What's your favorite thing about 2nd edition?

[Tallyn]

Per the title... what is your absolutely favorite thing about 2nd edition?

If you can't decide, keep it to 2 or 3, but try not to go too much longer. Due to life stuff, I haven't had the opportunity to play yet, and I just want to learn a little more about why people are loving the new system :)

[Kyrone]

Monsters:

- They are simple to run, you have an idea on what to do with them just taking a glance in the stat block.

- Have interesting abilities and gimmicks, fiends specially with an extra vulnerability with stuff against their sin.

- Easy to make your own monsters.

[Salamileg]

Every character, even martials, have a lot of different things they can do on their turn, meaning turns are varied and require more thought put into them.

Having a thousand options for building your character doesn't mean anything to me if you're doing the same thing every turn.

[Themetricsystem]

- Action Economy improvements help make most turns feel much more eventful and "faster" in general than 3.X games.

- The obliteration of the "Standard 6" must-have Magic Item culture. No longer are PCs trying to squeeze as many numerical bonuses onto our sheets, we are looking for cool things the Item can actually do for us actively instead of providing some passive Bonus for our Ability Scores, Saves, AC etc..

[Garretmander]

Treasure being more detailed on when a character can expect such and such items. Especially what level you should start dropping +x whatevers. It's just so much more convenient to plan treasure pools.

[Cyouni]

As a player, the ability to overall trust that my teammates are relatively competent and haven't picked some weird setup that's completely useless. Also that they haven't picked some weird setup that's head and shoulders above the rest of the party.

As a GM, more inherent system flexibility regarding things like DCs, while also being clearer and better codified (exploration, Stealth).

[Cole Deschain]

Spoiled for choice, to be honest, but-

- Action economy is SO MUCH better
- Creating NPCs and monsters invovles a lot less feat pre-req back-tracking for things that won't even come up.
- Way less absurd power disparity in possible builds. There are still good and bad choices, but there are nowhere near as many "oh dear God, no!" choices.

[TSRodriguez]

Action Economy. Monster Design. Overall difficulty Balance. Exploration Mode/Downtime and the crown Jewel "Crit system"

[Staffan Johansson]

1. Action economy. 3 actions per turn, with diminishing returns on attacks, makes for very dynamic combats. It also plays a very large part in the other two things I'm going to call out.

2. Monster design. Monsters get the stats they need without having to leap through hoops, and usually have some interesting abilities instead of being sacks of hit points. The action economy plays a large part in giving tactical costs to certain abilities.

3. PC options are, for the post part, actually options instead of must-have math stuff. PCs mostly get their math bits for free from their class, and options tend to either add new things to do with the math, improve the action economy (e.g. Sudden Charge, letting you take three actions for the price of two), or allow math in one area to catch up with math in another (e.g. Canny Acumen which gives you Expert proficiency in a save or in Perception, with Expert being fairly common in these areas even from first level)

[Ruzza]

What I've really fallen in love with is the difficulty of encounters now. Coming from 1e, I had one player who knew the system well enough (and only played spellcasters) that the rest of my party didn't need to actually do much on their turns.

Now, after encounters, my players point out the important decisions they made in combat. "I wasn't doing anything until you tripped him," or "That fear spell critting changed everything!" I'm just so glad to be away from one character running the encounters while everyone else was just set dressing.

My friend and I often pitch four man teams to each other that build on their strengths. It's been a fun exercise in playing around with party composition and seeing some of less obvious feats start to shine.

[Mathmuse]

1. The rules in PF2 have a more solid foundation. When Paizo adapted Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 into Pathfinder 1st Edition, the system had the scope defined by D&D and its splatbooks. It had some room for growth. But the imagination of Paizo's developers was greater than that scope, with wonderful ideas like the new classes in the PF1 Advanced Player's Guide. With each new book, the seams of the rules became stretched to bursting, with less certainty and more table variance. PF2 rules were designed with all those future books in mind and won't bend under the strain.

