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Okay, this is petty, and it is not very important, but I want to gripe about this, so I'm doing it here, and not elsewhere, where it could cause the Paizo community to get a bad name, further I say this as a die hard Critter who was there in the Geek&Sundry days...
The number of D&D creators I see doing all kinds of videos and dives on Daggerheart, but can never be bothered to even look at Pathfinder 2e! WHY!? (because DH, being tied to Critical Role, is gonna get them more views and there is nothing wrong with that but it still annoys me).
It is less of a change to try out PF2e, but they act like it's learning a different language, but Daggerheart comes out, using a completely different game engine, and they don't bat an eye and making content for that!
Petty Grumble, petty gripe.
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As funny as this is, I 100% agree!
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Daggerheart is a lighter game than D&D 5e, while PF2 is a meatier one. I think more groups are looking for the former than the latter these days.
Also, PF2 is 6 years old and Daggerheart is new - I can't blame them for being more fired up about a recent release!
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Daggerheart is also being pushed very hard through various support programs and influencer deals, something I haven't seen other people even really try.
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Also D&D into dagger heart is basically just following the money. We'll see if it holds up but we've always known the big $$ isn't pathfinder. Many people would like dagger heart to replace 5e as the big standard rules light that everyone plays and makes content for, so they can do so with less guilt at supporting a greedy company.
When/if the time comes that people don't just wholly watch D&D content, then pathfinder and other games can get more coverage but it has to get the views, and with that market twisting as it has been it doesn't seem likely.
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The only game I've ever seen take much market share from D&D is PF. If Daggerheart manages to take and sustain a decent market share for RPGs, more power to them. D&D has been the top dog for fantast tabletop RPGs for so long followed by PF, it would be interesting to see someone else carve something out. Though I kind of doubt it will last since RPGers are very tribal and dedicated to their preferred games.
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Hasn't daggerheart like, just come out? That'll be the main reason. It's also by the critical role people who are basically the biggest movers and shakers in the DnD space.
However, I do also get unreasonably fustrated at the popular idea that PF2e is somehow absurdly complex*. If you're able to read at a passable level, you can learn it. I'm not saying it's like playing catch but the idea it's ultra-complex seems like the typical r/dndmemes nonsense where a line is repeated constantly without any regard for what is actually true.
(20 as auto-succeeed on a skill check is another good example of this. It's not true, but if you read around certain places, you'd sure think it is).
That being said i'm very selfishly happy with the space PF2e occupies. It's large enough that there's a good sized community but not large enough that it's devolved into the depths of complete nonsense that other large fandoms do.
*And frankly if I feel like being mean, I'd point out how 5e refuses to give DMs anything to work with, making it much harder for first-time DMs to run.
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The big meme is that D&D players can't read, so it kinda makes sense for them to not like PF that much since it requires you to read the book at least once. It doesn't sound like much, but if looking at both systems, and specially if you are used to how D&D is, PF2e is the system that has the highest entry barrier out of the two, even if it isn't as bad as people seem to think it is. If Daggerheart aims more towards rules light (which I assume it does, because when I saw it requires cards to play I immediately ignored it tbh) then if the people that made 5e popular in the first place tells them to play that system, they are likely going to at least try it out. I also think it helps that WoTC is going downhill in recent years, both as a company and in the quality of products they been releasing (at least with D&D, because I think MtG has been doing great recently, but I don't play it. I don't like TCGs if you were asking yourself that lol).
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I'm not personally surprised, for many of the reasons others have already brought up. But also, you really can't discount the effect of star power when it comes to getting eyes on a product.
Critical Role is a massive influence on many people, and it's theater kid style approach to dnd is what set a new standard for how many people approach ttrpgs. Pathfinder doesn't really do that, and that isn't really something it demonstrates. Pathfinder loves the mechanics first, builds and number crunching, abilities defining your character approach to ttrpg playing, and the community for a very long time earlier, and even a sizeable chunk now, play that way.
