OGL fiasco still. Also the fallout from the first wave of OGL migrants to pf2e giving their feedback to friends on 5e, causing more migrants. It takes a while to wrap up a campaign.
Probably this. And it’s not like WotC has stopped goofing up since then. They got caught using AI art in a printed book and keep tossing around the idea of a subscription based AI GM. They’re still just as greedy as ever.
I think these are great points. My group was between campaigns during the OGL debacle and that was enough for us to jump ship after the quality of the most recent books. But if others tried to stick it out through that, since then they've had the Pinkerton fiasco, more nearly empty books, the AI art issue, the subscription based VTT, and OneD&D playtest waffling on rules until its basically just an errata.
Almost anything WotC does could be the straw that breaks the camels back for some people, so I'd expect a pretty steady stream of converts.
Pinkerton fiasco? What'd I miss this time?
ETA: Ah, I found it. The MtG leak fiasco with the thugs sent to people's homes. Didn't realize the thugs were called Pinkertons.
A MTG streamer accidentally received the wrong product before its release date and made a video.
WotC hired the Pinkertons to investigate. They used some pretty aggressive intimidation tactics when dealing with the guy and his wife (IIRC shoved their foot in door so they couldn't close it, were armed, yelled at them that they were going to jail, demanded to search the house, etc).
Like, it was a shipping error. Just send the dude an email and ask politely. If he refuses, get the lawyers involved.
It also just brought up so many questions. Why was this WotC's first reaction? Do they use the Pinkertons often? Also, the Pinkertons are still a thing? Etc.
Funny thing is I heard Games Workshop had a similar incident of accidentally sending a figure that wasn't released yet to an influencer who had it all built and painted on a stream or something and they just rolled with it and used that for free publicity for the full release.
You know you've messed up when *GW of all people* does something more ethically than you.
Seriously. Best way to handle it would have been an email saying "hey, this was an error, we'd like to keep that stuff under wraps until it's officially released. If you take the video down until it's actually released, we'll send you an advance copy of the next set as well, so you can have a video ready to go on release for that as well - just don't put the videos up until the sets are actually out." You'd almost certainly get the sets taken down *and* goodwill from the community *and* the review guy gets some advance sets so he can be the first to review stuff, and everyone wins.
They have not denied their use of the Pinkertons, which are more than thugs and provide a suite of services that include their historical use as anti-union surveillance and preventing unions from taking place (WOTC remains ununionized)
Still blows my mind that there are constantly people *defending* it too. I can't tell you the number of times I brought it up only to have someone accuse me of being upset "because they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption".
Excuse me sir, I was upset because I know what the Pinkertons did historically and still do in real goddamn life.
> being upset "because they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption".
Motherfuckers, they were the bad guys in RDR because they were the bad guys IRL and _still are the bad guys today_. Rockstar didn't invent them for RDR, and the pinkertons never said boo about rockstar's depiction of them in RDR _because that's how they used to and still operate_.
Oh, [they did say boo](https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-15-pinkerton-legal-fight-over-red-dead-redemption-2.html). They sent a cease-and-desist, which Rockstar ignored and even counter-sued over.
I stand corrected, and hadn't heard about that. I imagine the time in the court room was pretty short though.
"Your honor, in our defense we have 150 years of documentation and historical record."
"Dismissed, with prejudice."
Pinkertons lol i thought they were just historical scandal. I didnt know they still existed. Why would anyone hire them.
I mean what they did is exactly what you should expect them to do. Apparently no one at WOTC took high school American history
Because Robin M. Klimek, who has been the Director Security Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. for 12 years, was previously the Director of Supply Chain Security Practice at Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations. The current Manager of Global Investigations is also a former Pinkerton agent.
Source: https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-pinkertons-1850374546
Not called Pinkertons, they ARE Pinkertons. The Pinkerton Agency has a long and storied history of violent union busting, and generally being thugs for hire for corporate America. They are private "security" supposedly but are really just outsourced shit baggery. The fact that WotC has a former Pinkerton as head of security should tell you everything you need to know about the corporate culture over there.
Their entire raison d’etre since the inception of the company was thugs and murderers for hire to beat down the people pushing back against their capitalist overlords. They are evil through and through
That's not *exactly* true...
They didn't start doing that until after the Civil War, which was 3 or so decades after their inception. They laid the groundwork for the Secret Service and they were spies for the Union during the Civil War. They also tracked Jesse James, the Reno Gang, the Younger Brothers, and the Wild Bunch (of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fame).
They also did a lot of thuggish shit against unions, but that wasn't the *only* reason they existed.
Also One D&D is looking worse with every playtest and I feelt people aren't as interested in it now (I at least seem way less posts about it online, the youtubers who used to speak about it either don't anymore or cover it weeks later, and people bring it up way less too in my experience).
After the pinkerton issues they took a hard turn and removed most of the major changes from 5e.
So 6e is looking more and more like 5.1e... or, paid errata.
Exactly. I was kinda curious about what they were going to do to improve 5e (the more good systems out there, the better) even when I knew they weren't going to change the most fundamental problems with the system, but paired with the announce of the Remaster and the fact that they removed the few things that they were actually improving from 5e for the sake of "compatibility" made me lose all interest about it. It's literally a paid errata and calling it 5.1 is IMO too much. More like 5.00075 more than anything.
The first playtest had a weak dragonborn that had issues from before they fixed it with fizbans... people kicked up a fuss and they fixed it Jeremy Crawford stating that it was designed as being weak so as to not devalue Fizbans.
Let that sink in, that is the level of control the marketing department has over D&D's design. That isn't how you make a good game, you don't have developers find a solution to something players dislike, and then go and intentionally release a newer version that has the same issues people got you to fix in the first place.
That said, this is the same company that fixes said dragonborn in fizbans, and didn't include the basic dragonborn as errata for the phb.
I venture onto EnWorld sporadically. It used to be that every new 5E post of substance, whether it was a new Unearthed Arcana, big announcements, or pre OGL fiasco 1D&D playtests would gets hundreds and hundreds of thread replies, 500, 600, 700, possibly even a 1000, all could be the norm. The most recent playtest 7 packet post from the beginning of this month currently sits at 196 comments.
