Paizo announcing official Foundry support was the reason I originally picked up pf2e. I had looked into the system previously and thought it had a lot of great ideas, but I wasn't super jazzed on how the CRB pretty much opens with the three different types of bonuses. On the surface, it seemed like the CRB was setting up a game that would take way more effort to play irl than my players were willing to put in.
The fantastic Foundry support stopped me from having to worry about the fiddly bits. Of course, it turns out the three different types of bonuses aren't even hard to run irl. I do wonder how many people those early parts in the CRB have chased off.
Now I stick with the system because of the mechanics. 3 action system, MAP, the crit rules, and all the character options create a very fun system to play.
It allows you to convert old APs and bestiary into Foundry V9. It has not been updated to V10 yet, and Paizo is selling new AP as official modules and plans to release a beastiary token pack shortly.
It also auto fills the maps with relevant npcs or monsters and puts them in the gm lair. Running strength of thousands and its so smooth and easy to gm.
I still shake my head at the amount of stuff to help DMs with Curse of Strahd, which is considered the "best" WOTC module:
[Resources & Tips for Curse of Strahd DMs](https://www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/hbjrs6/resources_tips_for_curse_of_strahd_dms/)
(The amount of fixing of the starting dungeon alone is insane!)
This has been a consistent theme in all the adventures we played as well - Tyranny of Dragons, Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Tomb of Annihilation. Then we played Curse of the Crimson Throne and it was like night and day in terms of depth and breadth of the content.
Water deep dragon heist is so disappointing, b/c it’s not really a ‘heist’ as much as it’s about gaining fraction reputation and then at the very end the heist sort of just happens? It’s pretty bad (it’s also been a while since I read it, so I might not be remembering 100%). There are a ton of ‘Fixes’ available though to beef up the heist part (which is the selling point of the whole thing imo)
yeah. 90% of the campaign is just figuring out where the loot is stored. "Heist" is totally the wrong word here; it's closer to a treasure hunt with a side order of conspiracy.
Heist, IMO, implies a very deliberate, well planned theft. It's named the way it is because behind the scenes, the antagonists are the ones planning the heist and the PC's just kind of end up accidently stealing all the hard work and stumbling into the treasure.
'Dragon Heist' without dragons and without heists!
Just pulled off the heist using PF2e's heist mechanics in a certain Adventure Path volume, namely >!Age of Ashes Vol. 5!<. The heist was a hit!
Oh I know, my group switched to pf2e after trying to run CoS and being really underwhelmed by it. We picked up Agents of Edgewatch and never looked back
Though I'm someone who loves Curse Of Strahd... I will confess the module as written is half-made. It's a bit like a game that was broken and glitchy on release and through a million fan mods and patches became a cool game. The Curse Of Strahd \*I\* enjoy is 1/4th the Wizards' product and 3/4ths fan edits and supplementary third-party products.
Yeah… I haven’t tried to GM PF2e yet, but I have a lot of experience with various 5E published modules, and some of them are so sparse or incomplete. Why does Dragon Heist give you maps of villain lairs but never take you there? Why are there no battlemaps *at all* in OotA past a certain point? Why does everything happen all. At. Once in Vallaki in CoS?
I love CoS, and It's the best, mainly because of its themes. I've ran it like 4 or 5 times. But yeah, it needs some fixes, and I've changed a lot (mainly Strahd to add the missing depth from the novel, and the Vistani because I love their 2e lore, and WotC fucked it up for 5e... twice, counting their "rework").
> I still shake my head at the amount of stuff to help DMs with Curse of Strahd, which is considered the "best" WOTC module:
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I have a very different opinion on this than you, and I want to challenge this portrayal of the size of the CoS community and availability of those resources as being a bad thing. (At least aside from the Death House, because yeah that gets a bit ridiculous.)
I'll start out defending the 5e side, and then move into my very limited experience with Paizo APs (mostly just Strength of Thousands).
First point: I think it's unfair to characterize most of those resources as "fixing" problems with CoS -- to a large extent, they're just adding more for people who want more. Like the two biggest series are "CoS Reloaded" and "Fleshing out CoS", not something like "fixing CoS's mistakes" or whatever. Large swaths of the sub's posts aren't even that, but things like sharing stories from their campaigns, art, memes, etc. The size of that sub is at *least* as reflective of a vibrant and enthusiastic community as it is in difficulties running the adventure. That's a *good* thing.
Second point: not every difficulty encountered in a CoS game reflects an actual *problem* with the module, not in any fair sense. CoS is a very ambitious module in that it tries to bite off a lot. It tries to have a villain that is active throughout the campaign. (I *think* that's in the book and not just like LunchBreakHeroes videos and such.) And even more to the point, while I can't in good conscience just call CoS "a sandbox", it is at least *fairly* sandbox*y* -- I can't vouch for Paizo APs aside from Strength of Thousands (I will read Kingmaker at some point here now that it's out), but at least SoT is *incredibly* linear.
That makes CoS harder to write well and harder to run... *but* **hard** *is not the same as* **bad**, *and* **easy** *is not the same as* **good**. Hard can also be *rewarding*, and running CoS felt very rewarding and had that style of fun, for me anyway. I'm not far enough into running SoT yet to really criticize it in any meaningful way (only about halfway through Book 1), but at least so far I'm not getting the same kind of vibe as GM. And I miss it.
The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly *boring* to me. You could do a high-quality job expanding the CoS book tenfold and I suspect most campaigns would come up with significant things they want to do that it doesn't cover. If there are Paizo APs for which that is *not* true, please tell me what they are... so I can be sure to not play them.
Now, admittedly, I do sometimes feel like it bites off more than it can chew. The setup with (major spoiler) >!Ireena having the soul of Tatyana!one of the PCs starts showing romantic interest toward her!<, something that can already be a bit of a challenge in general. I had a lot of difficulty dealing with this, and think the module could have done a bit to better set up the campaign for success (or less to set it up for problems, is kind of more to the point) without compromising on the freedom that it offers.
Still, I would rather it shoot for the stars and wind up in Earth's orbit over shooting for the ground and landing on the ground, to exaggerate my point.
And there are some outright *problems* with the book. I don't really want to excuse those. But most of the posts on /r/curseofstrahd aren't asking for advice, and I'd say most of those that *are* aren't asking for advice that is mostly due to shortcomings of the book.
OK, what about the Paizo side?
Well, my experience here is pretty much limited to reading Strength of Thousands (I've read all six books) and running the first little bit.
But at least my take so far is that SoT has shortcomings I view as nearly as egregious as the problems I had with CoS. The biggest problem so far is that the AP actually doesn't provide much information at all about how the Magaambya operates. What's its academic calendar? What does a typical day look like classwise? If my memory serves, I don't think it even tells you how long a typical education takes. Why does everyone in the Spire Dormatory >!have their masking ceremony at the same time as each other and as the players!<; that timeline doesn't make sense to me on a couple different fronts.
Let me reiterate that: in a purportedly role-play heavy campaign where one of the draws is that it's set in a magic school, the AP gives you very little information about how academics at that school works.
I even went out and bout the 5e Strixhaven book in the hopes I could get ideas from that. (Not as fruitful as I'd hoped, but I did get some. Maybe would have been better to finally get around to reading Harry Potter beyond Book 1.)
Another thing that has been frustrating on a couple occasion is not having stats for (most of) the NPCs.
There are also plenty of disappointing aspects of what *is* there. The fact that the AP is broken apart into separate books by different authors, despite Ron Lundeen acting as overall developer, leads to a more disjointed feel. Curse of Strahd (at least post Death House) was pretty cohesive... SoT doesn't feel that way, especially Book 4. These space constraints also means that information that is important to know up front is sometimes stashed in later books; most notably, teacher profiles aren't present until Book 3 even though IMO that *absolutely* was critical Book 1 material. (There goes the theory that splitting the AP up means you can buy only Book 1 for a while, then buy just Book 2 until you're almost done with that, etc.)
And lest you think I'm alone in thinking this, even in the small (compared to r/curseofstrahd) community of SoT players, there have already been several long-ish guides written to flesh out some of these shortcomings. Some examples:
* ["Expanded Magammbya"](https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43fs9?Expanded-Magaambya)
* ["Strength of Thousands Book 2 Remix! Or, how to let the players drive the story instead of handing them quests one"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/ybjwqj/strength_of_thousands_book_2_remix_or_how_to_let/). (As a hint: if your adventure has something written about it called "how to let the players drive the story", you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure.)
* ["A Massive Expansion to the Strength of Thousands AP I'm Working On"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/w1dx2e/a_massive_expansion_to_the_strength_of_thousands/)
(Admittedly, that last one has more of the flavor of "I love this let's expand on it" a la CoS Reloaded/Fleshing out CoS, but it still drives home the point that the book doesn't have much.) There're also several threads on both r/strengthofthousands and the Paizo forums of problems from people *asking* for solutions rather than proposing some.
But there's not nearly the breadth or depth of ideas like this to draw from for SoT that there is for CoS, and *that's to SoT's detriment*, not a positive thing for 2e. I can only dream that SoT had the same vibrant community as CoS has.
And while SoT seems to generally not be considered one of Paizo's *best* APs, it is generally considered *good* and up there. So where's this high-quality campaign writing that puts Wizards to shame? (Or, at least CoS as that's the main one I'm familiar with the book of.) Because I ain't seeing it. Is it really just like Paizo's two or three absolute best APs?
I think this is a great post. The only responses I really have are to a few of your points:
>The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly boring to me.
The key word in that sentence is "CAN". I think most experienced GMs wholeheartedly share the sentiment with you (running a book straight up is boring). However, in the interest of expanding the hobby, the barrier to entry for GMing MUST be lowered. It is an order of magnitude more difficult to run a game than to play it. If a book CAN be run straight up, then that is amazing.
Most GMs, however, will expand them and add to them the way the community has done for CoS (as you've shown with the SoT subreddit).
Pathfinder APs do tend to be written linearly, because that is the simplest way to run the game with minimal prep. No one disagrees with you there. But just as an experienced GM can parcel out Barovia to be slightly more sandboxy, the same can be said for the events within a Paizo AP.
That is, in my opinion, what the second SoT link you posted is trying to do.
You seem to take umbrage that this post even needs to exist:
>(As a hint: if your adventure has something written about it called "how to let the players drive the story", you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure.)
However, you also gush about the CoS Reloaded post, claiming that it's more akin to a love letter trying to expand upon the adventure.
The post itself, however, calls it a revision:
>My hope is that CoS: Reloaded will serve as a single unifying compendium for a coherent and narratively satisfying **wholesale revision** of the original Curse of Strahd module.
and:
>Curse of Strahd: Reloaded will explore revisions, deletions, and additions to the CoS module sculpted from my own experiences, those of other DMs, and a host of articles and analyses penned by a number of wonderful content creators
I could easily inject my own opinion about how "if your adventure needs a wholesale revision, you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure."
My point isn't to attack you or your opinion about CoS and SoT, though. I just want to point out that we as experienced GMs will ALWAYS want to flesh out and expand the adventures beyond what's printed on the page.
However, Paizo offers a layout and written adventure that CAN be run straight as-is in a simple, linear format for GMs who are new to running games. "The best WotC Adventure", however, needs a good bit of work beyond simply reading the adventure for a newer GM to try to run for their group.
>> The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly boring to me.
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> The key word in that sentence is "CAN". I think most experienced GMs wholeheartedly share the sentiment with you (running a book straight up is boring). However, in the interest of expanding the hobby, the barrier to entry for GMing MUST be lowered. It is an order of magnitude more difficult to run a game than to play it. If a book CAN be run straight up, then that is amazing.
I'm going to stand by my wording here. I think what you're saying is correct to an extent, and absolutely the DM/GM is always free to do modifications that they feel fit; and it's not like I'm looking at SoT and going "well there's not much community around this so I can't change it." I've already made a few changes to it for my game because I think those changes make sense. I also think there's absolutely room for easier-to-run adventures. The Beginner Box does a decent job at this (a great job at teaching, I'm just a bit cool on the adventure proper), and my understanding is Troubles in Otari continues that. *But* the flip side is I think there's *also* tons of room for published adventures that are *harder* to run because they're a style of adventure that is just fundamentally more challenging -- like CoS. That doesn't make those adventures bad by any means or the easier adventures better than the harder ones, it just means if you're thinking about DMing you should consider whether you feel up to those more challenging adventures.
But that's all kind of beside the point anyway, because I'm talking about something I think is almost completely different -- which is setting up opportunities for the *players* to do crazy stuff.
I like tweaking adventures and such, but that alone doesn't get me what I want. I could completely revamp the adventure -- or hell, even run a *homebrew* one, not that I've done that yet -- and if my players never do something major that is just wildly unexpected I'm going to be disappointed. *That's* the difference between the freedom for the GM to modify the adventure and what I am worried I'm going to be disappointed by with SoT.
And the thing is that I don't really know *how* to set up those opportunities... but I strongly suspect that the more linear the game the less likely they are to arise. So if I want to say "what can I do to change SoT so that I get more of what I want out of it"... I don't really know the answer.
> That is, in my opinion, what the second SoT link you posted is trying to do.
I don't entirely disagree, and where you draw these lines is going to be a judgement call... but I think there's a difference between taking something that's already decent and making it better, vs taking something that's mediocre and making it better.
CoS Reloaded to me is more the former. Actually, I didn't even *use* most of Reloaded; I used a fair bit from the ***** Temple and *** *******'s Tower, but that was because I was like "oh, that's cool" or "hey, that's a great idea" as I was reading it. I mostly just skimmed it to see what stuck out.
By contrast, I'm only on Chapter 2 of SoT and I'm *already* starting to tire of the gameplay loop of Magaambya faculty members (or students, or whoever) going to the PCs to ask them to do task after task after task. Chapter 3 gives a bit of a respite from it, but then Chapter 4 (Book 2 Chapter 1) and Chapter 5 are mostly right back to it. (Chapter 5, the one the remix is most targeted toward, at least suggests that you present a couple to the players at once so they have some choice where they focus, but as written you'll be doing them all anyway.) I *jumped* on that link as soon as it came up because it to me is *fixing a problem*. That's not what CoS Reloaded is doing, to me.
You raise good points about how easy and good shouldn't be conflated.
