How Pathfinder 2e FIXES 1e and D&D (The Rules Lawyer)

to dismiss Pathfinder's second edition as Math Finder and as unapproachable and complex as Pathfinder first edition would be a mistake in fact many people who stick to Pathfinder first edition one of their common complaints about second edition is that it takes too much from fourth edition and 5th edition and is a completely different game this post describes it as building off of DnD 5th edition this person says it fixes some things from one e at the cost of imagination and takes a step towards DND 4E and this person says it's not even remotely the same game foreign welcome to Pathfinder law school this is the second course in my Series in which I try to orient and teach players coming from DND 5th edition and other systems who are now checking out Pathfinder second edition for the first time it's in my nature to start from the beginning one can't really understand the decisions made in the system without knowing what problems it's trying to solve and the history of previous systems behind it it's important to know the why of a system before explaining its details so the second course will get the design goals of Pathfinder second edition I'm Ronald the rules lawyer I am a civil rights attorney who also has game mastered tabletop role-playing games for the last 12 years and also have experience teaching middle schoolers in an after-school program about eight years of that all of which I think gives me a unique skill set primed to help people learn Pathfinder second edition if you like this video like And subscribe and ring the bell for notifications of the future courses before going into the design goals I think it's important to say where I'm coming from IG and Pathfinder first edition when I started playing ttrpgs in 2010 about a year into its life cycle and it was my preferred addition for nine years when DND 5th edition came out I appreciated and preferred gm'ing it because of its relative Simplicity however my heart was with Pathfinder first edition and its greater detail and customization however I did realize that DND 5th edition was much easier for a GM for me to run my preferred system is now Pathfinder second edition ever since its final version came out in 2019 I didn't like the play test as much but the final version sold me so I think it's important to see this timeline first of all DND Third Edition I think was the Pinnacle of offering character customization while sticking to the simulationist roots of d and d monsters and player characters were built using the same rules however a number of problems creeped up over time that later editions of the game have since tried to address I will go into those things in more detail however suffice it to say that d d 4th edition solves some problems in Third Edition in its own way that had a tepid reception for a number of reasons and Pathfinder first edition the continuation of Third Edition starts to sell as much if not more than DND 4th edition so seeing that as its leading competitor DND 5th edition came out as a counter to the complexity and unfriendliness to new players that the previous game had Pathfinder 1e meanwhile started to seem dated and got more way down under its own bloat its engine was nearly 20 years old and so paizo came out with Pathfinder's second edition which seeks to address the same issues 4E and 5e were trying to address in Third Edition but incorporating the lessons positive and negative from 4E and 5e in fact two of the co-designers of Pathfinder second edition Logan Bonner and Steven Rodney McFarland were people who had developed 4th edition so I'm going to systematically go through problems in Third Edition that 4E 5e and now Pathfinder 2 try to address first complexity in combat complexity in stacking spell effects imbalance between characters and traps and exploits that are available through multi-classing complexity in building characters magic items that are less wondrous melee combat being boring and lack of movement difficulty in balancing encounters including safer suck effects skills rarely being used partial Caster balance and spells that make certain stories harder to tell and the five minute adventuring day as you can see I'm addressing complexity first because that is probably the number one thing dissuading people from trying Pathfinder second edition the perception that it's complex yes the core rulebook is intimidating and big however most of it reflects the huge amount of options and most of the rules for playing the game are actually in this little section I am pointing at right there and it's not much greater page wise than DND 5th edition also by far the best way to learn the game is the beginner box but anyway in the Third Edition we had many different kinds of actions we had standard actions move actions when you combined a standard and move action they were a full round action that was different from a one round action you can do a full round action and a swift action during your turn also you can do an immediate action outside your turn which would also prevent you from having a swift action on your next turn immediate actions were different from a tax of opportunity you also had free actions and the DM decided how many of those you could do and you also had not in action such as five foot steps which you could only do if you did not change squares on the battle mat with one of your other actions during your turn and that was just the Action System you also had many bonuses that were in play and were usually changing in the middle of combat sure bonuses of the same type did not stack but that was not true about Dodge bonuses Dodge bonuses did Stack with each other unlike every other bonus type there are many situational rules you could use your move action to pull out your weapon for example unless you had the base attack bonus of plus one or greater in which case you could pull one out for free while moving and you had bespoke subsystems for specific mechanics that were often not consistent with each other there was Improvement yes over previous editions of DnD but it still was a problem and yet infamous grapple action which was quite complex and simplified and visualized in this flow chart there are many conditions that you had to look up that didn't have much consistency with each other this all served to dissuade new people from joining the system and a lot of these rules still tripped up veteran players all of these things added up together to slow down combat and that became especially true at higher levels fifth edition streamlined this quite a bit and made the game much more approachable for newcomers it reduced the number of action types you only had one action on your turn and movement was something that you could do for free during your turn similarly you can do one interaction with the environment or an object and you might have the ability to do a bonus action in addition to your action to simplify the game for new players it puts some considerations out of the way you did not have to worry about moving up to an enemy giving you fewer attacks that turn or worry about pulling out your weapon at the start of combat however over time it does lead to some of its own new problems for example what if you want to put one weapon away and pull another weapon out under the rules that requires your action to do and means you don't get to do an action on your turn what if you want to do two bonus actions on your turn under five E's rules even if you don't plan to use your main action you cannot do two bonus actions it also arguably makes speed and positioning and distance less important if the distance between yourself and your enemy is made unimportant by the fact that movement has no no cost all of the bonuses and penalties had added up and change in the middle of combat and Third Edition were simplified by being folded into the advantage disadvantage mechanic this is a big simplification that makes the game more approachable and easier for many players however after time it leads to some strange interactions one it doesn't allow for different effects combining so if that cleric casts guiding Vault and hits an enemy giving allies advantage against it there is now zero incentive to add other instances of advantage to that also if a rogue wants to apply sneak attack damage to an enemy and that the enemy's side has casted Darkness then even if the Rogue has three effects giving it Advantage it can never gain an advantage against that enemy because of one disadvantage effect so the advantage disadvantage mechanic simplifies combat but perhaps by too much DND 4th edition had what I would argue a more intuitive system than TNT fifth edition you had one action called a standard action and you had two other types of actions that were less valuable than your standard action you could always trade a standard action for a move action so you could do two move actions during your turn and one minor action I did a video on the history of action systems in DND which you should check out but what fourth edition did was really the three Action System in embryo Pathfinder second edition built off of this and also other systems that use action point systems and has created a three Action System you have three actions on your turn and one reaction that you can do before your next turn this is simpler and more intuitive you don't have to deal with action types everything you do uses one or more actions for example a character can spend three actions moving up to an enemy or two actions to move up to an enemy and make an attack or one action to move up to an enemy make an attack and cast a spell as a single action free actions exist and there is no limit on how many you can do however they all have specific triggers that you have to meet by having everything you can possibly do competing for your limited number of actions including movement and interacting with objects this leads to more interesting decisions and cost-benefit Analysis that lends to making combat more tactical also monsters don't have opportunity attacks by default only a minority of them do so a character can walk up to something make an attack and walk away and if they have a greater speed like this elf does they can walk away as a single action and the enemy monster has to spend two actions to go up to her also many minor actions are just given a cost of one action that guidance spell I mentioned is a one action spell the cleric can actually cast guidance on herself and her two allies because each costs one action there is no arbitrary limit on how many spells you you can cast during your turn you just look at how many actions they cost granted most spells cost two actions to cast but you also don't have to deal with action types in all of this for example spiritual weapon is not confined to using your bonus action you just spend two of your three actions to start it and in subsequent turns you spend one action to sustain it in theory you can have two spiritual weapons active at once the one DND play test has