I thought I'd review the new Pathfinder as I know a lot of people are curious about it. In the interest of full disclosure, I DM'ed 30 or so sessions of this during the playtest period, and I'm a wargame/strategy player that likes these type of systems. It ended up being longer than anticipated, feel free to TLDR to the end for the final grade.
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PRESENTATION
The Core Rulebook is a high quality 600 page hardcover. Given the size, I think the price is more than fair relative to other offerings.
The art ranges from good to excellent and maintains the signature Paizo style, with the football headed goblins and the like. There are some overt nods to 2019 "woke" culture in the text that I didn't find to be much of a distraction but might make the book appear dated in the future. Clearly there has been some art direction but it all looks pretty similar to other major games.
The spells from spell schools are all together and presented in alphabetical order, while the class specific spells are separated by class, making them hard to find. Some key differences in expected rules mechanics (like getting a critical hit if you beat the required difficult by 10) are buried in text and could be easily missed. There are a few typos. These fairly minor issues reduce what would otherwise be a perfect grade in this category.
GRADE: A
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BASE RULES
Many of the rules are familiar to anyone that has played d20 systems before so we will concentrate on the two major PF2E specific mechanics.
First, everyone has 3 actions and one reaction in a given combat round as a base. Attacking, moving, disengaging, etc all cost one action. Certain class feats can grant more reactions to specific things or allow more than one attack in an action, spells usually cost more than once action, etc. When attacking more than once, a cumulative -5 penalty applies to any additional attacks, which can be lessened by different weapons, feats, etc.
Secondly, everything uses the same basic "Action" roll. If you want to hit with weapons or spells, use a skill, make a saving throw, etc the same mechanic is used. Roll d20 + attribute + level + proficiency + other bonuses to beat a target number. If you beat it by 10 or get a natural 20 its a crit. Fail by 10 or get a natural 1 and it is a critical fail.
Once you get a feel for these two mechanics, the game flows very smoothly and combined with the different weapons, spells, feats etc provides a huge amount of depth to the system without as much book flipping as you might expect.
The decision to limit Attack of Opportunity to only the Fighter and certain "fighting" NPCs is something I have lukewarm feelings about. I think I'd prefer that everyone had it and the Fighter is already likely the best class even without it.
Overall in practice I've found these two mechanics to provide a great balance between crunch and speed of play and I think the system is great for players and Gms that like grid combat systems.
GRADE: A
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SCALING
Everything in the game scales sharply with level, gaining a +1 per each level as a minimum, plus any other bonuses from feats, attributes, magic weapons, etc. This is very different than, say, the "bounded accuracy" of D&D 5e. This in addition to the rules for extra criticals when beating/failing a required "to hit" roll by 10 create a very different dynamic to the game. When fighting monsters the same level as the party, its not that different than D&D, albeit with a lesser chance to hit/succeed baked in.
Monsters of lower level have a much harder chance to hit the players and are crit by them much more often, and quickly are worth no experience at all. Really clever Kobolds vs high level characters are not viable in this system.
What is viable are boss fights. The standard "boss" is 2 levels higher than the party and thus has a higher chance to hit and crit, and a lower chance to hit or be crit (and a much lower chance to be hit by a spell, see below). A +4 level enemy represents a likely TPK. The scaling system does a good job of simulating the danger of these higher level opponents, and the level of fear/respect the players should have of them.
What it also does is increase the value of buffs and debuffs. When everything is balanced this tightly a +2 AC from a shield, flanking bonus, buff spells etc play a much bigger role in the game than you normally see. By just using an action to Raise Shield, a melee character can reduce their chance to be critically hit by up to 10%, and can use his reaction the Shield Block some or all of the incoming damage. By contrast a Fighter that has been given a buff spell, is flanking, and has a higher than normal proficiency might use their 30% higher crit chance to try and burn down the enemy rather than "tank" it.