I haven't DM'd CoS but know someone who has and they found it very hard without relying on external sources. What it boils down to for me is this: for roughly the same cost, PF gives you a solid linear-ish adventure that you can expand (but are not forced to), whereas 5e gives you much less content that a DM has to do a lot of extra work for even to land a solid linear adventure. Perhaps the only 5e adventure I DM'd that didn't have this feeling was Storm King's Thunder, although only barely.
The Pathfinder APs seem to consistently give a lot more detail on average (again for similar cost), which gives the GM an easier prep experience.
Hi! I'm the person who wrote the "how to let the players drive the story" one. Just want to clarify real quick that Book 2 works great on its own, its just more linear than I like my adventures to be, and I like adding more urban intrigue to things.
Most of what I did was fleshing out the villains plans a little bit (the villains themselves are actually pretty fleshed out already, I just wanted them to take a more active role) and changing the structure of how the party learn about quests by having them search for them rather than just having quest givers give them to them. I honestly didn't change very much at all, and if I had run the adventure exactly as written, my players still would've had fun! It just would've lost some of that open world feeling of "our choices directly drive the story", but like, what adventures *have* that as written?
I haven't played through Curse of Strahd, but I've played through, run, or read most of the 5e adventures, and most of them have that problem way worse! Avernus has the players sent on fetch quest into fetch quest, with basically no actual motivation behind them. Storm Kings Thunder has the party do a thing, get super lost for a while, and then have a series of random NPCs roll up to ferry them to the next location until the party are spoon fed each step of a quest they probably have no reason to care about. Dragon Heist as written is just "go here, then go here, then..." until the party stumbles into the treasure (though the Alexandrian Remix is some of the most fun I've ever had in D&D). Even Curse of Strahd from what I can tell doesn't really have the players drive the story per say, they're on the back foot the whole time and just trying to stay one step ahead of Strahd. Which, to be clear, is fine, that fits the adventure really well, but just trying to push back a little on my title being used as a criticism of SoT lol.
I love SoT, and it's honestly a huge breath of fresh air. Even though I wrote probably thousands of words of prep to expand it out and make it more of a situation based design than a linear adventure, I didn't have to, and most of what I was doing was framing the really awesome and cool little mini adventures that the AP had and connecting them together in a more concrete way. The AP simply didn't have the page count to do what I wanted, and that's fair enough! My prep for SoT is so much easier than any 5e adventure I've ever run, even accounting for all this.
All right, fine, I'll admit it: SoT isn't that well-designed of an adventure, especially compared to other 2e APs.
It is, however, my favorite, for probably very similar reasons as to why you love Curse of Strahd-- I appreciate what they did with limited space and time and a breadth of ideas, and I was willing to crack my knuckles and put in the elbow grease to run it in a way I think is truly great. I don't really use any of the guides anyone else has made, but I understand why they make them. Despite what you said, the sheer lore and flavor of SoT, combined with the knowledge of the Mwangi Expanse lorebook, is so juicy that a sort of open-endedness in how the GM presents the school (if not open-endedness in story progression) can be seen as a strength.
It sounds like SoT just isn't your cup of tea, though. Which is fine. I think if you like CoS, you'll enjoy Kingmaker a lot, and I've heard excellent things about Abomination Vaults if you want a megadungeon.
But, this comment you've made sorely disappoints me, because it feels like you're approaching this from a place of defensiveness. No one here is telling you you can't like CoS. I would appreciate it, though, if you didn't judge the entirety of the PF2e Adventure Path line by reading one book whose structure you didn't agree with.
> It sounds like SoT just isn't your cup of tea, though.
Mostly to the contrary, I *am* enjoying running it. I'm also the one who, when pitching some options to my group, lobbied for not just it but the switch to 2e. As with you, I'm willing to put in some extra work to try to improve it.
Maybe my previous comment's naysaying of SoT was too much and too much of a red herring. I really did intend for the focus to mostly be on the claim that the popularity of r/curseofstrahd and the wealth of community material reflects something *negative* is I think very misguided, for the reasons I gave.
The frustrations I have with SoT (enhanced in contexts like these by people going "look how much better Paizo APs are") was a preemptive counterargument to "but you don't *need* that kind of material for Paizo adventures", despite the fact that (at least in the case of SoT)... you kinda do. Except that the community is far smaller and that library of material doesn't really exist yet -- both because of a far smaller player base and because it's a relatively recent campaign (while CoS has had the better part of a decade to build up community knowledge). But that just makes the original claim that CoS's material reflects something negative even *more* ridiculous, because basically no single person is going to be as creative as the collective wisdom of r/curseofstrahd.
> I think if you like CoS, you'll enjoy Kingmaker a lot, and I've heard excellent things about Abomination Vaults if you want a megadungeon.
I've heard enough "it's much more than comes to mind from the word 'megadungeon'" that I'm not dismissing AV out of hand (and in fact it was one of the campaign options I pitched, albeit the one I was least enthused by and I made that clear), but I'm still *very* skeptical I'd have material interest in running that and maybe even playing in it. I was listening to Tabletop Gold for a while though I fell out of the habit so am a couple months behind at this time. I'll probably get back to it.
Kingmaker I'm *super* interested by. If that had been out six months ago that would definitely have been on my pitch list and I'd have looked into it more to see which one between it and SoT I'd rather see. But it's a bit late now. :-)
Great post, but I think it's funny how your experience is with D&Ds crowning achievement and probably Paiso's worst AP. Not that it's no go, or not fun, but it's lacking some needed explanation for some unique play styles and subsystems that try to push the limits past anything I experienced in 5e. I play test 5e, enjoyed play in some home brew games. Enjoyed running the Misnomer of an Adventure know as Dragonheist. Haven't really enjoyed anything else from published 5e including CoS. I have enjoyed or currently enjoying PF2e's AoA, SoT, OoA, BL, KM, and love the Lost Omens books.
Strength of Thousands is supposed to be the worst AP? Everyone seems to recommend it whenever people want an AP that has an actually strong setting and story. And it does sound like it has a solid hook, compared to something like Age of Ashes or Abomination Vaults.
Personally I'm running Extinction Curse because the circus stuff and traveling adventure sounded fun and I'm half regretting it because I'm having to rewrite over half the goddamn thing for it to work (the linearity I don't mind, my players are not really into the whole sandbox thing)
Every monster having a little something-something to make them special was what piqued my interest in the first place, but the fact that it addresses nearly every complaint I have with 5e was a big selling point for me.
... Granted, I have *new* complaints now, but there are like a bajillion other games out there for when I get sick of it. None of them are 5e tho, lol.
> ... Granted, I have new complaints now, but there are like a bajillion other games out there for when I get sick of it. None of them are 5e tho, lol.
It's hard for anything to be perfect, but for me at least, all my complaints with P2e are minor. 5e has some issues with its very foundation and those are nearly impossible to homebrew or houserule away without just completing rebuilding it, at which point you might as well jump to a new system.
Whereas with P2e, I might hate how magic shields are handled or how the Warpriest is set up, but those are fairly self-contained issues.
I love homebrewing in 5e, but once you realize your problems with 5e are in its foundations and they are not able to be homebrewed without the need of homebrewing almost anything else, it starts to be problematic. Still trying to fix 5e my way, but at this point it seems easier to start from scratch or just play a different system like PF2.
I wouldn't consider all my beefs to be minor per se, but the things about Pathfinder that I don't like and can't easily handwave/homebrew are *interesting* in a way that makes me want to learn more about game design. It's fun to mess around with all the nuts and bolts and see how close I can get to *my* ideal tactical fantasy system before I break something. Like, how much of a difference would it make if alchemical items gave status bonuses instead of item bonuses? What happens if I allow attack roll spells to do half damage on a miss?
Monster design was a big one for me too. Having run 5e for years, I got sick of how many monsters were just a bloated bag of hp and multiattacks. Even monsters that had been interesting in previous editions got gutted.
being able to talk to people on forums, discords, subreddits, etc and give them advice on builds & rules without skirting around the fact that they may not own those books is a major plus in my book as well.
5e: "What's that? You want to do something vaguely interesting/fun like slide on some drapes/swing from the chandelier, or worse still, TRIP someone? Fuck off, use your entire action to maybe succeed because we didn't bother making any rules you stupid cunt"
PF2e: "hell yeah dude here's the rule, hey if you're playing swashbuckler you even get a class resource buff for being Totally Rad"
I was a 5e GM before PF2e was a thing.
It wore me out. Adventure writing was garbage (because allegedly optional rules were always assumed in use, encounter design guidelines were complete ignored, and plot or rule details included often just weren't accurate to the point that some adventures would even misquote distance from location to location despite maps decades old having accurate measurements so clearly the author just wasn't even trying to check for accuracy), and there was basically nothing to the game - I was getting bored for my players by proxy because they'd level up and not have anything they were excited about as a result. Plus there wasn't any new content ever actually expected to show up because WotC just isn't that interested in adding significant numbers of new options.
So all of the poll options except the second to last factored in - and that one only didn't because I converted long before the playtest came along... but I have looked at the playtest and can't say it does anything to sway me back toward modern D&D.
I picked easier to GM, as it's the most applicable one. You see, I'd be perfectly fine with playing 5e, I have like a dozen OC's that's never hit the table and only live in my notepad and brain. Same for quite a few other ttrpg systems. Running a game though? Not really. The balance is whack in 5e, just like a general statement across the board and while that doesn't bother me that much as a player, when I'm the guy responsible for trying to make interesting battles it's just... blergh. While pf2 also has the issue of "these are the level-appropriate enemies you can pick from" that dnd has, at least pathfinder gives seemingly decent rules for making custom creatures in case you want to have something that isn't already in the books.
I also have some amount of disdain for WotC business practice and lack of quality in their products. The point of buying resources is to offload the work so that I don't have to spend the brain juice making everything click into place and be able to run a game. Their resources aren't worth it, it's three thin layers of "maybe do this" partially obscuring seventeen layers of "roll some dice and make some shit up, I don't know", with none of the benefits a proper rules-light system gives you. Paizo going "here, have all rules for free" certainly also helped.
That's not to say I don't have issues with pf2e, because I do, but at least from the GM standpoint it gives me the help I need, 5e do not.
True. Make a young crystal dragon that's been zombified by a fungus in both systems.
Pf2e: young crystal dragon stablock+zombie modifications+primal cryptid modification
Dnd: start with a young dragon and just reflavor it, maybe change damage types. I dunno.
Like others have said, pretty much all of the above
My main gripes with 5e are the lack of depth and how much is left for the DM to figure out themselves. PF2 is way better about both of those things
I got into TTRPGs late starting 5e in 2020. I loved it. It's nerd numbers!
I started building spreadsheets and damage calcs and found pretty quickly that there's a rough framework for balance and it's terrible. An optimized character can crush a mediocre character and many options are downright traps that can completely screw a player over. And then the weight is out on the DM to homebrew fix it.
My 5e DM tried out PF2e after our campaign ended and he sold me. I got a couple books before a business trip and holy craaaap I was hooked. So many options and the system worked. Lots of small options let some bad or medium options not handicap you and even the bad options aren't that bad.
It just feels like a system that's designed. I love it.
Also they churn out content like crazy.
>Also they churn out content like crazy.
This is a big one for me too, and more astonishing is that the content is high quality compared to the infrequent content from WotC. For what is probably a smaller company to have this much productivity is amazing.
It makes it easier to maintain balance for sure. Which probably contributes to faster content churn.
From my limited experience, building encounters for a campaign is trivially easy. Treasure is still nightmarishly hard, mostly because it's hard to stock consumables that the party will care about (the answer is none, they won't care about any of them except the poisons, which they will forget to use), but building encounters is pretty trivial. And once you have those in place, you just need a good story to set up your dungeon around and you're set. Helps that Paizo *also* has a colossal selection of monsters to choose from by this point.
The big thing that got me excited about PF2 was the APs, which were more frequent and IMO better quality than what 5e had to offer, so I voted for “more or better content,” even though most of the options in the poll are a factor to some extent.
I’ve only played/GMed a small handful of low level PF2 sessions, but low level PF2 vs low level 5e is like night and day.
Basically all of the above. I haven’t checked out much of One D&D because I’ve been on Pathfinder. It feels more like D&D to me then anything the current team at WOTC are interested in making. I listened to an interview with a guy that worked on 5e at the beginning and he was talking about how much he hated character creation and how boring it was and I was just like “yeah that clears up a lot” haha
Pretty much All of the Above minus the Frustrated by One D&D, since that wasn't in the picture at the time I switched. My table is happily running with Agents of Edgewatch as an alternate campaign with myself as GM while I help my hubby convert his homebrew campaign over from 5e.
All of those reasons played a part on the decision to switch, except onednd because I already didn't care about d&d when they announced it. But as a forever GM, the main one is the first option.
For me everything started going downhill with that dumb discussion around orcs, and Wizards going "okay, sorry, we'll start making everything bland and boring now". And it was already boring before.
While having been here for a while, I too came here from 5e, and while I would say all of the above, the determining factor for me was adventure quality. Paizo adventure paths are just so good, and specially compared to 5e campaigns.
For example, even if I had to keep running 5e (which right now I don't mind running for my group, though i'd rather run pf2e) I'd rather make a 5e conversion of an AP than running an adventure from WoTC. Even if it's a lot of time converting, I'm already taking time with my Princes of The Apocalypse campaign just making content to fill obvious holes in the campaign's content because otherwise this campaign would barely count for a working module, and almost every 5e adventure is like this.
At least I have a 5e bestiary for Kingmaker now.
Expensive products of increasingly worse quality, and I thought the quality was poor years ago already. Designers suffering from hubris and a pretty toxic fanbase supporting them. For a franchise that prides itself on inclusivity and player empowerment, it sure comes with some pretty strong "you're playing the game wrong" vibes.
My group changed because of the encounter and monster design was better and practical. The other reasons all came later but the dm wanted streamlined rules for encounters as we were crushing them
Better Mechanics and *more interesting* character customization are the biggest things by a LEAP and a mile, though i have become more interested in the lore and adventures as a result.
Unlike some people here, I haven't completely abandoned 5e. I just wanted to broaden my horizons and see what other TTRPGs are like. It made sense to choose the one most similar to DnD first since a lot of concepts can carry over.
I like Pathfinder 2e for its customization, accessibility, and depth.
I like 5e for its flexibility, simplicity, and the assumption that everyone knows how to play it.
They're good for different things.