But a lot of the content creators who play dnd and specifically make youtube videos on it, they all rose up on the critical role style of playing ttrpgs. Whether as a show they liked to watch or a game they directly took inspiration from, the influence critical role holds is powerful. So when Critical Role, not WOTC, says they're doing their own TTRPG system, that makes people a lot more willing to put eyes on them than pathfinder, a game they may have 0 emotional attachment to and who feel it plays opposite to their style of imrpov heavy, winging the rules, narrative before mechanics style of play.
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As much as I would love to see PF2 get the attention it deserves, I think its good for the RPG space as a whole to see that attention going to something other than D&D. For to long, it has been the default option for anyone looking to get into RPGs and some of those people don't even know the other options exist, but if people know that they have options because the shows that introduce them to the hobby use different systems, then they might actually see what's out there instead of just going with the default.
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Isn't PF2 number 2 on sales for tabletop RPGS? What are the top selling fantasy RPGs now? In my life, I've never seen another company carve off part of D&Ds market like PF2 did. Has any other game even done this?
That means they get the credit they deserve. Who else has as big an audience in fantasy RPGs as D&D and PF2?
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Isn't PF2 number 2 on sales for tabletop RPGS? What are the top selling fantasy RPGs now? In my life, I've never seen another company carve off part of D&Ds market like PF2 did. Has any other game even done this?
That means they get the credit they deserve. Who else has as big an audience in fantasy RPGs as D&D and PF2?
And for a spell PFS staged more tables at cons than the DnD equivalent. Nothing has come as close as PF to challenging DnD's reign.
Plus the DnD/TTRPG channels did cover PF2. I remember when one of the more popular YouTubers caused a stir when he and his home table switched over (though I imagine he still discussed whatever the audience preferred). I do not watch those channels so they're not in my feed except for in those few months at the dawn of PF2 when I guess they were popular enough to widen the audience. I still didn't watch them, but the thumbnails looked positive and the Paizo forum discussions were abuzz analyzing the analysts and whatever biases/insights their videos showed. Again, mainly positive.
So yeah, PF2 enjoyed its fresh-new-toy phase and I'm feeling certain these content creators are leaping at this new RPG because it's the first new toy to spark conversation in the broader TTRPG world since then and it's their job to foster and feed off such conversations. But I don't know how such a game's going to endure. It'll have to capture the flavor of the cartoon & videos w/o the actors who provide that flavor. Maybe it'll carve out a niche like Savage Worlds and other simpler systems. Heck, GURPs & Hero Games still exist and I used to see an occasional Car Wars game at my local con before covid shut those down.
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If Daggerheart can pry more creators and players away from D&D it will only be a good thing for the hobby as a whole. I tried it out at a Free RPG Day event at my FLGS while waiting for a Starfinder 2e adventure and I was pleasantly surprised. Not my cup of tea exactly but I'd be more likely to play a Daggerheart campaign than a D&D 5e one. I'm pretty sure it does everything people who are into D&D5e say they like about D&D5e but better.
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To answer the original question, Daggerheart has just been released and has a lot of people with D&D fame behind it. The creators have also launched a marketing campaign specifically to attract D&D players, up to and including hiring D&D 5e's lead designers. Time will tell whether this will translate to long-term success, but right now the game's enjoying a popularity boost not unlike Pathfinder during the OGL crisis, so it makes sense for there to be a lot of hype around it right now.