Basically, anything that breaks the cycle of the scaling provides a real, significant benefit. Spells and Cantrips that give +1 to hit or AC are quite a lot more valuable than in other systems. Stuff that give +2 (such as shields, flanking, and higher than average proficiency) are gold. Using strategy and tactics to string together a few of these bonuses makes a massive difference in the outcome of a fight and I'd go as far as to say the game is based around this.
On the negative side, the scaling assumes everyone is a human equivalent and when superhuman attributes start appearing on monsters, this system can break down quickly. See Magic and Spells.
The leveling system works great with this type of scaling as players are rewarded for how dangerous the encounter was relative to their own strength, rather than monsters having specific XP values.
Overall I think the system functions very well on the tabletop. For some flavors of game/campaigns it does not really work all that well (low level pirates, orcs and the like quickly become irrelevant after a few levels).
GRADE: B
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COMBAT AND WEAPONS
Most systems of this type have all or most of the many weapons in PF2, and they try to make as many as they can into viable options yet often there are only a few real choices. The PF2 weapons and the way they interact with the combat system are fantastic as the myriad properties available on these weapons really influence the gameplay.
Your basic, shield using Fighter could use a Longsword that hits pretty hard for a one handed weapon but doesn't do much else. He could instead use a Shortsword which does a little less damage but has the Agile property making a second attack much more likely to hit, and would overall increase his damage if he expects to be making multiple attacks more often than not. Against enemies he has a high chance to hit already, a Military Pick does a little less damage on a regular hit and massive extra damage on a crit with its Fatal property. Maybe he even uses the 2H Greatpick for general use and switches to a shield for the harder enemies. There are weapons that do more damage when flanking and more damage when you keep attacking with them, like a prison shank. All have their place.
Many weapons also allow you to use them to make a specific Athletics move like Trip, Shove, or Disarm. A magic weapon adds its bonus to the Athletics roll, and the chance to hit with this attack is often very different than the chance to hit their AC. Disarm only actually disarms on a crit, but still inflicts a -2 to hit debuff on a hit. The gating on Athletics and other skills is not as strict as on weapon proficiencies and these alternate moves can be very viable for support characters. Trip to bleed an action from an opponent and provoke an AoO when they stand up. Disarm to debuff their attack. Shove them into a position where they can be flanked.
Shields are a very interesting part of the system also. You can raise your shield as an action to get an AC bonus and use a reaction to block, reducing incoming damage. A powerful effect with a high opportunity cost. Heavily armored characters raising their shields are plodding around the battlefield while the Monks and Barbarians are flying around doing whatever they want. The shield user can choose not to raise their shield and run around or attack more too. Shields were altered significantly post playtest to be stronger early and weaker later. Not sure yet how that will play out but it is a bit disappointing.
Grid combat is the strength of this system and was clearly the main point of emphasis for this edition.
GRADE: A
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MAGIC AND SPELLS
The magic system is pretty expansive and allows many spells to be cast at higher levels, be pumped up by using more actions to cast them, and/or have multiple modes. These use a modified version of the familiar spell pyramid, with fewer new low level spells as you level up.
There is also a separate spell point system that many classes have access to for additional spell like abilities such as Lay on Hands. They all use the same system rather than have a bunch of class specific mechanics.
As long as the spell does not directly target an enemy, it works pretty well. There are great healing spells and buffs, good utility spells, and quite a few spells that turn you into a bear, dinosaur, angel, elemental or what have you with enhanced combat characteristics.
All of that is pretty good. Once you get into debuffs and damage spells, things start to break down. The damage numbers and effects look more or less OK for a D&D game just looking at the lists, but in practice these spells are going against much higher defenses than in those other games. Your average, equal level monster is going to have anywhere from 50-75% chance to save against a given harmful spell. In D&D very few monsters can hit 50% and many even have a negative save modifier.
As an example, your Wizard has reached 5th level and learns Fireball and Blindness. As the party approaches the dungeon 2 5th level monsters bar your path. 19 of the 25 5th level monsters have 50% or better save chance vs the Fireball and 21/25 of them have a 50% or better chance to save against the Blindness. The most likely outcome of the Fireball is hitting them both for around 11. The Blindness will at least blind for one turn if the save is made. Really not much pop at all considering a limited use of your best spell, IMO.
