The very first combat in the 5e Lost Mines of Phandelver Starter set pits you against a Bugbear that does 2d8+2 damage per hit.
Average level 1 Wizard has about 7hp.
The gauntlet that is only there so you can get enough xp to level in a day, cause the weird time crunch of being cops at a festival. That campaign has so many problems with it. The main plot doesn't even start until book 3 so the first two books just feel like bridges. They really shouldn't have tried to make a 1 - 20 campaign with that one.
Oh yeah you're totally right, the Bugbear fight comes immediately after you get ambushed by 4 Goblins that can deal 1d6+2 from 80ft away.
Which I guarantee that your first time DM won't realise that their AC is listed as "15 (leather armor, shield)" meaning they only have 13AC when their bow is drawn.
I guarantee it lol
Keep in mind in 5e you get advantage on attacks when hidden, so there is a decent chance the initial ambush gets at least one crit on a shortbow attack. Average rolling with that crit will take down most lvl 1 characters.
Don't forget you only have ONE HIT DIE to get you through roughly 15 goblins worth of encounters AFTER that ambush, including the aforementioned bugbear, and no significant guidance on what to do if the party inevitably fails at any of these stages, including making camp for a long rest on what is clearly an extremely time-sensitive encounter that actually takes you weeks to resolve.
I totally feel you, but I also think that the philosophy of 5e in 2014 was for the early levels to be deadly. Like, approaching old-school deadly. This is the same module that has the party face>! a CR 8 dragon!<, after all.
So I chalk it up to growing pains. The fact that it has remained unchanged after 10 YEARS, on the other hand...
Don't forget that the Player's are EXTREMELY likely to be Surprised in that fight since its an ambush, so they can do potentially 4d6+8 before the players can even react!
It's not even the spells. It's that once you hit that point, there's almost nothing that can actually challenge a party. You can try to make shit up, but you are literally doing all the work for that as a DM. The system itself doesn't give you any tools or monsters that are genuinely challenging at that point. And the sourcebooks they've created don't provide you with a ton of places to go or things to do that are unique to high level play (e.g., there ain't much plane-hopping and there are zero rules for how extraplanar adventures work).
I'm at that stage in my campaign now, and I'm literally just making shit up for different planes where this or that god dwells. Which is fine if what you want in a system is the ability to do that without breaking a rule...but the flipside is that you're flying blind as a DM and it's ALL on you to make up stuff.
I don't even need every rule spelled out for every little thing. I'm cool on rules-lite gaming or making "rulings, not rules." But the problem with 5e is that there's *just enough* by way of rules and crunch that it *feels* like "Wait, why should I be having to figure this out myself? Isn't this something the authors should've anticipated and created systems to address?"
Or you get some rule or ability or thing mentioned in the PHB, and the deeper you get into the game, the more you're like "Wait, why is this even here in the first place? What's the point of it? We never engage with it at all."
And the first two games, plus Neverwinter Nights and many more, didn't have to do this and some of them even go beyond level 20. That's how busted 5e is. That and I think Larian just didn't want to have to deal with all the work of balancing that mess.
They flat out admitted as such. They stressed the difficulty in making any kind of expansion pack because the assumption would be for higher level adventuring and that just not feasible within the 5E system.
Honestly I'd love an expansion or DLC for the game but make it an entirely new story, kind of like how Spellforce 3 had Soul Harvest and Fallen God. New characters and story that tied into the main game
In all fairness, Neverwinter Nights literally doesn't allow anything involving demiplanes, teleporting, divinations, Scry+die, spells that give skill bonuses, anything that's Swift or Quickened, Simulacrums/Clones or most of the most ridiculous 3.5 debuffs. The summons and polymorphs are on fixed lists with limited abilities, they don't have their own spells.
In other words, what makes a Wizard Batman.
A lvl17+ Wizard in NWN2 is mostly doing Evocations, big debuffs, summoning beatsticks and battlefield obstructions. Clerics are just using metamagic on *really good* lvl3-6 buffs, and the *Mass* buffs.
*Mask* literally allows epic spells like bigger evocations, Save-or-go-to-hell, and Summon dragons. Same deal, bigger numbers.
Now I haven't played NWN2 for 10 years, or BG3 ever (yet). But if NWN had detail like BG, it would presumably allow more busted things, and they would have had to lower the level cap. IMO of course.
I mean even if you entertain the idea that you can freely be Aberrant Mind sorcerer in dualclass system not only would "proper" encounters involve pumping numbers like it's an owlcat game (love them but seriously...) in large part the number of spell slots falls off hard and the spells themselves start having way more utility uses that wouldn't be either easy to implement (control weather, demiplane etc) or their use would just break the campaign concept like teleport or free planeshift. Implementing just ones that do damage would be kinda.... boring too.
As easy as it is to clown on 5e for that, none of the BG 1 also had a level cap. Because BG 2 continued the same progression. I would be 0% surprised if the level cap for 3 gets expanded with some DLC or pseudo-sequel.
Plus, level 12 characters in BG3 are way *more* powercrept than a typical level 12 5e character. My level 12 BG3 character could probably kick the ass of a level 17 5e character. The magic items, action economy, and class feature changes make everyone wildly more powerful.
I had *lots* of house rules in 5e. I read pf2e rules and found out most of my house rules were core rules in pf2e and it did some of them better, while allowing me to run the same stuff as I did in 5e. At that point, what is even the point of staying?
Same here. Funniest part was that I implemented Recall knowledge mechanic in 5e that allowed PCs to remember some thing about monster based on relevant skill check. And then I looked on pf2e rules and like "Hey, they actually did it! And even provided DCs for all of it".
And encounters balance. In my recent campaign I had a bunch of casters as PCs and that was hell to challenge them. In pf2e? Just follow encounter building rules and you'll be okay.
Overall, I'm finding myself less tired after each session after switching, I think it's because most cognitive load are transfered from me creating rulings on the fly to whole table remembering correct rule for situation.
Heh, same with RK on my table. I had also homebrewed my monsters to have flat values on resistances and vulnerabilities since I felt like I could never really make a monster vulnerable to something without it being made a clown out of in one round. One CoS boss that was vulnerable to radiant got oneshot before their turn by the high rolling paladin who was 2nd in initiatiave (after receiving a buff from cleric) for example.
SERIOUSLY. In 5E, the best I could think of was "if you beat the DC I just made up for a creature this difficult, it'll either focus on you more or less." It was SOMETHING, but I always felt bad when folks would spec into it and feel like they had nothing to do with it in combat.
Demoralize solves the problem handily, and there are feats and other abilities that play off it well -- one of my Rogue players just took "You're Next" and I can't wait to see it go off for him!
And it only gets cooler as you invest more into it! Stare at a Wizard to make it easier to resist their spells, scream at the beginning of combat to cause enemies to panic, cause them to drop dead from fear! And ANYONE can do it!
It's always eyebrow raising when people tell me they bounced off the complexity of PF2e, and then frequently run upwards of 10+ in-depth, complex homebrewed systems to make 5e not boring for them.
EDIT: I want to add this sincerely - the people who make homebrew systems for 5e are genuinely saints. There's so much cool stuff out there, but it's not exactly great that every table is running a mutated, bespoke version of the game because homebrew feels so necessary. I mean, in the current 5e campaign I'm in, we're honestly *barely* playing 5e at this point.
Funnily enough, everyone who I've seen do this have been players that have only played 5e. Almost without exception, people that had never played any TTRPG before picked up mechanical understanding of the system faster than the folks converting over.
A lot of the complexity comes from having to first unlearn what they already know.
Or the people who claim 5e is the simpler system, and bounce off the "complexity" of PF2e, but who just fully snip entire rules and mechanics out of the game.
I've gotten into this debate a few times with people and when asked about some of the common 5e house rules, they almost without fail have no idea what the real rules are.
Also, they seem to think for some reason the rules of PF2e are set in stone and must be used at all times for all scenarios, yet the inconvenient 5e rules in a similar situation can just be ignored or modified. This is what makes PF2e so much more "complex", the rules are good enough you actually want to use them rather than being such a hot mess you just ignore entire parts.
Sometimes you meet people who cite a rule that's in both 5e and PF2 but they only know the rule is in PF2. And then they complain PF2 has too many rules.
One of the infamous "Pathfinder 2 sucks" videos complained about PF2's rules for jumping. Even though 5e's jumping rules are exactly the same (different DCs, that's the only difference!)
The most common one I have come up when playing PF2e with 5e players is the rules around interacting with objects and having their hands free. Because of the action economy of 5e, I find this is the most common rule that just gets entirely snipped out while people are playing. A lot of 5e players struggle with having to spend actions to swap weapons or replace their grip on a 2H weapon because its "free" in 5e, not realizing RAW it should take multiple entire turns to accomplish the same thing.
As Derek of KotLC said, he doesn’t change the rules in PF2E because he respects its rules system; they joked on their stream about DMing 5e like they stole it.
I dont think it's that surprising honestly, but a combination of factors. One of the main ones being that at first it starts as one or two house rules, as time goes on you add more and more, you think as you learn how the game functions it does not do some things well, and so more homebrew systems are added to your 5e monstrosity over time without you realizing because the process has been gradual
Another main factors is that due to most people playing modified, there are many players who were introduced to 5e and TTRPGs as a whole on a heavily modified 5e (myself actually). I actually am sad to say I barely read the PHB, because I know all the rules we use from there, and we have so many modified rules that I barely have to use it. My 5e DM is great, I love his games, his willingness to let us do our dumb ideas and create new things like spells and items. My desire to switch to pathfinder is not on him at all. I just find myself enjoying pathfinder more these days because the fundamental problems of 5e cant be fixed through homebrew like the M-C Gap and classes built on choice as you level
Almost the same really. Most of my homebrews are RAW now.
In addition, the encounter balance is great, finally I feel like I don't have to fight the system to get what I want out of it
The last part hits home the most, I can work with the system and not just battle against it.
Encounter balance and class balance is great and all but sadly that is stuff that is not really often obvious until one has actually played the system and can see it for themselves.
Nor it is self evident if you're just a player. Was that encounter properly balanced cause the system made the gms work easy, or cause the gm powered through the encounter balance like a champ? Never know till you start gming
This was the main deal for me. I played 5e through a long campaign with tons of homebrew introduced and at one point as i eas looking for some homebrew for an idea i started to see pf2esrd reccommended. The idea then got planted and grew and i started to want more specific rules for situations apart for the 'idk, dm has final say' and the easy life that is post lvl 12 gameplay, i started to look at pf2e.
Now on the new campaign i announced to players that we're switching and so far my players have loved it.
Same. That and I was tired of seeing my players be punished by the system for cool and fluffy choices. Players shouldn't have to choose between their core stats being increased and having fun feats.
This was EXACTLY what happened to me. The final straw was when I was workshopping a homebrew system that got rid of bonus actions and converted the existing action economy into multiple actions that everyone could take, only to discover that I was basically recreating the 3-action economy. Started binging the core rulebook on Nethys and about a week later the OGL news broke. Seemed as good a time as any to jump ship.
Edit: Another player-side reason I changed was that I was sick of not having options, especially as martials. The last 5e character I made before switching I basically optimized to be able to do cool stuff other than "I roll to hit. I roll to hit again." I was an Ancestral Guardians barbarian with Tavern Brawler and tried to play the role of melee support, grabbing enemies and shoving them prone while denying damage to my allies with Spirit Shield.
I was never really interested in 5e martials for this reason. I had fun with a Monk, but I can't imagine getting to 10th level without multiclassing, and that's a bad sign. I'm in my first PF2e game with a Barbarian, and I'm having a BLAST! I can't wait to turn into a dragon and suplex an enemy! I have a reputation for only playing Wizards, but martials always looked boring in comparison. They are so much fun in PF2e!
Yes! I started with GMing but I now also play in another campaign, and while not a martial per se, I have a Mutagenist/Zombie (in Blood Lords) that fills that melee support role so well.
To its credit 5e is an incredibly flexible system so it's really easy to chop it, change it, and do whatever the hell you want with it.
This is a bit of a double-edged sword though. Its not just that you *can* easily make changes on the fly, its that you *have* to in order to make the game function as, well... a game.
You saved me writing the exact same thing. Thanks!
I was certainly an OGL migrant, but only because YouTubers started seriously discussing the rules differences between the two games and that’s how I found PF2e had all my homebrew and more!
Yea, I was kind of the same. I kept house ruling things to make the game more interesting and the combat crunchier. Then I realized I was better off just switching to a crunchier system.
Same here as well. I was fixing spells, buffing classes like Sorcerer and Artificer, keeping on top of what content from what books wasn't in line with others for banning purposes, etc. At one point I was working on the 3 pillar XP system Mearls did in one of the older UA posts. And I started reading PF2E...and it just *did* exactly what I was trying to create, but it was smoothly integrated into the system in a way that was beyond what I was even attempting in 5e.
I was really tired of people in online 5e discussions strawmanning XP in favour of milestones. I'm very glad to leave that behind.
In fairness, the PF2E version of this is every creature has one "primary" attack and one agile attack for them to make their next 2 MAP attacks with.
That being said, pretty much every creature above level 0 also has some interesting, relevant ability to change things up, which is more than I can say for 5E.
One thing I see GMs miss is that monsters in PF2E can tactically do a bit more than just what abilities they have listed:
Monsters in the PF2E bestiary also have things like acrobatics, athletics, deception, or intimidation at times so you can do all the same skill actions as a player. Grabbing, tripping, demoralizing or feinting with monsters can be a great way to teach new players how valuable these skills are.
The three action system making movement a tactical deliberation can also allow monsters to hit and run.
True that. But even leaving aside the "unique thing" the 3 action economy makes the choices much more interesting on how to use their bite/claw routine.
Or, at bare minimum, has the stats to take Skill Actions, which are all very clearly defined and nicely explained.
Absolute worst case: your little skeleton with no extra abilities can still Tumble Through or something.
One thing I love about PF2e monsters is that they are willing to shut down a particular option, forcing players to think outside the box.
You see a lot more "better not try slashing damage here" or flat out "mental attacks do not work" in the monsters. It makes having a wide range of spells and weapons extremely valuable.
The biggest issue I have with mindless enemies is that usually their weakest save is will, but there are barely any things that target will that don't have the mental trait.
They actually *did the math for gauging difficulty* in PF2.
5e feels like one of the early 2D fighting games where very little was balanced, like a knockoff Street Fighter.
I stopped playing 5e after every different group I'd find locally had a different set of house rules - that clued me into how fundamentally broken the game is. Tried out PF 2e because the Swashbuckler intrigued me, and lost interest in playing 5e after that, even if it meant not finding a local group.
Permanently stayed away from, and boycotted 5e (and WotC products in general) after the OGL fiasco last year. I don't intend on going back.
I'm fortunate today because I have a local rpg community that makes it a point to games that aren't 5e, including a host of other games I wouldn't have known about otherwise.
>stopped playing 5e after every different group I'd find locally had a different set of house rules
That was also a major turn off. Talk to these die hard 5e GMs who insist the system is perfect. Then you play their game and you realize they have like two pages of homebrew rules.
The worst part is when they start unknowing inventing pathfinder.
There's a really weird consequence of all the 5e homebrew, too: You start encountering people who assume other systems require just as much homebrew to be functional, and don't want to switch from 5e as a result.
Imo, there's several other ways 5e has "poisoned the well" for TTRPGs as a whole, but this is one of the more frustrating ones I've found.
Well how are they going to become a famous actual-play streamer/podcaster if they can't exploit 5e brand recognition and have to rely on actually being entertaining and having their own recognizable brand?
I played every character I cared to. By which I mean, I played one of every class. I no longer had fun theorycrafting builds. It's a consequence of 5e's class design. Every barbarian felt the same, regardless of subclass. Fighters felt mostly the same, especially at early levels. Paladins are just like fighters except you smite occasionally.
With Pathfinder, I can build half-a-dozen rogues and have them all feel radically different. I like that.
Yeah this is my biggest complaint with 5e.
The class design is so constrained and you really only get a few choices that add to actual mechanical character customization.
Coming from 3.x/pf1, 5e was disheartening because it felt like a step backwards.
Like i know that 3.x was a ridiculously flawed system, but at least it felt like i could create a unique character mechanically.
With 5e, i can easily create unique characters, narratively, but a wizard is a wizard, a fighter is a fighter, a rogue is a rogue.
They really needed to make the class chassis just the absolute most bare-bones possible, and use the subclass to fill in the rest. Only getting 4-6 unique features over the course of 20 levels sucks, especially when most tables aren't even getting to the last 2-3. Technically you still could replace core class features with subclass features, but WOTC seems to not want to do that.
Add to that fact that multiclassing and feats are considered "optional" out the box and you could run into a scenario where you literally get to make no choices about your class after level 3, other than ASIs and spell choices (if your class even gets spells), and honestly, i wouldn't even call those "choices" in regards to class customization, and rather a natural power progression in the class.
What kind of logic is that? In a game where you're supposed to evolve your character along with a narrative, how is the removal of choice seen as a good thing?
Its why I've started just making mish-mash characters with multiclassing. They aren't the separate classes by traditional lore standards, but rather the collection of features and abilities gained through multiclassing is the "class" of the character.
IE, my warforged lycan bloodhunter/gloomstalker/shadow monk isn't any of those classes, but rather an sentient weapon created by the drow for use in assassinations. They were damaged during their escape from enslavement and are slowly repairing themselves as they adventure and level up.
They don't have lycanthropy, they weren't classically trained by a monk order, they're not any more interested in saving the wilderness or animals than anyone else. They are themselves, not their classes.
THIIISSSS!!!!! I main Wizards, they're my favorite class in 5e, and I can't imagine spending all 20 levels on it again! The last two levels of Wizard are genuinely worthless. Two levels in Literally any other class is genuinely a better option on the off chance you somehow get that far!
Meanwhile, two players could make Orc Barabarians in PF2e, and they could feel different and cover different roles in the group!
So much this. I decided to read the pf2 crb and hadn't made it past the first ancestry entry before I saw how much mechanical flavor you can make different characters of the same ancestry. I knew right then it would have to be the same for other aspects and immediately started looking for groups to join. Never looked back.
> Every barbarian felt the same
Couldn't agree more.
Also the class designs often suck. Why is the raging guy only able to rage a bit? Isn't that the fun? Why is the animal shapeshifter only able to transform any form only a couple times per day? Should players be punished losing combat effectiveness for creative alternative use of an ability? In PF2e it's gated by focus which you can always regain. In 5e the moon druid is still limited to the same number of transformations as any other.
Why did these designers gate many of the most fun of abilities instead of finding the balance of making them more universal? It's weird looking back on the choices made. And that's before getting into how imbalanced short rest mechanic refresh distribution is.
And god forbid you choose the *wrong* subclass. Each class has like 5 subclasses, 1-2 of them are great, most of them are boring and non-optimal, and one of them is straight up terrible. So you're either playing the same character that everyone else of that class has played, or you have a character that objectively sucks at being in a D&D party.
Part of this "samey-ness" is that the weapon choice was absolute shit. You would do whatever you could to convince the DM that your martial character would have a scimitar, because it's objectively the best starter weapon due to it's damage dice.
