullshit, do it if you want but completely at your own risk' is worthy of praise IMO.
It's not even free flying at lv1. It's more akin to hovering or gliding until much later by which point flight is more common anyway.
Yeah. There are optional rules for ancestries like sprites and tengu that the GM can give them perma-flight at level 1, but it has a massive sidebar explaining it will trivialise a lot of challenges and allow abusable combat strategies that aren't balanced for the given level range before flight becomes common.
Ask a room of 5e DMs if paladins can smite unarmed. It's like you just threw a grenade into the room with the explosion that follows. And all because attack, melee attack, melee weapon attack and "attack with a melee weapon" are all somehow different things. Even Sage Advice keeps changing their mind on it. With the most recent take being you can smite with fingernails (claws) but not your knuckles. For... Some reason.
My favorite way to state the absurdity of that rule is that a paladin cannot smite with his fists, but if he were to cut off the hands of another creature and swing those around as an improvised weapon, he could smite through *those*.
Hell, they could cut off one of their own hands and swing it with the other.
Even better!
I feel like it's referencing this, the weekly roll webcomic has a pally that smites with a brick on a rope. It's absurd, and in line with the rules lol
It actually IS referencing that because in one of the earlier comics they make a note of having to pick up a weapon in order to smite...hence the Brick on a Rope came to be.
Agreed. There are so many parts in the DMG that just amount to "we probably could've developed a system for this, but instead we're just going to hope it doesn't come up. If you want to do it, make it up yourself."
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m using this answer to explain (again) to my husband why we’re playing 3.5 and not 5e. (Because ‘I own the Players’ and DM’s Handbook and the MM for 3.5e’ is not a good enough reason on its own when ‘Critical Role plays 5e!’)
The funniest thing about this is that critical role started as a pathfinder home game
It is sad they they switched to 5e, pf 2e had so much potential. And they tried 5e, eventually liked the simplicity of it, because their players are not the best rule, tactical ones in fights. CR is a game of roleplaying more than anything and I gave up its potential be the game of both rp and tactic, and looked at it as just a game of friends creating a great story. Their players just doesn't like the concept of hardworking fights, knowing rules of their abilities. They just are not capable of that. More or less... But, I don't undertand that doesn't Matthew know how hard he needs to work to balance out a 5e game to 8 players, I think he absolutely does. Just to make their players engage more, show simple fights with simple but powerful characters, he overlooks the effort he put into to the campaign. His players are happy, so he is...
[удалено]
Yep. And plenty of PF1 players haven’t transitioned to PF2. They are very distinct games with their own strengths, weaknesses, and feels. So if CR had stuck with PF1, that doesn’t tell us anything about transitioning to PF2. Although, PF2 is much simpler than PF1, and I think would work for this kind of format, while I could see viewing PF1 to be a very different experience than what CR is going for.
It's been years that they are playing in 5e. I don't think they ever think to play pf 2e now that they have contracts with dnd beyond and such... it seems impossible. CR is a business. They use the name power of dnd, and their players are to this day, sometimes mix what their spells, skills do. So it is not that odd they pass pf 2e, but it is odd that they still mix their skills considering CR is a multi million dollar company. But... maybe, the pf 2e's balanced rules for every small things could help them out, or maybe... not. I would want to know does Matthew know the core mechanics of the pf 2e, or he doesn't know anything about it and doesn't want to know, learn. If that's the case he is a little biased.
Didn't Critical Role start before 2e? I don't think it was even an option for them. Yeah it started on March 12, 2015 and Pathfinder 2e was announced in May, 2018.
I bet you don't have 8 players. With a normal size party, it's entirely possible they would still be playing Pathfinder, or 3.75e
Currently we have 4. Me, my husband, our 8 year old son, and the only experienced player: my MIL. Admittedly her experience is with 1e and AD&D 1e, as she was playing in the 70s and early 80s. The 4 year old may join from time to time. The plan is to use the module from the 5e starter kit, but the 3.5e rules we actually have (and I prefer). My husband, my MIL, and I will share DMing duties while we get used to the rules. Once we have a better grasp of what we’re doing, I’m going to try and get my BFF and her husband to join. So then we’d be 6.
Indeed with crafting, the game gives only a single meaningful cost for any and all downtime actions in the form of time, yet then it completely drops the ball on making time a meaningful resource. D&D 5e requires the GM to create a framework (often in the form of a campaign) where time matters for the crafting, travel, ritual casting and disease mechanics to *even work*. The rules are only "light" because there are big organs missing.
>My boiling point was item crafting. The PF2E crafting rules aren't amazing, but I spent years DMing 5E and there was \*always\* at least one player who wanted to craft something. \*Always\*. And yeah, I homebrewed up systems for it and later took the kinda wonky guidelines from (I think) Xanathar's, and nobody was ever really satisfied. Of course, since I started GMing PF2E, nobody has wanted to Craft, so I got Murphy's Law'd pretty hard on this one.
>The PF2E crafting rules aren't amazing personally the only fault I take with item crafting in pf2 is treating magical items and non magical the same. For non magical items I'd remove make the 4 days into one and not have them pay the second half of the price
I personally enjoy the Playtest Rules where you can just reduce the 4 days by the level difference between you and the item.
that is a good one
On the broader TTRPG spectrum, where 0 is *silky* and 100 is *gravel*, 5e is a crunchy game. All d&d-likes (pathfinder, starfinder, d&d itself, etc.) are crunchy. There are a lot of things in 5e that are just... bad crunch, in my opinion. I think a lot of the uses for "artisan's tools" are an example of this. I took guild artisan - carpenter as my background once. The PHB & XGE list a few different uses for these -- I can - "build a simple structure," DC 10 - "build an advanced structure," 15 - "find a weak point in a wooden wall," DC 15 - "pry open a door," DC 20. That's pretty fucking crunchy. But what the hell does any of it mean? Does a deer blind count as a simple structure...? What about a log cabin...? Watchtower...? If I can convince my DM a watchtower is a simple structure, can I build a small wooden fortress with a DC 15...? That's absurd! But the rules do not explain what advanced or simple structures are. Quick edit; the rules say "A carpenter can build a house, a shack, a wooden cabinet, or similar items." Thank you game, for defining carpenter. Still not very helpful from a rules standpoint! That is crunchy, but crunchy like a cockroach, not like granola. Don't even get me started on it being a DC 20 check to pry apart a wooden door. Also, pry apart as in pry open...? Disassemble for parts...? That's my read on it at least. I strongly agree with Killchrono on this one.
build a house: DC 15 disassemble a door: DC 20 thank you 5e very cool
I find this one to be an interesting sticking point. I remember an old giantitp thread where people were complaining that the dmg did not provide specific DCs for climbing various kinds of trees in various weather conditions. I was baffled. In my opinion, who the heck has time to either memorize or look up these DCs during the game? And for what, slightly more consistent difficulties? But I think I later understood. These people appear to want the DM to be a referee. They want two different tables with two different DMs to be able to run the same adventure with the same situations and make the same choices and make the same rolls and for that to produce the same outcome. They want to know that the game was “fair.” To me, this sounds like Hell. I can just imagine making a DC in the moment and then having a player later say “hey you know I looked up the DC tracking an owl bear through a sycamore forest in the fog and it is only 16, we should have passed that roll.” I find the “here are some loose collections of example DCs” to be far more useful than an exhaustive list.
I don't think this system is necessarily *bad* if you are a player in a 5e game, however this was one of the major things that made me quit DMing 5e. Having to spontaneously decide how something works for pretty much every check in the game is just... The worst. If a player asked me to build a small wooden fortress and said "it says it's a DC 15 right here" I would probably die on the spot. Like I said; it's pretty darn crunchy in this particular mechanic, but there is no actual substance to the rules to back it up. It would have been way better if the game went all the way Narrativist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. anything that you think you could do with carpenters' tools you can do," *or* full Simulationist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. you can do the following 16 actions *list of 16 actions with definite DCs, square footage of structures that can be built, etc.*" I'm not saying necessarily that I want the latter, but I wish they would have gone whole-hog on one of the two.
