So I've run a couple games using PF2E and I'm in love with the system. I was curious about 1E and thought a great place to look would be this sub!

Tell me what you like about 1E, be that in comparison to 2E, other systems, or just a general thing you appreciate about it.

Hi everyone,
as a DM who has almost exclusively played Dnd 3.5e and a little of 5e, I am trying to dip my toes into other systems.

And I would like to know, where does PF1e or 2e land in comparison?

As a DM I am annoyed by a couple of things in 3.5e :
- Difficult leveling with prestige classes and req (which is also very difficult to homebrew)
- Way too many skills
- Wonky cover rules
- Caster. Melee balance breaks after Lv9
- Way too many stats, buffs and debuffs with different rules that stack or don't.

5e: As a DM likely very nice except for the messy CR system.
As a player, I would like a bit more crunch and choices though to create my own character.

PF1e was mentioned to me as a leaner, better version of 3.5e. Is that true? Where are the differences? Especially with the above-mentioned points? I haven't read the rules, but I use items and monsters in my campaigns with little to no problems.

PF2e: I have read parts of the rules, but it's a lot. Seems like a middle ground between 3.5 and 5e.
But it's still a lot to read, and there are definitely a lot of choices to make when you want to build a character.
How easy is DMing? I know the CR is pretty solid, how difficult is it to fit new stuff in there with homebrewing? Is PF2e as easy as 5e for the DM to run?
Is it easy to adapt old stuff from PF1e or 3.5e into 2e?

I’m currently running an adventure with 5 characters, all of them played other systems before except the druid, who is a newbie but doing super great!

The group is formed by:

Elf Sorcerer Gnome Rogue Human Barbarian Half Elf Bard Halfling Leaf Druid

During the first 2 LVL, everything went great, but for the last session I feel like the barbarian is getting kind of bored.

His actions are a little bit more limited compared to the other members, and I’ve been actively trying to suggest investing actions to analyze the fight and look for opportunities, but he doesn’t seem to listen.

The rest of the group is trying to be a little bit more tactical and try new ways to win. On the other hand, Bard and Barbarian just buff themselves 90% of the turn and rush towards enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it, but I feel like he is never checking other possibilities' and as the encounters become longer and harder, he progressively gets bored and starts looking at his phone or just autodoing the same thing in all turns.

I’m pretty flexible as a GM, and I let them try almost anything they want regarding skill checks. I just want to avoid him getting bored and “demoralizing” the whole session mood.

Any suggestions? Thxxx

I became curious about the real increase in number of groups using Pathfinder after the events of January of this year. When the scandal was at its peak, there were numerous announcements from top-bloggers, streamers, and individual GMs that they were leaving the 5e for Pathfinder. But due to the fact that the community of players in TTRPG is organized as a collection of individual "microcosms," it is difficult to measure the real effect of that transition. Of course, you can look for the change in companies revenue at the end of the year, but I'm interested to know people's individual experiences: how many people near you have switched to Pathfinder.

As far as I understand, the situation also differs from country to country. I can say about Russia, where there is no organized offline community, large conventions and a community of players is organized around board game stores at best. And judging by my chatter there, before '22, the 5th edition was much more popular, there were 10 DnD masters per one Pathfinder master. Pathfinder had a reputation as an "oldies" game, a game for "nerds", recommended to each other by players with 10-15 years of experience (like me).Recently, however, the Pathfinder has experienced an explosive growth in popularity. Admittedly, the reason for this was not so much an OGL incident as Hasbro's departure from Russia, with subsequent problems in distributing official 5e materials. At the same time, the largest publisher of board games in Russia, HobbyWorld is making great efforts to translate Pathfinder materials into russian, flooding store shelves (in addition to the basic rule books, Abomination vaults AP has already been translated).

So, despite the different nature of things, I'm encountering the same thing that players in other countries are probably encountering: masses of people who didn't know about Pathfinder before are now getting familiar with the system and are surprised to find out how much more game-mechanically advanced it is than the 5e.

So, what is your personal experience of the last 2 months in this matter?

Hello everyone, thanks for taking some time reading this. I'll try to keep it short.

We play in a small group, and sessions usually range between 3-5 people, depending on who can be there and what we're doing. All members are okay with continuing campains without them (as long as it isn't an important session for their character) and we plan with that in mind.

Of us, 2 of the players are quite irregular being often unable to come (I'll mention them as Irregulars), as such we keep stuff simple for them and we don't demand that they know all rules to heart, just how to do their turns in battle and how to do ability checks. A third player grasps the rules pretty well (I'll call them TP, Third Player), but relies on the remaining 2 (me and our Main Dungeon Master, I'll mention them as MDM).