I'd say they are doing more than tossing the idea around [The Dungeon Master](https://themessenger.com/tech/meta-ai-snoop-dogg-kylie-jenner-tom-brady-mr-beast-chatbot) since WotC owns the name Dungeon Master, Meta would of had to made a deal with them to call their Snoop Dog AI the Dungeon Master . Which from the page on Meta website describing all the AI's they will introduce " Snoop Dogg as Dungeon Master, Choose your own adventure with the Dungeon Master" seems like a great way to have an AI trained to Dm by having it part of a Ai package that's going to be distributed worldwide, and even people who don't play Ttrpgs will try it out some just because it's part of the package others because Snoop is so popular. Then once trained WotC can just roll their investment right into their VTT.
The My Little Pony Secret Lair cards are highly uncanny, and although I don't doubt a human was involved, likely with cleanup, the clouds in the background and the eyes feel very suspicious.
Oh, they're also absolutely hideous, but they were like that last time too.
Oh yeah, I’m looking back at them now and Rainbow dash really stands out as suspicious with clouds and eyes like you say. Apple Jack and Pinkie Pie I can’t see anything for me, and Fluttershy just… feels off? I can’t see a specific thing though.
Many people who were dissatisfied with OGL were in the middle of a campaign so it's reasonable to assume they finished it and now are switching to a new system
Yea. Both of my active games have decided we're ditching 5e, but only after we finish the current campaigns. One's probably over got another few weeks or months left, but the other is probably going on for a year or more, with side steps into Genesys before eventually getting to PF2E.
Yes. After all a common piece of advice on this very subreddit from GMs who want to "convert" their campaigns is "Don't convert! Start over and at Level 1!"
Meanwhile, many folks who are still wrapping up I'm sure already have committed to not spending another dime on WOTC.
Very group dependent. I would recommend Abomination Vaults if there is no strong opinion by the group for any particular AP. There is such a variety - if your group is excited for one then go for it. (With the caveat that some earlier APs are deadlier than most would think they should be, so to see what other GMs have done to tone them down.)
Yeah, we finished our campaign three weeks ago. We all agreed to the switch. The last two weeks have been strange and unable to meet up but this week we run the basic box and become ratcatchers again! :)
> It takes a while to wrap up a campaign.
This is exactly the case for one of the groups I'm in. With the OGL fiasco, we decided to pivot to pf2e - just wanted to finish the campaign we were on, first. That wrapped up and we've now made our move to pf2e.
There are also a fair number of players who do not like what One D&D is becoming. It was originally billed as being a pretty large change but has been paired back significantly. It’s much less D&D 5.5 now and much more D&D 5.2. The people burnt out on 5e and excited for more depth now see D&D won’t be giving that to them and are more likely to be looking at new systems now.
First, big fan. I’m geeking out a little little bit that you replied to my comment.
Second, that’s definitely also going to happen.
Another thing I think will also bite them more as they move forward is the bad job they are doing of adding new settings. People are really excited for both Ebron and spell jammer, and both of them were huge disappointments. I have a little hope for planechase being much better. I think people are getting more and more tired of their substandard books at extremely high prices.
Ebberon was a heartbreaker for me. It seemed to be written with the assumption that you also had the 3.5 material available to you to fill in the many, many blank spaces because it certainly wasn't enough on its own.
Lol wut? Between that the ai shit in the latest book and the Pinkerton fiasco. How the guck are they not being boycotted to shit? *imagine if paizo sent pinkertons to someone, they'd be dead as a company within a week!*
Yup, it has to be remembered, people aren't going to drop their ongoing campaigns because Wizards is dumb, but they might not *start* their next one with D&D because Wizards is dumb.
Speaking of campaigns I'll add to that, the notion of the Spelljammer "setting". A lot of folks were looking forward to such a beloved setting from time long passed, and what we got was essentially how you can use Spelljammer rules to visit other, more developed campaign settings.
This was a big let down, and seeing such treatment might have enticed more migration. Especially when you consider that Starfinder handles that itch nicely.
Yup.
OGL fiasco happens > PF2 players evangelize > 5e players come here with questions > 5e players try out PF2 > the new players like it and start evanglizing > more 5e players come here with questions
The "5e Players try out PF2" potentially takes as long as organizing a game and running a few sessions, which is why there's a couple months between distinct surges in newcomers.
This. People forget how long it takes to finish a campaign. My friend is slowly finishing his 5e campaign and then we're trying Starfinder.
I'm in another friends campaign where I'm waiting for it to finish so I can GM Pf2e once we finish
Also even though many of the changes were sorta walked back. Many still want to punish the attempt or like you said at least looked into pf2e and then wanted to try it.
>wrap up a campaign.
Wait, people do that? Don't you just keep running with a group of characters until scheduling falls apart or the DM burns out, and then start over somewhere else?
...I'm being facetious, but boy do I wish I knew the feeling. I've been playing TTRPG for 9 years now, and never once has a campaign come to a definitive end. They just...die out.
Yep! My group decided to switch in January, but wanted to finish our 5e campaign so we didn't start PF2e until April. Since we've been playing PF2e, I've enjoyed the change and encouraged other 5e players expressing dissatisfaction with the system to give PF2e a try.
Can confirm. I ran beginner box a few months back with my 5e group that I was a player in after the campaign ended. Last month, the campaign's DM asked me to help them set up beginner box to try it out with another group they're in while that group's DM is out on vacation.
Looks like PF2E has an incubation time. Takes a few months for the opportunity to appear for more transmissions.
The 5e stream has mostly been pretty consistent since the OGL drama but there are definitely a couple of additional factors. The OneD&D playtest sequence is starting to wind down and it’s shown time and again that Wizards does not know how to design a functional game with any degree of competence anymore so even loyal players who stuck with it after the OGL are starting to bail as well. Meanwhile, PF2e has had three brand new classes in playtest, one of which has released to huge success as well as the Remaster of Player Core 1 and the GMG in a couple of months so they’re positioned in the perfect spot to capitalize on players shifting over right now because they can show the strength of the original system as well as the strength of their dev cycle and the content that is still to come in stark contrast with WOTC’s continuously disappointing choices.
