The downside of PF2 is if you try to engage with the core of the online community with this “rules for if I want/need them” attitude, someone will come out of the shadows to shank you.

There’s a rabid “by the rules, and all the rules” cohort within the community, and they are pretty effective at chasing new players away.

Hells Rebels on the Find the Path Presents feed. Hands down.

If you like a little more silly/lewd Glass Cannon campaign 2 is a lot of fun.

I’ve always felt the community was extremely kind and welcoming, personally. The publisher even goes out of their way to support and represent LGBTQ+ in their official worldbuilding.

There’s always going to be elitists in every hobby of course, they do exist in PF2e as well. But it’s not the majority by any stretch.

The bestiary is also really good (and free!). There are thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature. And the they’re balanced to the same levels as players, so encounter power budgets are very intuitive.

The game gets a bit of a bad rap for having “nitpicky” rules, but people often seem to fail to recognize that the rules are spelling out how people already usually resolve things, rather than introducing something novel. It’s written in a very systematized way, and people aren’t used to reading about their intuitive experiences in systematized language.

The game’s broader community’s obsession with rules orthodoxy doesn’t help…

I don’t know. My experience with the community has been a lot of people yelling “You’re playing my fantasy XCOM board game wrong. You should probably play a rules-light game,” and no one stepping up to challenge them.

Hmmm, I’m very sorry to hear that, honestly. I’d say the average PF2e player takes it a bit more seriously than the average DnD5e/N player, but not a whole lot.

Perhaps it’s the part of the community you engaged with? Obviously every forum/chat server is going to have it’s own flavor. The older communities that started with PF1e and still focus there are going to be more elitist in general just because of how PF1e came to be and it’s target audience. But PF2e is much more widely targeted.

Discord isn’t free, private, or open source, but it does host several great PF2e communities I participate in if you’d like a recommendation. But if you are just sharing your personal experience and aren’t looking for a “solution”, that’s totally valid and I completely respect that.

Mortals & Portals is very good. They made the decision to use PF2e like 2 weeks before they started recording, and learned the game on the fly. Sometimes they trip over the rules, but they also illustrate how to fail forward in that regard.

They also run it as a Theatre of the Mind game, which a lot of people will try to convince you isn’t really feasible. They fease it just fine, so I like it as an example.

Narrative Declaration also has several campaigns on YouTube. Rotgrind and Rotgoons are campaigns set in a gritty homebrew world. They had an aborted Abomination Vaults campaign that started off with the game’s beginner box. They’re currently running Rusthenge, which is a different beginner’s adventure. They also have a series of “teaching Pathfinder 2e to VTubers” campaigns, which… They’re good, but they’re just the beginner’s box over and over again, with different cartoon variety streamers. They use Foundry, and play gridded combat.

Yeah, I’m mostly just… warning people to be prepared. The Paizo forums and the subreddit both house a significant number of people that actively chase people away for treating the game as a general purpose fantasy RPG. And as someone who champions PF2 as a really solid roleplaying game, and not just a tactical combat game, I’ve been repeatedly and harshly told I’m doing it wrong.

We’re RPG player, we have a long tradition of trolling each others, AD&D player will tell that Vampire is the opposite of a RPG while WOD player will reply that AD&D is a boardgames and that it misses the role play element to be called RPG.

But all this trolling tend to be all fun, and not many people would straight up refuse D&D game (even I, play it like once a decade, there is so many other game out there and so few time)

For anyone (thinking about) playing The Dark Eye:

Check out the character manager/creator Optolith, it’s wonderful!

thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature

That’s exactly what I want. I spent so much time looking at https://www.themonstersknow.com/ when DMing 5e. I like encounter design, but I feel like I had to work hard to make it passable, rather than work hard to make it excellent.

Neat! Thanks for mentioning that.

I think that the perceived complexity, particularly for people coming from 5e comes down to two issues.

There’s A Rule For That 5E leaves a lot of things to GM fiat, while in Pathfinder there is probably a specific rule. Now, the rule is going to be the same systemic rule that is used everywhere else and probably be the way you’d want to resolve it anyway, but there mere existence of the rule makes it seem like there is a lot of complexity.

Close, But Not Quite Because 5e and PF2 have a lot in common, players with a lot of 5e experience will assume that something works the same way as in 5e when it doesn’t. This can lead to gameplay feeling like walking in a field of rakes. I ran into this with a new player who had listened to a lot of 5e podcasts and picked up some 5e rules that they tried to use, like attacks of opportunity.

FWIW, I’ve been running a game with a group of new players, most of whom have never played an RPG before and they seem to be handling it fairly well. Well, once I talked with the person who listened to all of the 5e podcasts.

My current DM despises 5e

I think it’s because 3.5 offers such a ludicrous bag of dickfuckery for the GM to employ at their leisure it’s literally like hanging out with someone who insists on cleaning their guns with company over.

I just want to play cyberpunk red again.

I haven’t seen a lot of that, but what I have seen comes down to organized play vs home games. The online community has a very strong organized play culture, which requires closely adhering to RAW and fairly strict guidelines for play in order to keep the ability to jump and character into any table of a random session. I’ve found that being clear about if this is a Society game or a home game helps to avoid those misunderstandings.

Exactly this.

The game’s rules are, mostly, simple, intuitive, consistent, and predictable. In fact, the rules very often seem to follow from the fiction presented at the table! Sometimes, they do it too well, even – I’ve seen people complain about Trip being Athletics vs Reflex rather than Acrobatics or Fortitude, but as someone who’s taken judo and karate lessons, Athletics vs Reflex is 100% right.

The rules follow the fiction at the table, and that means 9 times out of 10, if you know the fiction being presented, you can just ask for the roll that makes sense to you. No need to look anything up.

The game is also moderately systematized, and functional. That is, a lot of what 5e DMs would just treat as “roll skill against DC” is formalized into an “Action” with a concrete name. These actions act like mathematical or programming functions, in that they can take parameters. So, it’s not “Trip”, it’s “Trip (Athletics)”. If your character comes out of left field and does something acrobatic, or even magical, that I think would cause a creature to stumble and fall, then I will leverage “Trip (Acrobatics)” or “Trip (Arcana)”, which now makes it an Acrobatics or Arcana roll vs Reflex. This means “Trip (x)” is actually “Roll x vs Reflex. On a success, the target falls prone, on a… etc.”

Super flexible, and super intuitive. But formalized, and only presented with the default option, so it looks both complicated and rigid.

I started running the game for 8 year olds, though, and they picked it up very quickly. I do my best to run sessions totally in-fiction, but that honestly gets broken every other turn or so.

Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.

The biggest “con” to PF2 is that it is decidedly not 5e, and people expecting it to work like 5e will have a bad time. AC generally hangs within 1 or 2 points for the entire party at a specific level, same for enemies. It is rarely a good idea to just walk up to the enemy and face tank them. Moving around is big for survivability. Synergy with other party members can be huge too. Sometimes that thing you can do doesn’t sound like a big buff or debuff, but if several party members are doing complementary buffs/debuffs it can turn the tide.

Modern iterations? Daggerheart. Full stop. ‍️

Oh yeah, big shoutout to @elyukai@mastodon.social and the whole team for creating the best ttrpg software I‘ve ever used.

The synergy part is so huge. PF2 is very strongly based around making your party as awesome as possible instead of just making your character individually powerful, which I think trips up a lot of people coming from other systems or video games.