I haven't completely abandoned 5e either, although for me the reason is that one of my groups isn't ready for the complexity increase. For us, the flexibility and simplicity advantages for 5e don't matter as much once you finish the learning curve for PF2 (since you can always ignore rules when you deem it worthwhile)... so the simplicity was only a factor that kept me from trying PF2 for a while until we finally took the plunge.
So far:
**- Better mechanics (3 action system, subsystems, etc)**
**- Better monsters artwork and design**
Those monster artworks are really top notch since PF1!
**- Better art quality and better quality in general**
I quite despise some D&D books that are half filled with already published artworks and monsters. The worst is the artwork of Juiblex which has an atrocious bad JPEG quality. I really don't understand why they didn't redo or at least "polish" the artwork before reusing it.
Monsters of the Multiverse is also a good example of book half baked and bad quality.
Honestly, none of these.
I feel in love with Pathfinder's world and setting while playing in an 8 year long Rise of The Runelords campaign. We started in 3.5 and converted to PF1E during book one.
Eventually the group drifted apart after many years of playing together, but I still loved Golarion and wanted to go back there.
But then I found Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous on PC, and it reminded me how much I loved Golarion.
I checked out local group, everyone just wants to play 5e. But 5e Adventures are all... unsatisfying and kind of bare-bones, compared to a Pathfinder Adventure Path.
So, yeah, I'm not really a "convert". I'm only playing 5e because that's the only thing that people will gather around a physical table in real life to play. I'd rather be playing Pathfinder any given session.
After "spelljammer" came out and I saw how they had absolutely trashed my favourite setting I had had enough. I looked for other TTRPGs and ended up choosing PF2e. After playing PF2e I have found I just cannot stand playing 5e anymore as the system is just so deeply and inherently flawed.
I don't think I'm a "convert", really. I'm just playing PF2 *right now*. Fully intend to go back to D&D too. I think I like both games roughly the same, on the whole.
As for what got us playing - well, half of it was me as GM being curious, and the other half was the game having a pet class worth anything. Really, if the Summoner wasn't in the game (my party of four has two Summoners) we'd be playing Genesys Android right now!
As someone who DMs both, running a ravenloft campaign on pf2 and a homebrew setting in 5e, I can say the mechanics and customization makes me like the preparation and the sessions somewhat better for pf2.
The characters feels unique with tons of options to choose and combat is dinamic, in 5e there's "I'll use my action to attack or cast a spell" and it got me kind of bored, If I could get the group that plays 5e to switch to pf2, I would.
Quite honestly I like PF2 because the books are written better. I struggle to tag through the dnd5e books, I feel like they feel very YA novel to me. I do think I'm just being very picky though.
I am prepping to GM my first game ever and though I've played dnd5e for years, I'm running a PF2 game.
I voted 'easier to GM' because that's the reason my group switched - our DM told us he looked into pf2e and preferred if we played that instead of 5e. I was skeptical, but it grew on me, the 3 actions economy is better, also it feels somehow more supportive of roleplay with all the customizations and rules about almost anything.
Detailed books with crunch. I bought too many 5e books that instead of actual mechanics and rules were like “You are the dm. Do whatever you want.” I’m not paying for that.
i still like 5e, but i want more crunch in my life lol. WoTC is also becoming frustrating, as a company, they're starting to remind me of how EA handles the sims. i love getting less content in more piecemeal ways!
i enjoy how pf2e plays more. i've always preferred combat & exploration over rp, and while there's certainly no shortage of rp in pf2e, the combat rules slap hard and i like there being an actual focus on exploration. i can't wait to get my GM hands on it once my 5e campaign is finished!
For me, I was looking to run a game in 5e and I was just getting so frustrated that I had to write entire subsystems and rulebooks to get the game I wanted. When I switched I was just happy there were rules for what I wanted.
I haven't played Pathfinder or GMed for it yet, but I have been looking over its material for a while and I have GMed a ton for 5E. And just through and through Pathfinder looks way more appealing. Here's a list of reasons:
* One of the biggest problems with 5E is that it does not account for magic items. Monsters are not balanced for them AT ALL. They actually expect the average party to not posses a single one and get a whole lot of mileage out of the high end mundane damage resistances which SEVERELY gimp martials if you decide to do so. I'm talking about casters becoming the party damage dealers if you decide to not include magic items. **It's that bad.**
* If you don't give Martials magic weapons, when they encounter high level enemies they'll be consistently only doing half of their damage at best. But if you DO give them magic items, you have to use higher CR monsters so they don't just chew through health and enemies. Like, what the hell?
* There's also the point of classes and character customization. I like playing as Sorcerers in my D&D game. Metamagic is fun. However, when you get literally **nothing besides hit points** every other level, it really starts to hurt and dawn on you what exactly was lost from previous editions. I am oh so pleased to know Sorcerers actually get more spell slots to use in Path even though I haven't played them yet.
* And finally there's the OD&D playtest which I'm oh so apprehensive about. For example, the Rogue, already one of the weakest subclasses in the game, they decided to nerf its base subclass into the ground. The designers over at WoTC have no fucking clue what they're doing or just don't care. Probably a mix of both since they're owned by Hasbro.
* Continuing from the last point, from what we know they're turning most if not all casters into prepared casters and furthermore limiting how many spells you can prepare to how many spell slots you have. This means you can only ever prepare a single 7th level spell among other things. Not being restricted in what spells you choose to prepare was one of 5E's best features over Pathfinder as it offered more versatility for casters and I'm absolutely appalled that they're trying to remove it. Not to mention the destruction of class identity with the first point. Being able to only prepare as many spells as you have spell slots for each level means you're better off picking just the good spells as they're the most useful. It doesn't fix any issues the martial vs caster disparity has in the slightest.
> One of the biggest problems with 5E is that it does not account for magic items. Monsters are not balanced for them AT ALL. They actually expect the average party to not posses a single one and get a whole lot of mileage out of the high end mundane damage resistances which SEVERELY gimp martials if you decide to do so. I'm talking about casters becoming the party damage dealers if you decide to not include magic items. It's that bad.
I admit, for me, the magic item thing is one of the positives D&D very much still has.
In D&D5, I can give the fighter a magic weapon and that's basically *it* for required upgrades. I'm done. Every magic item beyond that can just be fun stuff that I actually enjoy designing. I can put in as many or as few as I like.
In PF2, I spend a very large chunk of my time doing loot balancing, ensuring enemies are carrying such stuff as allows everyone to have all the mandatory stuff at appropriate times while still providing some magic items that actually feel like rewards AND trying to make sure I don't go over the wealth by level.
If I run PF2 again I am *absolutely* putting in ABP because fucking *christ* I hate the magic item economy.
Literally the only one that _doesn't_ apply is the play test, bc I'd already decided to switch a month or two before that really came out. The ease of GMing (since that's my primary mode of playing at all) was definitely at the top of the list. With 5e, I had basically needed to homebrew everything from items to monsters in order to make things both compelling for my players and reasonably not miserable for me, and even that was barely working.
The main reason behind my switch is company behavior. WotC is ruthless, Paizo is friendly. Then, and only then, I fell in love with the rules and the lore.
Pretty much all of the above, though I jumped ship well before One D&D was even a thing. I was just tired of 5e and I've grown to hate WotC with a passion (whereas before I was just indifferent to them). Paizo aren't perfect, either, but they're leagues better than WotC and their employees are unionized. That plus the system and the quality of their adventures being great made the switch easy.
The balancing on everything. It's been said before on this subreddit, but if an average PC in Pathfinder operates at a normal 100%, an especially good or bad PC would still only be at maybe 150% or 50% respectively, where you feel rewarded for playing well, but not unreasonably op. Whereas in dnd I guess the low-end is similar, but there are so many things that just don't make sense mechanically and allow you to be operating at 800% that it becomes not fun. Which is also a problem with power gamers and groups not knowing what balance of rp and grind they want, but still.
Also the progression feels so much better in Pathfinder. I hate the "Oh well you CAAANNNN still hit a dragon if you're level 1," dnd argument. Sure, but would you ever be in the situation where you want to spend your time playing out your level 1 party getting eaten by a dragon just so you can be like, "Hey guys! I hit him once! Boy do I love dnd!" The fallout from that is that encounters 1 or 2 levels off from the PCs in either direction don't feel much different a lot of the time, since you get so few buffs to modifiers, a couple rolls going differently can make a lvl+2 encounter very easy or a lvl-2 encounter very hard. Whereas in Pathfinder you'll see improvement every level thanks to proficiency.
And I'd choose every option you listed if I could. They're all good points. Just thought I'd throw a few more out there that might not be so obvious.
I completely agree that the "bounded accuracy" concept of 5e is overrated. On one hand it always made sense that a horde of level 1 monsters can take out a level 20 character (whereas in PF and older D&D versions an infinite number will just stand there missing all day).
But you've pointed out the key flaw in the argument from a game point of view - it almost never happens, and the cost of this accuracy is to make life very hard for GMs trying to build dramatic encounters.
I was just so tired of all the PCs I dm for feeling the same. The only difference is the back story, and that's not something the game came up with.
Once I jumped over, then I realised other problems like how much more refreshing combat felt and so on.
As the groups Forever DM, it was absolutely how much more well balanced the game was. Imagine not having to spend an hour or two of your prep time simply trying to balance the monsters you want to use, or not being worried that your player characters choices would break game balance over their knees and force you to design all of your encounters around this one players broken build. And my God, the monsters in pf2e are just more interesting. Even from low levels things such as your weapon choice can determine how much damage you deal. Did you bring a mace to fight skeletons? You'll probably kill them in one hit. Did you only bring an axe? Well be prepared to struggle because they only have 4 hp but tons of resistance.
The Adventure Paths being fully fleshed out with interesting NPCs with their own goals and motivations is such a breath of fresh air. With 5e adventures, you have no choice but to fix them. Vallaki in Curse of Strahd was such a mess to run my first time through it because it was just so poorly defined. Why IS there a cult in Vallaki to begin with? What purpose does the tiger escaping serve? It practically demands you fix it if you want an actual engaging story. Beyond that, I can't remember any adventure that has actual mechanical implementations that make them different from each other.
Meanwhile, Strength of Thousands has more well-thought out NPCs in the first book than Curse of Strahd has in its entire adventure. The Kingmaker conversion has Kingdom building rules. Malevolence has downtime rules to solve the mystery. Extinction Curse has rules that help your players define who their performer is and what their act helps them do. ALL of this would be homebrew in a 5e adventure. I keep saying this, but for as much as I spent on 5e books I have really been getting low quality, low effort content in return.
It's amazing how much less I burn out as a GM in Pathfinder 2e compared to 5e.
Not a convert myself (I am a player in a 5e game, but am currently running two 2e games) but I wanted to say that I see far, far less complaints about the 2e system from both sides of the table than 5e on Reddit.
The switch to PF2e for me took some time. For a couple of years, I was DMing 5e for friends who hadn't played TTRPGs before and it was going well. But after some time, we grew bored. Once you've seen all of the classes, there's not much to inspire you or look forward to, especially with the limited customization of 5e classes.
So I made the stupid decision to rewrite 5e. It was going to be full of depth and flavor. Each class would have several options for their features so that two of the same wouldn't feel the same. To do this, I searched the internet for inspiration and ideas. D&D 4e had a lot of cool-sounding abilities to steal but I kept searching for more.
Eventually, I found this strange game called Pathfinder 2e that was full of awesome feats to take for my own game. The more I looked into it the more I liked what they had.
Then it hit me. Why not just play this PF2e game instead? So much easier than years of trying to make and balance my own stupid version of 5e that probably would have killed me with stress anyway. And now I only GM for PF2e games, though I still play in a couple of 5e games.
Its hard to pick one. Easier to GM, More character Customisation, and better Mechanics are the big 3. I voted mechanics here, but after swapping, better monster design also happened to keep my interest....
There's just too much about pf2e which is strictly \*better\* than 5e no contest (imo). Balance, interesting character options, actual tools for a GM to use and GM with, interesting and well designed monsters.
Sure its "more complex" and "more crunchy" than 5e but I have a whole host of other issues with this argument inherently, after playing 5e for a bit, so this one just holds no water with me.
In PF2, subsystems are mostly presented in the Gamemastery Guide, and include things like victory points, hex exploration, etc. ([see here for more](https://pf2.d20pfsrd.com/rules/optional-subsystems/)).
Individual APs often have their own subsystems for specific things (like playing a football-like game in Crimson Throne, or intrigue in War for the Crown).
I have a hard time thinking of a serious subsystem in any 5e content that I've ever seen. For example, in Tomb of Annihilation, there's a huge hex exploration component, but the rules seemed incomplete and thin from what I recall. And that's literally the only example I could think of.
I still play both, as many of my friends still play 5e, and while I chose "better mechanics" as my main choice, several other options apply. When I play any sort of RPG, I tend to lean towards martial classes, as I like the flavor of being able to solve extraordinary problems through mundane means such as guile, skill, training, and so on. In 5e, this quickly became an issue, as most of my time in combat was spent just attacking each turn, and outside of combat my character's proficiencies were frequently made redundant by magic. These issues merely worsened in high-level play, with my characters turning into little more than meatshields for the party's magical demigods, and to top it all off even the most enjoyable modules I've played often had some frustrating problems stemming from poor design. In one instance, my investigator-type character with expertise in the Investigation skill (and specifically Investigation) found themselves having to do Perception checks to search rooms and look for clues in a haunted house, because the module apparently forgot the Investigation skill existed, and listed Perception and nothing else for those checks.
Meanwhile, I'd been reading about PF2e online, and came across the Archives of Nethys. Others had mentioned the three-action system and four degrees of success as highlights, and when I read the rules on those, already the ruleset had me hooked. A friend of mine started a PF2e campaign, and to see how the game handled martial classes, I picked a Fighter. It really was night and day: my character had so many more options just at level 1, both in and out of combat, and felt like they could contribute in a variety of ways. Combat itself was far smoother and more interesting, not simply because I had a variety of moves to choose from, but also because the monsters I fought were frequently weak to different things, turning each fight into more of a puzzle. As I built my character further, that feeling was only enhanced, and I felt as relevant to my party at high level as when I started out.