Now that's just against even level monsters. The spells are of course more effective against lower levels, if you want to "waste" them in this way. In higher level "boss" encounters those spells substantially worse. Saving your spells for the last fight isn't a great strategy other than using them for buffs and Magic Missile, which still always hits and can be pumped up.
Note that the spells, Dcs and saves were heavily tinkered with during and after the playtest. They were even worse! The spells are not exactly dripping with narrative flavor, either.
GRADE: D
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CLASSES AND RACES
On the Race side, the usual suspects are all available as well as the Goblin. All of them have their own
tree of racial feats and they are all pretty good and flavorful, with the humans being a little better. Humans also can choose to be half elf/orc at start. Between that and the more fluid attribute bonuses, I saw mostly humans and still some demi humans in my games. I was really happy with this ratio and its nice to see something that is often attempted come out right.
In practice, there are 3 basic character types:
With the combat characters, the Fighter stands apart with a stack of great class feats and more accuracy than anyone else. The Monk has a ton of fun and highly effective options and can be near untouchable if played well. The Paladin with shield is an awesome tank and rock for your party to play off of. The other Champion variants are a little squirrely to me and not my cup of tea, they look ok. The Ranger looks like he has a ton of action economy but needs to use those actions in specific ways to be effective. A good class for players that like a lot of fiddling. Barbarian is a damage dealer with trade offs. Rogue has good, not great damage and has the emphasis on skills you would expect. All in all, a pretty good assortment.
For the support characters, the Cleric clearly has the best array of support spells and is very powerful. The Druid has fewer heals but has the awesome shape change powers and can use these to be a good front line fighter that also has a full pyramid of spells! The Bard has a great set of buffs combined with an emphasis on skills. If the Alchemist can give the right mutagens to the right players he can really make a difference, as well as provide utility and secondary healing. The bombs are on the weak side like the combat spells.
Lastly we have the cloth casters, Wizard and Sorcerer. They are extremely vulnerable, have few buffs that the other casters don't have, do low damage, and are very frustrating to play. With the changes they do look at least playable, but markedly worse than the rest of the classes.
I've taken off a half letter for the power of the Fighter relative to everyone else and a full letter grade for the state of the cloth casters. The rest I'm very happy with.
GRADE: C+
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MULTICLASS
In PF2, you can never have more than one class. Instead, you can use your class feats to take Archetype feats, including but not limited to Multiclass feats (The Core book only has multiclass). In general, the first multiclass feat gives you some basic abilities from the given class, and future feats are for more specific benefits. For example you could take the Fighter archetype to gain proficiency with Martial weapons and one skill, then take a single low level Fighter feat with your next choice (as opposed to an even level feat in your own class).
Some of those low level class feats are very attractive to other classes, probably too much so. So some classes may not view this as optional as others.
You can't really make an equivalent to the D&D Paladin/Warlock staff master who also wields a shield or similar nonsense, so I think overall this mechanic is pretty good. I think baking in a weak multiclass mechanic is better than making an overpowered "optional" rule for people to argue over.
GRADE: B-
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CONCLUSIONS
The meat of PF2 is an excellent tactical RPG combat system well suited for minis and grids. It offers the GM a large toolbox for creating interesting and challenging combat encounters, heavily incentivizes group tactics, does a lot of things right, and is chock full of new ways of doing things. There are so many things I haven't even mentioned 5 pages in to it.
On the negative side, there are a few glaring deficiencies I have already covered. Post playtest they made a lot of good, common sense fixes but also added extra complexity that didn't need to be there, and didn't go far enough with other fixes. In my view, its not really a game designed for mass appeal.
I think that if the goal was to have a kind of alternate D&D like the original Pathfinder was, that it failed in that regard. Players may not realize they are supposed to be playing as a team and magic will be much weaker than they expected. None of these problems are insurmountable.
OVERALL GRADE: B