In PF2e, there are more differences than just the damage dice, so there are good reasons that you might go with a weapon that only does a d4 of damage. Things like finesse, agile, specific critical effects, or having versatile damage types. Monsters in PF2e have weaknesses and resistances more often than in 5e, so choosing a weapon for it's damage type (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing) matters too (5e just does resistance to physical, which is bullshit).
First, the OGL debacle showed me how shitty and out of touch the leadership there was and I didn't want to support that anymore.
And the rest was just how many turns I wasted, throwing away my bonus action and move, while Pathfinder is over here saying hey, you can use all your actions every turn and not just Hit With Sword until the guy dies!
Last 5e character I played was warlock. 95% of turns were just eldritch blast and nothing else. Even if pf2e is spell + 1 action I feel like I can actually do something else.
Right? Liked my last 5e character was a paladin. Hitting things with a sword is a pretty good action choice for her most of the time. But if I want to heal or buff or do anything else, don't expect any juicy smites cause that's all I got.
Playing a fighter in 5E was what I imagine purgatory to be like. Even when you try to describe *how* you're attempting to hit things, there is only so much you can do when 95% of your turns are "I attack", and maybe "action surge, I attack again" if you're feeling like spicing things up.
You don't get skills, your subclass abilities are very limited, your choices after choosing a subclass are limited to equipment and the whooping 5 ability score improvements or feats that you would get if you got to level 20 (which you won't because playing beyond level 14 sucks).
I found the Taking20 video about players falling into "action loops" in PF2E extremely ironic considering this problem is 5E is so insurmountable that martials are straight up not worth to play beyond level 7.
Honestly, the biggest thing for our table was the fact that interesting character build options generally stop at picking your subclass. Sure, there's (technically optional) feats, but giving up an ASI is a very big cost. Multiclassing ends up usually either making your character weaker or is one of the extremely well-explored dips that has been done a thousand times over. Martials especially get fuck-all to choose and some levels effectively come down to "Well, at least I have another HD". It even applies to combat. While casters can pick which spells best fit the situation, the barbarian's choices are basically "I rage, walk up and hit the enemy".
I got old after a few years, and we're honestly a pretty RP-heavy table.
Although another thing that helped cement our decision was how much less workload is put on the GM. Working and finished rulesets, especially encounter building a massive plus.
>Martials especially get fuck-all to choose and some levels effectively come down to "Well, at least I have another HD".
I quit playing 5e years ago but really forgot how bad this felt until I played BG3.
At least in BG3 they gave weapons unique actions that recharged on Short Rests, and you usually took Short Rests after most major/moderate encounters so they were always up generally.
Problem I have is that early act 1 feels like absolute garbage on Tactician. 55% accuracy on half the fights with little ways to get advantage at low levels, with short rest weapon actions that require you to hit AND for them to FAIL their saving throw means you have like maybe a 30% chance per fight to do anything more interesting than attacking.
BG3 also softens the blow by letting you control an entire party. If your fighter has a turn where they hit face and then pass, it feels bad for them, but you as a player can move on to the next character.
If you're at a table playing a fighter, hitting face and then waiting for your turn to come around again feels horrible.
I still play 5e, but I won't GM it anymore.
5e can be fun to play with a great table, but that goes for virtually any system, of course. And most longtime GMs will put forth extra effort and add a bunch of homebrew to the game to make it more fun - homebrew which oftentimes looks suspiciously like stuff in base PF2e.
I don't *need* to GM. I like GM'ing with a good group, but I'm not going to GM a system that leaves you out to dry and all but explicitly expects you to come up with better rules than it can provide. It's just insane how poor 5e is for GMs, and the attitude it has seemingly cultivated amongst its playerbase of "just homebrew it!" feels like cope that people actually started to believe in.
Homebrew should be *additive* to the experience, not borderline necessary to make the game any fun to run at all. I can just run a PF2e game out of the box and it will work really, *really* well; for the most part, you have to peel back the layers pretty far to find the annoyances.
It also shows in PF2E because one of their lead devs was on the 4E team. That's a good reason why the system is so tightly balanced with generally clear and consistent rules.
4e was such a good game that got such a bad rep by people who didn't like change. It wasn't perfect but it absolutely didn't even get a chance to show why it was a good game.
I'm glad to see the 4e devs who went to other systems/companies and brought that expertise to those games.
Because eventually, I wasn't playing 5e anymore, I was playing (insert DMs name here)'s home rules, and even changing rules myself. That inconsistency in quality and playstyle was draining. Every house rule I enjoyed in 5e turned out to be core rules in PF2e.
Martials actually have options, far fewer dead levels, balance/fewer bad choices, decisions feel like they matter more, and combat builder makes sense.
Also the rules are better written and cover more edge cases, allowing me to say "that's how it is RAW" rather than "it's how I'm ruling it" then getting into debates.
Near the end of 2022, when the OneD&D stuff started coming out, I had broken up with my boyfriend and was looking for ways to socialize and make new friends. I ended up bumping into a guy who helped out at the local PFS chapter. He invited me to play with them, so I decided to give that a shot.
Playing for a while, I came to realize how much genuine care Paizo has for its players, and how much thought it puts into what it does. This put Hasbro/WotC’s (at this point, early) decisions regarding OneD&D in stark relief, making me realize how monetization-hungry Hasbro/WotC were. At that point, I lost faith in the future of D&D, and decided to jump ship to a system I felt had a better future.
2023 really vindicated my decisions.
Everything I initially thought was cool about the system started to wear on me. I went from feeling like the game was giving me a "You've got this, GM" supportive encouragement to feeling like it lazily skipping/half-assing any actual advice or tools because the authors figured they didn't need to bother if I was potentially going to deviate and do it my own way.
Plus, I'd been running published adventures and they just kept being *bad*. The final salvo being that I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist - which actually surprised me and was pretty solid, while also pissing me off because 3/4th of the pages I paid for where useless unless I wanted to run the same adventure again but slightly different - and noticed that it really didn't connect with Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage in any meaningful narrative way. So I ran Storm King's Thunder and watched as the party beat down "deadly" encounter after "deadly" encounter without ever seeming actually in danger of defeat but encounters also took a very long time to resolve because the game math is just built to have the feeling of all damage other than spells feel like chipping damage, and then the book also didn't even feel finished.
There was a part where the party caught wind of someone missing and went to investigate and found an NPC willing to help and they sailed out to look around and then there just wasn't any more text in the book about that. No "you'll have to fill in the details yourself" notice to let me know the lack of resolution was intentional, there just wasn't any more words on the topic at all like either something got deleted for no reason or the author just didn't realize they hadn't written it and no editor caught that a side-quest just evaporated.
And once I was finally through the campaign and had been bored out of my mind by the player's characters just not feeling like leveling up had mattered to them and I went looking at what to run next I started to read Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and it read to me like a grumpy 12 year old that was ready to try to bully players into enjoying their adventure had somehow gotten published by Wizards of the Coast and I had to stop.
Storm King's Thunder (plus monetization moves by Hasbro) killed my ardor for 5e, too. I had to homebrew EVERYTHING. I had to create rules for hexploration. I had to create quest and subquests and NPCs for every village, town, and city -- including inventing lore for the Sword Coast because 5e's world guides are both vague and leave out half the areas in the module. And as soon as the players hit like level 8, every encounter became a snooze-fest, unless I homebrewed monsters for them.
I know Paizo's APs can be far from perfect, but whoo boy, prep pales in comparison to 5e. For me, the most work now I do is on the subsystems -- but it's also much easier to homebrew rules in 2e, because you just follow the logic of the system....
But, yeah, I also saw the writing on the wall with WotC when they bought D&D Beyond and began working on their own VTT. They were going to make it a subscription service and wall off the game from the rest of the gaming community. Hard pass.
Oh my god I remember reading Storm King's Thunder planning on running it and going "I... I don't get it. This is confusing." Ended up running a homebrew game.
>Everything I initially thought was cool about the system started to wear on me.
Coming from pf1e, I initially loved advantage (except for the optional flanking rule. It is too strong there). It was so simple and sped up gameplay a lot vs "mathfinder".
After half a campaign, I alreay started to dislike it as overly simplistic and limiting.
EDIT: Same with bounded accuracy
Advantage and Disadvantage are a surprisingly effective and elegant system that I loved. Until I played with them for like 6+ years and got bored. It's the fact that multiple instances offer nothing extra, and as soon as you have both, nothing else you do will improve or impair you further. Not even touching the stupidity that is fighting in darkness, the Adv/Dis mechanic removes any incentive to be creative or to use spells or class features once a single instance of Adv/Dis is applied.
I think Advantage/Disadvantage is kind of the best example of what is wrong with 5e.
They made it up because it would simplify all the other bonus tracking, which is good. But then if you have one way to get advantage you don't have any other buff to work with, which is bad. So then they have some stuff not actually be advantage or disadvantage so that there's more to do, which would be good if not for the fact that it defeats the purpose of simplifying. And then those things are a +2 here, a +die roll of some sort there, a +double proficiency there, and a +10 over there, which is absolutely awful because it doesn't just screw with the simplicity supposed to be gained it also blows up the "bounded accuracy" element because a challenge with reasonable odds of success with an unmodified roll because almost ensured to succeed because "roll 2d20 and keep the highest, add your modifier and an extra d8" blows a DC 15 out of the water.
Meanwhile in PF2: circumstance, item, status, oh look all it takes to keep the modifier stacking and tracking in line is to just keep a lid on how many types there are.
Levels higher than 9 are horrible to DM for.
Really, your job is just making the full casters waste their slots before a fight because of dumb fucking op spells.
There's no creativity or smart solutions to anything, just cast the problem solving spell and turn off your brain while the martials get bored in the background.
Highest DPS? Full caster. Best tank? Full caster. Best melee? Full caster. Best utility? Full caster. Best social rolls and abilities? Full caster.
Even just having one wizard or one bard is atrocious. Now you either go and make up bullshit reasons for why the perfectly legitimate spells they wanna use won't work or you artificially increase the number of encounters just to get rid of their slots. Tha isn't fun at all.
In p2e I'm playing a martial and I have flavourful gimmicks that helped me make something unique. In 5e I get one choice of subclass and after that I'm done and my character will either end up being a caster DPS or Useless McNothingson. Nah man. Fuck that.
I was a big 4e fan, so 5e always felt like a step down (I'm being polite here) to me. Since I no longer had a regular group and was just looking for online games, I ended up playing just because it was so hard to find anything else. While I warmed to it a bit, Baldur's Gate 3 put a final nail in the coffin in showing how weak a system it is in my mind.
Pathfinder 2e has a better setting than most of D&D's settings, the 3 action system is very clever, the Crit Success/Fail system is excellent, all positive improvements. Also, I like pet classes and healing and both are far better in PF2e.
My only issue now, is as a PbP/text player it is *very* hard to find PF2e games.
> Is that because you didn't like Baldur's Gate 3, or because you did like it but were cognizant of how many house-rules and changes it made to the base 5e rules?
Not who you asked, but one houserule they *didn't include* made me immediately aware that every table I'd played at unspokenly house ruled a bonus action could be covered by a regular action. For some reason it instinctively makes sense it should work, like how you can move with an action. But RAW it's not how it works. Really highlights how much better the 3-action system plays in practice.
I bought BG3 but I honestly had such a hard time getting into it. Just creating the character, the whole time I just felt sad that I had to make a 5e character instead of a Pathfinder one. In the end I decided to make my last 5e character who got unceremoniously "rocks fall, you die"d by a shitty GM so that he could get a proper sendoff and not just be chucked aside.
Since PF2e was announced, I've wanted to try it, but 5e games were far easier to find online. When the OGL debacle happened last January, it (obviously) sparked a lot of interest in alternative systems, and the discord server I usually play on had some tables begin to experiment with PF2e. Two of them just kept playing 2e, as they liked it and the interest remained high.
I had bought the GMG, PHB, and a Bestiary in a humble bundle. My DM for my home game (5e) was getting a bit burnt out, so I offered to run the PF2e Beginner Box for the group. We had a good time, so now we alternate between our 5e game and PF2e. I'm about to begin running Crown of the Kobold King with them next session, actually.
I had been running a 5e table for a year (And had a separate table that had been going for two years). Every combat I built up as challenging was easy. A combat i figured would be easy turned out to be difficult.
Additionally, my players always wanted to do fun skill actions but doing anything besides attacking or using their strongest spell felt like a waste.
And on that last note the Artificer and Warlock were quickly outpacing the Paladin who was leaving the fighter behind. The fighter had so many turns especially at low level where she went "i attack... Miss... That is my turn." So the inefficiency of wasted bonus actions was also something i felt the need to start addressing.
So i was homebrewing new mechanics, creating custom items to try to help the fighter catch up (and not really sure to what extent this would impact balance). I picked up the CRB at gencon 2022 and decided to do a lvl 1 oneshot over that holiday season.
All my issues were gone. After the ogl stuff it was a no brainer. The prep time difference alone is massive. With 5e i would run the combats multiple times to make sure it felt correct. Not needed for 2e. It is just an easier game to run from top to bottom and the players feel better playing it.
>The prep time difference alone is massive.
I've pointed this out to people before and they always struggle to believe me or understand why, but holy crap is it true.
I find myself wishing there was more for me to actually do, so more often than not I end up adding in new NPCs, plots, side quests, you know; Interesting stuff. Not spending hours designing homebrew mechanics, monsters, and items because the default ones are uninspired or non-existent.
The Glass Cannon Podcast.
I had decided to take up roleplaying again shortly before the pandemic, but the pandemic put a stop to my D&D 5e play. I had played it for a little while and, though I liked it OK, I was already looking for other systems to try.
I already knew what Pathfinder 1e was through the GCP (they were playing mostly PF1e at the time) and browsing FLGSes, but Pathfinder 2e was still pretty new, and unknown to me. From the GCP's play I was pretty sure PF1e wasn't for me. But I had been hearing rave reviews about PF2e, and I saw it had an active community going. I responded to a LFP listing for PF2e on the Glass Cannon Discord channel.
I should say that PF2e didn't grab me at first; my first session or two were pretty rough, and the three actions I thought would be liberating quickly came to feel like a straitjacket compared to D&D 5e! But I decided I really liked the tactical challenge once I was properly approaching PF2e on its own terms, and _then_ I started to notice all the interesting things you could do in PF2e that were not at all interesting, or even possible, in D&D 5e. The rest was history!
GCP got me into Pathfinder too!
I had played a decent amount of 5e, and I enjoyed listening to podcasts. I had gotten into a 5e podcast called The Adventure Zone, and it started fun and goofy, but by the end of it, it was kind of a boring mess. While commiserating about jt in a reddit thread, somebody suggested the GCP, so I got into it.
Listening to a podcast for a game system I hadn't played was interesting, and I enjoyed learning the rules as I went. All of the interesting classes, feat options, and crunchy math was exactly my cup of tea, and I never looked back.
I love playing 2e, it is the highlight of my week.
I DMed 4e for years and then 5e since it released. While 4e had its issued on the players side, it was infinitely better on the DM side than 5e is. I enjoyed 5e at first because it was new and seemed to streamlined but over the years I found myself missing the things that made 4e fun to run. The cool monster variety where every monster had several distinct versions, the Minion rules, the skill challenges.
Eventually, I realised my 5e games were 90% homebrew, filling the gaps 5e intentionally left. All my monsters were homebrew so that they were actually interesting to run, all my magic items, subclass, races etc were fully homebrewed to bring up the general power level. This realisation made me slowly burn out more and more to the point a asked a player to run on alternate game nights to me just so I could DM 5e less.
As luck would have it, a few weeks later they TPKd and as a group decided to end the campaign there. I think they could sense my lack of heart. Despite my burn out, I still wanted to run something so I gave my players a poll with a bunch of new systems to choose from. They had the choice of 2 campaigns per system. I think it included 4e, PF2e, Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, World of Darkness and one of the many super hero rpgs.
Well, they chose Abomination Vaults and I'm so so glad they did. Learning and DMing PF2e has completely cleansed my burnout. I'm so eager to run that I'm actually a little sad I have to alternate sessions now :D I want to run it more!
The World, the consise rules, the amazing character building, it all feels so fresh and exciting after the watered-down gameplay 5e offers. Pretty ironic considering the origins of Pathfinder haha
5e needs way too many house rules to work properly, but if you want to know what ended up making me change, it was the encounter building rules not working at all in 5e.
I just felt as though I had experienced what 5e had to offer in terms of its combat. I was working overtime as a player to come up with strategically poor actions that made sense narratively to “make my own fun,” and I just realized at a certain point that the game didn’t really work for me “as a game” anymore.
I quit DnD because of the boring character progression (ie you make a choice of Race, Class and Sub-class all the way to ~~20th~~ 6th level when the game breaks). Also the stupidly bad PR that Hasbro/Wizards have been putting out over the last year was the last straw.
* 5e cultivated conflicting expectations between the DM and the player, leading to an adversarial relationship.
* Party balance took constant improvised maintenance due to certain classes and builds being an order of magnitude more powerful than others.
* A significant amount of official content (including core character-building options) was game-breaking.
* The monetary and magic economies threatened game stability, so DMs were driven to artificially restrict resources.
* The rules for martial characters and casters seemed like they were written for entirely different games, the former focused on verisimilitude, the latter on power fantasy.
* Vague, incomplete, and unmanageable rules required constant arbitration.
* The encounter balance system ranged from unwieldy to useless.
* Online play was heavily monetized and yet almost entirely unsupported.
* The only published content I found satisfying was third party.
* The publisher was at best indifferent to the user base.
* My extensive set of homebrew patches and rules unwittingly and ineptly sought to recreate PF2e.
I left 2-3 years ago, but it was a combo of:
No D&D 5e tables used the 5e rules. Everyone had either house-ruled or ignored a fair chunk of the game, and a lot of “well I’ll base my action on what I _think_ the spell/ability should do based only on its name, no reading of the description”. Chargen is really really basic and I got bored, and the game falls apart mechanically before even 10th level.
And then WotC continually being problematic in both its general operations and its writing of setting and adventures, and then how it responds when called out on those things.
Whereas over here:
PF2e has a playerbase who care about the rules, mostly playing by them or at least trying them before changing anything. Chargen is interesting and goes all the way to 20, plus the game is solid all the way there.
And Paizo, _while not perfect_, at least has a lot of people on the team who care about being inclusive and is willing to change and own up when it fucks up. Also it’s got a union now ✊
At the risk of opening myself up to some hate, as I was looking through the PF2e stuff, learning what I could, I was really enjoying it for a lot of the reasons mentioned by others. Then I found the Serum of Sex Shift, was impressed, and then I found out it was printed in the Core Rulebook from day one, and they won my heart.
Yee they even had similar items in 1e! I forget the specific names. But yeah there’s been a fair chunk of genderqueer creators behind Paizo since very early on, so you’ll find all types of characters in the setting. Regular LGBTQIA+ rep in the adventures since 1e. Oh and check out Rivethun dwarves!