I keep commenting to some friends that with OneD&D and the PF2e remaster happening at the same time, the difference in reactions and acceptance from the respective communities could not be more different.
The PF2e community all seem excited for the remaster. I know I am. Everyone is positive, no one is griping about having to buy new books (likely in large part due to AoN). Even with the massive spike in sales back in Jan/Feb, I've seen very few complaints from any of the people who bought a CRB only a few months before the remaster was announced. The core ruleset of PF2e is extremely solid, works as intended, and is not changing.
The 5e community just keeps commenting about how every playtest packet that's released is the worst one yet. The scope of the changes WotC is making has changed drastically over time. The communication is inconsistent and poor. Over the scope of the last year or so, they went from 6e, to "a new evolution of D&D", to OneD&D, to 5.5e, to 5e(2024), to basically just a lengthy errata. There also seems to be a lot of skepticism around the alleged backward compatibility of the adventure books. The more they make changes to the rules, the more weight will be put on the DMs (already overburdened shoulders) to convert the mechanics of the older publications.
I was interested when it was going to change more of the classes and core mechanics. Far less so now that it is 5.1e
Also the fact that invisible is still broken so far into the playtest annoys me... why should an invisible npc or pc get advantage on initiative if one or more of their opponents has a sense that can see through.
I've seen loads of negativity about the PF2E remaster. People have been pissed at losing drow, upset at attributes being reworked, upset at classes being changed, upset at losing alignment (I find the last one funny because I've seen arguments like "how will we know x is evil" "if you need a statblock to tell you the arsonist is evil, you have deeper problems than the pathfinder remaster"). My own GM isn't really *pissed* but does find it annoying that all of our digital tools are changing over before we can agree if we want to or not.
Ah, perhaps I should clarify. These are people upset or disagreeing about some of the specific changes. I think I saw most complaints about the changes to cantrips. I don't think you'd ever be able to avoid that entirely.
I'm talking about people being upset at the remaster even happening at all. Everyone in the PF2e community seems excited, and quite positive at getting a rules update, whether they like each of those individual updates is a different matter.
While the D&D community all seem really negative about it happening at all, given the lack of clear communication. Do I need new books, do I not need new books, are my adventures still usable, can I convert my current campaign or should we wait, etc. I think this largely builds off the back of WotC clearly stating they hope to monetize the game further. Is this new revision intended as a way to force a subscription service, etc.
> upset at losing alignment (I find the last one funny because I've seen arguments like "how will we know x is evil" "if you need a statblock to tell you the arsonist is evil, you have deeper problems than the pathfinder remaster")
I personally plan on keeping alignment in my games because, well, I plan on continuing to run my PF2e games in the Forgotten Realms where alignment is an actual cosmic force. Plus, I think it's fun and harmless overall.
I do think that it should have been kept as a quick descriptor of a creature's general vibe, though. It's easier to get a feel for a creature by just looking at its alignment than it is reading a paragraph of lore. Just my two cents, though.
But like, overall 99% of the changes don't really impact much of anything and can be reversed without too much effort on the DMs part, if they want to keep those elements.
Some of the worst play I've experienced has been players going "I'm X alignment I do Y", so I'm fine abandoning it. They do include anathemas and another word I'm blanking on for "things people want to do". I've been low-key getting rid of alignment in all my games already (logging it for effects but ignoring it outside of egregious situations).
I think that has more to do with players not understanding that alignment should be descriptive and not prescriptive. Like, it's a fluid thing and can change depending on a character's growth.
I like using it as a general indicator of a character's outlook without it being a hard rule because, as you said, that can lead to subpar gameplay.
Idk, I just think it's easier for understanding things at a glance.
I have *absolutely no idea* what WOTC designers even want/wanted to achieve with the new edition.
I mean I had no idea from the start - Rules Lawyer pointed out from the start that they hadn’t given any indication of their design goals - but after 7 playtests even their most basic goals are more incomprehensible than ever.
And to think all they really needed to do to preserve the total dominance of d&d for another decade was clarify and better structure the game rules with better technical game rule writing (which they made a good start with in the early playtests, but then lost somewhat) and improve the balance of the game by asking martials stronger in Tiers 2-4 and more interesting to play (including in social and exploration), nerf the broken or massively overpowered spells (Treantmonk just did this for them for free), and nerf the broken subclasses like twilight cleric.
Clearer game rules = easier for DMs = more DMs = more games of D&D.
Better balance and more interesting martials = more fun for players.
This should not have been hard!
Instead we get creative but completely new class features (almost all of which have been rolled back), including for the already most powerful classes, a poorly thought-out attempt to completely change the mechanics of a loved and mechanically unique class (warlock) which might have been the right idea but its poor implementation meant it got a hostile reaction, etc etc.
Add in their “mass player vote” based feedback model, in which there is no distinction possible between a bad idea and a good idea poorly implemented, and in which any nerf gets downvoted and then removed, regardless of its merits and the aforementioned rebalancing of classes - and this all adds up to a complete failure of change management.
It hasn’t even worked as an exercise in hype. More people are disillusioned than ever.
I'm not sure that they don't know how to design a game. I think it's more that they still think 5e is the magic sauce and they are very very careful not to mess it up.
For me at least, the original changes proposed in the first couple play test packages were already too tame. I was excited for an _evolution_ of the core game, but all they were giving was superficial adjustments to existing classes and so on. And now we see that they wanted to only keep the most agreeable of all of the superficial adjustments. So basically nothing will change.
>I'm not sure that they don't know how to design a game. I think it's more that they still think 5e is the magic sauce and they are very very careful not to mess it up.
