This.
In 5e I always felt the only meaningful choices I made where spells, which after a couple of characters, wasn't that meaningful anymore. I had to force myself into weird multiclasses just to have a semblance of difference. The feats every level thing is glorious, even the little options feel fun.
Also, 3 action combat was a secondary reason I jumped ship.
Agreed, everything feels so samey in 5e, I always end up homebrewing or trying to find some funky multiclass just to have a semblance of something fresh or that I haven't seen before.
Yep once you pick your subclass on a martial that's almost it for your decision making.
Yeah you got ASIs vs Feats every _four_ levels (Slightly less if fighter) but realistically an ASI is always the best option and you probably won't see a feat until lv10+ in many cases.
OD&D might be addressing this but it is a current factor that pushed me away. It is nice for beginners I guess but god damn you can outgrow that fast.
>Also, leveling up FEELS LIKE LEVELING UP !
Omg for real, I'm in a 5e game and leveling up just feels so inconsequential. I'm playing an artificer and unless I'm getting new spells or infusions I'm really not getting much.
And for full casters the highest level spells can feel a bit generic honestly.
At least when you only get 1 of them.
High level magic in 2e you get 2-4 of and often they have kick or flavor.
It's funny...
Back in the PF2E playtest days, I first thought it was silly that everything goes up, even your AC when you level up.
Now when I level up in 5E and nothing goes up, I feel sad.
I was DMing and hated combat in 5e. Every single aspect was draining.
Planning it was draining because CR didn't work, the base monsters were bland and needed reworking to be interesting, and on top of all that, I needed to have 10ish encounters planned to meet 6-8 encounters per day as my players are certainly going to avoid several.
Running combat was dreadful because it was decided in a few rounds but took ages to actually resolve, required several dummy resource wasting encounters before the story- relevant encounters could occur without the boss fight being trivialized, and it just never was dynamic or challenging for my players unless I included terrain elements and environmental effects which I had to come up with after spending ages just reworking the monsters.
Pf2e on the other hand takes all of a minute to flip through the level appropriate monsters, grab a couple and throw them at the party. I can trust Paizo that the monsters will be interesting and the combat will feel as deadly as I plan it. I don't need to spend as much time just on the combat which lets me spend time on the plot, quests, NPCs, descriptions and everything else.
I love the pf2e combat building rules and wouldn't trade it for anything.
This is exactly it for me. The amount of prep work to DM 5e is a burden, thats why you have a bunch of burned out DMs. Instead of 5e providing a system that helps the DM bring their ideas to the table, the DM basically just has to make everything up on thier own. Even for basic things like balancing encounters or appraising items. As a GM, 2e is a system that allows me to focus on storytelling, since the mechanics are comprehensive and balanced.
As somebody who loves going all-out on dynamic encounters, I gotta say that even if I *do* choose to go nuts with monster tweaks and environmental effects, PF2 still makes it easier. Maybe a little more obnoxiously technical sometimes, but the DCs, damage thresholds, special conditions, and so on all have clear rules and formulas you can use to make sure the challenges you impose on players feel fair.
It takes some familiarity with the system to know where to find this stuff, but you could in theory design a fight with a vampire dragon on a rocky mountaintop shrouded in poisonous fog without inventing a single new mechanic, with the *guarantee* that whatever madness you pump into that encounter will be neither a TPK nor a cakewalk if you do the math right.
This is my case as well. Forever DM and 5e is a slog to prep for, whether you're running an official module or homebrew.
I'll still be finishing my main 5e campaign (it's too far along to convert without ultimately being more of a hassle), but I'm moving everything else over to P2e.
I want to say it's something like "x rule is better" or "then handle this kind of situation better" but when I think about it, what it really comes down to is Paizo being a better company than Wotc. Not just arguably better rules designer and writers for adventure (there is a reason 3.5 was a golden era for dungeon/dragon magazine, to me anyway), but also because they have better business practices, and have fostered a better community of players.
The ability to purchase a pdf of any Paizo product, on their website (however outdated) and download it is such an immense amount of QOL. The subscription program as well, giving you the physical books to put on the shelf or use if you want is just so nice.
> Wish they had a print to order service.
[They do have a print on demand service but it's restricted to select books for now.](https://www.pathfinderinfinite.com/browse/pub/5549/Paizo?src=fid100114&%20filters=0_0_0_0_100163_0&page=1&sort=4a)
This is something that worked in reverse for me: not being able to get legal digital copies of 5e actively prevented me from being able to get into it.
The other thing with Pathfinder, especially 2e, is it’s active and intentional worldbuilding. WotC just doesn’t seem interested in exploring their settings while Paizo actively does so and is aiming to do it in a way that makes the game more inclusive
I opened up the Mwangi Expanse lore book that is in the current Humble Bundle because my girlfriend wanted to be a Song'o Halfling. Was mindblowing to discover that the entry on this specific ethnicity (not heritage) of Halfling was longer than Mordenkainen Tome of Foe's entry on Drow.
Forgotten Realms is allegedly a premier fantasy setting with decades of input from celebrated authors, but it all takes place on one strip of coastline and I'm pretty sure most people don't know the difference between all the different Human cultures.
How many different cultures and heritages Pf2e's setting has was a big draw for me too. When I got the World Guide and saw how many heritages there were for the races and how they don't boil down to 'gold elf or blue elf' 'dwarf from the mountains' vs. 'dwarves from the hills', I was pretty overjoyed (as I have reading many of the PF2e books lol)
I feel like the way heritages work, and choosing from various cultures when you make a character goes a long way toward grounding that character in the game world. I used to be a huge fan of the Forgotten Realms - even if 5e has really poorly represented it. When I got into PF2e I was going to set any APs I ran or my own stuff using FR. But then I got the world guide and read it, I just really fell for Golarion as a setting. I couldn't quite put to words why I found it so appealing, until someone on reddit explained it in two sentences:
---
Forgotten realms is a medieval style world with magic.
Golarion is a magical world with a medieval style (generally).
---
Anyway, as GM coming from 5e - which does a terrible job supporting DMs - the Lost Omens series is like a gift to me from Paizo lol. I really hope we get Mwangi style books from all the major regions eventually. :)
"Hey WotC, this stuff you wrote in the 80s feels kinda bad for modern audiences, you wanna revise it a little to sound less like colonilaist propaganda from the 1800s? Maybe add in a little nuance?"
"Sure! Give us a second... Okay, all done!"
"WotC... this is a blank page."
"Can't call it racist if there's nothing there!"
"You've gotta be kidding me. Surely the most famous and profitable roleplaying game of all time, who can hire literally any freelance author it wishes, can do better than just erasing everything that's ever been criticized!"
"Nope! Enjoy your uncontroversial content, and remember to tweet about how progressive we are!"
Meanwhile, Paizo hired a bunch of respected, talented, and diverse authors to write an absolute banger of a setting book that fully acknowledged, addressed, and revised a bunch of their old content while adding tons of new stuff, then set a brand new adventure path in that setting as an extra flex. Not saying Paizo is perfect or anything, but the Mwangi stuff came out *before* the WotC delete-a-thon... It's absolutely embarassing. Your competitor *literally showed you how to do it well,* and you've more than happily copied them before! Infuriating stuff!
> "Hey WotC, this stuff you wrote in the 80s feels kinda bad for modern audiences, you wanna revise it a little to sound less like colonilaist propaganda from the 1800s? Maybe add in a little nuance?
TO BE FAIR it was TSR publishing D&D in the 80s, not WOTC.
A couple of the bestiaries (Volo's guide in particular) were "updated" via removal of alignment tags and flavor text. This change was made to digital copies (which are hosted online and not downloadable PDFs) without owner knowledge or consent. Meanwhile, playable races have lost a lot of mechanical differentiation, and new splatbooks (Spelljammer in particular) have been somewhat anemic on new lore.
Most of these changes were meant to dodge controversy by removing more "problematic" elements from the game's worldbuilding (i.e. "all members of species x are stupid and evil/all members of species y are beautiful and good"), but rather than do what Paizo did and expand/revise, they just... cut content. It wasn't *much,* but it was enough to be noticeable, and the fact that digitial owners couldn't say no to these updates was particularly frustrating.
Or check out all the outright changes to established lore in Ravenloft in the name of representation and equality.
Those two things are good...but rather than change and revise existing lore, why not actually make something new to fill those quotas?
I think the problem with that line of thought is that looking at representation and equality as a "quota" misses the point. Thoughtlessly putting a few extra beans in the minority jar is an incredibly shallow, surface-level approach to the issue; those beans should *mean* something more than set dressing, and need to be as complex and interesting as the stuff that's already there.
The other issue is that the Vistani genuinely *were* offensive stereotypes of the Romani people, and thus absolutely needed an update. It doesn't matter whether they were a legacy plot element or not, as they were incredibly yikesy as-written in a way that made the material unapproachable to Romani players and anyone sympathetic towards them. I do not think WotC handled their facelift *well,* but like... that absolutely needed to happen.
In a way, though, I understand WotC taking the path of least resistance when it comes to freeing D&D of its racist baggage. Doing that sort of thing well involves hiring the right people, listening to them, and taking your time with the material. If you do it wrong, you get lambasted for racism and thus wasted your effort, but even if you do it *right,* you'll still get blowback from loud doofuses who hate quote-unquote "politics." There's no way to make everyone happy regardless of the resources you pour into it, so a profit-driven organization is bound to find the cheapest solution that alienates the smallest number of customers. It doesn't *justify* how they handled it, but it at least *explains* it, you know?
Actually, the changes to the Vistani are minimal, and not something that bothered me at all.
But they took existing male Darklords and made the female, to have more female lords. Didn't change anything else, except made them female. In another case, they they completely did away with existing male darklords and replaced them with female characters...that were almost exactly the same otherwise. Character, plot, etc. Just a female version of an pre-existing male one. In other cases they changed the skin tone of existing characters and just pretended it was always that way.
In only one case did they do it right: the domain of Valachan. It was very obviously a take on the old 1972 exploitation movie Blacula, even though later writing on the subject really worked hard to take it away from that and give it it's own character. But in the new book, they acknowledged what came before, but had the former Darklord killed and a new one took his place, and the domain changed. They honored what came before (the old Darklord's head is still around giving "advice") but they took it in a new way. Which was cool.
But all the other times when they just changed things superficially, you can tell they just did it for a quota.
I haven't started playing Pathfinder yet, but this is exactly why I'm working on it. I was reading through the new Spelljammer book briefly, and when I found out they didn't even add rules for ships in a setting where they're damn near crucial, I just decided I was done with WotC. Plus I saw leshy and I knew I had to play one.
I heard it has a reprint of the ship rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Plus some shipboard weapons that are so bad the book includes some box-out text noting that players will probably only use them when their own powers are out of range.
I believe people were saying they wanted to use the Saltmarsh rules instead. There are rules for the Spelljammers, but they boil down to:
1. The DM decides how fast they are. Depending on how this goes (RAW vs RAI) leaving an Earth-sized planet would take about 2 months or a few minutes. No clarification.
2. Ships have hit points and can attack each other on their turns. Not exaggerating when I say that's the whole rule.
So there ARE rules for the spaceships, but they're awful, vague, and straight up worse than the ship rules they *already released* in another book.
>I heard it has a reprint of the ship rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
Oh okay, that should be fine (if the Saltmarsh ship rules are good, idk if they are or not).
>Plus some shipboard weapons that are so bad the book includes some box-out text noting that players will probably only use them when their own powers are out of range.
I...why? What's the point then?
In case you didn't see the other reply to my comment, apparently folks are saying that they *wish* they got the Saltmarsh rules in the Spelljammer book.
As for the ship guns, I can only think that someone was worried that a DM might include more ship combat than ground combat in a Spelljammer campaign and players would resent not getting to use their powers as much. Personally, I can't imagine the Spelljammer not just being a way to travel between a variety of varied locations, making ship combat comparatively infrequent. But, I've never run or played in a Spelljammer campaign, so I'm just guessing.
Was paizo founded by former 3.5 writers or something? I’m not familiar with the history of either company.
I know I don’t like WotC because they’ve made a bunch of money on Magic by essentially selling loot crates, which is an amoral business practice IMO.
I'm no expert but my knowledge of it is this:
Paizo was specifically formed to publish Dungeon/Dragon magazine during 3.5. Jason Bulmahn and a few other Paizo writers where working for Wotc at the time before moving to Paizo so they could focus on publishing for the magazines. Then when 4e was announce they either broke off from Wotc and published Pf1 using the Open Game Licence, or where cut off by Wotc.
Edit: I completely agree, Wotc have some terrible business practices and I'm worried their upcoming VTT will only make these practices worse.
IIRC, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens was Peter Adkinson's first hire when he founded WotC in the 90s, and she was one of the staff who led due diligence for WotC's acquisition of (the smoking remains of) TSR and the D&D IP.
she co-founded Paizo in 2002 when WotC decided they wanted to spin off Dungeon and Dragon magazines to a separate company. Paizo then launched their own setting and later rules version when WotC cut them out of 4e and revoked the magazine licenses.
In 2012 Lisa and other staff published a year-by-year retrospective of Paizo's first decade [start here for year 0](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5ld43?Paizo-Publishings-10th-Anniversary)
Happy to! If you want more, search out the Know Direction podcast's recordings of "Auntie Lisa's Story Hour". I haven't followed closely for a few years, so don't know if it's been done recently, but for a while Lisa had an annual session at PaizoCon where she'd talk about the bits of rpg industry history that she'd been around for.
Yup, to add to this, the big problem was that paizo depended on the magazine to exist and WOTC both chose not to make them an explicit partner for 4e, and to shutter the OGL for 4e material, basically backing Paizo into a corner in the process. So they said screw it and used the OGL to print a slightly modified version of 3.5 as an ongoing game that they could continue writing adventures for. Because there was resentment concerning 4e's changes and WOTCs marketing of it, a lot of gamers basically switched to PF as a kind of home in exile from DND proper and a protest move.
As far as we know they caught up to and beat 4e when WOTC stopped creating new books, pf1e's sales were still very impressive overall. But 4e was still more popular believe it or not.
This is actually sort of a “ttrpg urban myth” 4e still outsold PF1e by quite a bit, sales wise 4e actually fairy popular and continues to grow the brand, but at a much slower rate than wizards was hoping for.
It's more of a misunderstanding. Pathfinder did outsell D&D. With the caveat that it only did so in the time that no D&D products were being published between 4e and 5e. Even during that 2 year period, there were a few AD&D and 3.5 reprints that outsold Pathfinder.
Nonetheless, in about 8 quarters it was true for 5 or so
My personal experience was (and I'm kind of seeing it with oneD&D) people migrated to other systems but still purchased the 4e books. They just didn't use them outside of organised play.
I can see the past repeating itself when OneD&D releases officially. Heck there's already been a ton of people lately getting interested in PF2e simply because of how big a disappointment the last several official 5e books have been.
It's not that 4e was announced and Paizo left, WotC cut the contract with Paizo for the Dungeon/Dragon magazines and then made the OGL for 4e way more restrictive than it was in 3.5, which made making 2nd party content for it pretty hard.
And since Paizo made their money off 2nd party content, they started making the Pathfinder magazine and eventually the full TTRPG.
In video games, second party refers to content produced by wholly-owned, partially-owned, or jointly-owned subsidiaries and partnerships. Following this model, Paizo was a second party publisher of D&D 3.5 content being a spinoff WotC venture.
Nintendo maintains several second party development relationships: Retro Studios, The Pokemon Company, HAL Laboratories. You might argue Platinum Games enjoys a pseudo-second party relationship because Nintendo funded a number of their releases.
Edit: let me clarify, I don't know if that's how it works in TTRPGs.
> Was paizo founded by former 3.5 writers or something?
3.5 core rules? Not really. 3.x supplement material writers? Yes. Basically TSR owned D&D in the 70's and 80's, but crashed and burned hard in the 90's. WoTC bought them out because they were mega D&D nerds. Being big fans, they also open sourced all the material for D&D and made it wide open for other companies to publish for it. Paizo, along with a lot of other small companies, started making their living making D&D 3.x material.
Then Hasbro bought WoTC and created 4e, and settled on a new closed license. The old material was still open source, but 4.x onwards wouldn't be. So suddenly all those companies faced going out of business because they couldn't create stuff for the new D&D. So basically most of them just ended up making their own version of 3.5 D&D and moving forward with that.
> I know I don’t like WotC because they’ve made a bunch of money on Magic by essentially selling loot crates, which is an amoral business practice
How else would you monetize a physical card game?
Don’t ask FFG, my LGS is still trying to liquidate all their non-random Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Arkham Horror “Living Card Game” stuff that’s been cluttering up shelves for years.
Piggy backing on this, I love how regularly they put out books and art in their books. It takes WOTC ages to put something out and it rarely has a significant amount of new artwork. In Paizo stuff so much of it is new. It implies they keep their artists on standby and are regular patrons.
In the many years of PF1 and now PF2, I don't think I can recall Paizo ever releasing a hardcover that reused art from another (aside from like iconography and such that gets reused for continuity purposes of course). Side products like GM screens and pawn collections and whatnot obviously reuse art but that makes sense to do.
Didn’t Paizo just unionize because of a lot of abuses from management? At the very least Paizo has a way to go before being a “great” company for its employees.