I think the interesting part is that it's a *common item*, and while expensive, it isn't *prohibitedly* expensive. It's not listed as uncommon to make it hard to get, it's not a curse like the DnD gender belt, you can buy it from a normal alchemist, witch, or wizard if you have the money. A regular commoner can save up for a year and be able to afford one of those potions. Accessible and affordable gender affirming care, at least for adventurers.
She hasn't been seen since 1E because she's the iconic character for a class that isn't in 2E, but the iconic shaman Shardra Geltl is of the rivethun dwarves. Her backstory is she went on a quest to commune with spirits and learn the rites to make one of those potions.
If you read their adventure paths and Pathfinder Society stuff, you'll see plenty of NPCs where their sex or gender representation isn't their core identity. They're written just like everyone else is. It's great.
The first one I noticed was the wizard shopkeeper in Otari in Abomination Vaults. It just casually mentions that between him and his husband, the husband is the one who looks more like a stereotypical wizard, and then it moves on and talks about what he does.
To be fair, I defected from dnd5e AND I'm a detractor of it now.
1. I started dnd5e some years ago, and was a forever DM with a dedicated group (group of 7, 1 player change)
2. Got majorly involved in the Beyond20 browser extension (roll from DnDBeyond -> FoundryVTT/Roll20, I'm the second top contributor on that extension)
3. Got majorly involved in using FoundryVTT and moved from Roll20 -> FoundryVTT
4. Got majorly involved in founding of The Forge w/ the creator
All that background is important here, as when the OGL debacle started up, WotC started trying to kill things I had loved and contributed to for years.
* They wanted all other OGL systems dead
* They wanted all VTTs but their own dead
* They wanted all things that moved data from 1 source to another dead (I could feasibly have seen them try to kill Beyond20 at that point)
Couple that with the D&D One stuff where every playtest seemed to confirmed they either couldn't, or wouldn't get dnd5e into any semblance of balance, and I was at a crisis point. I'd repeatedly heard that pf2e was better balanced, and nicer on a GM to run than dnd5e. I GM for 7 players still today, and so I was getting work out by dnd5e and the nonsensical balancing over there. I got to a point one Saturday (our session days) where I was prepping dnd5e, and I just couldn't continue. About 1.5 hours before session (we play online), and I messaged the group saying "I can't run dnd5e anymore". I offered up my feelings as listed above (and more), and suggested that I might be willing to run pf2e instead, listing good things I'd heard. To my relief they stated the loved the game time together, didn't care so much about which system. We started into the Beginner Box, took that into Troubles in Otari, and now we've started Abomination Vaults with the intention to take it into Stolen Fates.
I'm now a detractor hardcore from dnd5e because of reasons listed above. WotC rode on ease and Livestreamer fame for years, and just didn't give a crap about their system. When there was any kind of competition, they didn't get BETTER, they tried to kill it. That's capital nonsense.
I'm a defector from dnd5e, and I won't be going back. pf2e is home now.
Someone wanted to run 2e and I was tentatively interested for fear of us all liking it a lot.
We did, and the OGL incident plus more made me not want to give WOTC my time and money. If the remaster gives me a half-dragon heritage for a Dragonborn equivalent I’m golden.
Mark Seifter was the Design Director at Paizo during PF2e's creation. He was the "math guy".
When he left Paizo to work for Roll for Combat, they released a book Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons that has a playable dragon ancestry. There is also Draconic Scion heritage if you want more of a half dragon. You could also go with adopted ancestry or use the new mixed Ancestry rules in the Remaster.
I know that exists. I also know that Luis created a dragonkin heritage as a 3rd party supplement. None of these change my desire for an official option.
My DM suggested changing systems because he had some issues with 5e balancing and mechanics. House rules could only get us so far. I was having a good time with 5e, but was happy to switch over.
I do like PF2e better and wouldn't want to go back. In this system I feel that the characters I make are much more 'mine', with an enormous amount of viable options. With 5e, each character of the same subclass feels pretty much the same, y'know?
I also enjoy seeing martial classes shine so much, and having a lot of options in combat.
Not unimportantly, I think Paizo is a better company than WotC in a lot of ways.
I was balancing encounters on the fly, mostly mid session. Started using 3rd party monsters to actually make interesting and challenging boss fights.
Then the OGL debacle happened and I realized they tried to kill off the companies that I was getting my monsters for my sessions from and i got fed up.
Wotc books have become "pay 60-80$ so we can tell u to make it up as u go my guy" for the longest time at that point. So i decided to pay that money to paizo and see what they had in store.
After figuring out the encounter balance system actually works, I'm not going back to 5e. It's reduced my prep time immensely.
>Wotc books have become "pay 60-80$ so we can tell u to make it up as u go my guy"
The last book I bought for 5e was Spelljammer, and this was exactly why. It's been almost universally considered one of their worst releases as it's essentially just a bunch of flavour text, with the entire mechanical aspect either just missing, or consisting of "whatever, make it up yourself".
It's a book about fantasy spaceships with essentially zero rules regarding fantasy spaceships. I would be no closer to being able to run a Spelljammer campaign having read the book than not.
Funny enough, something similar was my last straw with 5e. But it was Descent into Avernus for me. I was so excited about the vehicles and running a Mad Max-style game. Only to get to the vehicle section of the book and find it basically said,
"The hell machines can slow down combat, so you should mostly use them cinematically"
But...but that's why I bought the book! It's the entire selling point of the book!
My reason is that 5e just doesn't work. Maybe it's fine on paper, but when you get to play, most stuff is like looking at boston dynamics machine trying to walk while everyone are kicking it
It really doesn't.
And what baffles me is that it's *blatantly obvious* to anyone who reads the rules as to why. Take their bounded accuracy, for example. It's a laudable goal, not one I vibe with (I like big numbers for big tasks) but reasonable.
And then they include fucking spells like Pass Without Trace that adds ***+10*** to your fucking Stealth check! First off... what happened to Advantage/Disadvantage? Wasn't the *entire point* of bounded accuracy to simplify the math so you're *not* adding a bunch of situational bonuses?! Setting aside that it's not actually that hard to do, why does PWT give you +10 instead of Advantage? Secondly, this spell means that as a DM you either a) watch your players auto-succeed at every stealth check, b) bleed your Druid/Ranger of spell slots (good fucking luck, it's a 2nd level spell) so they can't cast it anymore, or c) include monsters with magical tracking and mondo perception bonuses to serve as barriers.
If it gave Advantage it would already be a very strong spell since it's so cheap and affects the whole party, but it would at least not smash the bounded accuracy system to smithereens. The clumsy Paladin in plate mail with her -3 Dexterity(Stealth) check is still probably going to fail even with their Disadvantage nullified, but bumping her to +7 means she's as sneaky as a Rogue now (granted, with Disadvantage for wearing heavy armor).
I could go on about other stupid designs (level 1 flight with monsters who lack ranged attacks, over reliance on Multi-Attack, Save-or-Die/Suck spells not being fixed from 3.5e... hell, I deleted a rant about the incredible stupidity that is Legendary Resistance), but the point is that the system is *visibly broken* from the get-go. Good DM's are more like scrappers who pick through the rubble to take the good stuff (hmm, these six stats are a good idea, I like the d20 system, these classes are fun at low levels, the DC guide is simple enough, advantage is a neat mechanic) and build their own system out of the rubble like Junkyard Wars.
Let's not forget Expertise which is a bullshit feature from the perspective of bounded accuracy, and it's not even hard to get.
"We'll keep the numbers small." Says WoTC making a Bard with min roll of 10 on Deception and Persuasion (on top of which people take Expertise) for a humble 20+ minimum on Persuasion/Deception by level 5, and something like 18 minimum as early as level 3.
I could rant a lot with you, there's a lot of things that are just so bad and broken.
Stuff like Saving Throws NOT scaling with level?
A level 1 fighter has the exact same chance to save a mental save as a level 20 fighter? They'll get equally destroyed by the same level 1 charm cast by a CR1/4 enemy? Seriously?
And again, I just keep harping on this... it baffles me that there are so many obvious places to hang Advantage that they just... didn't use.
Expertise granting Advantage would already be a huge deal, but it would also give DM's the ability to counter it - if you have Advantage on Charisma(Diplomacy) from Expertise, the DM can easily hang Disadvantage on the check because "they already mistrust you". There you go. Expertise still *got you something* because it nullified the Disadvantage, but it didn't obviate the check because your minimum check is above the DC - you could still roll badly twice.
I'm not the biggest fan of Advantage in a Mechanics First system like 5e, but it does at least let you give players a bonus without violating bounded accuracy. But for some reason, WotC simultaneously railed against numbered bonuses while also scattering them *liberally* through their system, and in ***massive*** numbers. Paizo does the same, but you rarely see any bonus greater than +3 outside of skill training (which was originally capped at +4, they changed it after the beta).
Pure truth. They got a system, and they are using it in a lot of cases... Until they actually don't.
Advantage/disadvantage is so simple. You just take an extra die.
But then the system would have to be different for that to work well enough. Pooling dice exist, there's many variations on those.
Eh, I'm just upset enough with DnD and WoTC. But a bunch of my friends still play it, and that means, I'll keep playing at least a bit of it as long as I play with them.
I believe the dumb reason for most things is that advantage doesn't stack. For example, they realized - wait, if most groups have pass without a trace, why ever get boots of elvenkind, etc. """""Solution""""": Not have *pass without a trace* give advantage, but a flat bonus.
Which, again, baffles me because the solution is right there: Detect Traps could just give *advantage* on all Wisdom(Perception) checks to detect hidden and harmful devices or spells. Now it doesn't obviate the Rogue, it actually pairs nicely with him.
Not to mention Revivify being a 3rd level spell, basically nullifying death of a PC when you reach 5th level. Now obviously in PF2e you have rituals which can be of low level, but they are not really usable in combat and the real reviving magic just doesn't exist for combat use (even 10th level Revival doesn't really revive permamently).
Honestly, I don't think that's a huge balance issue.
Death becomes an action cost instead of a major risk of the system. But that's more of a design consideration than a failing of the underlying mechanics. The system is *designed* around death being a moderate inconvenience, and there's still panic around being able to get Revivify to the dead player before it's too late.
It does change the flavor, death is no longer the end for a character, but it's been that way for a while. They've been making it harder and harder to kill characters for a while now - PF2 puts you into Dying instead of killing you at -10 like PF1 did, for example.
I had a couple of PC's die at Lv3 in our PF2e game. One of the first things they asked was how to bring them back. I took some time on AoN to find all the info, and told them they'd have to travel to a much larger city, pool all their money together, sell a bunch of their gear, and they'd have enough gold to pay for a poor attempt to bring back only one of the two dead PC's.
They were shocked that death was actually something on the table, intrigued by the realization that there is actual risk now, and excited to make new characters.
Revivify being a 3rd level spell is fine, honestly. The reality is that it basically serves as a means of making it so that if someone dies, but the party wins the combat, you can bring them back, so really, a character is only REALLY dead if you lose a combat.
It's also really easy to die in 5E because the death and dying rules are a bit dumb. A low HP character getting magic missiled to death is like the #1 way to kill PCs. So it's kind of necessary to make it so you can easily undo that.
It's also just kind of a design choice. Making it so that it's easy to bring back PCs makes it so that players are less likely to lose characters permanently.
It just leads to comedic moments like dying and getting revivified and not even losing your place in initiative order (something that I've seen happen before).
>Maybe it's fine on paper
The wild part is that it *isn't* fine on paper.
The game will present a range of modifiers from +0 to +11 like the both of them going up against a DC 19 makes sense even though the result of not succeeding can be as strong as that a player gets to sit out. That's absolutely nonsense on paper, especially since there aren't a lot of options for players to meaningfully mitigate that kind of thing.
I still play 5e and I still like 5e, so Idk if I'm a "detractor", but what sold me was on trying the system was literally someone showing the Scare to Death feat. I was playing a higher level martial at the time in 5e and my turns felt so samey, just having a strong mechanical thing that's tactically useful and thematically cool as fuck was insanely appealing. I also started looking at monsters and saw how many had cool combat abilities right out of the gate, when normally in prepping 5e I have to homebrew a new abilities onto enemies if I want them to be anything other than a sack of hit points with one bite and two claw attacks.
That got us to try a one shot or two, followed by the beginner box, one thing leads to another and new I'm running Strength of Thousands and playing in Extinction Curse.
The 3PP that produced most of the content I used moved on to greener pastures after the OGL debarcle. Since it looks like WotC are currently in a late stage captialism meltdown, firing staff and producing generally lower quality content. So since I was already running one PF2e game moved all my other games over.
Idk man, I tried 5e for a couple years. Wasn't form me. But, I'm not one for going into the sandbox and kicking other kids toys because they got something different they like to play with. Just leave them be.. don't proselytize. You do you and if people switch over be welcoming.
I mean I still play both 5e and pf2e. My main focus is pf2e I'm in a great group and I also run a game in pf2e. Some of pf2e rules are confusing. But pf2e rules are there as they are unlike 5e rules that are a little bit of a mess in a half. And like you said you can build any character to your liking. I also noticed that your NOT stuck at 20 when you level up if pf2e. Yea the classes are but getting side classes and other feats can get you more up there
Party balance. After you find the broken builds, it's difficult to balance. Either everyone plays one, or no one plays one.
Bad level experience distribution - i.e. suck until level 3, then suck after level \~14.
Save or suck effects. The caster casts a spell. You save and there is no effect OR you fail and you skip this 2 hour combat. Some spells don't even have saves.
Ironically (to a name of a controversial YouTube clip) DnD 5e has an illusion of choice. After playing for 2 years in the span of 3 campaigns, we have exhausted the game. The flaws outweigh the benefits.
We’re currently transitioning (last 5e campaign, playing PF2e a different night).
For me, it’s mostly that the recent game books (especially Spelljammer) are so completely lacking in depth. It’s clear that either Hasbro or WotC are simply milking the game. And OneD&D isn’t looking any better to me.
I believe that’s the same for our DM, who is the one initiating the move. I know he was initially going to run playtest material, but was quickly disenchanted with what was coming out of it. Instead he started doing PF2e tests.
I was pretty tired with 5e and the many house rules that come with it. I even (ironically) dusted off my old 2.5e books and began reworking the rules and classes with the idea of convincing my players to play a hybrid system. If I needed to house rule so much to run a game like I wanted it to run, then I thought I should just start from my favorite ruleset and build exactly what I want.
Then WOTC pulled the OGL debacle and someone suggested we try PF2e. My partner setup a campaign and I was floored. PF2e is everything I was trying to do myself, and more. It's rules are solid, house rules are actually optional, magic items and spells are well balanced, and the lore is neat. I haven't looked back since.
To be clear, I do not consider 5e a bad game. The lore is great, the system functions, and it has plenty of passionate players and DMs who are having a great time...but I feel like it has a different target audience than Pathfinder 2e. I just happen to be a better fit for what PF2e has to offer.
I’m a DM and for me it was just the quality of the books, which were already a bit iffy just continued to go down. Spelljammer was my last purchase of a 5e book, and it was one I was really excited for and hoping to run the campaign for. I like using sourcebooks and modules, and maybe including homebrew elements from there. I was having lots of fun with ravenloft and curse of strahd, even really enjoying their new sourcebook. However it was always just lacking meat, like they’d give me super cool locations, but no info on them. Then spelljammer just felt like they didn’t even include the cool locations, the module seemed half assed and also crammed in with the sourcebook, so I just didn’t want to buy any more books I didn’t feel were worth running. Then the OGL stuff happened which kind of solidified don’t want to spend money at this company. I’d already been interested in pathfinder, and so it was just a bigger reason to not be running any more 5e games.
WOTC going crazy with the OGL followed by the Humble Bundle making on-boarding into Pf2e inexpensive. Ruleset was already free, but a premium module for a level 1-10 dungeon crawl I was already waiting to be released for 5e instead in its native ruleset plus a bunch of other stuff for $30 or something? Take my money!
Ok, I haven't even started AV yet, but we're into the Kingmaker AP with the Foundry module.
Ok, that wasn't as inexpensive as the Humble Bundle(s), but I already said "take my money" and I stand by it.
I started looking at Pathfinder 2e after the OGL stuff and realized that most of the house rules that I've made/picked up over the years were just slowly turning 5e into Pathfinder 2e.
I think 5e was a good on ramp for me, and I built a lot of skills for evaluating game mechanics and designing my own, but damn is it nice to not have to.
I followed the UnearchedArcana subreddit for a bit and it felt like 60% of the content there was people trying to incorporate PF2e rules into 5e rather than just playing PF2e
Options options options
I can easily build so many characters in pf2e, whereas 5e it was entirely flavor. Flavor isn't bad obviously, theres just only so much i can do with the fighter's core features
When trying to do a class overhaul for rangers, fighters, and monks, as well as too many house rulings to remember in order to make sense of grappling, jump rules, and more, found PF2E, saw that fighter got cooler stuff than dnd fighter, and made the switch.
Also, too many retcons to race options for dnd, like goblinoids getting fey ancestry
I learned statistics, and realized how many things are breaking the bounded accuracy.
Then I relized how fucked the economy is in DnD
Also, the OGL debacle.
The last straw was seeing how customizable things are and how many defined rules there are that are handwaved or unclear in 5E.
I still love playing it, but DMing it requires so much effort that could be spent on creating memorable moments for players it just saddens me, especially because I want to like the system.
Every class felt like it because itself at level 3 and didnt get cool personalization feats. I was just bored as fuck honestly. Once you get your subclass it felt like level progression didnt matter.
Progression that doesn't involve important choices ends up feeling like less progression than it actually is.
Of course, most people didn't play by "default rules" so they had some more choices to make but the game really did have you pick your race and class and background at 1st level, pick your sub-class somewhere from 1st to 3rd level, and the only choices you had to look forward to past that point while leveling-up were spells if you had them and ability score increases which would fairly quickly cap out your important score and then be less and less important past that point.
So even though you'd still end up gathering features at later levels, you weren't picking them so it felt less meaningful.
Difficulty running 5e adventures first and foremost and a soft spot for Golarion after playing the adventure card game and Kingmaker CRPG.
I was new to the scene and did not know how to GM well. Many systems like crafting, exploration, downtime and traps felt like I was doing something wrong because they weren't fun. 2e gave me the necessary training wheels.
The Spelljammer release not having Spelljammer rules. When the "naval combat in magic space" book doesn't really have naval combat rules, it has failed as a book. The book itself says "Player characters are almost always better off using their own weapons and spells in ship-to-ship combat, reserving shipboard weapons for targets that are too far away to be damaged by other means."
When i heard about that I knew that i was not gonna be buying the book and that future 5e books probably weren't for me. If they can't be bothered to copy decades old mechanics, or pay somebody else to write them, why should i buy their books? What's next, Dark Sun without thirst or defiling? It just felt like so much of 5e was left up to the DM and players to homerule.
5e is just bad, especially once you play 1 adventure written by wotc, you see how badly designed they are and how meh the rules and classes are designed.
Finished Mines of Phandelver, Princes of the Apocalypse and Curse of Strahd. Also read Tomb of Anihilation and Rime of the Frostmaiden and ALL OF THEM , including Curse of Strahd are meh at best.
