Pathfinder 2E - My Pathfinder 2e Post-Mortem
Having recently finished a year-long 1-10 PF2 game I wanted to write down a few thoughts on the game.TL; DR: PF2 has a great foundation that's weighed down by most everything else around the core system. The game could use a revision.
This is all coming from the perspective of a GM. I have not been a player in a PF2 game.
First off, I've run Book 1 of Agents of Edgewatch and all 3 books of Quest for the Frozen Flame. A lot of people praise Paizo's APs, and while they certainly have great art, like nearly all published adventures they're linear and leave little room for player choice and creativity. I ran the first book of Agents of Edgewatch with barely any modifications to see how well it played, and ultimately it was a disappointing experience. This was my first PF2 game, and at this point I had yet to form a clear opinion on the game itself, but the adventure was poorly structured and didn't include any truly fun or dynamic encounters.
About a year later, I started running Quest for the Frozen Flame, which I ran to its conclusion. The further we got into the AP the more changes I had to make to make the adventure a more exciting experience. There were way, way too many filler encounters whose purpose was to feed XP to the party -- these encounters had zero relevance to the overall story of the AP, and they were nothing but basic deathmatches. I began to cut these and at times replace them with more dynamic encounters where the players could choose to fight or talk, depending on their choices and rolls. I also either outright changed or adjusted many of the maps provided in the AP. There were many maps with issues: the scale, the scale and the description being at odds, or they were too boring and dull. The hex maps were pretty good, although only Book 2 actually had a hex map that the players could meaningfully explore -- Book 1 and 3 had hex maps on rails, defeating the purpose.
Quest for the Frozen Flame also had issues with the adventure structure, and I ended up changing Book 3 drastically. The default structure was comically boring and even nonsensical at times. I wanted to run a full AP to gauge how good the pre-written stuff is because I don't think you can truly review an adventure until you prep and run it. My review of the Quest for the Frozen Flame is not favorable.
Now, the Pathfinder 2e system itself.
Pros:
- Great core system math! Maybe the best in the industry?
- Great production values with good art.
- Lots of monsters and creatures for the GM to choose from.
- Easy to set DCs for tasks, hazards, and creatures.
- Players have options galore as well.
- The ancestry/heritage system works well and allows for fun choices.
- Good class balance overall.
- I like the game's take on multiclassing.
The healing mini-game after a fight or a hazard is way too granular without giving enough in return for the complexity. In the large, large majority of situations there's no difference between 50, 60, 80, or 90 minute rests, but the default rules expect you to track this. There's no meaningful difference between a 20 minute and a 30 minute rest, but the game assumes that there is one. Before I ran PF2 I thought that the GM could use this granularity in time-sensitive scenarios, but those are exceedingly rare, and the APs I ran had none. Ultimately I ended up house ruling out-of-combat healing to make it simpler and easier, because the default experience was lacking to say the least.
Skill feats are a great concept with an atrocious execution. So many skill feats are too niche, yet some are nearly mandatory (Medicine). This con also ties to the skill system as a whole -- there are instances where skill feats should absolutely be just regular skill actions. Diplomacy and its Make an Impression is one of the biggest offenders, where by default you can only influence a single NPC at a time. Skill feats need a revision. And the worst thing? It's tough to house rule skills feats. Remove them? Ok, what about rogues and investigators? Or what do you do with Medicine and out of combat healing, or Battle Medicine? How do you rule Make an Impression and many other skill uses if you excise skill feats? What if you make all skill feat uses available by default with proficiency ranks? That's incredibly overwhelming to both the players and the GM.
Some of the general feats are horrible as well. Why is A Home in Every Port a thing? In fact, the Advanced Player's Guide as a whole has some very questionable additions to the game. It feels rushed.
Some of the lauded parts of PF2 don't work as well for the GM as they do for the players, I found. The 3 action combat economy is pretty good as a player, but it makes the GM's side take longer. Even mooks get 3 actions, which slows down resolving their turns. I also hated doing the item action economy for NPCs -- keeping track of what weapons or shield or item they had in hand, if their weapon was loaded or not, etc (not to mention shield hp and hardness...). Even the players often disliked the granularity of PF2's object handling economy.