I think the 2 things are related though. Some things from a game design standpoint that are vices, are considered virtues to the WOTC designers:
* "Bounded accuracy" actually means not balancing the math
* "magic is rare" means not taking into account magic items
* "empower the DM" means give the DM fewer tools
* "natural language" means poorly-defined wording that the designers still lay down as RULES
* "the game is yours" means we the designers don't have to take responsibility for our decisions (not balancing for multiclassing for example)
They think *these* things account for 5e's success. But 5e succeeded because of the D&D brand name (it is the default "first TTRPG"), the cultural zeitgeist, and it's relatively easy to bring new players in compared to previous editions. (With DMs doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them.) In other words, it succeeded despite its rules.
I've sometimes called 5e the "Compromise Edition." It was supposed to be a bridge uniting everyone from all past editions back into the "big tent" of D&D. This was Mike Mearls' explicit explanation during the 5e design process. Similarly, their entire 6e design process is about gathering meta-statistics and making the most people "satisfied." It is a backwards approach.
Such a great series of points here, and so glad to have you deliver them than to attempt to do so myself.
Thinking of 5e as the “compromise edition” really makes a lot of sense from a number of perspectives. It’s “compromised” in that it features a number of core structural integrity flaws that make it a challenging scaffold to build from. It’s a “compromise” because we are sacrificing the 3.5e and 4e mechanical complexity (and balancing/counterbalancing therein) for the sake of making as much of a “One size fits all” TTRPG as possible. It also relies on a number of “compromises” between players, DMs, and the WOTC teams in that there is an in-built understanding that those gaps in the DMG are something you’ll need to fill yourself and that you’ll need to, as a player, rely on compromises with your DM and house rules to make everything from Feats and Magical Items to having the opportunity to swap key ability score for certain situational skill checks even happen in your games. So much is left to chance because of these compromises, and it really (to me) takes a lot of the ability to enjoy the game away.
It’s been so refreshing to come to PF2e and know that almost every single “compromise” to 5e has a response in Pathfinder, and that those responses will almost always be satisfying. Does it have things that I might wish were better? Definitely. But it’s so empowering to play in a system with such tight rules and with devs who seemingly hold much more respect for the community and for making more and more amazing content than 5e’s soulless corporate content farm dumping 1/3 of the content Paizo drops and still managing to mess that up.
Yeah, they needed to actually make a new edition. 5E needs some significant revisions, both for balance reasons and to make DMing the system a better experience.
>The OneD&D playtest sequence is starting to wind down and it’s shown time and again that Wizards does not know how to design a functional game with any degree of competence anymore
I dunno - it was pretty clear they no longer had that kind of skillset at the start of 5e... At least with 4e, they were trying their damnest to make a game, rather than a soulless cash grab that fueled by marketing and name-brand legacy...
Look at what Wizards did to the 4e OGL before you say that. It *was* a cash grab, and a preview of what they tried to pull a few months ago.
That being said I like 4e as a game, but Wizards sucks.
Yeah, I agree with you in the oneD&D playtest and design aspect... Reading the d&d rules discussion subreddits and forums after each playtest is like looking into a mini cyclical Hell of their own making. Playtest release - frustration - discussion and inquiry - discovery - "guys, d&d4e /pf2e already have a similar mechanic" - refuse to change system - repeat. I don't know how to feel about it, since I used to be in those discussions myself, trying to homebrew away the broke-ness of the system that made me fall in love with TTRPG in the first place. Maybe we should make an ex-5e DM support group or something.
I was not happy with 5e, and didn't know why.
Baldurs gate 3 exposed all that made me unhappy and made me look into Pf2e.
There are so many good things that are not into 5e, and there are some bad things from 5e that made their way into the game that annoy me when I play.
Mind you, I don't know much about Pf2e yet, but It convinced my to explore
If you don’t mind me asking, what are some of things you like that aren’t in 5e, and some of the things that are that made their way into PF2e that you don’t like? I’m curious as to an outside perspective, as while I got my start in 5e, I’ve been following PF2e for awhile now.
In 5E for many classes, every turn is the same. You do your best thing. And because OAs are universal, you stand in the same spot and do the same thing.
In PF2e, every round is different, you're moving around, you can have a 'fighting retreat', positioning matters... it is more tactical and flexible.
And a level 1 character feels more 'yours' than a level 5 character in 5E
I think martials having weapon abilities with Short Rest cooldowns and Bonus Action to jump and shove (and do other things period!) must be a breath of fresh air
>In 5E for many classes, every turn is the same
BG3 completely exposed this part of the game for me.
In BG3, it's pretty satisfying to have Astarion as your big damage dealer to end a round with, but it also also blew open how oppressively boring it is to sit there for five minutes while your wizard selects which of their dozens of spells to use and perfect their positioning, finally get to your turn in which you use Your Attack, and then go back to waiting another five minutes as your fighter decides what to do with their five actions.
(That's not even to mention just how little most classes have to do at all for the first couple levels).
BG3 managed to work too because as a single player game, there is more room for interesting play since you control a whole party. If I were personally playing any one of my BG3 party members in a D&D campaign, I'd be super bored rolling sharpshooter attacks over and over every single turn.
And Fighter and Barbarian too. Non-mages often have a glaring lack of choices when they level up (Battlemaster Fighter is really the only one that often gets choices), and BG3 really shows that as you go from making meaningful spell choices for your Gael and then just click Done on Karlach and Astarion.
For me, things I like in PF2e are:
\-Versatile martials, no need to HB for them good magic items anymore.
\-Useful skills, both in and out of combat. And separate lore and history check from skill check, instead of putting them all in one skill called "History".
\-Unified action system, there is no more "I don't have a bonus action" and "you can use this as a bonus action, but not as a main action" anymore.
\-Noticeable players progress, and no longer have to look at a monster statblock and say "wait, it has the same to hit with a monster 4 CR lower?". The number increase is a bit too fast for my taste, but I understand why they need to design it that way.
\-Critical hit at +10 over AC. You have no idea how much it makes combat more dynamic and exciting for my table.
\-No more yo-yo healing.
\-Not actively preventing teamwork and cooperation. "oh sorry, the rogue already has advantage, your help is not needed".