I also agree, however, that it could very well benefit Paizo and other TTRPG designers if Daggerheart breaks more D&D players into other systems. The less monolithic D&D becomes and the more likely players are to try other tabletop systems, the better it is for the entire industry and not just WotC. Perhaps we'll see Daggerheart players also try out PF2e, and perhaps we might even end up in an environment where keen tabletop gamers have multiple systems under their belt, rather than just one they stick to for every type of game they want. D&D 5e had managed to capture a huge part of the TTRPG playerbase because it aggressively marketed itself as an accessible system fit for every type of roleplaying game, and now that it's at a low point players are finding out that there's at least one system out there that's in fact much more accessible and seemingly better at delivering cinematic roleplaying moments in combat, i.e. Daggerheart. If we enter a climate where players are keener to shop around, hopefully that'll also mean more players will come across 2e and see how good it is at delivering deep gameplay and detailed character customization.
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Thank you all for induldging in my griping. I love the folks at Critical Role, they are good people, and I'm glad for their success. and the creators I'm referring too do great work and I harbor no ill will. It was just a pebble in my shoe I had to get out, and I did it here to avoid the inevitable accusations of "proselytizing" that we get every time we point out to a D&D player "Oh, that thing you're complaining about in D&D so much that you made a house rule about it, that house rule is basically standard in PF2e"
Not kidding, I'm in a D&D campaign, and the DM gave us a primer for the new campaign, and no less than 3 house rules from his list are basically PF2e rules.
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I remember in the playtest you would build up a group of abilities that you could use, but only have 5 active at a time, with a pile you could swap in for certain resources all this was represented by have, basically, a five card hand, and then a deck you would pull specific ability cards from. Am I misremembering or did that get changed?
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Closer to the topic, as Nothing To See Here, Master Han Del of the Web, Teridax and probably others say, anything to move DnD from 'the only' ttrpg and being the synonym for it is great. It's extremely tedious.
It's also strictly better for the hobby. The less market share the company that tried to pull the OGL 1.1 scam and likes to hire the Pinkertons has, the better.
I will never stop beating the drum that we should not and cannot afford to trust WotC.
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Daggerheart is a lighter game than D&D 5e, while PF2 is a meatier one. I think more groups are looking for the former than the latter these days.Lighter than 5e? Gross.
5e doesn't even have sufficient rules to cover it's own common gameplay situations.
5e isn't really rules light. Its lighter than PF2e for sure, but it isn't rules light on its own. The problem is that the rules it has suck and are usually worse than stuff you can make up in the spot, but at that point, why bother paying them for it? I assume Daggerheart is closer to something like Savage Worlds or Fabula Ultima, which focus most of their rules to combat while the rest are usually guidelines to handle non-combat stuff.
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I personally really like rules-light systems, and while I haven't looked at Daggerheart's rules in super-great depth, several of its elements look to throw lots of narrative prompts at the players, including in combat, in a manner that seems really fresh and interesting. I get that we're all more likely to have a preference for rules-heavy systems on these forums (I certainly do) and want to be protective of Pathfinder, but I don't think the two systems necessarily exist in tension with each other, let alone in competition. If this new system turns out to be good to use, I'd readily include it alongside 2e for players wanting a lighter bite of fantasy tabletop gaming. If it means those players become more open-minded to trying out different tabletop systems, or even that some of them end up wanting to sink their teeth into a more in-depth game like Pathfinder, all the better for us all.
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Oh, I definitely want to agree in advocating for rules light systems, they serve a different purpose and are more about the narrative and can be better for different times of stories. And I think that Daggerheart is trying to be a bridge between rules-light and rules-heavy systems.
and yeah, i do have a preference for rules-heavy systems, but I would also like to play a rules light system sometime to get a feel for it.
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Yeah calling 5e rules-lite is a bit of an abuse of the term. 5e wants to be both rules-lite and crunchy at the same time and cannot make up its mind as to which one it is. So you get stuff like the gold ecomony being used as a balancing tool, whilst DMs are given zero advice as to how to handle this.
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Wait, is it Festivus?!?
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What grinds my gears the most is when, after all this time, people don't even bother to distinguish between PF1 and PF2. Makes my eye twitch.
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Hasbro is mining D&D for cash, that will eventually kill it unless someone else buys it.