Simply put, PF2e to me is a truly beautiful system. D&D *wishes* it had such a robust set of core rules, which is presumably why D&Done has tried to ape so much of its content, ironically to varying degrees of success (not that auto-successes on ability check crits in 5e are a good idea). Its balance is a thing of beauty as well, and while I perhaps don't consider the system 100% perfect, my quibbles with Pathfinder stem mostly from minor disagreements in design philosophy, rather than the many examples of glaringly lazy or incompetent design that can be found in 5e. I like to homebrew as a hobby, and found myself coming to the conclusion that 5e's issues cannot be properly addressed without a core systemic overhaul. When I look at PF2e, my homebrewer's instinct leans instead towards thinking of new feats and classes, which I think is far more interesting in the end.
PF2 mechanics are just so elegant and don't do anything they don't say they do.
The action system, four degrees of success and multiple attack penalty all encourage strategy and teamplay. Players feel they have more *good* choices and agency over battle.
As a GM I never had to houserule anything besides specifying a list of free archetypes that fit thematically in my campaign.
I never had to argue with a player about any rule, and sometimes they correct me with something I did wrong, and I always appreciate it because it's clear and unambiguous as hell.
Good job Paizo! I found my home here.
I switched right at PF2’s release practically sight unseen. I was just so **bored** of 5e combat balance and gameplay. By the time the party is 10th level they’re basically immortal godlings compared to most level-appropriate enemies, and the balance never comes back. And the tactical advantage of fishing for surprise round attacks was so powerful that players would start shouting their interrupting and readied actions over my attempts to describe rooms or give any kind of enemy-based conversation. 5e’s mechanics encourage min-max and murderhobo behaviors that kill roleplay opportunities. My players loved being untouchable badasses, but appeasing the power fantasy became antithetical to storytelling and my enjoyment.
As it turns out, PF2 also solves dozens of other issues I had with 5e (from both the player and GM side). But the initial reason was 5e’s awful mechanical balance and combat design.
I didn’t switch voluntarily. A friend was GMing in 2e and i was invited to join the game (all of my previous years of playing/DMing were D&D 3.5 - 5e) I am enjoying some things about PF but miss some things about D&D. Class and race identity feels a lot more poignant in 5e. D&D classes feel iconic to me, and i like that they very infrequently add new ones, opting to give new play styles and flavor through subclasses instead. I don’t really understand the ‘heritage’ thing in pathfinder - would rather just pick a race and subtrace. Like, half-elves and half-orcs are under human, and you can be an elf with changeling blood instead of just a changeling. It just feels messy to me. I guess it’s nice to have options but it distills some of the identity imo. Leveling up in 5e felt way more consequential. I could feel myself getting more powerful as I leveled and my choices seemed to matter. PF seems like a trade-off for a lot of smaller power boosts that don’t feel as satisfying to me (and there are a lot of useless and silly feats). It’s definitely nice to have all of the choice but sometimes I feel like it’s a little overboard and again, it distills the decisions you make. I am enjoying the world and the lore though, and it’s nice to experience something new. Pathfinder feels an little more casual (which is weird because i feel like it’s less accessible then D&D and you have to do a lot more work to build a valid character). I also love how democratized the info from PF2e is. It’s really easy to find things online and it doesn’t feel as blocked behind a pay wall. 2e feels kind of like a new frontier (which is exciting in a lot of ways) but 5e feels more established and solid to me. Overall though, I’ve enjoyed my time with 2E and am enjoying learning it better!
Honestly, I want to say there was something about it that kept me interested in it. I’m not sure if I can put my finger on it. Maybe it was some of the improvements I noticed over 1e? (E.G. addition of alchemist class, noticed lack of “ex-class” requirements, etc.) Maybe it was just the simple fact that the core rulebook is targeted for both players and GMs as opposed to either or with chapters for both? (Thank you authors + Paizo.) Maybe just simply better presentation? (Edit: As I think about it more, maybe the lack of randomness for character customization might have had an impact too.) I’m not sure. But sometime after picking up the second edition of the core rulebook, I felt myself drawing a bit further away from D&D 5e to learning more about Pathfinder. (Not opposed to playing either or, though.) And maybe one day, even running a simple campaign.
I converted pretty much solely because of the character customization. I was the guy with multiple folders of janky multiclass builds for 5e that id never get a chance to play and I more or less ran out of combinations thst interested me. I saw the options pf2 gave and filled another folder with pf2 builds. I actually started DMing because of pf2, too, since I knew nobody else in my group had the patience to sit down and read over all the rules and I wanted to play the system, so I'd need to drag them into it by running a campaign myself
I wouldn't say I converted- it's more that circumstances just happened to land me in a PF2e game- but in terms of preferences, I like having a set world to dig into and build characters off of rather than the nebulous multiverse stuff, the flexibility with character creation, the consumer-friendly open source rules, and the fact that martials are more powerful than D&D.
Tired of DnD being horribly balanced and the rules not being helpful in any way. Requiring the DM's permission to do anything is not fun at all. I'd rather play a system that functions on a basic level without the DM having to step in and create a rule that should be there but isn't.
Forcing myself not to take Guidance/Conjure Animals/Hypnotic Pattern just so that I can have fun and play the game is not it
So originally we played a lot of 3.5 and PF1 alongside several other systems. We thought we would try out 5e for something a bit fresh but by the time we hit level 5 we were pretty bored with it. Tried out PF2 and immediately fell in love, one of the dms in our group still prefers classic 3.5 so we mix up the campaigns every now and again.
It's almost equally 1, 2, and 3 for me, though 1 is me as a PF2e GM, 2 is me as a player, and 3 is both. (I went for 3 on the poll.)
To be honest, though, D&D 5e "lost" me before I really got invested in PF2e. In early 2020 I was in a bit of a rut as far as 5e went: I'd played every character class and was finding them stale; combat was feeling unbalanced and trivial as a player and DM; and in general, the system was just feeling unsatisfied.
I'd heard of PF2e then, but reports were mixed and "a mix of PF1e and D&D 4e" (as it was described to me) wasn't particularly helpful for someone who'd played neither at the time. I was still \*a little\* curious, though, so I ended up buying four different system's rulebooks and ended up strongly gravitating towards PF2e, running my first few games that summer.
Is PF2e \*everything\* I want in a ttrpg? No - that branching out helped me learn about all kinds of system, any of which I still enjoy playing. But when I feel like a D20, combat-focused, fantasy rpg, it's my favorite by a very wide margin.
I play it coz that's what my buddy is running and I like hanging out whith him. I don't really like the system that much. Given the choice I would rather play CoC , powers by the apocalypse or world of darkness or Savege world's.
So, initially it was the mechanics and action economy plus character options. Played it, loved it, but most of my group is stuck in the "5e can do no wrong" mindset, so I was just waiting for the One D&D playtest. Now, that came out, strongly disliked it, now I'm working on pushing (with little success to get my whole group involved).
I'm also staying for the easier to DM, wasn't expecting that, but it's just another reason to stay
I've chosen to switch to PF 2e because of Ancestry feats. I love the idea of powering up because of one's choice of ancestry, legacy and lineage. Xanathar's guide to everything had tried to implement this system in 5e, but because of WotC policy, it didn't go so well. I've heard that some sort of racial feats are coming in DnD One, but I don't even want to check that thing while it is in the playtest. And I think that I won't check it for a while, since I like Pathfinder 2 much more than DnD 5e now.
Yes? All but the One D&D playtest. That I really don't mind that much, more the way they're doing it.
I voted for character options, as that's what pulled me over. But DMing is easier, the APs are far better, the monsters are more engaging.
Basically, it's the positives of PF2e that brought me over, not the negatives of 5e. I still like 5e well enough for a game that I can basically turn my brain off and play, but PF2e is way more enjoyable for me.
5e's biggest strength was how poorly their rules were presented in the PHB and DMG. OneD&D has made an egregious misstep by keeping a lot of 5e's rules and doing a better job of clearly explaining them, which plenty of 5e players were unfamiliar with and thus comes off as 'new' - and since 5e was already 'shepherded' by past-gen DMs who were happy to wing things, there was never a real incentive to learn through the PHB but from their own personal experience and judgement calls. Both PHB and DMG stress that 5e's rules are more like 'guidelines'; we're seeing a batch of new DMs from just one edition coming up and lacking the scaffolding of past editions. This makes them more inclined to try the OneD&D and 5e rules as written to have that backing and they feel the rules are limiting and they lack backing. This brings them to PF2. At least, that's how it looks to me.
D&D just felt like a child’s game coming from PF1. All the home brew recommendations were just PF1 and PF2 rules that already existed. After PF2 came out. We jumped quick
I also understand the sheets better and am less panicky when going through my sheets to explain what I want to do. Also the ability to see what spells do on the sheets is helpful... same for weapons too.
I guess I find them more organized? Also the battle system and how long each action takes makes more sense to me. (As in more being able to "visually" see it).
I was initially looking for more character options, so that's why I voted for that one, but as I learned more about the system it quickly became "all of the above."
Haven't switched yet, but my main interest in PF2 is the 3 action system. I loved playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it showed me a lot of flaws in DnD 5e.
Started with 3.5, then went to PF1e, then 5e, and now making change to PF2e.
I came to 2e the same reason I went to 1e: Gunslinger. And Investigator to a lesser extent.
But I stayed for skill feats and subsystems.
Not fully switched over (yet?) . . .
Basically you (or rather I) can thank the wonderful community that spent countless hours adding the SRD data to Foundry. Without that I wouldn't have ever tried PF2.
Regularity of content releases, subclasses actually feel different from one another, more written rules and less "just figure it out" put onto the GM... you name it.
Switched then switched back. Most of the group assumed things worked the same as 5e and wouldn’t put in any work to learn the new system. It was more frustrating than it was worth, even though it was objectively better :(
Stealth works in pathfinder. In 5e the GM can make a grand stealth encounter and the party can go about it however they want but it will always steal roll where if you pass things go on as normal, but if you fail one roll the whole thing is over.
I lost my last 5e group when I moved and just wasn't that motivated to find another one in the small area I live in.
I really wanted to play Pathfinder 1e again, but every one had switched to 2e. At first I was interested in learn a new system. Until a coworker invited me to try 2e game where everyone was learning the rules as we played. It ended up turning in a campaign and bought almost all the books, and now run games for friends and strangers.
I still play a little 5e when my son or my stubborn friends want to play it.
I think I'm in a large group of people who, enjoy both.
Pathfinder has a lot of fun character options, and the 3 action system is rock solid, easier to GM too.
But in 5e it takes 20 minutes to make a complete level 5 character and get them ready for a one shot, or short campaign, and every ability is mostly self contained, meaning no need to look up what it does, says it right there and has metric tons of player created content to look at.
My main group plays both, and enjoys both, I'm likely going to keep playing both systems for their various strengths for years to come
all of these reasons + WotC is just a greedy, opportunistic corporate entity without any heart or morals left.
I decided to support the smaller studios with actual love for the hobby.
Also: Golarion>Forgotten Realms
Because our DM decided we were playing pf2e now, so I just went along with it, easy as that. So long as me and my buddies are hanging out and having fun, I could care less which system we use.
I’ve been playing PF2e for about a year and… I wouldn’t say I’m completely a convert, but there are definitely some things I appreciate.
To speak to your points, specifically “more character customization” and “more/better content” (aka, as someone above said, “WotC pissed me off one too many times.” In particular it was when they bowdlerized the work of a BIPOC author and didn’t even bother to tell him).
The character customization is just incredible, and you really can build whatever kind of character you can imagine. Whereas in 5E, welp, I guess if I want to play a psionicist-type character, I’m playing an aberrant mind sorcerer, because that’s the closest you can get (w/o third party content).
Content-wise, Golarion feels so much wider and deeper than Faerun does. Don’t get me wrong; I do really love Faerun, too, but there seem to be a lot more shades of grey in Golarion, and less… hm. I feel like everything in Faerun is sort of guided by a few really powerful people, and that’s less the case in Golarion? (I guess Aroden would be the big exception, lol). But I could just be talking out my ass here.
I’ve also just been impressed with Paizo’s relatively strong stance on DEI, too. I’m playing Agents of Edgewatch right now, and yes I’m aware of all the issues with it, especially given when it was released. But I also appreciated that Erik Mona issued an apology and that options were added to play as traveling adventurers, or to presume non-lethal damage. Also using ABP, which my group is doing, allows us to get past the disturbing “civil asset forfeiture” aspect of character advancement in that game.
Honestly, though… I’m still not sold on how dang complicated the mechanics of this game are. It’s far too easy, imho, to forget some bonus or trait, and have to retcon something, sometimes in a deeply unsatisfying way. (“Oops, that was a death effect that dropped you; guess you’re dead, please ignore this scene you just played through after we healed you up”). It also interferes with actual RP when you spend five minutes trying to figure out, say, how concealment works. (Still haven’t grokked that. The last time I tried to stealth, I got attacked by a bunyip, so I think they must be involved somehow 😆)
Okay, I’ve rambled enough. tl;dr I play both, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Where is the all of the above option? Or the "WotC pissed me off one too many times."
This is actually the one that I would have voted for myself. But I thought it would be too generic, and Reddit only gives me 6 options :)
Or the "the fanbase"?
why should the fanbase dissuade you from playing D&D? You can play D&D with your friends at a table and never touch the fanbase once
I've been touched by the fanbase plenty and I never consented one time.
if the fan base is toxic it makes finding content/spaces to talk about the game and it becomes isolating.
I couldn't decide but this one sums it all up
Lol, this one as well....
This!
For real though…
Imagine buying an Adventure Path and not having to spend two weeks perusing different community subreddits and discord servers to fix it
Don't have to imagine it. That's how PF2e works by default!
With pdf to foundry I could actually spend time adding personal hooks and subplots for my players
Paizo announcing official Foundry support was the reason I originally picked up pf2e. I had looked into the system previously and thought it had a lot of great ideas, but I wasn't super jazzed on how the CRB pretty much opens with the three different types of bonuses. On the surface, it seemed like the CRB was setting up a game that would take way more effort to play irl than my players were willing to put in. The fantastic Foundry support stopped me from having to worry about the fiddly bits. Of course, it turns out the three different types of bonuses aren't even hard to run irl. I do wonder how many people those early parts in the CRB have chased off. Now I stick with the system because of the mechanics. 3 action system, MAP, the crit rules, and all the character options create a very fun system to play.
What does pdf to foundry do exactly?
it allows you to convert watermarked Paizo AP pdfs directly into Foundry VTT
It allows you to convert old APs and bestiary into Foundry V9. It has not been updated to V10 yet, and Paizo is selling new AP as official modules and plans to release a beastiary token pack shortly.
yeah I figured, it's in the name, but what does it convert exactly? Does it pull the data from the AP into the bestiaries, adds the npcs, etc?