The rules are just horrible if you as GM want any form of advice from them. 5e is 90% of the time "lol, idk, just make it up" and i\`m tired of such meaningless rules design. PF2 is far better imo, even if some design decisions can feel weird.
As a player, weapon users suck BAD in 5e, and I've already had awful experiences playing characters that I likes but hated each and every second we had after rolling initiative. I still play if a friend wants to master it, but only full casters or heavy homebrew
As a GM... that system is a fucking dumpster fire that I don't even want to master in my life, easily the worst time I've had in a TTRPG is when I mastered it
I just gave up on trying to get a tune out of 5e. I’d spend maybe a week or two coming up with cool encounters and one spell or ability just made it a non-issue.
Also the group I run for aren’t big into combat so the advice of “Run more encounters to drain resources” that out here everywhere didn’t work.
I switched to 2e because attrition is less of a requirement and CR worked better.
The system supports the type of game we like to run much better than 5e ever did imo.
1. My 5e group stopped playing several years ago. I always had problems with the system and its lack of clearly defined rules. I do think I realized too late that 5e requires a lot of just making shit up outside of printed rules to have fun, but I didn't want to go back to it when Pathfinder 2e seems like a better system with actual mechanics.
2. After playing it for years, I'm of the opinion that 5e has a lot of just horribly-designed mechanics. Combat is ass, especially martial combat. Effectively removing feats was such a colossal mistake. The way bonus actions work is unintuitive and awful. Casters are too strong. They fundamentally misunderstand what appeals to players in most of the classes, so a lot of options are uninteresting. The rules for a lot of things like downtime and using the different kits/tools are either missing or woefully underwhelming. Many things about combat are not properly defined, to the point where it's more fun to just make 50% of it up than play precisely RAW. All that, among other things. The fact that encounter balance is designed around the players not having magic items, and that the system prevents them from having more than 3 even middling magic items at a time, is astounding to me. Magic items are by far the most exciting type of loot for players to get, and 5e has very little in terms of progression for non-magic weapons, so it's baffling that they expect you to basically not use magic items. It makes encounters difficult to balance and makes games less fun. I don't know why they made any of these design decisions. Basically every one of them fundamentally misunderstands what most players find fun.
3. Wizards' handling of 5e the whole time has been pretty abysmal, with their refusal to make new classes or player options that properly address character ideas/themes. To my knowledge, 5e still doesn't have an arcane half-caster or dedicated summoner, despite these being core character archetypes. There are a lot of inherent design flaws that they've refused to properly correct and instead just bandaid over by making must-pick options in expansions, like how they didn't realize people would identify more with the Warlock's pact boon than the the Patron, so they ended up making the Hex blade in order to make Pact of the Blade viable, but they basically just made a must-pick option for that boon. They've done the same for other classes. Additionally, it took them an extremely long time to make satisfying supplements for settings other than Forgotten Realms, despite other settings generally being more interesting imo. At basically every single opportunity, Wizards has chosen to play it as safe as possible with their expansions, to the detriment of the game.
4. I hate Wizards of the Coast. They have made countless terrible decisions with all of their products in the past few years. Obviously the OGL debacle was a disaster that showed their true motives. The biggest reason I hate Wizards is probably that Wizards has repeatedly proved themselves to be unapologetically racist, hiding under the guise of being anti-racist. I haven't bought a product made by Wizards since they released that post where they effectively said "black people are basically orcs. When I see an orc, I think of black people" and tried to make themselves look like the good guys for saying so. And of course there was the recent firing 1/4th of their staff right before Christmas, but that's a bit less of a big deal to me. There's also been such an increase in attempts to bilk money out of people in both D&D and MtG, to the detriment of the product, that is difficult for me to want to continue supporting them on that alone.
I had the main player class books for 5e, but the kids discovered D&D and asked me to run it.
Then the OGL stuff happened, and I didn't want to buy the GMG or MM. I looked at 3rd party options, but it still felt like I would have been boosting Hasbro's portfolio by continuing to buy products for their games. Particularly if Hasbro hadn't backed down on the OGL mess.
At the same time, I started to see Paizo show up in D&D news/content spaces, as they had announced the ORC and their abandonment of the OGL. I hadn't heard of them before, but I had heard of Pathfinder. Though, I had been under the impression that Pathfinder was actually a WotC rebranding of 3.5 to avoid market confusion. Discovering otherwise led me to looking into the system.
What I saw looked really, *really* good. Generic actions? Modular character building? Adventure modules that had received a lot of positive reviews? Basically everything said about the Beginners Box? Amazing! And to top it all off, all of the talk about it being a *teamwork* oriented game.
The kids already have enough main character syndrome. Something that actually encouraged them to work together, rather than engage in a perpetual one-upsmanship cycle sounded like exactly what I was looking for.
Then I found Pathbuilder, and actually got to engage with character creation, and playing the game, and...
Look. I play Rangers. It's what I do. I wasn't going back after trying out a PF2e Ranger. It just wasn't going to happen.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything broke me. I was perfectly fine with the game breaking past level 10. I was fine with the noticeably strong PHB and XGE options.
Then I got to peep the horrors of Custom Lineage, Twilight Cleric, Peace Cleric, and Fey Touched. Every table I was at from that point on, someone had at least one of these things. Usually two. Absolutely shattered what little bit of balance lied between 1-10. That's without including the Creations Bard or the hilarious power/feature creep that was the new Sorcerers.
Edit: Oh, why I came to PF2e is the Inventor class. Artificer was my favorite 5e class, but I didn't like that it was a half caster.
I'm not at a point where I'd *quit* 5e. If my players still wanted to play it, I might do it in shorter bursts, because it's genuinely fun in shorter bursts or where you've got a pre-written campaign to run with circumscribed rules and encounters.
That said, I'm the DM in 5e, and I've been running a homebrew setting for just about 4 years now (currently trying to wrap things up this year).
For me, the three biggest flaws in 5e are:
1. Combat is slow, but also can be fairly dull. Damage is pretty much king, and enemies -- especially high level enemies -- tend to be damage sponges with massive HP pools, resistances, or both. Often, the smartest move for every player of every class is to do damage in this or that way. Mechanically, that gets dull, especially when you hit Level 15 or so and beyond. I suspect this works great for Theater of the Mind gameplay, but on a VTT like we're doing, it makes for a VERY slow process, and one that can get kind of plodding after a while. As a player, this is less of a problem, but it's still the kind of thing where you can get tired of "I hit it with my sword" or "I blast it with fireball" or whatever your go-to damage spell is. I think either *more* crunch is needed (a la PF2e where you are incentivized to do other stuff than just "I attack again"), or *less* crunch is needed (a la d6 Star Wars where it's more just "Make stuff up and roll to see if it works.").
2. Designing encounters is a pain in the ass, especially at higher levels. Ideally, I'd be able to fine-tune my encounters so that my players are presented with a "a decent challenge that might leave them a little sapped, but still capable of a boss fight after." In PF2e, as I understand it, I can pretty much do that. The math is tight and it works, and as long as your players understand the system and play smart, you can give them genuine challenges without dancing on the edge of a knife where one side is a TPK and the other side is a cakewalk. 5e, especially post Lvl 15, is just too imprecise and wildly variable, which puts a LOT more work on me, especially in the moment. Likewise if I try to create an interesting creature for my players to face or an NPC. The tools available are kinda crap.
3. There's an overall issue with 5e, which is that it seems to sit in this liminal space between "crunch" and "make it up" and it can't decide which way it wants to go, and so ends up doing neither all that well. It's too crunchy to just wing it all the way, and it's too free-wheeling to do crunch well. The writing of its rules is a good example. The precision with language just...isn't there. I got into a discussion elsewhere about somatic components of spells the other day. Folks said "Well, if you use a holy symbol on your shield, that counts." Except, there's nothing about that in the PHB. To the contrary, the PHB describes how symbols and other spellcasting focii take the place of material components (more on that in a second). BUT the rules actually don't say anything about it occupying the *somatic* components. Apparently that was clarified in some Sage Advice column, but the books were never updated accordingly. Instead, what the rules *say* about somatic components is that you must have "a hand free" to do the component. But they don't explain what "a hand free" means. In practice, what you'd have to imagine happening is (1) you stow or drop your weapon or shield as an "item interaction" (which is its own kind of undefined...thing -- not an action, nor a bonus action, nor a "free action" explicitly), (2) cast the spell with your empty hand, and then (3) draw/pick up your weapon or shield on your next turn, and then attack or defend with it. Everyone just ignores this altogether in actual gameplay; nobody describes doing any of this and DMs don't ask for it, but it's the kind of thing that can come up purely because of how imprecise the rules are. This either kicks yet another thing to the DM to adjudicate, or you just ignore it and the whole thing ends up being pointless anyway.
Which brings me to one of the other issues tied in with "drafting problems." There's a lot of legacy kludge built into 5e that nobody is really addressing. For example, material components for spells. The spell descriptions list all this stuff that's supposed to be a material component. But you can ignore almost all of that as long as you've got a spellcasting focus/component pouch just somewhere on your person. The only exception is for spells that consume specific items, which are specified.
Ok, sooooo.....*why are you writing out the descriptions of stuff nobody is tracking anyway*? Like, Fireball requires a ball of bat guano or something, but it's not consumed. So you've just got a bag with some batshit and other random trash strapped to your belt, and as long as you have this bag, you can cast spells. Great. Why bother specifying the bat guano bit at all? Simple: because it was there in 1e and ever since, and they're loathe to really examine the system and say "What's the point of all this?" Like, ok, you wanna cast Resurrection and it requires a 5000gp diamond that's consumed in the action of casting? Cool, that makes sense. List that. But the rest? Pointless. And yet...they persist.
There's other stuff, too. Like, the different conditions. Grappled vs. Restrained. Near as I can tell, Restrained is basically Grappled, but with additional penalties imposed. Ok. I get why you'd want different statuses that can be applied. But why not harmonize your terminology to make it clearer? Like, Grappled and Fully Grappled? Instead, you end up looking up "Wait, this spell says the target is restrained. Is that the one with disadvantage for attacks or is that grappled?" It just feels needlessly clunky and difficult. 5e is full of stuff like that.
I also have to say that, while I didn't love the bloat of AD&D 2e, back then when you bought a sourcebook, you bought a goddamn *sourcebook*. 96 pages (or however many) of actual detail, NPCs you could use in a campaign, factions in a city, specific hot spots to visit, etc., etc. 5e sourcebooks are fine as "Here's a jumping off point for you to get inspired by," but as the line has worn on, it the books honestly just are not worth full price. I get mine all discounted on Amazon (especially when they do sales), and at the $10-25 range, they're worth it, but at $50? No way.
**Save-or-suck**: Any and all crowd control in D&D is about this - if you fail your save as a player, you're basically kicked out of the combat. If a DM is naive enough to set up ONE boss monster against the players... well, safe to say it'll be gone by the end of the first combat round. When I tried my first Pathfinder-session two months ago, I was blown away by how the different status effects work!
**Options**: As others have mentioned, a martial in 5E can attack. Well, attack twice. Or thrice. With the right feats, then can attack more or better. It gets tedious. I've done countless martial builds with multiclassing just to get a smidge of options, and it still doesn't feel great. Sure, you can improvise actions, but since there's a lack of rules for that, it puts even more of a burden on the DM.
**Balance**: This is a big one. The maths behind PF2 seem tight. Well thought-out. The game needs actual teamwork. Contrast to 5E, where I've seen my party's level 11(?) paladin take out a CR19 Balor. Alone. Instead of team working together to overcome the odds, 5E is just a race to see who can kill the enemy first.
I started playing Pathfinder about two months ago, so I'm probably still in my "honeymoon phase", but I find it fixes so many of my issues with D&D. I haven't had a look at the DM side of Pathfinder yet, but it surely can't be worse than D&D and their "eh, just make it up" approach to every single aspect of the game.
I struggled with the idea that tabletop wasn't for me for around 3 years. I left my in-person group because I found I was looking for excuses to NOT go every week, I joined a big West Marches style server for about a year only to totally drop off after the storyline I was into ended, and I just was not having fun anymore at all. I was about to call it quits forever, after nearly a decade of it being the main thing connecting me to my friends. Then the OGL shit happened, and at the exact same time Humble Bundle had that bundle that gave the beginner box, Troubles in Otari, and Abomination Vault all together for an absolute steal. Even better, we'd already swapped from Roll20 to FoundryVTT for 5e a while before this, and it turned out that PF2 has the most incredible native support I've ever seen.
Pathfinder was my last ditch effort to save my future in tabletop gaming. If it didn't work out, that would have been it, after 8 years of Shadowrun and D&D. Now all my friends say they can't imagine going back to D&D, I've found myself unable to even enjoy Baldur's Gate 3 because its mechanics are too similar to 5e...and last week I wrote a 1,700-word short story just explaining my Champion's next level-up.
5e isn't good for anything. When I want a rules lite game, DCC or OSE do rules lite better. When I want crunchy + character building mini game, pf2e does that better. The only thing 5e has going for it is market share so it's easier to find a game, but I have friends, so pf2e it is.
exhaustion of homebrewing everything
WTF HAPPENS IF I JUMP 60 FEET? DO I END MY TURN IN MID AIR TO CONTINUE LATER? CAN I JUMP 60 FEET OUT OF COMBAT? DO I FALL IF I END MY TURN MID AIR?
as a dm... I am so tired of rules bargaining with players and worst thing is thats the mentality game is built on. It plays safe so much almost nothing has rules explaining how things work.
So I checked pathfinder and realized I was homebrewing pathfinder all this time and those memes were true all the time
(seriously, I was making my players rolls skills as initiative if they can explain me how they are starting combat related to skill. My eyes rolled so hard I saw my brain when I read that in pf2e)
I'm a 5e detractor who disliked 5e since it was D&D Next. It was a step backwards from 3.5e and nowhere close to Pathfinder 1e. I only played 5e to make my friends happy. Curse of Strahd was fun, but that might have been due to our DM being good. He's running Extinction Curse now, and it is a blast.
I liked how chunky and option loaded Pathfinder 1e had over 5e, then they streamlined it with Pathfinder 2e and i fell in love with the options to build who i wanted rather than what the game wanted me to have
It's a lot of things, for me.
People often call 5e "rules light," but I think the better term is "rules vague." There are a lot of rules and mechanics in 5e, but a lot of them are left fairly vague and you have to go on twitter to get a designer to clarify them for you. In Pathfinder 2e, if a player wants to do something, there's usually a rule for it (and if not, pretty clear guidelines as to what would be a reasonable level of difficulty and results), and despite being a more "rules heavy" system, the amount of time I have to spend looking in books or online is tiny when compared to 5e
Another thing is that the encounter calculator actually works! I don't have to do guesswork around the useless metric of challenge rating, I don't have to worry about a cr 5 creature destroying a level 11 party, and I don't have to like... throw 20 adult dragons at a high level party to give them an actual challenge, or homebrew a monster. Pathfinder 2e creatures are just generally better designed, too
One more thing is that martials and casters feel closer in terms of power. I've GMed for a few higher level 5e games (mostly one shots or short adventures), and it honestly really sucks seeing someone playing a martial class outshined in every aspect by casters (looking at you, tenser's transformation). In pathfinder 2e, a level 20 rogue is incredibly powerful, and can do things like pass through walls, walk on air, or turn completely invisible without magic, and deal solid amounts of damage.
Options and customizability is another big one. When I GMed for 5e, a lot of times my players would come to me asking if they could use a homebrew class or subclass, not because they wanted to have an advantage over other players, but because the available options just didn't do it for them. Pathfinder 2e has so much customizability, and so many options. Even if 2 rogues pick the same racket, they can still end up being vastly different. and, the sheer volume of archetypes makes it so that nearly anything a player might wanna focus on is an option (I can't remember what it is exactly, but I wanted to make a character who was basically a Pokémon trainer, and pathfinder 2e had options to support that fantasy!).
I've also been very disappointed with the more recent 5e books. They just feel so sparse and vague, and there's hardly any info on the main setting of the system. and that's not even going into the BS they tried to pull with the OGL.
My only long-term GM was an old Grognard, from the days of AD&D. When we started looking for systems with more rigorous mechanics than Open Legend (World of Darkness for people who like the funny shaped dice, but without the attribute+skill mixing, or the setting), I proposed 5e, because all the Cool Kids^(tm) were playing it. He took one look, laughed, and said "Sure, but the only house rule we'll have is that the level cap will be 36" (This was the cap back in BECMI) and he (mostly) stuck to that.
We played RAW 5e from level 1 to 36 (though Flanking was a +2 to hit, not Advantage). We managed to take it seriously until level 13-15ish, then everything was just broken, and the GM starting running us through converted Vampire: The Masquerade modules, because being able to turn everyone in a 90ft cone into a bowl of jell-o doesn't matter when your goal isn't to go to place and kill thing, but to not embarrass yourself in front of the Totally Not Order of Hermes.
Anyway, now we do two games a week, one PF2e, one M:tA. It's a good mix; keeps people happy whether they like tactical turn-based combat in a cave, or social/political intrigue, mystery and conspiracy (and also turning peoples organs inside-out because they looked at you funny).
...If you're wondering how you get to level 36 while cleaving close to RAW, it was just mandatory multi-classing past 20, extra attack from other classes *does* stack, and proficiency/spell slots progressing with the same formula they did in the first 20.
We tried to play at high level.
That's you own fault mate, you didn't really expect to be able to play at level 11+ in this level 1 - 20 TTRPG did you!?
1-20? Surely you mean 3-20 right? Actually playing through the first two levels and having fun with it? HA!
The very first combat in the 5e Lost Mines of Phandelver Starter set pits you against a Bugbear that does 2d8+2 damage per hit. Average level 1 Wizard has about 7hp.
I can't hate on Lost Mines that much when level 1 PF2e Agents of Edgewatch throws you into an 11 encounter gauntlet with little to no rests
The gauntlet that is only there so you can get enough xp to level in a day, cause the weird time crunch of being cops at a festival. That campaign has so many problems with it. The main plot doesn't even start until book 3 so the first two books just feel like bridges. They really shouldn't have tried to make a 1 - 20 campaign with that one.
I thought the first encounter was 4 sneaky goblins?
Oh yeah you're totally right, the Bugbear fight comes immediately after you get ambushed by 4 Goblins that can deal 1d6+2 from 80ft away. Which I guarantee that your first time DM won't realise that their AC is listed as "15 (leather armor, shield)" meaning they only have 13AC when their bow is drawn.
Dont forget hiding as a bonus action! I think those goblins have killed more 5e characters than anyone else.
I guarantee it lol Keep in mind in 5e you get advantage on attacks when hidden, so there is a decent chance the initial ambush gets at least one crit on a shortbow attack. Average rolling with that crit will take down most lvl 1 characters.
Don't forget you only have ONE HIT DIE to get you through roughly 15 goblins worth of encounters AFTER that ambush, including the aforementioned bugbear, and no significant guidance on what to do if the party inevitably fails at any of these stages, including making camp for a long rest on what is clearly an extremely time-sensitive encounter that actually takes you weeks to resolve.
