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TL;DR - Scroll down to if you want to get right to the meat.
Thursday I made sure my friends had the rules, and I pitched my playtest game. Friday they made characters. Saturday I ran my first session of PF2, using a custom adventure.
As context, I've been playing Pathfinder for four years, and for the past year I've been running an all-paladin-PC campaign called SMITE EVIL. I've been publishing third-party d20 products since 2002, including the Elements of Magic alternate spellcasting systems and two adventure paths - War of the Burning Sky and ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution.
I've been eagerly looking forward to PF2, as I'm an itinerant tinkerer when it comes to game rules. In the past couple years I've played PF1, D&D 5e, Star Wars FFG, and the really nifty playtest rules for FFG's Legend of the Five Rings.
I am hopeful for a system that keeps the character customization and tactical optionality of PF1 while streamlining the speed of play and reducing the cognitive load of handling lots of shifting modifiers. Most specifically, I want the game to play intuitively, so if you intend to build a character who can do Thing X effectively, it'll actually be effective.
I read through Doomsday Dawn and saw what Paizo was asking people to pay particular attention to. For my session, I actively chose game options that I didn't think that adventure path was going to give good feedback on.
First, the new action economy is novel, but I wanted to see how it influenced tactical positioning and movement. I made sure to have some combats in open areas, others in close quarters, because having the ability to move twice and attack is really different than what we're used to. I tried to have some monsters that would focus on mobility, others that wanted to get right in the party's face and make three attacks.
Second, I wanted to test out the dying rules, and since the game has hero points to stave off a TPK, I intentionally made the second encounter be against a CR 4 ghost, vs 1st level PCs.
Third, I recall how D&D 4e focused heavily on balancing every encounter, which it was criticized for. So I wanted to see how PF2 played if we viewed combat as war where advance preparation could pay off. I set up a situation where they knew about a higher-CR monster that sounded ominous, which would lead to them planning how to defeat it instead of just fighting a monster when it popped out right in front of them. The idea was to go for more of the Monster Hunter vibe. Do the rules reward planning?
Fourth and finally, like I said, I'm a tinkerer, and I wanted to try out some rules I proposed for PF2 after playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and Monster Hunter. So I designed a custom monster that encouraged you to target specific vulnerable parts, instead of having just a single HP total.
The PCs were:
1. A human fighter with a flail (named Wright Dangerous)
2. A goblin cleric of Sarenrae-and-occasionally-Zogmugot (named Shelly Scraps)
3. A gnome bard (Fenthwick Fizzlebang)
4. An elf wizard (Serpent Arms Jimothen).
All 1st level.
ENCOUNTER ONE.
We started with them waking up on a beach after a shipwreck, roused as the full moon began to set and the coral reef was animated by a haunt to attack them (reskinned skeletons). Here I discovered that weak monsters want to stay hidden until they are close. Instead, these rose up from the water about 50 feet away. One spent three actions to get adjacent, and it died before it made any attacks.
The second stopped 20 feet away and . . . I learned there's no 'dodge' action in this game. And readying requires two actions. So it stood still. Wright Dangerous moved up and attacked twice, killing it.
The third moved to a bush and took cover. Then on its next turn it was able to move up and make two attacks, missed both attacks, and then died.
After they handily smashed those, it was time to TPK the party.
ENCOUNTER TWO.
A ghost (CR 4) of someone who'd been stranded on the island a century earlier floated over to them and wailed. The bard got to use his counter performance, which he really appreciated. He commented that he'd never found an excuse to use it in PF1, but as a reaction, it was great.
Then the ghost knocked out the entire party one by one. This despite the bard using magic weapon to let Wright Dangerous get some good hits in, and the cleric using Heal while the wizard used Disrupt Undead.
The ghost crit Wright, and he used a shield to block the incorporeal ghost. (That wouldn’t work in PF1. Should it work in PF2?) She still hit, and hit hard enough to somehow broke his shield, and nearly dropped him. Then she got a second attack and took him down. Everyone else went down about the same way.
Then the ghost left since the sun was coming up, and one PC only survived due to spending a Hero Point. Everyone else stabilized and later woke up, but we weren't quite sure what the DC to stabilize was. The idea that it's harder to stabilize from a higher-level monster's attack is kinda weird, but they rolled well.