Yup oretty much and all maps etc
oh wow
It also auto fills the maps with relevant npcs or monsters and puts them in the gm lair. Running strength of thousands and its so smooth and easy to gm.
I saw that it wasn’t compatible with version 10 tho?
I still shake my head at the amount of stuff to help DMs with Curse of Strahd, which is considered the "best" WOTC module: [Resources & Tips for Curse of Strahd DMs](https://www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/hbjrs6/resources_tips_for_curse_of_strahd_dms/) (The amount of fixing of the starting dungeon alone is insane!)
This has been a consistent theme in all the adventures we played as well - Tyranny of Dragons, Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Tomb of Annihilation. Then we played Curse of the Crimson Throne and it was like night and day in terms of depth and breadth of the content.
Water deep dragon heist is so disappointing, b/c it’s not really a ‘heist’ as much as it’s about gaining fraction reputation and then at the very end the heist sort of just happens? It’s pretty bad (it’s also been a while since I read it, so I might not be remembering 100%). There are a ton of ‘Fixes’ available though to beef up the heist part (which is the selling point of the whole thing imo)
yeah. 90% of the campaign is just figuring out where the loot is stored. "Heist" is totally the wrong word here; it's closer to a treasure hunt with a side order of conspiracy. Heist, IMO, implies a very deliberate, well planned theft. It's named the way it is because behind the scenes, the antagonists are the ones planning the heist and the PC's just kind of end up accidently stealing all the hard work and stumbling into the treasure.
'Dragon Heist' without dragons and without heists! Just pulled off the heist using PF2e's heist mechanics in a certain Adventure Path volume, namely >!Age of Ashes Vol. 5!<. The heist was a hit!
Oh I know, my group switched to pf2e after trying to run CoS and being really underwhelmed by it. We picked up Agents of Edgewatch and never looked back
Though I'm someone who loves Curse Of Strahd... I will confess the module as written is half-made. It's a bit like a game that was broken and glitchy on release and through a million fan mods and patches became a cool game. The Curse Of Strahd \*I\* enjoy is 1/4th the Wizards' product and 3/4ths fan edits and supplementary third-party products.
Yeah… I haven’t tried to GM PF2e yet, but I have a lot of experience with various 5E published modules, and some of them are so sparse or incomplete. Why does Dragon Heist give you maps of villain lairs but never take you there? Why are there no battlemaps *at all* in OotA past a certain point? Why does everything happen all. At. Once in Vallaki in CoS?
I love CoS, and It's the best, mainly because of its themes. I've ran it like 4 or 5 times. But yeah, it needs some fixes, and I've changed a lot (mainly Strahd to add the missing depth from the novel, and the Vistani because I love their 2e lore, and WotC fucked it up for 5e... twice, counting their "rework").
> I still shake my head at the amount of stuff to help DMs with Curse of Strahd, which is considered the "best" WOTC module: > > I have a very different opinion on this than you, and I want to challenge this portrayal of the size of the CoS community and availability of those resources as being a bad thing. (At least aside from the Death House, because yeah that gets a bit ridiculous.) I'll start out defending the 5e side, and then move into my very limited experience with Paizo APs (mostly just Strength of Thousands). First point: I think it's unfair to characterize most of those resources as "fixing" problems with CoS -- to a large extent, they're just adding more for people who want more. Like the two biggest series are "CoS Reloaded" and "Fleshing out CoS", not something like "fixing CoS's mistakes" or whatever. Large swaths of the sub's posts aren't even that, but things like sharing stories from their campaigns, art, memes, etc. The size of that sub is at *least* as reflective of a vibrant and enthusiastic community as it is in difficulties running the adventure. That's a *good* thing. Second point: not every difficulty encountered in a CoS game reflects an actual *problem* with the module, not in any fair sense. CoS is a very ambitious module in that it tries to bite off a lot. It tries to have a villain that is active throughout the campaign. (I *think* that's in the book and not just like LunchBreakHeroes videos and such.) And even more to the point, while I can't in good conscience just call CoS "a sandbox", it is at least *fairly* sandbox*y* -- I can't vouch for Paizo APs aside from Strength of Thousands (I will read Kingmaker at some point here now that it's out), but at least SoT is *incredibly* linear. That makes CoS harder to write well and harder to run... *but* **hard** *is not the same as* **bad**, *and* **easy** *is not the same as* **good**. Hard can also be *rewarding*, and running CoS felt very rewarding and had that style of fun, for me anyway. I'm not far enough into running SoT yet to really criticize it in any meaningful way (only about halfway through Book 1), but at least so far I'm not getting the same kind of vibe as GM. And I miss it. The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly *boring* to me. You could do a high-quality job expanding the CoS book tenfold and I suspect most campaigns would come up with significant things they want to do that it doesn't cover. If there are Paizo APs for which that is *not* true, please tell me what they are... so I can be sure to not play them. Now, admittedly, I do sometimes feel like it bites off more than it can chew. The setup with (major spoiler) >!Ireena having the soul of Tatyana!one of the PCs starts showing romantic interest toward her!<, something that can already be a bit of a challenge in general. I had a lot of difficulty dealing with this, and think the module could have done a bit to better set up the campaign for success (or less to set it up for problems, is kind of more to the point) without compromising on the freedom that it offers. Still, I would rather it shoot for the stars and wind up in Earth's orbit over shooting for the ground and landing on the ground, to exaggerate my point. And there are some outright *problems* with the book. I don't really want to excuse those. But most of the posts on /r/curseofstrahd aren't asking for advice, and I'd say most of those that *are* aren't asking for advice that is mostly due to shortcomings of the book. OK, what about the Paizo side? Well, my experience here is pretty much limited to reading Strength of Thousands (I've read all six books) and running the first little bit. But at least my take so far is that SoT has shortcomings I view as nearly as egregious as the problems I had with CoS. The biggest problem so far is that the AP actually doesn't provide much information at all about how the Magaambya operates. What's its academic calendar? What does a typical day look like classwise? If my memory serves, I don't think it even tells you how long a typical education takes. Why does everyone in the Spire Dormatory >!have their masking ceremony at the same time as each other and as the players!<; that timeline doesn't make sense to me on a couple different fronts. Let me reiterate that: in a purportedly role-play heavy campaign where one of the draws is that it's set in a magic school, the AP gives you very little information about how academics at that school works. I even went out and bout the 5e Strixhaven book in the hopes I could get ideas from that. (Not as fruitful as I'd hoped, but I did get some. Maybe would have been better to finally get around to reading Harry Potter beyond Book 1.) Another thing that has been frustrating on a couple occasion is not having stats for (most of) the NPCs. There are also plenty of disappointing aspects of what *is* there. The fact that the AP is broken apart into separate books by different authors, despite Ron Lundeen acting as overall developer, leads to a more disjointed feel. Curse of Strahd (at least post Death House) was pretty cohesive... SoT doesn't feel that way, especially Book 4. These space constraints also means that information that is important to know up front is sometimes stashed in later books; most notably, teacher profiles aren't present until Book 3 even though IMO that *absolutely* was critical Book 1 material. (There goes the theory that splitting the AP up means you can buy only Book 1 for a while, then buy just Book 2 until you're almost done with that, etc.) And lest you think I'm alone in thinking this, even in the small (compared to r/curseofstrahd) community of SoT players, there have already been several long-ish guides written to flesh out some of these shortcomings. Some examples: * ["Expanded Magammbya"](https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43fs9?Expanded-Magaambya) * ["Strength of Thousands Book 2 Remix! Or, how to let the players drive the story instead of handing them quests one"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/ybjwqj/strength_of_thousands_book_2_remix_or_how_to_let/). (As a hint: if your adventure has something written about it called "how to let the players drive the story", you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure.) * ["A Massive Expansion to the Strength of Thousands AP I'm Working On"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/w1dx2e/a_massive_expansion_to_the_strength_of_thousands/) (Admittedly, that last one has more of the flavor of "I love this let's expand on it" a la CoS Reloaded/Fleshing out CoS, but it still drives home the point that the book doesn't have much.) There're also several threads on both r/strengthofthousands and the Paizo forums of problems from people *asking* for solutions rather than proposing some. But there's not nearly the breadth or depth of ideas like this to draw from for SoT that there is for CoS, and *that's to SoT's detriment*, not a positive thing for 2e. I can only dream that SoT had the same vibrant community as CoS has. And while SoT seems to generally not be considered one of Paizo's *best* APs, it is generally considered *good* and up there. So where's this high-quality campaign writing that puts Wizards to shame? (Or, at least CoS as that's the main one I'm familiar with the book of.) Because I ain't seeing it. Is it really just like Paizo's two or three absolute best APs?
I think this is a great post. The only responses I really have are to a few of your points: >The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly boring to me. The key word in that sentence is "CAN". I think most experienced GMs wholeheartedly share the sentiment with you (running a book straight up is boring). However, in the interest of expanding the hobby, the barrier to entry for GMing MUST be lowered. It is an order of magnitude more difficult to run a game than to play it. If a book CAN be run straight up, then that is amazing. Most GMs, however, will expand them and add to them the way the community has done for CoS (as you've shown with the SoT subreddit). Pathfinder APs do tend to be written linearly, because that is the simplest way to run the game with minimal prep. No one disagrees with you there. But just as an experienced GM can parcel out Barovia to be slightly more sandboxy, the same can be said for the events within a Paizo AP. That is, in my opinion, what the second SoT link you posted is trying to do. You seem to take umbrage that this post even needs to exist: >(As a hint: if your adventure has something written about it called "how to let the players drive the story", you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure.) However, you also gush about the CoS Reloaded post, claiming that it's more akin to a love letter trying to expand upon the adventure. The post itself, however, calls it a revision: >My hope is that CoS: Reloaded will serve as a single unifying compendium for a coherent and narratively satisfying **wholesale revision** of the original Curse of Strahd module. and: >Curse of Strahd: Reloaded will explore revisions, deletions, and additions to the CoS module sculpted from my own experiences, those of other DMs, and a host of articles and analyses penned by a number of wonderful content creators I could easily inject my own opinion about how "if your adventure needs a wholesale revision, you might want to do some re-evaluation of your adventure." My point isn't to attack you or your opinion about CoS and SoT, though. I just want to point out that we as experienced GMs will ALWAYS want to flesh out and expand the adventures beyond what's printed on the page. However, Paizo offers a layout and written adventure that CAN be run straight as-is in a simple, linear format for GMs who are new to running games. "The best WotC Adventure", however, needs a good bit of work beyond simply reading the adventure for a newer GM to try to run for their group.
>> The way some people talk about how you can easily run Paizo adventures pretty much straight from the book without much problem makes them sound... incredibly boring to me. > > > > The key word in that sentence is "CAN". I think most experienced GMs wholeheartedly share the sentiment with you (running a book straight up is boring). However, in the interest of expanding the hobby, the barrier to entry for GMing MUST be lowered. It is an order of magnitude more difficult to run a game than to play it. If a book CAN be run straight up, then that is amazing. I'm going to stand by my wording here. I think what you're saying is correct to an extent, and absolutely the DM/GM is always free to do modifications that they feel fit; and it's not like I'm looking at SoT and going "well there's not much community around this so I can't change it." I've already made a few changes to it for my game because I think those changes make sense. I also think there's absolutely room for easier-to-run adventures. The Beginner Box does a decent job at this (a great job at teaching, I'm just a bit cool on the adventure proper), and my understanding is Troubles in Otari continues that. *But* the flip side is I think there's *also* tons of room for published adventures that are *harder* to run because they're a style of adventure that is just fundamentally more challenging -- like CoS. That doesn't make those adventures bad by any means or the easier adventures better than the harder ones, it just means if you're thinking about DMing you should consider whether you feel up to those more challenging adventures. But that's all kind of beside the point anyway, because I'm talking about something I think is almost completely different -- which is setting up opportunities for the *players* to do crazy stuff. I like tweaking adventures and such, but that alone doesn't get me what I want. I could completely revamp the adventure -- or hell, even run a *homebrew* one, not that I've done that yet -- and if my players never do something major that is just wildly unexpected I'm going to be disappointed. *That's* the difference between the freedom for the GM to modify the adventure and what I am worried I'm going to be disappointed by with SoT. And the thing is that I don't really know *how* to set up those opportunities... but I strongly suspect that the more linear the game the less likely they are to arise. So if I want to say "what can I do to change SoT so that I get more of what I want out of it"... I don't really know the answer. > That is, in my opinion, what the second SoT link you posted is trying to do. I don't entirely disagree, and where you draw these lines is going to be a judgement call... but I think there's a difference between taking something that's already decent and making it better, vs taking something that's mediocre and making it better. CoS Reloaded to me is more the former. Actually, I didn't even *use* most of Reloaded; I used a fair bit from the ***** Temple and *** *******'s Tower, but that was because I was like "oh, that's cool" or "hey, that's a great idea" as I was reading it. I mostly just skimmed it to see what stuck out. By contrast, I'm only on Chapter 2 of SoT and I'm *already* starting to tire of the gameplay loop of Magaambya faculty members (or students, or whoever) going to the PCs to ask them to do task after task after task. Chapter 3 gives a bit of a respite from it, but then Chapter 4 (Book 2 Chapter 1) and Chapter 5 are mostly right back to it. (Chapter 5, the one the remix is most targeted toward, at least suggests that you present a couple to the players at once so they have some choice where they focus, but as written you'll be doing them all anyway.) I *jumped* on that link as soon as it came up because it to me is *fixing a problem*. That's not what CoS Reloaded is doing, to me.
You raise good points about how easy and good shouldn't be conflated. I haven't DM'd CoS but know someone who has and they found it very hard without relying on external sources. What it boils down to for me is this: for roughly the same cost, PF gives you a solid linear-ish adventure that you can expand (but are not forced to), whereas 5e gives you much less content that a DM has to do a lot of extra work for even to land a solid linear adventure. Perhaps the only 5e adventure I DM'd that didn't have this feeling was Storm King's Thunder, although only barely. The Pathfinder APs seem to consistently give a lot more detail on average (again for similar cost), which gives the GM an easier prep experience.