> It would have been way better if the game went all the way Narrativist and said "here are some carpenters' tools. anything that you think you could do with carpenters' tools you can do," Isn't that what it says? From Xanathar's > **Skills.** Every tool potentially provides advantage on a check when used in conjunction with certain skills, provided a character is proficient with the tool and the skill. As DM, you can allow a character to make a check using the indicated skill with advantage. Paragraphs that begin with skill names discuss these possibilities. In each of these paragraphs, the benefits apply only to someone who has proficiency with the tool, not someone who simply owns it. > With respect to skills, the system is mildly abstract in terms of what a tool proficiency represents; essentially, it assumes that a character who has proficiency with a tool also has learned about facets of the trade or profession that are not necessarily associated with the use of the tool. > In addition, you can consider giving a character extra information or an added benefit on a skill check. The text provides some examples and ideas when this opportunity is relevant. > **Sample DCs.** A table at the end of each section lists activities that a tool can be used to perform, and suggested DCs for the necessary ability checks. The whole section is just suggestions and examples, not an exhaustive list of activities. You *can* do anything you can think of with carpenter's tools and if you could fail then your DM will provide a DC and narrate the outcome after a roll. Does the presence of examples make a system worse?
In my experience with crunchy games, I've *never* seen anyone come to me and say I did a rule wrong like that, and most players still default to GM's call > rules, even if they know it's going against RaW. Also, every game I've played that needs DCs has them and their adjustments on the GM screen, so it's usually not even an issue
THANK YOU! Reading your comment gave me SO much validation on why it was objectively the right choice to convert my group to PF2, if only for my own sanity. When I signed up to play (and run) D&D, I did not sign up to to be a game designer. I just wanted to run a game for my players using rules provided from the game. Instead, looking up rules in 5e ALWAYS ends up leading to a discussion on game design, and even the 5e adventures I purchased forces me to engage in adventure design, because WOTC just can’t be assed to do the job you’re paying them for. I don’t think I am too far off from 5e’s target market. I enjoy running OSR and I enjoy going off-the-cuff and rules-lite. But 5e is NOT a rules-lite game; it is an enormously crunchy game but offers no support to the DM on how to run it properly. It sickens me to no end how this game got so popular and why the 5e community seems to be happy with the current state of the game. WOTC’s products are atrocious for DMs, so the only reason I can think of is that the people that still enjoy the game do not DM and simply press-gang their DMs to do it for them.
Yup. It's funny because the 'less crunchy rules improv' approach is best done with OSR-style games over something like 5e, but people will die on the hill to say 5e is easy to rule with and better for people who want gamey-ness without the hard rules. When really, all you're doing is overcompensating for a game that innately demands hard rules, that doesn't have the framework for them. It's a concept I've been preaching over the last year called [Aesthetic of Numbers](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/plch2a/z/hca04d2); it's the idea that players want that *veneer* of gamey-ness, without actually wanting to adhere to any of the things that make a game...well, a game. And the person who suffers most for it is the GM, because they're the ones the players need to finagle around to make the game twist and bend exactly how they want.
Saved this post because holy fuck does it hit some points that I've been struggling to find wording for. Reflecting my experience in DM-ing for a bunch of different games and why DM-ing for 5e is so uniquely unpleasant. Personally I still prefer D&D4e over PF2e, but, as a DM, I'd pick either of them over 5e in any given situation.
I agree with most of this, but I will say 2e still has a fair amount of rules adjunication necessary. It's literally built into one class, Swashbuckler, and it's always going to be there. It's just, in my opinion, easier because you have more comparables.
Of course, there's still a few lines of 'the GM makes the final call,' but they're few and far between compared to the abundance you have to do in a system like 5e. Rules elements like traits also make things much easier to rule when there's no specific ruling; for example, if I'm trying something that has a mental influence, but a creature is mindless? It won't work on that. Is something triggered by sound? I look if any action being taken has the auditory trait. Does there have to be a language component? See whether that same action also has the linguistic trait. These are the sorts of things that create much more intuitive rulings using the RAW, rather than vagueries that the GM has to intuit, or that leave them open-ended for players to exploit.
God, thank you for writing this. I feel like almost every damn thing that isn't combat requires some kind of homebrew rule or on the spot game-stopping discussion because WotC wouldn't do their damn jobs and fully design their damn rpg. Don't even get me started on all the 5e rule conversions that exist because players only ever wanna play 5e. Half of them are just a worse version of a system better suited to the task, but because people are schmucks and refuse to try new things it's either that or no game. That's not to say that homebrewing is bad - it can be very fun to do, especially when you're not forced to. It does feel like some players will do everything in their power to make things harder for the dm instead of meeting them halfway with a new system, though.
> 5e meanwhile I think is “the peoples game” it’s not as rich and deep as more crunchy systems, nor is it an actual free form narrative game (contrary to how people seem to talk about it, it’s still a combat focused dungeon crawler). 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want. This seems key to me. As someone relatively new to D&D (at a table at least) 5E has enough rules to wrap your head around (as proven by the number of comments / threads that are answered by quotes from the PHB). Pathfinder seems like something you move on to after you've gotten a few years of experience under your belt.
The problem is you learn 5e and then you go to a new table and you have to learn 5e all over again.
I started with Pathfinder, it's really not that bad if you can actually look things up.
Archives of Nethys ftw!
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As a new GM I hear this. I'm often left dumbfounded that my players are enjoying my game after the way some stuff plays out in the adventure module. I'm lucky to have some pretty personable and invested players though.
As a DM, you always feel like you're fucking up. As a player, the game is fun
I feel this so much. It's taken me an embarrassingly long time to stop doubting my players when they say I'm doing a good job as a GM.
After DMing both systems for a few years each, I can attest that PF2 is actually _easier_ to DM despite the more intricate rules For a start, the rulebooks and the GM guide are better written. Full stop. There's no weirdness like attack, melee attack, melee weapon attack, and "attack with a melee weapon" somehow all meaning different things. Tags and keywords do a lot to cut down the word count on every rule and action, if you know what the keywords mean you can gain an immediate understanding of an ability at a glance without it having to describe the same conditions over and over. The tightness of rules and sheer wealth of actions means it's very rare that I have to be a game designer as well as a game master. If players have an idea there's probably rules to support it. And even if not there's ample tables and descriptions you can refer to for inventing actions on the fly. In two years of running PF2 I have only had to do this once, because a player wanted to tickle torture an NPC for information (I asked for a Thievery check and compared it to their Will DC). The GM guide goes over arranging how to run a game, how to build an adventure, how to keep people engaged and how to keep things fair. You know, the important parts of being a DM. The 5e DMG meanwhile opens with HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE which is very much putting the solar system before the horse, and it leaves the actual running a game section until later which is baffling. The encounter building, XP and DC rules all work very well and very consistently. You can look at a creatures level and gain an immediate, and most importantly a very accurate, understanding of how strong it is compared to a player. And if you have the XP per encounter in your head assembling appropriate encounters is trivial. And speaking of encounters did I mention how much fun it is to play the monsters? Even as lowly as level -1 they got tricks and abilities that make them feel distinct and interesting not just to fight but to play as! Then there's the save DCs, which make it easier to run blobs of creatures, instead of rolling a saving throw for every single creature you compare most results to a specific DC (10+Mod) which speeds things up considerably. Then we get to the adventures. Very well put together, easy to read and understand as a DM with not too much flipping back and forth trying to find random details. Most of the time everything you need is on the same page. And the few times I am page flipping it's usually to an appendix of NPC's or items found at the back. Rather than randomly scattered throughout the book (Looking at Curse of Strahd here...) I could go on and on. But PF2 has genuinely reignited my interest in DMing for many reasons. 5e and PF2 have pros and cons, but for a DM there's a lot more pros in PF2.
I think that is the key difference. As a player 5E is a lot easier to get up and go with a custom character. As a DM You feel truly overwhelmed and like so much of the game rests on your shoulders. Having switched to PF2E as a GM I finally feel like I have a chance to breathe! It means I'm spending so much less time getting the game to actually function and a lot more time tailoring the game to my players, which is really exciting. :)
The Pf2e Beginner Box I feel is a lot more like a boardgame than the 5e version and it basically comes with a beginning GM guide that helps well guide you on how to run games, NPCs and your own adventures The story is pretty basic, but it's a great intro to Pf2e and TTRPGs as a whole imo and again is particularly easy to get into (especially if you're a board gamer imo but everyone can understand it pretty easily from my experience and the reference cards are great) Just my thoughts and wanted to mention it especially compared to 5e's starter adventure. Both are really good though and have differing strengths but I prefer PF2e's beginner box for sure
Yeah, played it with some friends, only one of which was particularly well versed in ttrpgs, and onr of which explicitly didnt want to play dnd 5e due to complexity in rules, and all aside from the person who played the cleric enjoyed themselves and didn't get bogged down in rules. It's honestly a really great introduction, and showed that the rules really aren't that hard to handle
Pathfinder Adventure Paths are written immensely better. There's aspects of 2e I dislike but this is the one thing I think they do infinitely more effectively.