2. The changes forced me to re-examine my house rules. They had developed in D&D 3.0 and been brought over wholesale into PF1. The clarity of PF2 highlighted where I had made my own interpretations. Some house rules I liked and chose to keep and refine. Others I dropped.

3. Evaluating the new rules and my house rules in prophetic detail involved a lot of mathematics. I love mathematics and like any excuse to play with math.

[Deadmanwalking]

1. Clearer and more consistent rules. You learn one core mechanic which is then used for pretty much everything, and the math used in that mechanic makes the characters more consistent in power level as well. This makes everything so much easier.

2. Monster Design. The monsters are built with such neat and evocative abilities (a fire giant, with 15 foot reach, can attack everyone in a 15 foot line with their sword...that's an easy example and so cool), and are built so much more easily. It's really a GM's dream in many ways.

3. Action Economy. The three action economy and the way it's implemented allows so many neat effects and rules interactions. It's also vastly simpler to learn and remember than PF1's weird collection of actions.

[masda_gib]

That if you poke a high-level Animal Instinct Barbarian with a pole, they might go *plopp* and turn into a big fish if they're startled. :)

[keftiu]

The deliberate effort to be less racist in 2e’s worldbuilding.

[Jader7777]

3 action economy makes things fast and fluid

Everything is determined almost entirely by level vs level, extremely easy to adjudicate. Players basically instantly kill anything 10 levels lower or run away from anything 10 levels higher.

Building a character is (slow and dumb) easy to choose customization without creating massive power differences between players characters.

[EberronHoward]

Meaningful choices. I love to build PCs, and with the closer power levels of classes, each class has more choices that matter. There are good reasons to stay in your base class up to level 20, as well as multi-classing.

[Ched Greyfell]

Action Economy. Cantrips useful all the way up. Healing in between fights that keeps you up and running, but takes enough time to where it's not spammed or abused.

[TwilightKnight]

Action economy, action economy, and um, action economy. IMO, it the best feature of the new system. It really improved game flow.

[corwyn42]

TwilightKnight wrote:

Action economy, action economy, and um, action economy. IMO, it the best feature of the new system. It really improved game flow.

Ditto, ditto, ditto

[Uchuujin]

Action economy, and simplified math that makes it easier for new players.

[TheGentlemanDM]

Four degrees of success, coupled with the tighter proficiency math, meaning that the swinginess of save-or-suck is largely gone.

[LuisCarlos17Fe]

To can choose my favorite racial traits, the racial feats. This allows a PC gnome not always illusionist or rogue.

[MaxAstro]

I've said it before, but monster design. As a GM, this is by far the biggest thing. PF2e was an absolute revelation for me. I didn't realize I'd been doing monster design wrong - for years - until I saw PF2e do it right.

Distant second is the four degrees of success system, which makes control wizards - my favorite class - more rewarding to play.

But really, monster design. Wow.

[Michael Sayre]

Personally: I love that everyone gets big, flashy abilities as they level. Barbarians that can rage so hard they turn into dragons, monks that can wind punch every enemy on the battlefield at the same time, etc.

Runner up would be 3-action economy and how much that improves the flow and dynamism of the play experience.

Professionally: I like how much better balanced the system is and how that opens up stories that were really hard to tell previously. Since characters are much better balanced to each other, you can do Resident Evil inspired adventures with one big, hunting monster and have a reasonable expectation of how it will play out at the table, or create tactical set piece encounters that aren't going to screw over the low skill point or low save classes disproportionately.

[PossibleCabbage]

Honestly? How efficient character creation is, without sacrificing depth. You can literally say "I am [ancestry], [class], [background relevant job]" and you're over halfway done. I've never played a D20 game where character creation flows this efficiently (even in a rules light game like 13A, you spend a lot of time figuring your icon relationships.)

Honorable mentions to the action economy and the monster creation rules.

[Nocte ex Mortis]

My favorite thing beyond action economy and the ease of character creation is that the tag system more-or-less makes sense, and doesn’t bog everything down. What turned me off of Exalted 3E, for example, is that literally everything in the game has like three tags or more you have to cross-reference.