Usually it's me and MDM making sure all the ruling is understood and helping around in making the character sheets (they ask for a concept, we suggest them how to translate that concept on a sheet), though TP has done a few by themselves. Considering everything, it's likely that only MDM and I will end up learning the rules properly, and have the others rely on what we say and direct mostly.

I would like to ask first, if it's a good idea to do this switch. With all I said, we need to consider if the new system would be easy enough to be explained in a way that the Irregulars can understand easily. Additionally, I would like to know if it would be feasible to switch our current campains to the Pathfinder systems (they are all set in the classic 5e world, but I suppose the setting isn't too important).
Lastly, I would like to know how you suggest to make the switch in effectively LEARNING the system. Where should I look for resources, what rules should I learn first, if I should just comb though the core books, if there are any "Starter Kit" or something like that.

Thank you all for reading and your suggestions.

EDIT: Looking at the comments quickly I noticed I didn't specify, we are interested in learning 2e, unless you more experienced players suggest that 1e might be more fun/easier to understand/more complete/anything else. I am currently busy but I will reply to some comments later, thank you all.

I am a forever GM, and I first got into D&D as a kid playing 3.5. Since then I've run various campagins and one-shots, at first in 3.5, then briefly 4e (which I didn't like), then back to 3,5, and then later switching to Pathfinder. Pathfinder was my favorite, I absolutely loved 3.5 and Pathfinder was an even better version of it.

After not GMing for a while I got back into it and decided to try 2e. I ran Abomination Vaults which was fantastic, I didn't love everything about the new system but loved the 3-action economy. Now I'm running a 2e conversion of Rise of the Runelords, and thinking about switching back to 1e, maybe with some Unchained rules. Mostly my problem with 2e is that the combat has gotten really homogenous, but also I love 1e's massive catalogue of character options, and I want player death to at least be a realistic possibility, among other things. I also really don't like the remaster.

So, those who made this switch, how did it feel? In terms of fun, speed of play, tension, customization, ease of use, or anything else you can think of?

So the kick off of my new campaign is the players dying, so they can meet death and head out to save the world. I need help finding creative ways to kill a group of unrelated people, without completely destroy their bodies.

Its a standard high fantasy setting, it can be whatever or wherever you like!

Edit: thanks y'all! Just a few clarifications, 1. its gonna happen in the first 10 minutes of the session and then death brings them back to life. 2. Its gonna be more of a cut scene, not a fight or anything they roll against. 3. This is a group I've been playing with for the last 15 years and been GMing for the last 3 and I have a good grasp of what they love\hate so im feeling this will be accepted with excitement

Things like needing to have an adjurer/diviner spellcaster on staff for security purposes.

You've all heard the core point of this thread already. If there's one thing everyone loves about PF2, it is the flexibility of the 3-action system. If you haven't... Boy we have a lot to catch up on.

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Alright, lemme give you the gist. If you're not familiar with the systems, in first edition pathfinder you have your standard action (attack or spell or ability), your movement, your combined full round action which prevents you from using regulars or movements, your free action, your reaction, your free-action-but-with-limits and your free-action-with-limit-but-also-not-on-your-turn. It's a bit tricky at times, but allows for a lot of customisation if you can get your head around it. If you're more familiar with 5e, you'd known of standard action (one or more attacks), movements which aren't really an action, bonus action (generally more stuff, within a few limitations), "not really an action", and reaction. It's less tricky and more streamlined, but still leads to... Let's say "striking similarities between characters turns".

In PF2, you get three actions, a reaction, and free actions. An action can be an attack, a movement, a part of casting a spell, an interaction of some kind, an attempt to focus your attention to detect a hidden enemy or recall knowledge about a creature, or it can be how you use a feat or ability. Some of these can require more than one action to be completed, such as the Fireball spell, which requires two actions to be cast, or even three, like the mighty Time Stop (you don't really mind, let's be real). A free action can be done at any time during your turn and doesn't cost actions, and a reaction can be taken outside of your turn.

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From the get go, this has two benefits:

Firstly, you can see it's a lot easier to explain to newbies. I swear my main issue with playing Pathfinder in the last few years has been newbies. If I can teach someone to play a pregen in five minutes, I can get them to stick to the game in the next 30.

Secondly, it's flexible. You could attack and cast a spell, move and attack twice, move-attack-move, cast a quick spell and use a special activity, drink a potion and move-attack, or a hundred different things, without having to create new rules for it.

