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To start off, I just wanted to share my own experience with RPGs for the sake of context. I have over 14 years of RPG experience both as a player and as GM. I have experience in playing many published systems and many homebrewed systems, and have even homebrewed a few of my own systems. I play or GM quite regularly with several different groups, all of which have differing playing styles. At the moment, I’m playing mostly Pathfinder and D&D 5e, and one of my groups agreed to do the playtest of 2e with me. The group I am running the test with are all people with player and GM experience equal to or greater than my own; a great group to test with, in my opinion.
I would also like to be completely open with this community and admit that upon reading many of the preview blogs as well as the core book when it was released, I did not like a lot of what I read (though some of the changes seemed promising). However, I wanted to keep an open mind, and see the game played as a whole rather than just judging the individual elements of it. Our GM for the playtest likes most of what he read in the core book. Everyone else is somewhere in between.
After playing the first part of Doomsday Dawn, I have reversed some of my opinions on some of the things I disliked. Seeing it as a whole made me see how well it worked with the new system. But I do believe there are some things that can be adjusted and fixed.
With all that said, I will try to keep things concise and brief.
The Party:
• Gnome Rogue (me)
• Half-Orc Barbarian
• Halfling Fighter
• Dwarf Druid
• Goblin Alchemist
• Elf Sorcerer
A six person party, but our GM was able to use the adjustment rules in the core rulebook to adjust the encounters to fit our party size. And it was brutal! We had 9 times that someone was knocked to 0 HP, my character being 2 of those times. We almost had a TPK with the fight in the cave with the goblins (the trap room). It was only luck that kept us alive.
I’m not complaining about the difficulty, I like games to have some challenge to it. But it felt like a beat down. We had no money to buy potions with; we eventually had to go back to town and rest for several days until we could go back in and deal with the boss.
Overall the first part of the adventure it was fun and we enjoyed ourselves.
Things I like about Pathfinder 2e:
• Action Economy: This is good. It’s easy, it’s simple, and you don’t have a million types of actions. I think this was a great change and it offers some variety to what you can do in battle. I feel like it’s better than 5e’s action system.
• Silver Standard: I thought this was a good idea the moment I read about it. It puts more value on gold and silver in general. Also, I joked about this on the forums, but I love the fact that a spyglass doesn’t break the bank. Not much else to say about it. I think this is great.
• Weapons: Weapons feel different from each other with their new qualities. I love this! I want to implement this into 1e! This makes every weapon do different things and nothing is chosen for a fluff reason, really. I really, really like this. Though, a bastard sword really should be listed as a slashing weapon, not piercing.
• Character Creation: This wasn’t too bad. Pretty clear and easy, I’m not a fan of the attribute cap, but I can get used to it. The only suggestion I can make here is really clarify were features can be found in the book so that CC can be smoother.
Things I dislike about Pathfinder 2e:
• Resonance: I feel like resonance as it is written now is like cutting off a hand can calling it a fix. I understand the purpose of resonance, and I don’t hate resonance as a whole, but the way it is now is just not good. Say you have a character that is out of resonance, he drops to 0 HP, and a buddy throws a potion down his throat to save his life. The player rolls against overuse of resonance, critically fails, he now can no longer drink potions. He dies because of this. This did not happen in our game, but it can happen. A magic restriction mechanic should not have the chance of killing a character, in my opinion. I suggest resonance being there, because as a whole, it’s not a bad idea, but remove it from consumables like potions and scrolls. I also suggest removing charges from wands and adding a per day limit or have it operate only on resonance to eliminate CLW spamming. I think if resonance was dialed back a little, it can work. But as it is now is a deal breaker for me.
• Crit System: Oh boy, I was not a fan of this. I’m sorry to say, but it’s not intuitive and easy, not even that fun. It sounds simple on paper, but in practice, it’s not. Its mechanic is easy: 10 greater or lesser than DC and it’s a critical success or failure. What’s not intuitive is that it’s there are four degrees of success, but it’s not universal. Some things have all four degrees; other things only have three or two. Different things happen on a crit with some weapons or spells, but not others. It bogs down battle when you have to look up several different effects based on a crit. It was not a fun element to the game. I did enjoy the chance to critically fail skills, but I’m not a fan of the degrees of success. It got confusing almost every time there was a Nat 20 or some other kind of crit.
• Death too complicated: I went down twice in the first part of Doomsday Dawn, some other members of the party did as well. It’s confusing how the DC of what downed you was figured out, and it was a constant question. Also, I don’t like that your place on the initiative tick moves. I get the purpose of it, to allow you a full round for people to help you, which is a good idea, but then it takes even longer to get back to your turn, and you sit around with nothing to do for a while. It just got a little boring for me waiting for my turn to come around when I would have been next, I now had to wait another whole round before I got to see if I stabilized.
• Layout of the core rulebook: Yeah, I know Paizo is aware of this, and are probably already working on the layout. It’s a bit of a mess here and there and just needs to be better. Also, some of the wording is hard to read even for experienced players, I feel bad for new players who don’t know much about RPGs in general.
• Character Sheet: The same can be said about the character sheet. AC needs to be more visible and bigger on the page. There were some things that I felt should be on there, like your dying status (similar to how 5e has it would be nice). A horizontal sheet didn’t bother me in the least, but a few of the others didn’t like it very much.
• Half-Elf/Half-Orc/Goblin: Goblins have been made core, and Half-Elf and Half-Orc have become feats added to Human, it felt like a demotion. I do not like this at all. Half-Elf and Half-Orc tend to be popular choices and to make it so that it’s simply a feat added to Human seems cheap to me. I feel like they don’t get enough features to make the feat required to be one is worth building one. And I’m not 100% anti-Goblin. But I don’t think they should be core. Based on the history already established in Pathfinder, they are not welcome to have around due to the violent and chaotic nature. I feel like they should be moved to 2e’s APG (if there will be one), and Half-Elf/Hlaf-Orc be made full ancestries.
• Lock Picking: Three successes to pick a lock. With numbers at low level and the crit system, the chances of succeeding are too small. I played a Rogue, with a +5 in Thievery, and I was unable to open the lock because I critically failed my second attempt at success. Please reconsider this.
Things I’m on the fence on about:
• Magic: I’m a little on the fence about magic. I love cantrips being able to scale and do damage! But I’m not sure about Sorcerer not getting an auto heightening like some of the other classes get. I’m also not sure if I like the crit system with magic (again because it’s too complicated and may nerf magic too much). However, we didn’t get to test the full capability of magic just yet due to low levels. We’ll see in the next few parts.
• Secret Rolls: I don’t have an issue with secret rolls in general, but I felt like almost half the rolls made in the first part of the adventure were secret. Every time I looked around or sneaked around, I didn’t get to roll. I like rolling dice. Let me roll dice. But again, I think we’ll have to wait to decide until I see this in action a little more.
Those are my thoughts; I’ve been enjoying the playtest so far.
I hope this feedback was clear and concise and didn’t sound angry or hateful, because that is not how I wanted it to sound. So, forgive me if it did.
Thanks for reading.