[Kelseus]

For me, particularly as a GM, is how balanced it is. What I mean is that the possible range of abilities for PCs is relatively narrow. Take saves for instance. A PC that is only trained with 8 in the ability modifier has a save roll of 1+level, pretty much the minimum. Even a fully maxed out legendary PC in the same save is a max of 15 + level. Max difference of 14 at 20th level. With a more common difference of no more than 5.

It just makes it so much easier to run. I don't have to fight with the constant, either challenge the specialist or make it possible for anyone else to succeed.

[Albatoonoe]

For me, the single biggest thing is the uniformity of the math. On both the player and GM sides of things, it makes everything run so much smoother. A player can build a character that isn't necessarily the most powerful, but you don't have to worry about being useful. A GM has a lot firmer idea for what is appropriate for any given level now, so adventure design is a lot easier.

[Reckless]

The encounter building actually work. This is due to the game actually being balanced and the monster design being top-down, something I never thought I would love as much as I do.

This is in my top ten, for sure.

[Gorbacz]

The fact that you no longer have to adjust *everything* to handle the fact that one of your players is running a dagger and rapier cRogue with Lightning Reflexes and Endurance and another is a Savage Horticulturist running on an instakill Intimidate + nonlethal damage + aerial trip juggle build wielding two Tiny kukris that are actually Gargantuan. Only to discover that adjusting fixes nothing, "GM can just fiat things into balance" is a myth perpetuated by people with agendas, and PF1 is a game that you win or lose at character building.

The rest (action economy, math, monster design) is just gravy.

[Ice Titan]

Normally at 9th level the game starts to strain a bit. By 15th it's utterly broken and there's no semblance of narrative weight-- the dialogue between the PCs and the villains of the campaign last longer than the combat themselves. If the wizard's quickdraw save or die doesn't get them, the fighter pounces and they're dead. Now it's time to fight their like 5 mooks who no one is excited to fight and that takes an hour.

In PF2 the combat has just been linearly scaling. We're 17th level now and everything is just smooth. Enemies can still be total pains in the butt, survive for multiple rounds, and even solos can force the party into tight situations. I'm really enjoying it.

[Ed Reppert]

You didn't say so, Ice Titan, but I gather your first paragraph is about first edition, right?

[The Gleeful Grognard]

For me it is the cohesive design elements, as a GM I have found that it lets me teach the game better and retain that knowledge myself more effectively.

In 3.x the core systems were rarely decided with each other in mind which is why skills had different break points and remember what DCs were adjusted by what and by how much. All bespoke systems that had little or no mathematical connectivity or reasoning other than a designer thinking it felt right.

Move over to PF2e and we have the counteract system and it is a thing of beauty. Even the VP system can be seen to have its hooks everywhere in the CRB.

[TSRodriguez]

Gorbacz wrote:

"and another is a Savage Horticulturist running on an instakill Intimidate + nonlethal damage + aerial trip juggle build wielding two Tiny kukris that are actually Gargantuan"

I had a good laugh with that. I love PF1 to death, but that is so true

[masda_gib]

Honestly, what others said and that PF2 tries to have as little rules as possible and reuses them throughout the game.

The 4 spell traditions are an example and the 3 codified spellcasting variants cantrip, focus spell, slot spell.
The biggest example of this though is counteracting for me. Counteracting rules are a bit hard to grasp (but 50% of the confusion is using "level" for character and spell level...) but that same rule is used everywhere. Dispel Magic? Cure Poison? 2 mutagens at once? All Counteracting, no different rules.

[WatersLethe]

Really hard to pick my favorite thing. I think maybe it's the fact that the design philosophy of the game is front facing, letting you make house rules with more confidence. This encompasses monster design, build option silos, rarity, proficiency, and more.

