I like pathfinder(2e) more in every way except less people play it
What are some highlights that make you feel that way? I've never played.
Here's my list:
I don't know if I agree that all classes are good.
Oracle and Gunslinger have always (at least in my mind) seemed to be overly weak. Like, Gunslinger seems like if should be a high damage output class, but lack of Dex to Damage really seems to hinder him from being a hard hitter. Lol, not to mention, guns just feel really weak.
For Oracle, her curse seems a major downside without a compensating upside (at least until late levels; haven't built one above lv 5).
I'd love to hear counterpoints of anyone has any.
To be clear, 95% agree with your takes though.
but lack of Dex to Damage really seems to hinder him from being a hard hitter.
This is offset by nearly every firearm having the lethal trait, where on a crit their damage dice increase in size and they get an addition damage die.
The class is built around crit-fishing, and it works well. Granted, it gets hard to reliably crit higher-level enemies, but that's easily offset by the party working together
Wait, your party works together??
Wish mine did that.
Very rarely
I just wish I could be a player in a PF2E game for once because I love playing support classes
I'm a gunslinger in one of the games I play in, and yeah, I don't do barbarian numbers, but I hold my own, and it is a FUN class to play. I built a dual-wielder with the hopes that it would play like Han Solo running down the hallway shooting back at stormtroopers, and it delivers.
Plus, being 60 feet away means that I can help everyone do damage at once. It makes the party happy, too.
Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don't lay down much damage, but they can move, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip).
I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I'm just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.
Re: oracle
Being a divine spontaneous caster fucks; your entire spell list is Heal if you need it, and literally anything else if you don't. And trading a spell/day and slightly smaller repertoire for some extra durability is generally worth it in my experience.
Also Divine Access means you can pretty much pick whatever spells you want, and more as more gods come out or you and your GM make some more.
I liked the focus spells more back when battle oracles weren't hit with the nerf bat and could literally just be the juggernaut whenever they got cursed
Great list. Totally agreed across the board, and I'd add that they just folded Starfinder into the PF2e engine, which means that it now has a ton more content for it (including some stuff that isn't sci-fi exclusive).
Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn't have giant blank spots that you're expected to fill in for a few levels. They're switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn't shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.
Two big things I love:
Three action system: every "activity" (strike, stride, cast a spell, etc) has an action cost. On a standard turn, your character gets 3 actions to spend on those various activities. This obviates the need for DnD's rules about spending a whole turn running since you can just spend multiple actions striding.
Keyword system: PF2e leans more onto standardized keywords and uses them appropriately. Everything (all actions, weapons, items, even statuses) has a set of traits that (usually) briefly explains how the thing acts. It allows for standardized templates for interactions between different elements of the game. This takes a HUGE burden off the GM during game play, esp for modules that weren't written to think about each other. All the examples I can think of would take several pages to explain, but you can look up some things on Easy Tools and see their traits.
Bonus thing I love: all the rules are openly published, leading to TONS of extra tools that just make the game easier to run. (That said you should buy a set of books to help the publishers after you've been converted).
Not OP but the top 3 for me are
As a GM i love the balance. Martial-caster balance is overall pretty good. Player options across the board seem fairly well balanced. And as a GM i love that the creatures/hazards are all balanced as well. They have this whole set of easy to use guidelines on how to build an encounter based on the party level and how challenging you want it to be. I don't have to keep throwing monsters at the party to see what sticks, i can instead craft an encounter in a minute and know pretty darn well how tough it will be for the party. I cannot express to you how amazing that feels to take the guess work out of things. It makes my party going off the rails easier to manage because i can create fun and challenging encounters on the fly
That does seem like a big upside!
3 action economy for me, I also like that the rules are much clearer and more balanced to more play styles.
I think one of the biggest things, besides not being owned by WOTC, is that it doesn't have a million exceptions you have to remember.
D&D5e: Want to use your bonus action? Cool. Is it for a spell? Have you cast a spell this round? Is it a spell that's allowed to be cast even if you've cast a spell?
Pathfinder2e: Do you have enough actions to perform an action? OK, do it.
That does seem nice. One of the many reasons I DM 5e from a "does it make sense" perspective over a rules as written perspective.
I’ll play with you.
Seriously.
I haven’t before but I’d love to. Last dnd I played was 3.5. I won’t touch anything else, except pathfinder and other non-dnd games.
I haven't really played PF2e, but from reading it I don't really love that it does the "numbers go way up" thing. I did 3e and I didn't like the "I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check" thing. I'm told PF2e has a "without level bonus" mode, but I don't know if anyone plays it.
To me it feels meaningful in a way that the ludicrous numbers never did in previous versions. The expanded crit system makes degrees of success matter, and they do a great job of making you feel heroic; especially when you go back and fight underleveled enemies and crit on every attack. (Or, alternatively, when you roll a natural 20 and it just upgrades your crit fail to a regular fail. That's when you know it's time to run.)
I think the level scaling fits Golarion, since "becoming a god" is a semi realistic goal for someone to set for themselves :P
But people who want to play in grittier settings do use the proficiency without level rules, and from what I've seen all the major third party tools support that option. As a gm, It can be hard to balance for though! The +level to everything mostly serves to give your level 10 cleric a fighting chance on their stealth checks, and without that boost there are some actions some characters just can't perform.
I wish GURPS had taken off more.
I was curious about this some years back.
Are there any published materials on how to run a game in a GURPS system?
GURPS Lite is available for free, and includes the basic rules on how to do things, combat, etc. It doesn't include the introductory "What is a GM?" stuff to save space; though that does show up in the Basic Set. You can extrapolate quite a lot from just what's in Lite - a lot of the stuff in even the Basic Set that's not in Lite is corner cases (how far can I jump? What can I shift or drag, instead of lifting?), clarifications (how long does it take me to dig a hole?)... and lots more skills and abilities!
Mook has some very basic combat examples worked through here
In a little different vein, Feral Sword Wielding Wizard has some fight scenes from movies he's gone through and labeled with GURPS combat maneuvers, so you can see how they work! (Just keep in mind this is with a bunch of optional rules!)
If you like Actual Play shows, the Film Reroll podcast plays exclusively in GURPS. They play a fairly light version of the rules, but still make custom mechanics for various settings that show how modular of a system it is.
The show takes the premise of a movie and plays it out as a roleplay campaign. My favorite is Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, in which the GM tells the players they're playing an obscure teen romance from the 80s so that they wouldn't know they were in a horror movie. I probably wouldn't recommend that for a table, but the actors know to expect tricks and it works very well as entertainment.
Meanwhile, non D&D players are like: they're the same picture.
Pathfinder is D&Ds brother that studied business and economy instead of theater
A valid build in Pathfinder 1.0 was a quad pistol halfling paladin with a velociraptor mount.
OSR: oh you guys are having uh, ill see myself out
I've come to the conclusion that 3.5e was the peak of TTRPG and frankly I've just decided I'm going to go back to that. It's not like there isn't plenty of 3.5e materials to use.
Me as a changeling the dreaming main washing my hands of the dirty pathfinder main.
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