| MartinTheActor |
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?