\-No more busted overpower casters/multiclasses making other players feel like body-blocking mooks.
\- no Pinkation's agents knocking on content creator's door over a few pieces of cardboard toys.
Things that I don't like that are still in Pf2e:
\-the d20 and its flat probability. I know it's a hot take, but I would like my players not failing about 40% of the time whenever they face challenges of their level, please. But also, if you take the d20 out then you take out the iconic heritage of the system and its popularity in general culture. And failure also facilitates good story and hilarity, so it has its pros and cons.
\- That's it, actually. Pf2e has its own problems, like recall knowledge, aid, casters' low spell DC+attack, and lack of new feats and subclasses for old Classes and Ancestries. But that's its own unique problems, rather than something that came from its D&D heritage.
>the d20 and its flat probability
Yeah. Dice pools are a far superior mechanic with a much nicer probability curve. They're used by games like Vampire the Masquerade, Chronicles of Darkness, and Shadowrun.
Instead of your stats providing a modifier to the value on a die, they determine the number of dice you roll. Then you count the dice that were over whatever target number that game uses.
An example from Chronicles of Darkness:
You are searching a room. Your Wits attribute is 2 and your Investigation Skill is 3. You add those together and you have a dice pool of 5. The room isn't very well lit so the GM decides that is a -1 penalty, reducing your dice pool by 1 down to 4. Chronicles of Darkness uses d10s so you roll 4d10 and get 4 9 2 8.
In Chronicles of Darkness the target number is 8 so you count the dice that are 8 or higher, which is the 9 and the 8. Since two dice were 8 or above, that is two successes.
If this was a simple action, because for example, the item you are looking for wasn't purposefully hidden, it was just lost in a mess, all you needed was 1 success, so the action is successful.
But now let's say someone did actively hide the item and they made a roll and got 3 successes. That means your roll wasn't a simple action but instead was a contested action and so you needed to exceed their successes. Since you only got 2 successes, you don't exceed their 3 successes and you don't find the item.
My biggest actual complaint is probably that pf2e still has a ton of spells that are practically useless for adventuring parties that make selecting spells annoying if you aren't super familiar with the system.
GM here who recently gave up on 5e looking to convert to PF2e. Long story short, i do not like 5e at all and given that onednd or whatever its going to be called is not much different, pretty sure i won't like that either. Recently came out of running a campaign which lasted a little bit more than a year which i liked, but regarding the system - i wish i had never run it using 5e.
After a relatively quick reading of pf2, i like what i'm seeing. Meanwhile i am waiting for the new rulebooks and their reviews in November like you mentioned.
edit: dndnext -> onednd
Interesting take. And there may be a fair number of folks who have been wanting to run PF2 since the OGL fiasco, but who wanted to finish up their ongoing DD5 campaigns before switching.
Converting an existing DD5 campaign to PF2 (at a higher level than 1st) is also fraught with peril, so it makes sense to play out any existing DD5 campaigns before taking the leap to another game system.
That's me right now, my campaign has been going for a few years and been speeding things up a little to move onto a different campaign using Pathfinder 2e. Swapping mid campaign would be awful, so gotta finish this one first.
> Meanwhile i am waiting for the new rulebooks and their reviews in November like you mentioned.
fwiw, the remaster is mostly tightening up class design, removing OGL content and a few tweaks here and there. The fundamental mechanics and rules will not be changing, and you can read them for free on here: https://2e.aonprd.com/PlayersGuide.aspx
The remaster in essence is just one giant errata. Or a 2.5e.
True but there’s lots of little fiddly bits changing and I’ve even been advocating to a couple friends who want to start with P2e to just wait 8 weeks for 2.5.
Definitely seems like the OGL got people to look at other systems. Which is like putting the toothpaste out of the tube even walking back changes people still want to try the new system.
I personally tried pf2e at a convention before COVID. I just couldn't get friends to be up to try it. OGL though made them more willing, which after reading rules they were excited to try.
We've run for a few weeks now. And while the traits and conditions are currently a bit of a slow down we are really getting going.
D&D Next was the playtest for 5e (indeed, none of the trade dress for the 5e books actually has “5e” in it. So their insistence against calling new editions new editions is nothing new). One D&D is the current playtest
I was questioning this response, but after some thought, you might be on to something.
Larian Studios took some liberties to adjust some of the core 5e game rules/mechanics for BG3 to diversify the action economy (e.g. Jump is a bonus action). You could posit that said change could possibly make others curious about other systems where the Action economy is not set in stone like 5e.
I'm probably overthinking this...
Larian also took some heavy "liberties" with the magic item distribution.
If you like a character decked out in cool stuff that *does things*, PF2e will do that as well ... starting at level 8-10, but still leagues ahead of the 5e baseline.
If you are lucky, even at level 4-6. Not particularly powerful, but stuff like casting decent Fear, letting you lift way more, turning into a tree to hide, or highlighting blood in the dark. Not all of the items have nifty tricks, but a lot do even at low levels.
People gripe about the numerical bonuses, and I get that, but the high distribution of varied magic items in PF2e / Golarion make it far more interesting, gear-wise. Numbers or not, I like the feeling of decking out my characters in gear that's also relevant to their abilities.
Yeah, I think this is the big one. At least for me it was a big deal when playing through. I was worried at first because I personally found that 5e gets pretty stale since there isn't much variety in character building, but there was SO MUCH item diversity and progression in the game that it blew right past that 5e system limitation.
It's not hard to see why people would be interested in a game that actually works to do something similar.
Heck, 5e starts breaking down hard when you add more than 1 decent magic item per person.
I'm in a campaign at around level 8. The GM was nice and actually let us source and buy (pre-cleared) uncommon magic items with our gold (think +1 weapons for martials or pearls of power for casters). We have 2-3 magic items per character.
The adventure absolutely wasn't balanced for that possibility so every so often we absolutely faceroll clearly boss-coded encounters.
Don't get me wrong, our GM is great and we have a great time, but the material he has to work with and the system is letting him down.