The sunrise drove the ghost away, and the party met a local who gave them details about the archipelago and the monster that controlled the seas in the area and kept anyone from leaving. The players figured out from clues that it’s an aboleth, but the PCs were in the dark. The PCs of course resolved to build a raft, find any other castaways from their ship, and go kill that sea monster.
Wright Dangerous got sucked into a giant clam, but the cleric summoned an animated broomstick to hold the thing open long enough for him to climb out.
ENCOUNTER THREE.
After a night's rest they explored a long-abandoned haunted temple of Aroden, and slew some spooky floating sharks. This was where we discovered that you cannot ready an action to cast a 2-action spell. You also can't draw a weapon and move into position and then ready an action to attack. Shelly got chased by a shark and she ran to the safety of her teammates, so formed ranks around her . . . and then were unable to stop the shark when it used its move speed of 50 to swim around them and bite Shelly twice.
Yes, these were special sharks that could float over land, but honestly it would have been worse if they’d been in the water because the PCs would move even slower. High-speed enemies in PF2 sorta end up getting more attacks, because they can close from a farther distance without having to spend two actions. This began the grumbling about how many things require actions that you used to be able to do for free.
ENCOUNTER FOUR.
Exploring the temple attracted a shadow that had risen from a dead priest of Aroden. Due to a series of critical hits from the cleric and wizard (Disrupting Undead), and the bard putting Magic Weapon on Wright Dangerous's flail, they completely trounced the shadow, even though it was CR 4.
I’d expected this would be the encounter where I’d use a higher-level monster to hit and run, to create an emotion of dread over multiple rounds as the monster struck from the shadows and their attacks barely hurt it. I’d given the party some treasure earlier of arrowheads that lit up when you shot them – this could hurt the shadow, and I had this cool mental image of the party being worn down by light hits before finally getting a weapon that could kill the monster.
Nope, instead what mattered were crits, and once again penalizing the first person to enter the fray.
It used ‘slink in shadows,’ moved up, struck from cover, and peeled away a bit of Wright’s shadow, but it was close enough for everyone to gang up on it. They did 30 of its 42 HP in a single round of good rolls. I had it attack Wright, then ‘Step’ 5 feet to flee through the floor into a basement. Wright survived, moved and used sudden charge to sprint downstairs and kill it with . . . ding ding, a crit!
They found silver dust and a few scrolls of circle of protection, which they figured would help them resist the powers of the aboleth. (So did I, except in PF2 apparently it doesn’t block mind control like magic circle vs. evil used to. I’ll have to do a deep dive of the spells to see what accomplishes what I wanted. I want them to be able to protect themselves with good planning.)
ENCOUNTER FIVE.
The next day they set out for a tomb they'd heard about, which was guarded by a huge bird. They scouted it from afar, concocted a plan to lure it into a trap, and did a great job enfilading it with ranged attacks from the high ground.
Nevertheless, I got to enjoy my tweaked custom monster -- basically a CR 4 monster stitched together from three weaker monsters. The 38-hp, CR 3 head and beak could bite or spit fire (based on an ankheg/ankhrav), 30-hp, CR 2 wings functioned like a shield to tank a hit and could slice and buffet (based on a skeletal champion), and an 8-hp, CR 0 peacock tail had a reaction to swipe and shove whenever the monster was hit (based on a pig). It had three actions a turn and two reactions (one for wing shield, one for tail swipe), so it was less like fighting a CR 4 monster than fighting three weaker monsters consecutively.
I’d learned my lesson about charging into melee with Wright, so when he tried to lure it into position for everyone else to blast it, it instead just spat fire and roared to intimidate him, which succeeded! I rather like being able to spend one action out of three for a monster to scare a PC, but I noticed that it took a penalty because it wasn’t using language, just roaring. Maybe I should have just ad-hoc given the monster expert training in Intimidation, or something.
But anyway, it was just a big dumb monster so eventually it did close into melee, at which point the rest of the party pounded it with spells from high ground. It screeched and took to wing to get them.
They really liked breaking its wing/shield, which caused it to lose its fly speed. Then everyone cringed when Wright cracked its beak and it drooled flaming oil. When they finally took it down, they all took trophies.
ENCOUNTER SIX.