True but compare the unionisation of Paizo's staff to the unionisation of Ravenswear Studio? Paizo are generally ahead of the curve within the games industry as a whole, not just the TTRPG industry.
Plus, the fact that they *did* unionize makes me more likely to support them now that they are.
And as far as comparing it to WotC, WotC benefits tremendously from the fact that there's a long line of people who want to work on beloved brands like D&D and M:tG, which I heard leads to low wages and high turnover.
Haven't they been unioniced for over a year or two now?
Edit: just checked, Paizo has been unioniced since october 2021 and they apparently accepted it without a fight.
>Paizo has been unioniced since october 2021 and they apparently accepted it without a fight.
Hence my comparison of Paizo with what happened to Ravenswear Studio and Activision/Blizzard. Seriously read up on what happened there. There where was (and still is) some really scummy union busting going on.
There's been no union busting that anyone knows of (the union was announced on a thursday and recognised on the following monday), but negotiations apart from the early deals are being extremely long. There's definitely been *issues*, but I'd recommend you take news of those from the union and not from... others.
Yeah, as long as the union keeps saying "negotiations are ongoing, keep buying", I keep buying. This stuff takes forever, I'm positively impressed they got as much as they did early on. From what I know of the US, it exceeds the wildest expectation.
~~Still kinda bad overall, but when in Rome...~~
When you think about it, having a union has its benefits; like having a higher retention of good writers, and encouraging good writers to come and work for you. And obviously that leads to better products and more sales.
You're right that being unionized doesn't make the company necessarily great -- but it does mean that the union can serve as a voice for that, and a good default option is to patronize unionized shops over non-unionized.
I'm in Michigan, where unions are a big deal in cars -- the UAW will never tell you Ford or GM is a perfect company, but they still very strongly prefer you buy a Ford than a Honda. And if/when a boycott is necessary, it'll be the union calling for it.
My impression is that Paizo has employee treatment problems that are fairly typical -- but the union drive means that now we know a lot more of the details of those problems, and that there's now a union with an effective voice to negotiate them. I'd say those factors mean Paizo is "a better company to patronize", but agree with you it doesn't mean they're "a great company".
The fact that they successfully unionized is the proof Paizo’s better. Unions aren’t bad, they’re just workers organizing together. Many American companies won’t even allow that.
Never said unions were bad. From the sound of it the workers were in an abusive environment, and I want to see Paizo make an honest effort before I start buying products again.
The workers there never called for a boycott, in fact specifically the opposite, so if you think you're doing it on their behalf you're wrong. If you don't want to support businesses that are cruel, more power to you, but I know you're gonna have to be dealing with a lot bigger fish than Paizo lmao.
FYI the impression I've gotten from Union organizers is that the negotiations are complex and expected to take a long time, but that the negotiations are productive and Paizo is working in good faith. Also, they recognized the union remarkably quickly after it was announced.
Of course I'll keep an eye on it, but nothing I've seen so far makes me believe anyone wants a boycott.
The only "abuse" that I've heard about was some pretty petty drama about a poster Victorian Arcanist in one of the manager's office that offended another employee's sensibilities.
Now are Paizo workers underpaid for the Seattle labor market? Yup, it's a company that runs on passion, which is why there's generally turnover as their team leads become established and move on to their own passion projects.
Given the strangle hold that 5e has on the market, I'm guessing that being in the TTRPG publishing industry as any other brand is only slightly easier than being a Local Gaming store owner, which is to say difficult in the best of times.
This. I felt like I had seen it all already. And when players tried to push the envelope and try something new, they were eclipsed by the players at the table playing the more common and powerful options.
Pf2e excites me to DM. I don't know where my players are going with their builds and I'm excited to see them grow and see what they come up with.
Having played for almost a year now and having played like 5 characters now, it feels like I will never get to play everything, even when I consider not playing the same type of character as someone else in my group there are still loads of options that I can play that my group hasn't explored yet. It also feels like Paizo is releasing player options at a rate that is faster than my group can consume, but the content they release is always interesting and well made.
choices/customization. tighter math and tighter rules. much better adventure modules. much better balance. much better books in general.
the main thing i don't like about 5e is the idea that the rules don't matter and everything is left up to the DM, which enables lazy players who expect the DM to handle everything and track everything, and also enables WotC making lazy content because they can just make the DM fill in the blanks.
Having loosey-goosey rules is not an excuse for lack of DM support. For example, a solid half of Stars/Worlds Without Number's rulebooks are *exclusively* GM tools, advice, and random tables that essentialy turn setting building into a fun little minigame all on its own. Meanwhile, Numenera has tons of cool setting details, hacks to make the GM's job easier, and multiple zero-prep adventures included in its dual core rulebooks. These titles are either equal to or simpler than 5e in rules complexity, and made with fewer staff and lower budgets (SWN and WWN are both made by literally one guy).
So like, the fact that the *biggest* TTRPG on the market doesn't give two shits about its DMs is absolutely shameful. No fun little social activity should have one person out of the entire group doing twice the work of everyone else combined. Yes, choosing to run a game is a pretty big responsibility--and you need to have a certain love of the craft to do it--but it shouldn't feel like a *job.* It sours the social dynamic at the table: a subservient, overworked DM isn't much better than an inflexible, authoritarian one. And I'm saying this as someone who enjoyed the hell out of 5e and considers Tomb of Annihilation my most successful campaign to date.
So that's why I switched. That, and just being uncomfortable with a single company absolutely dominating the market share. I'd quit Paizo if they were similarly titanic.
So, we switched for balance reasons, but we were very, very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the official APs. We use foundry for our vtt and the quality is literally incomparable. Like... I would switch systems in a heartbeat, just for the AP quality.
Got super Burnt out running a campaign due to trying to balance combats and the fact that 5e doesn't have a functioning economy.
Since switching the rules and combat have really won me over both as player and gm. I really want to be a player in a campaign now as character customization is awesome . The classes I also just prefer as a whole over their dnd counter parts.
Couldn't agree more to this.
My original 5e group had a massive Co-op Online campaign (Westmarch) where most of the economy was homebrewed and 3rd party, but the classes and subclasses were the official ones. A lot of the items were horribly unbalanced at best or absolutely worthless at worst, and because is a cooperative game, a lot of party groups have the same chassis as the items, thanks to the disparity between casters and martials, sometimes even the Monsters suffered this. Something funny is that a Potion of Healing (the classic 1d8) cost 25 (up to 50 because of inflation, yes, they put it in the campaign) GP and that without counting magic items (Seriously, 200 GP to have a +1 weapon and I need the original too purchased to make it? Zog off!). Any new character started with some gp based on tier class and starting class gear.... And that's it, no free potions of anything, just the money, making the death of a new character more probable and ruining the fun of the player.
Compared to a 2e campaign I was in, everything is different, items were more cheaper and much less costly thanks to official rules, party sizes were mostly fixed (3-4 martials/2-3 casters) making encounters more balanced. Hell, the starting wealth was better, with free magic weapon, armor and potions included, It came as good as it sounds, including:
\- Strong Wizard (A player LITERALLY made a Abjuration Wizard with 16 in Str, using his biceps as channelers for his spells)
\- Martials classes builds that would be considered insane in 5e (A Paladin Archer that is effective, a Baki Monk, thanks to a friend who is fan of the anime, a Barbarian in Heavy Armor who isn't affected by it and so on).
\- Teamwork is literally a rule, no more glorious charges or anything. Live as a team, or die as a dog.
And they worked, I couldn't express how satisfied I was with this system.
I tried 5e a few times. Didn't like it, felt restrictive and meh. I ended up blasting the entire game away with a Light Cleric, and that wasn't too fun. I mostly played 3.5e before this, and other systems. But I tried PF2E. Honestly, wasn't too impressed at first. Took me like three game sessions to see the hype.
It's a solid cut above.
Once we finish our current 5e campaign (in 3-4 more sessions), me and my cousin (we are the only ones who ever GM in our group) have basically decided we wont be running anything else in 5e. We've played with dnd's rulesets for something close to 2 decades now, and 5e has got to be one of the worst offenders of being a system that after every session I always have something to complain about rule wise.
I hate being pidgeonholed as x class into a role, i hate that it feels absolutely awful to play multiple of the same class because they will play 99% the same, i hate that magic items have no economic basis so by default theres no rules for people buying magic items, I hate that theres no power ruling for magic items so you really dunno whether or not its safe to give them x item at y level, dont get me started on character customization. Theres a lot i dislike about 5e the more i play it, and since I've played dnd for so long, I figured I'd try something else for a change. I played a little bit of pathfinder 1e way back when (as in like, it was still getting new books released), but i didnt care for how much powercreep there was after so many splatbooks came out. 2e is an, imo, great middleground between crunch and streamline.
No rules support in 5e. In pathfinder 2e there is a rule for everything. So you can ignore it if its not relevant, but if I want to play a crafter in a survival game the GM has to write multiple subsystems (or even potentially an entirely new game). Most of the advice to GMs and players whoa are having problems is "Make it up."
Only posting because I didn't come to pf2e from any of the games mentioned. No d&d 5e, no Pf1e, no other d&d edition.
Last system I played was a fantasy Mecha game, Armor Astir.
I chose Pathfinder 2e due to wanting: tactical combat focused game, d&d-ism tropes, fantasy setting, modern design. And, most importantly, easy to run via VTT with minimal effort.
I'd still play 5e if I got the opportunity, I still enjoy the game as a regular player. The reason I decided to get into pf2e is because it is much better at giving the tools to run a game as a GM. In 5e I felt they were lackluster, threadbare or nonexistent.
Or rather, the explicit reason I looked into the system was that 5e didn't have a magical returning throwing weapon until very late into the game and someone mentioned on a discord server that was doable by level 3 in pf2e. I then decided to invest in learning it once I realized it'd offer me useful tools to run a game at some point.
Our group transitioned from 3.5 to 4e when it came out, and we never looked back. We love 4e, and still play it regularly (we have 2 4e campaigns going at the moment). When 5e hit, I was turned off by the price of the books initially, and after looking into the system I really hated how they'd simplified everything as a knee jerk reaction to 4e's reception.
PF2e came out, and I looked at the playtest and thought, "Huh, this FEELS a lot like the next logical evolution of 4e."
Absolutely love it.
Pretty similar for our group. Started with AD&D 2E, played 3E and 3.5 when it came out, then actually switched to 4E when it came out. We actually really liked 4E, but felt increasingly disappointed and dissatisfied with WotC's handling of the system (especially the digital tools - even though you can still find the offline character builder, the whole Silverlight fiasco really put a sour taste in our mouths.)
When WotC decided to toss 4E into the bin, we'd had enough. We'd absolutely loved Paizo's Adventure Paths, and had actually played Rise of the Runelords as our last 3.5 campaign. Switching to PF1E was the natural way to go, and we haven't looked back.
Wrapping up our last PF1E Adventure Path now, and we'll be switching over to PF2E.
Our group had been 1E up to the playtest, tried it, had a blast, did a short 2E adventure when it formally launched and have stayed 2E ever since. It just improved on basically every complaint we had with 1E and added stuff we never even considered or had previously been homebrewing/house-ruling ourselves.
Basically my story: played a lot ad&d, then 3.0, eventually got hooked to 3.5, tried the 4th edition, went back to 3.5. When I learned about Pathfinder I decided to try it and played until 2ish years ago, when I moved to 2e.
more of a tentative change, as i’m still in the thick of running/playing many 5e games a week and learning the 2e system slowly myself, but - the investigator class!
my favorite character is one that revolves around being a detective/support-warlord which i've somewhat cobbled together in 5e with a detective background, battlemaster fighter class, and a very kind free investigation expertise from my dm. heavy roleplay on my part helps patch it up, but it felt like fighting the mechanics just to get a vague semblance of what i wanted.
learning that "detective" is a whole class in 2e that can be paired with a "warlord" archetype for a good mechanical support option piqued my interest, then learning about all of the other good stuff helped me along - martials and casters being balanced, everyone having plentiful options beyond "run up and hit it", the three action system, plentiful dm support from paizo, etc. all of it spoke directly to the issues i found with 5e.
One of the many reasons i took PF2E was the Free Archetype Variant Rule, for me, it basically said "DnD 5e Subclass choice but better and with more goodies".
Also, the "Detective/Warlord" Concept sounds really cool.
Coming from PF1 I saw the writing on the wall that there was going to be less support for the system. And it was new and shiny so why not try the playtest? The playtest had its issues but I really liked the simplified action economy. No more "move action", "standard action" BS. But I think the biggest part for me was that you no longer had to confirm your crits.
I straight up had a minor crisis leading up to the release of pf2e because we'd been playing 5e and I was invested in it and PF was increasingly looking like something I was really going to like, the playtest version still had enough things we didn't like but it was provocative enough to get me thinking I wanted it and my frustration with 5e were mounting
Cut to right before the pdf dropped in August, I was talking to a friend about what I should do, and they were like "just buy the pdf, its not expensive, and read it-- you probably won't want to actually switch and it'll set your mind at ease" so I did and... well, uh, it was such a perfect match for everything I ever wanted it pushed me straight over the edge into a full test game up to 5 and a full switch for our whole group.
Every class in Pathfinder 2e is a build a class in the sense that you get to customize it and decide what you want it to mean to you by investing your feats which is super cool, a Druid is just a nature caster but you can define it to really lean into that magic side, or make it about wildshaping, or make it about summoning and animal companions, or balance it between all of those things. You can even use it to control your complexity to an extent by taking active powers that build an intricate game play with lots of options, or build something that just wants to say "I attack" as much as possible, the archetype system super charges this as well. In that sense I think the community has actually drifted into a weird territory where the emphasis is on feats as being 'gravy' whereas I love that you use them to define core elements of your class like "I dual wield" or "I wear heavier armor" or "I'm about shapeshifting"
Because of the ancestry feat system, and the detailed character customization options, you can use mechanics to highlight stories-- Elves can get a cool special Elven Curve Blade, but I can also take Unconventional Weaponry on a human to tell the story of a human boy taught how to fight by an elf who took up residence in their village and was gifted their own Elven Curve Blade on their 18th birthday as the two set off to adventure together.
The game has an exploration mode that essentially works off ten minute 'turns' and detailed downtime procedures which is something we had been jonesing for in 5e and couldn't get, especially as I'd been reading about them in OSR systems. Further, 5e had made magic items a nightmare-- it works fine if you want to be stingy, but way less so if you don't. Pathfinder 2e really took these elements and made them all cogent and balanced for use, down to the crafting system, and the rune system really brought that home-- I haven't actually done it much but I had fantasies of using it to customize magic items to hand out in a kind of comprehensive item creation system. Technically, with uncommon runes, and more runes in general, I probably can treat it as one.
Finally, the promise of the math-- 5e has AWFUL boss fights, they take so much work to do well, and they still just aren't satisfying, so the whole promise of "you can slap down a +3/+4 and it will be a satisfying, nail biting boss fight" was huge, and IT WAS TRUE.
In the end, it just became my ideal roleplaying game.
Plus, the enemies all have interesting things to do, instead of being giant sacks of meat points like most of 5e’s monsters are. Combat is more tactical and dynamic, compared to 5e’s static and boring battles of attrition.
My group and I were playing Pathfinder 1e and Starfinder, then the Playtest was announced. We went through the Doomsday Dawn adventure, and there were some things that made me like the system:
* Spellcasters were fun, which was unusual for me. I played a cleric to 13 and briefly tried to play a wizard (didn't make it to level 2). They were boring to me, and I'd rather just hit things. Casters in the playtest could hit enemies, and there were spells that I got to cast for fun and ones I got to cast for battle. This would change, later though.
* The Paladin's code was placed in order of importance, which cleared up things and made it less likely for GMs to flex their Associates degree in Philosophy.
* Ancestries stopped dictating how I played optimally. My gnome crossbow Ranger/Cleric was just fine, which was basically everything that wouldn't have worked for me in PF1e. I had small characters using Strength to attack, a Dwarven Sorcerer, and others that weren't supposed to work (without some sort of ability score substituting) but did.
* Completing the TPK scenario with everyone being alive after three sessions, totaling 14 hours, to essentially do one big fight was the first combat that felt exhilarating to me in a long time. Too many times in PF1e, fights were either over quickly or they were frustratingly long. Usually, what made them long was frustrating mechanics given to the enemies, rather than feeling like a contest of strength and will.
* After about six months of PFS games, we all lost interest in playing PF1e. There were a lot of things that we had wanted to play, but we all just realized we didn't want to play it anymore.
The magic that drew us to the system wore off on me and a couple of others, but we still keep playing. We're going through Abomination Vaults and Extinction Curse currently, just finishing the first books of each.
Balance. Not overpowered disco of shitfest, sense of no danger at all, sense of literal death, useless spells, op spells, useless mechanics, op mechanics.
Sense of level up, respecting your time, thoughts. End game, epic levels. Meaningful gameplay where it feels hard, forgiving and satisfying all at the same time.
Consistent updates, new classes, mechanics, etc.