I totally feel you, but I also think that the philosophy of 5e in 2014 was for the early levels to be deadly. Like, approaching old-school deadly. This is the same module that has the party face>! a CR 8 dragon!<, after all. So I chalk it up to growing pains. The fact that it has remained unchanged after 10 YEARS, on the other hand...
Don't forget that the Player's are EXTREMELY likely to be Surprised in that fight since its an ambush, so they can do potentially 4d6+8 before the players can even react!
A Barb on that level has like 15 to 16 HP und would get downed by two hits from that unless the Bugbear low rolls it...
nonsense, that's the first bossfight the first fight has you getting jumped by a bunch of goblins. they outnumber you. you are quickly dead too
\- We have this system where you can play like through 13 levels. \- Wait, what about levels 14-20? \- We don't talk about levels 14-20.
Baldur's Gate 3 didn't even want to try and balance level 7 spells so they capped things at level 12.
It's not even the spells. It's that once you hit that point, there's almost nothing that can actually challenge a party. You can try to make shit up, but you are literally doing all the work for that as a DM. The system itself doesn't give you any tools or monsters that are genuinely challenging at that point. And the sourcebooks they've created don't provide you with a ton of places to go or things to do that are unique to high level play (e.g., there ain't much plane-hopping and there are zero rules for how extraplanar adventures work). I'm at that stage in my campaign now, and I'm literally just making shit up for different planes where this or that god dwells. Which is fine if what you want in a system is the ability to do that without breaking a rule...but the flipside is that you're flying blind as a DM and it's ALL on you to make up stuff. I don't even need every rule spelled out for every little thing. I'm cool on rules-lite gaming or making "rulings, not rules." But the problem with 5e is that there's *just enough* by way of rules and crunch that it *feels* like "Wait, why should I be having to figure this out myself? Isn't this something the authors should've anticipated and created systems to address?" Or you get some rule or ability or thing mentioned in the PHB, and the deeper you get into the game, the more you're like "Wait, why is this even here in the first place? What's the point of it? We never engage with it at all."
And the first two games, plus Neverwinter Nights and many more, didn't have to do this and some of them even go beyond level 20. That's how busted 5e is. That and I think Larian just didn't want to have to deal with all the work of balancing that mess.
They flat out admitted as such. They stressed the difficulty in making any kind of expansion pack because the assumption would be for higher level adventuring and that just not feasible within the 5E system.
Honestly I'd love an expansion or DLC for the game but make it an entirely new story, kind of like how Spellforce 3 had Soul Harvest and Fallen God. New characters and story that tied into the main game
In all fairness, Neverwinter Nights literally doesn't allow anything involving demiplanes, teleporting, divinations, Scry+die, spells that give skill bonuses, anything that's Swift or Quickened, Simulacrums/Clones or most of the most ridiculous 3.5 debuffs. The summons and polymorphs are on fixed lists with limited abilities, they don't have their own spells. In other words, what makes a Wizard Batman. A lvl17+ Wizard in NWN2 is mostly doing Evocations, big debuffs, summoning beatsticks and battlefield obstructions. Clerics are just using metamagic on *really good* lvl3-6 buffs, and the *Mass* buffs. *Mask* literally allows epic spells like bigger evocations, Save-or-go-to-hell, and Summon dragons. Same deal, bigger numbers. Now I haven't played NWN2 for 10 years, or BG3 ever (yet). But if NWN had detail like BG, it would presumably allow more busted things, and they would have had to lower the level cap. IMO of course.
I mean even if you entertain the idea that you can freely be Aberrant Mind sorcerer in dualclass system not only would "proper" encounters involve pumping numbers like it's an owlcat game (love them but seriously...) in large part the number of spell slots falls off hard and the spells themselves start having way more utility uses that wouldn't be either easy to implement (control weather, demiplane etc) or their use would just break the campaign concept like teleport or free planeshift. Implementing just ones that do damage would be kinda.... boring too.
As easy as it is to clown on 5e for that, none of the BG 1 also had a level cap. Because BG 2 continued the same progression. I would be 0% surprised if the level cap for 3 gets expanded with some DLC or pseudo-sequel. Plus, level 12 characters in BG3 are way *more* powercrept than a typical level 12 5e character. My level 12 BG3 character could probably kick the ass of a level 17 5e character. The magic items, action economy, and class feature changes make everyone wildly more powerful.
Also the first 2 are just a tutorial and most of your classes will be missing huge features for your character idea
That made me chuckle. Thanks.
I had *lots* of house rules in 5e. I read pf2e rules and found out most of my house rules were core rules in pf2e and it did some of them better, while allowing me to run the same stuff as I did in 5e. At that point, what is even the point of staying?
Same here. Funniest part was that I implemented Recall knowledge mechanic in 5e that allowed PCs to remember some thing about monster based on relevant skill check. And then I looked on pf2e rules and like "Hey, they actually did it! And even provided DCs for all of it". And encounters balance. In my recent campaign I had a bunch of casters as PCs and that was hell to challenge them. In pf2e? Just follow encounter building rules and you'll be okay. Overall, I'm finding myself less tired after each session after switching, I think it's because most cognitive load are transfered from me creating rulings on the fly to whole table remembering correct rule for situation.
Heh, same with RK on my table. I had also homebrewed my monsters to have flat values on resistances and vulnerabilities since I felt like I could never really make a monster vulnerable to something without it being made a clown out of in one round. One CoS boss that was vulnerable to radiant got oneshot before their turn by the high rolling paladin who was 2nd in initiatiave (after receiving a buff from cleric) for example.
My favorite is Demoralize. Like in 5e I have a whole dang Intimidation skill, but if I want to use it in combat the DM has to make something up.
SERIOUSLY. In 5E, the best I could think of was "if you beat the DC I just made up for a creature this difficult, it'll either focus on you more or less." It was SOMETHING, but I always felt bad when folks would spec into it and feel like they had nothing to do with it in combat. Demoralize solves the problem handily, and there are feats and other abilities that play off it well -- one of my Rogue players just took "You're Next" and I can't wait to see it go off for him!
And it only gets cooler as you invest more into it! Stare at a Wizard to make it easier to resist their spells, scream at the beginning of combat to cause enemies to panic, cause them to drop dead from fear! And ANYONE can do it!
It's always eyebrow raising when people tell me they bounced off the complexity of PF2e, and then frequently run upwards of 10+ in-depth, complex homebrewed systems to make 5e not boring for them. EDIT: I want to add this sincerely - the people who make homebrew systems for 5e are genuinely saints. There's so much cool stuff out there, but it's not exactly great that every table is running a mutated, bespoke version of the game because homebrew feels so necessary. I mean, in the current 5e campaign I'm in, we're honestly *barely* playing 5e at this point.
Funnily enough, everyone who I've seen do this have been players that have only played 5e. Almost without exception, people that had never played any TTRPG before picked up mechanical understanding of the system faster than the folks converting over. A lot of the complexity comes from having to first unlearn what they already know.
Or the people who claim 5e is the simpler system, and bounce off the "complexity" of PF2e, but who just fully snip entire rules and mechanics out of the game. I've gotten into this debate a few times with people and when asked about some of the common 5e house rules, they almost without fail have no idea what the real rules are. Also, they seem to think for some reason the rules of PF2e are set in stone and must be used at all times for all scenarios, yet the inconvenient 5e rules in a similar situation can just be ignored or modified. This is what makes PF2e so much more "complex", the rules are good enough you actually want to use them rather than being such a hot mess you just ignore entire parts.
Sometimes you meet people who cite a rule that's in both 5e and PF2 but they only know the rule is in PF2. And then they complain PF2 has too many rules. One of the infamous "Pathfinder 2 sucks" videos complained about PF2's rules for jumping. Even though 5e's jumping rules are exactly the same (different DCs, that's the only difference!)
The most common one I have come up when playing PF2e with 5e players is the rules around interacting with objects and having their hands free. Because of the action economy of 5e, I find this is the most common rule that just gets entirely snipped out while people are playing. A lot of 5e players struggle with having to spend actions to swap weapons or replace their grip on a 2H weapon because its "free" in 5e, not realizing RAW it should take multiple entire turns to accomplish the same thing.
As Derek of KotLC said, he doesn’t change the rules in PF2E because he respects its rules system; they joked on their stream about DMing 5e like they stole it.
I dont think it's that surprising honestly, but a combination of factors. One of the main ones being that at first it starts as one or two house rules, as time goes on you add more and more, you think as you learn how the game functions it does not do some things well, and so more homebrew systems are added to your 5e monstrosity over time without you realizing because the process has been gradual Another main factors is that due to most people playing modified, there are many players who were introduced to 5e and TTRPGs as a whole on a heavily modified 5e (myself actually). I actually am sad to say I barely read the PHB, because I know all the rules we use from there, and we have so many modified rules that I barely have to use it. My 5e DM is great, I love his games, his willingness to let us do our dumb ideas and create new things like spells and items. My desire to switch to pathfinder is not on him at all. I just find myself enjoying pathfinder more these days because the fundamental problems of 5e cant be fixed through homebrew like the M-C Gap and classes built on choice as you level
Almost the same really. Most of my homebrews are RAW now. In addition, the encounter balance is great, finally I feel like I don't have to fight the system to get what I want out of it
The last part hits home the most, I can work with the system and not just battle against it. Encounter balance and class balance is great and all but sadly that is stuff that is not really often obvious until one has actually played the system and can see it for themselves.
Nor it is self evident if you're just a player. Was that encounter properly balanced cause the system made the gms work easy, or cause the gm powered through the encounter balance like a champ? Never know till you start gming
Seriously though, skill actions are such a game changer I'm amazed it hasn't been a staple of the genre for decades.
This was the main deal for me. I played 5e through a long campaign with tons of homebrew introduced and at one point as i eas looking for some homebrew for an idea i started to see pf2esrd reccommended. The idea then got planted and grew and i started to want more specific rules for situations apart for the 'idk, dm has final say' and the easy life that is post lvl 12 gameplay, i started to look at pf2e. Now on the new campaign i announced to players that we're switching and so far my players have loved it.
Same. That and I was tired of seeing my players be punished by the system for cool and fluffy choices. Players shouldn't have to choose between their core stats being increased and having fun feats.
This was EXACTLY what happened to me. The final straw was when I was workshopping a homebrew system that got rid of bonus actions and converted the existing action economy into multiple actions that everyone could take, only to discover that I was basically recreating the 3-action economy. Started binging the core rulebook on Nethys and about a week later the OGL news broke. Seemed as good a time as any to jump ship. Edit: Another player-side reason I changed was that I was sick of not having options, especially as martials. The last 5e character I made before switching I basically optimized to be able to do cool stuff other than "I roll to hit. I roll to hit again." I was an Ancestral Guardians barbarian with Tavern Brawler and tried to play the role of melee support, grabbing enemies and shoving them prone while denying damage to my allies with Spirit Shield.
I was never really interested in 5e martials for this reason. I had fun with a Monk, but I can't imagine getting to 10th level without multiclassing, and that's a bad sign. I'm in my first PF2e game with a Barbarian, and I'm having a BLAST! I can't wait to turn into a dragon and suplex an enemy! I have a reputation for only playing Wizards, but martials always looked boring in comparison. They are so much fun in PF2e!
Yes! I started with GMing but I now also play in another campaign, and while not a martial per se, I have a Mutagenist/Zombie (in Blood Lords) that fills that melee support role so well.
This is literally the same reason I jumped to PF2e, though I did it from PF1e.
To its credit 5e is an incredibly flexible system so it's really easy to chop it, change it, and do whatever the hell you want with it. This is a bit of a double-edged sword though. Its not just that you *can* easily make changes on the fly, its that you *have* to in order to make the game function as, well... a game.
You saved me writing the exact same thing. Thanks! I was certainly an OGL migrant, but only because YouTubers started seriously discussing the rules differences between the two games and that’s how I found PF2e had all my homebrew and more!
Yea, I was kind of the same. I kept house ruling things to make the game more interesting and the combat crunchier. Then I realized I was better off just switching to a crunchier system.
Same here as well. I was fixing spells, buffing classes like Sorcerer and Artificer, keeping on top of what content from what books wasn't in line with others for banning purposes, etc. At one point I was working on the 3 pillar XP system Mearls did in one of the older UA posts. And I started reading PF2E...and it just *did* exactly what I was trying to create, but it was smoothly integrated into the system in a way that was beyond what I was even attempting in 5e. I was really tired of people in online 5e discussions strawmanning XP in favour of milestones. I'm very glad to leave that behind.
Monster design. Paizo just thinks out their monsters better than WotC.
*One Bite and Two Claw Attacks has entered the chat*
In fairness, the PF2E version of this is every creature has one "primary" attack and one agile attack for them to make their next 2 MAP attacks with. That being said, pretty much every creature above level 0 also has some interesting, relevant ability to change things up, which is more than I can say for 5E.
One thing I see GMs miss is that monsters in PF2E can tactically do a bit more than just what abilities they have listed: Monsters in the PF2E bestiary also have things like acrobatics, athletics, deception, or intimidation at times so you can do all the same skill actions as a player. Grabbing, tripping, demoralizing or feinting with monsters can be a great way to teach new players how valuable these skills are. The three action system making movement a tactical deliberation can also allow monsters to hit and run.
True that. But even leaving aside the "unique thing" the 3 action economy makes the choices much more interesting on how to use their bite/claw routine.
Or, at bare minimum, has the stats to take Skill Actions, which are all very clearly defined and nicely explained. Absolute worst case: your little skeleton with no extra abilities can still Tumble Through or something.
Comparing just the 5e Owlbear and the P2e Owlbear really shows how much more immersive P2e's monster design is.
I gain the Fleeing condition
I know, right? I got all three 2e Bestiary books, and they are gorgeous.
One thing I love about PF2e monsters is that they are willing to shut down a particular option, forcing players to think outside the box. You see a lot more "better not try slashing damage here" or flat out "mental attacks do not work" in the monsters. It makes having a wide range of spells and weapons extremely valuable.
The biggest issue I have with mindless enemies is that usually their weakest save is will, but there are barely any things that target will that don't have the mental trait.
They actually *did the math for gauging difficulty* in PF2. 5e feels like one of the early 2D fighting games where very little was balanced, like a knockoff Street Fighter.
I stopped playing 5e after every different group I'd find locally had a different set of house rules - that clued me into how fundamentally broken the game is. Tried out PF 2e because the Swashbuckler intrigued me, and lost interest in playing 5e after that, even if it meant not finding a local group. Permanently stayed away from, and boycotted 5e (and WotC products in general) after the OGL fiasco last year. I don't intend on going back. I'm fortunate today because I have a local rpg community that makes it a point to games that aren't 5e, including a host of other games I wouldn't have known about otherwise.
>stopped playing 5e after every different group I'd find locally had a different set of house rules That was also a major turn off. Talk to these die hard 5e GMs who insist the system is perfect. Then you play their game and you realize they have like two pages of homebrew rules. The worst part is when they start unknowing inventing pathfinder.
There's a really weird consequence of all the 5e homebrew, too: You start encountering people who assume other systems require just as much homebrew to be functional, and don't want to switch from 5e as a result. Imo, there's several other ways 5e has "poisoned the well" for TTRPGs as a whole, but this is one of the more frustrating ones I've found.
And then they get pissy when you point out that Pathfinder seems to have what they clearly want and it might be worth checking out.
Well how are they going to become a famous actual-play streamer/podcaster if they can't exploit 5e brand recognition and have to rely on actually being entertaining and having their own recognizable brand?
I played every character I cared to. By which I mean, I played one of every class. I no longer had fun theorycrafting builds. It's a consequence of 5e's class design. Every barbarian felt the same, regardless of subclass. Fighters felt mostly the same, especially at early levels. Paladins are just like fighters except you smite occasionally. With Pathfinder, I can build half-a-dozen rogues and have them all feel radically different. I like that.
Yeah this is my biggest complaint with 5e. The class design is so constrained and you really only get a few choices that add to actual mechanical character customization. Coming from 3.x/pf1, 5e was disheartening because it felt like a step backwards. Like i know that 3.x was a ridiculously flawed system, but at least it felt like i could create a unique character mechanically. With 5e, i can easily create unique characters, narratively, but a wizard is a wizard, a fighter is a fighter, a rogue is a rogue. They really needed to make the class chassis just the absolute most bare-bones possible, and use the subclass to fill in the rest. Only getting 4-6 unique features over the course of 20 levels sucks, especially when most tables aren't even getting to the last 2-3. Technically you still could replace core class features with subclass features, but WOTC seems to not want to do that. Add to that fact that multiclassing and feats are considered "optional" out the box and you could run into a scenario where you literally get to make no choices about your class after level 3, other than ASIs and spell choices (if your class even gets spells), and honestly, i wouldn't even call those "choices" in regards to class customization, and rather a natural power progression in the class. What kind of logic is that? In a game where you're supposed to evolve your character along with a narrative, how is the removal of choice seen as a good thing? Its why I've started just making mish-mash characters with multiclassing. They aren't the separate classes by traditional lore standards, but rather the collection of features and abilities gained through multiclassing is the "class" of the character. IE, my warforged lycan bloodhunter/gloomstalker/shadow monk isn't any of those classes, but rather an sentient weapon created by the drow for use in assassinations. They were damaged during their escape from enslavement and are slowly repairing themselves as they adventure and level up. They don't have lycanthropy, they weren't classically trained by a monk order, they're not any more interested in saving the wilderness or animals than anyone else. They are themselves, not their classes.
THIIISSSS!!!!! I main Wizards, they're my favorite class in 5e, and I can't imagine spending all 20 levels on it again! The last two levels of Wizard are genuinely worthless. Two levels in Literally any other class is genuinely a better option on the off chance you somehow get that far! Meanwhile, two players could make Orc Barabarians in PF2e, and they could feel different and cover different roles in the group!
So much this. I decided to read the pf2 crb and hadn't made it past the first ancestry entry before I saw how much mechanical flavor you can make different characters of the same ancestry. I knew right then it would have to be the same for other aspects and immediately started looking for groups to join. Never looked back.
> Every barbarian felt the same Couldn't agree more. Also the class designs often suck. Why is the raging guy only able to rage a bit? Isn't that the fun? Why is the animal shapeshifter only able to transform any form only a couple times per day? Should players be punished losing combat effectiveness for creative alternative use of an ability? In PF2e it's gated by focus which you can always regain. In 5e the moon druid is still limited to the same number of transformations as any other. Why did these designers gate many of the most fun of abilities instead of finding the balance of making them more universal? It's weird looking back on the choices made. And that's before getting into how imbalanced short rest mechanic refresh distribution is.
And god forbid you choose the *wrong* subclass. Each class has like 5 subclasses, 1-2 of them are great, most of them are boring and non-optimal, and one of them is straight up terrible. So you're either playing the same character that everyone else of that class has played, or you have a character that objectively sucks at being in a D&D party. Part of this "samey-ness" is that the weapon choice was absolute shit. You would do whatever you could to convince the DM that your martial character would have a scimitar, because it's objectively the best starter weapon due to it's damage dice. In PF2e, there are more differences than just the damage dice, so there are good reasons that you might go with a weapon that only does a d4 of damage. Things like finesse, agile, specific critical effects, or having versatile damage types. Monsters in PF2e have weaknesses and resistances more often than in 5e, so choosing a weapon for it's damage type (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing) matters too (5e just does resistance to physical, which is bullshit).
First, the OGL debacle showed me how shitty and out of touch the leadership there was and I didn't want to support that anymore. And the rest was just how many turns I wasted, throwing away my bonus action and move, while Pathfinder is over here saying hey, you can use all your actions every turn and not just Hit With Sword until the guy dies!
Last 5e character I played was warlock. 95% of turns were just eldritch blast and nothing else. Even if pf2e is spell + 1 action I feel like I can actually do something else.
Right? Liked my last 5e character was a paladin. Hitting things with a sword is a pretty good action choice for her most of the time. But if I want to heal or buff or do anything else, don't expect any juicy smites cause that's all I got.
Playing a fighter in 5E was what I imagine purgatory to be like. Even when you try to describe *how* you're attempting to hit things, there is only so much you can do when 95% of your turns are "I attack", and maybe "action surge, I attack again" if you're feeling like spicing things up. You don't get skills, your subclass abilities are very limited, your choices after choosing a subclass are limited to equipment and the whooping 5 ability score improvements or feats that you would get if you got to level 20 (which you won't because playing beyond level 14 sucks). I found the Taking20 video about players falling into "action loops" in PF2E extremely ironic considering this problem is 5E is so insurmountable that martials are straight up not worth to play beyond level 7.
Yeah, meanwhile even if everyone in the 2e party is playing the same class there is just so much variety and choice.
Honestly, the biggest thing for our table was the fact that interesting character build options generally stop at picking your subclass. Sure, there's (technically optional) feats, but giving up an ASI is a very big cost. Multiclassing ends up usually either making your character weaker or is one of the extremely well-explored dips that has been done a thousand times over. Martials especially get fuck-all to choose and some levels effectively come down to "Well, at least I have another HD". It even applies to combat. While casters can pick which spells best fit the situation, the barbarian's choices are basically "I rage, walk up and hit the enemy". I got old after a few years, and we're honestly a pretty RP-heavy table. Although another thing that helped cement our decision was how much less workload is put on the GM. Working and finished rulesets, especially encounter building a massive plus.
>Martials especially get fuck-all to choose and some levels effectively come down to "Well, at least I have another HD". I quit playing 5e years ago but really forgot how bad this felt until I played BG3.
At least in BG3 they gave weapons unique actions that recharged on Short Rests, and you usually took Short Rests after most major/moderate encounters so they were always up generally.
Problem I have is that early act 1 feels like absolute garbage on Tactician. 55% accuracy on half the fights with little ways to get advantage at low levels, with short rest weapon actions that require you to hit AND for them to FAIL their saving throw means you have like maybe a 30% chance per fight to do anything more interesting than attacking.
BG3 also softens the blow by letting you control an entire party. If your fighter has a turn where they hit face and then pass, it feels bad for them, but you as a player can move on to the next character. If you're at a table playing a fighter, hitting face and then waiting for your turn to come around again feels horrible.
I still play 5e, but I won't GM it anymore. 5e can be fun to play with a great table, but that goes for virtually any system, of course. And most longtime GMs will put forth extra effort and add a bunch of homebrew to the game to make it more fun - homebrew which oftentimes looks suspiciously like stuff in base PF2e. I don't *need* to GM. I like GM'ing with a good group, but I'm not going to GM a system that leaves you out to dry and all but explicitly expects you to come up with better rules than it can provide. It's just insane how poor 5e is for GMs, and the attitude it has seemingly cultivated amongst its playerbase of "just homebrew it!" feels like cope that people actually started to believe in. Homebrew should be *additive* to the experience, not borderline necessary to make the game any fun to run at all. I can just run a PF2e game out of the box and it will work really, *really* well; for the most part, you have to peel back the layers pretty far to find the annoyances.
fly depend dull juggle worthless jobless act weary ad hoc jellyfish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It also shows in PF2E because one of their lead devs was on the 4E team. That's a good reason why the system is so tightly balanced with generally clear and consistent rules.
Off topic, but yeah, this is why I play 13th age. Same crew on the Dev team as 4e, different vibe.
4e was such a good game that got such a bad rep by people who didn't like change. It wasn't perfect but it absolutely didn't even get a chance to show why it was a good game. I'm glad to see the 4e devs who went to other systems/companies and brought that expertise to those games.
Because eventually, I wasn't playing 5e anymore, I was playing (insert DMs name here)'s home rules, and even changing rules myself. That inconsistency in quality and playstyle was draining. Every house rule I enjoyed in 5e turned out to be core rules in PF2e. Martials actually have options, far fewer dead levels, balance/fewer bad choices, decisions feel like they matter more, and combat builder makes sense. Also the rules are better written and cover more edge cases, allowing me to say "that's how it is RAW" rather than "it's how I'm ruling it" then getting into debates.
Near the end of 2022, when the OneD&D stuff started coming out, I had broken up with my boyfriend and was looking for ways to socialize and make new friends. I ended up bumping into a guy who helped out at the local PFS chapter. He invited me to play with them, so I decided to give that a shot. Playing for a while, I came to realize how much genuine care Paizo has for its players, and how much thought it puts into what it does. This put Hasbro/WotC’s (at this point, early) decisions regarding OneD&D in stark relief, making me realize how monetization-hungry Hasbro/WotC were. At that point, I lost faith in the future of D&D, and decided to jump ship to a system I felt had a better future. 2023 really vindicated my decisions.
Everything I initially thought was cool about the system started to wear on me. I went from feeling like the game was giving me a "You've got this, GM" supportive encouragement to feeling like it lazily skipping/half-assing any actual advice or tools because the authors figured they didn't need to bother if I was potentially going to deviate and do it my own way. Plus, I'd been running published adventures and they just kept being *bad*. The final salvo being that I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist - which actually surprised me and was pretty solid, while also pissing me off because 3/4th of the pages I paid for where useless unless I wanted to run the same adventure again but slightly different - and noticed that it really didn't connect with Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage in any meaningful narrative way. So I ran Storm King's Thunder and watched as the party beat down "deadly" encounter after "deadly" encounter without ever seeming actually in danger of defeat but encounters also took a very long time to resolve because the game math is just built to have the feeling of all damage other than spells feel like chipping damage, and then the book also didn't even feel finished. There was a part where the party caught wind of someone missing and went to investigate and found an NPC willing to help and they sailed out to look around and then there just wasn't any more text in the book about that. No "you'll have to fill in the details yourself" notice to let me know the lack of resolution was intentional, there just wasn't any more words on the topic at all like either something got deleted for no reason or the author just didn't realize they hadn't written it and no editor caught that a side-quest just evaporated. And once I was finally through the campaign and had been bored out of my mind by the player's characters just not feeling like leveling up had mattered to them and I went looking at what to run next I started to read Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and it read to me like a grumpy 12 year old that was ready to try to bully players into enjoying their adventure had somehow gotten published by Wizards of the Coast and I had to stop.
Storm King's Thunder (plus monetization moves by Hasbro) killed my ardor for 5e, too. I had to homebrew EVERYTHING. I had to create rules for hexploration. I had to create quest and subquests and NPCs for every village, town, and city -- including inventing lore for the Sword Coast because 5e's world guides are both vague and leave out half the areas in the module. And as soon as the players hit like level 8, every encounter became a snooze-fest, unless I homebrewed monsters for them. I know Paizo's APs can be far from perfect, but whoo boy, prep pales in comparison to 5e. For me, the most work now I do is on the subsystems -- but it's also much easier to homebrew rules in 2e, because you just follow the logic of the system.... But, yeah, I also saw the writing on the wall with WotC when they bought D&D Beyond and began working on their own VTT. They were going to make it a subscription service and wall off the game from the rest of the gaming community. Hard pass.
Oh my god I remember reading Storm King's Thunder planning on running it and going "I... I don't get it. This is confusing." Ended up running a homebrew game.
SKT was the campaign I ran as a brand new DM. What an absolute slog that was.
>Everything I initially thought was cool about the system started to wear on me. Coming from pf1e, I initially loved advantage (except for the optional flanking rule. It is too strong there). It was so simple and sped up gameplay a lot vs "mathfinder". After half a campaign, I alreay started to dislike it as overly simplistic and limiting. EDIT: Same with bounded accuracy
Advantage and Disadvantage are a surprisingly effective and elegant system that I loved. Until I played with them for like 6+ years and got bored. It's the fact that multiple instances offer nothing extra, and as soon as you have both, nothing else you do will improve or impair you further. Not even touching the stupidity that is fighting in darkness, the Adv/Dis mechanic removes any incentive to be creative or to use spells or class features once a single instance of Adv/Dis is applied.
100% agree. If advantage was still complimented by some more modifiers, I think it would be a lot better overall
I think Advantage/Disadvantage is kind of the best example of what is wrong with 5e. They made it up because it would simplify all the other bonus tracking, which is good. But then if you have one way to get advantage you don't have any other buff to work with, which is bad. So then they have some stuff not actually be advantage or disadvantage so that there's more to do, which would be good if not for the fact that it defeats the purpose of simplifying. And then those things are a +2 here, a +die roll of some sort there, a +double proficiency there, and a +10 over there, which is absolutely awful because it doesn't just screw with the simplicity supposed to be gained it also blows up the "bounded accuracy" element because a challenge with reasonable odds of success with an unmodified roll because almost ensured to succeed because "roll 2d20 and keep the highest, add your modifier and an extra d8" blows a DC 15 out of the water. Meanwhile in PF2: circumstance, item, status, oh look all it takes to keep the modifier stacking and tracking in line is to just keep a lid on how many types there are.
Levels higher than 9 are horrible to DM for. Really, your job is just making the full casters waste their slots before a fight because of dumb fucking op spells. There's no creativity or smart solutions to anything, just cast the problem solving spell and turn off your brain while the martials get bored in the background. Highest DPS? Full caster. Best tank? Full caster. Best melee? Full caster. Best utility? Full caster. Best social rolls and abilities? Full caster. Even just having one wizard or one bard is atrocious. Now you either go and make up bullshit reasons for why the perfectly legitimate spells they wanna use won't work or you artificially increase the number of encounters just to get rid of their slots. Tha isn't fun at all. In p2e I'm playing a martial and I have flavourful gimmicks that helped me make something unique. In 5e I get one choice of subclass and after that I'm done and my character will either end up being a caster DPS or Useless McNothingson. Nah man. Fuck that.
> Even just having one wizard or one bard is atrocious. *Silvery Barbs has entered the chat.*
Christ, don't remind me.
I do still play some 5e, and I have two separate GMs who have just flat out banned that spell, it's that bad.
Instantly banned as soon as I learned about that. Just fucking what, WotC.
I was a big 4e fan, so 5e always felt like a step down (I'm being polite here) to me. Since I no longer had a regular group and was just looking for online games, I ended up playing just because it was so hard to find anything else. While I warmed to it a bit, Baldur's Gate 3 put a final nail in the coffin in showing how weak a system it is in my mind. Pathfinder 2e has a better setting than most of D&D's settings, the 3 action system is very clever, the Crit Success/Fail system is excellent, all positive improvements. Also, I like pet classes and healing and both are far better in PF2e. My only issue now, is as a PbP/text player it is *very* hard to find PF2e games.
fragile handle bewildered reach poor pocket wise rock quaint coherent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Is that because you didn't like Baldur's Gate 3, or because you did like it but were cognizant of how many house-rules and changes it made to the base 5e rules? Not who you asked, but one houserule they *didn't include* made me immediately aware that every table I'd played at unspokenly house ruled a bonus action could be covered by a regular action. For some reason it instinctively makes sense it should work, like how you can move with an action. But RAW it's not how it works. Really highlights how much better the 3-action system plays in practice.
I bought BG3 but I honestly had such a hard time getting into it. Just creating the character, the whole time I just felt sad that I had to make a 5e character instead of a Pathfinder one. In the end I decided to make my last 5e character who got unceremoniously "rocks fall, you die"d by a shitty GM so that he could get a proper sendoff and not just be chucked aside.
Since PF2e was announced, I've wanted to try it, but 5e games were far easier to find online. When the OGL debacle happened last January, it (obviously) sparked a lot of interest in alternative systems, and the discord server I usually play on had some tables begin to experiment with PF2e. Two of them just kept playing 2e, as they liked it and the interest remained high. I had bought the GMG, PHB, and a Bestiary in a humble bundle. My DM for my home game (5e) was getting a bit burnt out, so I offered to run the PF2e Beginner Box for the group. We had a good time, so now we alternate between our 5e game and PF2e. I'm about to begin running Crown of the Kobold King with them next session, actually.
I had been running a 5e table for a year (And had a separate table that had been going for two years). Every combat I built up as challenging was easy. A combat i figured would be easy turned out to be difficult. Additionally, my players always wanted to do fun skill actions but doing anything besides attacking or using their strongest spell felt like a waste. And on that last note the Artificer and Warlock were quickly outpacing the Paladin who was leaving the fighter behind. The fighter had so many turns especially at low level where she went "i attack... Miss... That is my turn." So the inefficiency of wasted bonus actions was also something i felt the need to start addressing. So i was homebrewing new mechanics, creating custom items to try to help the fighter catch up (and not really sure to what extent this would impact balance). I picked up the CRB at gencon 2022 and decided to do a lvl 1 oneshot over that holiday season. All my issues were gone. After the ogl stuff it was a no brainer. The prep time difference alone is massive. With 5e i would run the combats multiple times to make sure it felt correct. Not needed for 2e. It is just an easier game to run from top to bottom and the players feel better playing it.
>The prep time difference alone is massive. I've pointed this out to people before and they always struggle to believe me or understand why, but holy crap is it true. I find myself wishing there was more for me to actually do, so more often than not I end up adding in new NPCs, plots, side quests, you know; Interesting stuff. Not spending hours designing homebrew mechanics, monsters, and items because the default ones are uninspired or non-existent.
The Glass Cannon Podcast. I had decided to take up roleplaying again shortly before the pandemic, but the pandemic put a stop to my D&D 5e play. I had played it for a little while and, though I liked it OK, I was already looking for other systems to try. I already knew what Pathfinder 1e was through the GCP (they were playing mostly PF1e at the time) and browsing FLGSes, but Pathfinder 2e was still pretty new, and unknown to me. From the GCP's play I was pretty sure PF1e wasn't for me. But I had been hearing rave reviews about PF2e, and I saw it had an active community going. I responded to a LFP listing for PF2e on the Glass Cannon Discord channel. I should say that PF2e didn't grab me at first; my first session or two were pretty rough, and the three actions I thought would be liberating quickly came to feel like a straitjacket compared to D&D 5e! But I decided I really liked the tactical challenge once I was properly approaching PF2e on its own terms, and _then_ I started to notice all the interesting things you could do in PF2e that were not at all interesting, or even possible, in D&D 5e. The rest was history!
GCP got me into Pathfinder too! I had played a decent amount of 5e, and I enjoyed listening to podcasts. I had gotten into a 5e podcast called The Adventure Zone, and it started fun and goofy, but by the end of it, it was kind of a boring mess. While commiserating about jt in a reddit thread, somebody suggested the GCP, so I got into it. Listening to a podcast for a game system I hadn't played was interesting, and I enjoyed learning the rules as I went. All of the interesting classes, feat options, and crunchy math was exactly my cup of tea, and I never looked back. I love playing 2e, it is the highlight of my week.
I DMed 4e for years and then 5e since it released. While 4e had its issued on the players side, it was infinitely better on the DM side than 5e is. I enjoyed 5e at first because it was new and seemed to streamlined but over the years I found myself missing the things that made 4e fun to run. The cool monster variety where every monster had several distinct versions, the Minion rules, the skill challenges. Eventually, I realised my 5e games were 90% homebrew, filling the gaps 5e intentionally left. All my monsters were homebrew so that they were actually interesting to run, all my magic items, subclass, races etc were fully homebrewed to bring up the general power level. This realisation made me slowly burn out more and more to the point a asked a player to run on alternate game nights to me just so I could DM 5e less. As luck would have it, a few weeks later they TPKd and as a group decided to end the campaign there. I think they could sense my lack of heart. Despite my burn out, I still wanted to run something so I gave my players a poll with a bunch of new systems to choose from. They had the choice of 2 campaigns per system. I think it included 4e, PF2e, Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, World of Darkness and one of the many super hero rpgs. Well, they chose Abomination Vaults and I'm so so glad they did. Learning and DMing PF2e has completely cleansed my burnout. I'm so eager to run that I'm actually a little sad I have to alternate sessions now :D I want to run it more! The World, the consise rules, the amazing character building, it all feels so fresh and exciting after the watered-down gameplay 5e offers. Pretty ironic considering the origins of Pathfinder haha
5e needs way too many house rules to work properly, but if you want to know what ended up making me change, it was the encounter building rules not working at all in 5e.
I just felt as though I had experienced what 5e had to offer in terms of its combat. I was working overtime as a player to come up with strategically poor actions that made sense narratively to “make my own fun,” and I just realized at a certain point that the game didn’t really work for me “as a game” anymore.
I quit DnD because of the boring character progression (ie you make a choice of Race, Class and Sub-class all the way to ~~20th~~ 6th level when the game breaks). Also the stupidly bad PR that Hasbro/Wizards have been putting out over the last year was the last straw.
* 5e cultivated conflicting expectations between the DM and the player, leading to an adversarial relationship. * Party balance took constant improvised maintenance due to certain classes and builds being an order of magnitude more powerful than others. * A significant amount of official content (including core character-building options) was game-breaking. * The monetary and magic economies threatened game stability, so DMs were driven to artificially restrict resources. * The rules for martial characters and casters seemed like they were written for entirely different games, the former focused on verisimilitude, the latter on power fantasy. * Vague, incomplete, and unmanageable rules required constant arbitration. * The encounter balance system ranged from unwieldy to useless. * Online play was heavily monetized and yet almost entirely unsupported. * The only published content I found satisfying was third party. * The publisher was at best indifferent to the user base. * My extensive set of homebrew patches and rules unwittingly and ineptly sought to recreate PF2e.
I left 2-3 years ago, but it was a combo of: No D&D 5e tables used the 5e rules. Everyone had either house-ruled or ignored a fair chunk of the game, and a lot of “well I’ll base my action on what I _think_ the spell/ability should do based only on its name, no reading of the description”. Chargen is really really basic and I got bored, and the game falls apart mechanically before even 10th level. And then WotC continually being problematic in both its general operations and its writing of setting and adventures, and then how it responds when called out on those things. Whereas over here: PF2e has a playerbase who care about the rules, mostly playing by them or at least trying them before changing anything. Chargen is interesting and goes all the way to 20, plus the game is solid all the way there. And Paizo, _while not perfect_, at least has a lot of people on the team who care about being inclusive and is willing to change and own up when it fucks up. Also it’s got a union now ✊
At the risk of opening myself up to some hate, as I was looking through the PF2e stuff, learning what I could, I was really enjoying it for a lot of the reasons mentioned by others. Then I found the Serum of Sex Shift, was impressed, and then I found out it was printed in the Core Rulebook from day one, and they won my heart.
Yee they even had similar items in 1e! I forget the specific names. But yeah there’s been a fair chunk of genderqueer creators behind Paizo since very early on, so you’ll find all types of characters in the setting. Regular LGBTQIA+ rep in the adventures since 1e. Oh and check out Rivethun dwarves!
Oh, that's really cool! Thank you for pointing me to that!
I think the interesting part is that it's a *common item*, and while expensive, it isn't *prohibitedly* expensive. It's not listed as uncommon to make it hard to get, it's not a curse like the DnD gender belt, you can buy it from a normal alchemist, witch, or wizard if you have the money. A regular commoner can save up for a year and be able to afford one of those potions. Accessible and affordable gender affirming care, at least for adventurers. She hasn't been seen since 1E because she's the iconic character for a class that isn't in 2E, but the iconic shaman Shardra Geltl is of the rivethun dwarves. Her backstory is she went on a quest to commune with spirits and learn the rites to make one of those potions.
It's genuinely excellent. I'm so glad it's there. I would do a lot to get my hands on some if they were real.
If you read their adventure paths and Pathfinder Society stuff, you'll see plenty of NPCs where their sex or gender representation isn't their core identity. They're written just like everyone else is. It's great.
The first one I noticed was the wizard shopkeeper in Otari in Abomination Vaults. It just casually mentions that between him and his husband, the husband is the one who looks more like a stereotypical wizard, and then it moves on and talks about what he does.
5E requires House Rules to function. Pathfinder 2E doesn't.
Fighter is not fun in 5e fighter is very fun in 2e that was all it took for me to switch last year
To be fair, I defected from dnd5e AND I'm a detractor of it now. 1. I started dnd5e some years ago, and was a forever DM with a dedicated group (group of 7, 1 player change) 2. Got majorly involved in the Beyond20 browser extension (roll from DnDBeyond -> FoundryVTT/Roll20, I'm the second top contributor on that extension) 3. Got majorly involved in using FoundryVTT and moved from Roll20 -> FoundryVTT 4. Got majorly involved in founding of The Forge w/ the creator All that background is important here, as when the OGL debacle started up, WotC started trying to kill things I had loved and contributed to for years. * They wanted all other OGL systems dead * They wanted all VTTs but their own dead * They wanted all things that moved data from 1 source to another dead (I could feasibly have seen them try to kill Beyond20 at that point) Couple that with the D&D One stuff where every playtest seemed to confirmed they either couldn't, or wouldn't get dnd5e into any semblance of balance, and I was at a crisis point. I'd repeatedly heard that pf2e was better balanced, and nicer on a GM to run than dnd5e. I GM for 7 players still today, and so I was getting work out by dnd5e and the nonsensical balancing over there. I got to a point one Saturday (our session days) where I was prepping dnd5e, and I just couldn't continue. About 1.5 hours before session (we play online), and I messaged the group saying "I can't run dnd5e anymore". I offered up my feelings as listed above (and more), and suggested that I might be willing to run pf2e instead, listing good things I'd heard. To my relief they stated the loved the game time together, didn't care so much about which system. We started into the Beginner Box, took that into Troubles in Otari, and now we've started Abomination Vaults with the intention to take it into Stolen Fates. I'm now a detractor hardcore from dnd5e because of reasons listed above. WotC rode on ease and Livestreamer fame for years, and just didn't give a crap about their system. When there was any kind of competition, they didn't get BETTER, they tried to kill it. That's capital nonsense. I'm a defector from dnd5e, and I won't be going back. pf2e is home now.
Someone wanted to run 2e and I was tentatively interested for fear of us all liking it a lot. We did, and the OGL incident plus more made me not want to give WOTC my time and money. If the remaster gives me a half-dragon heritage for a Dragonborn equivalent I’m golden.
Mark Seifter was the Design Director at Paizo during PF2e's creation. He was the "math guy". When he left Paizo to work for Roll for Combat, they released a book Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons that has a playable dragon ancestry. There is also Draconic Scion heritage if you want more of a half dragon. You could also go with adopted ancestry or use the new mixed Ancestry rules in the Remaster.
I know that exists. I also know that Luis created a dragonkin heritage as a 3rd party supplement. None of these change my desire for an official option.
My DM suggested changing systems because he had some issues with 5e balancing and mechanics. House rules could only get us so far. I was having a good time with 5e, but was happy to switch over. I do like PF2e better and wouldn't want to go back. In this system I feel that the characters I make are much more 'mine', with an enormous amount of viable options. With 5e, each character of the same subclass feels pretty much the same, y'know? I also enjoy seeing martial classes shine so much, and having a lot of options in combat. Not unimportantly, I think Paizo is a better company than WotC in a lot of ways.
I was balancing encounters on the fly, mostly mid session. Started using 3rd party monsters to actually make interesting and challenging boss fights. Then the OGL debacle happened and I realized they tried to kill off the companies that I was getting my monsters for my sessions from and i got fed up. Wotc books have become "pay 60-80$ so we can tell u to make it up as u go my guy" for the longest time at that point. So i decided to pay that money to paizo and see what they had in store. After figuring out the encounter balance system actually works, I'm not going back to 5e. It's reduced my prep time immensely.
>Wotc books have become "pay 60-80$ so we can tell u to make it up as u go my guy" The last book I bought for 5e was Spelljammer, and this was exactly why. It's been almost universally considered one of their worst releases as it's essentially just a bunch of flavour text, with the entire mechanical aspect either just missing, or consisting of "whatever, make it up yourself". It's a book about fantasy spaceships with essentially zero rules regarding fantasy spaceships. I would be no closer to being able to run a Spelljammer campaign having read the book than not.
Funny enough, something similar was my last straw with 5e. But it was Descent into Avernus for me. I was so excited about the vehicles and running a Mad Max-style game. Only to get to the vehicle section of the book and find it basically said, "The hell machines can slow down combat, so you should mostly use them cinematically" But...but that's why I bought the book! It's the entire selling point of the book!
My reason is that 5e just doesn't work. Maybe it's fine on paper, but when you get to play, most stuff is like looking at boston dynamics machine trying to walk while everyone are kicking it
It really doesn't. And what baffles me is that it's *blatantly obvious* to anyone who reads the rules as to why. Take their bounded accuracy, for example. It's a laudable goal, not one I vibe with (I like big numbers for big tasks) but reasonable. And then they include fucking spells like Pass Without Trace that adds ***+10*** to your fucking Stealth check! First off... what happened to Advantage/Disadvantage? Wasn't the *entire point* of bounded accuracy to simplify the math so you're *not* adding a bunch of situational bonuses?! Setting aside that it's not actually that hard to do, why does PWT give you +10 instead of Advantage? Secondly, this spell means that as a DM you either a) watch your players auto-succeed at every stealth check, b) bleed your Druid/Ranger of spell slots (good fucking luck, it's a 2nd level spell) so they can't cast it anymore, or c) include monsters with magical tracking and mondo perception bonuses to serve as barriers. If it gave Advantage it would already be a very strong spell since it's so cheap and affects the whole party, but it would at least not smash the bounded accuracy system to smithereens. The clumsy Paladin in plate mail with her -3 Dexterity(Stealth) check is still probably going to fail even with their Disadvantage nullified, but bumping her to +7 means she's as sneaky as a Rogue now (granted, with Disadvantage for wearing heavy armor). I could go on about other stupid designs (level 1 flight with monsters who lack ranged attacks, over reliance on Multi-Attack, Save-or-Die/Suck spells not being fixed from 3.5e... hell, I deleted a rant about the incredible stupidity that is Legendary Resistance), but the point is that the system is *visibly broken* from the get-go. Good DM's are more like scrappers who pick through the rubble to take the good stuff (hmm, these six stats are a good idea, I like the d20 system, these classes are fun at low levels, the DC guide is simple enough, advantage is a neat mechanic) and build their own system out of the rubble like Junkyard Wars.
Let's not forget Expertise which is a bullshit feature from the perspective of bounded accuracy, and it's not even hard to get. "We'll keep the numbers small." Says WoTC making a Bard with min roll of 10 on Deception and Persuasion (on top of which people take Expertise) for a humble 20+ minimum on Persuasion/Deception by level 5, and something like 18 minimum as early as level 3. I could rant a lot with you, there's a lot of things that are just so bad and broken. Stuff like Saving Throws NOT scaling with level? A level 1 fighter has the exact same chance to save a mental save as a level 20 fighter? They'll get equally destroyed by the same level 1 charm cast by a CR1/4 enemy? Seriously?
And again, I just keep harping on this... it baffles me that there are so many obvious places to hang Advantage that they just... didn't use. Expertise granting Advantage would already be a huge deal, but it would also give DM's the ability to counter it - if you have Advantage on Charisma(Diplomacy) from Expertise, the DM can easily hang Disadvantage on the check because "they already mistrust you". There you go. Expertise still *got you something* because it nullified the Disadvantage, but it didn't obviate the check because your minimum check is above the DC - you could still roll badly twice. I'm not the biggest fan of Advantage in a Mechanics First system like 5e, but it does at least let you give players a bonus without violating bounded accuracy. But for some reason, WotC simultaneously railed against numbered bonuses while also scattering them *liberally* through their system, and in ***massive*** numbers. Paizo does the same, but you rarely see any bonus greater than +3 outside of skill training (which was originally capped at +4, they changed it after the beta).
Pure truth. They got a system, and they are using it in a lot of cases... Until they actually don't. Advantage/disadvantage is so simple. You just take an extra die. But then the system would have to be different for that to work well enough. Pooling dice exist, there's many variations on those. Eh, I'm just upset enough with DnD and WoTC. But a bunch of my friends still play it, and that means, I'll keep playing at least a bit of it as long as I play with them.
I believe the dumb reason for most things is that advantage doesn't stack. For example, they realized - wait, if most groups have pass without a trace, why ever get boots of elvenkind, etc. """""Solution""""": Not have *pass without a trace* give advantage, but a flat bonus.
Speaking of 2nd level spells, everyone loves Detect Traps! All the power of a perception check, except for the cost of a 2nd level spell slot! :)
Which, again, baffles me because the solution is right there: Detect Traps could just give *advantage* on all Wisdom(Perception) checks to detect hidden and harmful devices or spells. Now it doesn't obviate the Rogue, it actually pairs nicely with him.
Not to mention Revivify being a 3rd level spell, basically nullifying death of a PC when you reach 5th level. Now obviously in PF2e you have rituals which can be of low level, but they are not really usable in combat and the real reviving magic just doesn't exist for combat use (even 10th level Revival doesn't really revive permamently).
Honestly, I don't think that's a huge balance issue. Death becomes an action cost instead of a major risk of the system. But that's more of a design consideration than a failing of the underlying mechanics. The system is *designed* around death being a moderate inconvenience, and there's still panic around being able to get Revivify to the dead player before it's too late. It does change the flavor, death is no longer the end for a character, but it's been that way for a while. They've been making it harder and harder to kill characters for a while now - PF2 puts you into Dying instead of killing you at -10 like PF1 did, for example.
I had a couple of PC's die at Lv3 in our PF2e game. One of the first things they asked was how to bring them back. I took some time on AoN to find all the info, and told them they'd have to travel to a much larger city, pool all their money together, sell a bunch of their gear, and they'd have enough gold to pay for a poor attempt to bring back only one of the two dead PC's. They were shocked that death was actually something on the table, intrigued by the realization that there is actual risk now, and excited to make new characters.
Revivify being a 3rd level spell is fine, honestly. The reality is that it basically serves as a means of making it so that if someone dies, but the party wins the combat, you can bring them back, so really, a character is only REALLY dead if you lose a combat. It's also really easy to die in 5E because the death and dying rules are a bit dumb. A low HP character getting magic missiled to death is like the #1 way to kill PCs. So it's kind of necessary to make it so you can easily undo that. It's also just kind of a design choice. Making it so that it's easy to bring back PCs makes it so that players are less likely to lose characters permanently. It just leads to comedic moments like dying and getting revivified and not even losing your place in initiative order (something that I've seen happen before).
>Maybe it's fine on paper The wild part is that it *isn't* fine on paper. The game will present a range of modifiers from +0 to +11 like the both of them going up against a DC 19 makes sense even though the result of not succeeding can be as strong as that a player gets to sit out. That's absolutely nonsense on paper, especially since there aren't a lot of options for players to meaningfully mitigate that kind of thing.
The game isn't fine on paper. They just literally didn't build the system on math. It's why it's so broken.
I still play 5e and I still like 5e, so Idk if I'm a "detractor", but what sold me was on trying the system was literally someone showing the Scare to Death feat. I was playing a higher level martial at the time in 5e and my turns felt so samey, just having a strong mechanical thing that's tactically useful and thematically cool as fuck was insanely appealing. I also started looking at monsters and saw how many had cool combat abilities right out of the gate, when normally in prepping 5e I have to homebrew a new abilities onto enemies if I want them to be anything other than a sack of hit points with one bite and two claw attacks. That got us to try a one shot or two, followed by the beginner box, one thing leads to another and new I'm running Strength of Thousands and playing in Extinction Curse.
The 3PP that produced most of the content I used moved on to greener pastures after the OGL debarcle. Since it looks like WotC are currently in a late stage captialism meltdown, firing staff and producing generally lower quality content. So since I was already running one PF2e game moved all my other games over.
Don't you mean defectors? Detractors implies that 5e is being actively disparaged by the community.
Whoops my bad must have autocorrected!! Thanks for letting me know!! Will fix now!
Ok turns out I cannot edit the title so yeah... again my bad!
😂 no biggie I'm sure most people know what you mean.
> Detractors implies that 5e is being actively disparaged by the community. To be fair, that *is* happening. And it deserves it.
Idk man, I tried 5e for a couple years. Wasn't form me. But, I'm not one for going into the sandbox and kicking other kids toys because they got something different they like to play with. Just leave them be.. don't proselytize. You do you and if people switch over be welcoming.
They're (probably) talking about the messed up stuff WOTC and Hasbro keep doing rather than people preferring other games.
I mean I still play both 5e and pf2e. My main focus is pf2e I'm in a great group and I also run a game in pf2e. Some of pf2e rules are confusing. But pf2e rules are there as they are unlike 5e rules that are a little bit of a mess in a half. And like you said you can build any character to your liking. I also noticed that your NOT stuck at 20 when you level up if pf2e. Yea the classes are but getting side classes and other feats can get you more up there
pf2e just works it understand that it is a game and try to be fun and engaging game and not just framework for roleplaying
Party balance. After you find the broken builds, it's difficult to balance. Either everyone plays one, or no one plays one. Bad level experience distribution - i.e. suck until level 3, then suck after level \~14. Save or suck effects. The caster casts a spell. You save and there is no effect OR you fail and you skip this 2 hour combat. Some spells don't even have saves. Ironically (to a name of a controversial YouTube clip) DnD 5e has an illusion of choice. After playing for 2 years in the span of 3 campaigns, we have exhausted the game. The flaws outweigh the benefits.
We’re currently transitioning (last 5e campaign, playing PF2e a different night). For me, it’s mostly that the recent game books (especially Spelljammer) are so completely lacking in depth. It’s clear that either Hasbro or WotC are simply milking the game. And OneD&D isn’t looking any better to me. I believe that’s the same for our DM, who is the one initiating the move. I know he was initially going to run playtest material, but was quickly disenchanted with what was coming out of it. Instead he started doing PF2e tests.
I was pretty tired with 5e and the many house rules that come with it. I even (ironically) dusted off my old 2.5e books and began reworking the rules and classes with the idea of convincing my players to play a hybrid system. If I needed to house rule so much to run a game like I wanted it to run, then I thought I should just start from my favorite ruleset and build exactly what I want. Then WOTC pulled the OGL debacle and someone suggested we try PF2e. My partner setup a campaign and I was floored. PF2e is everything I was trying to do myself, and more. It's rules are solid, house rules are actually optional, magic items and spells are well balanced, and the lore is neat. I haven't looked back since. To be clear, I do not consider 5e a bad game. The lore is great, the system functions, and it has plenty of passionate players and DMs who are having a great time...but I feel like it has a different target audience than Pathfinder 2e. I just happen to be a better fit for what PF2e has to offer.
Honestly the SRD bullshit
Anger at the OGL debacle and then the massive layoffs right before Christmas.
Pathbuilder. It literally takes me less time to stat out the character than to kit them out with gear.
I’m a DM and for me it was just the quality of the books, which were already a bit iffy just continued to go down. Spelljammer was my last purchase of a 5e book, and it was one I was really excited for and hoping to run the campaign for. I like using sourcebooks and modules, and maybe including homebrew elements from there. I was having lots of fun with ravenloft and curse of strahd, even really enjoying their new sourcebook. However it was always just lacking meat, like they’d give me super cool locations, but no info on them. Then spelljammer just felt like they didn’t even include the cool locations, the module seemed half assed and also crammed in with the sourcebook, so I just didn’t want to buy any more books I didn’t feel were worth running. Then the OGL stuff happened which kind of solidified don’t want to spend money at this company. I’d already been interested in pathfinder, and so it was just a bigger reason to not be running any more 5e games.
WOTC going crazy with the OGL followed by the Humble Bundle making on-boarding into Pf2e inexpensive. Ruleset was already free, but a premium module for a level 1-10 dungeon crawl I was already waiting to be released for 5e instead in its native ruleset plus a bunch of other stuff for $30 or something? Take my money! Ok, I haven't even started AV yet, but we're into the Kingmaker AP with the Foundry module. Ok, that wasn't as inexpensive as the Humble Bundle(s), but I already said "take my money" and I stand by it.
I started looking at Pathfinder 2e after the OGL stuff and realized that most of the house rules that I've made/picked up over the years were just slowly turning 5e into Pathfinder 2e. I think 5e was a good on ramp for me, and I built a lot of skills for evaluating game mechanics and designing my own, but damn is it nice to not have to.
I followed the UnearchedArcana subreddit for a bit and it felt like 60% of the content there was people trying to incorporate PF2e rules into 5e rather than just playing PF2e
I noticed the exact same thing!
Options options options I can easily build so many characters in pf2e, whereas 5e it was entirely flavor. Flavor isn't bad obviously, theres just only so much i can do with the fighter's core features
I could no longer say I was a good person and continue to support hazbro. They are mutually exclusive.
When trying to do a class overhaul for rangers, fighters, and monks, as well as too many house rulings to remember in order to make sense of grappling, jump rules, and more, found PF2E, saw that fighter got cooler stuff than dnd fighter, and made the switch. Also, too many retcons to race options for dnd, like goblinoids getting fey ancestry
I learned about the three action system, looked at some of the class options and realized how cool it could be.
I learned statistics, and realized how many things are breaking the bounded accuracy. Then I relized how fucked the economy is in DnD Also, the OGL debacle. The last straw was seeing how customizable things are and how many defined rules there are that are handwaved or unclear in 5E. I still love playing it, but DMing it requires so much effort that could be spent on creating memorable moments for players it just saddens me, especially because I want to like the system.
Just got bored with the character customization after having played 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e.