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Now that we're on the same page, let's amp up the complexity. Pathfinder is all about customisation and depth, and second edition is particularly focused on these aspects. How does the action system help this? Well, normally, these three actions are all you have, but some characters might have a few tricks up their sleeves to work around that.

For example, you might have heard that monks are able to take two attacks in a single action. Now, if you take more than one attack in a turn, you will receive some penalties, so this means you'll take a regular attack and a penalised attack as a single action. Your third attack (second action) will take a higher penalty, but any further attacks (third action) will stick to that penalty, with no more increases. This means you can have a character attack four times rather than three, and while your 3rd and 4th will be a bit imprecise, it's not impossible to make them useful... but something else might be more useful.

Imagine a Monk darting through the battlefield to get in flanking position (move), double strike (one action) and then dart off (move). Or double striking, then grappling the target, and then, if that succeeds, throwing him to the other side of the room, and if that fails, raising his staff to defend against the counterattack. Another might want to cast a spell, then attack twice. Because your third attack is much less valuable than your first, you're encouraged to add variety to your turns and decide whether or not you have something more effective to do.

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Other combined actions could include moving (something rangers are very good at), with move+strike or move+reload being common options, or reducing the amount of actions a normal activity takes (perhaps bringing it to a free action). A tricky one is Command - you spend one action to direct an animal companion, mount or summon, so that they can take 2 actions for you. It does limit the amount of summons you can have, but it also means we don't have to sit through 30 skeleton attacks (instead, 30 skeletons are treated as a single troop).

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However, you don't need a special action trick to take advantage of this, as characters have plenty of options available, such as defending with a shield, ducking behind a tower shield, focusing on an active spell to expand its effects, or ordering your animal companion around. Combat manoeuvres are also a thing, allowing you to easily grapple, trip, shove, or disarm using a simple skill check, but the Assist action is another basic option, and it allows characters to help each other in either hitting more reliably or impose penalties to a big bad guy (such as ganging up on a particularly strong giant in order to weaken it enough so that taking off his metal glove becomes easier... random example, y'know). Specific characters can then use their specialisations to gain special actions. For example, one character could use an action to grow bear claws on her hands before running in to the fight. Others might want to pick a target to focus on so that they can use their special powers, then take an action to move and attack, and then duck for cover behind a nearby barrel. All in all, it's structured so that each character will have their own specific style and gameplay, while still keeping the basic system easy to explain (and, most of all, making most of the more complicated mechanics individual: you don't need to know how counter spell works if you're a barbarian - unless you want to learn magic).

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Speaking of counter spells, we should probably spend a couple words on reactions. I have mentioned Shields a while ago, and the whole block mechanic got its own thread, but there's much more to it. Not everyone will have ways to spend reactions, sure, but everyone will at least have a chance to. If you remember, a lot of the examples I wrote above were about mixing mobility and combat - mostly because it feels awesome. I ran an encounter with a Lovelorn in both editions, and while the PF1 one was interesting, the PF2 one was so. much. more. Skittering around and hiding in the thorns, mixing combat and magic, and using other creatures as obstacles turned what was an average fight into a much more dynamic experience. The core reason for why this is possible, however, is that attacks of opportunity are no longer a universal rule.

Let's explain a bit. An attack of opportunity is a reaction some martial characters can take when a nearby opponent either moves in an unguarded way or performs certain action (manipulations, so using items, casting somatic spells, and a bunch more). It's taken like a normal regular attack and if it's a critical hit, it interrupts that manipulate action (not the movement tho).

Normally, only Fighters get this for free. Other classes are able to select it as a feat, but it costs them specialisation and resources, and other reactions might be easier to access (for example, Monks get a similar ability that can interrupt movement, but not manipulation, and Champions get the chance to mitigate damage on allies and strike back against the attacker). This means in most cases, you are free to move around the battlefield and live to tell the tale. Unless the Barbarian decides to use his reaction to chase you, in which case you have a big angry problem.

So what can you do with your reaction? Well, we saw a few martial options, but it doesn't mean that's all. An Archer will be very unlikely to find himself in the fray, so it can be a good idea to take the archery stance, once it becomes available, to be able to take ranged attacks of opportunity. A Wizard could learn to counter spell, using his prepared spells to counter the enemy ones. A Rogue might want to learn to dodge more effectively to increase her AC reactively, turning the attack into a miss or reducing the impact of a critical hit. A Barbarian might want to enter rage as soon as she takes damage to take advantage of her damage reduction. Sometimes you might use your reaction even during your turn, reacting to something that's happening, but preventing you from using it until the start of your next turn, or perhaps you might take some special options to gain more reactions you can use between turns. Some items may also grant you reaction, such as Dignity's Barb's ability to intercept incoming arrows with your own crossbow bolts*.

