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.

It definitely trips up people who usually just look at RPGBot to build their characters out from levels 1 - 20 before the first session. That’s how I made my build choices, and it was a pretty significant stumbling block for me when I made the switch.

The blue options aren’t always the best options, because the best options depend on what everyone else is doing.

For me it’s the 3 actions per turn. So much nicer to still have a turn even after I rolled an attack and missed.

OMG yes. I was trying to figure out how to say that but couldn’t put it into words, but you perfectly put together what I was thinking.

How did I forget to put that on my list? I love not worrying about action types and if I can do this action as this other kind of action. I just have to count to three.

I’d argue DnD is no different and we only see it less because half the DnD player base is busy home brewing Pathfinder content into 5e

Fair. I definitely haven’t engaged with the 5e community to the same extent I have with the PF2 one. I never became a special interest to me the way Pathfinder has.

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.

Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.

It’s with noting that the adventure paths and Paizo one-shots are also all very well-written (from the perspective of a novice GM). I’ve sat down with a group of 11yo kids after giving the adventure a 15-minute glance and been able to run a pretty decent session with next to no prep time.

That sounds great!

I ended up using a remix of the 5e Waterdeep: Dragonheist module because it really didn’t work for me. It would be a nice change to use a well-written module.

I’ve Cyberpunk RED’s Tales of the RED to be hit or miss. Some adventures are great, but many are meh.

I’m partial to Fate.

It’s very open. You don’t have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it’s cool and a good fit for the story, you’re basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it’s more of a question of what you’re willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don’t want to pay any costs) fail, don’t get what you want

It’s a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don’t like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch “ok I’m trying to hack open this terminal… how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?” or “I’m trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll… How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I’m disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!”.

It’s more collaborative, like a writer’s room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there’s less swinginess like you’ll get in systems rolling one die.

I’ve also found that it’s really easy to convert D&D 3.x and PF1 modules to the system. Not so easy that thought and care doesn’t need to be put into it, but most creatures are based off of the 3e monsters, and there’s a similar philosophy of DC adjustments. So, you get both Paizo’s catalogue of well designed adventure books, as well as a massive back catalogue of classic favourites that you can dig out for a relatively modest effort.

The dungeon master can do whatever the fuck they feel like. It’s their game. These systems are suggestions, inspiration, not law. I don’t get why people get so hung up on the particular rules of some edition