They entered the tomb the monster was guarding and found it covered in slime. When they found the grave at the back of the tomb, Wright triggered a ‘haunt’ (a psychic trap that could be disabled with Occultism or by sealing the source of the haunt), wherein he saw a vision of being caught in thick slime over his head, and saw the aboleth swimming around him watching him. Wright basically started drowning and suffering from aboleth slime (which I had to make up mechanics for), but the rest of the party realized the slime was pouring out of an urn, so they burnt the urn and found a single slime-coated scale inside it, which they chanted at to end the haunt. Then a Medicine check figured out how to help Wright as he recovered from the aboleth slime.
With the haunt dismissed (for now), they studied the tomb and learned the single scale had been knocked free from the aboleth’s body by a champion who died centuries ago. The aboleth had retaliated by cursing the island so its dead rose. Apparently the champion had some special weapon that harmed the monster, but everything the PCs tried to hit the scale with just bounced off the slime, which became rock hard whenever it was attacked.
They figured they’d look for clues on how to hurt the aboleth, but for now they contented themselves with the clue, the trophies (and meat) from the bird, and an enchanted breastplate they found in the tomb. They returned to their base camp, finished their raft, and prepared to set sail at the start of next session.
1. Critical successes and failures feel swingy. It might just be because they're at 1st level.
2. The action economy is good in theory, but has some frustrating hitches where you can’t do things in six seconds that seem like it would be perfectly reasonable.
3. The spellcasters were more fun to play than the fighter.
Crits happen a lot more than in PF1, and even with the extra 1st level HP compared to PF1, crits felt too dangerous.
It's especially pronounced when fighting a higher-level monster. I mean, I didn't expect the party to win against the ghost, but it could crit on a 15-20 against Wright Dangerous. The bard didn’t have his armor because he failed a swim check and peeled it off to lessen his chance of drowning after the shipwreck, and so against him even level 0 monsters basically had a 17-20 crit range (and unlike PF1, had no need to roll to confirm). In this edition it'll be a lot harder to throw the party against a higher-CR monster because of how much more likely it is for damage to spike suddenly.
Maybe that only happens at 1st level, though. We’ll playtest more and see how it goes.
Also, this is a small thing, but when one PC was dying and another tried to 'stabilize' her with a Medicine check, we realized that since a critical failure would make things worse, and the character wasn't trained in Medicine, it was more effective to sit by and do nothing than to try to help a dying friend.
Moreover, since the character trying to help didn't have a healer's kit, it seemed like he couldn't try at all. I let him improvise material by tearing cloth and such, but imposed a penalty, which would have caused him to kill his friend.
Similarly, the critical failure penalties for Survival seem a bit harsh. They were hiking, camping, and looking for food, and could have succeeded the Survival check if they took 10, but you can’t do that now. So they rolled a natural 1, which turns a failure into a critical failure. I guess that means they failed to find food on a tropical island, and burned their tent down? Obviously I could have just said ‘no need to roll,’ but I felt like it was possible to fail to find enough food to feed the whole party; it didn’t seem believable for that sort of disaster to befall them.
Action rules felt petty and stingy sometimes. A monster was chasing Shelly Scraps the goblin (who'd bravely gone alone to scout), and the party shouted for her to get back to them. They wanted to ready actions to attack the monster when it came into view. Wright Dangerous drew a handaxe and got into position to throw it at the monster when he had a clear view . . . and then didn't have the two actions needed to ready. Serpent Arms Jimothen couldn't ready to cast a spell, since the spell he wanted to cast required two actions to cast. The bard Fenthwick likewise couldn't ready a spell. So lots of people delayed.
The monster was then able to move around the whole party and still attack Shelly and knock her out.
We feel like you shouldn't need to spend an action to do these, or at least should be able to get one per turn free:
Draw a weapon
Recall knowledge
Switch to two hands
And maybe you should be able to ready 2-action activities by spending 3 actions on readying? Or maybe just make it 1-to-1.
On the flip side of the action economy, even though you have a low chance of hitting with a third attack, low is better than nothing. There is a higher opportunity cost to be the first engage to engage with the enemy. If you think you can survive a hit, it can make sense to let them make the first move, so you can retaliate with three attacks.
Caster-Martial Disparity Wright Dangerous lived up to his name (though he got a lot of help from the bard who kept inspiring him and casting magic weapon). He was strong in combat. However, he wasn’t interesting in combat. Every round, every combat, he just made melee attacks.
The wizard could choose between a few spells. The bard could combine spells and bardic inspiration with making attacks. The cleric could heal and summon monsters who had options of their own.