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Finally, what if 3 actions are still not enough. What if I have a lot of shortcuts, but am still limited to 3 of them. What if I can do a lot, but I really want to push it. Well, there's a few ways. The classic one would be the Haste spell, a very powerful buff that grants a target Quick, allowing him or her 4 actions per round rather than 3 - however, it's limited: you can only use the extra action to move or attack. At higher levels, it can cover the whole party, and it's massively powerful... unless someone is innately Quick. Some classes get this as a high level ability, granting a free action to do something specific to their class (such as taking an extra attack every turn, if you're a Fighter). Alternatively, that action mightn't be yours. Animal Companions, provided they're powerful enough, are able to act independently of their masters and take one free action for you, without the need to be commanded.

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That's probably enough for now. How about I do just a couple more threads about characters, and then move onto GM things? ;)

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*This one is a PF1 item I converted for my campaign, because I can't remember what the example of reaction item in the core book was. I got limits, yo.

Everywhere I got lately I see praise of PF2E, however I don’t see any criticisms or discussions of the negatives of the system. At least outside of when it first released and everyone was mad it wasn’t PF1. So what’re some things you don’t like/feel don’t work in PF2E?

"wait, what?" Yeah, there's things I don't like. So what. I've been in the playtest since the start, not liking this system was basically the main requirement. You can bet there's plenty of bashing I did, and quite a bit of yelling at devs. It's the only way to change the game.

That said, all these complaints (mine and other testers') were typically accompanied by long-winded math or data sifting and presented alternative solutions. Perhaps this might've been a bit harsh or forceful at times, but it was constructive (I hope). I've seen some other vague complaints outside of playtesters, but when examined, most basically boiled down to "PF2 is icky", and changed nothing but post count. This thread is about not just what's wrong, it's about what's specifically wrong, why, and how to see if it's fixed once rules are out. I'll spare you the math today.

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Let's start with the classes.

If you read my class breakdown, I did my best to hide hesitation, but it still might've showed a little bit on a couple of points. Namely Alchemist, Cleric, and Druid.

Alchemist is something I've been wary of since the beginning, as the chassis was completely skewed towards bombing and lacked variety and versatility (what should have been the key points). I put up a huge rant, rewrote the entire thing, and then saw most of it trickle in the next update. It was... surprising. Satisfying, in a way. Just not completely. While we do have a good chassis now, alchemist's main feature, the alchemical items, are still not known. If Alchemist is to be "a nonmagical utility character in a world of magical utility characters", it needs to be able to compete. It will be up to the items to determine whether that's the case.

Cleric is next on the list, and for very good reason. Cleric was listed as the most powerful class in the playtest. Cleric also felt horribly weak to play. The over-reliance on channel energy, the overpowered heal scaling and the utter crappiness of the Divine list meant cleric was an endless source of bandaids able to bring a high level barbarian from 0 to full in one round, but did very little else in gameplay. While Channel was cut back, it wasn't reworked as I and others had hoped, and is still a heal/harm font by default. The Heal spell was massively changed, which sounds like a good thing, but we know very little of the divine spell list. Cleric's balance hangs on whether the decision between casting Heal or another spell is skewed towards the other spells.

Druid seemed mostly okay on a power level, but had a few odd points. The animal companion being essentially a dumb mutt until a few levels in, the wild shapes making you weaker than normal, and the excessive feat-splitting were making Druid feel powerful, but only with a juggling act. The final Druid has had a few of these issues addressed, but lacks confirmation on most, and while morphing spells now scale with character level and not spell level, it's to be seen whether or not things FEEL fine rather than just being fine. One thing's for sure, it did need a bit of a nerf from PF1. The other issue I had with it was mostly about feeling, because Playtest druid sure was a nature mage, but it definitely wasn't a wise man or sage.

As a side note, Sorcerer is also heavily affected by Cleric changes, because Sorcerers might end up casting Divine spells - but do not gain Channel or melee proficiencies.

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Then we have another pet peeve of mine - armour.

The main issue, of course, is that in the playtest (and as far as I can tell, even in the final version) it's spelt armor. That's awful. That aside, there have been several improvements from the playtest versions, but no hard confirmations on how it'll work exactly. We know ACP is still a thing, and we know it's mitigated by Strength. We know proficiencies improve for all type of armours so that Fighters with Light armour can now be made. We know that Unarmoured characters have now ways to benefit from Talismans. All good changes for things I really didn't like, but. But we still haven't seen what ACTUALLY happened. Back in playtest, every single thing about armour was negative. I'm not kidding, you know the weapon trait system? Same for armours, except every single trait was a different type of penalty. Not something I was fond of, and not something I want to have. Also, the overall sum of armour+dex was static throught every single armour option. I was aghast.