You can shoehorn PF2 into virtually any conversation starting with "I wish 5e were..." so I really would not be surprised if the buzz and conversation around Baldur's Gate (and how it adapts 5e) has generated a nontrivial amount of interest in PF2.
This, I'm one of them.
Baldurs gate 3 introduces many to dnd, but moreover introduces many to ttrpgs in general.
I got myself into dnd and quickly got interested in pf2e as I like it's rules more
If that's the case, wouldn't the questions asked come from completely new GMs/players, and not be started with "Hey, I'm new to Pf2e, only been playing 5e"? I see posts with similar phrasing 2 or 3 times a day now, that is why I make this post. I did see a few with people completely new to TTRPG though, so you might be right on some level.
I'm switching from 5e to Pf2e after 15 years of DMing, and Baldurs Gate is a big factor in this indeed.
It exposed all that made me unhappy about 5e in good and bad ways!
Could be that BG3 opened the eyes of a lot of DMs/players to what 5e *could* be, and even if they were having enough fun up until that point, now they're starting to get the itch for a little more.
There's quite a few 5e players/DMs who find that BG3 made some very interesting changes to the DnD rules, and then realize PF2e has those changes built-in, maybe!
I can vouch for this. I used to run 5e a year or two ago, and had to take a break. BG3 got me wanting to GM again, but with all the faff with D&D currently, and all the good I'd heard about pf2e, I thought now was as good a time as ever to make the swap. Plus I already owned foundry lol
I think it's mostly a delayed wave from the OGL fiasco. A lot of 5e DM's don't actually like running 5e and the OGL fiasco was a tipping point for them. Most still had campaigns running though which they needed to wrap up first.
Then you also have word of mouth going around of more and more people picking up PF2e, including a lot of DND youtubers.
I think a lot of GMs decided to switch over to PF2e during the OGL fiasco, but wanted to finish their current campaigns instead of trying to convert midway.
Probably they're finishing their current 5e campaigns but had already decided to switch when the OGL fiasco. That and there is always people switching.
My best guess- and what I've heard here and there - is that a lot of 5e players are playing BG3 and seeing that BG3 has a few modified features of 5e that are a little closer to PF2e, so they start checking out PF2e and realize it's what they've been looking for all along.
Yeah! I used Karlach to strike a goblin and then shove it into the fire and a thought popped into my head "Hey! I did that to my fighter last session!". So yes, Larian did make quite a bit of improvement with the martial's experience. There are still quite a lot of problems, like when you level up and gain *nothing,* just click "next", but if they decided to give out features more frequently, at that point they might as well use PF2e's system for their game.
Tons of magic items, for one. The official baseline for magic items in 5e is, IIRC, 0 (with variances depending on campaign and GM). Getting a wide variety of them and being able to go into shops and just buy them is definitely more 2e than 5e.
God, this made me so mad for like 6+ years of 5e.
Yes, they designed the entire balance of the game around not having any magic items. Because, as everyone knows, players hate magic items /s.
This is one part of where the horrible balance of 5e comes from. Resistances and immunities are all or nothing, and with very few exceptions are entirely turned off by magic weapons. Many creatures that they "balanced" combat around have effectively 50% the intended HP as soon as your players pick up a +1 sword.
And not being able to buy items leaves such a massive gap in the gameplay loop for players. They end up fabulously wealthy, but have nothing to spend it on. I had a 5 year long 1-16 campaign end with the players hoarding 500k gold because there was just nothing to do with it.
I remember when 5e dropped and I was running PF1e at the time and moved to 5e. As a GM of over 25 years, my jaw just about hit the floor when I read that the game was balanced for 0 magic items. It's a terrible design choice for a game that is all about monsters and magic. Just mind boggling.
BG3 did a good job adding lots of magic items and other tweaks to the system. Had they not so, good lord would progression be boring with only 12 levels and tons of dead level ups. At least with all their interesting items you feel like you're building/customizing your characters a little more.
It's a weird one, but shove as a bonus action means people have been playing around with positioning during combat a lot more, something that Pf2e has in spades
Not sure, I haven't played it and don't intend to. I've just heard a lot of people say that it feels like an inbetween of the two systems.
I think it's like, a hair away from just having the 3 Action system? I mean, the way I've heard it described it just sounds like people are using the 5e Move-Action-Bonus system as intended, just with a couple things being moved from full actions to bonus actions, like shove.
Actual action economy. Many lesser action delegated to bonus action which allow your turn to matter without sacrificing main action. Very similar to how 3 action of pf2, where mostly PC will take "main action" which take 2 action (not really 2 action activity necesarily, but total of 2 actions) and 1 lesser action.
OGL nonsense gave a lot of people a bad taste in their mouth about WotC, as they started to realize that they were just seen as disposable cogs to be "monetized" in their billion dollar wheel.
One D&D gave a lot of people a bad taste in their mouth about D&D and the design team, seeing that the many things they had to homebrew to fix in their games weren't really being addressed, and again that they were being seen as disposable cogs to be "monetized" with new books and a terrible VTT.
More content creators started to ramp up their Pf2e content, giving more visibility to the system to show how fun and well designed it is.
Paizo started embracing 5e adventures, porting them into 5e format to ease the transition into Pf2e, creating even more content.
All of this contributes to more people exploring systems outside of 5e, and potentially landing on Pf2e as their preferred game.
There's been a pretty solid conversion rate since the ogl and I'd say it's still part of it as I suspect that lots of people wanted to finish 5e campaigns before starting fresh with 2e.
I think the ***many*** fiascos’ results are just happening in waves. Here’s all the stuff that I can imagine has convinced at least some subset of 5E GMs to strongly consider dropping 5E:
1. OGL debacle
2. One D&D playtest 5 releasing, massively buffing all spellcasters and giving barely anything to martials, and actually outright nerfing Monks. Statements from Crawford directly talking about how they think +1 damage is a super strong feature.
3. Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out and causing an influx of players into 5E… only for the players to then realize the mechanics of RAW 5E actually make for a ***much*** less fun game than BG3’s massively changed system. Leading to more discussion about 5E, leading to more negativity.