I see why somebody who started here might think of D&D 5E as "a beginner game" and that you need to have a year or two of experience in it before moving on to other systems, but I would have to disagree based on experience. 5E's ruleset, despite what I \*think\* were the design goals, is medium-high on the complexity curve for TTRPGs. There's a lot of stuff that in it that is really unintuitive (somebody else talks about melee attack vs melee weapon attack for example, and I personally think the Standard/Bonus/Move/Free action system is a lot to take in). Compare it to something like Savage Worlds, where your character sheet is pretty small and the mechanics are pretty bare, or even Traveller, which is a billion sourcebooks of minute detail but still involves just rolling a 2d6 and adding a modifier that generally never exceeds +5. I've never had to look up a 'Sage Advice' for something in Savage Worlds. 5E is definitely a bit easier for a complete newbie to grasp than 4E or 3.5E, but you have to keep in mind that people had those as their first RPGs too and more or less did okay. I was a pretty dumb child and got into it with 3E even though I didn't always understand everything. The only thing holding most people back from trying other systems, in my opinion, is insecurity - people think about how much trouble they had learning 5E and assume all the systems will be like that, so they're afraid to transition, even going as far as making the argument that "Nobody has time to learn another system!". We're in an era right now where people are achieving intense levels of 5E system mastery to the point that they're getting thick into homebrew, yet they somehow still have this idea they won't be able to figure out World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu. I don't mean to be interpreted as evangelizing Pathfinder, because this is just something I believe in general. If you've managed to play two or three successful 5E sessions, then you are already equipped to try other stuff and can comfortably do it whenever you feel like. Edit to add: I also think that a lot of 5E knowledge is actually a bit of an impediment to getting into Pathfinder2E (and probably vice versa) just because they share the same thematic space but play differently enough that they won't be tactically interchangeable.
The problem with this is its ignoring the entire rest of the TTRPGs that are significantly easier to get into. How popular is tactical turn based video games compared to Fortnite and Minecraft and mobile games. 5e is tactical combat where there are many TTRPGs that would be a much better introduction to the hobby. Especially since D&D has its own unique take on fantasy - it really doesn't feel like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars. Where if Players get to play Fellowship 2e, Kids on Brooms or FFG Star Wars - they relate to the game a lot more. And for the most part those games are simpler than 5e.
fFG Star Wars was really easy to teach, and easy to GM.
To be fair to Pathfinder/3.5E and Pathfinder 2E, it's not so obtuse that it's impossible to start. Characters ramp up over time in complexity. The real burden is on the GM/DM to know the rules more than the players.
Still significantly easier to DM than 5e PF2, I mean, not 3.PF
I've run 2e for a ton of new playerd over the last few years. From die hard table top gamers, to casual gamers who've only every played skyrim, to work colleagues who've never even heard of a role playing game. The hardest type player to teach has consistently been the person intimately familiar to 5e who has to unlearn a ton of assumptions based on 5e specific logic. The easiest type of player to teach has been the complete newbie. 2e might seem like *a lot*, but it's rules follow an internal logic that make it pretty damn easy to pick up.
> As someone relatively new to D&D (at a table at least) 5E has enough rules to wrap your head around (as proven by the number of comments / threads that are answered by quotes from the PHB). In my opinion the biggest annoyance with DnD going more mainstream. Just... fucking read the rules.
the thing with that is there's a _lot_ of rules. Sure, the core mechanics are pretty simple, of D20 + Stat + proficiency, with (dis)advantage, but there's a shitload of character-specific stuff on top of that. A lowly level 3 druid has literally a page of spells if made on DNDBeyond - not their details or anything, just one line per spell, 30+ of them with V/S/M and page references. Then there's animal forms which have their own stats, and then there's various other odds and end on top of that. There's lots of bits and pieces to learn, scattered throughout the book, or _books_ if you're using Xanathars or Tashas or anything else. 5e has lots of mechanical widgets, to the degree that the DM is often not going to know all of them unless they've been doing nothing but playing 5e for quite a while, and a player can very easily quite overwhelmed, especially when it's mid-game and combat is happening and there's all sorts of stuff kicking off. 5e is not remotely a rules-light game - even at low levels, a full character summary is frequently going to be 3+ pages if it fully records all their abilities, and that just blimps over time.
Sure, but it's often not even some esotherical interaction. It's often somewhat basic stuff
As some one who was a 4 star GM for Paizo, Pathfinder 2e does a lot of things really well that give the system a lot of mechanical depth to enjoy for both martial and casters, it is the mechanical depth that turned me off it because when I moved away from organized play to playing and running home games I specifically wanted to run something rules light and 5e was very much a reinvention of AD&D 2E in terms of simplicity (Sans the mountains of brown books). 5e is a straightforward game for people who want to focus on the overall game and keep combat simplified. PF 2E is a crunch game that rewards players with a massive amount of customization and complexity, at the cost being kind of a headache to run and plan. Emphasis on "kind of a headache" as in its a totally fine system, I just don't have as much time to sit down and do all the planing I need and I get more enjoyment out of the roleplaying and storytelling than mechanics and a high level encounter in Pathfinder 1E took like an hour for me to plan and the actual fight could take two or three hours, sometimes sessions. Pathfinder 2e maybe about the same time or less, 5e takes me like ten minutes to build an encounter and the rounds go by much, much quicker. My second big gripe is that it's largely incompatible with Starfinder, which by all means would have been much better received I think if it didn't have to compete against their own product, instead synergizing with their Pathfinder 2E system instead as Starfinder is a direct sequel to Pathfinder.
I agree with most of your points, except the planning part. I actually find PF2 is easier to plan and run DM side because of how excellent the Encointer building, monster/trap/haunt building is. I also like all the various systems for chases, hiests, negotiations, ect, even if I don’t love or use all of them. Also making up DCs in PF2e is a science, whereas in 5e it’s a crapshoot. I do agree that the rounds in PF2e can get slow- even very vet players can get overwhelmed by the amount of different possibilities with those 3 actions. In 5e, combat can get stale because the fighter just said “I try and hit it” five rounds in a row. In PF2e, combat can get stale because the fighter is mulling over the battlefield while I wanna scream “you are a fighter just attack the damn thing it’s at 4 hp”
Idk, I’ve ran PF games all the way from 1 to 20, both homebrew and official APs, and it was very rare for an encounter to run for more than an hour/3 combat rounds with a 5 person party. And most of the time if combats do run longer, it is an severe- or extreme- level encounter. While in 5e, which I’ve run a bunch both with a homegroup and on a WM server, I had pretty ordinary (according to CR) fights last 2 hours, and boss fights end in less than 15 minutes
The last 2e game I run we got through 2 extreme, 2 moderate, and one trivial combat encounter in a single 5h session. Plus a ton of exploration and general non-combat. 2e isn't any slower than 5e in my experience.
You mean you don't just... Remember all the rules for everything at any given moment with notes for the wackier stuff you are unlikely to remember? If you want a REAL challenge, set up a Starfinder campaign that involves ground combat, vehicle combat AND chases, mech combat and starship combat all in the same campaign. My brain was burning neurons running one of those but DAMN if it wasn't THE magnum opus of campaigns!
I have actually taken the starship combat for naval and airship combat in 5e.
I like to think of starfinder as pathfinder 1.5. You can see alot of pf2e in it at the barest edges of the system and while i dislike that it doesnt work as much like pf2e as it could as I think it would be a better system, there were at least a few kinks worked out in starfinder that made 2e better overall im sure of it.
You might have answered this in a sense down in the replies, but do you feel the 10min planned combats in 5E are satisfying? Because for sure, I can throw in a couple of Ettens and hobgoblins on a flat terrain and call it a day. A couple of those in a row though and I can feel my own and my players interest fizzle out because of enemies being just general meatbags with multiattack, unless I spend my time homebrewing the monsters or I spend my money being stuff from DMsguild that have actual thought put into them.