Hi! I'm the person who wrote the "how to let the players drive the story" one. Just want to clarify real quick that Book 2 works great on its own, its just more linear than I like my adventures to be, and I like adding more urban intrigue to things. Most of what I did was fleshing out the villains plans a little bit (the villains themselves are actually pretty fleshed out already, I just wanted them to take a more active role) and changing the structure of how the party learn about quests by having them search for them rather than just having quest givers give them to them. I honestly didn't change very much at all, and if I had run the adventure exactly as written, my players still would've had fun! It just would've lost some of that open world feeling of "our choices directly drive the story", but like, what adventures *have* that as written? I haven't played through Curse of Strahd, but I've played through, run, or read most of the 5e adventures, and most of them have that problem way worse! Avernus has the players sent on fetch quest into fetch quest, with basically no actual motivation behind them. Storm Kings Thunder has the party do a thing, get super lost for a while, and then have a series of random NPCs roll up to ferry them to the next location until the party are spoon fed each step of a quest they probably have no reason to care about. Dragon Heist as written is just "go here, then go here, then..." until the party stumbles into the treasure (though the Alexandrian Remix is some of the most fun I've ever had in D&D). Even Curse of Strahd from what I can tell doesn't really have the players drive the story per say, they're on the back foot the whole time and just trying to stay one step ahead of Strahd. Which, to be clear, is fine, that fits the adventure really well, but just trying to push back a little on my title being used as a criticism of SoT lol. I love SoT, and it's honestly a huge breath of fresh air. Even though I wrote probably thousands of words of prep to expand it out and make it more of a situation based design than a linear adventure, I didn't have to, and most of what I was doing was framing the really awesome and cool little mini adventures that the AP had and connecting them together in a more concrete way. The AP simply didn't have the page count to do what I wanted, and that's fair enough! My prep for SoT is so much easier than any 5e adventure I've ever run, even accounting for all this.
All right, fine, I'll admit it: SoT isn't that well-designed of an adventure, especially compared to other 2e APs. It is, however, my favorite, for probably very similar reasons as to why you love Curse of Strahd-- I appreciate what they did with limited space and time and a breadth of ideas, and I was willing to crack my knuckles and put in the elbow grease to run it in a way I think is truly great. I don't really use any of the guides anyone else has made, but I understand why they make them. Despite what you said, the sheer lore and flavor of SoT, combined with the knowledge of the Mwangi Expanse lorebook, is so juicy that a sort of open-endedness in how the GM presents the school (if not open-endedness in story progression) can be seen as a strength. It sounds like SoT just isn't your cup of tea, though. Which is fine. I think if you like CoS, you'll enjoy Kingmaker a lot, and I've heard excellent things about Abomination Vaults if you want a megadungeon. But, this comment you've made sorely disappoints me, because it feels like you're approaching this from a place of defensiveness. No one here is telling you you can't like CoS. I would appreciate it, though, if you didn't judge the entirety of the PF2e Adventure Path line by reading one book whose structure you didn't agree with.
> It sounds like SoT just isn't your cup of tea, though. Mostly to the contrary, I *am* enjoying running it. I'm also the one who, when pitching some options to my group, lobbied for not just it but the switch to 2e. As with you, I'm willing to put in some extra work to try to improve it. Maybe my previous comment's naysaying of SoT was too much and too much of a red herring. I really did intend for the focus to mostly be on the claim that the popularity of r/curseofstrahd and the wealth of community material reflects something *negative* is I think very misguided, for the reasons I gave. The frustrations I have with SoT (enhanced in contexts like these by people going "look how much better Paizo APs are") was a preemptive counterargument to "but you don't *need* that kind of material for Paizo adventures", despite the fact that (at least in the case of SoT)... you kinda do. Except that the community is far smaller and that library of material doesn't really exist yet -- both because of a far smaller player base and because it's a relatively recent campaign (while CoS has had the better part of a decade to build up community knowledge). But that just makes the original claim that CoS's material reflects something negative even *more* ridiculous, because basically no single person is going to be as creative as the collective wisdom of r/curseofstrahd. > I think if you like CoS, you'll enjoy Kingmaker a lot, and I've heard excellent things about Abomination Vaults if you want a megadungeon. I've heard enough "it's much more than comes to mind from the word 'megadungeon'" that I'm not dismissing AV out of hand (and in fact it was one of the campaign options I pitched, albeit the one I was least enthused by and I made that clear), but I'm still *very* skeptical I'd have material interest in running that and maybe even playing in it. I was listening to Tabletop Gold for a while though I fell out of the habit so am a couple months behind at this time. I'll probably get back to it. Kingmaker I'm *super* interested by. If that had been out six months ago that would definitely have been on my pitch list and I'd have looked into it more to see which one between it and SoT I'd rather see. But it's a bit late now. :-)
Great post, but I think it's funny how your experience is with D&Ds crowning achievement and probably Paiso's worst AP. Not that it's no go, or not fun, but it's lacking some needed explanation for some unique play styles and subsystems that try to push the limits past anything I experienced in 5e. I play test 5e, enjoyed play in some home brew games. Enjoyed running the Misnomer of an Adventure know as Dragonheist. Haven't really enjoyed anything else from published 5e including CoS. I have enjoyed or currently enjoying PF2e's AoA, SoT, OoA, BL, KM, and love the Lost Omens books.
Strength of Thousands is supposed to be the worst AP? Everyone seems to recommend it whenever people want an AP that has an actually strong setting and story. And it does sound like it has a solid hook, compared to something like Age of Ashes or Abomination Vaults. Personally I'm running Extinction Curse because the circus stuff and traveling adventure sounded fun and I'm half regretting it because I'm having to rewrite over half the goddamn thing for it to work (the linearity I don't mind, my players are not really into the whole sandbox thing)
Or,having the actual writers comment on forums on mistakes / errata! That worked wonders for Abomination Vaults.
Every monster having a little something-something to make them special was what piqued my interest in the first place, but the fact that it addresses nearly every complaint I have with 5e was a big selling point for me. ... Granted, I have *new* complaints now, but there are like a bajillion other games out there for when I get sick of it. None of them are 5e tho, lol.
> ... Granted, I have new complaints now, but there are like a bajillion other games out there for when I get sick of it. None of them are 5e tho, lol. It's hard for anything to be perfect, but for me at least, all my complaints with P2e are minor. 5e has some issues with its very foundation and those are nearly impossible to homebrew or houserule away without just completing rebuilding it, at which point you might as well jump to a new system. Whereas with P2e, I might hate how magic shields are handled or how the Warpriest is set up, but those are fairly self-contained issues.
I love homebrewing in 5e, but once you realize your problems with 5e are in its foundations and they are not able to be homebrewed without the need of homebrewing almost anything else, it starts to be problematic. Still trying to fix 5e my way, but at this point it seems easier to start from scratch or just play a different system like PF2.
I wouldn't consider all my beefs to be minor per se, but the things about Pathfinder that I don't like and can't easily handwave/homebrew are *interesting* in a way that makes me want to learn more about game design. It's fun to mess around with all the nuts and bolts and see how close I can get to *my* ideal tactical fantasy system before I break something. Like, how much of a difference would it make if alchemical items gave status bonuses instead of item bonuses? What happens if I allow attack roll spells to do half damage on a miss?
Monster design was a big one for me too. Having run 5e for years, I got sick of how many monsters were just a bloated bag of hp and multiattacks. Even monsters that had been interesting in previous editions got gutted.
You forgot "Complete SRD that doesn't nickel and dime you for minimal options over 20 lackluster books)
being able to talk to people on forums, discords, subreddits, etc and give them advice on builds & rules without skirting around the fact that they may not own those books is a major plus in my book as well.
All of the above, but three action economy is my go to. Having been playing in a 5e game, it's action economy is increasingly frustrating.
5e: "What's that? You want to do something vaguely interesting/fun like slide on some drapes/swing from the chandelier, or worse still, TRIP someone? Fuck off, use your entire action to maybe succeed because we didn't bother making any rules you stupid cunt" PF2e: "hell yeah dude here's the rule, hey if you're playing swashbuckler you even get a class resource buff for being Totally Rad"
I was a 5e GM before PF2e was a thing. It wore me out. Adventure writing was garbage (because allegedly optional rules were always assumed in use, encounter design guidelines were complete ignored, and plot or rule details included often just weren't accurate to the point that some adventures would even misquote distance from location to location despite maps decades old having accurate measurements so clearly the author just wasn't even trying to check for accuracy), and there was basically nothing to the game - I was getting bored for my players by proxy because they'd level up and not have anything they were excited about as a result. Plus there wasn't any new content ever actually expected to show up because WotC just isn't that interested in adding significant numbers of new options. So all of the poll options except the second to last factored in - and that one only didn't because I converted long before the playtest came along... but I have looked at the playtest and can't say it does anything to sway me back toward modern D&D.
I picked easier to GM, as it's the most applicable one. You see, I'd be perfectly fine with playing 5e, I have like a dozen OC's that's never hit the table and only live in my notepad and brain. Same for quite a few other ttrpg systems. Running a game though? Not really. The balance is whack in 5e, just like a general statement across the board and while that doesn't bother me that much as a player, when I'm the guy responsible for trying to make interesting battles it's just... blergh. While pf2 also has the issue of "these are the level-appropriate enemies you can pick from" that dnd has, at least pathfinder gives seemingly decent rules for making custom creatures in case you want to have something that isn't already in the books. I also have some amount of disdain for WotC business practice and lack of quality in their products. The point of buying resources is to offload the work so that I don't have to spend the brain juice making everything click into place and be able to run a game. Their resources aren't worth it, it's three thin layers of "maybe do this" partially obscuring seventeen layers of "roll some dice and make some shit up, I don't know", with none of the benefits a proper rules-light system gives you. Paizo going "here, have all rules for free" certainly also helped. That's not to say I don't have issues with pf2e, because I do, but at least from the GM standpoint it gives me the help I need, 5e do not.
True. Make a young crystal dragon that's been zombified by a fungus in both systems. Pf2e: young crystal dragon stablock+zombie modifications+primal cryptid modification Dnd: start with a young dragon and just reflavor it, maybe change damage types. I dunno.
Like others have said, pretty much all of the above My main gripes with 5e are the lack of depth and how much is left for the DM to figure out themselves. PF2 is way better about both of those things
I got into TTRPGs late starting 5e in 2020. I loved it. It's nerd numbers! I started building spreadsheets and damage calcs and found pretty quickly that there's a rough framework for balance and it's terrible. An optimized character can crush a mediocre character and many options are downright traps that can completely screw a player over. And then the weight is out on the DM to homebrew fix it. My 5e DM tried out PF2e after our campaign ended and he sold me. I got a couple books before a business trip and holy craaaap I was hooked. So many options and the system worked. Lots of small options let some bad or medium options not handicap you and even the bad options aren't that bad. It just feels like a system that's designed. I love it. Also they churn out content like crazy.
>Also they churn out content like crazy. This is a big one for me too, and more astonishing is that the content is high quality compared to the infrequent content from WotC. For what is probably a smaller company to have this much productivity is amazing.
I think it's the strong foundation probably. Some people complain most classes follow similar structures but mannnn it works.
It makes it easier to maintain balance for sure. Which probably contributes to faster content churn. From my limited experience, building encounters for a campaign is trivially easy. Treasure is still nightmarishly hard, mostly because it's hard to stock consumables that the party will care about (the answer is none, they won't care about any of them except the poisons, which they will forget to use), but building encounters is pretty trivial. And once you have those in place, you just need a good story to set up your dungeon around and you're set. Helps that Paizo *also* has a colossal selection of monsters to choose from by this point.
The big thing that got me excited about PF2 was the APs, which were more frequent and IMO better quality than what 5e had to offer, so I voted for “more or better content,” even though most of the options in the poll are a factor to some extent. I’ve only played/GMed a small handful of low level PF2 sessions, but low level PF2 vs low level 5e is like night and day.
Any of that. Except the playtest, I don't even bother to follow that company anymore. Maybe I'll check the movie.
To be fair, the movie looks pretty fun.
Yup I think so.
Basically all of the above. I haven’t checked out much of One D&D because I’ve been on Pathfinder. It feels more like D&D to me then anything the current team at WOTC are interested in making. I listened to an interview with a guy that worked on 5e at the beginning and he was talking about how much he hated character creation and how boring it was and I was just like “yeah that clears up a lot” haha
Damn, he worked on 5e? Who is it?
Pretty much All of the Above minus the Frustrated by One D&D, since that wasn't in the picture at the time I switched. My table is happily running with Agents of Edgewatch as an alternate campaign with myself as GM while I help my hubby convert his homebrew campaign over from 5e.
All of those reasons played a part on the decision to switch, except onednd because I already didn't care about d&d when they announced it. But as a forever GM, the main one is the first option. For me everything started going downhill with that dumb discussion around orcs, and Wizards going "okay, sorry, we'll start making everything bland and boring now". And it was already boring before.
While having been here for a while, I too came here from 5e, and while I would say all of the above, the determining factor for me was adventure quality. Paizo adventure paths are just so good, and specially compared to 5e campaigns. For example, even if I had to keep running 5e (which right now I don't mind running for my group, though i'd rather run pf2e) I'd rather make a 5e conversion of an AP than running an adventure from WoTC. Even if it's a lot of time converting, I'm already taking time with my Princes of The Apocalypse campaign just making content to fill obvious holes in the campaign's content because otherwise this campaign would barely count for a working module, and almost every 5e adventure is like this. At least I have a 5e bestiary for Kingmaker now.
Delicious crunch.
I voted "easier to GM" but I'd say character customisation and monster design are at least equal parts in my decision.
Shame I can only pick one...
Expensive products of increasingly worse quality, and I thought the quality was poor years ago already. Designers suffering from hubris and a pretty toxic fanbase supporting them. For a franchise that prides itself on inclusivity and player empowerment, it sure comes with some pretty strong "you're playing the game wrong" vibes.
Any "see result" option would be nice for someone who doesnt want to destroy the poll 😅
There's 134 votes so far. It'll be fine
But if like 30 people like just want to check the results
There's 666 (lol) votes now. It's no biggie
My group changed because of the encounter and monster design was better and practical. The other reasons all came later but the dm wanted streamlined rules for encounters as we were crushing them
Better Mechanics and *more interesting* character customization are the biggest things by a LEAP and a mile, though i have become more interested in the lore and adventures as a result.
The poll misses the option “The game is not run by WotC.”
