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Honestly, I'm the opposite--I wish champions were distanced more from the gods, and got to focus entirely on being as good and kind as possible. If I wanted to play some sky wizard's loyal cop, I'd play a warpriest or inquisitor or whatever exists now.Eberron, as always, handles this very well - in this case, both by allowing divine characters to be a half-step away from their gods /and/ by allowing divine characters dedicated to an ideal or domain, rather than a god.
PF2 attempts to straddle “powerful shield of your god” and “Alignment warrior,” but the end result is a kind of incoherent combo: a devout warrior who cares about one of six preset philosophies more than anything actually tied to their god or church.
You can totally do Ideas, philosophies etc as a "god" it isn't in the published setting but it isn't hard to do with in the rules of the game.
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As 2 of my 3 greatest RPG pick checklist was passed (#1 via OGL, and #3 via actually broadly competent martials), most of my dislikes within PF2 has to do with (#2) Verisimilitude, plus some Lost Omens lore stuff.
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- I don't like PC-NPC Symmetry no longer being default just for the sake of ease of gameplay.
-- A direct tangent of the former, it's especially jarring when PCs require fundamental runes in order to "catch up" to the hit/dodge numbers for NPCs of playable ancestries.
Shame that ABP is optional, not the default. Personally I'd run vanilla rules and ABP together, making only the higher of potency and item bonuses apply, plus renaming the baked in item bonus in nonmagical armor as Armor Bonus for clarity in usage.
- I don't like how Sorcerers (and other innate spellcasting monsters) still need to vocalize and wiggle elaborate digits to cast spells, when they're supposed to be a natural function of their beings.
TBH, the Psychic still keeping Somatic (albeit allowed to be more subtle by default) also counts as disapproval.
- I don't like the "official" interpretation of the Timeless Body/Nature feats prohibiting the feats' taker from enjoying "immortality until slain or succumbing to various affilctions".
So I would run them as meaning it literally, plus letting the True Elixir of Life also include the effects of the Sun Orchid Elixir (at the very least for the brewer/maker of the P. Stone used during the process).
- I really don't like that in the Lost Omens setting, trying to extend your presence (and self consciousness) post-mortem to prevent being turned into cosmic building blocks, then unto nothingness after the current universe dies, is nigh impossible as of now (unless you're the very last being and the very first being for the next universe, just like Pharasma).
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Fixed DC items are just plain bad for the game since they loose relevancy very soon turning into junk loot. Materials are way to expensive for what they provide. I also do not like that recall knowledge is ruled very loosely and would appreciate some clarity. There are quite a lot of skill feats that are pretty useless while others are so good you cannot possibly skip them.
I think that is it, i mostly love everything else.
Not in tune with the intent of this thread, but still. As a houserule I let players buy/upgrade fixed DC items by using the GMG item creation scales. It increases to the relevant level and scales gold based on the relevant table :)
Using an excel sheet is ideal if you have a computer or phone near by, but taking a rough stab at gold level for the level will generally work well enough for the players.
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As a DM, it seems like you have to put in a lot more work to make your own system-compatible setting, compared to 1E. In particular, creating new races and deities. New deities require a codified anathema, a skill, and three spells of varying levels; new races require roughly TWELVE unique (and hopefully balanced) feats. Kind of feels like Paizo saying "If you're going to play our game, *you're going to use our setting*"
Which would line up with some other complaints I've seen.
For what it's worth, there's a bunch of ways you can cheat on those requirements.
- As far as new races are concerned, you only really need to build out feats for races that your players are interested in playing as. If no one is interested in playing a Noble Megaskink then you don't need to stat them out to that degree. For the races they are interested in, if they're deep enough in the optimizing game that they want to build out their entire plan from level 1 to level 20 from the beginning, then yeah, they'll need a full set of racial feats, but if not, then you can do a degree of just-in-time delivery, or even a bit of bespoke. Basically, don't bother to build the feats that your players won't take. If their race has a winged subtype that they're not particularly interested in, then there's no need to build out the "winged subtype" racial feats, and so forth.
For deities, "codified anathema" is the sort of thing that makes the world richer, but yeah, it's pretty mandatory. "skill" is probably important too, but should be pretty easy to come up with. The three spells, though... you only really need those if it's going to be pertinent - if you have PCs who might receive such spells or are likely to enter combat with cultists who have such spells or whatever.
