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This restful and enjoyable Christmas season included three sessions of PF2. The players were a mix of PF1 veterans and RPG newbies. The PF1 veterans were flexing their RPG muscles by playing character ancestries and classes that they hadn’t in our PF1 campaigns and the TRPG newbies were getting their feet wet on all fronts. So here are some comments and tidbits on characters and gameplay from those sessions.
1. Human Alchemist – played by PF1 player that had never played an alchemist previously but had one in his party for years. He found PF2’s alchemist very flavorful, was glad that alchemy was its own thing rather than “spells in a bottle” and was loving it when he made the clutch move of taking out the BBEG with his alchemical lightning and narrowly avoiding a TPK/capture event.
2. Halfling Fighter, Half-Orc Barbarian, Human Fighter & Human Ranger – between class options and 3-action economy, these players felt like they always had meaningful tactical choices to make and every "warrior" was distinct/unique.
3. Dwarf Bard – Played by a fan of Starfinder’s Envoy, this was a big departure for the player from a Pathfinder perspective but he quickly found his footing and felt the character was a contributor on social, magic, and combat fronts. He got his Envoy experience and was very pleased.
4. Human Cleric – Another instance of playing against type, this warpriest of a god of strength had multiple moments where he felt like an avatar of Thor. A cleric convert was born.
5. Goblin Druid – A gambler wild druid for a brand new player. He loved the primal fury bound inside a conniving gambler that was much more cosmopolitan than your average goblin. As it turned out he was part of a party infiltrating the lair of a goblin tribe that had fallen under a barghest’s rule. This sneaky, deception-focused, primal engine of death acted as advance scout and infiltrator and helped set up multiple ambushes. The heroes were able to act in stealth-commando mode almost the whole way to the barghest – and the players loved every minute of it.
The Rule of Cool - things that were very popular with players & the GM
1. New Action Economy – called out on multiple occasions by the PF1 veterans as a huge improvement.
2. New Magic Economy – cantrips + focus + spells; spellcasters said that they always felt that they had magic/spell options at their disposal. The action economy as it’s applied to spells was also super-intuitive for the new players to understand.
3. Conditions – super flavorful yet incredibly easy to apply, understand, and remember. Specifically, Dying & Wounded replacing negative hit points was received very positively by the PF1 veterans as being simpler, yet more flavorful.
4. The 4 degrees of success – this was a huge hit, even when a failure or critical failure didn’t go the players’ way. Sometimes it was the result achieved but I think the players just liked that it wasn’t a binary outcome.
5. Feel like an Action Hero – a combination of greater access to broader skills, higher hit points, ability to recover HP without an 8-hour rest, and hero points. Even at 1st and 2nd level, the players felt like their characters were heroes.
6. ABC character creation – even though PF2 is a crunchier system that creates detailed characters, the new character creation system was intuitive and easy for the newbies to understand.
7. Martials Being Bada-$ – Shield block was very popular as was the spell-less ranger. The new class abilities, level & class design, and 3-action economy had everyone happy with their characters but those who traditionally played casters were impressed with the new flexibility of martials.
The What Now? Effect – things that weren’t viewed as bad but did cause a pause or discussion as it produced an unexpected/unusual effect
1. Treat Wounds – The ability to keep going as you would expect in books, TV, or movies was great. A character going from 1 hit point to full HP from a critical success on a Medicine check did kind of break suspension of disbelief momentarily. I’m really hoping that the GMG’s implementation of Starfinder’s Stamina/HP system finds a better middle ground for those who want little more grit but who don’t want to abandon some rapid healing/recovery.
2. Secret Checks – It was an unexpected change for PF1 veterans but everyone liked these and said that they made perfect sense.
Gifts for the GM – things that I appreciated from the other side of the screen
1. More robust characters – characters still have roles to fill but aren’t the 1-trick ponies of PF1. Players embraced trying new things much more readily and weren’t afraid to try things that grognards would say were “suboptimal”.
2. Easier to run Monsters – I was a multi-decades long “monsters should be built via PC rules” guy. Starfinder put cracks in that wall but PF2 tore the wall down. Monsters with shorter stat blocks but more flavorful abilities are a joy and a breeze to run at the table.
3. Exploration Mode – being able to shift focus from between Encounter - Exploration – Downtime in a more codified way was not only easier for me to run but to explain/set expectations with the players. They understood it almost immediately and it prevented being stuck in combat/encounter mode and dragging out the actions & events between combats.
4. Conditions – as noted above but worth a 2nd shout-out
5. Secret Checks – the “my teammate rolled low so let me try too” effect is dead. Thank God. The game moves faster, players don’t know things that their characters shouldn’t, and no one is arguing about “seeing the roll”.
All in all, PF2 has been met with tremendously positive feedback by my players, both new and old. The game is easier to teach and runs faster. I also continue to find that its internal consistency and flexibility make it far easier to create new/missing game mechanics. Creating/adapting game mechanics is my least favorite part of GM duties but unlike with PF1 or other RPGs, I’m much less fearful that I can create something that is tremendously unbalanced or broken. And once I have the Gamemastery Guide, which I now consider to be PF2’s 3rd core rulebook in my hands, I expect to have more tools to tinker with and more examples of how to adapt prior subsystems to my PF2 campaigns.
My group is enjoying it as well.