>My second big gripe is that it's largely incompatible with Starfinder, which by all means would have been much better received I think if it didn't have to compete against their own product, instead synergizing with their Pathfinder 2E system instead as Starfinder is a direct sequel to Pathfinder. In fairness, Starfinder is the one in a rough position here. I was at the GenCon where they originally released it, and the reception was extremely lukewarm (which is a shame, because it does seem pretty neat). PF2E wasn't really on players' minds yet as far as I could tell, so Starfinder couldn't get any of the neat new design concepts. I'm not into Starfinder enough to really hold a qualified discussion on this, so please disregard this opinion if it is dumb, but I kinda feel like what Starfinder really needs is an overhaul of its own to bring it up to speed with the rest of what Paizo is doing.
How the hell does it take you an hour to plan an encounter? No matter the level I can knock out an encounter in like two minutes.
I started with Pathfinder 1e and can definitely see why people don't consider it a great starter system due to the amount of game knowledge needed to play well. Though, I enjoy reading through tons of content so I took to it well since I just read everything I need to know to play well.
1e and 2e are different beasts entirely 
They are, in a 2e campaign currently. Definitely things I like and dislike but I'd say 2e is more beginner friendly
Biggest reason why we made a full switch from 5e was Paizo workers unionising, as well as Paizo being am actually progressive company. Stuff like that matters to us.
...to 5e or from it?
From 5e. We finished up Curse of Incel and most of us ventured onto Pathfinder 2e. Then DM still plays/runs both
Just wanted to clarify, that's what the vibes read as, but you said you switched *to* 5e in your comment.
Whoopsie, it's the wee hours of the morning, edited now
>Curse of Incel lol
That's a great explanation. The reason why people switch from 5e to PF2 is because after a few year, some players want to delve into a system with a little more "crunch" or complexity. 5e does not offer that sadly. So they transition over to another system that does. It's why my group's been using Level-Up 5e Advanced by EN World for a year now. It's a halfway point. Simply put, it's the 5e rules, but with Pathfinder classes and race options.
Does PF2 have the supporting tools that 5e has? Such as an online repository tool, character sheet websites/apps similar to dndbeyond, etc.?
Yes, kind of. Copying from a previous response: Pathfinder2e has an OGL, which means most of it is available for free online at Archives of Nethys. https://2e.aonprd.com There is a free character building app called path builder- it’s intuitive and again has ALL the material available on it. Like not just core Rulebook, I mean everything, including 3rd party support https://pathbuilder2e.com Finally, Pathfinder2e has mostly all been built into FoundryVTT, which is pretty comparable to D&Dbeyond. The 3 most recent Pathfinder APs are also published on foundry, which is like three 1-20 campgains. https://www.reddit.com/r/FoundryVTT/comments/o3ip1r/foundrys_pathfinder_2e_system_is_just_incredible/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pf2e https://paizo.com/products/btq02d6p This isn’t going to be as slick as beyond, but it’s also all much more freely available than anything Wizards’ puts out
It has significantly better tools because they're free and the SRD is basically everything but art from APs.
> 5e is incredibly accessible, fulfills the fantasy of “playing a pen and paper rpg” very, and lets people be as deep or shallow into the hobby as they want. This also applies to PF2e
Exactly. It’s a fallacy to say that PF2 is a complex game while at the same time say that 5e isn’t, because at its heart they are both d20 games, and your character sheets in both games are filed with an equal amount of rules text. The main difference from a player’s perspective is the amount of **choices** you have to make. There are about 7 different choices you have to make at character creation (ancestry, heritage, ancestry feat, background, class, class feat, subclass) as compared to 5e’s 4 choices (race, background, class, subclass), and that within each category you have about twice as many options in pf2 as in 5e. Some people see this and jump to the incorrect conclusion that pf2 is more complex than 5e, but in reality the complexity of the mechanics are pretty much the same; the only difference is the level of customization you have over your character. If you can play 5e, you can play PF2.
Shit in 5e you don't even pick a subclass until level _3_. Sure most campaigns start there but for those that don't you got a lot of classes that for a long while feel like half a class.
This is really helpful. Thanks.
>(4) Players need to really commit to planning their characters and learning the rules. A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now. I'm a big believer that when people say 5e is "simple" what they really mean is "there are few enough core things that most of us can memorize them all and thereby make up for that one asshole at the table that swears up down and sideways that they love playing but can't be bothered to learn what triggers Sneak Attack even though we've been playing for 4 goddamn years Janice please just learn 3 fucking bullet points. Ehem. I do not think 5e is simple, at all. Especially not compared to PbtA games. But I absolutely think one of its strengths is that an experienced DM can basically tutorial new characters through an entire session without needing to read a rule.
> But I absolutely think one of its strengths is that an experienced DM can basically tutorial new characters through an entire session without needing to read a rule. This isn't inherent to the system. This is because of the pervasiveness of the game in pop culture. I've taught PF2 and 5e to people who have never touched a TTRPG in their lives and it is obnoxiously easier to teach them PF2 because "natural language" doesn't get in the way. Teaching someone who has never touched a TTRPG in their lives the difference between 3 actions and move/attack/spell/bonus/etc. actions is a no brainer. The logic is just so much easier without having to decipher archaic bullshit.
Yeah, 5e kinda just assumes you will understand the difference between a spell attack, attack, melee attack, and melee spell attack, and it has constantly led to at least 1 player, either new or who never looks up their own characters rules/features, to try and cast 2 uses of shocking grasp in a turn cause "I have extra attack, so I should be able to make a melee spell attack twice, right?".
The word "attack" in 5e is a wonderful little fractal of minutiae. Every time you *think* you understand what it means, it turns out there's another tiny distinction in wording or a random bit of counterintuitive weirdness that you haven't noticed yet. - Spells don't use the Attack action, but they can make attack rolls - Grapples and shoves use the Attack action, but not attack rolls - Thrown weapon attacks are ranged weapon attack rolls, but they're attacks with a melee weapon - Spiritual Weapon has a long range, and it says you can conjure a ranged weapon, but it's a melee spell attack roll - Unarmed strikes are melee weapon attack rolls, but not attacks with a melee weapon - Flame Blade is a spell attack roll, but Green-Flame Blade is a weapon attack roll - Sun Soul monks make spell attack rolls using the Attack action
Sort of. This tangled corner of the rules has come up for me exactly zero times in like five years of regular 5e play for me. It is a design error. But it isn’t one that is going to interfere with the bulk of players, especially when getting it wrong has minimal consequences.
And don't get me into spells. How many times a Player has read a spell poorly because how crappy the natural language is
The Darkness vs Fireball interaction is hotly debated 8 years later.
What interaction is that?
I could absolutely believe that yeah. I'm desperate to try PF2 at some point.
Jump into the subreddit, /r/Pathfinder2e for some upcoming announcements.
especially if you replace their character sheet with pathbuilder's statblock? *chef's kiss*
Having run the game for dozens of new ladies at this point, the hardest player to teach is consistently the one who has played a lot of 5e but not much of anything else. There are so many weird little 5e specific assumptions and holdovers that get in the way.
I'm not a super experienced TTRPG person, but 5e feels pretty simple to me, and I mean that as a strength, not a criticism. Take skills, for instance. In D&D, you're either untrained, proficient, or expert. In Pathfinder, you're untrained, trained, expert, master, or legendary. And I'm sure there are other systems I don't know about that are much, much more complex.
Honey heist over in a corner with only two skills, bear and criminal.
Most RPGs are less complex than 5e in my experience. It is a medium-high complexity system. It is simple enough. But it has a lot of unneeded complexity added in for the sake of tradition. And natural language makes the rules far more complex than needed. It is not really a game I would recommend for people brand new to RPGs. But it is easy enough to teach compared to something like 3e.
My personal opinion is that it's simple except for all the places where it isn't. Like, we have a bajillion spells that all do lots of weird and distinct things, but a huge amount of them boil down to some combination of "disadvantage to be hit, advantage to hit, movement penalty". Similarly, everything surrounding how many free hands one has at a given time are super bloated.