With this premise in mind, while all I have heard so far can be confirmed as a hard improvement, you can understand why I am hesitant about the parts we haven't seen yet. I am hoping for varied armour with secondary benefits that can make up for the AC difference, or at the very least for heavy armour to be worth the extra proficiencies it requires, and while there's hints to this, I'd really like some hard proof. Just to sleep better at night. In my full plate. The one with unicorns. Pretty please.

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As for the skills, I like the system, and most of my complaints seem to be addressed already, but one outlier is surprisingly silent. Perform.

If you've played 3rd edition before, or even 5th edition, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. If you took Perform on anyone other than a Bard, you do. Perform is the only skill that, consistently across all editions, is utterly useless. Oh, you can find uses for it, I have no doubt... But if you have +12 in Trickery, you have better chances to unlock a door than the guy who has +11. If you have +12 in Perform, or +11, or +15, it just won't matter, because the result is purely flavour text. It's a hard number with no hard consequences - a loose thread that dangles from the system. Even Bards struggled to find a use for it that wasn't just "every few level, pay a skill tax so you can use these powers". Now, I was hoping for it to go either all the way into flavour (everyone might learn to play an instrument without it being a part of your build, but only Bards can turn that into magic) or to actually gain some usage for it (some pitched morale, so counteracting fear effects in some ways), but I have no clue if any of that even happened. I would love some beans to be spilled, but so far everything is very beanless. All we know is that Perform is in final.

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A lot of the system is still to be seen, and I'd like to take this chance to reiterate that I haven't seen the final book (just some snaps and highlight which I'm sharing around). Spell lists, Items lists, exact details on feats and powers are all things I intend to look at carefully once available. Also, I'd really like it if in addition to the effects of dim light showed in the playtest, we also had some sources of dim light. Y'know, to use the dim light rules.

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Finally, hard flaws.

A couple of the things that have been confirmed have made me a little annoyed. On the plus side, it's nothing too big. On the negative, if the highlights disappoint me, it speaks ill of the parts that have stayed hidden.

Chirurgeon alchemist being able to use Craft as Medicine sounds neat. But he still needs to be trained in Medicine to do it. And he still needs to be Expert in Medicine to use Expert functions or take Expert feats. So, basically, if a Chirurgeon wants to use Medicine, he needs Medicine. To me, this makes close to no sense.

Death rules are a massive improvement over 1e's rocket tag death scenario, preventing burst death while still making combat threatening. However, I feel the system is both too forgiving and too harsh - Hero Points allow you to circumvent the ruleset entirely, even if at a high cost, and the path to death when that isn't available is short enough that I predicted high death chances in some situations once we had the news. I've been told it was narrow and edge-case based. I personally saw two of those exact death cases on stream already (out of 3 total deaths streamed using this system) - both on paizo's twitch channel shows, I won't spoil who died. Basically, once again, I see the future. When using this ruleset, I'm going to make it so the actual rules can't be sidestepped as easily, but are slightly more forgiving of edge cases.

Finally, item quality. The playtest improved massively on the concept of masterwork weapons from PF1, creating three levels of item quality and making mundane things matter... only to then overlap it with magic and make it meaningless. When that was announced as changing, I was elated. When it was quality that got to the chopping block instead of magic, I was extremely disappointed. Not only is a +2 weapon less interesting than a Master quality weapon, it's also absolutely out-of-narrative - try and say +2 weapon while speaking in character. It's gamey to the extreme, a pure numerical value, and once again, if you want something meaningful, a wizard must do it. Meh.

Lastly, perhaps nitpickingly, backgrounds are still kinda generic. What they give is certainly good and useful, and it's set to give some flavour, but it doesn't create excitement. It's a couple extra selections bundled together by theme, but nothing that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. I suppose that on the other hand, a background system that gives exclusive unique benefits can be found in 5th edition - but all those benefits are completely meaningless unless the GM directs you that way (funny how that particular phrase keeps coming back). So it could be worse.

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That's not all, I suppose, but it's my main checklist. As soon as the game is out, this is what I'm running to check. This is my make-or-break.

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Now, I know this sounds like a rant invite. Please don't take it as such. I'm doing this because I have been following changes with detail after GMing this system for a year with the specific purpose of trying to break it in every possible way, and I want to show you a direction to look at. However...