nerfed spiritual weapon a bit by requiring concentration however that means the same Caster cannot sustain another concentration effect while keeping spiritual weapon up such as invisibility or fly in Pathfinder we don't have to worry about such complexities we just look at whether it requires being sustained and that costs one action per subsequent turn now Pathfinder second edition did not take the road of advantage and disadvantage so in this respect it is not as simple as 5e however the reputation of 3E and path our first edition of having a million bonuses to add up is greatly exaggerated because the bonuses have all been reduced to essentially circumstance and Status bonuses and penalties these are the only ones that change in the middle of combat in my experience your item bonuses from your gear are basically written down on your character sheet in advance circumstance bonuses are things that come as you can tell from the situation like raising your Shield which increases your armor class status bonuses and penalties have to do with spell effects and conditions the other one to track is the multiple attack penalty which I'll admit in my first few games I did find this to be more than I was used to handling compared to 5e and lower level Third Edition in fact however it was something I just got used to it became second nature and also it scales well into the higher levels it does not get much more complex also by not folding everything into advantage and disadvantage it leads to more possibilities of teamwork and interesting decisions in combat for example our Rogue here attacking the auric warrior has a plus seven attack bonus and needs to have an 18 or better to hit the orc this leads to a 50 chance to hit and as she rolls a natural 20 she has a chance to critically hit however if her Ally valoros were to go into this square and be on opposite sides of her so that she's flanking that makes the orc flat-footed and have a minus two circumstance penalty to AC also the cleric has a blessed spell active indicated by the aura if the cleric moves here and includes the Rogue in her bless Aura the Rogue gets a plus one status bonus to her attacks Also let's say that the Rogue before her attack tries to demoralize the orc and say something terrifying to it causing the orc to have a minus one status penalty to all of its statistics temporarily when we combine all that together the Rogue now has a much likelier chance to hit 70 and also because exceeding the target's armor class by 10 makes her hit into a critical hit doing double damage she has quadrupled her chance of scoring a critical hit also she and two of her allies will be behind her Rapier thrust and could take credit for a critical hit also all of the bespoke subsystems that were very complicated like the grapple chart we saw earlier have been simplified there has been a streamlining of mechanics pretty much every debuff in the game debuffs something via one of the conditions that are already defined so the grapple action is now greatly simplified when you grapple something it becomes grabbed or restrained on a critical success the conditions themselves are pretty intuitive there are more to memorize however they don't merge into each other which was my experience with 5e conditions some give advantage and disadvantage on some checks but not other checks I found that a bit clunky in my mind and harder to memorize honestly I find that there is an internal logic and consistency with the conditions in 2E in my experience so flat-footed is a very common condition in Pathfinder that just indicates the person is distracted and is not able to defend itself as effectively there's a lot of ways to make someone flat-footed you can make them prone you can grapple them you can flank them this also means that all of those effects being piled up on top of each other do not stack because they only give you that same flat-footed condition and that's intended at the same time another condition immobilized means you cannot do actions with the move trait such as standing up or moving into another Square our grapple action just simply says you are grabbed which just incorporates these two actions we've just learned that you are both flat-footed and immobilized and there's a chance of failing anything you do that has the manipulate trait basically using your hands to do something I plan to do a video as part of Pathfinder Law School teaching all of the conditions so like And subscribe and ring the bell for that as you can see there's referring to other things in these rules which is a cause for some complaints there is a learning curve to learning Pathfinder second edition it also leads to some page flipping which is one of the common complaints about the core rule book one you can mitigate that by using the online reference tool archives of mathis two once you've learned them and actually use them in play they're like that they you know them they turn out to be streamlined in practice one thing that 5e did to simplify play also was to have all of a monster's abilities written out on the page now that is something Pathfinder second edition does not do it actually has a glossary at the back of the bestiary that defines what attack of opportunity does and ferocity does in the case of our auric Warrior this is kind of similar to the previous issue in which there is a learning curve but once you know it it makes actual play more streamlined and here it does lead to more interesting monsters in my experience because you can fit more into limited space here we have a tack of opportunity which is similar to opportunity attack and ferocity it can as a reaction when it would be brought down to zero hit points still stay conscious and have one hit point it also means an interesting tactic where you can bait a creature's attack of opportunity and then try to knock it out because it has already used its reaction on the attack of opportunity and cannot use ferocity anymore or you can try to knock it out two times between its turns it is more complex than in 5e but through the shorthand it does allow for more variety and monsters and compared to my experience running monsters in Third Edition Pathfinder first edition and fourth edition I have found preparation faster and running a monster easier in Pathfinder second edition another benefit of the three action economy is that it allows interesting decisions on how many actions you're going to use for something and also having actions of different levels of power in accordance with how many actions they cost so the heal spell is a classic example you can spend one action to heal somebody within touch range two actions to heal them up to 30 feet away and it does an additional amount of healing or three actions to heal the one action version amount of healing but to everything within a 30-foot radius something like Shield which is relatively minor in this game which gives you a plus one circumstance bonus to AC constantly one action whereas spells that can really impact the battlefield can cause three actions like wall of force there are martial abilities too that require more actions such as Whirlwind strike a level 14 feat that barbarians and also fighters can take to make a melee attack against every single creature within their reach which is a lot of fun if you prep it with an enlarged spell or have a reach weapon it also leads to interesting decisions for Monsters who might have abilities that cost different numbers of actions the guthalith for example can make one attack and grab an enemy as part of that attack and then throw them with a second action they could spend two actions on Annihilation beams or they can spend three actions to trample which also lets it move through the battlefield so that's the first and most extensive problem with 3E that Pathfinder 2E addresses that I'm going to cover now I'm going to go more quickly over the other ones the next one is complexity in stacking spell effects in Third Edition you had an incentive to pre-buff before every battle here is a screenshot from Pathfinder K maker the computer role-playing game that's based on first edition Pathfinder there is a mod that you can install that allows you to pre-buff before battles and there are a lot of Buffs that optimal play required you to use also many of these effects lasted a long time one minute per level up to one hour per level conjuration spells also could be spanned and had long durations and you could fill the battlefield with many conjured creatures what 5e does is simplify this greatly first by lessening the number of effects that you can stack with each other however there were exceptions you could for example stack guidance bless and the peace domain clerics emboldening Bond together however it did limit the number of concentration spells that you could have you could only have one concentration effect active per Caster that tones things down considerably however a number of these effects did last quite a while like 10 minutes in the case of emboldening bond and it also leads to not being able to have some effects together that come on we want to be invisible and fly but they both require concentration so one Caster cannot cast both this also leads to more complexity in spell selection and figuring out what spells you can combine together so even with this first level cleric I have in DMD Beyond you have to consider which ones require concentration which ones do not there's a button for you to isolate which ones that do and by the way you cannot ready the casting of a new spell while maintaining a concentration spell and some of them require your action While others require your bonus action so this arguably leads to more complexity of its own kind what Pathfinder 2E does is what 4E did which is limit buff effects to one minute in Pathfinder many durations are one minute magic weapon Mirror Image now you could conceivably cast them before battle but if it's only one minute you're probably with an earshot of those enemies and if they hear you casting spells right outside their room they probably know to investigate or attack you in actual play now I've run at least 10 campaigns now I rarely see more than two buff spells in effect in any given combat this has two nice effects first of all this has the advantage of making durations predictable nearly every buff spell has this one minute duration but it also removes the incentive from longer durations of rushing the dungeon milking the buff for every encounter that you can also the goal of preventing stacking too many powerful effects with concentration in 5e I would argue is done more elegantly through taxing an action by requiring that it be sustained this is possible because of the three action economy so when you summon most creatures with most spells in Pathfinder it requires all three of your actions to do so and what you summon immediately can use two of its actions on subsequent turns you sustain it with one action and it can do two actions this also creates interesting decisions because sometimes