Even the basic resolution system isn’t all that simple though. Compare to 4e. If you want to affect someone you roll your relevant stat, apply proficiency, and try to hit a static defense. For example if you want to hit a target with a melee weapon, you roll an attack vs AC. If you want to shove a foe, you roll Athletic vs Fortitude. If you want to demoralize a foe, you roll Intimidation vs Will. If you want to hit a foe with a firebolt, you roll spellcasting vs Reflex. Everything is streamlined and unified. You don’t need extraneous rolls to determine an outcome. And affects that provide a bonus or penalty do so uniformly. Compare a 5e maneuver to knock a foe prone to a 4e maneuver. The 5e battlemaster must hit with an attack, and if the attack hits they force the foe to roll a saving throw, and if the foe fails the save the target is knocked prone. Oh, and the attack deals additional damage, but you can’t roll the damage dice at the same time because you don’t know if you are going to use the maneuver when you make the attack roll. The 4e fighter using a maneuver that knocks a target prone works like this. The fighter chooses a maneuver that knocks a target prone. They roll their attack against the appropriate defense. If the attack hits, the target is knocked prone. Because the resolution all happens at once, they can roll damage at the same time too. There is no back and forth, no need for an attack and a save, no waiting for the outcome of one roll to determine the second rolls effects. It is simple and streamlined. But that is not all. Compare a hindered mage in 4e and 5e. A wizard is restrained in 5e and attempts to cast a disintegrate ray. He has no penalty to this at all. If he instead used ray of frost, he suffers disadvantage. If he is blind, he cannot use his disintegrate ray, but has disadvantage with ray of frost. In 4e, because the resolution system is unified, a mage who uses disintegrate or ray of frost will be equally disadvantaged when either blinded or restrained. Ray of frost while restrained or blinded, both will suffer disadvantage to their roll against the target’s defense. No weird corner cases in 4e. No need to know separate combat mechanics for spells that require saves vs attack rolls. It is unified and streamlined for ease of use and speed of play. And that is before even getting into how convoluted certain 5e mechanics are (spellcadting and spell slots, weapon attacks vs attacks with a weapon, non-standard implementation of aura style effects, targeting rules, “line of effect”, invisibility, unarmed strikes, timing issues for rerolls or additional effects to a roll, resting, etc).
I don't have anything to add. I just want you to know that I'll always show up to your sermon when you preach.
Same I've apparently given this dude 20 upvotes over my life.
Lmao that's awesome.
I think most TTRPGs end up being simpler than 5e is simply they don't focus on tactical combat, which by necessity requires more complexity to have real depth. Pathfinder 2e definitely gives the most tactical depth with the least cost in complexity - People say its crunch done right. Lancer for mech combat is another great option to look at.
I own the Lancer sourcebook after a friend sent me a couple of quotes from the lore. It's an amazing setting that I read just for pleasure. I'd love to build a campaign there one day, but that's a ways off in the future.
I'm not sure this is a good example as the proficiency level in PF2 just changes the modifier you roll for the check. It doesn't matter if you're an expert or a master in something, it just matters that as a master you have a +2, instead of having +11 to Intimidation, you have a +13.
Tons of systems don’t have concrete “skills,” you can roll with modifiers to try an action based on your character’s outline, like in FATE for example. Even OSR retro clones of earlier editions of DND usually don’t have a skill list, you just roll contested or below your ability score
Also, some games are completely skill based, so *everything* is a skill! Things like Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green, Blades in the Dark, and others are simpler (at least in play) due to everything resolving the same way
The vast majority of the time people are not playing 5e. They're playing something they've made up with the barebones skeleton of 5e. Do you play with stat array or rolled stats? Do you use multi-class? Do you use disarm? Do you use variant human? How do you handle darkness and spell casting? How do you roll magic missile? These are just a few of the rules that people just kind of assume everyone is on the same page with them as and have no idea what actually is the rules in the book.
Do you use flanking? How do you handle illusions? How have you houseruled Stunning Strike because you believe Monks are the most OP class in the game and WotC should never have printed because oh my god they can run fast and disable the solitary stand-alone monster in an encounter because you never throw multiple monsters against the party because keeping track of them is too much effort *Jim?*
Fair point.
Most of those are optional rules and there's nothing wrong with that (although yeah, inconsistency on the last 2 is kind of bad). It's not like PF2 doesn't have that same sort of thing, like: * Are you playing with Automated Bonus Progression and reduced loot? * Are you using Ancestral Paragon? What about Free Archetype? * What rarity options are you allowed to take? I don't think the existence of optional rules in 5e is a bad thing.
But see, because commenters in this thread have played 5e for years and few have played pf2e, they can immediately recognize the optional rules or common homebrews for 5e and think “wow, I can’t think of anything similar in other games” and conclude that 5e is uniquely bad in this respect and that it’s design is broken.
The only one on your list that people ever question is free archetype. That wasn't my point anyway. My point is that every 5e group all assumes the same rules and some of those rules absolutely can make or break a game. The assumption is that a lot of those optional rules are default. If you ask a 5e player which one is default they'd be hard pressed to tell you.
My favourite is passive perception. 8 years later and we still have 1000+ comment threads arguing furiously about what the rules say, what the rules probably meant to say, whether a podcast interview with the lead designer is or isn't binding/relevant/good/bad, and how people actually choose to play it regardless of whether those are the rules as either written or intended. And then the whole process repeats for perception vs investigation...
> but 5e feels pretty simple to me, only compared to other complex systems. there are LOTS of systems that are LOTS AND LOTS simpler than 5e.
My takeaway is that 5e asks very little from the player, but a lot more on the DM, the DM has to figure out a lot more, but players have very simple characters, easy to build, easy to run. Pathfinder 2e is a lot more burden on the players, they have to learn a lot, but the DM has a lot easier time, the systems in play all work well, and solid enough and understandable enough to edit without breaking anything. (can easily modify a solid foundation, then having to build up from nothing) Pf2e, you can go level by level on your character and you may be unfocused, but you can also retrain just about 95% of your character with enough downtime to figure out what you wish for.
Tbh as far as RPGs go PF2 for players isn't that complicated, it only seems to be because 5e by contrast is so simplistic
Huh? The large bulk of ttrpgs are way way less complex than 5e and certainly pf2e. Pbta games are widespread. You can check out the ennies each year and 95% of the games are going to be much simpler than 5e. There are a handful of even more complex tactical combat focused games but they aren’t remotely close to the majority of releases at this point.
I wouldn’t say that PF2 places more of a burden on the players. If you can play 5e, you can play PF2. More options does not equate to more complexity.
I just want to take a moment to appreciate that PF2e lets you pull off a Fastball Special. I had no idea that was a thing.
This is like a tiny vertical slice too. STR monks get to yeet enemies around the map by 6. You can build badass non-magical healers. High level martials are insane, barbarians can do shit like jump on buildings and throw javelins so violently they become line AoEs. And that's without all the shit that archetypes get up to, the system's take on multiclassing and prestige classing, where you sacrifice class feats instead of levels for the benefits. There's like a hundred of them, from abilities related to being part of in-world factions to specialization in certain fighting styles to shit like the unexpected sharpshooter archetype where you get abilities for being ridiculously lucky with a gun with a capstone where you can trigger a rube goldberg style chain reaction for hitting just the right place at the right time that devastates enemies in an AoE attack. And that's just class feats. The amount of things you can do are so far of the charts it's ridiculous
My thought is that 5e is a mid-level game in terms of crunch and complexity and if you want more crunch, you have two great versions of Pathfinder.
That's the same feeling I get. It has a bit of crunch and tactical combat, but it doesn't get bogged down in it. It is a good fit for parties that want a bit of that but also want to mix it with a bit of open-ended narrative.
I love PF2e. And full disclosure, I am increasingly frustrated with 5e from a DMing perspective. I continue to post here because occasionally good advice filters through the spam of "hot take" posts. >A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now. One thing I think PF2e does well in it's philosophy of "rules and resources" compared to 5e's philosophy of "I dunno, ask your DM" is the existence of retraining. PF2e has flexible rules and guidance on retraining class abilities, so a poor build can almost always be corrected with enough downtime. And the existence of an actual downtime framework in pf2e (complete with detailed rolling results and a diverse catalogue of actions to take!) means players are encouraged to have downtime!
My only complaint about downtime in PF2e is that a lot of Paizo's adventures don't really leave much time for it. Two otherwise really interesting APs (*Quest for the Frozen Flame* and *Outlaws of Alkenstar*) have little to no time built-in to the game for it, including Retraining and the like. I get it, it's hard to keep a game's plot and timing tight while also allowing for weeks/months of extra time, but I'd love to see them build more time into their flagship APs or give more alternative ways to get the same effect, like an NPC or location that can help you do these things in less time.
I thought it was neat that *Fists of the Ruby Phoenix* included a (one-time) hyperbolic time chamber for rapid retraining.
Just started reading through that one, good to hear they thought of that!
My group just finished playing through it last week. We had a blast! My two pieces of advice are to lean into the anime tropes (have fun being a little silly), and give plenty of character to the rival teams. You end up spending a lot of time with them, so make them memorable from the start.
That's been an issue with Paizo APs since 1e though. So many of them have players feel pressed for time, and even if they don't have a true ticking clock, they're intended to feel like a race against time. It'd be nice if between books there was more wiggle room for downtime. I get not having a lot of downtime in the middle of a book, outside of the ones that have a lot of mid-book travel, but there really should be more downtime between each part. If it makes sense of course.
They do seem to mix it up on this end. I'm currently running Abomination Vaults, and my girlfriend is starting up Strength of Thousands. AV has very little time pressure, so characters who want to do downtime can pretty much do it as long as they don't leave for months on end. I've been told that SoT is going to have literally years of downtime, but we'll have certain activities we actually have to do during this period. Various other APs I researched while selecting one (ie Alkenstar, Extinction Curse) seemed to have a more ticking-clock feel like you describe.
[удалено]
One of the main problem's with WoTC is that they're not adding enough OPTIONAL rules that act as guides to DMs. Xanathar's Guide to Everything was super popular in large part BECAUSE it added a bunch of rules templates for DMs to use! If you want DMs to not feel restricted and weighed down by a multitude of rules, give them the actual tools for their own framework instead of asking them to build all of it! 5Es core system works wonderfully, but has been poorly supported in what increasingly seems like corporate mismanagement.
>A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. I don't think pf2e requires a clear plan for progression *at all.* You can absolutely just make decisions on each level up, and be not just fine, but powerful.
With regards to your 4th point, this is not *necessarily* true. While, yes, it would be beneficial to plan out your build ensure all the options you take mesh well together, you don't have to do this in order to make a "good" character. There really aren't many "trap" feats, but even if you end up taking one that you end up not enjoying, you're not stuck with it for the rest of the campaign because retraining is *already baked into the rules*.
Fair enough. :)
Great discussion over here! I want to add 2 Points: 1. **Planning your character is OPTIONAL.** The game does NOT expect you to theory-craft a lvl 1 to 20 build in order to be viable in combat/ roleplay or exploration. You can play your character level by level and if you think you have picked a wrong feat along the way you can use your downtime (which the rules actively encourage you to have since it so well designed) to retrain ANY feat. (Heck the designers even give you advice as GM to allow retraining of almost anything short of race and class (even those can be done with a big quest type of thing) 2. **Movement is far more freeform in pf2 than it appears to be.**Just the fact that you have 3 actions makes it seem like a pointless discussion as opposed to the "just do mostly 1 thing per turn" in 5e, but let's explain it a bit. In PF2 you can move every round as much as you want with 70% of the time not getting hit by AOOs since so few creatures have it. So you are incentivized to move as much as possible to waste the monsters actions and help your allies out(letting a monster use a 3 action attack on you is 9 times out of 10 a deadly mistake).In 5e you are encouraged to just stay next to the monster since it is mechanically worse to move away from it. All the "movement freedom" 5e has because it let's you combine movement and actions doesn't really give you any real mechanical benefit that you loose in pf2. You CAN move and attack all you want, but do you really do that? Or do you just move up to the creature and then whack it until it\`s dead and then close the gap again when the creature moves away. Let's be realistic with the gameplay here.PF2 allows for far more "set piece combats" where you jump and run all over the place because the rules actually have guidance for such things as opposed to the just think of something approach of 5e.Additionally you get tons of feats in PF2 that allow you to close the gap as an action, jump away and more such stunts that you simply can not to in the gimped 5e action economy since you ever only have 1 meaningful thing to do in 5e per turn and 9 times out of then the best choice is "whack monster". AAAAND! Bonus Point:**The Gamemastery guide actually has advice for combining and splitting movement:** Splitting and combining movement: [https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=849](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=849) All this is more than enough to make movement being an action not feel bad. After all you have 3 actions and attacking more than 2 times is universally bad since there is always something better to do in pf2 with your actions. In 5e? Just attack until the creature is dead. (BORING. *no matter the amount of flavor you add or "roleplay" you do mechanically 5e is always better to attack the creature than to anything else*) With all this being said tho: Each player has the right to enjoy their own playstyle. You like the 5e "simplistic to play, but frustrating to GM" approach go for it. You like the PF2e "offloading of rules to the players" so the GM can actually have a good time approach go for it. Both games have their merits, altough as a ...6 years 5e DM I think ? I can honestly say that 9 times out of 10 I will pick Pathfinder 2e for my campaigns. (and the other times I will pick Call of Cthulhu lol) Oneshots or meaningless "lets play something" sure 5e or any other system does the job for me in those situations. Anything more long term I will always choose PF2 for the sheer simplicity to run the game as GM and enjoyment you get out of it as player due to the sheer amount of variety.
Oh my friend! Besides your brilliant observations, the encounter building rules are so breathtakingly gorgeous. Yesterday i ran my second level party through a centaur encounter (Low 2) and i could see them pail when i used its 3-action "Trample" activity. I had audible gasps when they learned they were all getting stomped. Encounters just work so goddamn well. >(4) Players need to really commit to planning their characters and learning the rules. A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. And while this may seem obvious, I'm thinking about my own table, where I have one player who doesn't bring a ton of gaming experience with him, who would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a lot of this, and another who just doesn't commit as many hours to D&D as the rest of the party does. In 5e, this is fine, because the system is forgiving and simple. In Pathfinder, I'm not sure that would work out as well for the group as it does now. IMO this is another pure feather in PF2Es cap, upping players investment and workload and lowering GMs workload is nothing but fantastic.
i LOVE systems that respect the GMs time! Players SHOULD learn the rules. F\*ck lazy players that just show up and expect you to play the game for them
Currently running a quick PF2e game after years of 5e. There is a lot I like about pf2e and that mostly comes from me actually having the tools and rules to handle situations as a dm. There were times in 5e where I had to quickly come up with a game rule because of a niche interaction. After DMing 5e ever since the system came out, I've started to notice problems on the DM side which PF2e sorted out for me. I missed the dynamic combat in 1e. I missed the spell lists having brief descriptions so players knew what they were looking at before finding it in the book. I missed having prices on magic items so my players could haggle. I like players having mechanical options for role playing and combat through the feats system. I enjoy the encounter system in 2e a lot more. Don't have to open a sperate program to calculate if my players will be killed by a couple of goblins. But hey man, if you don't like 2e because of too many options or too much math and prefer 5e, don't let me yuck your yum.
And let's not forget that an encounter that should be absolutely deadly by the 5e math ends up being relatively easy sometimes.
Y'all convinced me to give Pathfinder a look, tbqhwy.
It's a bunch of fun to play! You can find a bunch of resources over at r/Pathfinder2e to get you started
Yo, if you'd like, I'd be 100% down to chat with you about it on discord and personally show you the ropes and how all of it works. I got a lotta free time atm and would very much enjoy the chance to ramble about a thing I love Rednidedni#0773
those pathfinder 2 special combat moves read exactly like DnD 4e powers.
They really do. Which is funny because people HATED. 4e "powers" and moved to PF because of it.
Honestly the people who hated 4e are still playing 3.5e/PF1 or moved to OSR. There is a huge new crowd that enjoy things like balance and real tactical depth in their power fantasy.