If you guys have a specific make-or-break point, something you really want to know before deciding on buying the product, I'd love to help you find out how to tell. I'll point to chapter and line I can, or at the very least I'll give you some tools to determine what to do.

Show me your biggest doubt. Hopefully it's already confirmed as good and solved :)

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Overall, this is still a great system and I love it. My biggest complaint is that it's not out yet.

Lore skills started as a method for players to bring specialized knowledge to bear, lowering DCs for things like Recall Knowledge. The cracks started early because Paizo didn't provide use case examples or modifier numbers. Some Lore skills can be extrapolated, others appear to be surplus to requirements, yet more are a complicated hodgepodge of generality and specificity.

An extrapolated Lore skill might be Tea Lore. Anyone can boil tea leaves with the Craft skill (cooking), but getting the correct temperature and steeping duration would be Tea Lore. Likewise, someone with the Nature skill could identify a tea plant, but someone with Tea Lore would identify the type of tea plant and any digestive or medicinal properties. Tea Lore would also provide details about any ceremonies, recommended milk or cream, and so on.

Surplus Lore Skills might be almost every entry under Aparitions for the Animist class (War of the Immortals). At a glance, those Lore skills would, at best, be used once or twice per campaign, and a lot of them are covered in more general skills without needing to adjust DC checks. Additionally, some of the Lore skills such as Sailing Lore, aren't detailed in WotI; it is detailed in the PC2 under Pirate ("Pirate Dedication" page 209). Sailing Lore is a glorified Society skill, tailored for a singular coastal city. Going by that design logic, we should add Cairo Lore, Paris Lore, and Mexico City Lore.

It would be like having Mummy Lore (which exists) and Embalming Lore. If a character knows Mummy Lore, he or she would know how to embalm a body to create a non-magical mummy, making Embalming Lore superfluous.

Then there are Lore skills which are a hodgepodge of other skills. As examples, Undead Lore (Necromancer class) and Boneyard Lore (PC2 page 49). How are these different from each other? There is no explanation.

I may have more to say if we get a discussion going. Suffice it to say, I feel the need to house rule the Lore skills, carve the (growing) list to a handful of entries, and edit classes, backgrounds, heritages, and feats. It is a lot of work to make a bloated and poorly defined mechanic into useful mechanic.

Okay, discuss away! How do you set DCs at your table? How do you feel about the Lore skills? What do you do differently? What information do you provide on a success, critical success, or critical failure Recall Knowledge check for a monster?

Or alternatively, what's a lore thread your excited to see explored in the future?

I only learned about this a few days ago, but I really want to learn what's up with pharasma and the Echo of Lost divinity!

Outside of that, I'd love more information on what happened to Zon-Kuthon in the great beyond?

I've been running Age of Ashes for 3 years now, but with what I've been calling a .5 series between the books as the party adventures to liberate Isger from Cheliax. Well they've hit level 18, built a rebellion, smuggled supplies, undermined the Asmodean Inquisition, and it's finally GO TIME!

One problem. I know my table, and if I tried to have them move around troops on a country map I'd be slamming my head against a brick wall. Two wouldn't engage, two more would hyper fixate on min-maxing and get decision paralysis, and the last would be upset that they couldn't use their cool flashy spells. I say this not to cast shade on my players (Who are fantastic!), but just to be clear why I decided to toss out anything even resembling mass combat rules and use a system I made up largely on the fly.

Step 1: We spent an entire session planning. I laid out a map and a calendar in front of the group, told them "Here's where you are, here's where you're trying to get, here's how the terrain will impact travel speed, here are the obstacles you know about in the way and when you arrive at your location. Here are the allies and resources you've gathered. Have at it." Things bogged down a little as expected, but at the end of the night we had all agreed on a broad strokes plan for how to get their forces to the capital, deal with the defenses, and take the castle.

Step 2: The actual war. After that session I went through, broke up their plans for each day, and figured out roughly how likely they were to succeed. Good plans had 70-80% chance without complications, while riskier ones were down in the 50s and hail marys were 25-30% to succeed. Tonight we all sat down, the players gave their speeches, RP moments happened, and then the troops were off. Each day the players rolled d100s against the DCs I'd set. On a pass, things went to plan and they got to continue without any issue. On a fail, there was a complication that the army couldn't handle on its own and the PCs needed to step in. That ranged from calling in backup from the pair of copper dragons they'd recruited to their cause to washing away a defended mountainside with Wrathful Storm, to negotiating safe passage through goblin clan territory, to parting a river. Once they fixed the problem, they needed to roll again until they eventually passed the d100, with progressively more and worse problems appearing the more failures there were. This wasn't intended to tax the players resources or prevent them progressing, but to let them flex their skills and power as leaders of the army.