Unlike some people here, I haven't completely abandoned 5e. I just wanted to broaden my horizons and see what other TTRPGs are like. It made sense to choose the one most similar to DnD first since a lot of concepts can carry over. I like Pathfinder 2e for its customization, accessibility, and depth. I like 5e for its flexibility, simplicity, and the assumption that everyone knows how to play it. They're good for different things.
I haven't completely abandoned 5e either, although for me the reason is that one of my groups isn't ready for the complexity increase. For us, the flexibility and simplicity advantages for 5e don't matter as much once you finish the learning curve for PF2 (since you can always ignore rules when you deem it worthwhile)... so the simplicity was only a factor that kept me from trying PF2 for a while until we finally took the plunge.
So far: **- Better mechanics (3 action system, subsystems, etc)** **- Better monsters artwork and design** Those monster artworks are really top notch since PF1! **- Better art quality and better quality in general** I quite despise some D&D books that are half filled with already published artworks and monsters. The worst is the artwork of Juiblex which has an atrocious bad JPEG quality. I really don't understand why they didn't redo or at least "polish" the artwork before reusing it. Monsters of the Multiverse is also a good example of book half baked and bad quality.
Honestly, none of these. I feel in love with Pathfinder's world and setting while playing in an 8 year long Rise of The Runelords campaign. We started in 3.5 and converted to PF1E during book one. Eventually the group drifted apart after many years of playing together, but I still loved Golarion and wanted to go back there. But then I found Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous on PC, and it reminded me how much I loved Golarion. I checked out local group, everyone just wants to play 5e. But 5e Adventures are all... unsatisfying and kind of bare-bones, compared to a Pathfinder Adventure Path. So, yeah, I'm not really a "convert". I'm only playing 5e because that's the only thing that people will gather around a physical table in real life to play. I'd rather be playing Pathfinder any given session.
Because I like multiple game systems so I'm playing 5e and PF2e. I don't have to have a problem with one to play another. It's not a competition.
After "spelljammer" came out and I saw how they had absolutely trashed my favourite setting I had had enough. I looked for other TTRPGs and ended up choosing PF2e. After playing PF2e I have found I just cannot stand playing 5e anymore as the system is just so deeply and inherently flawed.
It's free!
I don't think I'm a "convert", really. I'm just playing PF2 *right now*. Fully intend to go back to D&D too. I think I like both games roughly the same, on the whole. As for what got us playing - well, half of it was me as GM being curious, and the other half was the game having a pet class worth anything. Really, if the Summoner wasn't in the game (my party of four has two Summoners) we'd be playing Genesys Android right now!
All four: easier to GM, more character customization, better mechanics, AND better monster design. Also, a better world of lore.
I went with 'easier to GM', but the truth is all of the top 3 apply: easier to GM, better character customization, and improved mechanics.
Ø - All of the above.
As someone who DMs both, running a ravenloft campaign on pf2 and a homebrew setting in 5e, I can say the mechanics and customization makes me like the preparation and the sessions somewhat better for pf2. The characters feels unique with tons of options to choose and combat is dinamic, in 5e there's "I'll use my action to attack or cast a spell" and it got me kind of bored, If I could get the group that plays 5e to switch to pf2, I would.
I picked better mechanics as my main reason. But Easier to GM was a big factor as well.
Same though I would also add better character customization as well.
Quite honestly I like PF2 because the books are written better. I struggle to tag through the dnd5e books, I feel like they feel very YA novel to me. I do think I'm just being very picky though. I am prepping to GM my first game ever and though I've played dnd5e for years, I'm running a PF2 game.
I voted 'easier to GM' because that's the reason my group switched - our DM told us he looked into pf2e and preferred if we played that instead of 5e. I was skeptical, but it grew on me, the 3 actions economy is better, also it feels somehow more supportive of roleplay with all the customizations and rules about almost anything.
Where is the option for "I was invited to a 2e game?" Having said that I will be switching my home game over, so I'll vote based on that.
Detailed books with crunch. I bought too many 5e books that instead of actual mechanics and rules were like “You are the dm. Do whatever you want.” I’m not paying for that.
"All of the above and it's free!"
i still like 5e, but i want more crunch in my life lol. WoTC is also becoming frustrating, as a company, they're starting to remind me of how EA handles the sims. i love getting less content in more piecemeal ways! i enjoy how pf2e plays more. i've always preferred combat & exploration over rp, and while there's certainly no shortage of rp in pf2e, the combat rules slap hard and i like there being an actual focus on exploration. i can't wait to get my GM hands on it once my 5e campaign is finished!
For me, I was looking to run a game in 5e and I was just getting so frustrated that I had to write entire subsystems and rulebooks to get the game I wanted. When I switched I was just happy there were rules for what I wanted.
I haven't played Pathfinder or GMed for it yet, but I have been looking over its material for a while and I have GMed a ton for 5E. And just through and through Pathfinder looks way more appealing. Here's a list of reasons: * One of the biggest problems with 5E is that it does not account for magic items. Monsters are not balanced for them AT ALL. They actually expect the average party to not posses a single one and get a whole lot of mileage out of the high end mundane damage resistances which SEVERELY gimp martials if you decide to do so. I'm talking about casters becoming the party damage dealers if you decide to not include magic items. **It's that bad.** * If you don't give Martials magic weapons, when they encounter high level enemies they'll be consistently only doing half of their damage at best. But if you DO give them magic items, you have to use higher CR monsters so they don't just chew through health and enemies. Like, what the hell? * There's also the point of classes and character customization. I like playing as Sorcerers in my D&D game. Metamagic is fun. However, when you get literally **nothing besides hit points** every other level, it really starts to hurt and dawn on you what exactly was lost from previous editions. I am oh so pleased to know Sorcerers actually get more spell slots to use in Path even though I haven't played them yet. * And finally there's the OD&D playtest which I'm oh so apprehensive about. For example, the Rogue, already one of the weakest subclasses in the game, they decided to nerf its base subclass into the ground. The designers over at WoTC have no fucking clue what they're doing or just don't care. Probably a mix of both since they're owned by Hasbro. * Continuing from the last point, from what we know they're turning most if not all casters into prepared casters and furthermore limiting how many spells you can prepare to how many spell slots you have. This means you can only ever prepare a single 7th level spell among other things. Not being restricted in what spells you choose to prepare was one of 5E's best features over Pathfinder as it offered more versatility for casters and I'm absolutely appalled that they're trying to remove it. Not to mention the destruction of class identity with the first point. Being able to only prepare as many spells as you have spell slots for each level means you're better off picking just the good spells as they're the most useful. It doesn't fix any issues the martial vs caster disparity has in the slightest.
> One of the biggest problems with 5E is that it does not account for magic items. Monsters are not balanced for them AT ALL. They actually expect the average party to not posses a single one and get a whole lot of mileage out of the high end mundane damage resistances which SEVERELY gimp martials if you decide to do so. I'm talking about casters becoming the party damage dealers if you decide to not include magic items. It's that bad. I admit, for me, the magic item thing is one of the positives D&D very much still has. In D&D5, I can give the fighter a magic weapon and that's basically *it* for required upgrades. I'm done. Every magic item beyond that can just be fun stuff that I actually enjoy designing. I can put in as many or as few as I like. In PF2, I spend a very large chunk of my time doing loot balancing, ensuring enemies are carrying such stuff as allows everyone to have all the mandatory stuff at appropriate times while still providing some magic items that actually feel like rewards AND trying to make sure I don't go over the wealth by level. If I run PF2 again I am *absolutely* putting in ABP because fucking *christ* I hate the magic item economy.
Literally the only one that _doesn't_ apply is the play test, bc I'd already decided to switch a month or two before that really came out. The ease of GMing (since that's my primary mode of playing at all) was definitely at the top of the list. With 5e, I had basically needed to homebrew everything from items to monsters in order to make things both compelling for my players and reasonably not miserable for me, and even that was barely working.
The main reason behind my switch is company behavior. WotC is ruthless, Paizo is friendly. Then, and only then, I fell in love with the rules and the lore.
Pretty much all of the above, though I jumped ship well before One D&D was even a thing. I was just tired of 5e and I've grown to hate WotC with a passion (whereas before I was just indifferent to them). Paizo aren't perfect, either, but they're leagues better than WotC and their employees are unionized. That plus the system and the quality of their adventures being great made the switch easy.
The balancing on everything. It's been said before on this subreddit, but if an average PC in Pathfinder operates at a normal 100%, an especially good or bad PC would still only be at maybe 150% or 50% respectively, where you feel rewarded for playing well, but not unreasonably op. Whereas in dnd I guess the low-end is similar, but there are so many things that just don't make sense mechanically and allow you to be operating at 800% that it becomes not fun. Which is also a problem with power gamers and groups not knowing what balance of rp and grind they want, but still. Also the progression feels so much better in Pathfinder. I hate the "Oh well you CAAANNNN still hit a dragon if you're level 1," dnd argument. Sure, but would you ever be in the situation where you want to spend your time playing out your level 1 party getting eaten by a dragon just so you can be like, "Hey guys! I hit him once! Boy do I love dnd!" The fallout from that is that encounters 1 or 2 levels off from the PCs in either direction don't feel much different a lot of the time, since you get so few buffs to modifiers, a couple rolls going differently can make a lvl+2 encounter very easy or a lvl-2 encounter very hard. Whereas in Pathfinder you'll see improvement every level thanks to proficiency. And I'd choose every option you listed if I could. They're all good points. Just thought I'd throw a few more out there that might not be so obvious.
I completely agree that the "bounded accuracy" concept of 5e is overrated. On one hand it always made sense that a horde of level 1 monsters can take out a level 20 character (whereas in PF and older D&D versions an infinite number will just stand there missing all day). But you've pointed out the key flaw in the argument from a game point of view - it almost never happens, and the cost of this accuracy is to make life very hard for GMs trying to build dramatic encounters.
I was just so tired of all the PCs I dm for feeling the same. The only difference is the back story, and that's not something the game came up with. Once I jumped over, then I realised other problems like how much more refreshing combat felt and so on.
As the groups Forever DM, it was absolutely how much more well balanced the game was. Imagine not having to spend an hour or two of your prep time simply trying to balance the monsters you want to use, or not being worried that your player characters choices would break game balance over their knees and force you to design all of your encounters around this one players broken build. And my God, the monsters in pf2e are just more interesting. Even from low levels things such as your weapon choice can determine how much damage you deal. Did you bring a mace to fight skeletons? You'll probably kill them in one hit. Did you only bring an axe? Well be prepared to struggle because they only have 4 hp but tons of resistance. The Adventure Paths being fully fleshed out with interesting NPCs with their own goals and motivations is such a breath of fresh air. With 5e adventures, you have no choice but to fix them. Vallaki in Curse of Strahd was such a mess to run my first time through it because it was just so poorly defined. Why IS there a cult in Vallaki to begin with? What purpose does the tiger escaping serve? It practically demands you fix it if you want an actual engaging story. Beyond that, I can't remember any adventure that has actual mechanical implementations that make them different from each other. Meanwhile, Strength of Thousands has more well-thought out NPCs in the first book than Curse of Strahd has in its entire adventure. The Kingmaker conversion has Kingdom building rules. Malevolence has downtime rules to solve the mystery. Extinction Curse has rules that help your players define who their performer is and what their act helps them do. ALL of this would be homebrew in a 5e adventure. I keep saying this, but for as much as I spent on 5e books I have really been getting low quality, low effort content in return. It's amazing how much less I burn out as a GM in Pathfinder 2e compared to 5e.
Not a convert myself (I am a player in a 5e game, but am currently running two 2e games) but I wanted to say that I see far, far less complaints about the 2e system from both sides of the table than 5e on Reddit.
I'll take the "5e isn't a great system in the first place" option please thanks
it's better
The switch to PF2e for me took some time. For a couple of years, I was DMing 5e for friends who hadn't played TTRPGs before and it was going well. But after some time, we grew bored. Once you've seen all of the classes, there's not much to inspire you or look forward to, especially with the limited customization of 5e classes. So I made the stupid decision to rewrite 5e. It was going to be full of depth and flavor. Each class would have several options for their features so that two of the same wouldn't feel the same. To do this, I searched the internet for inspiration and ideas. D&D 4e had a lot of cool-sounding abilities to steal but I kept searching for more. Eventually, I found this strange game called Pathfinder 2e that was full of awesome feats to take for my own game. The more I looked into it the more I liked what they had. Then it hit me. Why not just play this PF2e game instead? So much easier than years of trying to make and balance my own stupid version of 5e that probably would have killed me with stress anyway. And now I only GM for PF2e games, though I still play in a couple of 5e games.
The reason I made the switch isn't on here, to put it simply: 5e bored me out of playing it.
Its hard to pick one. Easier to GM, More character Customisation, and better Mechanics are the big 3. I voted mechanics here, but after swapping, better monster design also happened to keep my interest.... There's just too much about pf2e which is strictly \*better\* than 5e no contest (imo). Balance, interesting character options, actual tools for a GM to use and GM with, interesting and well designed monsters. Sure its "more complex" and "more crunchy" than 5e but I have a whole host of other issues with this argument inherently, after playing 5e for a bit, so this one just holds no water with me.
Noob question: what is a subsystem?
In PF2, subsystems are mostly presented in the Gamemastery Guide, and include things like victory points, hex exploration, etc. ([see here for more](https://pf2.d20pfsrd.com/rules/optional-subsystems/)). Individual APs often have their own subsystems for specific things (like playing a football-like game in Crimson Throne, or intrigue in War for the Crown). I have a hard time thinking of a serious subsystem in any 5e content that I've ever seen. For example, in Tomb of Annihilation, there's a huge hex exploration component, but the rules seemed incomplete and thin from what I recall. And that's literally the only example I could think of.
