MartinTheActor's page

Thanks for the variety of replies folks. There's some good stuff to think about and to utilise.

I was one of the very few advocates in my social circle back when Pathfinder 1e launched and played that for years. I kinda fell out of running it some time around 2015(ish). Obviously, I've developed a lot as a writer, world builder, and GM since then. I run systems from FATE to Mork Bork and basically anything that grabs my interest.

I think that in returning and trying to 'properly' dive into Pathfinder 2e I just found myself with the impression that it all feels a little more tight. The number of complaints I got from players for example when I ran PF2e without Free Archetypes was unreal.

Player: 'But it's about player choice'
Me: 'Yes, but I want to get a grip on the rules without the variants and options before we branch out.'

Similar complaints came when I ruled out firearms. I'm just not a fan of them in magical world and that's a subjective thing.

I think @Tridus nailed it - the APs are very linear. The whole of Pathfinder to me as I wrote the post felt frustrating and set in stone. Sometimes reading and listening to other view points can help pull one out of that mindset.

Ultimately, I want to give my players the best experience possible of Pathfinder 2e. I want to leave them with an appreciation of what is a really well designed system. It's a tough sell though. When you GM a variety of systems - Pathfinder still has this resistance, especially among players of less crunchy systems. I find it really difficult to create enthusiasm for the system outside of those already familiar with it.

Again, thanks for giving me stuff to think on. If there's any other advice or suggestions for working with a world built from the ground up and applying Pathfinder to that please shoot them my way.

I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but I'm confused by your statement since the official scenarios and adventure paths are a big portion of what keep Paizo running as a business. The "main" books are sellers, but mostly in a burst after release. The continuous release of adventures composes a big portion of sales.

I bring this up to say, could you explain what it is you don't like about official adventure paths and scenarios?

You know what you're right. I'm somewhat frustrated and I've transferred my feelings about GM Core and Gamemastery Guide over to the adventures. It was unfair. Abomination Vault for example is a pretty decent adventure, as are a few others. They're just not what I have enjoyed running most.

Like if I'm playing PF2 in one of my homebrew settings I just... play PF2 in that homebrew setting. There's very little that requires some Golarian setting conceit to work, and most of what does can just be kind of handwaved (like the various setting specific options in 5e).

Yeah, sorry Squiggit but that's just not true. Sure, you can very easily plug and play a very basic and generic fantasy world in when playing PF2e. However, in the adventure setting I mentioned earlier the whole aim was to prevent the antagonist group from severing the connections between the mortal realm and the gods. If the antagonists succeeded they'd sever the magic that said deities granted to the mortal realm. That kind of adventure meant sorting spell lists quite easily into the domain of one of 5 deities. Now in other systems that was relatively easy (yes even D&D 5e). In PF2e it's simply not because of the overlap in traditions. You'll note that many spells draw from more than one tradition.

Even leaving aside my example here. Let's say you want to create a lower magic world. A casual reader of 1e or 2e Gamemastery Guide, or even GM Core would be forgiven for assuming that's pretty simple. It is after all summed up in a single short paragraph. However, the core maths upon which Pathfinder 2e is based assumes that your players are getting specific amounts of magic items as they level. I don't know if you've ever tried running PF2e in a game where your player characters didn't get magic items at the same rate - it's no fun for anyone because the maths starts to fall apart FAST!

That your suggestion is 'stop making more work for yourself' kinda tells me you've probably never really built your own settings from scratch. It's something I've done maybe three times over the decades - oddly enough the first was for PF1e when I didn't know any better. The idea in building one's own world really is that once introduced you've got a unique setting. It's easier to maintain any shape of continuity where players actually get to shape and alter the world of which they are a part. I actively want the effort for this, because I want to give my players an environment that draws on their interests the most. Reskinning stuff, isn't something that appeals to me. Which is why I asked for suggestions in the first place.

I truly enjoy Pathfinder as a system. I run it from time to time as a one-shot game here and there. However, I've noticed a real bottleneck in running a full adventure. I'm not very taken with the rather poor quality of the official adventures and adventure paths.

To be clear, I've been running and playing TTRPGs for over two decades at this point. I'm the kind of GM that enjoys crafting a world and an adventure path for players. Compared with adventure paths or campaigns from other systems and other publishers Pathfinder's offerings just seem a lot less engaging and a lot more resistant to alteration by the GM.

Which leads me to wonder how other GMs manage this?

Creating an adventure setting or world for a system like D&D 5e tends to be so much more straightforward and require so much less work. The flip of that is that D&D's per-session prep is a lot higher than PF2e for the GM in my experience. In PF2e though so much of the mechanics seem heavily tied into the official setting.

As an example, let's take a world I crafted previous - Eternarii. It is a world with just five deities. Magic in this world all ties back to those deities. In 5e it is pretty easy to fit the lore in with the mechanics. Spells, classes and abilties are really well tied into the deities of the world because you've got just the 8 schools of magic or even just the 3 main spell list types (Arcane, Divine, Primal). In PF2e though there is so much overlap between the traditions the task would then necessitate going through every single spell and categorise them individually. With well over 300 in Player Core alone (not including rituals or focus spells) that's a daunting task and before I even get into Player Core 2 or other options.

GM Core (and Prior Gamemastery Guides) absolutely SUCK for the worldbuilding GMs out there. Want to mess with Deities by removing them entirely? GM Core has zero advice on how to handle Clerics. Should you disallow Clerics? What happens when a cleric acts more in line with their religion's anathema? The 'Building Games' section of GM core is truly badly written because of what is overlooked.

I'd absolutely love to run Pathfinder 2e for some of my players, but a big part of my enjoyment is building the worlds and adventures. This is part of how I make the adventure feel unique and interesting. If just really feels like Pathfinder isn't designed for GMs like me.

So, again I ask - what do other Pathfinder GMs tend to do?

Do you just stick to published adventure paths? Do you do only surface only worldbuilding where you just reskin the existing Golarion stuff? What advice have you folks got for me?