But the fighter was boring. And we don't think it'll get better at higher level, because every time the fighter gets one new feat, the casters gets more than one new spell. While the fighter could have a lot of cool options and tactics by switching weapons since the Mastery-level crits have some great variety,
a) the actions it takes to swap weapons are too much of a cost, so you want to just stick with your main weapon, and
b) the stupid unfun decision to have magic weapons be the only way to really increase your damage at high level makes you definitely want to just stick with your main weapon.
We don’t mind it. It has potential. We’re in the middle of playing a PF1 campaign at 14th level so the faster speed was a breath of fresh air, which we hope would carry over to higher level in PF2. But so far it doesn’t excite us. It certainly doesn’t wow us or intrigue us that much.
By contrast, Star Wars FFG had a ton of balance issues, but its weird dice did cool stuff, like let you succeed at a check but suffer a drawback for next turn, or fail but get some advantage you could capitalize on later. That was nifty. The FFG Legend of the Five Rings game had five different ways to try every skill, based on which ‘ring’ you were using – are you attacking brashly (Fire) or defensively (Earth) or trickily (Air) or probing for openings (Water) or letting intuition and fate guide you (Void)? That was something new I’d never seen before.
PF2 has the three-action economy, and that intrigues us. What doesn’t do it for us is ‘turning everything into feats’ and ‘making every minor thing require the same action attacking does.’
At 1st level, spellcasters feel more interesting and useful than they were in PF1. The martial character didn’t get a similar upgrade. D&D 5e already has the ‘simple-to-play’ market. I think PF2 should give martial characters more options. I, of course, have a ton of opinions and options I want to tinker with, but I’m holding off until I get a better sense of the system.
Considering how often crits happen, I wonder if critting shouldn’t double damage, but should instead give you some tactical perk. Make grant a free combat maneuver? Make the target flat-footed against the next attack? Again, maybe it’s just a problem at 1st level.
We’re going to keep playing this playtest – after all, the party needs to explore the other islands, gather tools and allies, and then confront the aboleth (which, yay, I get to create myself since there’s not one in the bestiary) – but we’re only going to do it when our schedules are open. It’s not replacing our regular weekly paladin game.
I hope these comments were useful.
A very enteristing read - thank you!
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Very nice and insightful. And a good story, too!
One of the critiques I had when we were getting the previews was about criticals: I think there's no need to auto-crit (or auto-crit-fail) on a natural 20 (or 1) when we already have the +10/-10 rule.
Increasing (decreasing) the result by one step is already better, but only matters in rather extreme cases.
Being able to move a lot, combined with the fact that AoO are more rare now, makes positioning and attacking your preferred target much easier. That's not inherently bad, but I think that martial classes expecially should get more options to mess with that. Fighter has AoO, Paladin has Holy Wall, Ranger has snares, that's ok, but not enough IMO.
Fighter class feats (as well as other classes ones) should give options to play differently, not just reinforce your standard area of competence (eg: striking with his flail). I wasn't excited when I read those options. Some were nice, and at low level I don't expect anything much bigger than Sudden Charge (which allowed Wright to finish off a dangerous enemy); but for the most part they only make the Fighter more competent at his basic job, which is indeed boring.
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Three Takeaways
1. Critical successes and failures feel swingy. It might just be because they're at 1st level.
I agree, however we loved it.
2. The action economy is good in theory, but has some frustrating hitches where you can’t do things in six seconds that seem like it would be perfectly reasonable.
Totally disagree, I hope they sustain the 3 action system. It was so smooth and the tempo was great.
3. The spellcasters were more fun to play than the fighter.
I disagree, I have not played a martial class for like 20 years, I decided to try something new, Barbarian and it was fun as hell, the features were simple, but simple did not mean I didn't have interesting choices. Rage was awesome and hedonistic. I built him for girth, my Level 1 Barbarian 27 hit points, 31 when Raging (temp hp = 4). Ya I was a beast. It's been a while since I cut goblins in half like that.
Is your fighter aware of all the possible decisions he can make with weapon choices, shield or not, how to use weapon properties and feats. Have your players study the new action system, there a lot more interesting choices/tactics, e.g. did you read Take cover. Did you see the exploration tactic of defensive (forget the actual name of it).
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Crits are more deadly to PC's in the long run and now that the occur more often, especially with monsters having large to hits, perhaps monsters should Only crit on a 20?
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It certainly doesn’t wow us or intrigue us that much.