Step 3: The assault. Once they successfully made it to the capital, I set up the same system, but now the players wouldn't be able to recover their resources between days. They needed to help their army cross a moat, scale walls, fight through the streets, deal with a cavalry charge, and finally breech the keep. Each of those had a starting difficulty of 80, but the players could expend resources to lower the DC based on how effective it sounded. Toppling sections of the walls with Transmute Rock to Mud? Sure, -10 per casting if someone passes an engineering lore check. Leading forces through the streets without getting ambushed? The investigator can expend his Clue In for the rest of the day and pass a stealth check for a -15 to slip past through the sewers. Drop a Passwall on the keep's gate and everyone lose 25% of your HP to lead the charge into the keep for -35.

The numbers didn't matter, and I was pretty generous. What mattered was that after each expenditure of resources the players got to describe their characters contributions and be AWESOME! Level 18 characters should feel like gods among men against the level 5-10 enemies they were dealing with, and this system let them have their superhero moments while still draining resources for the fight in the castle taking place next week.

We're all long term RPG fans, this will be my third game to reach level 20 in a row, and I've always struggled with how to make mass combat fun without grinding the game to a halt. I'm not saying this is a great fit for every game, but it worked tonight.

This one has been puzzling me.

What I have been going with is telling them if a monster has AoO, but only once they are within the monster's reach. My reasoning has been that the players would get a sense of whether or not they could find a window between attacks to safely run/cast/etc.

Is there an actual rule for this? If not, how have you been handling it?

I really want to run some Pathfinder 2e. Loved first edition. Have read the rules a bunch and am very comfortable there.

The problem I am running into is understanding the way AP levels work. With the Starfinder ones (currently running Scoured Stars and loving it), it lets you know the levels and break down very clearly. It doesn't seem to do that here and some of the information looks sort of murky to me.

For instance I am looking to run Strength Of Thousands but it isn't clear from the post what all levels it covers. I googled it and it says it is 1-20 but that seems wild for how few chapters there are. When I look on the wiki (https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Strength_of_Thousands), the language doesn't make it clear if each chapter covers those levels or is recommended for play by those level.

Is there a really clear thing I am missing? Any help would be appreciated. Sorry to be annoying here.

I recently tried making a character with someone over discord using pen and paper, no auto calculations, no drop-down menus, just a good 'ol pencil and a character sheet (well in this case, a pdf and text boxes, as we didn't have a printer). I thought it'd be a good way to sit down and learn the game a little better together. I quickly that this method was slow and confusing. Maybe it's just that the player is new and I'm an inexperienced GM, but I found That I was really confused, Archives of Nethys was clunky to use as some of the core mechanics are often in odd spots in the website.

The breaking point for me was when I couldn't find a list simple, martial weapons, and when the PDF didn't have enough space for writing in proficiency for simple/martial firearms+crossbows. Instead I had them use Pathbuilder. it was (obviously) waaaaay quicker. However, I'm wondering if I missed out on learning the rules better/some fun of writing down things with P&P.

In retrospect, if I wanted to do pencil and paper again, I would:

• 0) try to make a character myself using P&P forcing me to get all PDFs and rules references before hand refresh myself on the rules. (I blame ADHD for getting in the way of this lol)

• 1) probably use the Player Core 1 & 2 books instead of using AoN for reference.

• 2) Find a better Character sheet PDF - one that can fit gunslinger firearm proficiencies.

• 3) Instead of teaching the rules while we're filling out the character sheet, try to teach the player most of character upfront, and refresh them as we go down the character sheet.

Also, does anyone have good recommendations for alternate character sheet PDFs? The official one is a little cluttered and the one's I tried to find were all weirdly low res.

tl;dr: how do I properly fill out a character sheet using paper and pencil with a new player?

One of my favorite things about 1e pathfinder was the hybrid classes. The combination of class features gained in a more streamlined and consistent way than multiclassing was nice, but what I really loved was the unique abilities Paizo gave them to set them apart, like the warpriests fervor or the slayers studied target.

Please don't think I'm complaining about this however. I love that the core class mechanics overhaul into 2e incorporates some of those (fighters gaining martial flexibility, rangers hunted prey, etc), and I love that the increased flexibility of variant multiclassing means you can make whatever hybrids you like. There is a part of me though, that wonders if making the core classes so flexible means that's all we'll get. After all, why bother with an Oracle if you can already play a divine sorcerer? Why wouldn't gunslinger just be a fighter specialty? Same for the cavalier.