sustaining that spell means you cannot cast another spell which probably costs your remaining actions and the move or do something else that could be urgent this is Pathfinder basically saying yes but you can do that however it will cost something so you can have two spells that require sustaining active at once the next problem I'll take on in Third Edition is the great imbalance that often happened between characters at the same table one player who had deep knowledge of the system and built a character to optimize it can completely outshine another player who could be relatively new to the system or just someone who cared more about their character concept through their mechanical choices than optimization this can lead to a number of problems at the table one the second player feeling out shown and also just difficulty for the game master in providing meaningful challenge to all the members of the party simultaneously also related is how multi-classing in Third Edition and Pathfinder first can be very rewarding to those players who know the system but can be punishing for those who chose it for flavor some people who reject Pathfinder second edition say it does not provide as many options as Third Edition and Pathfinder first there are thousands of Feats in Pathfinder first edition for example and I'm going to show them on the screen however many of these Feats are very Niche situational or are completely invalidated by the fact that there are some go-to Feats in the system there are very few martial optimization guides for Pathfinder first edition for example that don't have power attack which is kind of like great weapon master and Sharpshooter and that it gives you an essential damage boost at the cost of accuracy the fact that there were some Auto picks meant that there was an illusion of choice you had many thousands of options but there were some things that were just Auto picks and also pretty much invariably optimizing your character meant jacking up the numbers and stacking a bunch of things on top of each other for a specific thing you did every turn or a handful of things that you consistently did all the time this imbalance and character building leads to a situation where the decisions you make during a combat are far less important than the decisions you made when building your character in 5e and Pathfinder first edition as compared to Pathfinder 2 one arguably can win the game quote unquote at character creation I remember reading a forum where someone compared characters in these systems to building a wind-up toy that you deploy in battle and it pretty much runs on autopilot based on what you've built it to do that's clearly an exaggeration but for anyone who sees the importance of adapting to the situation and working with your teammates in a Pathfinder second edition game it does feel like that when compared to pf2 in my experience if you're interested in some videos where I do combat demonstrations that show the importance of emergent tactics check out the videos that I'll be pointing to on the screen this became a barrier to new players first of all but who would be intimidated by all of the choices and not want to make a mistake without the tutelage of a more veteran player at the table simply going for a flavor let's say you want to have a Caster who dabbles in fighting and so takes a level in fighter you have now permanently lessened your spell casting ability lowering your Caster level in Third Edition by One Forever And also delaying access to those crucial higher level spell levels this exacerbates problems for game Masters who are trying to provide a balanced challenge to parties so I just found easily through some Google searches people who made level one characters who have an AC of 33 or have five attacks per turn with a damage per round much higher than what a new player would build with a fighter what fifth edition did was basically make feeds optional and also had a much smaller list of feeds that it was pretty committed to not expanding but it did not eliminate the problem of balance among those choices very few optimization guides for melee Marshalls do not include great weapon master and a handful of other Feats and range weapon builds almost always have Sharpshooter and or crossbow expert warcaster is an essential feat if you want to control the battlefield with concentration spells and also if you want to be in melee also it never really accounted and balanced for multi-classing which to this day is simply a variant rule that most tables use and many classes are front heavy so taking one level in warlock with a hex blade subclass lets you use your charisma modifier for attacks making it an essential level dip for many builds other popular level dips are two levels in fighter so that you can have two actions which lets you cast two spells on your turn so this rewards people who are in the know you might sacrifice one spell level but boy is it worth it so being a more effective impactful spellcaster sometimes involves taking two levels in fighter which is not obvious to the new player also you can protect yourself and have one of the highest armor classes in the game if you are a spellcaster and take a feat or take one level of cleric which gives you heavy armor proficiency and unlike Fighters you might have access to the shield spell giving you plus five to your armor class at the low cost of a first level spell slot actually spell casters are often tougher and harder to take down in battle if their player is optimizing them then Marshalls so Pathfinder second edition does a number of things to address and balance among characters first the math is tight there are very few ways to get permanent bonuses and the temporary bonuses that you get are relatively minor through the first several levels you can get a plus one bonus from your magic items and from spells and that's it what matters most is your proficiency bonus your proficiency bonus once you become at least trained in something includes your level which goes up as you level up obviously and you're at least trained in all of your saving throws in your armor class and in weapons and your spell attacks this mathematical progression is baked into your class it determines when you graduate to that next level of proficiency in weapons in your perception ability and your saving throws basically your numerical progression is determined by your class and your level and the designers now know what your numbers will be at a certain level allowing the designers and game Masters to easily balance for the party so how do you customize your character in this environment if your numbers are predetermined well through Feats very rarely do Feats give you straight up mathematical Improvement if they do it's while using a certain activity that is competing with your other actions that you could be spending your actions on or they are situational the fighter Feats list for example even if you took all of these feeds all of these different things compete with each other for your three actions Feats essentially give you what I've been calling horizontal progression more versatility and more options here double slice is something that you can use with you have two weapons it means your second attack is going to be much more accurate than otherwise however it requires you commit using two actions which you may not want to use if you only need one strike to knock something out sudden charge is a nice ability that lets you spend two actions for the effect of three you get to move your speed two times and make a melee attack against an enemy obviously you cannot do this in the same turn that you used double slice exacting strike also shows this regard for balance when you use it if you miss with your attack that attack does not contribute to your multiple attack penalty so your next attack will be at the same accuracy however it has the Press trait which means you can only use it when you already have the multiple attack penalty in effect so let's say you're standing up next to an enemy already at the start of your turn your first attack is at your full bonus your second attack is exacting strike at a minus five penalty and if you miss your third attack will be at a -5 penalty also but only if you miss all of these Feats Express a fantasy a concept a fighting style that you have with your fighter and speaking of expressing concept let's get to multi-classing which you can do in this system and not be punished for prioritizing concept the way multi-classing works is through archetypes at every even level in Pathfinder second edition you gain a class feet from your class you can choose to forego a class feet to take an archetype feat when you take an archetype feed you must take its first feat into its list called its dedication feat you can take the abilities of another class for example by taking the dedication feat for Wizard if you are a fighter which gives you a couple of at-will count trips that dedication feat then unlocks future archetype Feats that you can take within that archetype in the future this is building off of what DND 4E did with multi-classing it did not give you levels in another class it gave you some abilities of another class via Feats that you chose however this is I would argue better than what 4E did because there are more variety in the Feats that you can take in that archetype there are many archetypes that are not tied to another class as you can see there are about 40 of them here in the advanced players guide that have nothing to do with any other class and you can take more than one archetype if you want to have an animal companion take The Beastmaster archetype which lets you have a companion that gets stronger as you level up automatically but can be yet stronger if you take some of these Feats or you can improve your ability to fight in tandem or learn some spells that enhance what you can do with your animal companion and remember that your vertical progression in your base class is unchanged by taking these archetypes so let's take a wizard who wants to dabble in fighting our wizard can take the fighter archetype and not take a single wizard feat over the course of their career and instead take these Feats plus take Advanced maneuver a number of times which allows that wizard to take more and more fighter feats while doing so the wizard gets to still take all of the high level abilities that being a wizard gives them including being a legendary with spell casting and also get all of the spell slots that they would be getting otherwise including 10th level spells which do exist in Pathfinder they'll be able to do that while having proficiency with all martial weapons extra hit points and a tax of opportunity or you can be a fighter who doesn't take any fighter Feats at all and just takes Feats in Wizard archetype you get to be a master in spell casting who can cast one spell of every spell level from one through eight every day you can also adjust of course if you want to do a Gish character which I've been kind of talking