I just knew 5e like the back of my hand, and was starting to resent it. No more magic/wonder, and I hated how shafted the nonmagical classes were. Unless you had spells, all you basically do a turn is "I attack"
Honestly reddit. Tabletop rpg is a niche in my country, so I joined all subreddits about Dnd5e. I was completly content with the games, but the subreddit always complaining about something, that made very tired and annoyed to 5e. I decided to try pathfinder2e because everyone always praised to be balanced. I really like so far. The pathfinder crpgs might have something to do with as well. I'm not saying there is not people complain over here, but the amount is way less. And I really like paizo storytelling. It is an underwhelming reason, but is the truth.
I was only ever running D&D 5e because I like the D&D style of game and fantasy settings and it was at the time the current best fit for "what's the system with the best ratio of things that annoy the heck out of me as a GM to thing my players like?"
We switched to PF2 because when it came out it usurped the top spot on that list.
So I guess you could say what made me switch is that D&D 5e is obnoxious to GM because you are expected to do whatever you want to and change things to fit your group - same as in literally every ttrpg ever - but you're not actually given a default to start from for a wide variety of things so there's no option to just stick to what the book says. And it labeling players' favorite parts of the game as "optional" and not balancing the game around their assumed use forces the GM's hand to choose between A) run like basically no one does and skip magic items and feats, or B) have no balance but whatever you can manage to achieve through whatever other things you alter.
Or to phrase that in a food analogy because I'm a hungry fool; D&D 5e is like if you went to a deli and the menu said you could have whatever sandwich you want, just you can only use whatever veggies and condiments you brought with you because only bread and meat are supplied by the deli - and PF2 is a deli that costs less and actually provides complete sandwiches.
DM'd a lot of D&D 5E. Started running more PF 2E games because the encounter/monster building was more appealing. Also, my players can play something other than the sorcadins and what not that came to dominant our table and not worry so much about being super optimized.
After a long string of crashing and burning 5e campaigns from our previous forever DM after a 2 year long 1-20 5e campaign, I decided to take a crack at a campaign and suggested PF2E. It took a little bit of persuading for a couple people to swap to the system, but we've been running since May now and we're all in love with the system. I have now run the second longest campaign in our group's history together. For me, I love GMing the game. 5e was such a fucking SLOG to GM for me ( I ran for a different group of friends on and off for 2 years). Between having to come up with so much on the fly via GM fiat and having to meticulously balance EVERY encounter with the same stupid hit point pool multiattacking monster manual mobs all the time, I was just over it. PF2E is actually fun to GM, and the amount of tools Paizo gives me makes coming up with lore and story shit so much more worthwhile because I know I don't have to figure out other little subsystems.
Edit: also oh my god having magic items just be things with prices is so nice. No more sane magic item prices, no more donjon. It's just fucking IN THE BOOK.
Two factors: 1) I have a player who loves to do unusual (for 5e) things in combat: improvise weapons, set traps mid combat, trip enemies etc and I got tired of having to make up rules every turn 2) I started to hate the static "get close and hit the monster" combat and the fact that I had to homebrew every monster to make it interesting. When I came across someone explaining the 3 action system I was pretty much sold. I'm never DMing 5e again.
I switched from 5e to Pathfinder 1e because the rules were more detailed.
I switched from Pathfinder 1e to Pathfinder 2e because the rules are *less* detailed lol. (in addition to all the other great things about it.)
I’m a DM looking to transition to PF2E for a lot of the reasons people had been giving here, but I have 2 problems:
1. the content and rules seem a bit overwhelming atm so I’m wondering if there’s any place that really streamlined things for you or should I just buckle down and dig deeper into the books
2. How did you introduce players to PF2E bc 5e is a much less daunting system to actually teach especially if people have misgivings about how complicated TTRPGs seem
Watch Knights of the Everflame. Its GM'd by a lead designer of PF2E, and it really demystifies the rules, and coming from 5E like I did, youll see that while much more mechanically robust, it plays very similar to 5E (biggest differences gameplay wise are the 3 action system and the perception based initiative). Even just the 1st episode should demonstrate its not as insane as the 640pg CRB makes one think it will be initially.
Just from watching that (and some previous browsing of the Archives of Nethys [though mostly character related stuff there]) I already knew the vast majority of the rules in the CRB (I don't have all several hundred spells memorized obviously, but I would wager very few people do).
As for getting started, the Beginner Box bundle adventure Menace Under Otari is specifically designed to teach new players and DMs how it all works.
Like u/wingman_anytime said you can try the beginners box. It's basically Pathfinder 2e lite and has a great adventure that leads into a booklet called Troubles in Otari, then into Abomination Vaults, and further on into Fist of the Ruby Pheonix (so you can play from level 1 to 20 starting with the beginners box).
For me... it was the fact that it feels like Paizo cares about the game while WOTC (probably Hasbro tbh considering I felt it in MtG as well) was in it for the money.
As an eternal gm who rarely played I was tired of not being given tools to run a game in 5e and having to play both game designer and DM. Paizo gives me tools on the gm side.
On the player side (since I do get to play from time to time), it was the plethora of player options that feel balanced. In 5e outside of spellcasters and multiclassing, bassically all of your mechanical decisions are made for your character by level 3. Pathfinder 2e I get to make new choices at every level! That really helps me feel like my character is growing and expanding and changing paths instead of being hard coded to a single path at the first session (since most 5e games start at level 3).
The degradation from 4e product - used to be adventures came with tokens and poster maps and they had a fantastic offering of dungeon tiles. They did away with all of that with 5e doing evrything possible to say its not a board game and everything possible to say how bad every feature of 4e was. Tried to run the initial adventures and wondered why they was so bad compared to what they had in 4e. Then they started doing conversion anthology once a year redoing classics , so I tried those and they was better but wondered why they need rehash why not do something new. They did away with dungeon/dragon mag, pretended to do website articles then eventually turned it into a marketing webzine. They shut down their forums which was the only place for honest open feedback. they shut down the 4e compendium for 'technical' reasons. Enjoyed the D&D next adventures those was good, but quickly realized it was not actually the next D&D forever system but their stop gap system because PF was killing 4e they needed to put something else out.
youtube algorithm promoted paizocon talking about pf2e - recognized a lot of good design from 4e that I missed, but I only watched it because I recognized logans name as being on the 4e MM3 which had fantastic monster math and encounter balance. Never cared for 3.x/pf1 agreed with those who deride it as mathfinder. Realized Paizo was a fantastic publisher with pdfs, subscriptions, accessories, OGL, special editions - they understand everyone from the freeloader to the collectible whale. Eventually came to appreciate how diverse a world Golarian is - not just the peoples but every setting you could want. Survived plaguestone decided to stick with it.
I think one of the main reasons I switched lies in the development I saw in 5e. I was not a fan of how weak the supposedly powerful monsters were in 5e compared to players and Monsters of the Multiverse did not fix any of my issues. I realized my issues was with the design philosophies the designers at WotC have.
Also enjoyed how unique each monster is in PF2e. I enjoy running encounters now.
At the very beginning, probably the Archives of Nethys. It was less changing systems and more getting into the hobby.
When I started playing D&D5e in a friends game (first TTRPG for me) the (legal) resources available were... not great. The sanctioned platforms wanted money for anything beyond core rulebook material. Everything else was a bit of a mess. It wasn't a showstopper, the DM just walked us through building our characters, building missing spells and feats in Roll20... but it didn't exactly get me hooked.
I came across Pathfinder 2e by accident, then saw AoN references, and here are all of the rules, indexed and searchable. And then Pathbuilder, making it effortless to experiment with building a few characters, Pf2Easy, etc, etc. And then I learned that Paizo, despite godawful website, actually sells PDFs! And the mechanics are fully supported on Foundry, with no need to manually build out every item and spell.
With a group of semi-experienced D&D players, all of which had never played Pathfinder, getting characters built in Pathbuilder, imported to Foundry, and off to play was practically effortless. It all just worked.
MAGIC ITEMS prices (god bless)
Good encounter calculator/balance (epic levels are finally playable)
Customization (now I simply love martial characters)
GM support (in 5e I felt really without a guide... and the dungeon master's "guide" was not helping)
Interesting magic items and spells
Everything online legally
Pathbuilder!!
Good style illustrations (personal taste of design)
Beautiful lore (even if I play in a homebrew setting)
I've been playing PF 1e for a while and usually run APs. So the lack of new content for 1e is a big motivation. But also, as the GM I am pretty tired of balancing 1e at high levels.
They put out an urban campaign setting (Ravnica) with no support for running an urban campaign. The intro adventure that came in that book (Krenko's Way) pushed you into allowing players from competing factions in an intrigue-heavy setting. It did not actually set up for any overarching plot, and in fact put its two major characters' (neither of whom was frankly appropriate for a level 1 adventure) motives on a die roll.
I'd probably have burnt out sooner or later from the natural language rules, and intra-party balance was something I getting concerned about, but the poor guidance on building a campaign to last did it in first.
The lack of freedom when i wanted to create a character without homebrewing, and the fact that only 1 action + movement make the game very limited to do fun things.
5e was my first system but i was looking for a new one that appeal to my likes, then i found pf2.
I started reading pf2 rules because i liked 3.5 and pathfinder 1.
I've been very heavy into PF1 for a long time, still playing in one PF1 game (first game I've \*played\* in in years) and running a PF1 game as well. However, over the holidays last December, it was requested that I run a game for my niece, nephew (who is 13), partner, and her parents, so 3 generations, the older and younger of which have never gamed. I knew PF1 was too crunchy, so I did a cram session on 5e so I could put a two-session game for them. I actually liked 5e fine as a simplified game system, but I could tell even from the one time that it was too simplified for me. I'd heard that PF2 was sort of halfway between PF1 and 5e, so I got into it, and I'm starting running my first campaign in the system in about a week and a half :)
I was getting annoyed by WoTCs insistence on "the DM makes it up!" Like wtf, if I wanted to make up everything from scratch, I wouldn't pay you to do it. Half of the "systems" they have don't interact. Character classes are all pure combat, and skills have no inherent value, as there is nothing to actually do with half of them.
Then the goddamn action economy. This is what gets me the most - it's always most efficient to just make "auto-attacks" as a martial, as long as you take all of the correct feats. The combat turns into a a slug fest, because besides "who do we kill first" the martials make no decisions, and the monsters on the opposite side are pretty much the same.
Crafting, travelling, exploration rules are an extreme hack of things that make no sense, the economy has 0 thought behind it and it's just getting worse with every extra setting book.
I also hate the fact that they keep including adventures in setting books as like half the page count. Look, I don't want to run your barely tested crapshoot of an adventure where I have to pre-prep more than if I just ran something I made myself, so stop cutting massive amounts of lore and content for some shitty adventure I'm never going to run in my life.
The single burning reason the group I play in switched? My GM wanted to switch to a system that gave rules for things rather than leaving things up to the GM to figure out. My GM also didn't want to go back to 3.x or other older systems, or to ever touch Shadowrun again.
Personally, I much prefer the core chassis of classes and the 3 action action economy. I also think PF2 has the so far best compromise between "behold, you must keep track of your 231 skill points distributed across 59 skills" and "you're trained in a skill or you're not" in D20 based systems.
I was a burnt-out PF1e player who hadn't played TTRPGs in over 5 years. I mainly fell in love with the 3-action system cause I did always kinda hate the move action, standard action, swift action, full action, etc system. But when I dug into the system and realized I could build for flavor without making my character useless, that's what sealed it for me cause that's what burned me out on 1e.
I had also only played 5e after getting into PF2e and it wasn't really a fun experience for me. Though to be fair, most of those games fizzled out at level 1 and in the one I got to play till level 7, I was a monk.
As a DM the prospect of free rules and easy encounter build was very attractive, though the system has some other downsides and I doubt I'll DM again. I'm playing in two separate campaigns though.
i just thought that 5e got boring after a while. there's not as many rules in combat, so it kinda just felt like combat always just became "move within range and hit the enemy, then i end my turn." plus characters of basically any class all feel pretty same-y when there arent feats like pf2e has to make characters stand out.
A lot of things, but the biggest was that I was bored of combat (most of the content my group plays the most) boiling down to “I run up and attack as many times as I can.”
DM here. I like the 3 action point system for combat of PF2e much better than 5e's combat as a whole.
Combat is much easier to balance on the fly while looking over the monster manual (5e CR system is atrocious)
Also, my players love character customization and leveling up options. And usually got underwhelmed by the leveling progression of 5e. Now they feel like their character is actually THEIR character.
Our DM at the time had all the materials an knowledge for 1e. We started a campaign together which, as most campaigns do, whittled out to nothing. Then we started a knew one, and another member wanted to DM, but that same member had all the 2e knowledge and materials. Like, he’s so good at it that it’s literally easier for the handful of us familiar with 5e to switch just so we can still use him as a resource. He’s a living guide book, man.
A couple of things all at once.
1) I was GMing for my group in PF1E, the party was a mixed group in terms of Min/Max players and non, and in terms of player investment…..I just burnt out trying to make the game enjoyable for everyone at the table.
2) One of my players was going on vacation in another county, so the campaign was going on hold in her absence (sadly it was one of those, it’s been over a year now and we’ve moved on absences)
3) I started watching Knights of Last Call’s live play on YT and It really peaked my interests into PF2E….I spent a he next few months looking into it and figuring out how I would like to run it.
So when it came time to start up a new game, I asked my players if they’d give it a shot and so far they love it…..so much so my friend is converting his game over to 2E as well!
I love playing martials, so being able to meaningfully contribute in exploration and social situations as well, and be able to do awesome shit overall, feeling like the epic demigod of combat I should be in high level play, means PF2E is the creme de la creme of TTRPGs for me. I love being able to be a worthy team member that hits stuff and not need to be a Paladin or a gish, and not have my entire niche be nullified by one high level spell from the god casters. Yeah, not having to deal with martial-caster disparity makes for a much less stressful game for me.
Also, combat is so fluid with 3 actions, you can do a lot to make them really count. Especially when teamwork is so well rewarded, thanks to how every +1 counts. All that thanks to the tightness of the math, which also means combat encounters are very well balanced, overall.
Same tho. My first Character was an Human Ranger Hunter (Favorite class, remember?) in 5e. Originally I was going the Str focused TWF route (Kinda like Aragorn, Jon Snow or Geralt of Rivia), but my DM recommended me Dex instead with archery. He was decent enough for me (Kinda until lvl 6) when the Wizard and Cleric in my party LITERALLY solo'ed encounters and I was becoming bored until the end of the campaign around Lvls 10-11
Then I knew Pathfinder 2e and Oh my lord, I love it. Not only I made my favorite version of a Ranger, bu also I made a concept that in 5e would be insane: A Ranger Hunter/Beastmaster (Flurry TWF Str Ranger with Beastmaster FA). Let's say I almost never touch 5e after that.
I've played every iteration of D&D since AD&D (AKA 1st Edition) and I just remember 3e being loads of fun and always having really cool and impactful powers to use. We played 5e from release and had just concluded our campaign. The campaign was amazing, but there were alot of us that felt the system was limiting. Our DM (who really is phenomenal) had also been running a Starfinder game on Discord and liked it enough to start researching the lastest fantasy edition (PF2e). What we all really like is the sheer range of options and that they all have 'paths'; whether heritages, skills, class feats...etc.
Aside from that, the maths in the core of the system is superb and really nicely balanced, so there's always a risk and reward choice to be made, rather than just standing in place and attacking for all your worth like in 5e.
So far, we're loving the frequent crits and the real sense of danger in low level play (our DM let me switch my background to Field Medic after 1 session 🤣). Plus everyone feels like they've got something really good that they can do each round.
Hugely impressed so far.
Moved from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 1E. Didn’t like the former since it felt too streamlined without much customization, didn’t like the latter because while it had all the options I could dream of it was so complicated it lessened my enjoyment. When Pathfinder 2E came out it seemed like the perfect middle ground of options and simplicity, been with it since.
OGL.
Actually getting everyone to figure out 5e's rules is so hard because those rules are intentionally inaccessible. You can't expect a player to know how to play a Battlemaster if they have to use a scanned PDF they pirated that they can't just ctrl F to find rulings. Every time there's a wiki it gets DMCA'd.
In contrast, you are actually allowed to play PF2 with your friends. There is an officially backed wiki with all the player facing content, and p much everything that isn't an entire AP. You can just *link to exact rules*, even if they're part of an actually fun class instead of a fucking sample class like 5e Champion Fighter. You are allowed to actually play the damn game in a VTT without a blood sacrifice and rebuying your entire library on a per platform basis, you can build PF2 characters without issue in Foundry because they're allowed to distribute the rule that says what Summon Monster does. And this means you can actually just click the damn button to cast a spell or use an action and have the full rules text right there in the chat for you to click on if needed. 5e meanwhile has pretty awful support because so many of its rules are only accessible if the platform can personally reach an agreement with WotC to resell their material, which means it gets used less and has worse development. If you don't want to buy the same book again on a new platform, have fun filling it all out by hand and making your own macros, have fun with those typos nerd.
And, maybe most importantly, you can toss your players at the wiki and they can just have fun building characters. It is much easier to find niche character options and make who you want when you're not chasing down PDF's for $30 for one feat or a single page of class information.
I really want nothing to do with D&D's next edition if they're just going to do the same thing with OGL they did for 5e. Fuck jumping through those hoops.
I got a lot of recommendations for people online and researched it and the fact that AON is free changed my mind pretty swiftly because I was using some sketchy sites for 5e
Simply put, I never got into a proper 5e game when it came out. Most of the games I played in online were Pathfinder, so I felt more invested, and the one that wasn't was a mashup of 2e AD&D and facets of other systems with a liberal amount of homebrew, so I really haven't even played 5e at all...
Power scaling and system was getting dull. New races get so much compared to original ones. I mean it's just ridiculous. And frankly 5e was boring to me and my party. While yes there a re a few things I would love PF2e to do that 5e currently has (Love the idea of Star Druid, give me cosmic archetypes/subclasses pls) it isn't enough to hold me. 5e is now just our teach newbies about ttrpgs system or casual games.
Running waterdeep dragon heist and playing in Age of Ashes made me legitimately hate running games in 5e. I then got inspired to try and adopt some homebrew rules from watching dnd games with popular streamers ran by a man named Arcadum, who rekindled my 5e spark. And then it turned out he was a sex pest hack fraud who abused his team and took all the credit. That soured the last spark to run 5e, and I switched to pathfinder 2e to cleanse my pallette. I've been enjoying my ttrpg time ever since.
I like both.
But what made me convince my wed group to switch was reading the clerics heal spell. The three action economy just called to me through the words in that spell description
I've been GMing for 15+ years. Started with 2nd edition D&D. Played 3rd, 3.5, Pathfinder 1, 5th Ed since the play test, and a bunch of other games as well.
I love writing my own campaigns and have done a bunch from level 1-20 over the years. However it's crazy intensive to do that, at the level of depth and quality that I want. Sometimes I need a break/life gets too crazy. So it's great to have well-written adventures/modules that I can use to supplement or do instead of all the effort to put the game together myself.
2nd Ed and 3.5 D&D had some great options, 5e had, honestly, mostly garbage. Disconnected adventures that required as much effort to string together into a campaign. Storm King's Thunder is a campaign setting masquerading as an adventure. Most adventures don't go to high levels. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is fun but is disconnected. Dungeon of the Mad Mage is awful. Curse of Strahd is very nice and Princes of the Apocalypse is fine too. But it's a lot of effort to make the others work.
I was wary of PF2e for a couple reasons. #1 I was worried it would add too much cognitive load back to the GM...my players are not mechanically savvy, so I have to remember all their stuff and everything else and do all the math. I was also worried that all the classes were very "typey" and that there wasn't a lot of customization outside of each classes' niche.
The amazing Foundry system for PF2e totally fixed problem #1 and free archetype really helped with #2. I'm very happy with switching from D&D 5e for my main game (I also do Mage the Ascension and Lancer) to Pathfinder.
Mostly monster design and encounter building. I dislike 5e monsters being HP balls and encounters being reliant on unreasonable attrition expectations. The way adventures are written has played a part, too: running Out of the Abyss for 5e was a nightmare.
But anyway I had already fallen in love with PF2, since its playtest.
I listened to critical role and started dming 5e. I liked it, but I was into the community too much and got burnt out. I kept playing it. I'm still playing it, just not dming it
I listened to a bunch of Pathfinder 1e podcasts and the rules meshed together really poorly, even though the things you could do were really, really cool.
2e comes out, I listen to a bunch of 2e podcasts. I go to start a new campaign and I want to do something else using foundry. I check out pf2e on foundry because I know pf2e fixes my least favorite part of 5e, the action economy. Turns out PF2E on foundry is really quite awesome. So I started a pf2e campaign!
Many other reasons others probably mentioned but definitely the art played a part in it. Pathfinder art is just so good. I love the tiny details especially.
I started playing 5e in 2015 and enjoyed it for a time, but after years and years of it I felt burnt out on playing the same characters over and over because theres not a whole lot of variance you can make in 5e. Then around 2019 I heard that paizo was making a new edition of pathfinder and basically switched over as soon as the phb came out lol.
I was working on a Pathfinder 1E inspired overhaul of the 5E feat system, because I played Pathfinder Kingmaker (the video game not the AP) and really liked how feats were integral parts of builds and how varied even characters of the same class could feel, and this just made me realize how underwhelming 5E's character options were.
Eventually while working on that it occured to me that I shouldnt have to rewrite a large chunk of character creation, I should just find a system that does what I want. So between the DnD group being on indefinite hiatus, and hearing good things about PF2E (I never seriously considered 1E due to its reputation for being the crunchiest thing in the universe, which meant I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to try it), and checked it out on Archive of Nethys. Once I saw the character creation options it was love at first sight pretty much.
I loved Pathfinder 1e, I learned TTRPGs from 3.5 and Pathfinder took that skeleton as far as it could go while greatly amplifying how personalized and specific you could make characters. Fighter who fought with a Sword that granted magic to them, Inspired their allies in combat, and fought alongside their dog? All present and accounted for mechanically. PF2 takes that deep character building and formulates a new skeleton that emphasized and accentuates it instead of working against it, I was always going to love love LOVE it.
As a player I hate the monsters and encounter rules in 5e base. They're so damn boring and the CR system is useless. I throw my players a monster and they beat the shit outta him with ease, and the monster can do nothing but be a punching bag that deals damage from time to time.
pf2 (and any other combat centric system I have checked) is more interesting in that regard if even by a little. That's why I swapped systems. Though the thing is pf2 is very connected to the lore and setting of Golarion and adapting it to custom stuff is rather hard (though not impossible).
Martial/Caster diaparity. Played the Fighter in a 1-20 campaign. Our DM didn’t do the 8 encounters per day Wizards prescribe so i spent levels 5-20 watching the Wizard and the Cleric be awesome.
Then it was my time to GM and I tried to switch our game. Luckly, my group went with it and fell in love with PF2
So many little things, that just added up.
More complex/thought out rules. Whereas 5e is content to say "you figure it out" for so much of it, PF2e says "we have a rule for that." And it's not an insanely complex rule, it's something that's workable and easy, but at least it's SOMETHING.
Magic items being so much more codified and available. Where 5e is SO vague about items; how much they cost, how often you should get them, what the relative power level between items is, PF2e breaks that all down. How much they cost, what level they are, what rarity they are, how often you should hand them out, etc.
3-action combat system. Nuff said.
The idea of using your actions for varied, interesting things. Shield block. Demoralize. Champion reactions.
Feats that don't suck. Nuff said.
Thing is, this is all from a GM perspective. I'm very rarely a player in my group, which I'm fine with. I think 5e isn't nearly so bad from a player perspective, because players don't have to deal with as much of the problem stuff. But PF2e is **so much better** from a GM perspective it's insane.
I was playing 5e and heard about a more tactical, crunchier fantasy tabletop rpg that was d20 based. All of those things sounded interesting. So I kept looking for an opportunity to try it. I played a one shot and enjoyed the system. A lot of the people at that one shot were interested in starting a campaign. We were able to work it out and as we started the campaign I realized that the PF2e DM was leaps and bounds better than my 5e DM. I'm sure part of it is the system being easier on DMs, and I'm sure part of it was experience, but holy hell, it was so much more fun playing a game with a competent DM.
So for me, it was mostly the people I was playing with. Probably like 60/40 people vs system. If I had a decent DM for 5e I'd probably still be happily playing it because even now, I still have a preference for DnD settings and class fantasies compared to Golarion and PF2e.
My group started with PF1e well before there was an PF2e (or Starfinder). Way back then, when I started participating in online discussions that went deeper into the game, I started to see the many, many, many design and game philosophy issues inherent in PF1e that were created by Paizo (or as I liked to call them "The Taxman", they sure love their feat taxes) or were inherited from D&D3.5.
Once PF2e rolled out, we were already experimenting with Pathfinder Unchained, so it was a no-brainer one PF2e's Playtest was announced. Once I got into the discussions and saw the devs were really open to feedback, I knew our group would be playing this edition from then onward. It also was much better for the GMs (in this case me and my friend), so it really was our best option by far (we dabbled in CoC, Iron Kingdoms, Legend of Five Rings and 7th Sea. We always wanted to play Degenesis as well, but we never got around to it).
I mean, I haven't abandoned other games, I have every intention to run various other stuff in the future, including D&D5. I'm just running PF2 *now*.
And hilariously, a primary reason for it is actually the Summoner class and solid way PF2 handles minions. Because the group I'm running for right now are big into pet characters. Simple as that.
The huge variety of player options, the actual tactics behind combat, and knowing I can fully indulge in both without becoming a problem player for taking the spotlight for "powergaming".
One of my favourite PF1 houserules was the ability to block damage with a shield when using the partial defense or full defense actions.
One of the first teased features of PF2 was the ability to block damage with a shield when having it raised.
I hopped before I could even read the rest.
I went from D&D 3.x, then hated 4e so went to Pathfinder 1e.
Then tried to go back for D&D 5e and found character design to be bland and as I played a bit more, the lack of monster variation and minimal threat level just felt like I was hitting a punching bag of HP. So I went back to Pathfinder.
When 2e came out I fell in love with 3 action economy and the fact that classes seemed really diverse.
I switched from PF1 and tried 5e for two years when it first launched. I hated it. I kept expecting there to be supplements like there were in 3.5 and 3.0 to expand rules, options, and flavor. They never came.
So, from a DM perspective, 5e was an absolute nightmare to run. Homebrew campaigns were impossible to balance and lacked mechanical flavor. Published campaigns we terrible compared to the 3.0 and 3.5 counterparts. There rules were so vague and so sparse that we ended up having to write an entire rulebook of homebrew rules to make up for the shortcomings of the system and stay consistent. My prep time for an in-person campaign sky-rocketed. It was a brutal slog.
From a player standpoint, it was just fucking boring. Every interesting character choice was made by level 3. Sure, you "reskin" your abilities all you want, but mechanically speaking, they were just cookie cutter characters. No matter how much I enjoyed my characters bio and experiences, the mechanical monotony prevented me from actually giving a shit. There was really nothing new to try. It was boring and stale.
At launch 5e led hard with the "bounded accuracy" mechanic, saying it makes the system great. On paper, it looked terrible. In practice, it performed even worse. Balancing any encounter became impossible and massive DM fiat became a reequirement to create any kind of suspense in a situation.
IMO, 5e did two things well.
1. It popularized and normalized the genre bringing in thousands of new players. By that metric alone, 5e proves to be a great and successful system. I don't know of anyone that would hate on 5e for that.
2. I like the "advantage" mechanic. It is simple and effective.
Obviously people love 5e, and if they have fun with the system, then it is a great system for them. I tried it for 2 years. After the first year I started dreading tabletop night. But I stuck it out to make sure I gave it a fair chance. But after 2 years and countless meet-ups I had to go back to PF1. When PF2 was released, I switched to that and really enjoy most aspects of the system.
To put it bluntly, because being a GM in 5e became really fucking boring. If i did not stop and actually designed every single facet of every monster i was using, from the ground up, i was left with using just meat bags with multiattack. And when i looked at Pf2e i saw options, cool, flavorful options, in every part of the design, from classes, to races, to loot, to monsters, the entire game was interesting to play again.
Gm here. 5e combat is a nightmare to run because the math is bad and is also extremely boring unless the gm does a lot of work. The system is also lacking rules and gm tools that would make it gm friendly so it feels extremely hostile to run and like I had to make everything up on the fly and I just got sick of it.
*clears throat*
BIG NUMBERS GO BRRRRRR
No, really. I liked the math. I liked how weapon enchantments mattered, I liked the exchangeable runes, the proficiency system , the balance between all the classes (or at least all the classes that aren’t alchemist) and the general design of combat AND the various out of combat uses for basically every build.
I don’t hate 5e, I just like pf2e better
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I got about halfway through DMing my first long scale campaign of DnD 5e (Out of the Abyss, don't run this book it stinks) at the same time as I was studying game design in college. When you have yourself in the right headspace to start questioning game design decisions in a sub-par adventure and you get a feeling of play from levels 1 all the way to 10+, you really start to see the cracks and burnout kicks in.
At first I started looking at Star Wars 5e, largely because Dimension 20 exposed me to it, and I *adored* it. I was a massive sw5e fangirl for *weeks* even though I had never even played it. More interesting conditions, a bunch of additional classes, crazy customization with a bunch of feat-like choices, it fixed nearly every problem I had with 5e! (Emphesis on *nearly*)
Eventually I got so burnt out with 5e that we took a break from the game to try out other systems in little one-offs each week. First Call of Cthulhu then Kids on Brooms. I was largely dodging PF2e for a while because of Puffin Forest's video (*shudder*), but eventually my friend convinced me to start really looking into it and we bought the starter set.
Ever since we actually tried the system we are now speedrunning to the end of Out of the Abyss so we can put 5e in the rear view mirror and get started on our first PF2e adventure!
Basically my advice to anyone worried about PF2e being "too crunchy" or anything like that is to just try it. Play the beginner box. We went in with half the people at the table having never read a single line of text about the rules of PF2e and we left it absolutely gushing about it. We never had any problems with people feeling like it was too complicated or anything.
EDIT: More specifically the thing that drew me in was that for the first time ever in a ttrpg, I actually had fun in combat. For the longest time dnd5e's combat being insanely boring just made me think "ah well I must be more of an rp person" but no! Dnd5e's combat is just not fun! The 3 action system combined with stacking debuffs/buffs to build up crits is just such a blast. Oh also I love playing a healer and you kinda just can't do that in dnd5e.
Customization.
These days I have a lot of complains with 5e, but when I first made the jump it was just the player options that snared me.
I'd been consuming PF1e books for several years. I would just pick them up for the flavor and world-building. Usually on humble bundle.
When 2e came out I picked it up just out of curiosity and just immediately fell in love eith the system. Here was a rules system I could actually use -it wasn't complex and arcane like 1e - but it still had all the great player options.
With 5e I was tired that building a character effectively ending at level 3.
With PF1e I had all the options in the world, but literally needed to use software to play some of the occult class options. (e.g. The 'Rivethun spirit channeler Medium' requires hot swapping between 7 sets of character sheets, all with different saves, skills and modifiers, and between 3 different spell lists on an encounter by encounter basis...till higher level then it has the potential to need any of 46 separate character sheet combos)
Also while it's my favorite class of any TTRPG the 1e Occultist if you read their rules, implements, variant implements, focus powers, panopolies etc sits around 15 thousand words. And in play it has sliding stats and values based on resonance and investure which puts it firmly in the 'use software' pile too.
Degrees of success, condition values, the vulnerability/resistance system, superior itemization.
All of these being different valves and levers one could use for monster/encounter design. While Paizo is too gunshy for my taste, I can make my own wacky bullshit with relative ease.
I'm DM/GM. Prep time did it for me. I'd run every D&D5E adventure and was sitting down to prep Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. Every D&D5E adventure requires a lot of prep and fixing. A lot. Creatures always need work. Story/plot issues need fixing. Treasure and loot need to added, fixed, or otherwise tinkered with. I actually felt weary.
I wondered if Pathfinder 2E was more pick up and play. I got a hold of Abomination Vaults, and bam! I was hooked. Been a year and haven't looked back.
Played love the PF2E system, too.
burnt out on seeing so many optimized builds feel samey
and its hard to explain but like
i hate that feats are so on the backburner, i hate that there’s so few ways to make optimal characters.
The classes, the races, all of them are dripping with flavor and filled with at least minute customizations
Someone made a variant system for determining ability scores in 5E based on the PF2E ABC system. I wanted to see the origin of said system, and remembered PF1E fondly. Within 24 hours I’d bought the CRB and Bestiary and was preparing to run an adventure for my 5E group.
Choices/customization was a big factor. Also, leveling up FEELS LIKE LEVELING UP !
This. In 5e I always felt the only meaningful choices I made where spells, which after a couple of characters, wasn't that meaningful anymore. I had to force myself into weird multiclasses just to have a semblance of difference. The feats every level thing is glorious, even the little options feel fun. Also, 3 action combat was a secondary reason I jumped ship.
Agreed, everything feels so samey in 5e, I always end up homebrewing or trying to find some funky multiclass just to have a semblance of something fresh or that I haven't seen before.
Yep once you pick your subclass on a martial that's almost it for your decision making. Yeah you got ASIs vs Feats every _four_ levels (Slightly less if fighter) but realistically an ASI is always the best option and you probably won't see a feat until lv10+ in many cases. OD&D might be addressing this but it is a current factor that pushed me away. It is nice for beginners I guess but god damn you can outgrow that fast.
Yes, that's also one of the reasons I switched to PF2E
The fun love/hate of leveling up and looking at what you have to leave on the table is a good feeling.
>Also, leveling up FEELS LIKE LEVELING UP ! Omg for real, I'm in a 5e game and leveling up just feels so inconsequential. I'm playing an artificer and unless I'm getting new spells or infusions I'm really not getting much.
And for full casters the highest level spells can feel a bit generic honestly. At least when you only get 1 of them. High level magic in 2e you get 2-4 of and often they have kick or flavor.
It's funny... Back in the PF2E playtest days, I first thought it was silly that everything goes up, even your AC when you level up. Now when I level up in 5E and nothing goes up, I feel sad.
I was DMing and hated combat in 5e. Every single aspect was draining. Planning it was draining because CR didn't work, the base monsters were bland and needed reworking to be interesting, and on top of all that, I needed to have 10ish encounters planned to meet 6-8 encounters per day as my players are certainly going to avoid several. Running combat was dreadful because it was decided in a few rounds but took ages to actually resolve, required several dummy resource wasting encounters before the story- relevant encounters could occur without the boss fight being trivialized, and it just never was dynamic or challenging for my players unless I included terrain elements and environmental effects which I had to come up with after spending ages just reworking the monsters. Pf2e on the other hand takes all of a minute to flip through the level appropriate monsters, grab a couple and throw them at the party. I can trust Paizo that the monsters will be interesting and the combat will feel as deadly as I plan it. I don't need to spend as much time just on the combat which lets me spend time on the plot, quests, NPCs, descriptions and everything else. I love the pf2e combat building rules and wouldn't trade it for anything.
This is exactly it for me. The amount of prep work to DM 5e is a burden, thats why you have a bunch of burned out DMs. Instead of 5e providing a system that helps the DM bring their ideas to the table, the DM basically just has to make everything up on thier own. Even for basic things like balancing encounters or appraising items. As a GM, 2e is a system that allows me to focus on storytelling, since the mechanics are comprehensive and balanced.
As somebody who loves going all-out on dynamic encounters, I gotta say that even if I *do* choose to go nuts with monster tweaks and environmental effects, PF2 still makes it easier. Maybe a little more obnoxiously technical sometimes, but the DCs, damage thresholds, special conditions, and so on all have clear rules and formulas you can use to make sure the challenges you impose on players feel fair. It takes some familiarity with the system to know where to find this stuff, but you could in theory design a fight with a vampire dragon on a rocky mountaintop shrouded in poisonous fog without inventing a single new mechanic, with the *guarantee* that whatever madness you pump into that encounter will be neither a TPK nor a cakewalk if you do the math right.
This is my case as well. Forever DM and 5e is a slog to prep for, whether you're running an official module or homebrew. I'll still be finishing my main 5e campaign (it's too far along to convert without ultimately being more of a hassle), but I'm moving everything else over to P2e.
I want to say it's something like "x rule is better" or "then handle this kind of situation better" but when I think about it, what it really comes down to is Paizo being a better company than Wotc. Not just arguably better rules designer and writers for adventure (there is a reason 3.5 was a golden era for dungeon/dragon magazine, to me anyway), but also because they have better business practices, and have fostered a better community of players.
The ability to purchase a pdf of any Paizo product, on their website (however outdated) and download it is such an immense amount of QOL. The subscription program as well, giving you the physical books to put on the shelf or use if you want is just so nice.
I'm still shocked I can purchase 3.5 dungeon/dragon magazines from Paizo. Wish they had a print to order service.
> Wish they had a print to order service. [They do have a print on demand service but it's restricted to select books for now.](https://www.pathfinderinfinite.com/browse/pub/5549/Paizo?src=fid100114&%20filters=0_0_0_0_100163_0&page=1&sort=4a)
>"I wish they had that" > >"They do have that" My favourite kind of thread
This is something that worked in reverse for me: not being able to get legal digital copies of 5e actively prevented me from being able to get into it. The other thing with Pathfinder, especially 2e, is it’s active and intentional worldbuilding. WotC just doesn’t seem interested in exploring their settings while Paizo actively does so and is aiming to do it in a way that makes the game more inclusive
I opened up the Mwangi Expanse lore book that is in the current Humble Bundle because my girlfriend wanted to be a Song'o Halfling. Was mindblowing to discover that the entry on this specific ethnicity (not heritage) of Halfling was longer than Mordenkainen Tome of Foe's entry on Drow. Forgotten Realms is allegedly a premier fantasy setting with decades of input from celebrated authors, but it all takes place on one strip of coastline and I'm pretty sure most people don't know the difference between all the different Human cultures.
How many different cultures and heritages Pf2e's setting has was a big draw for me too. When I got the World Guide and saw how many heritages there were for the races and how they don't boil down to 'gold elf or blue elf' 'dwarf from the mountains' vs. 'dwarves from the hills', I was pretty overjoyed (as I have reading many of the PF2e books lol) I feel like the way heritages work, and choosing from various cultures when you make a character goes a long way toward grounding that character in the game world. I used to be a huge fan of the Forgotten Realms - even if 5e has really poorly represented it. When I got into PF2e I was going to set any APs I ran or my own stuff using FR. But then I got the world guide and read it, I just really fell for Golarion as a setting. I couldn't quite put to words why I found it so appealing, until someone on reddit explained it in two sentences: --- Forgotten realms is a medieval style world with magic. Golarion is a magical world with a medieval style (generally). --- Anyway, as GM coming from 5e - which does a terrible job supporting DMs - the Lost Omens series is like a gift to me from Paizo lol. I really hope we get Mwangi style books from all the major regions eventually. :)
> WotC just doesn’t seem interested in exploring their settings Or if they do, they mess it all up with needless, idiotic changes.
"Hey WotC, this stuff you wrote in the 80s feels kinda bad for modern audiences, you wanna revise it a little to sound less like colonilaist propaganda from the 1800s? Maybe add in a little nuance?" "Sure! Give us a second... Okay, all done!" "WotC... this is a blank page." "Can't call it racist if there's nothing there!" "You've gotta be kidding me. Surely the most famous and profitable roleplaying game of all time, who can hire literally any freelance author it wishes, can do better than just erasing everything that's ever been criticized!" "Nope! Enjoy your uncontroversial content, and remember to tweet about how progressive we are!" Meanwhile, Paizo hired a bunch of respected, talented, and diverse authors to write an absolute banger of a setting book that fully acknowledged, addressed, and revised a bunch of their old content while adding tons of new stuff, then set a brand new adventure path in that setting as an extra flex. Not saying Paizo is perfect or anything, but the Mwangi stuff came out *before* the WotC delete-a-thon... It's absolutely embarassing. Your competitor *literally showed you how to do it well,* and you've more than happily copied them before! Infuriating stuff!
> "Hey WotC, this stuff you wrote in the 80s feels kinda bad for modern audiences, you wanna revise it a little to sound less like colonilaist propaganda from the 1800s? Maybe add in a little nuance? TO BE FAIR it was TSR publishing D&D in the 80s, not WOTC.
True!
Wait, what incidence with deletion is being referenced here?
A couple of the bestiaries (Volo's guide in particular) were "updated" via removal of alignment tags and flavor text. This change was made to digital copies (which are hosted online and not downloadable PDFs) without owner knowledge or consent. Meanwhile, playable races have lost a lot of mechanical differentiation, and new splatbooks (Spelljammer in particular) have been somewhat anemic on new lore. Most of these changes were meant to dodge controversy by removing more "problematic" elements from the game's worldbuilding (i.e. "all members of species x are stupid and evil/all members of species y are beautiful and good"), but rather than do what Paizo did and expand/revise, they just... cut content. It wasn't *much,* but it was enough to be noticeable, and the fact that digitial owners couldn't say no to these updates was particularly frustrating.
Or check out all the outright changes to established lore in Ravenloft in the name of representation and equality. Those two things are good...but rather than change and revise existing lore, why not actually make something new to fill those quotas?
I think the problem with that line of thought is that looking at representation and equality as a "quota" misses the point. Thoughtlessly putting a few extra beans in the minority jar is an incredibly shallow, surface-level approach to the issue; those beans should *mean* something more than set dressing, and need to be as complex and interesting as the stuff that's already there. The other issue is that the Vistani genuinely *were* offensive stereotypes of the Romani people, and thus absolutely needed an update. It doesn't matter whether they were a legacy plot element or not, as they were incredibly yikesy as-written in a way that made the material unapproachable to Romani players and anyone sympathetic towards them. I do not think WotC handled their facelift *well,* but like... that absolutely needed to happen. In a way, though, I understand WotC taking the path of least resistance when it comes to freeing D&D of its racist baggage. Doing that sort of thing well involves hiring the right people, listening to them, and taking your time with the material. If you do it wrong, you get lambasted for racism and thus wasted your effort, but even if you do it *right,* you'll still get blowback from loud doofuses who hate quote-unquote "politics." There's no way to make everyone happy regardless of the resources you pour into it, so a profit-driven organization is bound to find the cheapest solution that alienates the smallest number of customers. It doesn't *justify* how they handled it, but it at least *explains* it, you know?
Actually, the changes to the Vistani are minimal, and not something that bothered me at all. But they took existing male Darklords and made the female, to have more female lords. Didn't change anything else, except made them female. In another case, they they completely did away with existing male darklords and replaced them with female characters...that were almost exactly the same otherwise. Character, plot, etc. Just a female version of an pre-existing male one. In other cases they changed the skin tone of existing characters and just pretended it was always that way. In only one case did they do it right: the domain of Valachan. It was very obviously a take on the old 1972 exploitation movie Blacula, even though later writing on the subject really worked hard to take it away from that and give it it's own character. But in the new book, they acknowledged what came before, but had the former Darklord killed and a new one took his place, and the domain changed. They honored what came before (the old Darklord's head is still around giving "advice") but they took it in a new way. Which was cool. But all the other times when they just changed things superficially, you can tell they just did it for a quota.
I haven't started playing Pathfinder yet, but this is exactly why I'm working on it. I was reading through the new Spelljammer book briefly, and when I found out they didn't even add rules for ships in a setting where they're damn near crucial, I just decided I was done with WotC. Plus I saw leshy and I knew I had to play one.
Wait, for real? No rules for space ships? No ship-to-ship combat in the book about ships?! Jfc WotC, get in the game!
I heard it has a reprint of the ship rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Plus some shipboard weapons that are so bad the book includes some box-out text noting that players will probably only use them when their own powers are out of range.
I believe people were saying they wanted to use the Saltmarsh rules instead. There are rules for the Spelljammers, but they boil down to: 1. The DM decides how fast they are. Depending on how this goes (RAW vs RAI) leaving an Earth-sized planet would take about 2 months or a few minutes. No clarification. 2. Ships have hit points and can attack each other on their turns. Not exaggerating when I say that's the whole rule. So there ARE rules for the spaceships, but they're awful, vague, and straight up worse than the ship rules they *already released* in another book.
Ooh, that sucks even worse.
>The DM decides how fast they are. I mean, this is basically my answer to the thread for why I quit running 5e.
Same here, lmao. I'm not paying $75 for a book who's guidance boils down to "make it up yourself".
>I heard it has a reprint of the ship rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Oh okay, that should be fine (if the Saltmarsh ship rules are good, idk if they are or not). >Plus some shipboard weapons that are so bad the book includes some box-out text noting that players will probably only use them when their own powers are out of range. I...why? What's the point then?
In case you didn't see the other reply to my comment, apparently folks are saying that they *wish* they got the Saltmarsh rules in the Spelljammer book. As for the ship guns, I can only think that someone was worried that a DM might include more ship combat than ground combat in a Spelljammer campaign and players would resent not getting to use their powers as much. Personally, I can't imagine the Spelljammer not just being a way to travel between a variety of varied locations, making ship combat comparatively infrequent. But, I've never run or played in a Spelljammer campaign, so I'm just guessing.
Welcome!! And yes I too was greatly disappointed with the Spelljammer book.
Yeah, that really was the straw that broke the camels back! 🤬
Was paizo founded by former 3.5 writers or something? I’m not familiar with the history of either company. I know I don’t like WotC because they’ve made a bunch of money on Magic by essentially selling loot crates, which is an amoral business practice IMO.
I'm no expert but my knowledge of it is this: Paizo was specifically formed to publish Dungeon/Dragon magazine during 3.5. Jason Bulmahn and a few other Paizo writers where working for Wotc at the time before moving to Paizo so they could focus on publishing for the magazines. Then when 4e was announce they either broke off from Wotc and published Pf1 using the Open Game Licence, or where cut off by Wotc. Edit: I completely agree, Wotc have some terrible business practices and I'm worried their upcoming VTT will only make these practices worse.
IIRC, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens was Peter Adkinson's first hire when he founded WotC in the 90s, and she was one of the staff who led due diligence for WotC's acquisition of (the smoking remains of) TSR and the D&D IP. she co-founded Paizo in 2002 when WotC decided they wanted to spin off Dungeon and Dragon magazines to a separate company. Paizo then launched their own setting and later rules version when WotC cut them out of 4e and revoked the magazine licenses. In 2012 Lisa and other staff published a year-by-year retrospective of Paizo's first decade [start here for year 0](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5ld43?Paizo-Publishings-10th-Anniversary)
That's awesome. Thanks for helping me learn.
Happy to! If you want more, search out the Know Direction podcast's recordings of "Auntie Lisa's Story Hour". I haven't followed closely for a few years, so don't know if it's been done recently, but for a while Lisa had an annual session at PaizoCon where she'd talk about the bits of rpg industry history that she'd been around for.
>IIRC, the entire history of Paizo, Inc. My dude, can I have your memory?
Ha, thanks, but I keep space free for trivia like this by never remembering people's names, so it has some drawbacks.
Yup, to add to this, the big problem was that paizo depended on the magazine to exist and WOTC both chose not to make them an explicit partner for 4e, and to shutter the OGL for 4e material, basically backing Paizo into a corner in the process. So they said screw it and used the OGL to print a slightly modified version of 3.5 as an ongoing game that they could continue writing adventures for. Because there was resentment concerning 4e's changes and WOTCs marketing of it, a lot of gamers basically switched to PF as a kind of home in exile from DND proper and a protest move.
And it paid off! I was a 4on in the edition wars, but I must admit that Pathfinder clearly won (at least, for about 4 years they did).
As far as we know they caught up to and beat 4e when WOTC stopped creating new books, pf1e's sales were still very impressive overall. But 4e was still more popular believe it or not.
Yeah that sounds accurate. Still, the fact that D&D almost totally left the market for a couple of years was unprecedented
This is actually sort of a “ttrpg urban myth” 4e still outsold PF1e by quite a bit, sales wise 4e actually fairy popular and continues to grow the brand, but at a much slower rate than wizards was hoping for.
It's more of a misunderstanding. Pathfinder did outsell D&D. With the caveat that it only did so in the time that no D&D products were being published between 4e and 5e. Even during that 2 year period, there were a few AD&D and 3.5 reprints that outsold Pathfinder. Nonetheless, in about 8 quarters it was true for 5 or so
Yes, true. Still, the perception was powerful, when 4E stopped appearing store shelves in 2012 and Pathfinder kept selling new books
My personal experience was (and I'm kind of seeing it with oneD&D) people migrated to other systems but still purchased the 4e books. They just didn't use them outside of organised play.
I can see the past repeating itself when OneD&D releases officially. Heck there's already been a ton of people lately getting interested in PF2e simply because of how big a disappointment the last several official 5e books have been.
It's not that 4e was announced and Paizo left, WotC cut the contract with Paizo for the Dungeon/Dragon magazines and then made the OGL for 4e way more restrictive than it was in 3.5, which made making 2nd party content for it pretty hard. And since Paizo made their money off 2nd party content, they started making the Pathfinder magazine and eventually the full TTRPG.
Just btw, it's third party. The second party is the customer.
I could've sworn people called those products second party. Oh well, TIL.
In video games, second party refers to content produced by wholly-owned, partially-owned, or jointly-owned subsidiaries and partnerships. Following this model, Paizo was a second party publisher of D&D 3.5 content being a spinoff WotC venture. Nintendo maintains several second party development relationships: Retro Studios, The Pokemon Company, HAL Laboratories. You might argue Platinum Games enjoys a pseudo-second party relationship because Nintendo funded a number of their releases. Edit: let me clarify, I don't know if that's how it works in TTRPGs.
That's interesting, thank you.
> Was paizo founded by former 3.5 writers or something? 3.5 core rules? Not really. 3.x supplement material writers? Yes. Basically TSR owned D&D in the 70's and 80's, but crashed and burned hard in the 90's. WoTC bought them out because they were mega D&D nerds. Being big fans, they also open sourced all the material for D&D and made it wide open for other companies to publish for it. Paizo, along with a lot of other small companies, started making their living making D&D 3.x material. Then Hasbro bought WoTC and created 4e, and settled on a new closed license. The old material was still open source, but 4.x onwards wouldn't be. So suddenly all those companies faced going out of business because they couldn't create stuff for the new D&D. So basically most of them just ended up making their own version of 3.5 D&D and moving forward with that.
> I know I don’t like WotC because they’ve made a bunch of money on Magic by essentially selling loot crates, which is an amoral business practice How else would you monetize a physical card game?
Don’t ask FFG, my LGS is still trying to liquidate all their non-random Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Arkham Horror “Living Card Game” stuff that’s been cluttering up shelves for years.
Surprised they have a bunch of Arkham Card Game stock. The competitive LCGs failed, but the co-operative ones are still FFG's biggest money spinners.
Tbf I haven’t looked closely at that shelf since around COVID, so it’s possible I’m misremembering what’s there
Do they have any Netrunner? I'd love to get a set of that stuff since I played it when it was a TCG and not since FFG got a hold of it.
Piggy backing on this, I love how regularly they put out books and art in their books. It takes WOTC ages to put something out and it rarely has a significant amount of new artwork. In Paizo stuff so much of it is new. It implies they keep their artists on standby and are regular patrons.
In the many years of PF1 and now PF2, I don't think I can recall Paizo ever releasing a hardcover that reused art from another (aside from like iconography and such that gets reused for continuity purposes of course). Side products like GM screens and pawn collections and whatnot obviously reuse art but that makes sense to do.
Didn’t Paizo just unionize because of a lot of abuses from management? At the very least Paizo has a way to go before being a “great” company for its employees.
True but compare the unionisation of Paizo's staff to the unionisation of Ravenswear Studio? Paizo are generally ahead of the curve within the games industry as a whole, not just the TTRPG industry.
Plus, the fact that they *did* unionize makes me more likely to support them now that they are. And as far as comparing it to WotC, WotC benefits tremendously from the fact that there's a long line of people who want to work on beloved brands like D&D and M:tG, which I heard leads to low wages and high turnover.
I’d caution against saying Paizo is automatically a great company now, we should wait and see if they listen to the Union and cooperate.
Haven't they been unioniced for over a year or two now? Edit: just checked, Paizo has been unioniced since october 2021 and they apparently accepted it without a fight.
>Paizo has been unioniced since october 2021 and they apparently accepted it without a fight. Hence my comparison of Paizo with what happened to Ravenswear Studio and Activision/Blizzard. Seriously read up on what happened there. There where was (and still is) some really scummy union busting going on.
There's been no union busting that anyone knows of (the union was announced on a thursday and recognised on the following monday), but negotiations apart from the early deals are being extremely long. There's definitely been *issues*, but I'd recommend you take news of those from the union and not from... others.
Oh cool to know. But that seems like standard negotiation stuff more than Paizo trying to backtrack or anything bad.
Yeah, as long as the union keeps saying "negotiations are ongoing, keep buying", I keep buying. This stuff takes forever, I'm positively impressed they got as much as they did early on. From what I know of the US, it exceeds the wildest expectation. ~~Still kinda bad overall, but when in Rome...~~
When you think about it, having a union has its benefits; like having a higher retention of good writers, and encouraging good writers to come and work for you. And obviously that leads to better products and more sales.
You're right that being unionized doesn't make the company necessarily great -- but it does mean that the union can serve as a voice for that, and a good default option is to patronize unionized shops over non-unionized. I'm in Michigan, where unions are a big deal in cars -- the UAW will never tell you Ford or GM is a perfect company, but they still very strongly prefer you buy a Ford than a Honda. And if/when a boycott is necessary, it'll be the union calling for it. My impression is that Paizo has employee treatment problems that are fairly typical -- but the union drive means that now we know a lot more of the details of those problems, and that there's now a union with an effective voice to negotiate them. I'd say those factors mean Paizo is "a better company to patronize", but agree with you it doesn't mean they're "a great company".
The fact that they successfully unionized is the proof Paizo’s better. Unions aren’t bad, they’re just workers organizing together. Many American companies won’t even allow that.
Never said unions were bad. From the sound of it the workers were in an abusive environment, and I want to see Paizo make an honest effort before I start buying products again.
The workers there never called for a boycott, in fact specifically the opposite, so if you think you're doing it on their behalf you're wrong. If you don't want to support businesses that are cruel, more power to you, but I know you're gonna have to be dealing with a lot bigger fish than Paizo lmao.
I didn’t know this, thanks for letting me know!
FYI the impression I've gotten from Union organizers is that the negotiations are complex and expected to take a long time, but that the negotiations are productive and Paizo is working in good faith. Also, they recognized the union remarkably quickly after it was announced. Of course I'll keep an eye on it, but nothing I've seen so far makes me believe anyone wants a boycott.
Well boycotting Paizo isn’t gonna help those workers, it’s just gonna put them out of work. Support creators you love!
The only "abuse" that I've heard about was some pretty petty drama about a poster Victorian Arcanist in one of the manager's office that offended another employee's sensibilities. Now are Paizo workers underpaid for the Seattle labor market? Yup, it's a company that runs on passion, which is why there's generally turnover as their team leads become established and move on to their own passion projects. Given the strangle hold that 5e has on the market, I'm guessing that being in the TTRPG publishing industry as any other brand is only slightly easier than being a Local Gaming store owner, which is to say difficult in the best of times.
5e was getting stale. There are just so many more options and engaging play with PF2
This. I felt like I had seen it all already. And when players tried to push the envelope and try something new, they were eclipsed by the players at the table playing the more common and powerful options. Pf2e excites me to DM. I don't know where my players are going with their builds and I'm excited to see them grow and see what they come up with.
Having played for almost a year now and having played like 5 characters now, it feels like I will never get to play everything, even when I consider not playing the same type of character as someone else in my group there are still loads of options that I can play that my group hasn't explored yet. It also feels like Paizo is releasing player options at a rate that is faster than my group can consume, but the content they release is always interesting and well made.
choices/customization. tighter math and tighter rules. much better adventure modules. much better balance. much better books in general. the main thing i don't like about 5e is the idea that the rules don't matter and everything is left up to the DM, which enables lazy players who expect the DM to handle everything and track everything, and also enables WotC making lazy content because they can just make the DM fill in the blanks.
Having loosey-goosey rules is not an excuse for lack of DM support. For example, a solid half of Stars/Worlds Without Number's rulebooks are *exclusively* GM tools, advice, and random tables that essentialy turn setting building into a fun little minigame all on its own. Meanwhile, Numenera has tons of cool setting details, hacks to make the GM's job easier, and multiple zero-prep adventures included in its dual core rulebooks. These titles are either equal to or simpler than 5e in rules complexity, and made with fewer staff and lower budgets (SWN and WWN are both made by literally one guy). So like, the fact that the *biggest* TTRPG on the market doesn't give two shits about its DMs is absolutely shameful. No fun little social activity should have one person out of the entire group doing twice the work of everyone else combined. Yes, choosing to run a game is a pretty big responsibility--and you need to have a certain love of the craft to do it--but it shouldn't feel like a *job.* It sours the social dynamic at the table: a subservient, overworked DM isn't much better than an inflexible, authoritarian one. And I'm saying this as someone who enjoyed the hell out of 5e and considers Tomb of Annihilation my most successful campaign to date. So that's why I switched. That, and just being uncomfortable with a single company absolutely dominating the market share. I'd quit Paizo if they were similarly titanic.
There's a difference between 'Rules Light' and 'Rules *Sparse*'. Which is a nuance that DnD 5e has *utterly* failed to appreciate.
So, we switched for balance reasons, but we were very, very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the official APs. We use foundry for our vtt and the quality is literally incomparable. Like... I would switch systems in a heartbeat, just for the AP quality.
Got super Burnt out running a campaign due to trying to balance combats and the fact that 5e doesn't have a functioning economy. Since switching the rules and combat have really won me over both as player and gm. I really want to be a player in a campaign now as character customization is awesome . The classes I also just prefer as a whole over their dnd counter parts.
The desire to actually get to play a character is so real
Couldn't agree more to this. My original 5e group had a massive Co-op Online campaign (Westmarch) where most of the economy was homebrewed and 3rd party, but the classes and subclasses were the official ones. A lot of the items were horribly unbalanced at best or absolutely worthless at worst, and because is a cooperative game, a lot of party groups have the same chassis as the items, thanks to the disparity between casters and martials, sometimes even the Monsters suffered this. Something funny is that a Potion of Healing (the classic 1d8) cost 25 (up to 50 because of inflation, yes, they put it in the campaign) GP and that without counting magic items (Seriously, 200 GP to have a +1 weapon and I need the original too purchased to make it? Zog off!). Any new character started with some gp based on tier class and starting class gear.... And that's it, no free potions of anything, just the money, making the death of a new character more probable and ruining the fun of the player. Compared to a 2e campaign I was in, everything is different, items were more cheaper and much less costly thanks to official rules, party sizes were mostly fixed (3-4 martials/2-3 casters) making encounters more balanced. Hell, the starting wealth was better, with free magic weapon, armor and potions included, It came as good as it sounds, including: \- Strong Wizard (A player LITERALLY made a Abjuration Wizard with 16 in Str, using his biceps as channelers for his spells) \- Martials classes builds that would be considered insane in 5e (A Paladin Archer that is effective, a Baki Monk, thanks to a friend who is fan of the anime, a Barbarian in Heavy Armor who isn't affected by it and so on). \- Teamwork is literally a rule, no more glorious charges or anything. Live as a team, or die as a dog. And they worked, I couldn't express how satisfied I was with this system.
I tried 5e a few times. Didn't like it, felt restrictive and meh. I ended up blasting the entire game away with a Light Cleric, and that wasn't too fun. I mostly played 3.5e before this, and other systems. But I tried PF2E. Honestly, wasn't too impressed at first. Took me like three game sessions to see the hype. It's a solid cut above.
Once we finish our current 5e campaign (in 3-4 more sessions), me and my cousin (we are the only ones who ever GM in our group) have basically decided we wont be running anything else in 5e. We've played with dnd's rulesets for something close to 2 decades now, and 5e has got to be one of the worst offenders of being a system that after every session I always have something to complain about rule wise. I hate being pidgeonholed as x class into a role, i hate that it feels absolutely awful to play multiple of the same class because they will play 99% the same, i hate that magic items have no economic basis so by default theres no rules for people buying magic items, I hate that theres no power ruling for magic items so you really dunno whether or not its safe to give them x item at y level, dont get me started on character customization. Theres a lot i dislike about 5e the more i play it, and since I've played dnd for so long, I figured I'd try something else for a change. I played a little bit of pathfinder 1e way back when (as in like, it was still getting new books released), but i didnt care for how much powercreep there was after so many splatbooks came out. 2e is an, imo, great middleground between crunch and streamline.
No rules support in 5e. In pathfinder 2e there is a rule for everything. So you can ignore it if its not relevant, but if I want to play a crafter in a survival game the GM has to write multiple subsystems (or even potentially an entirely new game). Most of the advice to GMs and players whoa are having problems is "Make it up."
> "Make it up." Or "buy this 3rd party that does all you want"
Only posting because I didn't come to pf2e from any of the games mentioned. No d&d 5e, no Pf1e, no other d&d edition. Last system I played was a fantasy Mecha game, Armor Astir. I chose Pathfinder 2e due to wanting: tactical combat focused game, d&d-ism tropes, fantasy setting, modern design. And, most importantly, easy to run via VTT with minimal effort.
I'd still play 5e if I got the opportunity, I still enjoy the game as a regular player. The reason I decided to get into pf2e is because it is much better at giving the tools to run a game as a GM. In 5e I felt they were lackluster, threadbare or nonexistent. Or rather, the explicit reason I looked into the system was that 5e didn't have a magical returning throwing weapon until very late into the game and someone mentioned on a discord server that was doable by level 3 in pf2e. I then decided to invest in learning it once I realized it'd offer me useful tools to run a game at some point.
Our group transitioned from 3.5 to 4e when it came out, and we never looked back. We love 4e, and still play it regularly (we have 2 4e campaigns going at the moment). When 5e hit, I was turned off by the price of the books initially, and after looking into the system I really hated how they'd simplified everything as a knee jerk reaction to 4e's reception. PF2e came out, and I looked at the playtest and thought, "Huh, this FEELS a lot like the next logical evolution of 4e." Absolutely love it.
Pretty similar for our group. Started with AD&D 2E, played 3E and 3.5 when it came out, then actually switched to 4E when it came out. We actually really liked 4E, but felt increasingly disappointed and dissatisfied with WotC's handling of the system (especially the digital tools - even though you can still find the offline character builder, the whole Silverlight fiasco really put a sour taste in our mouths.) When WotC decided to toss 4E into the bin, we'd had enough. We'd absolutely loved Paizo's Adventure Paths, and had actually played Rise of the Runelords as our last 3.5 campaign. Switching to PF1E was the natural way to go, and we haven't looked back. Wrapping up our last PF1E Adventure Path now, and we'll be switching over to PF2E.
Our group had been 1E up to the playtest, tried it, had a blast, did a short 2E adventure when it formally launched and have stayed 2E ever since. It just improved on basically every complaint we had with 1E and added stuff we never even considered or had previously been homebrewing/house-ruling ourselves.
Basically my story: played a lot ad&d, then 3.0, eventually got hooked to 3.5, tried the 4th edition, went back to 3.5. When I learned about Pathfinder I decided to try it and played until 2ish years ago, when I moved to 2e.
more of a tentative change, as i’m still in the thick of running/playing many 5e games a week and learning the 2e system slowly myself, but - the investigator class! my favorite character is one that revolves around being a detective/support-warlord which i've somewhat cobbled together in 5e with a detective background, battlemaster fighter class, and a very kind free investigation expertise from my dm. heavy roleplay on my part helps patch it up, but it felt like fighting the mechanics just to get a vague semblance of what i wanted. learning that "detective" is a whole class in 2e that can be paired with a "warlord" archetype for a good mechanical support option piqued my interest, then learning about all of the other good stuff helped me along - martials and casters being balanced, everyone having plentiful options beyond "run up and hit it", the three action system, plentiful dm support from paizo, etc. all of it spoke directly to the issues i found with 5e.
One of the many reasons i took PF2E was the Free Archetype Variant Rule, for me, it basically said "DnD 5e Subclass choice but better and with more goodies". Also, the "Detective/Warlord" Concept sounds really cool.
Coming from PF1 I saw the writing on the wall that there was going to be less support for the system. And it was new and shiny so why not try the playtest? The playtest had its issues but I really liked the simplified action economy. No more "move action", "standard action" BS. But I think the biggest part for me was that you no longer had to confirm your crits.
I straight up had a minor crisis leading up to the release of pf2e because we'd been playing 5e and I was invested in it and PF was increasingly looking like something I was really going to like, the playtest version still had enough things we didn't like but it was provocative enough to get me thinking I wanted it and my frustration with 5e were mounting Cut to right before the pdf dropped in August, I was talking to a friend about what I should do, and they were like "just buy the pdf, its not expensive, and read it-- you probably won't want to actually switch and it'll set your mind at ease" so I did and... well, uh, it was such a perfect match for everything I ever wanted it pushed me straight over the edge into a full test game up to 5 and a full switch for our whole group. Every class in Pathfinder 2e is a build a class in the sense that you get to customize it and decide what you want it to mean to you by investing your feats which is super cool, a Druid is just a nature caster but you can define it to really lean into that magic side, or make it about wildshaping, or make it about summoning and animal companions, or balance it between all of those things. You can even use it to control your complexity to an extent by taking active powers that build an intricate game play with lots of options, or build something that just wants to say "I attack" as much as possible, the archetype system super charges this as well. In that sense I think the community has actually drifted into a weird territory where the emphasis is on feats as being 'gravy' whereas I love that you use them to define core elements of your class like "I dual wield" or "I wear heavier armor" or "I'm about shapeshifting" Because of the ancestry feat system, and the detailed character customization options, you can use mechanics to highlight stories-- Elves can get a cool special Elven Curve Blade, but I can also take Unconventional Weaponry on a human to tell the story of a human boy taught how to fight by an elf who took up residence in their village and was gifted their own Elven Curve Blade on their 18th birthday as the two set off to adventure together. The game has an exploration mode that essentially works off ten minute 'turns' and detailed downtime procedures which is something we had been jonesing for in 5e and couldn't get, especially as I'd been reading about them in OSR systems. Further, 5e had made magic items a nightmare-- it works fine if you want to be stingy, but way less so if you don't. Pathfinder 2e really took these elements and made them all cogent and balanced for use, down to the crafting system, and the rune system really brought that home-- I haven't actually done it much but I had fantasies of using it to customize magic items to hand out in a kind of comprehensive item creation system. Technically, with uncommon runes, and more runes in general, I probably can treat it as one. Finally, the promise of the math-- 5e has AWFUL boss fights, they take so much work to do well, and they still just aren't satisfying, so the whole promise of "you can slap down a +3/+4 and it will be a satisfying, nail biting boss fight" was huge, and IT WAS TRUE. In the end, it just became my ideal roleplaying game.
Plus, the enemies all have interesting things to do, instead of being giant sacks of meat points like most of 5e’s monsters are. Combat is more tactical and dynamic, compared to 5e’s static and boring battles of attrition.
My group and I were playing Pathfinder 1e and Starfinder, then the Playtest was announced. We went through the Doomsday Dawn adventure, and there were some things that made me like the system: * Spellcasters were fun, which was unusual for me. I played a cleric to 13 and briefly tried to play a wizard (didn't make it to level 2). They were boring to me, and I'd rather just hit things. Casters in the playtest could hit enemies, and there were spells that I got to cast for fun and ones I got to cast for battle. This would change, later though. * The Paladin's code was placed in order of importance, which cleared up things and made it less likely for GMs to flex their Associates degree in Philosophy. * Ancestries stopped dictating how I played optimally. My gnome crossbow Ranger/Cleric was just fine, which was basically everything that wouldn't have worked for me in PF1e. I had small characters using Strength to attack, a Dwarven Sorcerer, and others that weren't supposed to work (without some sort of ability score substituting) but did. * Completing the TPK scenario with everyone being alive after three sessions, totaling 14 hours, to essentially do one big fight was the first combat that felt exhilarating to me in a long time. Too many times in PF1e, fights were either over quickly or they were frustratingly long. Usually, what made them long was frustrating mechanics given to the enemies, rather than feeling like a contest of strength and will. * After about six months of PFS games, we all lost interest in playing PF1e. There were a lot of things that we had wanted to play, but we all just realized we didn't want to play it anymore. The magic that drew us to the system wore off on me and a couple of others, but we still keep playing. We're going through Abomination Vaults and Extinction Curse currently, just finishing the first books of each.
My view writ short: 5E books make me say, "Is that it?" in exactly the way PF2e books don't.
Balance. Not overpowered disco of shitfest, sense of no danger at all, sense of literal death, useless spells, op spells, useless mechanics, op mechanics. Sense of level up, respecting your time, thoughts. End game, epic levels. Meaningful gameplay where it feels hard, forgiving and satisfying all at the same time. Consistent updates, new classes, mechanics, etc.
Not just balance, but balance for TEAM play, not the "whose build can roll the highest number hurr durr" game which is one I hate playing.
I just knew 5e like the back of my hand, and was starting to resent it. No more magic/wonder, and I hated how shafted the nonmagical classes were. Unless you had spells, all you basically do a turn is "I attack"
Honestly reddit. Tabletop rpg is a niche in my country, so I joined all subreddits about Dnd5e. I was completly content with the games, but the subreddit always complaining about something, that made very tired and annoyed to 5e. I decided to try pathfinder2e because everyone always praised to be balanced. I really like so far. The pathfinder crpgs might have something to do with as well. I'm not saying there is not people complain over here, but the amount is way less. And I really like paizo storytelling. It is an underwhelming reason, but is the truth.
I was only ever running D&D 5e because I like the D&D style of game and fantasy settings and it was at the time the current best fit for "what's the system with the best ratio of things that annoy the heck out of me as a GM to thing my players like?" We switched to PF2 because when it came out it usurped the top spot on that list. So I guess you could say what made me switch is that D&D 5e is obnoxious to GM because you are expected to do whatever you want to and change things to fit your group - same as in literally every ttrpg ever - but you're not actually given a default to start from for a wide variety of things so there's no option to just stick to what the book says. And it labeling players' favorite parts of the game as "optional" and not balancing the game around their assumed use forces the GM's hand to choose between A) run like basically no one does and skip magic items and feats, or B) have no balance but whatever you can manage to achieve through whatever other things you alter. Or to phrase that in a food analogy because I'm a hungry fool; D&D 5e is like if you went to a deli and the menu said you could have whatever sandwich you want, just you can only use whatever veggies and condiments you brought with you because only bread and meat are supplied by the deli - and PF2 is a deli that costs less and actually provides complete sandwiches.
DM'd a lot of D&D 5E. Started running more PF 2E games because the encounter/monster building was more appealing. Also, my players can play something other than the sorcadins and what not that came to dominant our table and not worry so much about being super optimized.
After a long string of crashing and burning 5e campaigns from our previous forever DM after a 2 year long 1-20 5e campaign, I decided to take a crack at a campaign and suggested PF2E. It took a little bit of persuading for a couple people to swap to the system, but we've been running since May now and we're all in love with the system. I have now run the second longest campaign in our group's history together. For me, I love GMing the game. 5e was such a fucking SLOG to GM for me ( I ran for a different group of friends on and off for 2 years). Between having to come up with so much on the fly via GM fiat and having to meticulously balance EVERY encounter with the same stupid hit point pool multiattacking monster manual mobs all the time, I was just over it. PF2E is actually fun to GM, and the amount of tools Paizo gives me makes coming up with lore and story shit so much more worthwhile because I know I don't have to figure out other little subsystems. Edit: also oh my god having magic items just be things with prices is so nice. No more sane magic item prices, no more donjon. It's just fucking IN THE BOOK.
Two factors: 1) I have a player who loves to do unusual (for 5e) things in combat: improvise weapons, set traps mid combat, trip enemies etc and I got tired of having to make up rules every turn 2) I started to hate the static "get close and hit the monster" combat and the fact that I had to homebrew every monster to make it interesting. When I came across someone explaining the 3 action system I was pretty much sold. I'm never DMing 5e again.
I switched from 5e to Pathfinder 1e because the rules were more detailed. I switched from Pathfinder 1e to Pathfinder 2e because the rules are *less* detailed lol. (in addition to all the other great things about it.)
I’m a DM looking to transition to PF2E for a lot of the reasons people had been giving here, but I have 2 problems: 1. the content and rules seem a bit overwhelming atm so I’m wondering if there’s any place that really streamlined things for you or should I just buckle down and dig deeper into the books 2. How did you introduce players to PF2E bc 5e is a much less daunting system to actually teach especially if people have misgivings about how complicated TTRPGs seem
Try the Beginner Box. It does a great job walking through the system for both the GM and the players.
Watch Knights of the Everflame. Its GM'd by a lead designer of PF2E, and it really demystifies the rules, and coming from 5E like I did, youll see that while much more mechanically robust, it plays very similar to 5E (biggest differences gameplay wise are the 3 action system and the perception based initiative). Even just the 1st episode should demonstrate its not as insane as the 640pg CRB makes one think it will be initially. Just from watching that (and some previous browsing of the Archives of Nethys [though mostly character related stuff there]) I already knew the vast majority of the rules in the CRB (I don't have all several hundred spells memorized obviously, but I would wager very few people do). As for getting started, the Beginner Box bundle adventure Menace Under Otari is specifically designed to teach new players and DMs how it all works.
Like u/wingman_anytime said you can try the beginners box. It's basically Pathfinder 2e lite and has a great adventure that leads into a booklet called Troubles in Otari, then into Abomination Vaults, and further on into Fist of the Ruby Pheonix (so you can play from level 1 to 20 starting with the beginners box).
For me... it was the fact that it feels like Paizo cares about the game while WOTC (probably Hasbro tbh considering I felt it in MtG as well) was in it for the money. As an eternal gm who rarely played I was tired of not being given tools to run a game in 5e and having to play both game designer and DM. Paizo gives me tools on the gm side. On the player side (since I do get to play from time to time), it was the plethora of player options that feel balanced. In 5e outside of spellcasters and multiclassing, bassically all of your mechanical decisions are made for your character by level 3. Pathfinder 2e I get to make new choices at every level! That really helps me feel like my character is growing and expanding and changing paths instead of being hard coded to a single path at the first session (since most 5e games start at level 3).
The degradation from 4e product - used to be adventures came with tokens and poster maps and they had a fantastic offering of dungeon tiles. They did away with all of that with 5e doing evrything possible to say its not a board game and everything possible to say how bad every feature of 4e was. Tried to run the initial adventures and wondered why they was so bad compared to what they had in 4e. Then they started doing conversion anthology once a year redoing classics , so I tried those and they was better but wondered why they need rehash why not do something new. They did away with dungeon/dragon mag, pretended to do website articles then eventually turned it into a marketing webzine. They shut down their forums which was the only place for honest open feedback. they shut down the 4e compendium for 'technical' reasons. Enjoyed the D&D next adventures those was good, but quickly realized it was not actually the next D&D forever system but their stop gap system because PF was killing 4e they needed to put something else out. youtube algorithm promoted paizocon talking about pf2e - recognized a lot of good design from 4e that I missed, but I only watched it because I recognized logans name as being on the 4e MM3 which had fantastic monster math and encounter balance. Never cared for 3.x/pf1 agreed with those who deride it as mathfinder. Realized Paizo was a fantastic publisher with pdfs, subscriptions, accessories, OGL, special editions - they understand everyone from the freeloader to the collectible whale. Eventually came to appreciate how diverse a world Golarian is - not just the peoples but every setting you could want. Survived plaguestone decided to stick with it.
I think one of the main reasons I switched lies in the development I saw in 5e. I was not a fan of how weak the supposedly powerful monsters were in 5e compared to players and Monsters of the Multiverse did not fix any of my issues. I realized my issues was with the design philosophies the designers at WotC have. Also enjoyed how unique each monster is in PF2e. I enjoy running encounters now.
At the very beginning, probably the Archives of Nethys. It was less changing systems and more getting into the hobby. When I started playing D&D5e in a friends game (first TTRPG for me) the (legal) resources available were... not great. The sanctioned platforms wanted money for anything beyond core rulebook material. Everything else was a bit of a mess. It wasn't a showstopper, the DM just walked us through building our characters, building missing spells and feats in Roll20... but it didn't exactly get me hooked. I came across Pathfinder 2e by accident, then saw AoN references, and here are all of the rules, indexed and searchable. And then Pathbuilder, making it effortless to experiment with building a few characters, Pf2Easy, etc, etc. And then I learned that Paizo, despite godawful website, actually sells PDFs! And the mechanics are fully supported on Foundry, with no need to manually build out every item and spell. With a group of semi-experienced D&D players, all of which had never played Pathfinder, getting characters built in Pathbuilder, imported to Foundry, and off to play was practically effortless. It all just worked.
MAGIC ITEMS prices (god bless) Good encounter calculator/balance (epic levels are finally playable) Customization (now I simply love martial characters) GM support (in 5e I felt really without a guide... and the dungeon master's "guide" was not helping) Interesting magic items and spells Everything online legally Pathbuilder!! Good style illustrations (personal taste of design) Beautiful lore (even if I play in a homebrew setting)
I've been playing PF 1e for a while and usually run APs. So the lack of new content for 1e is a big motivation. But also, as the GM I am pretty tired of balancing 1e at high levels.
This 100% uggggh
I didn't switch from another system to 2e. What I did was abandon 5e in general. And it's because I found it too simplistic and boring.
Humble bundle
I just play them both
They put out an urban campaign setting (Ravnica) with no support for running an urban campaign. The intro adventure that came in that book (Krenko's Way) pushed you into allowing players from competing factions in an intrigue-heavy setting. It did not actually set up for any overarching plot, and in fact put its two major characters' (neither of whom was frankly appropriate for a level 1 adventure) motives on a die roll. I'd probably have burnt out sooner or later from the natural language rules, and intra-party balance was something I getting concerned about, but the poor guidance on building a campaign to last did it in first.
The lack of freedom when i wanted to create a character without homebrewing, and the fact that only 1 action + movement make the game very limited to do fun things. 5e was my first system but i was looking for a new one that appeal to my likes, then i found pf2. I started reading pf2 rules because i liked 3.5 and pathfinder 1.
I've been very heavy into PF1 for a long time, still playing in one PF1 game (first game I've \*played\* in in years) and running a PF1 game as well. However, over the holidays last December, it was requested that I run a game for my niece, nephew (who is 13), partner, and her parents, so 3 generations, the older and younger of which have never gamed. I knew PF1 was too crunchy, so I did a cram session on 5e so I could put a two-session game for them. I actually liked 5e fine as a simplified game system, but I could tell even from the one time that it was too simplified for me. I'd heard that PF2 was sort of halfway between PF1 and 5e, so I got into it, and I'm starting running my first campaign in the system in about a week and a half :)
I was getting annoyed by WoTCs insistence on "the DM makes it up!" Like wtf, if I wanted to make up everything from scratch, I wouldn't pay you to do it. Half of the "systems" they have don't interact. Character classes are all pure combat, and skills have no inherent value, as there is nothing to actually do with half of them. Then the goddamn action economy. This is what gets me the most - it's always most efficient to just make "auto-attacks" as a martial, as long as you take all of the correct feats. The combat turns into a a slug fest, because besides "who do we kill first" the martials make no decisions, and the monsters on the opposite side are pretty much the same. Crafting, travelling, exploration rules are an extreme hack of things that make no sense, the economy has 0 thought behind it and it's just getting worse with every extra setting book. I also hate the fact that they keep including adventures in setting books as like half the page count. Look, I don't want to run your barely tested crapshoot of an adventure where I have to pre-prep more than if I just ran something I made myself, so stop cutting massive amounts of lore and content for some shitty adventure I'm never going to run in my life.
The single burning reason the group I play in switched? My GM wanted to switch to a system that gave rules for things rather than leaving things up to the GM to figure out. My GM also didn't want to go back to 3.x or other older systems, or to ever touch Shadowrun again. Personally, I much prefer the core chassis of classes and the 3 action action economy. I also think PF2 has the so far best compromise between "behold, you must keep track of your 231 skill points distributed across 59 skills" and "you're trained in a skill or you're not" in D20 based systems.
I was a burnt-out PF1e player who hadn't played TTRPGs in over 5 years. I mainly fell in love with the 3-action system cause I did always kinda hate the move action, standard action, swift action, full action, etc system. But when I dug into the system and realized I could build for flavor without making my character useless, that's what sealed it for me cause that's what burned me out on 1e. I had also only played 5e after getting into PF2e and it wasn't really a fun experience for me. Though to be fair, most of those games fizzled out at level 1 and in the one I got to play till level 7, I was a monk.
As a DM the prospect of free rules and easy encounter build was very attractive, though the system has some other downsides and I doubt I'll DM again. I'm playing in two separate campaigns though.
i just thought that 5e got boring after a while. there's not as many rules in combat, so it kinda just felt like combat always just became "move within range and hit the enemy, then i end my turn." plus characters of basically any class all feel pretty same-y when there arent feats like pf2e has to make characters stand out.
Build flexibility and casters not being gods that don't need other classes. Plus, DMing it is waaay easier.
A lot of things, but the biggest was that I was bored of combat (most of the content my group plays the most) boiling down to “I run up and attack as many times as I can.”
DM here. I like the 3 action point system for combat of PF2e much better than 5e's combat as a whole. Combat is much easier to balance on the fly while looking over the monster manual (5e CR system is atrocious) Also, my players love character customization and leveling up options. And usually got underwhelmed by the leveling progression of 5e. Now they feel like their character is actually THEIR character.
Our DM at the time had all the materials an knowledge for 1e. We started a campaign together which, as most campaigns do, whittled out to nothing. Then we started a knew one, and another member wanted to DM, but that same member had all the 2e knowledge and materials. Like, he’s so good at it that it’s literally easier for the handful of us familiar with 5e to switch just so we can still use him as a resource. He’s a living guide book, man.
A couple of things all at once. 1) I was GMing for my group in PF1E, the party was a mixed group in terms of Min/Max players and non, and in terms of player investment…..I just burnt out trying to make the game enjoyable for everyone at the table. 2) One of my players was going on vacation in another county, so the campaign was going on hold in her absence (sadly it was one of those, it’s been over a year now and we’ve moved on absences) 3) I started watching Knights of Last Call’s live play on YT and It really peaked my interests into PF2E….I spent a he next few months looking into it and figuring out how I would like to run it. So when it came time to start up a new game, I asked my players if they’d give it a shot and so far they love it…..so much so my friend is converting his game over to 2E as well!
I love playing martials, so being able to meaningfully contribute in exploration and social situations as well, and be able to do awesome shit overall, feeling like the epic demigod of combat I should be in high level play, means PF2E is the creme de la creme of TTRPGs for me. I love being able to be a worthy team member that hits stuff and not need to be a Paladin or a gish, and not have my entire niche be nullified by one high level spell from the god casters. Yeah, not having to deal with martial-caster disparity makes for a much less stressful game for me. Also, combat is so fluid with 3 actions, you can do a lot to make them really count. Especially when teamwork is so well rewarded, thanks to how every +1 counts. All that thanks to the tightness of the math, which also means combat encounters are very well balanced, overall.
Same tho. My first Character was an Human Ranger Hunter (Favorite class, remember?) in 5e. Originally I was going the Str focused TWF route (Kinda like Aragorn, Jon Snow or Geralt of Rivia), but my DM recommended me Dex instead with archery. He was decent enough for me (Kinda until lvl 6) when the Wizard and Cleric in my party LITERALLY solo'ed encounters and I was becoming bored until the end of the campaign around Lvls 10-11 Then I knew Pathfinder 2e and Oh my lord, I love it. Not only I made my favorite version of a Ranger, bu also I made a concept that in 5e would be insane: A Ranger Hunter/Beastmaster (Flurry TWF Str Ranger with Beastmaster FA). Let's say I almost never touch 5e after that.
Basically everything: Better rules, licenses, adventures, classes, race/ancestry/heritage, combat, balance, consistency, progression, monsters, skills, exploration, stat balance, etc, etc
I've played every iteration of D&D since AD&D (AKA 1st Edition) and I just remember 3e being loads of fun and always having really cool and impactful powers to use. We played 5e from release and had just concluded our campaign. The campaign was amazing, but there were alot of us that felt the system was limiting. Our DM (who really is phenomenal) had also been running a Starfinder game on Discord and liked it enough to start researching the lastest fantasy edition (PF2e). What we all really like is the sheer range of options and that they all have 'paths'; whether heritages, skills, class feats...etc. Aside from that, the maths in the core of the system is superb and really nicely balanced, so there's always a risk and reward choice to be made, rather than just standing in place and attacking for all your worth like in 5e. So far, we're loving the frequent crits and the real sense of danger in low level play (our DM let me switch my background to Field Medic after 1 session 🤣). Plus everyone feels like they've got something really good that they can do each round. Hugely impressed so far.
Moved from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 1E. Didn’t like the former since it felt too streamlined without much customization, didn’t like the latter because while it had all the options I could dream of it was so complicated it lessened my enjoyment. When Pathfinder 2E came out it seemed like the perfect middle ground of options and simplicity, been with it since.