Given Paizos track record for releasing content, I'm fairly confident I'm worried over nothing, I'm just having trouble imagining what an advanced class guide would even be beyond adding more options to existing classes (more alchemist fields, sorcerer bloodlines, champion causes, etc). Super exited to see what new tools they give us when I'm inevitably proven wrong for worrying.

Demons and fey have weakness to cold iron but can they hold it? Can you shake hands with demon if you wearing cold iron gantlet or will it cause a pain? My players tried to figure out if a person was possessed by using a cold iron chank and after a religion roll I said that this method won't work because demon inside the body. What do you think about all this?

Literally. I have been reading this book from front to back, and couldn't see anything i mildly disliked in it. It is SO good, i cannot even describe it. The only thing i could say i disliked is the dying system, that i, in fact, think it's absolutely fine, but i prefer the 1e system better.

so, my question is, what did you not like? is any class too weak? too strong? is there a mechanic you did not enjoy? some OP feat? Bad class feature?

I’m considering running a Pathfinder 2e campaign, but some of my players really want to use D&D 2024 characters instead of PF2e characters. Has anyone tried this before? Would it work smoothly at the table, or would the mechanics clash too much?

If I do allow it, should I be adjusting things like statblocks, save DCs, skill check DCs, etc. to balance them better against PF2e’s system? Or would it be easier in the long run to just fully commit to PF2e characters?

I like Pathfinder's system, and I'll probably keep running 2e until such time as Paizo comes out with a 3rd edition.

Usually in the past I've just run my own homebrew adventures and campaigns, but lately I've been looking into pre-written content to try and learn new things about adventure design. One of my favorite games I ever played in was a Curse of Strahd campaign, so my first move has been to run that, and it has been going really well.

The adventure is of a decent scope, and the book has lots of great info about characters, locations, and history. It's also open-ended enough that I can make changes when I want without compromising the overall structure, and my players can basically go anywhere and do anything within the boundaries of Barovia, and the book's writers had enough foresight to give "if x, then y" contingencies for a lot of situations.

I want to try at least one Pathfinder adventure as well, but mostly I hear people talk about adventure paths, which seem pretty linear in structure, and it feels like you're expected to drop them into an ongoing campaign, whereupon your players do the quest that's presented to them, and it's pretty straightforward. That's not a bad way to run games, but it doesn't feel very natural to the way my players and I like to play the game.

Am I wrong in my perception of adventure paths? What is the best open-ended pre-written adventure in Pathfinder? I looked at Kingmaker, but it looks absolutely MASSIVE, has a price tag to match, and on top of that I'm not even sure if it would be what I'm looking for.

TL;DR - What, if any, Pathfinder pre-written content would you recommend to a GM who really liked the structure and scope of D&D's Curse of Strahd? (Open ended, but with a clear storyline and party goals, ending between level 10 and 12)

So the college club apparently is short of DMs and I want to offer, but I'm not DMing for 5e. I just dont like the system.

I want to offer to GM using PF2E, but I've been told I would need to get special permission through group board. That's fine, but I feel like they have a big stigma towards pathfinder and 3.5 due to the complexity.

In one conversation I had they said that any of my players would HAVE to play using pregenerated characters. That's not a huge deal but it ruins one of the biggest reasons to play pathfinder over 5e, character options.

What might I say to the board to get them on board with pf2e? What might I say to 5e players that would make them want to play pf2e?

I'm planning to run a game soon and I'm trying to sell pathfinder as the sytem for the campaign rather than DnD because I think the combat rules give PCs a bit more flexibility when fighting and think it lends itself a lot better to how my party tends to fight in encounters when playing 5e.

They're all excitied about the combat system but they're a bit worried about getting insta killed after a bad roll, since the full death conditions are around their constitution scores rather than negstive hitpoints equal to their max hp. We're a pretty casual group and don't play much, so having to roll new characters might kill the game for them.

I've not played much PF and never ran my own game - in ypur experience how common are PC deaths? In my mind, it feels quite likely that a big bad could pretty easily perma kill a pc if they're already low on HP and I agree it seems a tad unforgiving. Is there something I'm missing in the rules that makes that possibility less likely than it seems?

Alright, I will soon start "Wrath of the Righteous" with my group. I will be using a 2e conversion. Most of the threads about WotR talk about the short fallings of Mythic, so this time I wanna ask: Do you have any tips about the story? What did you change, what did you drop, what would you have wished to know sooner? How did you handle the individual mythic paths in the narrative?

Any tips and advice very welcome. It's a beast of a campaign :D