have done something that broke everything
When talking about dnd5e -> pf2e, I STRONGLY disagree. Pf2e is a much, much more stable and balanced system than DND and waaaay harder to break.
With pf1e I agree. That system has so many busted builds.
On the other hand the analogy is very good, as DND/windows is only considered to be "stable" and "intuitive" because it is the "Default" and usually the first thing people get in contact with. From an objective, unbiased perspective they can be very unintuitive.
... And yes I play pf2e and use Linux how could you tell.
If you trust the system and try the system in good faith, you can't break it. The guardrails work, and everything stays on track.
But not everyone does that. In the past 13 months, we've seen a bunch of people look into or be introduced to the game who don't really want to try it, but feel some sort of internal moral pressure or external social pressure to abandon 5e, who then either want to beat it back into a 5e-like shape (use a separate and splitable movement pool, expand mis/fortune rules to better emulate dis/advantage, give monsters legendary buklshit, try to actually use proficiency without level, etc), or who are so used to these games being non-functional out of the box that they insist on implementing homebrew originally crafted with broken character builds or boring, HP sack monsters in mind, and then end up finding the game both boring, and unfairly deadly.
Plenty of people break the game. Breaking it is a lot more than just trying to win in character creation.
Dnd5e leaves to many things up to the gm, like magic items and encounter balancing. CR is notoriously inaccurate and running level appropriate fights can easily end up as unwinnable deadly or just a trivial steamroll. Especially once higher lvl magic comes into play with save or suck spells (cough polymorph cough). Yes legendary resistance can fix that, but that is not the system being stable, it is the system giving you tools to fix its unstableness. And even then, the fight ends after X presses of the "I win" button instead of one.
While there are a lot worse systems than dnd5e, when comparing it to pf2e it is objectively the system with more holes. No doubt, partly because pf2e could learn from dnds mistakes and is not produced by a company trying to milk its customers for every cent.
D&D leaves a lot up to the GM to fill in that Pathfinder doesn't, but it's mostly in the subsystems. Pathfinder has all of the subsystems, to the point where many fans don't accept that you can swap them out for other ideas that might work better for their table.
But 5e doesn't leave core systems up to the GM. Magic items and encounter balancing are there as intended. They just intended magic items to be lame and bullshit, and encounters to be balanced around core rules.
But everyone plays with variant rules, classes are not balanced, or even particularly well thought out, and bounded accuracy breaks down completely around 10th level, because it's a half baked mechanic that stinks of "well, what if we didn't even try any more?"
The issue isn't that WotC leaves everything up to the GMs, it's that GMs have had to take everything on because they produced a broken game and released it to an audience that wanted to love it anyway, because it seemed like a mea culpa after everyone shat all over 4e.
Was not expecting to see my meme get reposted. I guess it has been a while.
i'll note it was liberally stolen from !linuxmemes!linuxmemes@lemmy.world when i saw it on there just recently.
As a GM, the Pathfinder adventure paths are so freaking good, you can run them with minimal prep or adaption if you lack the time. Really well done. Still, if you want to adapt, you have a ton of stuff ready to be plugged in without breaking things. Also, the system works great at high levels, my group is lvl 14 and fights are still nailbiters most of the time (I sprinkle in the occasional easier encounter so my players can go crazy)
My GM's currently running one with just the foundry module and some skimming of the pdf just before each session. I have no idea how he does it.
If it's an official Foundry Module, they are pretty amazing. Everything is where you need it. My biggest issues is that we dont play in English, but with some time and deepl, it's easy to prep.
And my reasoning for not switching to both is the same. “The programs I rely on for creation and collaboration aren’t there.”
For $50 and a bit of self-hosting effort, you can purchase a license for Foundry Virtual Table Top and get free lifetime updates. The community-built PF2e module is nigh fucking perfect. It's already incorporated the remaster rules.
I do love how easy the PF2 Foundry Game Module is. Sadly my players all want to use Herolab even though its far more user unfriendly. In Foundry you just drag and drop your stuff from the compendium browser.
Would they maybe consider Pathbuilder? I do think the export to Foundry is a premium feature though.
Mhm thing is that we already bought a dozen or so herolab modules. Thus it's a bit in conflict, furthermore we share our one Foundry server across serveral game worlds and campaigns. So that's also not easily feasible.
But yeah pathbuilder is also a very nice tool, even better imho than herolab.
Is there a direct export to Foundry? I thought there was a Foundry module that imported Pathbuilder's JSON exports, but I don't remember seeing anything in Pathbuilder specifically for Foundry.
I don't use a VTT, though, so I admit I haven't dug too deeply.
There's a Foundry module that imports Pathbuilder's JSON exports, but Pathbuilder has a link to that module in it and steps on how to use it.
How do you not own what you buy with dnd? Are you leasing your books, minis, dice, character sheets, etc?
Not because they haven't screwed people over yet, but because that's a comparison of dndbeyond to pathfinder, not a product that sells digital Pathfinder source books. It's comparing apples to oranges. As I mentioned in my first post, you can just buy physical books for dnd and the point is moot.
And my point was, though I admit I didn't state it explicitly, that the current signs point to WotC limiting their physical book offerings going forward.
As someone who has never been able to get into DnD I never realized that pathfinder is different. I always assumed it was a sub-company for wotc.
it has its origins working for D&D iirc, then they split off and made their own D&D with blackjack and hookers when everyone got mad at 4e
I always assumed it was just an official setting for continued 3.5 games. I only learned early last year that it was from a different company.
But Pathfinder 1 was basically just 3.5 in a different setting.
Pathfinder 2's it's own thing, like if the designers of 4e had a chance to try again. Because, uh, that's a lot of what is actually is.
I would like any recommendation for things that would make pf2 easier. I love the system and I am currently playing it I have the books and read them. I used nethys and watch YouTube videos explaining the rules. But when I am playing it is just so much to keep track of in my head. I am really looking for a remastered cheat sheet or something to put on my dm screen and the best way to keep track of all my players stats for when ever I need to do a secret roll. (Doesn't help that I am currently swamped with work and try to spend as much time with my family as possible as well)
Try a Pathfinder 2e character builder like Pathbuilder. The character generator on Demiplane is also very nice and has all the automation bells & whistles, but you need to buy the books for most options like in D&D Beyond.
How do you prefer to track things? Other than trying to track things entirely mentally.
I'm still trying to learn how to take orderly notes as a GM, but I find just scratching things down in my notebook as conditions and the like crop up effective. And when tracking in combat, I use a grid to track rounds, with HP in the cell, and sub-scripts and super-scripts to track negative and positive status bonuses, respectively.
Things end up looking like the periodic table.
Though, really, it's the players responsibility to actually keep track of their buffs and debuffs. I just track to remind myself to ask them.
I also haven't bothered to give a damn about any of the remastered rules yet. I print off spell lists from pf2easy, and players are responsible for knowing how their abilities work. I'm just there to determine whether they apply in the given situation.
Also, what things can you get away with just not tracking? I dropped most secret checks right away, because my table didn't like them, and it gave them something else to burn heron points on. It takes away the element of being unsure if you've been spotted or not, but there are other ways to inject that back into the game.