about by taking the Magus class who can combine magic with their weapon fighting and even deliver spells via their weapon strikes while also having access to ninth level spells what this regard for balance means is it frees up care character building so that you can express a whole variety of Concepts without having to know tricks of the trade and without anxiety that you are somehow underperforming at a table we now get to another problem that is often perceived about Pathfinder second edition because of its roots in Third Edition which is that making a character is complex as we saw earlier there are many thousands of feeds that you can take in Pathfinder first edition there are also dozens of classes each of those classes has at least 10 archetypes if not more and there are alternate racial features alternate favored class bonuses they're also traits which are like half Feats it can be very overwhelming to its credit D fifth edition was laser focused on removing that barrier of entry for new players by simplifying character creation when you create a character you simply choose a race the sub race choose a background which has not much mechanical effect and choose your class your subclass will be chosen by level three some would say this went too far in fact most tables in practice do not not limit themselves to this and use the optional rules for Feats and multi-classing however it's undeniable that it has made 5e very accessible to new players many 5e players feel limited by this number of choices but Blanche at playing Pathfinder second edition because of its reputation so I'm just going to break down what you have to do in Pathfinder second edition to make a character and demystify it now we look at Pathfinder second edition and compare the number of choices you have to make to fifth edition it's about the same the only things we're adding are choosing An ancestry feat and your subclass is chosen at first level if you have one it's not a huge number of Choice points that you have Pathfinder gives you several choices at each of these steps now I'm talking about if you're limiting yourself to the core rulebook you have the option of opening yourself up to the other books that are published afterward and they're all available and free to see on Archives of nephis but many players if not a majority who are new to the system use a free tool like path Builder or Wanderers guide to make this whole process easier we're given a menu at every step both tools also allow you to limit yourself to the core rulebook so if you're limiting yourself to the core rulebook you'll have at most seven a choices at each step and actually for background you actually have about 40 things to choose from but on the other hand you can just as I said choose it based on your character concept which you will not be punished for here is what path Builder looks like when you choose your class feet and you're a fighter and fighter is one of the classes that has more level one feeds you just tap on the feeds and it shows you what it does the main factor making your character easier is the regard for balance you can't just pick things if you start with a character concept and you choose Things based on whether they Express that concept you are making a completely viable character now after level one you are not making that many choices per level now this chart may look overwhelming to a 5V player but when you level up which is every several sessions you're making two choices maybe more if you are getting ability boosts but who doesn't want to get more stuff you know but leveling up is actually quite fast in practice and it feels good the next problem in Third Edition addressed by later systems is magic items being less wondrous in Third Edition you had what you called the big six every martial character would be chasing after numerical bonuses that they could get from a weapon suit of armor a shield a ring of protection an amulet of natural armor and a cloak of resistance which would improve your attacks AC and saving throws this was often called the Christmas tree effect and NPCs that you bested would often be dropping plus one weapons left and right that you would then sell so that you can get your ever greater pluses on your weapons now this does not suit the world that some players and DMS want to have where magic is pretty much ever present where he toss away that plus one sword that you inherited from your forefathers that has all this lore behind it in favor of that plus two weapon that's gonna make you more optimal in combat there are people who wanted to have more story more lore more Wonder surrounding magic items so what 5e did was basically I would say overreact and balance the game around parties not having magic items at all and make them optional and you can see this in the chart and then dungeon Masters Guide where the presumed Armor class of a monster never goes above 19 which any party can trivialize with their magic items alone in most typical 5e tables I'd also say it's kind of an overreaction because it kind of assumed that magic items before Third Edition were rare and hardly ever given when that wasn't true keep on the Borderlands which is probably the most played old school module included with every basic D box had many magic items and this was for a party of level one to three characters it also poses a problem for DMS who now have to bear the burden of balancing encounters with no clear expectation of what magic items the party has and if the game is kind of balanced around there being no magic items when most parties have magic items it can throw things for a loop so the werewolf is a creature that is immune to weapons that are not silver and are not magical whether the party has magic weapons or silver weapons is going to have a huge effect on the difficulty of encountering them and if the DM does give access to silver or magic weapons this ability becomes a non-ability in both instances it is difficult to assess and give a challenge rating to that creature under a system that does not have a clear expectation on what parties might have and let's be real players like magic items they they want to find them they want to get new bling so what happens is that most tables give magic items out players have them and because the system was balanced without magic items in mind what happens is that those magic items combined with effects like blasts and bartic inspiration start to trivialize the numbers of the monsters and we get the phenomenon where players after achieving a certain level in d d start to outclass the monsters that the system throws at them AC becomes trivial for example many optimization guides for martial characters take into account damage per round calculations without any regard to what the armor class of the enemy is and often use the great weapon Master feat for melee weapons which gives you a minus five penalty in exchange for plus 10 damage because they assume you're just going to hit them anyway it's around levels five to ten or so things get to a point where the DM start to throw away the dmgs and counter building guidelines entirely so 5v's effort to make magic items unique and wondrous did so while creating other problems what Pathfinder 2E does is yes it leads to a kind of expected number of magic items that you need at various levels in order to keep the math predictable first of all this avoids the problems we see in 5e magic items have levels and prices which makes it much easier for GMS to figure out what items to make available to players this also supports players wanting to do crafting but the Christmas tree effect the big six that is generally reduced because there are fewer items that you need to increase your numerical bonuses they don't give you as big bonuses either they only go up to plus three in this Edition as opposed to plus five in Third Edition also you can keep that heirloom sword inherited from your forefathers from Level 1 to 20 because the way that numerical Improvement is expressed is through runes that you can transfer from one weapon to the next that level one sword you inherited from your father could become a plus three major striking sword so it has plus three two attacks does four dice of damage and you could apply three property runes to make it to fire ice and acid damage also and most importantly a lot of these items have special abilities it's something that Pathfinder second edition borrows from 4E so you can get boots of Elven kind which yes give you a plus one item bonus to acrobatics checks there's your flat bonus but once per hour you can ignore difficult terrain and get a plus five bonus to your speed for a turn the cloak of Elven kind lets you once per day become invisible and if you happen to have both the boots and the cloak you can activate this invisibility effect twice per day these special abilities accorded to magic items also dovetails with the automatic bonus progression variant rule a table can remove the treadmill of getting higher numerical bonuses from items by simply making those bonuses baked into gaining levels which this chart does so that you get items purely for the special abilities that they give you so you're able to do here what 5e works toward but you now have magic items that are gained exclusively for the wondrous things that they do and not simply for their numbers all while the system is supporting the GM in its math the next problem in Third Edition was boring melee combat what basically happened is that the two opposing sides would lock into melee and exchange blows round after round and there will be little movement or maneuvering after two opposing creatures met Plus in 3E if you were able to make more than one attack per round you could only do so with a full round action which took up both your move action and your standard action so you couldn't move on that turn so why would you move on your turn if you were a monk why would you do one attack when you could do seven and also moving away from the enemy would provoke an attack of opportunity further disincentivizing you from moving at all basically this is the problem of I attack and that being what martial characters in 3E did most of the time what fifth edition has done was partially address this problem now many people watching who play fifth edition this is a complaint still in fifth edition you lock into place and fight each other until one side dies but fifth edition did some things to try to mitigate this first by making movements not require giving up any of your attacks which was a step forward however keeping opportunity attacks when you moved away from the enemy still meant that you often would lock into place and admittedly there weren't many effects of things you could do besides eye attack so what Pathfinder's second edition does is it gives martial characters who engage in melee more options of things that they can do on their turn you can choose class Feats that give you something different besides a basic strike just like the fighter can choose from these actions this solution of alternate actions is an adaptation of what existed in DND 4th edition in fact where Marshall characters had a variety of powers that they could use on their turn however unlike 4E which some of those abilities you're limited to one per encounter and unlike the Battle Master subclass of the fighter in 5e where he used superiority dice a resource that you tracked in Pathfinder second edition you basically have abilities that you can use over and over and over again and they also tend to be more straightforward because they are keying off of things you already can do Under the basic rules for example everyone can raise their Shield to get a plus two to their Armor class with an action but the reactive Shield feet if the fighter takes it lets the fighter use the reaction in response to a blow to raise their shield and possibly even block that blow this is a case of a feat that just lets you use your action economy more efficiently just like a sudden charge down here lets you do the equivalent of three actions with the cost of two actions two stride stride and then attack with your weapon also the three action economy gives players a sense that you can kind of do more on their turn a number of things in fifth edition that cost your whole action and therefore if you were to do them you would not be able to make a tax on your turn only cost one of your three actions and Pathfinder so instead of the help action you can spend one action to prepare to Aid an ally using an item instead of using your whole action could use just one of your actions hiding uses just one action and in the case of ranged attackers you can be behind cover spend one action to hide and therefore make your enemy flat-footed to your next attack instead of searching costing you your action seek is a single action to try to find something that's hidden the equivalent of five feet disengaging is to step lets you move one square without provoking any reactions like opportunity attacks and use a second action to move or stride lay on hands costs only a single action for a paladin or champion in the system to use also most creatures do not have a tack of opportunity which allows for more fluidity and motion in combat and means that where the melee combat takes place can often move over the course of a fight also starting at level 1 anyone can make more than one attack per turn and you can move while making two attacks unlike in Third Edition you just have to deal with the fact that the multiple attack penalty means that your repeat attacks are less and less accurate so this leads to more variety in turns maybe after you faint against an enemy your Rogue will want to make two attacks or just one attack and walk away forcing the orc to go after her and in this case waste of two actions to do so as you can see this leads to Greater Variety in your turns so the faint action was a deception skill check that makes the enemy flat-footed costs one action only and does not suffer from the multiple attack penalty so you're incentivized to mix things up with eye attack grapple makes an enemy immobilized and flat-footed trip makes them prone and therefore flat-footed and a minus two circumstance penalty on attacks and demoralize uses your intimidation skill and lets you terrify somebody to lower all of their stats temporarily it's using actions like this that caused our Rogue earlier to quadruple her chance of critically hitting and when a martial character reaches level five they get what are called critical specialization effects where they can impose a different effect on the enemy when they score a critical hit giving you other benefits for being tactical besides raw damage together all of these changes mean that you are doing more than simply eye attack on my turn and you have more variation in what you're doing from turn to turn if you are in melee and also if you are a ranged weapon fighter as well even the monster design for monsters that are basically melee Fighters it leads to more interesting melee fights the Gaga is a level 12 foe that when it bites something it grabs the target immediately and it can walk around the battle carrying its victim in its jaws it also has a two-action activity that lets it stride three times making an attack during each stride and a reaction to move away from a PC who moves within its reach this all serves to make melee fights more memorable and a lot of melee brute monsters and Pathfinder tend to have these signature abilities so that they're not just what many 5e players call sacks of hit points that you exchange blows with while they do multi-attack over and over the next problem in Third Edition and Pathfinder first edition is the difficulty of balancing encounters in those editions once you get past the early levels challenge rating becomes more and more just a guideline that the DM relies less and less on due to the unbounded accuracy of Third Edition it was very possible to have wide differences in the statistics of PCS within the same party and for an optimal group to far exceed the numerical expectations of the system such that they are challenging monsters much higher level that they're not supposed to be able to realistically defeat and also Savor suck effects can make it harder to balance encounters because a single die roll can determine the outcome of the vowel which can lead to encounters that are accidentally too hard for the party or what often happens you have a monster that is a villain that's been built up by the DM for months turning out to be a pushover because some somebody incapacitated them those of you who play fifth edition know that these problems I described in Third Edition pretty much are still intact in fifth edition there were a number of things that they did to try to mitigate it in that Savor suck effects often give you a new save every round things that turn you to Stone or are paralyzed you for example it is widely recognized that challenge rating is kind of not useful so the shadow is only a challenge rating one half creature but it's one of the deadliest foes that a high level party can face because their strength damage will outright kill a character meanwhile the challenge rating 30 to Rask can be trivialized by a low-level party who has flight and ranged weapons because of its lack of ranged attacks and it cannot fly and also it's very susceptible to effects that Target its dexterity saving throw I won't go deep into it here as this difficulty of balancing encounters is rooted in a number of things but I'll focus on two primary culprits one of them is bounded accuracy bounded accuracy is the term put forward by the designers of 5e that flattens the math from Level 1 to 20 such that your proficiency bonus only goes up slightly from plus two at level 1 to plus six at level 17. this means that characters and monsters of low level have attack bonuses and armor classes that compared to previous editions at least are not much lower than the highest level creatures one of the consequences of bounded accuracy is that the effectiveness of one side's actions is less important than the sheer number of actions that side has this makes it difficult to use the encounter building system provided in the dungeon Masters guide and xanother's guide to everything we have to account for the number of creatures in the encounter a single enemy has has no multiplier but if you get to three or more enemies you are supposed to double their strength because of their greater action economy this leads to a cumbersome encounter building method where you sometimes have to make several attempts to get the number just right and even when you get the target number you often get wildly varying results depending on what the abilities of those monsters are like the case of the Shadow or because of some errant die roll and that gets us to save or suck effects and because the math was flattened the success of any particular die roll is determined less by that creature's power and more by the dieroll that low-level party with a polymorph spell and silvery barbs is quite likely to shut down a very high level creature there's only so many times a monster can use legendary resistance which basically just gives a timer to the battle that the party will fully expect they will win another thing reported by 5e tables is that a deadly encounter usually is not that they have to go far beyond what is recommended in this chart to make something even feel challenging also implied in kind of what I've talked about so far is the fact that bounded accuracy kind of isn't bounded in 5e there are usually ways PCS get access to steer the math in the party's Direction even at low levels so let's take a low level party in 5e which can do a number of things to bend the math in its favor the guidance spell gives a plus D4 to Ability checks and bards who are at least second level can add half of their proficiency bonus to Ability checks that they are not already adding their proficiency bonus to these two effects stack with each other and ability checks include your initiative role and also counter spell checks all of the next bone bonuses can improve saving throws and attack rolls which are the bless spell a level one spell which adds a D4 to three allies roles emboldening Bond the peace domain cleric ability which lasts 10 minutes bartic inspiration which can give a D6 and eventually a D12 to a single role and if the party has silvery barbs if they fail a role they can call for a re-roll or if the enemy succeeds on a saving throw against an spell that would shut it down entirely they can force a re-roll of that and all of this on top of finding a way to add advantage to the role or disadvantage to an enemy role in fact the accusation of Math Finder often leveled against Pathfinder both first and second editions is arguably more appropriate for 5e than it is for Pathfinder 2nd edition because those extra bonuses reward you so heavily so what does Pathfinder second edition do first it doubles down on what 4E did which 4E added half of a creature's level to all of its statistics Pathfinder now adds your entire level so this is kind of the opposite of bounded accuracy in which there's an aggressive escalation of power from Level 1 to 20. this is Multiplied further by the four degrees of success system a creature one level higher than the party is likely going to have stats that are one or two higher than the party that not only increases their chance to hit a party member but also to crit a party member this affects every interaction in the game every demoralized check every saving throw and makes higher level creatures much scarier we also have a controlling of the math all of the stacking effects that I showed in the previous screen you really can't do that because of the bonus types there are only status bonuses and Circumstance bonuses so you can't add things like crazy so the math is actually more bounded in the sense that it's controlled compared to 5e while escalating but in a planned way such that I call it this term has not caught on but I think it conveys what Pathfinder 2E does it creates a bounded escalator so what this means is that you can have an encounter building system where you simply add up the XP totals of every single Monster without having to use any multiplier for a higher number of creatures and that tells you how difficult that fight will be now there are some caveats for low-level parties especially a higher level creature feels more difficult and sometimes is straight up more difficult but with that caveat I find it to be night and day the ease of balancing encounters compared to Third Edition and fifth edition and this reliability persists through level 20. another thing we see is that spells that basically remove a monster out of battle off often have that effect hidden behind a critical failure this allows a rebalancing of a number of spells in the game to be more in keeping with a balanced game this also means that even a Target that succeeds on its saving throw can have a significant partial effect in addition spells that take a creature out of a combat often have this trait called incapacitation every target has a level if its level is higher than double the Spells level in this case a 13th level creature then it counts its saving throw as one degree of success higher so it's impossible for a level 13 creature to have this very bad effect of being turned into a harmless animal for unlimited duration a spellcaster will want to use a higher level version a seventh level version of baleful polymorph against that creature instead some tables may not like this and might want to house rule it right away but I strongly suggest writing it as written this is key to the encounter balancing system and forces parties to have to work together to defeat higher level foes and means that those villains you've built up as the GM are not going to crumble and make for anticlimactic fights this balances both ways this also means that a 20th level party will not be turned into hamsters by level 13 creatures the end result that I find running Pathfinder encounters is this strange mix of feeling more unpredictable because the math is balanced and because of the the four degrees of success you never quite know what the result of any dire role will be and it might turn into a critical success or critical failure at any time hit points are very swinging higher level melee creature can knock out your front liner in one or two hits it leads to dramatic moments it leads to more unpredictability during the fight but the ultimate outcome becomes more predictable and is on this satisfying Razor's Edge where the party's tactical decisions matter in determining whether they win the next problem from Third Edition is that skills are rarely useful for a number of reasons first there are not many defined ways to use a variety of skills during combat and outside of combat the party just usually seated something to the one character who drove up their bonus really high the Rogue has a plus 30 to disabling the device will try to disarm that trap and probably succeed also at the same time there would be magic spells that would often make skills redundant like spells to unlock a lock or other similar spell effects this problem is arguably even more pervasive in 5e because there are fewer defined ways your sequels can be used it's kind of just left for the DM and players to invent ways to use the skills what Pathfinder 2E does is a lot of what 4E did in giving some defined ways to use your skills in and outside of combat here is a chart showing many of the ways the core rulebook allows you to use your skills tumble through lets you use acrobatics to go through an enemy's space shove lets you use your Athletics to force an enemy backwards faint lets you use your deception skill to make an enemy flat-footed to your next attack or attacks demoralize let's use intimidation to debuff an enemy and hide and sneak makes you hidden and then undetected in combat and these are actions that any character can do in the game without any Feats now there are some Feats that let you do more things with your skills called skill Feats in this case bonma which lets you insult an enemy and if you succeed they get a penalty to their their mental defense and to their perception and the only way they can remove that penalty is by insulting you back battle medicine lets you use your medicine skill to give urgent healing to an ally in the middle of combat Pathfinder also has hazards or traps being one of them and some of those hazards are complex hazards they actually enter the initiative order and do something every turn which the party can use their knowledge skills to try to understand and figure out how to disable and usually there are one or more skills that the party can use to try try to disable those devices while they are trying to kill the party outside of combat there is Rule support for skills coerce is uh underappreciated use of intimidation which if you succeed you can get a prisoner to do the party's bidding for a period of time up to 24 hours it's up to the GM to decide how long exactly and the party critically succeeds they are too scared of you to retaliate at least in the short term this gives real support for GMS who don't want to reenact uncomfortable torture scenes which I've had to do sometimes before this became available and for downtime there is Rule support to do a number of different activities including earning income here is the chart that gives the DM a way to reward work in a way that works with the gold economy of the system the next problem from Third Edition was the greater power of casters Marshall Caster balance and certain Certain Magical spells that can prevent a game master from having certain kinds of stories or Adventures starting with Third Edition DND casters arguably became even more powerful compared to martial characters in older editions in the older editions you needed many many hours to prepare spells for the day you also had to declare your Spells at the start of a round during which any damage you took automatically disrupted your spell starting with Third Edition Wizards were able to choose their spells and were not dependent on the dungeon master giving them out through a scroll and very importantly as you leveled up as a spellcaster in Third Edition it did not get that much harder to land or spells and sometimes it became easier if you optimized your character in older editions very high level creatures could resist your spell on a two or three on the die roll also some spells made it harder to have certain kinds of Adventures like it would be hard to have a mystery Adventure if your party had access to to speak with the dead detect lies detect alignments scry and Fry was a term to scry an enemy pre-buff your party and then teleport to where that enemy was kill them get their stuff and teleport out teleportation also trivialized great distances so for fifth edition they toned down Marshall Caster disparity sum first by toning down some spells spells like haste and fly for example now only affecting one creature instead of the whole party the concentration mechanic meant that you couldn't really stack so many spell effects on top of each other and high level spellcasters don't have many spell slots Beyond fifth level spells however these changes were arguably more than outweighed by the greater flexibility spellcasters have in 5e what's called modified fancy and spell casting the wizard has a number of spell thoughts and can decide at the time of casting which of their prepared spells that slot is going to be spent when you combine that with the fact that most tables have only a few encounters per day much fewer than the system anticipated this means that there often is little consequence when a spellcaster decides to spend a first level slot on the shield spell or silvery barbs when by level five they have about 10 spell slots 10 more opportunities to cast that same spell this is overall led to a situation where the spellcasters who have the wider variety of tools to handle different situations pretty much have access to that wide variety of tools at all times now I'm going to talk about what Pathfinder's second edition does with caveat that some people watching will not like these changes first thing is that a number of spells are nerfed in order to make Marshalls comparable to casters they both strengthen Marshalls in some ways and also weakened Casters in a number of ways there is balance in both directions some spells that people have used in the past us that are kind of Show Stoppers are less so in this system it forces more teamwork in the game when you're a Caster in the system you have your Niche the Marshalls excel in single Target consistent damage whereas you are better at area of effect spells especially against many lower level enemies and also tilting the battlefield in the party's favor and also you just have a wider variety of tools your magic Missile might not do as much damage as the Barbarian but it is automatic which is great against higher level bosses who are very hard to hit your spells that do different types of energy damage can Target weaknesses of creatures so for example our ancient white dragon has a weakness to fire every time it takes fire damage it takes an extra 15 damage so your produce flame spell cantrip can trigger that damage and if you critically succeed on your attack roll it takes persistent it's fire damage so that gets triggered every turn burning hands because it calls for a basic reflex save means that it does half damage on a successful saving throw that is not a critical success so you can trigger that weakness even when it succeeds on its safe all this while preserving the traditional fancy and spell casting of prepared casters having to predict what spells they're going to use that day and when you cast it you cross it off of the list spontaneous casters have more flexibility which I won't go into here however the overall point is that playing spellcasters rewards players you like to be rewarded for putting some thought into their play and also having the right tool for the job being able to deal with a wider variety of situations but in general spells have been rebalanced to be more fitting to what people expect for that spell level teleport is elevated to a six level spell and so is baleful polymorph true strike is not useless you spend only a single action and it means that your attack roll later that turn is going to have what in 5e would be called Advantage you can use this right before casting a high level important spell attack I plan to have the video as part of Pathfinder law school on how to Caster good and if you're interested in that like subscribe ring the bell because that'll be a fun one now on spells that can have a detrimental effect on the kinds of stories some TMS want to tell we find Rarity tags if a spell might have an unintended effect on a campaign like teleport which some DMS might not want to have if they want to make travel more important in their campaign and Wilderness skills then it will have the uncommon tag or rare tag the GM can simply say something is not available if it has this tag and have the confidence to tell players you can have access to all of the common options in the game and know that it won't have any unintended effects you'll also notice that the teleports spell takes 10 minutes to cast which is another change detect alignment also has the uncommon trait and so does scrying taking a cue from 4th edition some spells are turned into rituals and take a substantial amount of time to do the resurrect ritual takes a day and it also has the uncommon tag creating Undead also has the uncommon tag also these rituals are priced with balance in mind Resurrection has a cost that makes sense for a character of that spell level in other words death does not become trivial after a certain level so in summary powerful magic is still in the game but the DM can control access to it another thing about rituals is that any character can conduct a ritual a fighter who is a expert in religion can conduct at the resurrection ritual in case you're wondering Rey's dead still is in the game as a Divine spell that clerics can cast but it takes 10 min minutes and it has the uncommon tag the last issue from Third Edition that later editions trying to solve was the five minute adventuring day the phenomenon that certain abilities especially spells are quite powerful and that you want to go Nova use all of your abilities in if fight and then immediately rest to get those daily resources back now arguably any DM could solve this by having wandering monsters or giving a story reason for the party to rush on through but over time it becomes hard to justify this narratively to have these conditions constantly true fifth edition addresses this sum by allowing players to do short rests this is something from fourth edition allowing players to restore their hit points and get some short rest resources back such as warlock spell slots and other abilities however it's only a partial solution because the game was designed around having six to eight encounters per day and having an attrition of daily resources this is not how most tables have played the DM has the same problems as before of having to consistently put pressure on the players to plow forward which is not viable in the long term also the nature of an attrition model for encounters is that some of those encounters inevitably are just resource strains and not particularly exciting in and of themselves also what if you're running a Sandbox or a exploration campaign where the party will at most get one encounter per day there isn't really a solution for that so what does Pathfinder second edition do first I want to report my experience you can have a campaign where a party has one encounter every few days or a few weeks and that fight be quite tense and exciting and using this same system have an adventuring day with 15 encounters as my recent at level 12 campaign of fifths of the Ruby Phoenix hat now how does Pathfinder do this first of all through unlimited healing in theory treat wounds is a way you can use your medicine skill to restore two d8 hit points to a party member there is no absolute limit on how many times you can do this your limitation essentially is time and until you get a later skill fee you can do this on any one particular Target only once per hour the activity itself takes 10 minutes so it's something you have to do outside of combat also when you become better at your medicine skill when you become an expert you can add 10 to the amount you heal eventually you could become legendary and add 40 to what you heal also there are skill Feats for medicine that let you treat eventually up to eight members of the party at a time what this means is that if the party rests between combats the party can be expected to have near if not maximum hit points for the next battle this makes it easier for the game designers and the GM to balance for the individual encounter as a opposed to the adventuring day and every encounter therefore can be tense and exciting if you want them to be and you often see really wild swings of hit points in the middle of a given combat this is a reworking of what fourth edition did with healing surges but unlike fourth edition there is no daily limit to how many times you can restore your hit points another resource that recharges between fights is focus points many classes get abilities called Focus spells a wizard who specializes in an Arcane school can have a school spell that uses their focus points to cast and they can refocus with 10 minutes of focusing to get that Focus point back and the party is normally going to have at least 10 minutes between fights barring extraordinary circumstances these Focus spells are also not limited to spell casters monks can have access to key strike for example this means that a spellcaster who has used many if not most of their spell slots for the day can still fall back on their focus abilities here is a high level Focus ability where a Bard can sing and kill a creature with their song also these Focus spells and the cantrips that characters can gain all scale up with their spell level more aggressively than cantrips in 5th edition many of them improve with every single spell level that you gain also Marshals do not have limited usabilities like in other editions you're not going to be limited in how many times you can do whirlwind strike for example you don't have to track superiority dice like Battle Master Fighters have to do in fifth edition you can just use them over and over throughout the day and keep on going this all dovetails with the encounter balancing system so that a game master can tune every fight no matter what time of day it is or how many previous encounters the party has had to be exactly as difficult as they want it and intend it to be now time for some closing thoughts I will say that Pathfinder second edition is not best for every group and every game master there are different styles of play that this system will not serve best there are more rules than the Pathfinder second edition game that you have to know from moment to moment then in a fifth edition game and for those who want to focus more on the narrative and have combats be fast and furious Pathfinder second edition may not be better for them also the concern for balance that is in Pathfinder second edition may not be what a table wants some game Masters may want a disregard for balance and view that as a feature in their games they want to be able to throw Monsters of widely different levels and with abilities that are very memorable because of how powerful they are thrown at the party it's just that that does require a certain amount of finesse and experience on the part of a game master that not many new game Masters will necessarily have for the majority of DMS though the lack of regard for balance and the sheer amount of powerful abilities that characters get by level 10 and above makes dming it a frustrating experience as this excellent video by XP to level three shows so to go back to my history of the additions fourth edition did a number of things that were very Innovative and were later Borrowed by fifth edition and then Pathfinder second edition but for a number of reasons it was not as financially successful as Wizards of the Coast had hoped Pathfinder first edition was selling similar amounts and a lot of the player base moved away from DND at that time it was also too different from what was before for many of those players DNT fifth edition had as a main goal not to look like first edition as my friend Luke from the DM layer said they wanted to rebuild Bridges with players who had been alienated by fourth edition and make it a greatest hits of all the preview obvious editions and they talked openly about bringing together mechanics and people for previous editions its essential approach was to take the Third Edition engine and pare it down to make it more approachable for newer players and also more manageable less crunchy for at least veteran GMS from Third Edition so that running it was less of a burden compared to Pathfinder first edition who was Wizard's primary competitor at the time it succeeded with flying colors and is easier for new players to enter and easier to run in a number of ways it also empowered game Masters to rely more on rulings not rules their sense of balance which was a relief for people like me who were getting some fatigue from running DND Third Edition and Pathfinder first edition that you could have a lighter system with less rules load and focus more on things that make tabletop role-playing games unique the story of The Narrative however over time as with any addition its limitations have become apparent players have wanted more ability to customize their characters players and DMS have been frustrated by somewhat stale combat and unworkable high-level play Pathfinder second edition was made in counter position to 5e as a way to preserve the amount of customization and tactical crunch from Third Edition while borrowing Innovations and simplifications from 4E and 5e it has had the advantages of being after these other editions and learning from the lessons positive and negative from those additions and and it also did not have the burden of not having to look like 4E enough time had passed from the addition Wars of that time when Pathfinder 2E inevitably looks clunky and dated to Future Gamers it will go through its own process of reassessment and redesign my main criticism of current design efforts to revise 5th edition d d is being too conservative and overestimating how much people want to Hew to some parts of 5v's design that create a number of unwanted problems so that's it I hope that this was a convincing presentation uh this is my first time using PowerPoint to this extent I hope that I showed why I think Pathfinder 2E is a great system and also I hope I gave some insights into some of its designs that can inform the flowering of new companies and efforts to design new tabletop role-playing games to succeed DND 5th edition that we're seeing right now due to Wizards of the Coast messing up that's it I have been Ronald the rules lawyer like And subscribe and ring the bell if you want to get notifications about more courses in my pathfinder law school series if you like my deep dive into the history of DnD design then check out my video that I'm going to point to on whether DND should use the action economy from Pathfinder second edition where I propose that they abandoned the bonus action and use either the DNT 4E system or Pathfinder system tell me what you think in the comments also join my Discord Community where we continue these discussions and also you can play the Pathfinder 2E beginner box and find people who run it for you also support my patreon to get early access to videos and get exclusive videos only available to patrons so I hope you enjoy the video and I will see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: The Rules Lawyer