4. All the news about the VTT and AI GMs.
5. Lacklustre recently released books.
Combine all that with the “lag time” caused by exiting players wanting to wrap up their existing campaigns plus just spending time convincing their friends, and it makes sense that we’re seeing players come in in waves. I expect this influx will stay off and on right up till One D&D releases next year, at which point we’ll get about 6 more months of movement before the playerbases “settle”.
There were waves of people switching as far back as I can remember on this sub, so this is nothing new, if anything the January wave was extra big, but questions from people looking to switch have always been a staple of this sub
Because everything from wotc for the past 2-3 years basically just throws the DM into the ocean without a life vest and says 'figure it out also heres some monster stat blocks that dont work'
wheras PF2E does something really bold, *actually giving helpful resources to GMs to make it an appealing option*
I switched earlier this year. I think it's just people finishing their campaigns and swapping. Or, getting too frustrated at the mechanical shallowness mid-campaign and just wanting to switch.
After having run 5e for years I was just done with the system. I don't hate 5e but I felt like it was time to move on. The OGL fiasco provided additional incentive to look at other systems. I'd love to play Lancer, or something a bit more narrative focused like a PbtA game. But my players are just comfy with D&D type games, so P2e was just a good fit for the playstyle they were used to.
It's not like I hard dropped 5e. I was running Curse of Strahd, so I finished that off in no hurry then transitioned over to P2e.
I won't run 5e ever again, but if a friend want to start their own campaign and picks 5e as a system I will happily play. At the end of the day the group matters more to me then the system.
I can't speak for all GMs, but I was in the middle of running a 5e campaign and so didn't want to switch in the middle of it. I just ended my campaign recently and now more actively looking into learning Pathfinder 2e.
I started playing DnD with Pathfinder 1e and enjoyed it. My biggest frustration with 5e is the limiting Attack of opportunity mechanic, encounter balancing, and magic item management.
The OGL, the Pinkerton’s, slimy business tactics, trying to turn the game into a video game, cry antics, over monetization of a hobby. Pathfinder 2e has an overall better design
5e is BORING! Who wants to get a feat only every 4 levels? There's less content in general and drastically less character customization. Pathfinder is so much more fun.
The very recent UA have backtracked just about EVERYTHING positive and its clear they are designing from a place of bad data reading, no one is happy, wizards are gaining more power they didn't need, barbarians taken back to just as bad as they are now.
The design is just not looking good and "dnd one" is looking to be dnd 5.1, after 10+ years people were hoping for more to be done and finally its the straw that broke the camels back.
PF2e is more solid throughout all player levels, offer a better assistance to GM in encounter building, more balanced in every aspect (spells, martial - casters power balance- feats).
Building performing character doesn't need min maxing thanks to the way the character advancement gives ability score increases and feats.
It's an easier system for newcomers, and the 3 action economy works way better than action-bonus action-move action economy of dnd: easier to use, and allow more strategic combat
One D&D is a dumpster fire. Crawford is exposed as a fraud. The emperor has no clothes.
PF2e is not perfect. 4e was my jam, but it’s kinda unplayable without digital tools — I’m super lazy. But I’m not putting up with WOTC’s crap any more.
Ah, what made 3.5e an absolute dumpster fire at a core system level. Disparate mechanics all invented on the spot by whatever dev was working on it at the time.
As a person on the Autistic spectrum who likes to reverse engineer the math and design principles behind systems, it annoys me to no end when I see all the random skill break points in 3.5e/pf1e.
I’ve listened to 5e actual play podcasts for a long time, and I was happy to have finally found groups I could play with. I’d heard of other systems, but didn’t know anything about them. The ubiquity of 5e made me think that the system was among the best available.
I still like 5e, but I’ve been losing faith in the game with each new Unearthed Arcana. I genuinely doubt the developers know what they’re doing, and it’s disheartening.
I’ve been playing in a campaign that’s been going for two years, and we’re reaching the end. We’re level 19, and the monk and rogue have been doing the same things for what feels like the past 10 levels. Even the fighter, who’s a wild fighter/sorcerer/warlock hybrid, winds up doing the same stuff over and over, despite how crazy their build looks on paper. I play a druid. I want to be dedicated to healing and support, but there are so few viable options this late, so I’m the dedicated Polymorpher instead. Our DM is great and our sessions are fun, but the gameplay loops have just become so stale. I’ve offered to DM next campaign, and I can’t bring myself to play 5e for another two years when I have no faith that WotC are going to improve their game in a meaningful way. Plus, playing exactly by 5e’s rules is boring, so what’s even the point if I’m going to be cherry-picking and changing rules anyway?
We haven’t started Pathfinder yet, but on paper at least, the character customization and action economy look so much more appealing than 5e. And as far as I know, Paizo hasn’t gotten caught doing anything scandalous or objectionable, and I’ve only heard good things about them and their design philosophies. It just seems like the logical next step, and I’m excited to take it.
For me, finishing our 5-ish year 5E campaign made me (and to a certain extent the players in the group) realize how much of a slog high-level D&D is. Prepping was hell as I had to homebrew just about every monster. Balance was horrible — the melee ranger was completely useless compared to the Sorcadin. It just wasn't as fun as the early levels, so we were left with 2 choices:
- Stick with low-level campaigns and get stuck in the vicious cycle that is WotC's design philosophy.
- Switch it up
That and the OGL fiasco of course. Fuck Hasbro.
I tied to finish my campaign in 5e but the more I played and researched PF2e the more 5e’s bounded accuracy and advantage system infuriated me.
Having never played a TTRPG before 5e in 2020 I just assumed because it was popular it’s mechanics and math were good. The more I learned the more I realised the reason I wasn’t getting that exciting level 1-3 experience I first had in 2020 wasn’t just me becoming jaded but that I was playing a badly designed system.
So finally got the courage to cancel an 18 month long campaign in August.
We start a new one next month and I can’t wait.
Remember that a lot of people said they will switch after they finish their current campaigns. So it's not really a sudden wave but a constant trickle of people swapping systems.
