What the title says. I’ve looked over the rules a bit, and watched some brief amount of gameplay, and to me it looks pretty bad. Very complicated with all the buffs and debuffs, very abstract rules that don’t reflect the game world.
Not to degenerate into Paizo hating (I quite like PF1e), but I’m old enough to remember when their mission statement was to continue the 3.5 legacy. They were quite critical of WoTC moving on to a game that was very much like a video game. It seems ironic that that is now the direction they have taken. Though I imagine that they would argue that their original mission is completed.
Anyways, my biases aside, what do you players like about the system? Is my perception about it being very crunchy and video-gamey wrong?
I’m playing it now, in a multi-year AP. Unfortunately, I agree with what you’ve said here, and look forward to the campaign ending. The other players and GM are great, but I don’t like the system compared to D&D 5 or Pathfinder 1. That said, I don’t have a lot of system mastery, but I don’t like what I see.
I must say I like the three action system though. That is an improvement over the swift/move/standard/ messiness of Pathfinder 1 and it limits some of the weirdness of 6 attacks per round at higher levels with some PF1 builds.
My two cents (obviously) is that it’s better in some ways and worse in others, is not perfect by any means, but overall the good outweighs the bad. Some unordered thoughts:
It does feel like a tighter rules game compared to pf1e or 3.5. The complexity it removes when compared to pf1e is usually good (e.g., actions, inventory management, focus points vs. lots of class-specific pools of points, removal of a lot of the must-have magic items, etc.).
The tag system is powerful but harder to get the hang of initially. It does cut down on a lot of boilerplate in the rules.
I like the emphasis on criticals as this encourages the party to work together better to, e.g. stack debuffs and aid another.
Reactions/AOOs play less of a role than earlier versions which means that things move around more during combat. This is a welcome change.
Min/maxing (for people that enjoy that) is probably overall less interesting than earlier versions; some of that is due to fewer options (since it’s not backwards compatible with 3.x or pf1e) also because there feel like fewer imbalanced feats or other options. I find most of the skill feats particularly boring.
Some builds like characters with a lot of summons/undead/minions/etc. (which honestly don’t work well at the table anyway) don’t render well into pf2e. But that’s probably for the best because pf2e is a tabletop social game and not a generic fantasy character generator like pf1e/3.x sometimes felt like it could be.
The setting seems to feature more in rulebooks than I remember in past versions. Depending on your point of view this could be good or bad. Though I like that the setting is very inclusive I also prefer a setting/pantheon/etc. that’s customized to the game I’m playing and sometimes I feel like Golarion/PF2e are a package deal. Nothing that can’t be worked around though.
I generally dislike that there are scaling items by level because that doesn’t feel right from a simulationist perspective.
I don’t really play it, but there are some aspects I like. There is a lot of PC customization. Special abilities and conditions are fairly standardized, improving speed of play. Most monsters have a very simple stat block. There are few issues with scaling the defenses of characters who don’t wear armor.
Your topic didn’t really invite criticisms of the game system, although you are critical of it. Did you want to hear things I don’t like about it?
I only played an intro game. it was ok, but i feel we didn’t get to flex our creativity and really learn the game that well. it’s a little too streamlined and the intro game was a poorly written railroad module.