Views: 35,548

Keywords: rules lawyer, rpg, dnd, d&d

Id: a_Sz8Pe5rp0

Length: 84min 35sec (5075 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023

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[u/the-rules-lawyer]

I go into the DESIGN GOALS of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, which is the latest attempt to address issues that came up in D&D 3e/Pathfinder 1e.

This is the second "course" in PATHFINDER LAW SCHOOL, for people who are now checking out Pathfinder 2e!

0:00 Introduction
2:19 Overview
4:34 Complexity in combat
19:50 Complexity: stacking spells
23:59 Imbalance between characters
36:17 Complexity in character building
39:42 Magic items less wondrous
46:12 Boring melee combat
52:56 Difficult to balance encounters
1:03:15 Skills rarely used
1:06:24 Martial/caster balance, story-breaking spells
1:13:33 5-minute adventuring day
1:18:40 Closing thoughts

[u/Edymnion]

Is there a transcript that can be copy/pasted?

[u/evaned]

Maybe I ought to respond over on YT... but whatever.

I was surprised when talking about the 5e action system that you didn't mention that one of 5e's really fiddly bits when it comes to rules comes into play, which is the rules for casting two spells in one turn. (I think you were kind of thinking it when you mentioned 2e lacks such rules.)

Another thing that could have been mentioned when talking about conditions (e.g. around 16:35) is that online character sheets like Pathbuilder and Wanderers Guide (let alone full VTTs) will let you apply conditions and automatically adjust DCs and modifiers. I know some people are fine doing this by hand, but at least personally I wouldn't want to play without that. It doesn't eliminate the complexity; you still have to track when the conditions come off or are reduced, and of course there are some conditions that have non-numerical effects (e.g. immobilized), but it's still a significant help that I suspect most people can use right away. (Tables that eschew digital tools are what I'm thinking of when it comes to "can't.")

[u/Arius_de_Galdri]

Great video, love seeing how PF2e has learned from previous editions and systems.

[u/mynamewasalreadygone]

Nice to see that 4e is getting praise where praise is due (and quite frequently in this video!), even if you got some of the details wrong. Pathfinder 1e did not outsell 4e. This is a myth. D&D4e also does have basic actions outside of powers! There are the three Aid actions for aiding a creature making a skill check, an attack roll, or for improving a creature's defense. Pushing and grabbing a creature are basic combat actions. You can also intimidate a creature during combat, and if they were bloodied, this even outright forced them to surrender! Good video otherwise. Very informative.

[u/Alwaysafk]

Working my way through the video, good job. Could use some work in the camera focusing but the content is great. Keep it up!

[u/Valhalla8469]

I’ve just started looking at PF2e because of an upcoming campaign I’m supposed to play in and one of my initial impressions was how weak magic seems to be