This is the crux of the matter, I think.
I loved the action system because it seemed exciting, but it doesn't look like martials are poised to interact with it well.
I feel like Paizo needs to go bigger with martial classes, grant them for class feats simultaneously for them to do more varied things to do, not just master one playstyle but have many options simultaneously.
I have ideas for martial characters, but I'm not sure the player base would buy into them. It would be equivalent to how 3e added attacks of opportunity, which 2e didn't have. This would be adding some other mechanics that would try to capture a common narrative in sword fights and monster battles: moments of good fortune.
FFG's Star Wars and Legend of the Five Rings RPGs each have mechanics that capture the same feel. (I think L5R does it better.) They let you keep the focus of combat on simple "attack/damage" rolls while slightly changing the conditions of the fight in ways that aren't worth spending a whole action on.
Very nice and insightful. And a good story, too!
One of the critiques I had when we were getting the previews was about criticals: I think there's no need to auto-crit (or auto-crit-fail) on a natural 20 (or 1) when we already have the +10/-10 rule.
Increasing (decreasing) the result by one step is already better, but only matters in rather extreme cases.Being able to move a lot, combined with the fact that AoO are more rare now, makes positioning and attacking your preferred target much easier. That's not inherently bad, but I think that martial classes expecially should get more options to mess with that. Fighter has AoO, Paladin has Holy Wall, Ranger has snares, that's ok, but not enough IMO.
Fighter class feats (as well as other classes ones) should give options to play differently, not just reinforce your standard area of competence (eg: striking with his flail). I wasn't excited when I read those options. Some were nice, and at low level I don't expect anything much bigger than Sudden Charge (which allowed Wright to finish off a dangerous enemy); but for the most part they only make the Fighter more competent at his basic job, which is indeed boring.
this puts properly to words what's been bothering me for this playtest (and i've complained about in some stripe or another), and it nicely frames my issues with the caster/martial divide here: martials get class feats and features to give them basic competence in their chosen style, while casters' class feats and features do the same--and then they get spells (powerful, interesting options to choose from all the time) on top.
in PF1e, one reason I quite liked the DSP content for 'path of war' was that it helped solve that issue for martials in 1e, by effectively making them a new type of 'caster' (giving them options to say, target various saves on an enemy, or interesting stances and damage options every round). the only martial I didn't feel particularly needed DSP's maneuvers was the barbarian, as it's rage and rage powers were all mechanically solid and flavorful, and interesting to make use of (and is generally my yardstick on where a martial SHOULD be at its most basic, and was a source of disappointment for the rogue, whose similar setup with rogue talents fell completely flat by comparison, being saddled with limitations and extremely narrow use cases).
it was really the only option at the time, since paizo wasn't about to go over all the martial classes and amp up their class features to compete on that side (which i would have preferred). hopefully through the playtest that can be different in the new edition.
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90% of the interesting tactical decisions to do with martials seems to be tied to having a shield.
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Nice post btw. You should write it up for ENWorld.
Some specific comments.
This began the grumbling about how many things require actions that you used to be able to do for free.
IF they leave this in, in the final version I can see a LOT of house rules come into play.
You also can't draw a weapon and move into position and then ready an action to attack.
Having played 3.5e/PF for 12 years I can saw that rule doesn't make sense at all. I can see again, house ruling that away.
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It certainly doesn’t wow us or intrigue us that much.This is the crux of the matter, I think.
I loved the action system because it seemed exciting, but it doesn't look like martials are poised to interact with it well.
I feel like Paizo needs to go bigger with martial classes, grant them for class feats simultaneously for them to do more varied things to do, not just master one playstyle but have many options simultaneously.
Think you've hit the nail on the head there.
My ideal would be for martials to have options that make multiple combat styles viable for the same character - I'd love to play a fighter that swaps between say a greatsword, a flail and shield or a spear depending on the situation
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A very simple rule that I would add: being Expert with a weapon means that you can draw it as a free action.
Problem with Fighter not getting that feat is solved. Other martials who don't have/take it will still be freed from this problem a few levels later.
Instead of a critical failure on a Survival check meaning they burned their tent down while looking for food, it would make more sense to rule that they found what they thought was edible food but wasn't, leading to some Fortitude saves after the meal. Or if you're feeling not so punitive, perhaps they wasted a lot of time and simply found nothing worthwhile, which can be disastrous if the party is in desperate straits.