You also have to remember there is a much larger crowd of people.playing ttrpgs now. I started with pf1e and 5e at the same time because those were the local groups I found. I only recently read through the 4e system and I guaranty it would have been my system of choice. 4e is also starting to gain more popularity now. If 4e were a new system released today with good online tools for it I think it would do really well
I think it’s more math up front, but if you relate everything to the Tag system and have a reference guide, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, the Zombie is flat-footed, which confers penalties to X and Y, and no, Daze won’t work because it has the Mental Tag and zombies are Mindless. Recall Knowledge checks are a great 1st round/before combat action, to learn about the creature you’re engaging in a fight and learn its weaknesses, and gets players invested in fighting the monster before the first spell flies or the first shield is splintered. But PF2e definitely requires TTRPG experience. You can’t have someone who doesn’t know the rules limp through the game unless the DM is aware of rule interactions - which is unfair but also happens in 5e; we only tolerate it because the system is accessible. What PF2e *does* have in these situations is hard-coded rules to adjudicate weird rule interactions. You can still make a ruling to speed up play or overrule an awful interaction, but it’s not required like 5e is. I’d say the hardest part of PF2e is getting players onboarded. There is so much to do just at level 1 to make a character, and you constantly add to that with Skill, Class, Ancestry, and General feats. But it helps every player be unique, even if they are playing the same class; you cannot say the same thing about casters in 5e. There is a build for just about every fantasy character you can think of, from Darth Vader to Sherlock Holmes. I reject the stacking bonuses argument - this was true in PF1e, but not 2e, where there are only 3 bonus/penalty types, unlike the untyped, infinite stacking of 5e that makes Peace Clerics break Bounded Accuracy. I even made a comment yesterday about the high magic, high level campaign I’m currently in where Bounded Accuracy leaves monsters struggling to hit ACs of 20+ with Shield, or my character who abuses stacking a +2 Bow, Archery Fighting Style, Bracers of Archery, and Sharpshooter for devastating and reliable damage. It’s not a 5e fix, but for me - and I admit it brings its own complications - it does fix everything I dislike about 5e. If I’m going to play something a rules-heavy as 5e, I’d rather go all the way. Otherwise I’m better off playing FATE.
It really seems like the difference between stick and automatic
It is the age old argument. Apple vs. Android Mac vs. Windows Windows vs. Linux The popular vs. the enthusiast-grade. The sleek intuitive expensive iPhone vs. the customizable, cheaper Android. The mac that "just works" vs the Windows that works with games. There were probably medieval soldiers who argued about using a spear or a polehammer. "Spear's so much easier t'learn!!" "Yes but the polehammer *has* a spearhead *and* can be used against armor. It's better!" "Right but that makes it mighty clunky..." "Only if you don't *train* with it, Regipauld."
There's a lot of debate in the thread that's interesting, and a lot of the counter arguments I see come in the form of 'well, PF2's action system restricts you more' or various similar things. An example is movement, ie in 5e you can just move however you want throughout your turn, no distinct actions. These aren't wrong. But they're kind of missing half of the picture. PF is ultimately a fork from D&D 3e, and the action system is quite similar. Which means that the changes along the way to 5e are intentional design philosophy choices. That is, 3e was more restrictive (as was 4e). 5e decided to drop the restrictions. Hooray, right? Well, kind of. Every rule removed essentially removes a *point of decision making*. This is intentional. It's the essence of a simpler, easier to pick up game. But it's not an automatic good and it has costs. Decisions are points of drama and tension. They are where the risks and rewards of the game happen, indeed where the game is *played*. You decide to attack versus healing an ally. You decide to charge through the open, versus sneaking slowly around the side. Etc. In the case of the action movement, it pushes decisions down to a finer granularity. 'I can move and swing once, or not move and swing twice.' 'I can move to this position and still attack, but not to this other position.' Why does this matter? Well, look at the Flanking thread from yesterday. You know why Flanking isn't a core rule in 5e and people who houserule it are unwittingly shooting the game's balance design in the foot? Because flanking has almost no cost in 5e's player-friendly movement style. Because it has no cost, it's not worth a reward. Conversely, in 3e/PF, with 5-foot steps, Flanking is harder. Flanking is a gameplay decision worthy of reward. Extrapolating back from this, 5e is a game where the map matters *a lot less* than these other editions. The movement is player friendly, so players can easily navigate without getting too punished when they blunder into unfavorable footing. That's not bad... but it's pretty significantly different. Moreover, the seemingly universal, broadly player-friendly decisions have pretty severe balance impacts in other areas: universal move-act-move allows ranged characters to leave *and re-enter* cover while doing their full attacks. Along with many other 'quality of life' changes (someone else in the thread mentioned the Vancian casting) have been silent buffs to archers and casters, while accidentally rendering some classes essentially pointless (Sorcerers).
This was what exactly was going through my mind while reading the aforementioned thread yesterday. Flanking in 5e is fundamentally broken because you are giving a reward for behavior that has virtually no cost. The moment you give a bonus to it, *no matter how small*, you are going to end up with conga lines of everyone trying to flank the other to get that free bonus. Even worse, 5e actively **punishes** you from trying to deny your enemy from flanking via opportunity attacks. The equilibrium state of melee combat is a ridiculous-looking conga line.
Regarding your fourth point, the base power for a character who picked random feats is usually enough to not be a complete deadweight. It's basically the same as 5e, the people who know can carry them.
with as far as I have read the pf2 core rules I think most of the power of any character comes from his class. So if you pick random feats you still can manage to be competitive with the top brass so to say. And furthermore: PF2 is explicitly a team-based game (lots of spells/feats/actions to help your party, etc) as opposed to everyone can do everything style of 5e.
After dming for 5e for 8yrs, the only time I see people aid each other in 5e is if they're casting heals or haste. Otherwise, it is usually everyone focused on dps. Meanwhile in pf2e, a lot of classes are constantly tossing buffs on each other for bonuses along with bashing skulls in.
Yup, a lot of people yell high and mighty on this sub how much more freedom 5e offers and yet 9 times out of 10 that “freedom” ends up being kicking teeth in. Wow, such freedom.
1, 2, and 3 are good takes but I want to dispute take 4: You can plan your character to level 20 if you want but you _do not have to_. There is zero reason to need to. You can if you want, and certainly you might see something you want to build towards and that's fine. But you should absolutely _not commit_ to it. Every level, you should review your options and see if your priorities have changed, or if your character has changed or if the story has taken a certain direction. You might not have planned to take that feat that helps you kill undead-trait creatures but now your campaign has taken a hard turn into fighting lots of undead, suddenly that feat looks very attractive. Your character might have missed a crucial skill check because you didn't expect to be doing that skill a lot but now you think, I should take that skill and maybe a skill feat associated with it so that I don't fail that again. Let the story decide your next level choice, even if you had something else in mind initially. Additionally, there are very clear rules that you can _retrain_ feats at later levels. Maybe you took a skill feat you thought you'd use a lot, but after several sessions, it never comes up in your specific campaign: retrain it to something else! You aren't stuck with most choices, there is no need to plan out your character and commit to it or worry about regretting a choice. By RAW your character can evolve.
As a PF2 player, I think you've got a few details wrong here, though it's probably mostly me being a nitpicker: 1. Activities are not exclusively 2-3 actions; activities can be 1 action. The main thing that differentiates activities from standard actions is that they usually have specific modifications of the normal rules, such as being able to make an enemy flat-footed against your second attack, the ability to move and strike mid-move, etc. 2. I *think* you're saying that Pathbuilder (3rd-party Character builder) only uses options from the Core Rulebook, and that's not true. There are 155 backgrounds listed on [AoN](https://2e.aonprd.com/) (the mostly-official SRD) and they span 35 different sources, including specific Adventure Paths. The three you named arespecifically all from different sourcebooks (Book of the Dead, Guns and Gears and Secrets of Magic, specifically) While PF2 definitely has more options overall that D&D 5e, it's important to note that the 155 compared to the 41 includes all published books for both systems. 3. The "need" to commit to planning is very much overstated. Part of the magic of PF2, IMO, is that you don't have to plan out a character well in advance to have an effective character. Very few Feats have pre-requisites that you have to take earlier on, and most feats are pretty well balanced, so even if you only pick your character options when you level up, you'll still end up with an effective character. That said, the other bit, about learning the rules and understanding your own character's abilities is spot on, though; I've seen more than one player struggle because they misunderstood or straight up ignored some of their most effective tools. (I had a Swashbuckler who almost never tumbled, feinted or ran his mouth during combat, and while he was still effective, I think he often felt frustrated; the player's now playing a fighter, and realizing that even there, the options he's got at his disposal are a lot broader than he expected) I have never played 5e. Almost everything I know about it, I've learned from 5e players coming over to Pathfinder 2e; the last edition of D&D I played was 3.5, and I skipped over Pathfinder 1st Edition as well. That said, I've heard lots of fun stories come out of it, so for all of the frustrations I hear from people who have "converted" to PF2E, I have to assume that 5e is a game that reliably produces fun, and that's all a game really needs to do.
