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So, my table has had two sessions. One character gen where we questioned Paladin restrictions, and then a few good hours of Doomsday Dawn. It was the first opportunity for my players to try out the characters they made.
Some history: I've been playing tabletops for around 15 years, and seen my character development evolve over that time. My players are 2 veteran PF players, two 5e players of varied experience, and one newbie.
Mechanically the game was alright, things worked for the most part albeit with some growing pains that will hopefully be ironed out. The biggest problem we had was character depth.
To put it in context, one of our players was an Elf Noble Rogue, but it really didn't mean anything. They weren't a person they were a series of mechanics, despite being based on a character that originally had depth on one of my other 5e tables.
Comparing 5e to PF2 of course is apples and oranges, so I'm going to compare it simultaneously to 5e and another of my favorite series Scion: Hero, just from character depth perspective.
In its closer relative 5e, when you look at Backgrounds like Noble, you have pretty much a page and a half of information. There's mechanical benefits like starting equipment and free proficiencies, which is a small section, and then nearly half a page entirely devoted to Personality, Bonds, and Flaws. They aren't set in stone, but it gives a guideline for what a character who grew up in that background might be like, and you can freely make up your own to fit the idea of your character. Comparatively, PF2 has less information overall on their backgrounds, and where half that information is a brief description, the other half is what you get mechanically.
Now to the outlier comparison Scion. Scion uses three aspects to determine who your character is. You have your character's Calling, Nature, and Virtues that define the character. Calling is your character concept, your Nature is essentially you Achilles heel, the weakness in your personality like being a libertine, and your Virtues are inherited by your chosen godly lineage. Playing into them is rewarded with recovery to your Legend or Willpower, or extra dice for a roll. This is an example of mechanics supporting a three dimensional character.
So compared to two other recent series, PF2 characters felt less like making and playing a relatable and real character. We saw the biggest example of this mechanics trumping character with just the wording of the Paladin Anathemas. All the Paladins Anathema are worded less as a code to live by as they are legal contract to protect them from a bad GM. Even the druid anathemas, which are the most lenient all have in brackets the "it's okay to do this, your GM can't penalize you".
The end result was that in combat, or even out, the characters felt like just a series of actions. How will you spend your downtime? Well I'm going to roll the check I want to do. I used to be a Blacksmith after all. You stopped though... Why did you stop? Why did you become a fighter if you're still going to tend the bellows in your spare time anyway?
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I don't think the rules exist to give your characters depth. You might start off with a 'cardboard character', but once you have your class, skills, and mechanics, it's up to you to provide the characterization. Come up with wants, needs, goals and fears that your character has. I don't quite understand why you need the rulebook to tell you what those are.
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Sounds like 5E designs your background for you, no real work needed for the player, I guess it is good for the lazy player.
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Sounds like 5E designs your background for you, no real work needed for the player, I guess it is good for the lazy player.
I would maybe not call OP or their player's lazy out of hand. That said, if 5E sets certain expectations that these backgrounds are provided to the player, I could see being disappointed to not have that available by default.
My general order when creating a character is to come up with an archetype (knight in shining armour, dashing swordsman, venerable old witch), and then come up with a personality: how they react to and interact with the world, what they want and need, and maybe a few notes on how they deal with conflict. At this point I'll see what classes give me the features I see as vital to the character.
There's the other way which is more useful for testing out the rules: pick a class, build to one of the expectations that class has. Your characterization may seem less organic, but there's no reason you cannot go back and come up with a personality for that character once you have their stats and abilities.
That might make a very nice 'Extended Backgrounds' separate book but I can't see it fitting in the CRB.
Personally I do this already with my PCs during character creation. A fully manual process, other than putting a frame around their traits and alignment. No pages of backgrounds could replace the manual and fairly involved process of crafting a players backstory with them and building that into the campaign.
Very much a 'your mileage may vary' case.
Again, not saying it's a bad idea but I don't think it's for everyone. Good material for a standalone book, perhaps combined with richer Ancestry information tied into Golarion lore more deeply.
I made it a point to tell my players in session 0 that the playtest wasn't designed to test roleplaying. That's something you don't need rules for, you just do it as you play. The Lost Star also has minimal opportunity for such roleplaying: it's just a fetch quest after all. That doesn't mean roleplaying won't happen when we play, as I will work in as much opportunity as I can without straying far from the book as written, but you can be sure that what's most important to Paizo is us testing character creation and the mechanics of exploration and combat. The very nature of playing five characters over differing character levels should also tell us there won't be much opportunity for character development outside of their stats.
Having the right expectations before going in is crucial to having a good experience.
Sounds like 5E designs your background for you, no real work needed for the player, I guess it is good for the lazy player.I would maybe not call OP or their player's lazy out of hand. That said, if 5E sets certain expectations that these backgrounds are provided to the player, I could see being disappointed to not have that available by default.
It is less laziness as Mergy is correct, the expectation. Two of my players were 5e players and the way it came up was less "who am I" but "who am I in this world"? The newbie could very much have used some guidance.
In 5e your equivalent feature from your background in the Noble's case is that high society types will often provide you a place to stay. You are a noble, your reputation and standard precedes you and mean something. Or alternatively you're a knight and get a squire follower. In PF2 being a noble is a +2 Cha and Courtly Graces which makes you able to sub Society for Nobility Lore on recall. One has weight in the world it exists in, the other is a general skill feat that doesn't contribute much to the character. Just a dice roll.
The main complaint people had with 4e was what I'll call the gameification of everything. Cutting out roleplaying in favor of standardized abilities. While I would not call it that bad, on first play nothing has weight from a story or character perspective.
Fumarole brings up a good point though, the point is testing mechanics not roleplaying. I hope some of this "legaleeze" approach to anathema goes away though, because the things that should contribute most to character come of as... Bleh.