My issue with rules light is that it rarely properly represents certain things, they all have certain assumptions about your character and going outside that box rarely works. It's hard enough in 5e and PF2 to be large and have that be a meaningful part of your character beyond visuals. So long as there's mechanics that fit my strange characters I would be happy with lite or crunchy rules, there just needs to be lots of options.
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so in the rules lite games I've seen (using engines like PbtA) being large wouldn't necessarily be represented, but you would have an experience like "Towering over Everyone" that would have a modifier attached to it, and for any situation where your towering over everyone could be related, like trying to intimidate someone, or seeing someone in a crowd, or however you can justify to your GM, you would role that experience, otherwise you'd have some basic stats the GM would ask you to roll.
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The thing is, being large doesn't really matter in a world of super powerful characters. In the real world a human can't really kill a bear with their own hands because the bear is both larger and stronger. In D&D / PF even a non-monk can easily kill a bear with their own hands because we assume its fantasy and that the PCs are pretty much superheroes. In this reality, being large or small is mostly and aesthethic thing, which I think its perfectly fine.
But like Zoken44 said, those kind of "circumstancial" bonuses are usually handed by the GM in rules light systems. Using Fabula Ultima as a example, in that system if you want to intimidate someone you could argue being bigger should contribute to the result, so you could spend a fabula point to reroll the result if you want to without GM input. A ton of rules light systems have guidelines for the GM to grant similar benefits on the spot as well.
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My issue with rules light is that it rarely properly represents certain things, they all have certain assumptions about your character and going outside that box rarely works. It's hard enough in 5e and PF2 to be large and have that be a meaningful part of your character beyond visuals. So long as there's mechanics that fit my strange characters I would be happy with lite or crunchy rules, there just needs to be lots of options.
Yeah, this is fundamentally the tradeoff between rules-light and rules-heavy games: at the extreme rules-light end of the spectrum, you have playing pretend, where there are no rules and you just make everything up as you go, but when there are no constraints that force you to consider a specific subset of options with meaningful tradeoffs, roleplaying ends up being pretty arbitrary, and because you have to come up with your own narrative prompts, the game is only as imaginative as its participants. The more functioning rules you add, the more constraints and narrative prompts those rules generate, the more meaningful choices you can make, and the more you can drill into detail where your decisions have well-defined implications in your game, all at a cost in initial accessibility.
Rules-light games tend to be much more accessible, and often have an engine that's tightly-focused around a specific theme, but also in my opinion tend to lack the same depth and longevity as rules-heavier systems. That's not a bad thing, and those games are excellent for one-shots and short-term adventure when you want to try a new system out or decompress from a longer-running campaign, but it does mean that a lot of the mechanics rules-heavy systems deal with in depth tend to resume themselves to "just figure it out between you and/or the storyteller". Fine for a simpler, shorter game or if you're sitting at a table of experienced improvisers who know how to bounce off of each other, less fine if you want to make deeper decisions whose consequences flow naturally and consistently from the rules.
With that said, "just figure it out" isn't exclusive to rules-light systems, and I remember a certain wizard game using pretty much exactly that as its sole guidance for creating planets in a spacefaring sourcebook it was selling for fifty bucks. In this respect, Daggerheart using a simpler ruleset doesn't necessarily mean it'll lose out on depth compared to D&D 5e.
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All those flaws about watching people play PF2 also apply to DnD, which is what Critical Role launched itself with. I liken playing PF (both versions) to half chess and half improv, and if one leans into the latter (perhaps via editing) then skilled roleplayers can surely make enjoyable PF2 videos. They would have minimal focus on the game's mechanical differences so I'm unsure what a spectator would gain about the game itself, though if they were playing explicitly in Golarion with some of the more colorful NPCs, maybe even some iconics, then maybe that'd be something...at least to those into such things, of which I'm not (unless I get to participate). Just need PF2-playing pro actors to step up. :)
I suppose if really interested in showing both sides then one could have a camera on the battlemat, maybe numbers running down the side or even health bars, practically like a Twitch stream w/ group improv. Lotta work, but hey, some people have watched 1000s of rounds of Dust II both to enjoy and to analyze.