I mean, I do see your point. I think it's worth the cost, but it really is quite a lot more expensive to add individual chunks to this game than it is to many others. Trying to add an entirely new class is even moreso. Still, there are ways to reduce the pain of it.
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As a DM, it seems like you have to put in a lot more work to make your own system-compatible setting, compared to 1E. In particular, creating new races and deities. New deities require a codified anathema, a skill, and three spells of varying levels;
I've seen a Twitch chat come up with a new deity in under an hour. And then do it again enough times to make a whole pantheon. If you've put the work into your setting and know the deity's concept, all the rest is pretty straightforward.
It's a lot easier to come up with things that are balanced within the game in PF2. It was way more work to ensure a PF1e ancestry was well-balanced. For PF2, you can borrow most of what you need from what exists already and fill in just what's still missing.
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Let's refrain from responding to "I think this is very difficult" with "no it's not, you just don't know your concept well enough". It's okay to leave it at, "I disagree and haven't personally had trouble with it," or offering advice.
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I’ve tried to persuade my RPG group to try Pathfinder 2nd ed. Although they played 1st on and off for ten years, they won’t try it. A couple played 2nd ed at cons and had several complaints. A bit later, one member tried running Starfinder, but we only got through the first book before the game died for reasons cited below.
1. The game is too easy. Most encounters are trivial, and bosses quickly overcome. It’s rare for experienced players to die and if they do, the Raise Dead spell is common. I feel bad for Pharasma. I ran two full adventure paths (CotCT and Carrion Crown) and I consistently had to buff encounters. This in turn made characters level faster which messed up progression.
2 Progression is too steep. A fifth level character can fight 1st level villains all day without breaking a sweat. We have been playing OSR games with flatter curves and have been much happier.
3. Character design rewards specialization too much. It makes one-trick-ponies effective, but also boring to play. Why not have strength do damage and use a combination of other stats for hit bonuses? Our current game does this and I like it better.
4. Golarian is bland and broad. It’s like visiting Disneyland. You can fight the generic evil empire by visiting Cheliax town, Eqyptland for exotic pyramid adventures. Ustaluv is scary and Numeria is Conan vs. The robots from space. It’s a kitchen sink world and I want something more thematic, like Ebberon or Scarred Lands.
I am aware that some of these concerns have been addressed and I’m currently going through the forums to see what has changed. I like how heritages can give a min-max'ed fighter something to do outside of combat.
I’ve always liked Paizo games. I love how easy it is to run adventure paths and how well supported they are with supplementary material. I'll keep reading through these threads. Maybe enough has changed to entice my players to come back.
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I'm honestly not a huge fan of the kitchen sink approach, though I think it's very clever from a marketing perspective. I thought Varisia was a wonderful country to focus on. My ideal version of Golarion focuses on areas like Varisia, the Mwangi Expanse, Lastwall, Geb/Nex, a distant Arcadia, and the River Kingdoms--a land of mostly wilderness and informal states/citystates rising from the crumbling ruins of empires. Maybe a couple nations like Irrisen to add flavor or threats to deal with.
Actually, I mocked up a very disrespectful map for one game I run.
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I'm honestly not a huge fan of the kitchen sink approach, though I think it's very clever from a marketing perspective.
I agree. Kitchen sink worlds allow game companies to publish material for different genres and sub genres without having to build entire worlds around them. It just seems kind of dumb to me. When I ran my games I told the players that places like Numaria are only rumored to exist, and probably don't. I soft banned inappropriate magic items.
"No, your cleric cannot have nanotechnology."
Unfortunately, some players see this as an imposition because an entire build can be predicated on a specific magic item or enchantment. A high dexterity fighter absolutely needed the agile weapon enchantment or had to wait until 3rd or 5th level to get the Slashing Grace feat. I've always considered that a flaw in the game. Maybe they fixed stuff like that in 2nd ed.
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Actually, I mocked up a very disrespectful map for one game I run.
Wow, that map looks like it took a bit of care to edit! It looks really good for a mock up. Much as I do love the kitchen sink, I can appreciate the the desire for a more tightly-themed world and also admire craftskobold-ship.
Also while I'm here I may as well add my appreciation for your efforts to making a thread for respectful criticism and to keep it on topic. I did not think I would be able follow such a thread for long without becoming ~invested~ but it appears those tendencies were as much a reaction to the bickering tone of some other commenters in its predecessor as emotional gut reaction. Kudos all around.
If I were to offer my own criticisms... I know I have one around here what was it again...?
Well, my attempts to remove alignment have mostly been motivated by losing patience with table disagreements... Which I suppose on that note I'm not at all fond that neutral deities do not have any form of divine damage they can offer followers.
Also I feel like in general the game would have been better served by a much smaller gap between trained and untrained, but surveys wanted what they wanted...
That's all I have time to remember just this instant.
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A lot of people in playtest, myself included, wanted level to really matter, and as a result pretty much anything 3 or more levels lower than you is a bug to be stepped on.PF2E does reward specialization less than 1E though. Mainly in that using the same tactic in all situations ever is eventually not going to work. But also there's a lot less of x stat to y going on.
It's a difference in design philosophy. Paizo games are very player centric. Pathfinder is about building a fun powerful alter ego to explore the world, gain experience, and earn cool treasures and magic items. That's a lot of fun and why the game is so popular. Players don't want their alter ego to die, and Pathfinder accommodates that. The stakes in Pathfinder are low. It’s rare that a player is on the edge of their seat, knowing everything depends on the next die roll.
This makes Pathfinder a lot of fun for players, but in my opinion, it's a chore to run. There are generally no setbacks in Pathfinder, which makes for a boring story. Since a GM doesn't have a character to play, the story is all they got. I think this is why they must give GMs all sorts of perks to run games in Pathfinder Society.
Right now, I’m running an old school game in which it’s easy to die. Combat is deadly, so players avoid it when they can, or they plan so they have an advantage. They’re trying to rescue villagers taken prisoner by a kind of lizard men. They know a frontal assault is suicide because they tried that in another adventure and lost a character. As a GM, I’m excited to see what they come up with next session. The stakes are real, and they could party wipe with bad planning or bad luck. In a Pathfinder game, they’d just run into the cave and use some power or another to win and I, the GM, would be bored to tears.
I'm not judging though. I enjoy both styles of play, but I’d love to see this sort of dynamic in a game supported by Paizo. Too bad they don’t make one.
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is this a thread for when one has a legitimate criticism of PF2e?
or is this thread for replying to such posts?
I thought the former yet … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve been debating tossing in my two cents
that is, would like to comment in this thread yet feel I really cannot
why not?
because I don’t know what PF2e is
what!?! how can that be?!?
I don’t know because there is so much that is
- vague and ambiguous (battleforms anyone?)
or
- simply completely missing (how **exactly** does the Nightmare Rider ability of a Night Hag work? [Bestiary pp202-3])
or
- (you all know what I mean)
that I truly don’t feel like I know what the design intent is
so for each such instance, I have to guess which of the various possible interpretations is what the designers meant
even if I’m right one time, I cannot be correct every ruddy time, so I’m not playing PF2e, I’m playing a game that is kinda PF2e-adjacent
which means any criticisms I have might not really be about PF2e, but about how I (when I GM) or my companions (when one of them GMs) decided to interpret/implement it
I believe the designers knew what they intended for every rule they wrote;
that is, I do not believe there was ever even a single instance of
you know, not really sure how many, if any, hands should be needed for Battle Medicine, so gonna write it in a deliberately weasel wordy way and let the buyers of our product figure it out
yet the CRB itself (let alone all the ensuing products) is so riddled with such ambiguous writing that I haven’t been in a session which did not encounter multiple instances where the GM had to make a rules call - not a ‘how will this NPC react?’, nor a ‘who will the ettin attack?’, nor even a ‘what is the name of the ship they’re trying to book passage on?’ but an actual honest to the gawds gawd-be-damned-basic game mechanics question!
and that makes bb Merisiel cry
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I don't like the summoner. It doesn't do much well at all. Doesn't do damage. Doesn't support. Doesn't have a niche it does well. Doesn't debuff well. You get dropped way too easy to tank. You don't offer much to a group as a summoner.
The Magus hits like a truck. It's still that alphastrike class it was in PF1 in PF2. It brings a real strong damage component to a group that stands out.
The summoner though is not even close to what it was in PF1. Just very bland and doesn't have an ability that makes it stand out in a group.
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This isn't anywhere near a kind of gripe that is universally shared but for my personal taste I REALLY wish they would have stuck with the more mechanical and codified structure of how the mechanics, traits, conditions, and abilities were defined in the playtest for the system, or to go even further, I wish it would have been even more rigidly structures and defined by way of markdown text or even mere [Bracketing] whenever something like a Trait, Class, of a specific set of rules was intended to be communicated.
There have been countless bits of confusion over the rules where things are ambiguous when casual wording and fluff/flavor descriptions are mixed in with the mechanical effects such as the many places where Interact, Manipulate, Wield, Attack, and other such functions or rules were written.
Some have said this kind of style isn't preferred when reading rulebooks and that this type of thing is one of the hallmarks of what they personally disliked about other games such as D&D 4e, but I can't speak for them myself and really only wanted to "get my gripes out" in this outlet thread.
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my prior post can be more succinctly stated/summarized as:
rules should be rules - clear, unambiguous
otherwise it’s jus prose with pretensions
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I'm honestly not a huge fan of the kitchen sink approach, though I think it's very clever from a marketing perspective. I thought Varisia was a wonderful country to focus on. My ideal version of Golarion focuses on areas like Varisia, the Mwangi Expanse, Lastwall, Geb/Nex, a distant Arcadia, and the River Kingdoms--a land of mostly wilderness and informal states/citystates rising from the crumbling ruins of empires. Maybe a couple nations like Irrisen to add flavor or threats to deal with.
Actually, I mocked up a very disrespectful map for one game I run.
KC, you've filled me with dread inspiration, and I think my map makes yours look kind.
I just marked off places I don't ever really see myself using... and I've kind of turned Avistan into a nightmare continent? Civilization either exists under oppressive evil or is actively threatened, while the harsh wastelands and wildernesses are full of peril.
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and I've kind of turned Avistan into a nightmare continent?
It's spelt Australia, not Avistan.
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I don't like how they got rid of most monster templates. I get that if I'm a GM I can do whatever anyway, but it gives other GMs less incentive to easily make something beyond what's in the books.
This is something I also greatly appreciated in Starfinder. It has pretty much everything you need to transform your monster into something else entirely. Like, want a colossal cybernetic T-Rex? We got you. Want a giant two-headed direshark from hell? We got you.
Out of the many things that were gutted from PF2, this shouldn't be one of them.
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The stakes are real, and they could party wipe with bad planning or bad luck. In a Pathfinder game, they’d just run into the cave and use some power or another to win and I, the GM, would be bored to tears.
Coming from 5 years of 5e, this is the opposite of my reaction to PF2 combat. Compared to their biggest competitor, Pathfinder is already much harder. Your group must be real pros if they just randomly clear Level +3 encounters.
I don't like how they got rid of most monster templates. I get that if I'm a GM I can do whatever anyway, but it gives other GMs less incentive to easily make something beyond what's in the books.
This is something I also greatly appreciated in Starfinder. It has pretty much everything you need to transform your monster into something else entirely. Like, want a colossal cybernetic T-Rex? We got you. Want a giant two-headed direshark from hell? We got you.
Out of the many things that were gutted from PF2, this shouldn't be one of them.
I find building monsters to be easier in PF2 than any other game I've ever played. You pick what it's good at, what it's bad at, assign (or steal) appropriate abilities and weakness, and you're done. So easy.
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As a DM, it seems like you have to put in a lot more work to make your own system-compatible setting, compared to 1E. In particular, creating new races and deities. New deities require a codified anathema, a skill, and three spells of varying levels; new races require roughly TWELVE unique (and hopefully balanced) feats. Kind of feels like Paizo saying "If you're going to play our game, *you're going to use our setting*"
Which would line up with some other complaints I've seen.
Hmm. Interesting.
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Let's refrain from responding to "I think this is very difficult" with "no it's not, you just don't know your concept well enough". It's okay to leave it at, "I disagree and haven't personally had trouble with it," or offering advice.
Does 2e get away from the spectre of system mastery arguments or does it make them worse?
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Let's refrain from responding to "I think this is very difficult" with "no it's not, you just don't know your concept well enough". It's okay to leave it at, "I disagree and haven't personally had trouble with it," or offering advice.Does 2e get away from the spectre of system mastery arguments or does it make them worse?
All deeply mechanized games are going to have some component of system mastery. The general impression I get of PF2 seems to be "the mastery floor has been raised somewhat and the mastery ceiling will continue to grow as new content releases."
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Let's refrain from responding to "I think this is very difficult" with "no it's not, you just don't know your concept well enough". It's okay to leave it at, "I disagree and haven't personally had trouble with it," or offering advice.Does 2e get away from the spectre of system mastery arguments or does it make them worse?
2e is complex, but I have the feeling that it's easier to grab for beginners. Unlike previous editions, system mastery is not a prerequisite to play, you can just let the GM handle all the complex things and play your character accordingly. Also, system mastery won't give you much edge to someone who lack it.
That's a massive change from previous editions where lack of system mastery could really lessen your experience and extreme system mastery was allowing you to break the game.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't know if it's easier for beginners, honestly, because it's neither linear nor simple. It is, however, easy to pick fun and effective options. It just doesn't help you know what to do in what order (ABCD does not work), or help you come up with a base concept, which PF1 definitely handled a lot better in my opinion.
The skill floor being higher is phenomenal, though.
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I don't know if it's easier for beginners, honestly, because it's neither linear nor simple. It is, however, easy to pick fun and effective options. It just doesn't help you know what to do in what order (ABCD does not work), or help you come up with a base concept, which PF1 definitely handled a lot better in my opinion.
The skill floor being higher is phenomenal, though.
For me, I can't remember the order or exact process of character creation in any system except p2e. ABC as shorthand was pretty clever (in my opinion, of course). I'll never forget that process.
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Yeah, it's memorable, but I don't think it works. If anything, it seems a lot better to start with Class, then Background, then Ancestry, and only calculate abilities after the fact. Especially when humans offer a lot of options like skill feats that I likely won't even understand until I've finished with Class.
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I think it isn't the best if you know what class you want to play, it seems more pointed towards making a character with no assumptions of progress already made.
I do like how it asks questions about your character in a sort of chronological ordering:
- (Ancestry) What people do you come from?
- (Background) What have you done?
- (Class) What do you do?
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I don't know if it's easier for beginners, honestly, because it's neither linear nor simple.
- The feat baskets are super usefull. You don't have to look at a crazy list of feats to choose yours. Unlike previous editions where the GM was basically choosing your feats for you, the player is now choosing the feats for their character. The only thing that the GM is still choosing for you are spells, but beginners tend to avoid spellcasters (as they are rarely easy to play) and you can often change spells during the course of the adventure.
- You can't build a useless character. My first 3.0 character was a reach Fighter counting on Spring Attack and AoO to deal his damage. I've been very quickly weak. By level 10 I was so useless I was regularly asked to stay behind. In PF2, that's no more possible.These 2 things alone are a great improvement over previous edition.
As a side note, I've found players who know nothing about D&D and PF1 to build stronger first characters. The old reflexes are bad in PF2.
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I love the feat baskets and I love the high skill floor. :)
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I don't know if it's easier for beginners, honestly, because it's neither linear nor simple.
We have like a dozen new players we've gotten into tabletops via PF2 in this year alone in our group and they've all found it fairly intuitive and straight forward.
They also don't have the "thing I remember from PF1" baggage that I and a lot of other people have, which honestly seems to have made it even easier for them to get into the game.
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I really don't want this back-and-forth, so I'm going to drop it.
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Interesting. I am learning.
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Oh, so it's 1, 2, 3, 4! Since the four final bonuses come at the end. ;P
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My gripe: I miss rolling for abilities, and I wish they'd designed the system with rolling in mind and looked for ways to reduce the spread, rather than simply shunting it into a very disorienting variant rule that doesn't play nice with the rest of the system. Did you know a paladin with 6 Intelligence gets no optional skills? ask me how I know.
The new ability score generation system is very lovely. I've come around to liking it. It's very well-thought-out. But I think rolling was a very helpful aid for coming up with a concept, especially as a new player.
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rolling for stats has a lot of variance
for many, too much to maintain a balanced game
that is, while stat differences may be less important for some, it is very possible to end up with the difference between best rolled stats and worse rolled stats characters averaging +1 across the board (or = here, +1 there, +2 in that!)
and PF2e specifically suggests
“It’s recommended that you keep all the player characters at the same XP total.”
because a level difference is essentially a +1 (or so) difference, all around (depending on which specific levels are being discussed)
EDIT addition:
there was more implied in those phrases than I was capable of inferring (sorry)
some ideas:
- have a choice of fixed arrays, roll where each stat goes
- have a bag of 6 chits, each with a +#; draw one chit for each stat
- some other variation of ‘specified total, randomize how it’s distributed’
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I am pretty sure I covered that with "designed the system with rolling in mind" and "looked for ways to reduce the spread". Agree to disagree. :)
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I think one of the (very few, as it is far and away the best TTRPG system I have ever seen) criticisms I have of PF2 is that they didn't do the best job of consistently future-proofing the rules language in many of their feats and abilities. Stuff like Gnome Obsession referring to "the lore skill from your background" and then the Time Traveller background later on giving you three lore skills, and rules for worn magic items saying they can only be used by humanoids, and then non-humanoid ancestries being added are examples of how this causes confusion with how to interpret the rules.
Another criticism is that bestiary statblocks are lacking a few things - firstly, I think they should list the recall knowledge DC for that creature (probably just below the perception value) in a similar manner to how AoN lists it (as I find that flicking back and forth to find a value in a table really slows the game down). Secondly, most of the humanoid statblocks lack an unarmed attack, which causes problems when PCs built around Disarm get involved - including a fist attack would fix this.
I also don't like some of the baggage that comes from PF1 and from the games original D&D roots, most of these things coming from them being a bit too afraid of upsetting players by cutting things when they made PF1. They have started to cut or de-emphasize things (like leaving D&D specific deities like Orcus out of the tables in Gods & Magic) but a lot of things still remain in the setting that I would rather see replaced entirely by something uniquely Paizo (such as drow and duergar).
The final thing that comes to mind is the inclusion of real world deities where bespoke Paizo inventions would fit better with the world (and be generally more interesting) - stuff like Osirian just randomly having the real world egyptian pantheon is the most egregious.
Most of these things are pretty minor however, many of them having mitigating factors that probably explain why they are the way they are (such as copyfit for bestiary statblocks and resistance to change among the playerbase/inertia for why things from D&D got left in).
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I think that the setting is rather dry on villains because Paizo has spent the past 5 years nerfing most of them into the ground, with the exception of Tar-Baphon because undead are always the safe, inoffensive choice for villains. I enjoy political intrigue and tension as a subtextual theme in my stories, but there doesn't seem to be much to work with these days.
Cheliax appears to be a nothingburger, even more nerfed than its 1e incarnation.
Katapesh is going to be memory-holed or nerfed into a harmless trading nation famous for its narcotic drugs based on Erik Mona's recent open letter.
The Worldwound is closed.
There's a "good" ruler on the throne in Taldor. Same with Irrisen.
Korvosa has a democratically elected leader.
I'd love to use Razmir/Razmiran but it was skipped over in 1e and I don't see them releasing a Broken Lands splat soon.
Belkzen/Oprak have been revised into non-threatening monstrous humanoid powers that just want to be left alone instead of expansionist.
Etc. It's a rather dull world now for region-threatening mundane powers and it shows in the AP's.
It's so bad that I'd even accept something like "Hellknights are bad actually and have launched an EVIL crusade" just to have something interesting happen.
If things keep being so blandly inoffensive I'll probably just start subbing to the corebooks and nothing else.
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I think that the setting is rather dry on villains because Paizo has spent the past 5 years nerfing most of them into the ground, with the exception of Tar-Baphon because undead are always the safe, inoffensive choice for villains.
I enjoy political intrigue and tension as a subtextual theme in my stories, but there doesn't seem to be much to work with these days.
[snip]
Etc. It's a rather dull world now for region-threatening mundane powers and it shows in the AP's.
It's so bad that I'd even accept something like "Hellknights are bad actually and have launched an EVIL crusade" just to have something interesting happen.
If things keep being so blandly inoffensive I'll probably just start subbing to the corebooks and nothing else.
If I can politely contest this:
Many of the regions visited in 1e had prominent threats cleared up, by nature of all Adventure Paths being canon. I like this idea of world progression a lot, but I understand that it can make the setting feel "solved" - because all the places we're familiar with have had their stories told.