I discovered that I prefer solo enemies to have off-turn actions like in 5e and 4e. I think off-turn actions make for a more dynamic encounter. I just don't think that PF2's approach to solo threats is the best. The players missed so often, their turns ending up doing nothing to the enemy. That's not fun, even if the encounter building math works. It's just not fun to miss all your attacks and fail your skill actions. Another aspect to dangerous solo enemies that I found negative was the power of the heal and soothe spells. A full caster with either of those spells is too good of an option to miss. Sure, you could run a party with just Battle Medicine, but it's like playing a barbarian with 14 Strength or a sorcerer with nothing but out of combat utility spells -- technically it works, but you're clearly losing out on something much more effective. A highest or second highest slot on heal/soothe is incredibly powerful in tough fights that sometimes the caster would do nothing but that for half the fight, and they weren't even built with a healer role in mind!
To add to the enemy creature criticism, I don't think that PF2's skill actions, weapon traits, and spells work well on the GM's side. The skill actions are clearly written for the players, and they're not a good fit for the GM's side. The weapon traits are present in all creature stat blocks that use weapons, but they are needlessly granular for the GM. Nice for players, but too complex for the GM. Sweep, forceful, backswing, and backstabber are the worst offenders.
The same goes for many of the spells too. Many a time I would have to pause to read over spells during a fight, which is obviously not ideal. Simple damage spells are fine, but many control, buff, or utility spells are rather complex -- great for the players, poor for the GM. Also, the 4 degrees of success mean that many spells take longer to resolve as you have to check which of the 4 results apply to which creatures or player characters.
PF2 magic items are pretty boring, especially the consumables. So many small situational bonuses. And the permanent magical items aren't super interesting either. Some of the weapon runes are too good, basically -- why wouldn't you get the energy damage runes over the other property runes? Handing out magic items was kind of a chore. (And Book 2 of the Quest for the Frozen Flame omitted striking runes entirely... a massive goof to say the least, considering it's a paid product that's supposed to be ready-to-run.)
While I don't mind the amount of conditions, some of them are badly implemented. First, paralyzed/unconscious is weird since you still make Reflex saves, and at no penalty when paralyzed... odd. But the worst by far is poison. Not only do you have to track the stage, you also have to track duration. Imagine a fight where you have 2 different kinds of poison, and 3 PCs are suffering from them -- one has poison A at stage 2 with 4 rounds remaining; the second has poison A at stage 1 with 6 rounds remaining, and the third has poison A at stage 3 with 4 rounds remaining and poison B at stage 1 with 6 rounds remaining. Unbelievable.
Exploration activities are a great example of a PF2 system that sounds great on paper but is not great in practice. First, it's silly that only select characters with a feat can do meaningful sneaky scouting. If you don't have the proper feat, you cannot both remain stealthy while keeping an eye out for traps, hazards, and hidden enemies. I suppose they did it this way to preserve role identity, but in practice it felt bad. Second, as a GM I didn't really find all the extra rules and structure that beneficial, and I grew to dislike all the secret checks. Exploration activities (while traveling) are a good concept but much like skill feats the execution wasn't my cup of tea.
Downtime is boring. Even 5e with Xanathar's has a more interesting and useful downtime system! Like with many, many other systems in PF2, downtime is needlessly granular with little to no benefit for all the extra rolling and tracking.
As an aside, there's been some talk about how PF2 is similar to 4e. Maybe superficially, but in play they are very different. 4e combat encounters are much more dynamic; the monsters are both more dynamic and easier to run; and 4e skills are much more freeform and DM-dependent. Overall I have to say that I've been disappointed in PF2's combat encounters when comparing them to 4e D&D. And honestly, 5e isn't that much worse tactically, compared to PF2 -- sometimes better even. Sure, 5e breaks down after level 10-12 or so, but level 3-10 5e is a more fun game (as the GM/DM) than PF2. Maybe PF2 at levels 11+ is a better game than 5e? At least the system and encounter building math seems to keep up much better.
I'm not sure if I'll run PF2 again. I think 4e D&D does the PF2-style fantasy better -- the style with rich player options and tactical grid combat. I really think that PF2 could be an amazing game if it had a revision, or maybe Pathfinder 3rd edition could be the better iteration. I wanted to love PF2 (and I've spent hundreds of $$$ on it) but at the end of the day I found it lacking.
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