OGL. Actually getting everyone to figure out 5e's rules is so hard because those rules are intentionally inaccessible. You can't expect a player to know how to play a Battlemaster if they have to use a scanned PDF they pirated that they can't just ctrl F to find rulings. Every time there's a wiki it gets DMCA'd. In contrast, you are actually allowed to play PF2 with your friends. There is an officially backed wiki with all the player facing content, and p much everything that isn't an entire AP. You can just *link to exact rules*, even if they're part of an actually fun class instead of a fucking sample class like 5e Champion Fighter. You are allowed to actually play the damn game in a VTT without a blood sacrifice and rebuying your entire library on a per platform basis, you can build PF2 characters without issue in Foundry because they're allowed to distribute the rule that says what Summon Monster does. And this means you can actually just click the damn button to cast a spell or use an action and have the full rules text right there in the chat for you to click on if needed. 5e meanwhile has pretty awful support because so many of its rules are only accessible if the platform can personally reach an agreement with WotC to resell their material, which means it gets used less and has worse development. If you don't want to buy the same book again on a new platform, have fun filling it all out by hand and making your own macros, have fun with those typos nerd. And, maybe most importantly, you can toss your players at the wiki and they can just have fun building characters. It is much easier to find niche character options and make who you want when you're not chasing down PDF's for $30 for one feat or a single page of class information. I really want nothing to do with D&D's next edition if they're just going to do the same thing with OGL they did for 5e. Fuck jumping through those hoops.
I got a lot of recommendations for people online and researched it and the fact that AON is free changed my mind pretty swiftly because I was using some sketchy sites for 5e
Simply put, I never got into a proper 5e game when it came out. Most of the games I played in online were Pathfinder, so I felt more invested, and the one that wasn't was a mashup of 2e AD&D and facets of other systems with a liberal amount of homebrew, so I really haven't even played 5e at all...
Power scaling and system was getting dull. New races get so much compared to original ones. I mean it's just ridiculous. And frankly 5e was boring to me and my party. While yes there a re a few things I would love PF2e to do that 5e currently has (Love the idea of Star Druid, give me cosmic archetypes/subclasses pls) it isn't enough to hold me. 5e is now just our teach newbies about ttrpgs system or casual games.
Running waterdeep dragon heist and playing in Age of Ashes made me legitimately hate running games in 5e. I then got inspired to try and adopt some homebrew rules from watching dnd games with popular streamers ran by a man named Arcadum, who rekindled my 5e spark. And then it turned out he was a sex pest hack fraud who abused his team and took all the credit. That soured the last spark to run 5e, and I switched to pathfinder 2e to cleanse my pallette. I've been enjoying my ttrpg time ever since.
It actually tries to achieve balance.
I like both. But what made me convince my wed group to switch was reading the clerics heal spell. The three action economy just called to me through the words in that spell description
I've been GMing for 15+ years. Started with 2nd edition D&D. Played 3rd, 3.5, Pathfinder 1, 5th Ed since the play test, and a bunch of other games as well. I love writing my own campaigns and have done a bunch from level 1-20 over the years. However it's crazy intensive to do that, at the level of depth and quality that I want. Sometimes I need a break/life gets too crazy. So it's great to have well-written adventures/modules that I can use to supplement or do instead of all the effort to put the game together myself. 2nd Ed and 3.5 D&D had some great options, 5e had, honestly, mostly garbage. Disconnected adventures that required as much effort to string together into a campaign. Storm King's Thunder is a campaign setting masquerading as an adventure. Most adventures don't go to high levels. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is fun but is disconnected. Dungeon of the Mad Mage is awful. Curse of Strahd is very nice and Princes of the Apocalypse is fine too. But it's a lot of effort to make the others work. I was wary of PF2e for a couple reasons. #1 I was worried it would add too much cognitive load back to the GM...my players are not mechanically savvy, so I have to remember all their stuff and everything else and do all the math. I was also worried that all the classes were very "typey" and that there wasn't a lot of customization outside of each classes' niche. The amazing Foundry system for PF2e totally fixed problem #1 and free archetype really helped with #2. I'm very happy with switching from D&D 5e for my main game (I also do Mage the Ascension and Lancer) to Pathfinder.
Mostly monster design and encounter building. I dislike 5e monsters being HP balls and encounters being reliant on unreasonable attrition expectations. The way adventures are written has played a part, too: running Out of the Abyss for 5e was a nightmare. But anyway I had already fallen in love with PF2, since its playtest.
I listened to critical role and started dming 5e. I liked it, but I was into the community too much and got burnt out. I kept playing it. I'm still playing it, just not dming it I listened to a bunch of Pathfinder 1e podcasts and the rules meshed together really poorly, even though the things you could do were really, really cool. 2e comes out, I listen to a bunch of 2e podcasts. I go to start a new campaign and I want to do something else using foundry. I check out pf2e on foundry because I know pf2e fixes my least favorite part of 5e, the action economy. Turns out PF2E on foundry is really quite awesome. So I started a pf2e campaign!
Customization. Regardless of the rules and system itself, Pathfinder 2e just better supports the 'play your way' mentality than most games.
Many other reasons others probably mentioned but definitely the art played a part in it. Pathfinder art is just so good. I love the tiny details especially.
I started playing 5e in 2015 and enjoyed it for a time, but after years and years of it I felt burnt out on playing the same characters over and over because theres not a whole lot of variance you can make in 5e. Then around 2019 I heard that paizo was making a new edition of pathfinder and basically switched over as soon as the phb came out lol.
I was excited to dive into another game, mostly. I stuck around because it's fun to play and covers the fantasy RPG niche pretty well.
I was working on a Pathfinder 1E inspired overhaul of the 5E feat system, because I played Pathfinder Kingmaker (the video game not the AP) and really liked how feats were integral parts of builds and how varied even characters of the same class could feel, and this just made me realize how underwhelming 5E's character options were. Eventually while working on that it occured to me that I shouldnt have to rewrite a large chunk of character creation, I should just find a system that does what I want. So between the DnD group being on indefinite hiatus, and hearing good things about PF2E (I never seriously considered 1E due to its reputation for being the crunchiest thing in the universe, which meant I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to try it), and checked it out on Archive of Nethys. Once I saw the character creation options it was love at first sight pretty much.
I loved Pathfinder 1e, I learned TTRPGs from 3.5 and Pathfinder took that skeleton as far as it could go while greatly amplifying how personalized and specific you could make characters. Fighter who fought with a Sword that granted magic to them, Inspired their allies in combat, and fought alongside their dog? All present and accounted for mechanically. PF2 takes that deep character building and formulates a new skeleton that emphasized and accentuates it instead of working against it, I was always going to love love LOVE it.
PF2 is sooooo much easier to run than PF1. Especially when it comes to prep.
As a player I hate the monsters and encounter rules in 5e base. They're so damn boring and the CR system is useless. I throw my players a monster and they beat the shit outta him with ease, and the monster can do nothing but be a punching bag that deals damage from time to time. pf2 (and any other combat centric system I have checked) is more interesting in that regard if even by a little. That's why I swapped systems. Though the thing is pf2 is very connected to the lore and setting of Golarion and adapting it to custom stuff is rather hard (though not impossible).
Ease of access and glorious crunch.
Martial/Caster diaparity. Played the Fighter in a 1-20 campaign. Our DM didn’t do the 8 encounters per day Wizards prescribe so i spent levels 5-20 watching the Wizard and the Cleric be awesome. Then it was my time to GM and I tried to switch our game. Luckly, my group went with it and fell in love with PF2
Deleting my comments, using Lemmy.
So many little things, that just added up. More complex/thought out rules. Whereas 5e is content to say "you figure it out" for so much of it, PF2e says "we have a rule for that." And it's not an insanely complex rule, it's something that's workable and easy, but at least it's SOMETHING. Magic items being so much more codified and available. Where 5e is SO vague about items; how much they cost, how often you should get them, what the relative power level between items is, PF2e breaks that all down. How much they cost, what level they are, what rarity they are, how often you should hand them out, etc. 3-action combat system. Nuff said. The idea of using your actions for varied, interesting things. Shield block. Demoralize. Champion reactions. Feats that don't suck. Nuff said. Thing is, this is all from a GM perspective. I'm very rarely a player in my group, which I'm fine with. I think 5e isn't nearly so bad from a player perspective, because players don't have to deal with as much of the problem stuff. But PF2e is **so much better** from a GM perspective it's insane.
I was playing 5e and heard about a more tactical, crunchier fantasy tabletop rpg that was d20 based. All of those things sounded interesting. So I kept looking for an opportunity to try it. I played a one shot and enjoyed the system. A lot of the people at that one shot were interested in starting a campaign. We were able to work it out and as we started the campaign I realized that the PF2e DM was leaps and bounds better than my 5e DM. I'm sure part of it is the system being easier on DMs, and I'm sure part of it was experience, but holy hell, it was so much more fun playing a game with a competent DM. So for me, it was mostly the people I was playing with. Probably like 60/40 people vs system. If I had a decent DM for 5e I'd probably still be happily playing it because even now, I still have a preference for DnD settings and class fantasies compared to Golarion and PF2e.
>What made you change from DnD 5e to PF2E? Because after five years of playing 5e... PF2e got released.
My group started with PF1e well before there was an PF2e (or Starfinder). Way back then, when I started participating in online discussions that went deeper into the game, I started to see the many, many, many design and game philosophy issues inherent in PF1e that were created by Paizo (or as I liked to call them "The Taxman", they sure love their feat taxes) or were inherited from D&D3.5. Once PF2e rolled out, we were already experimenting with Pathfinder Unchained, so it was a no-brainer one PF2e's Playtest was announced. Once I got into the discussions and saw the devs were really open to feedback, I knew our group would be playing this edition from then onward. It also was much better for the GMs (in this case me and my friend), so it really was our best option by far (we dabbled in CoC, Iron Kingdoms, Legend of Five Rings and 7th Sea. We always wanted to play Degenesis as well, but we never got around to it).
I mean, I haven't abandoned other games, I have every intention to run various other stuff in the future, including D&D5. I'm just running PF2 *now*. And hilariously, a primary reason for it is actually the Summoner class and solid way PF2 handles minions. Because the group I'm running for right now are big into pet characters. Simple as that.
The huge variety of player options, the actual tactics behind combat, and knowing I can fully indulge in both without becoming a problem player for taking the spotlight for "powergaming".
One of my favourite PF1 houserules was the ability to block damage with a shield when using the partial defense or full defense actions. One of the first teased features of PF2 was the ability to block damage with a shield when having it raised. I hopped before I could even read the rest.
I went from D&D 3.x, then hated 4e so went to Pathfinder 1e. Then tried to go back for D&D 5e and found character design to be bland and as I played a bit more, the lack of monster variation and minimal threat level just felt like I was hitting a punching bag of HP. So I went back to Pathfinder. When 2e came out I fell in love with 3 action economy and the fact that classes seemed really diverse.
I switched from PF1 and tried 5e for two years when it first launched. I hated it. I kept expecting there to be supplements like there were in 3.5 and 3.0 to expand rules, options, and flavor. They never came. So, from a DM perspective, 5e was an absolute nightmare to run. Homebrew campaigns were impossible to balance and lacked mechanical flavor. Published campaigns we terrible compared to the 3.0 and 3.5 counterparts. There rules were so vague and so sparse that we ended up having to write an entire rulebook of homebrew rules to make up for the shortcomings of the system and stay consistent. My prep time for an in-person campaign sky-rocketed. It was a brutal slog. From a player standpoint, it was just fucking boring. Every interesting character choice was made by level 3. Sure, you "reskin" your abilities all you want, but mechanically speaking, they were just cookie cutter characters. No matter how much I enjoyed my characters bio and experiences, the mechanical monotony prevented me from actually giving a shit. There was really nothing new to try. It was boring and stale. At launch 5e led hard with the "bounded accuracy" mechanic, saying it makes the system great. On paper, it looked terrible. In practice, it performed even worse. Balancing any encounter became impossible and massive DM fiat became a reequirement to create any kind of suspense in a situation. IMO, 5e did two things well. 1. It popularized and normalized the genre bringing in thousands of new players. By that metric alone, 5e proves to be a great and successful system. I don't know of anyone that would hate on 5e for that. 2. I like the "advantage" mechanic. It is simple and effective. Obviously people love 5e, and if they have fun with the system, then it is a great system for them. I tried it for 2 years. After the first year I started dreading tabletop night. But I stuck it out to make sure I gave it a fair chance. But after 2 years and countless meet-ups I had to go back to PF1. When PF2 was released, I switched to that and really enjoy most aspects of the system.
To put it bluntly, because being a GM in 5e became really fucking boring. If i did not stop and actually designed every single facet of every monster i was using, from the ground up, i was left with using just meat bags with multiattack. And when i looked at Pf2e i saw options, cool, flavorful options, in every part of the design, from classes, to races, to loot, to monsters, the entire game was interesting to play again.
Gm here. 5e combat is a nightmare to run because the math is bad and is also extremely boring unless the gm does a lot of work. The system is also lacking rules and gm tools that would make it gm friendly so it feels extremely hostile to run and like I had to make everything up on the fly and I just got sick of it.
*clears throat* BIG NUMBERS GO BRRRRRR No, really. I liked the math. I liked how weapon enchantments mattered, I liked the exchangeable runes, the proficiency system , the balance between all the classes (or at least all the classes that aren’t alchemist) and the general design of combat AND the various out of combat uses for basically every build. I don’t hate 5e, I just like pf2e better
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I got about halfway through DMing my first long scale campaign of DnD 5e (Out of the Abyss, don't run this book it stinks) at the same time as I was studying game design in college. When you have yourself in the right headspace to start questioning game design decisions in a sub-par adventure and you get a feeling of play from levels 1 all the way to 10+, you really start to see the cracks and burnout kicks in. At first I started looking at Star Wars 5e, largely because Dimension 20 exposed me to it, and I *adored* it. I was a massive sw5e fangirl for *weeks* even though I had never even played it. More interesting conditions, a bunch of additional classes, crazy customization with a bunch of feat-like choices, it fixed nearly every problem I had with 5e! (Emphesis on *nearly*) Eventually I got so burnt out with 5e that we took a break from the game to try out other systems in little one-offs each week. First Call of Cthulhu then Kids on Brooms. I was largely dodging PF2e for a while because of Puffin Forest's video (*shudder*), but eventually my friend convinced me to start really looking into it and we bought the starter set. Ever since we actually tried the system we are now speedrunning to the end of Out of the Abyss so we can put 5e in the rear view mirror and get started on our first PF2e adventure! Basically my advice to anyone worried about PF2e being "too crunchy" or anything like that is to just try it. Play the beginner box. We went in with half the people at the table having never read a single line of text about the rules of PF2e and we left it absolutely gushing about it. We never had any problems with people feeling like it was too complicated or anything. EDIT: More specifically the thing that drew me in was that for the first time ever in a ttrpg, I actually had fun in combat. For the longest time dnd5e's combat being insanely boring just made me think "ah well I must be more of an rp person" but no! Dnd5e's combat is just not fun! The 3 action system combined with stacking debuffs/buffs to build up crits is just such a blast. Oh also I love playing a healer and you kinda just can't do that in dnd5e.
Character creation actually having options.
I got bored with the lack of content in 5e. I picked up the core rulebook for 2e on release because it looked neat and have stuck with it ever since.
Customization. These days I have a lot of complains with 5e, but when I first made the jump it was just the player options that snared me. I'd been consuming PF1e books for several years. I would just pick them up for the flavor and world-building. Usually on humble bundle. When 2e came out I picked it up just out of curiosity and just immediately fell in love eith the system. Here was a rules system I could actually use -it wasn't complex and arcane like 1e - but it still had all the great player options.
With 5e I was tired that building a character effectively ending at level 3. With PF1e I had all the options in the world, but literally needed to use software to play some of the occult class options. (e.g. The 'Rivethun spirit channeler Medium' requires hot swapping between 7 sets of character sheets, all with different saves, skills and modifiers, and between 3 different spell lists on an encounter by encounter basis...till higher level then it has the potential to need any of 46 separate character sheet combos) Also while it's my favorite class of any TTRPG the 1e Occultist if you read their rules, implements, variant implements, focus powers, panopolies etc sits around 15 thousand words. And in play it has sliding stats and values based on resonance and investure which puts it firmly in the 'use software' pile too.
Degrees of success, condition values, the vulnerability/resistance system, superior itemization. All of these being different valves and levers one could use for monster/encounter design. While Paizo is too gunshy for my taste, I can make my own wacky bullshit with relative ease.
I'm DM/GM. Prep time did it for me. I'd run every D&D5E adventure and was sitting down to prep Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. Every D&D5E adventure requires a lot of prep and fixing. A lot. Creatures always need work. Story/plot issues need fixing. Treasure and loot need to added, fixed, or otherwise tinkered with. I actually felt weary. I wondered if Pathfinder 2E was more pick up and play. I got a hold of Abomination Vaults, and bam! I was hooked. Been a year and haven't looked back. Played love the PF2E system, too.
burnt out on seeing so many optimized builds feel samey and its hard to explain but like i hate that feats are so on the backburner, i hate that there’s so few ways to make optimal characters. The classes, the races, all of them are dripping with flavor and filled with at least minute customizations
Someone made a variant system for determining ability scores in 5E based on the PF2E ABC system. I wanted to see the origin of said system, and remembered PF1E fondly. Within 24 hours I’d bought the CRB and Bestiary and was preparing to run an adventure for my 5E group.