2e has taken the really smart approach, IMO, in that their solution to this is not to re-imperil places that players worked to save, but rather to move the lens elsewhere in Golarion, to places less familiar. The Mwangi Expanse was a place of pulp misadventure and colonial repression in 1e; 2e has seen it fleshed out as a mini-setting unto itself. Strength of Thousands dealt with a local perspective, roamed across the region and beyond, and presented a whole new arc, while still leaving potential for several plots.
Usaro could see the rise of a new demonic champion. The Alijae work to cleanse the cursed city of Nagisa, and hunt fiends with their Matanji allies. The Ekujae brace for the apocalyptic return of Dahak to the Material Plane. Mzali in 1e was a curious local footnote most remarkable for violence against Chelish invaders; in 2e, it's a place of heroic rebellion against a vicious theocratic police state (one that executes dissidents with public burnings), tied to ancient and forgotten gods players could return to glory (I hope they do this AP very badly). Vidrian has everything from pirate hunting to a growing espionage service.
The same extends to other areas neglected in 1e. We're about to get our first real Realm of the Mammoth Lords story, followed by our first real Alkenstar plot. A thorough look at an insider's view of Geb after that is another first, and seems to be a story of the political intrigue you're craving. Guns & Gears showed us an indigenous Wild West with necromancer giants and a realm of demon-worshipping bird cults. We have all of Arcadia, Tian Xia, and Casmaron to see - we got our first ever map of Vudra last year. We still don't know what 2/3 of Garund has going on. Nex is coming back. Tar-Baphon's around. Cheliax yet lives, and Nidal hasn't lost anything.
Hell, they finally got around to 'fixing' Galt.
2e is still a dynamic, interesting world, it's just a bigger one than we had in 1e. It has lots to do, and I'm glad to see it move on to new things.
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There are plenty of old villains left, new trouble introduced for old areas(the new villain trying to take control of Usaro is really interesting one) and I say Monsters of Myth book is really good at emphasizing several different threats of various levels on various locations.
Also I would like to add that I'm not actually huge fan of paizo moving away from D&D things just for sake of originality :P It kinda reminds me of how in age of sigmar they changed names of various fantasy ancestries so they could trademark them.
Like, I don't really want drow to be replaced by "well suspiciously similar dark elven civilization" or suddenly pretend they never existed in first place
(speaking of, I still need to write a dire corby bestiary full of dire corbies for all the levels and try to release that on infinite or something ;P)
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Honestly my gripe would be in the opposite direction. I find Tar Baphon really boring because he's just sort of... Bad Guy who exists and feels annoyingly untouchable.
Other parts of the world have more complicated problems and international relationships and I find that a lot more interesting.
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I feel like the setting could use more villains who are creatures other than regular humanoids - it feels like there is still a big divide between nonhumanoid creatures and NPCs. There is no reason that all of our evil wizards and tyrants and champions of dark gods have to be humanoids when probably most of the bestiary entries are sentient and intelligent enough to participate.
I would love to see more dragons* that are villains not just because they are dragons doing normal dragon things, but because they are leading a cult or a champion of Dahak or leading an army of the undead or ruling tyrannically over a city or whatever.
*dragons just being an example here, replace with aboleth, giant, sentient giant spider, troll, etc as necessary.
The same goes for nonhumanoid creatures being NPCs in general - a gold dragon who owns a bank in Absalom, a giant who joined the town guard, an awakened bear who teaches transmutation magic at a mages academy, a manticore who leads a bandit gang, etc.
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Remember how I keep saying things like, "There is no good reason to demand a debate with people for expressing totally harmless opinions about a super unimportant thing like a board game?"
So, it should be obvious to everyone that the slavery issue is seen as pretty important to both sides. Unlike talking about ability score generation or unbalanced feats, the issue of slavery being represented in Golarion actually has pretty heavy emotional stakes for people.
So this isn't a very good thread for it. It's okay to complain about feeling like Golarion is having the corners "rounded" off it, and it's okay to note areas where the "sharp corners" persist. Let's leave it at that.
Just noting this because your post, which was largely fine, Leon, included some mentions to that issue. I would strongly rather we leave that for threads where fuller debate can be appropriate.
I would also remind those with criticisms to please try to write your criticisms as if your favorite dev is reading them. Paizo devs do browse the forums, and you're talking about their work, not the work of a faceless corporation.