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Something that also might be a factor in this is that, frankly, the engagement I've seen on Pathfinder 2e videos is awful.
Almost every single video I've seen about 2e has had comments that ignore 99% of everything OP is saying, in order to nitpick them misreading or misremembering how a feat works.
And yeah, of course that's going to happen, Pathfinder 2e is a game that specifically rewards the kind of people with brains who latch onto those tiny details. (Y'know. Us. The kind of people who care enough to post on Paizo forums. We're not the normal ones)
But it also means that these comments are being made instead of, say "That's a fascinating point you made OP! Let me address and engage with it". Or even a comment like "Hey, I liked the video! Keep up the good work!".
If you don't believe me, check out ThrabenU_Gaming. Amongst a sea of dry, poorly made videos where people just read feats at a camera, Phil stands above the rest. His videos are in-depth, unique, and fun- and every single comment will pick ONE thing they felt that he did wrong and focus solely on that.
I guess if you don't have completely encyclopedic system mastery, you just shouldn't talk at all? (And if you don't believe me- he tries posting on these very forums, and everyone here just complained that the videos were too long!)
Ok, so if you ignore videos ABOUT Pathfinder 2e, what about actual plays using Pathfinder 2e?
...Why on earth would you ever use Pathfinder 2e for an actual play? Everything about PF2E that makes it more fun to PLAY kind of makes for terrible radio- from the modular characters building (that the audience doesn't engage with) to be map-focused tactical combat (that the audience doesn't see or play).
Narrative Declaration is a gem to watch and i don't care who i need to fist fight in the parking lot to say it.
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It doesn't help that the PF2 content creators have the charisma of stale bread. The only creator I can stand to watch that does PF2e content is Jacob from XP to Level 3, and he did a dramatisation of a test encounter he ran. The comments were all over him for a couple of rule mistakes and the encounter being too hard, even though he never presented any negativity about the system in that video.
If the PF2 community wants its flowers, we have to be better at not being a!#~~#&s when people dare to play our game and get things wrong.
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I think that table consensus is great for any system and helps improve everyone's experience when everyone is like minded, however when that's required for someone's idea to work then that's a problem for people like me who rely on random online groups.
I haven't played any PBtA, I've only played Overlight and read the rules for several other games that all seemed very theme focused. While few games give much room to be non standard humanoid, it feels like rules heavy games are more likely to give you tools to express that experience without having to rely on someone else.
I don't watch any TTRPG content creators other then the Mythkeeper for Golarian lore, so I don't really know what people are looking for in that regard. One of the live plays I watch recently did a game of Lancer while a few members were away, everyone was new to it and seemed to enjoy it. It's not something I would be very interested in but several people in chat were very into it and knowledgeable. They have also played a few other systems as short specials and that seems like a good way to expose people to new systems.
It's not likely to make a lot of engaging discussions unless the content is about the social aspects of the game, so I think that's likely the common outcome.
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Being large, being small, having tendrils instead of hands, just things that differ from the standard. Centaur for example simply can't do several typical adventuring type activities, like climbing a ladder or crawling. Hand waving those differences away for ease of use does a disservice to the very core of the identity of those differences IMO.
Required for it to work just means if there's rules for it then you know you can do it, instead of requiring buy in from your storyteller.
PBtA "experiences" is a new thing I've only seen in daggerheart, none of the other rules light systems I've seen have an open ended rule like that. Most tend to be sticking very close to a specific theme and thus the rules are more like a board game with very set options.
Not that I think PF2 or many of the other systems I've seen do a good job of having those rules, being physically nonstandard is usually seen as a problem to fix for ease of use. I love the variety of options in Rifts for example but that system leaves much to be desired.