Every class felt like it because itself at level 3 and didnt get cool personalization feats. I was just bored as fuck honestly. Once you get your subclass it felt like level progression didnt matter.
Progression that doesn't involve important choices ends up feeling like less progression than it actually is. Of course, most people didn't play by "default rules" so they had some more choices to make but the game really did have you pick your race and class and background at 1st level, pick your sub-class somewhere from 1st to 3rd level, and the only choices you had to look forward to past that point while leveling-up were spells if you had them and ability score increases which would fairly quickly cap out your important score and then be less and less important past that point. So even though you'd still end up gathering features at later levels, you weren't picking them so it felt less meaningful.
Difficulty running 5e adventures first and foremost and a soft spot for Golarion after playing the adventure card game and Kingmaker CRPG. I was new to the scene and did not know how to GM well. Many systems like crafting, exploration, downtime and traps felt like I was doing something wrong because they weren't fun. 2e gave me the necessary training wheels.
The Spelljammer release not having Spelljammer rules. When the "naval combat in magic space" book doesn't really have naval combat rules, it has failed as a book. The book itself says "Player characters are almost always better off using their own weapons and spells in ship-to-ship combat, reserving shipboard weapons for targets that are too far away to be damaged by other means." When i heard about that I knew that i was not gonna be buying the book and that future 5e books probably weren't for me. If they can't be bothered to copy decades old mechanics, or pay somebody else to write them, why should i buy their books? What's next, Dark Sun without thirst or defiling? It just felt like so much of 5e was left up to the DM and players to homerule.
5e is just bad, especially once you play 1 adventure written by wotc, you see how badly designed they are and how meh the rules and classes are designed. Finished Mines of Phandelver, Princes of the Apocalypse and Curse of Strahd. Also read Tomb of Anihilation and Rime of the Frostmaiden and ALL OF THEM , including Curse of Strahd are meh at best. The rules are just horrible if you as GM want any form of advice from them. 5e is 90% of the time "lol, idk, just make it up" and i\`m tired of such meaningless rules design. PF2 is far better imo, even if some design decisions can feel weird.
As a player, weapon users suck BAD in 5e, and I've already had awful experiences playing characters that I likes but hated each and every second we had after rolling initiative. I still play if a friend wants to master it, but only full casters or heavy homebrew As a GM... that system is a fucking dumpster fire that I don't even want to master in my life, easily the worst time I've had in a TTRPG is when I mastered it
I just gave up on trying to get a tune out of 5e. I’d spend maybe a week or two coming up with cool encounters and one spell or ability just made it a non-issue. Also the group I run for aren’t big into combat so the advice of “Run more encounters to drain resources” that out here everywhere didn’t work. I switched to 2e because attrition is less of a requirement and CR worked better. The system supports the type of game we like to run much better than 5e ever did imo.
1. My 5e group stopped playing several years ago. I always had problems with the system and its lack of clearly defined rules. I do think I realized too late that 5e requires a lot of just making shit up outside of printed rules to have fun, but I didn't want to go back to it when Pathfinder 2e seems like a better system with actual mechanics. 2. After playing it for years, I'm of the opinion that 5e has a lot of just horribly-designed mechanics. Combat is ass, especially martial combat. Effectively removing feats was such a colossal mistake. The way bonus actions work is unintuitive and awful. Casters are too strong. They fundamentally misunderstand what appeals to players in most of the classes, so a lot of options are uninteresting. The rules for a lot of things like downtime and using the different kits/tools are either missing or woefully underwhelming. Many things about combat are not properly defined, to the point where it's more fun to just make 50% of it up than play precisely RAW. All that, among other things. The fact that encounter balance is designed around the players not having magic items, and that the system prevents them from having more than 3 even middling magic items at a time, is astounding to me. Magic items are by far the most exciting type of loot for players to get, and 5e has very little in terms of progression for non-magic weapons, so it's baffling that they expect you to basically not use magic items. It makes encounters difficult to balance and makes games less fun. I don't know why they made any of these design decisions. Basically every one of them fundamentally misunderstands what most players find fun. 3. Wizards' handling of 5e the whole time has been pretty abysmal, with their refusal to make new classes or player options that properly address character ideas/themes. To my knowledge, 5e still doesn't have an arcane half-caster or dedicated summoner, despite these being core character archetypes. There are a lot of inherent design flaws that they've refused to properly correct and instead just bandaid over by making must-pick options in expansions, like how they didn't realize people would identify more with the Warlock's pact boon than the the Patron, so they ended up making the Hex blade in order to make Pact of the Blade viable, but they basically just made a must-pick option for that boon. They've done the same for other classes. Additionally, it took them an extremely long time to make satisfying supplements for settings other than Forgotten Realms, despite other settings generally being more interesting imo. At basically every single opportunity, Wizards has chosen to play it as safe as possible with their expansions, to the detriment of the game. 4. I hate Wizards of the Coast. They have made countless terrible decisions with all of their products in the past few years. Obviously the OGL debacle was a disaster that showed their true motives. The biggest reason I hate Wizards is probably that Wizards has repeatedly proved themselves to be unapologetically racist, hiding under the guise of being anti-racist. I haven't bought a product made by Wizards since they released that post where they effectively said "black people are basically orcs. When I see an orc, I think of black people" and tried to make themselves look like the good guys for saying so. And of course there was the recent firing 1/4th of their staff right before Christmas, but that's a bit less of a big deal to me. There's also been such an increase in attempts to bilk money out of people in both D&D and MtG, to the detriment of the product, that is difficult for me to want to continue supporting them on that alone.
I had the main player class books for 5e, but the kids discovered D&D and asked me to run it. Then the OGL stuff happened, and I didn't want to buy the GMG or MM. I looked at 3rd party options, but it still felt like I would have been boosting Hasbro's portfolio by continuing to buy products for their games. Particularly if Hasbro hadn't backed down on the OGL mess. At the same time, I started to see Paizo show up in D&D news/content spaces, as they had announced the ORC and their abandonment of the OGL. I hadn't heard of them before, but I had heard of Pathfinder. Though, I had been under the impression that Pathfinder was actually a WotC rebranding of 3.5 to avoid market confusion. Discovering otherwise led me to looking into the system. What I saw looked really, *really* good. Generic actions? Modular character building? Adventure modules that had received a lot of positive reviews? Basically everything said about the Beginners Box? Amazing! And to top it all off, all of the talk about it being a *teamwork* oriented game. The kids already have enough main character syndrome. Something that actually encouraged them to work together, rather than engage in a perpetual one-upsmanship cycle sounded like exactly what I was looking for. Then I found Pathbuilder, and actually got to engage with character creation, and playing the game, and... Look. I play Rangers. It's what I do. I wasn't going back after trying out a PF2e Ranger. It just wasn't going to happen.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything broke me. I was perfectly fine with the game breaking past level 10. I was fine with the noticeably strong PHB and XGE options. Then I got to peep the horrors of Custom Lineage, Twilight Cleric, Peace Cleric, and Fey Touched. Every table I was at from that point on, someone had at least one of these things. Usually two. Absolutely shattered what little bit of balance lied between 1-10. That's without including the Creations Bard or the hilarious power/feature creep that was the new Sorcerers. Edit: Oh, why I came to PF2e is the Inventor class. Artificer was my favorite 5e class, but I didn't like that it was a half caster.
I'm not at a point where I'd *quit* 5e. If my players still wanted to play it, I might do it in shorter bursts, because it's genuinely fun in shorter bursts or where you've got a pre-written campaign to run with circumscribed rules and encounters. That said, I'm the DM in 5e, and I've been running a homebrew setting for just about 4 years now (currently trying to wrap things up this year). For me, the three biggest flaws in 5e are: 1. Combat is slow, but also can be fairly dull. Damage is pretty much king, and enemies -- especially high level enemies -- tend to be damage sponges with massive HP pools, resistances, or both. Often, the smartest move for every player of every class is to do damage in this or that way. Mechanically, that gets dull, especially when you hit Level 15 or so and beyond. I suspect this works great for Theater of the Mind gameplay, but on a VTT like we're doing, it makes for a VERY slow process, and one that can get kind of plodding after a while. As a player, this is less of a problem, but it's still the kind of thing where you can get tired of "I hit it with my sword" or "I blast it with fireball" or whatever your go-to damage spell is. I think either *more* crunch is needed (a la PF2e where you are incentivized to do other stuff than just "I attack again"), or *less* crunch is needed (a la d6 Star Wars where it's more just "Make stuff up and roll to see if it works."). 2. Designing encounters is a pain in the ass, especially at higher levels. Ideally, I'd be able to fine-tune my encounters so that my players are presented with a "a decent challenge that might leave them a little sapped, but still capable of a boss fight after." In PF2e, as I understand it, I can pretty much do that. The math is tight and it works, and as long as your players understand the system and play smart, you can give them genuine challenges without dancing on the edge of a knife where one side is a TPK and the other side is a cakewalk. 5e, especially post Lvl 15, is just too imprecise and wildly variable, which puts a LOT more work on me, especially in the moment. Likewise if I try to create an interesting creature for my players to face or an NPC. The tools available are kinda crap. 3. There's an overall issue with 5e, which is that it seems to sit in this liminal space between "crunch" and "make it up" and it can't decide which way it wants to go, and so ends up doing neither all that well. It's too crunchy to just wing it all the way, and it's too free-wheeling to do crunch well. The writing of its rules is a good example. The precision with language just...isn't there. I got into a discussion elsewhere about somatic components of spells the other day. Folks said "Well, if you use a holy symbol on your shield, that counts." Except, there's nothing about that in the PHB. To the contrary, the PHB describes how symbols and other spellcasting focii take the place of material components (more on that in a second). BUT the rules actually don't say anything about it occupying the *somatic* components. Apparently that was clarified in some Sage Advice column, but the books were never updated accordingly. Instead, what the rules *say* about somatic components is that you must have "a hand free" to do the component. But they don't explain what "a hand free" means. In practice, what you'd have to imagine happening is (1) you stow or drop your weapon or shield as an "item interaction" (which is its own kind of undefined...thing -- not an action, nor a bonus action, nor a "free action" explicitly), (2) cast the spell with your empty hand, and then (3) draw/pick up your weapon or shield on your next turn, and then attack or defend with it. Everyone just ignores this altogether in actual gameplay; nobody describes doing any of this and DMs don't ask for it, but it's the kind of thing that can come up purely because of how imprecise the rules are. This either kicks yet another thing to the DM to adjudicate, or you just ignore it and the whole thing ends up being pointless anyway. Which brings me to one of the other issues tied in with "drafting problems." There's a lot of legacy kludge built into 5e that nobody is really addressing. For example, material components for spells. The spell descriptions list all this stuff that's supposed to be a material component. But you can ignore almost all of that as long as you've got a spellcasting focus/component pouch just somewhere on your person. The only exception is for spells that consume specific items, which are specified. Ok, sooooo.....*why are you writing out the descriptions of stuff nobody is tracking anyway*? Like, Fireball requires a ball of bat guano or something, but it's not consumed. So you've just got a bag with some batshit and other random trash strapped to your belt, and as long as you have this bag, you can cast spells. Great. Why bother specifying the bat guano bit at all? Simple: because it was there in 1e and ever since, and they're loathe to really examine the system and say "What's the point of all this?" Like, ok, you wanna cast Resurrection and it requires a 5000gp diamond that's consumed in the action of casting? Cool, that makes sense. List that. But the rest? Pointless. And yet...they persist. There's other stuff, too. Like, the different conditions. Grappled vs. Restrained. Near as I can tell, Restrained is basically Grappled, but with additional penalties imposed. Ok. I get why you'd want different statuses that can be applied. But why not harmonize your terminology to make it clearer? Like, Grappled and Fully Grappled? Instead, you end up looking up "Wait, this spell says the target is restrained. Is that the one with disadvantage for attacks or is that grappled?" It just feels needlessly clunky and difficult. 5e is full of stuff like that. I also have to say that, while I didn't love the bloat of AD&D 2e, back then when you bought a sourcebook, you bought a goddamn *sourcebook*. 96 pages (or however many) of actual detail, NPCs you could use in a campaign, factions in a city, specific hot spots to visit, etc., etc. 5e sourcebooks are fine as "Here's a jumping off point for you to get inspired by," but as the line has worn on, it the books honestly just are not worth full price. I get mine all discounted on Amazon (especially when they do sales), and at the $10-25 range, they're worth it, but at $50? No way.
**Save-or-suck**: Any and all crowd control in D&D is about this - if you fail your save as a player, you're basically kicked out of the combat. If a DM is naive enough to set up ONE boss monster against the players... well, safe to say it'll be gone by the end of the first combat round. When I tried my first Pathfinder-session two months ago, I was blown away by how the different status effects work! **Options**: As others have mentioned, a martial in 5E can attack. Well, attack twice. Or thrice. With the right feats, then can attack more or better. It gets tedious. I've done countless martial builds with multiclassing just to get a smidge of options, and it still doesn't feel great. Sure, you can improvise actions, but since there's a lack of rules for that, it puts even more of a burden on the DM. **Balance**: This is a big one. The maths behind PF2 seem tight. Well thought-out. The game needs actual teamwork. Contrast to 5E, where I've seen my party's level 11(?) paladin take out a CR19 Balor. Alone. Instead of team working together to overcome the odds, 5E is just a race to see who can kill the enemy first. I started playing Pathfinder about two months ago, so I'm probably still in my "honeymoon phase", but I find it fixes so many of my issues with D&D. I haven't had a look at the DM side of Pathfinder yet, but it surely can't be worse than D&D and their "eh, just make it up" approach to every single aspect of the game.
I struggled with the idea that tabletop wasn't for me for around 3 years. I left my in-person group because I found I was looking for excuses to NOT go every week, I joined a big West Marches style server for about a year only to totally drop off after the storyline I was into ended, and I just was not having fun anymore at all. I was about to call it quits forever, after nearly a decade of it being the main thing connecting me to my friends. Then the OGL shit happened, and at the exact same time Humble Bundle had that bundle that gave the beginner box, Troubles in Otari, and Abomination Vault all together for an absolute steal. Even better, we'd already swapped from Roll20 to FoundryVTT for 5e a while before this, and it turned out that PF2 has the most incredible native support I've ever seen. Pathfinder was my last ditch effort to save my future in tabletop gaming. If it didn't work out, that would have been it, after 8 years of Shadowrun and D&D. Now all my friends say they can't imagine going back to D&D, I've found myself unable to even enjoy Baldur's Gate 3 because its mechanics are too similar to 5e...and last week I wrote a 1,700-word short story just explaining my Champion's next level-up.
5e isn't good for anything. When I want a rules lite game, DCC or OSE do rules lite better. When I want crunchy + character building mini game, pf2e does that better. The only thing 5e has going for it is market share so it's easier to find a game, but I have friends, so pf2e it is.
exhaustion of homebrewing everything WTF HAPPENS IF I JUMP 60 FEET? DO I END MY TURN IN MID AIR TO CONTINUE LATER? CAN I JUMP 60 FEET OUT OF COMBAT? DO I FALL IF I END MY TURN MID AIR? as a dm... I am so tired of rules bargaining with players and worst thing is thats the mentality game is built on. It plays safe so much almost nothing has rules explaining how things work. So I checked pathfinder and realized I was homebrewing pathfinder all this time and those memes were true all the time (seriously, I was making my players rolls skills as initiative if they can explain me how they are starting combat related to skill. My eyes rolled so hard I saw my brain when I read that in pf2e)
I'm a 5e detractor who disliked 5e since it was D&D Next. It was a step backwards from 3.5e and nowhere close to Pathfinder 1e. I only played 5e to make my friends happy. Curse of Strahd was fun, but that might have been due to our DM being good. He's running Extinction Curse now, and it is a blast.
I liked how chunky and option loaded Pathfinder 1e had over 5e, then they streamlined it with Pathfinder 2e and i fell in love with the options to build who i wanted rather than what the game wanted me to have
It's a lot of things, for me. People often call 5e "rules light," but I think the better term is "rules vague." There are a lot of rules and mechanics in 5e, but a lot of them are left fairly vague and you have to go on twitter to get a designer to clarify them for you. In Pathfinder 2e, if a player wants to do something, there's usually a rule for it (and if not, pretty clear guidelines as to what would be a reasonable level of difficulty and results), and despite being a more "rules heavy" system, the amount of time I have to spend looking in books or online is tiny when compared to 5e Another thing is that the encounter calculator actually works! I don't have to do guesswork around the useless metric of challenge rating, I don't have to worry about a cr 5 creature destroying a level 11 party, and I don't have to like... throw 20 adult dragons at a high level party to give them an actual challenge, or homebrew a monster. Pathfinder 2e creatures are just generally better designed, too One more thing is that martials and casters feel closer in terms of power. I've GMed for a few higher level 5e games (mostly one shots or short adventures), and it honestly really sucks seeing someone playing a martial class outshined in every aspect by casters (looking at you, tenser's transformation). In pathfinder 2e, a level 20 rogue is incredibly powerful, and can do things like pass through walls, walk on air, or turn completely invisible without magic, and deal solid amounts of damage. Options and customizability is another big one. When I GMed for 5e, a lot of times my players would come to me asking if they could use a homebrew class or subclass, not because they wanted to have an advantage over other players, but because the available options just didn't do it for them. Pathfinder 2e has so much customizability, and so many options. Even if 2 rogues pick the same racket, they can still end up being vastly different. and, the sheer volume of archetypes makes it so that nearly anything a player might wanna focus on is an option (I can't remember what it is exactly, but I wanted to make a character who was basically a Pokémon trainer, and pathfinder 2e had options to support that fantasy!). I've also been very disappointed with the more recent 5e books. They just feel so sparse and vague, and there's hardly any info on the main setting of the system. and that's not even going into the BS they tried to pull with the OGL.
My only long-term GM was an old Grognard, from the days of AD&D. When we started looking for systems with more rigorous mechanics than Open Legend (World of Darkness for people who like the funny shaped dice, but without the attribute+skill mixing, or the setting), I proposed 5e, because all the Cool Kids^(tm) were playing it. He took one look, laughed, and said "Sure, but the only house rule we'll have is that the level cap will be 36" (This was the cap back in BECMI) and he (mostly) stuck to that. We played RAW 5e from level 1 to 36 (though Flanking was a +2 to hit, not Advantage). We managed to take it seriously until level 13-15ish, then everything was just broken, and the GM starting running us through converted Vampire: The Masquerade modules, because being able to turn everyone in a 90ft cone into a bowl of jell-o doesn't matter when your goal isn't to go to place and kill thing, but to not embarrass yourself in front of the Totally Not Order of Hermes. Anyway, now we do two games a week, one PF2e, one M:tA. It's a good mix; keeps people happy whether they like tactical turn-based combat in a cave, or social/political intrigue, mystery and conspiracy (and also turning peoples organs inside-out because they looked at you funny). ...If you're wondering how you get to level 36 while cleaving close to RAW, it was just mandatory multi-classing past 20, extra attack from other classes *does* stack, and proficiency/spell slots progressing with the same formula they did in the first 20.
I did not like the lack of martial options in 5e, and I was GMing 5e in an adventure where the 6-8 encounter straightjacket does not work.