Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn’t have giant blank spots that you’re expected to fill in for a few levels. They’re switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn’t shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.

Sure but Pathfinder 2E is explicitly about teamwork and positioning. One archer will not be able to hit the death knight unless it’s very lucky (which IMHO makes sense), but an archer supported by some melee fighters flanking the knight and giving them some off-guard malus has way better odds. “Every +1 matters” is true for both the party and the NPCs

I understand heroic fantasy not being your cup of tea, that’s the beauty of having lots of RPGs to choose from. But beware of thinking that bounded accuracy makes things more gritty. In my experience it just makes things more heroic for the party (which can now take down a dragon at level 2) and just breaks down after the first dozen levels

Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don’t lay down much damage, but they can move, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip).

I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I’m just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.

I’ve always been allergic to spell casters (the strategy behind the best use of spell slots just never clicked for me - which is extra painful because it seems like if should be simple, but I consistently manage to botch it), going back to when i picked this all up in the 3.0e days.

I think that’s caused me to not really engage with the spell casting side of spell casters in PF2e. I remember in 3.5, we banned Mystics because spontaneous divine spell casting was broken, so maybe I just need to run one to see if work.

Sounds like a good resource, but I guess what I meant was a setting to run a game in (e.g. a campaign set in the Inner Sea or Sword Coast) with enemies and grabbags of challenges with balanced NPCs for side interactions and such.

I’ve come to the conclusion that 3.5e was the peak of TTRPG and frankly I’ve just decided I’m going to go back to that. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of 3.5e materials to use.

Pathfinder is D&Ds brother that studied business and economy instead of theater

You forgot counteracting. So effin elegant!

That’s awesome. I haven’t gotten my head around a swashbuckler myself, but the ones I’ve seen play definitely feel like they’re “of a kind” with gunslingers.

It’s worth noting, too, that the gunslinger “way” that you choose will define a lot of how the class plays. My pistolero’s quick, seemingly careless gunplay will feel very different from someone who builds a sniper and is much more methodical and sneaky.

They have several setting/adventure books, a lot of IPs choose to my heart: Star Trek, Discworld, Girl Genius. You can get their Infinite Worlds book which is kinda the default setting. It’s a multiverse thing so technically your homebrew is canon, but they lay out a bunch of What-if settings like “What if the Nazis won?” or “What if Rome never fell?”.

There’s also Dungeon Fantasy, which is a Powered by GURPS module which gives you pre-built character templates and enemy stat blocks and adventures and stuff. If you’re used to D&D, it’s a fairly gentle transition with familiar themes.

The thing about the challenges and side interactions though, is that once you get a feel for setting difficulty modifiers, you can import that stuff from anywhere. The best part of GURPS is running homebrew. Its strength is that you can write any scenario you want, with the confidence that you can make it work mechanically somehow.

The people on the Discord are generally pretty helpful if you need help, although just about anything you want to do has already been theory crafted on the Steve Jackson Games forum.

Very rarely

I just wish I could be a player in a PF2E game for once because I love playing support classes

A valid build in Pathfinder 1.0 was a quad pistol halfling paladin with a velociraptor mount.