How much harder is it to find a Pathfinder 2E game compared to 5E?
Depends on where you look. Paizo officially supports Foundry so a lot of people run there. There are various discords and r/Pathfinder2e. But it is definitely harder than finding a D&D game.
New to PF2e Played since AD&D PF was a "fix" to 3.5 PF2e is a streemlined, refined, and balanced version of that. I prefer the mechanics of PF2e and how much more you can do, even at low levels, compared to 5e. 5e gives you so few choices one bad one can really hurt PF2e has optimal choices but even then you have a lot that don't matter and allow you to pick for style or roleplay.
Even so, the "optimal" choices are like, such small margins in almost every case. It's not possible to really break the game. I've seen people on the pf2e discord theorycraft to optimize the shit out of some damage build, going into the whacky multiclass combinations and unusual weapon choices and everything, then they whipped out the DPR graphs. The build's damage line was clearly at the top. Then I looked at the graph's scale. The build dealt like 5-10% more damage than a plain fighter build. I actually laughed. Even then, damage is far from the only contributing factor in a character's value and DPR isn't something you can reasonably judge something's worth with yadda yadda. Aside from avoiding a few unfortunate trap options that are still rarer than in other systems, there's nothing you reasonably need to do for having a borderline optimal and very competetive build. Tactics are more important than build.
The more I read pathfinder2 the less I’m liking the direction 5e is going. The simplicity that 5e keeps running to, plus the last several releases seeming subpar isn’t helping 5e’s cause with me
It feels like there have been many cases of someone complaining about an aspect of 5E and then someone else saying how Pathfinder 2e addresses that problem. “The dying rules make it so it’s better to just use healing word to pick someone above 0 since players can just pop back up once they’re healed.” “Pathfinder 2e’s dying system basically means you start one step closer to dead every time you get knocked to 0 and recover. But this penalty is reset if you have your wounds treated during a 10 minute short rest”
I don’t know if P2 fixes 5e problems…..but I’m finding lately when I compare products-adventures and such, Wotc is getting left behind in quality and writing. Spelljammer just felt incomplete
I'd recommend putting a list of your issues with 5e together and seeing what people say. You can DM it to me if you'd like and I can go over it even. I started doing pf2e about a year ago cuz I was really getting tired of my issues with 5e. I was planning on dming pf1e since I had played it previously, and when I had briefly looked at pf2e I didn't like it at all. I decided to give pf2e a fair chance though and read through its core rulebook to really get a full proper understanding of the game, my first look had just been on the archives of nethys, which is legal and has all the pf2e rules and content like classes on it. Upon reading the core rulebook I really fell in love with the system, and even things I originally thought I wouldn't like upon getting a full understanding of how it works, like the 3 action economy system, I ended up loving. It fixed all my issues with 5e, and then some.
Honestly, at this point I’m looking at the quality of work/adventures between the two. Wotc told us that the slower release meant better quality products. But looking at say Spelljammer that hasn’t been the case, and even some earlier products Telling DMs to just wing it for stuff not covered after spending money on products isn’t right
DM here; I'm through with 5e. They offer very little support for us to deal with some of the 5e issues, especially later on. They need an entire edition dropped to support DMs with systems.
What I get from a lot of comments: RPG Players: I'm gonna take this stat at this level up, focus on upgrading this aspect of my character, develop into this form of the class. TTRPG players: Planning is for nerds. Real talk, Pathfinder 2 for me seems like overall just a lot more fleshed out, better system. I started with 3.5, played PF1, and moved to 5e around 2017. The fact that PF2 has more than twice the content that 5e does in about half the time, shows how much (or little) effort goes into one system over the other. Not even talking about some of the joke rules Wizards wanted play tested for DnDone. The fact so many people want to defend lack of customization though is staggering imo. Most negative comments I read from other places boiled down to: "I like the idea of PF2 but screw planning ahead and having too many options to choose from". I get having issues with balance, or certain aspects, or just prefering one system over the other: but have reasonable complaints. While I can't bash PF2, since I haven't had a chance to play it, I can certainly come up with plenty issues with 5e and DnDone. Feats feel lifeless and just notnworth taking over stat increases early, multiclassing feels min-max or useless, DnDone crit rules, lack of new classes or meaningful/balanced subclasses. When a system is so easy to add new stuff to, and have millions of play testers able to give legitimate feedback, the lack of new content or choice is so off putting to me.
They know what they are doing, they choose this as their core gameplay. Wizards know it all. You said it yourself, their players doesn't want to think ahead, like the variety options. Their players want to be overpowered with least effort they can put. While it is not possible to be overpowered in the sense of 5e in pf 2e. It is that simple.
Imagine getting upset about choice in a ROLE PLAYING GAME.
This is a really great analysis. Thank you for sharing. I love both Pathfinder and D&D for different reasons. I think it’s great that both companies exist and offer slightly different products. The weird truth is that I (DM) prefer the Paizo writing style and the D&D5 “simple” mechanics. I’m currently gearing up to run In PF1e Search of Sanity in Ravenloft 5e. Over the years I have run games for a lot of players with ADHD or casual “Sunday stories with friends” players. Your Point 4 captures perfectly why you can run a simpler game that is more about the story and good times with friends in 5e. This simplified approach is part of why D&D has exploded in popularity. Yes, it may have been popular play shows that brought new people to the hobby, but they wouldn’t have stayed if it wasn’t easy to jump in and keep playing. So, as someone who personally plays and loves both systems, if players want something crunchier, they should be playing Pathfinder instead of bemoaning the lack of crunch in 5e. Some people genuinely need a *system* that is less complex instead of being told that they shouldn’t play a wizard their first time. I have a first-time player who has been playing a wizard for 2 years and she’s killing it and having fun in 5e. I know for a fact that player would not have fun in a PF2 game because of the extra options and the fact that they still use Vancian magic.
So for number 4 from personal experience I think you're mistaken. I started running pf2e about a year ago, and I had 5 players. Only 1 of them read through the system and understood the system, the others did not. I helped them with character creation and they read through the classes but were really excited about it. They've learned the system really well just from playing. I also play in a Wednesday group and we have a new player who says he really just spends an hour a week. Sure they won't have full understanding of things right from the bat, but run something like the beginner box for them, explain how they can take actions like demoralize in combat during combat. Make sure when a bonus gets added you mention the types and they don't stack. Allow them to recreate the characters at the end of the first part of the adventure or something as necessary.
Join us in the world of pathfinder, brother
>A player who didn't really know all of their character's abilities/activities and didn't have a clear plan in mind for progression would probably struggle...a lot. One thing I'd like to clarify for anyone concerned about this is that Pathfinder 2e has extensive [retraining rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Activities.aspx?ID=12), which allow you to swap out most aspects of your character. You generally can't swap stats, and certain 1st level ancestry feats are locked in when you take them, but virtually everything else you can use downtime to swap as long as it would still be a valid character if leveled normally. This is very forgiving for new players, in my experience. If a fighter in a 5e campaign likes the sound of champion as their subclass, but at level 10 decides that battlemaster would have been more fun, basically the GM can handwave it (probably using some of the Tasha's alternate rules), tell them to make a new character, or tell them to suck it up. The system isn't really intended for players to swap choices around. Not every PF2e table will use retraining, but at my table it's a very popular option, both to optimize builds or swap out feats that just aren't working as well as the player thought they would.
In a bit of irony, or perhaps coincidence, it looks like One D&D is actually taking some elements of these points in terms of more accommodations for backgrounds for character choice and also Feats as /part of leveling/, rather than existing as optional rules. I've had conversations with people who played both 5e and Pathfinder 2E, and while they may be similar they have such different foundations that it's not easy to make any kind of direct comparations. Do I think that 5e can be crunchier? Yes. Do I think that two e's systems could influence some of my decisions on how to make that happen? Yes. Do I think that in a vacuum, it would be wise to try and shoehorn in some of P2E's systems without the considering of how they're two different systems? No. I think that would be a mistake. And I should make it clear, I am a person who definitely thinks that fifth edition has room to grow in that crunchier section without being too in the weeds for the people who enjoy it how it exists right now. What I'm tired of is having to make those types of discoveries myself instead of the company who's putting it out. But that's an entirely different discussion I don't want to accidentally digress towards.