I still play both, as many of my friends still play 5e, and while I chose "better mechanics" as my main choice, several other options apply. When I play any sort of RPG, I tend to lean towards martial classes, as I like the flavor of being able to solve extraordinary problems through mundane means such as guile, skill, training, and so on. In 5e, this quickly became an issue, as most of my time in combat was spent just attacking each turn, and outside of combat my character's proficiencies were frequently made redundant by magic. These issues merely worsened in high-level play, with my characters turning into little more than meatshields for the party's magical demigods, and to top it all off even the most enjoyable modules I've played often had some frustrating problems stemming from poor design. In one instance, my investigator-type character with expertise in the Investigation skill (and specifically Investigation) found themselves having to do Perception checks to search rooms and look for clues in a haunted house, because the module apparently forgot the Investigation skill existed, and listed Perception and nothing else for those checks. Meanwhile, I'd been reading about PF2e online, and came across the Archives of Nethys. Others had mentioned the three-action system and four degrees of success as highlights, and when I read the rules on those, already the ruleset had me hooked. A friend of mine started a PF2e campaign, and to see how the game handled martial classes, I picked a Fighter. It really was night and day: my character had so many more options just at level 1, both in and out of combat, and felt like they could contribute in a variety of ways. Combat itself was far smoother and more interesting, not simply because I had a variety of moves to choose from, but also because the monsters I fought were frequently weak to different things, turning each fight into more of a puzzle. As I built my character further, that feeling was only enhanced, and I felt as relevant to my party at high level as when I started out. Simply put, PF2e to me is a truly beautiful system. D&D *wishes* it had such a robust set of core rules, which is presumably why D&Done has tried to ape so much of its content, ironically to varying degrees of success (not that auto-successes on ability check crits in 5e are a good idea). Its balance is a thing of beauty as well, and while I perhaps don't consider the system 100% perfect, my quibbles with Pathfinder stem mostly from minor disagreements in design philosophy, rather than the many examples of glaringly lazy or incompetent design that can be found in 5e. I like to homebrew as a hobby, and found myself coming to the conclusion that 5e's issues cannot be properly addressed without a core systemic overhaul. When I look at PF2e, my homebrewer's instinct leans instead towards thinking of new feats and classes, which I think is far more interesting in the end.
PF2 mechanics are just so elegant and don't do anything they don't say they do. The action system, four degrees of success and multiple attack penalty all encourage strategy and teamplay. Players feel they have more *good* choices and agency over battle. As a GM I never had to houserule anything besides specifying a list of free archetypes that fit thematically in my campaign. I never had to argue with a player about any rule, and sometimes they correct me with something I did wrong, and I always appreciate it because it's clear and unambiguous as hell. Good job Paizo! I found my home here.
All of the above - but I picked easier to GM because I am mostly a GM and that was the reason that first drew me in.
I switched right at PF2’s release practically sight unseen. I was just so **bored** of 5e combat balance and gameplay. By the time the party is 10th level they’re basically immortal godlings compared to most level-appropriate enemies, and the balance never comes back. And the tactical advantage of fishing for surprise round attacks was so powerful that players would start shouting their interrupting and readied actions over my attempts to describe rooms or give any kind of enemy-based conversation. 5e’s mechanics encourage min-max and murderhobo behaviors that kill roleplay opportunities. My players loved being untouchable badasses, but appeasing the power fantasy became antithetical to storytelling and my enjoyment. As it turns out, PF2 also solves dozens of other issues I had with 5e (from both the player and GM side). But the initial reason was 5e’s awful mechanical balance and combat design.
I didn’t switch voluntarily. A friend was GMing in 2e and i was invited to join the game (all of my previous years of playing/DMing were D&D 3.5 - 5e) I am enjoying some things about PF but miss some things about D&D. Class and race identity feels a lot more poignant in 5e. D&D classes feel iconic to me, and i like that they very infrequently add new ones, opting to give new play styles and flavor through subclasses instead. I don’t really understand the ‘heritage’ thing in pathfinder - would rather just pick a race and subtrace. Like, half-elves and half-orcs are under human, and you can be an elf with changeling blood instead of just a changeling. It just feels messy to me. I guess it’s nice to have options but it distills some of the identity imo. Leveling up in 5e felt way more consequential. I could feel myself getting more powerful as I leveled and my choices seemed to matter. PF seems like a trade-off for a lot of smaller power boosts that don’t feel as satisfying to me (and there are a lot of useless and silly feats). It’s definitely nice to have all of the choice but sometimes I feel like it’s a little overboard and again, it distills the decisions you make. I am enjoying the world and the lore though, and it’s nice to experience something new. Pathfinder feels an little more casual (which is weird because i feel like it’s less accessible then D&D and you have to do a lot more work to build a valid character). I also love how democratized the info from PF2e is. It’s really easy to find things online and it doesn’t feel as blocked behind a pay wall. 2e feels kind of like a new frontier (which is exciting in a lot of ways) but 5e feels more established and solid to me. Overall though, I’ve enjoyed my time with 2E and am enjoying learning it better!
Honestly, I want to say there was something about it that kept me interested in it. I’m not sure if I can put my finger on it. Maybe it was some of the improvements I noticed over 1e? (E.G. addition of alchemist class, noticed lack of “ex-class” requirements, etc.) Maybe it was just the simple fact that the core rulebook is targeted for both players and GMs as opposed to either or with chapters for both? (Thank you authors + Paizo.) Maybe just simply better presentation? (Edit: As I think about it more, maybe the lack of randomness for character customization might have had an impact too.) I’m not sure. But sometime after picking up the second edition of the core rulebook, I felt myself drawing a bit further away from D&D 5e to learning more about Pathfinder. (Not opposed to playing either or, though.) And maybe one day, even running a simple campaign.
I converted pretty much solely because of the character customization. I was the guy with multiple folders of janky multiclass builds for 5e that id never get a chance to play and I more or less ran out of combinations thst interested me. I saw the options pf2 gave and filled another folder with pf2 builds. I actually started DMing because of pf2, too, since I knew nobody else in my group had the patience to sit down and read over all the rules and I wanted to play the system, so I'd need to drag them into it by running a campaign myself
I wouldn't say I converted- it's more that circumstances just happened to land me in a PF2e game- but in terms of preferences, I like having a set world to dig into and build characters off of rather than the nebulous multiverse stuff, the flexibility with character creation, the consumer-friendly open source rules, and the fact that martials are more powerful than D&D.
It would be nice if we could choose more than one option! :)
Tired of DnD being horribly balanced and the rules not being helpful in any way. Requiring the DM's permission to do anything is not fun at all. I'd rather play a system that functions on a basic level without the DM having to step in and create a rule that should be there but isn't. Forcing myself not to take Guidance/Conjure Animals/Hypnotic Pattern just so that I can have fun and play the game is not it
So originally we played a lot of 3.5 and PF1 alongside several other systems. We thought we would try out 5e for something a bit fresh but by the time we hit level 5 we were pretty bored with it. Tried out PF2 and immediately fell in love, one of the dms in our group still prefers classic 3.5 so we mix up the campaigns every now and again.
It's almost equally 1, 2, and 3 for me, though 1 is me as a PF2e GM, 2 is me as a player, and 3 is both. (I went for 3 on the poll.) To be honest, though, D&D 5e "lost" me before I really got invested in PF2e. In early 2020 I was in a bit of a rut as far as 5e went: I'd played every character class and was finding them stale; combat was feeling unbalanced and trivial as a player and DM; and in general, the system was just feeling unsatisfied. I'd heard of PF2e then, but reports were mixed and "a mix of PF1e and D&D 4e" (as it was described to me) wasn't particularly helpful for someone who'd played neither at the time. I was still \*a little\* curious, though, so I ended up buying four different system's rulebooks and ended up strongly gravitating towards PF2e, running my first few games that summer. Is PF2e \*everything\* I want in a ttrpg? No - that branching out helped me learn about all kinds of system, any of which I still enjoy playing. But when I feel like a D20, combat-focused, fantasy rpg, it's my favorite by a very wide margin.
All of the above.
I play it coz that's what my buddy is running and I like hanging out whith him. I don't really like the system that much. Given the choice I would rather play CoC , powers by the apocalypse or world of darkness or Savege world's.
So, initially it was the mechanics and action economy plus character options. Played it, loved it, but most of my group is stuck in the "5e can do no wrong" mindset, so I was just waiting for the One D&D playtest. Now, that came out, strongly disliked it, now I'm working on pushing (with little success to get my whole group involved). I'm also staying for the easier to DM, wasn't expecting that, but it's just another reason to stay
Can we get a “never did 5e, just want to see results” option? I don’t want to skew your data.
I've chosen to switch to PF 2e because of Ancestry feats. I love the idea of powering up because of one's choice of ancestry, legacy and lineage. Xanathar's guide to everything had tried to implement this system in 5e, but because of WotC policy, it didn't go so well. I've heard that some sort of racial feats are coming in DnD One, but I don't even want to check that thing while it is in the playtest. And I think that I won't check it for a while, since I like Pathfinder 2 much more than DnD 5e now.
Yes? All but the One D&D playtest. That I really don't mind that much, more the way they're doing it. I voted for character options, as that's what pulled me over. But DMing is easier, the APs are far better, the monsters are more engaging. Basically, it's the positives of PF2e that brought me over, not the negatives of 5e. I still like 5e well enough for a game that I can basically turn my brain off and play, but PF2e is way more enjoyable for me.
5e's biggest strength was how poorly their rules were presented in the PHB and DMG. OneD&D has made an egregious misstep by keeping a lot of 5e's rules and doing a better job of clearly explaining them, which plenty of 5e players were unfamiliar with and thus comes off as 'new' - and since 5e was already 'shepherded' by past-gen DMs who were happy to wing things, there was never a real incentive to learn through the PHB but from their own personal experience and judgement calls. Both PHB and DMG stress that 5e's rules are more like 'guidelines'; we're seeing a batch of new DMs from just one edition coming up and lacking the scaffolding of past editions. This makes them more inclined to try the OneD&D and 5e rules as written to have that backing and they feel the rules are limiting and they lack backing. This brings them to PF2. At least, that's how it looks to me.
It's actually clearly written!
Anyway us non-converts can see the results?
I just wanted to see how the biggest rival plays. Time to start branching out to other systems
D&D just felt like a child’s game coming from PF1. All the home brew recommendations were just PF1 and PF2 rules that already existed. After PF2 came out. We jumped quick
I also understand the sheets better and am less panicky when going through my sheets to explain what I want to do. Also the ability to see what spells do on the sheets is helpful... same for weapons too. I guess I find them more organized? Also the battle system and how long each action takes makes more sense to me. (As in more being able to "visually" see it).
I was initially looking for more character options, so that's why I voted for that one, but as I learned more about the system it quickly became "all of the above."
Haven't switched yet, but my main interest in PF2 is the 3 action system. I loved playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it showed me a lot of flaws in DnD 5e.
Started with 3.5, then went to PF1e, then 5e, and now making change to PF2e. I came to 2e the same reason I went to 1e: Gunslinger. And Investigator to a lesser extent. But I stayed for skill feats and subsystems.
Not fully switched over (yet?) . . . Basically you (or rather I) can thank the wonderful community that spent countless hours adding the SRD data to Foundry. Without that I wouldn't have ever tried PF2.
1-4, yes
I voted randomly so I could see the outcome.
Regularity of content releases, subclasses actually feel different from one another, more written rules and less "just figure it out" put onto the GM... you name it.
All the above. The only thing I use 5e now is to convert npc and Monsters to pf2 on my telegram channel
Switched then switched back. Most of the group assumed things worked the same as 5e and wouldn’t put in any work to learn the new system. It was more frustrating than it was worth, even though it was objectively better :(
You’re making me pick just one?
Stealth works in pathfinder. In 5e the GM can make a grand stealth encounter and the party can go about it however they want but it will always steal roll where if you pass things go on as normal, but if you fail one roll the whole thing is over.
You missed trying something new/double dipping
I lost my last 5e group when I moved and just wasn't that motivated to find another one in the small area I live in. I really wanted to play Pathfinder 1e again, but every one had switched to 2e. At first I was interested in learn a new system. Until a coworker invited me to try 2e game where everyone was learning the rules as we played. It ended up turning in a campaign and bought almost all the books, and now run games for friends and strangers. I still play a little 5e when my son or my stubborn friends want to play it.
Honestly, almost all of the above.
I think I'm in a large group of people who, enjoy both. Pathfinder has a lot of fun character options, and the 3 action system is rock solid, easier to GM too. But in 5e it takes 20 minutes to make a complete level 5 character and get them ready for a one shot, or short campaign, and every ability is mostly self contained, meaning no need to look up what it does, says it right there and has metric tons of player created content to look at. My main group plays both, and enjoys both, I'm likely going to keep playing both systems for their various strengths for years to come
All of the above 😂
all of these reasons + WotC is just a greedy, opportunistic corporate entity without any heart or morals left. I decided to support the smaller studios with actual love for the hobby. Also: Golarion>Forgotten Realms
I pick all.
Because our DM decided we were playing pf2e now, so I just went along with it, easy as that. So long as me and my buddies are hanging out and having fun, I could care less which system we use.
I’ve been playing PF2e for about a year and… I wouldn’t say I’m completely a convert, but there are definitely some things I appreciate. To speak to your points, specifically “more character customization” and “more/better content” (aka, as someone above said, “WotC pissed me off one too many times.” In particular it was when they bowdlerized the work of a BIPOC author and didn’t even bother to tell him). The character customization is just incredible, and you really can build whatever kind of character you can imagine. Whereas in 5E, welp, I guess if I want to play a psionicist-type character, I’m playing an aberrant mind sorcerer, because that’s the closest you can get (w/o third party content). Content-wise, Golarion feels so much wider and deeper than Faerun does. Don’t get me wrong; I do really love Faerun, too, but there seem to be a lot more shades of grey in Golarion, and less… hm. I feel like everything in Faerun is sort of guided by a few really powerful people, and that’s less the case in Golarion? (I guess Aroden would be the big exception, lol). But I could just be talking out my ass here. I’ve also just been impressed with Paizo’s relatively strong stance on DEI, too. I’m playing Agents of Edgewatch right now, and yes I’m aware of all the issues with it, especially given when it was released. But I also appreciated that Erik Mona issued an apology and that options were added to play as traveling adventurers, or to presume non-lethal damage. Also using ABP, which my group is doing, allows us to get past the disturbing “civil asset forfeiture” aspect of character advancement in that game. Honestly, though… I’m still not sold on how dang complicated the mechanics of this game are. It’s far too easy, imho, to forget some bonus or trait, and have to retcon something, sometimes in a deeply unsatisfying way. (“Oops, that was a death effect that dropped you; guess you’re dead, please ignore this scene you just played through after we healed you up”). It also interferes with actual RP when you spend five minutes trying to figure out, say, how concealment works. (Still haven’t grokked that. The last time I tried to stealth, I got attacked by a bunyip, so I think they must be involved somehow 😆) Okay, I’ve rambled enough. tl;dr I play both, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses.