Honestly, PF2 is kind of what I wanted from D&D 5e. The 3-action combat system feels good and offers a very understandable and easy to explain to new players way to handle action economy, the character advancement is more fun (you get a lot of small things to pick at basically every level - there’s never a level-up where you just increase a couple numbers by 1 and have nothing else to do, and the choices you make feel like they matter more. The bigger numbers also make things feel more impactful, while still being very balanced against itself. It just feels better to see bigger numbers on a character sheet… you feel like you’re getting noticeably stronger as you level. I don’t know. It’s a small thing, but the numeric normalization in 5e always irked me.
The fact that WotC is stealing concepts from PF2 as they update 5e is really telling.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.
*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.
PF1e was effectively 3.75, but PF2e is a considerably different game from PF1e. All that said, it kind of sounds like you aren’t a big fan of D&D, either, so I can understand not enjoying Pathfinder.
Honestly, PF2 is kind of what I wanted from D&D 5e. The 3-action combat system feels good and offers a very understandable and easy to explain to new players way to handle action economy, the character advancement is more fun (you get a lot of small things to pick at basically every level - there’s never a level-up where you just increase a couple numbers by 1 and have nothing else to do, and the choices you make feel like they matter more. The bigger numbers also make things feel more impactful, while still being very balanced against itself. It just feels better to see bigger numbers on a character sheet… you feel like you’re getting noticeably stronger as you level. I don’t know. It’s a small thing, but the numeric normalization in 5e always irked me.
The fact that WotC is stealing concepts from PF2 as they update 5e is really telling.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.
*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.
PF1e was effectively 3.75, but PF2e is a considerably different game from PF1e. All that said, it kind of sounds like you aren’t a big fan of D&D, either, so I can understand not enjoying Pathfinder.