[Ravingdork]

My favorite thing about 2nd Edition is how Paizo is utilizing their own tools to create amazing stories and encounters for us. It actually feels like they aren't shackled anymore. Take the Snickers in the Smoke encounter of Age of Ashes, for example. I just want to thank whoever was responsible for making it. It was easily one of the most fun and engaging scenarios our gaming group has encountered in a long, long time! What's more, the mechanics used, when combined with the ease of the 3-action mechanic, can easily be reused in a myriad of similar scenarios.

WatersLethe wrote:

Really hard to pick my favorite thing. I think maybe it's the fact that the design philosophy of the game is front facing, letting you make house rules with more confidence. This encompasses monster design, build option silos, rarity, proficiency, and more.

This. I used to hate most homebrew/house rule stuff. Now I realize it is because I lacked confidence. Anything I, or others, made would inevitably be unbalanced in some way. It seems obvious to me now that this stemmed from the fact that it would have been impossible to make a balanced rule in an unbalanced game anyways.

In 2nd Edition, this isn't nearly an issue. In fact, if I want to do something simple like increase a monster's power by more than a level, it's almost mandatory that I homebrew, since the adversary advancement and creation systems are top down. This creates an expectation and, along with the streamlined, codified rules, helps to empower the GM and boost confidence more than ever before.

[Ubertron_X]

Ravingdork wrote:

Take the Snickers in the Smoke encounter of Age of Ashes, for example. I just want to thank whoever was responsible for making it. It was easily one of the most fun and engaging scenarios our gaming group has encountered in a long, long time! What's more, the mechanics used, when combined with the ease of the 3-action mechanic, can easily be reused in a myriad of similar scenarios.

AoA reply:

Apparently one man's trash is another man's treasure. After we dealt with the immediate threat we gathered around the map, went full into hive-mind-problem-solving mode, figured what the hazard will do each round, our relative positions in regards to each other and our objectives and quickly determined what was possible and impossible in the time left. From there we simply played each pre-planned round for maximum effect. Note that is not to dimish the fun and engagement you guys apparently had but to demonstrate that two different parties can have two radically different impressions of any given mechanic. Once my group of veteran (war) gamers understood the encounters underlying algorythms the event was more of a chess riddle than especially exiting.

.
Definitely character creation.

[Malk_Content]

I think any encounter were the groups gets to just pause the game and naths it out is going to be unexciting.

[Del_Taco_Eater]

As someone whose knee jerk reaction to PF2's announcement was bewilderment and loss, It's lovely that I now have trouble narrowing down my favorite parts of the system. That said...

Changes to full casters: Aha! It was a trick! I couldn't pick just one, but it all fits under this umbrella. Due to re balancing of spell power, the great softening of save or suck via degrees of success, easier levels 1-2, and the dignity of all martials, I feel able to have fun playing a full caster for the first time. This thread has a lot more on the topic.

[Ravingdork]

I have observed that I am playing more martial characters now because of that, Del_Taco_Eater.

Ubertron_X wrote:

** spoiler omitted **

Age of Ashes #1 spoilers:

I mathed it out a bit as well, declaring to the party that we only had three or four rounds left before it became a lost cause. (We didnt consider this metagaming as our characters could all easily see the growth rate of the fire and make a quick estimate.) If anything, that announcement re-energized everyone into more desperately trying to get people out. We killed the monster and saved everyone, but ultimately lost the building.

[Donovan Du Bois]

The three action economy was a stroke of pure genius, moment to moment combat is the best it has ever been. Everything around that begins to break down, but you can't fault the primary gameplay loop.

[Ice Titan]

Ed Reppert wrote:

You didn't say so, Ice Titan, but I gather your first paragraph is about first edition, right?

Yeah! I should've clarified that. Can't brain good sometimes!

[Queaux]

My favorite thing is downtime. Packaging each character with a Lore skill through their background was genius. Every character, by default, has something they can do during downtime. The moves to make downtime a more integral part of the system really allows for more nuanced character expression than simple build considerations.

[Thaliak]

When I try to build characters based on video games, anime or books, I can usually come up with a reasonable approximation. For example, I had a lot of fun trying to represent the various archetypes in Chroma Cast, a funny turn-based tactics game that pays homage to Power Rangers.