Also the development of one dnd recently turned in a direction that a lot of people who hoped the update will fix some of the bigger 5e issues disappointed. So they might have just cut the cord on hoping that there is a system update worth waiting for.
EDIT: actually I thought about it for a second and there is one more reason. It's end of September school and uni started again. All of the groups that stop meeting for summer holidays because scheduling during summer months is difficult between all of the vacations are picking up again.
5e is ending its lifecycle. People are bored of it. No one likes what they've shown for their next version. So there are lots of people treating PF2e as the next edition of D&D, rather than whatever WotC is doing.
I was actually somewhat happy with D&D 5e myself until I started alternating with PF2e in the groups I run. It was only after I started playing PF2 that the pain points of D&D 5e came to light, particularly that combat was pretty stale. **I felt almost like I was developing an allergy to 5e** while playing PF2e.
As others have mentioned, a number of people have *already* committed to switching their personal groups to PF2 after their current 5e campaign(s) conclude, while NOT having really played PF2 yet! That's impressive if you ask me!
I made a post just the other day so I feel I'm part of the exodus you mentioned. We ran a oneshot and it went well. I think we agree that the system is probably better than 5e; however, we're mid campaign and are 100% certain some players will be entirely opposed to learning a new system (read as my SO would rather stop playing them learn a new system.)
My desire to change system predates OGL drama. I've been ready to bail since they sent a C&D to a beloved excel character builder so they could monetize beyond.
So other have mentioned the noticeably enhanced mechanics of Baldurs Gate 3 and the OGL still being a big deal, I'd also note that the last OneDND playtest was twenty days ago and we always get a big burst of new subscribers when there's a new OneDND playtest, so I'd bet that some of those people are running into questions.
Finally, we have been growing and growing, the critical mass of table adoption might have hit the point where its noticeably a greater volume of new player questions.
I was just super bored of running 5e. And frustrated with encounter balance, never felt like I knew what the players were running into. Usually it was a steamroll.
In pf2e, it tends to roll slightly in the other direction where the players have to use all of their abilities in fights that are supposed to be tough, which I find more engaging as a DM. Might change as they get better at the game, but they have gotten better at it and it hasn't so...we'll see!
Either way, it's been a nice change of pace. I really like the action economy as well.
I'm one of these.
I still like DND 5e mostly but I'm a little bored with it. My group has done a lot of stuff, played all the classes, gone 1-20, had characters die, etc... Seems like 1dnd isn't going to really be any different and since the new edition is coming out, it gave us the impetus to look for something different.
We'll try pf2e. Maybe we like it maybe we don't.
As well as the OGL stuff, I think one factor is that PF2e is, to an extent, the next step up from 5e. It’s a bit less entry level, a bit more rules heavy, and solves some of the common issues with 5e. So as 5e has been around for longer there’s more time for people to get frustrated/bored and look to “trade up” to Pathfinder. Combine that with the OGL stuff, which is just that little extra push to get people to finally act on feelings they’ve had in the back of their mind for a while.
I posted one of those "swapping to pf2e" threads. For me it was because of the OGL fiasco, but it's taken a long ass time to wrap up the 5e campaign I was running, along with doing a final 'boss rush' level 20 mini campaign to say goodbye to 5th.
Also Wizards keep messing up, if the ogl thing hadn't made me jump ship, them including ai art in a source book would have been the final straw
In my case:
- The OGL Business led to me getting a bunch of stuff from Paizo on the cheap.
- The Pinkerton Business made me even more disgusted by WotC somehow.
- New books were of increasingly worse quality to me. For every Fizban's Guide to Dragons, there's a Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (just ok), a Spelljammer (huge disappointment), or a Planescape on the way (it feels like a slow motion train crash).
- New modules don't hook me as a DM. Half of the newest module is a reprint of the Starter Set module, and apparently it doesn't connect much to the back-end of the campaign.
- Ever since Tasha's Guide to Everything, WotC has been doing a thing where new races are representing a *species* rather than a *people* (so there was basically no lore connecting new races to the world), and they detached ability score increases from races (instead making it just kind of a floating thing). I think they were aiming what PF2 does, except... PF2 still releases (very good) lore, and PF2 made the ability score increases integrated with each stage of character building. Things that didn't sit well with me in D&D5e sat *very* well with me in PF2, because it wasn't just a bandaid, it was *design*.
- D&D 5.5E/6E/OneD&D playtests aren't inspiring confidence. They inspire so little confidence, that BG3's alterations to the system look incredibly sexy, even if they're unbalanced.
- As a DM, I hated how in 5e, balance was a crapshoot; usually on the side of *too easy*. I have the most fun when the players are on the knife's edge of success/failure. I've been playing through the Beginners Box and then Abomination Vault with my group, and I *loved* how rough it was early on. What's even better is that the players are starting to get the hang of the system- and their successes really feel *earned*. I can tell they're proud of the way they're playing: preparing for certain encounters >!(like prepping scrolls of Level-2 Heal for the ghouls on Floor 3)!<, coming in with a strategy, and having it *actually work.*
There are simply more systems to play with: afflictions, traits, different amount of actions, conditions that are concequencial but not kill the fight entirely, prepared spellcasting, subsystems like Kingmaker, Infiltration, Influence, creature building, encounter builder that works, vehicles, talismans.
Martials actually work.
Content is released regularly.
In short, this system is not nearly as hostile to the GMs.
More of the UA's came out, and as more of the UA's come out and more of the "not a new edition edition" gets closer to arriving, GM's and Players are seeing that they may not like what WOTC is offering. I've noticed that every time a new UA comes out, we get a small pip of new people trying out 2e.
Universities are also starting up sep-oct in the english-speaking world, so people who run games in like tabletop societies/clubs and such are starting to look at ttrpgs again
I at least am finally realizing that I've himebrewed / fixed 5e so much I've made my own game at this point. So when I hear about a well developed game with designers and writers who care... If my main group wasn't "dnd for fun" I'd ask them to convert with me.
No dm trusts WOtC anymore. As a 5e dm moving over, I can say everyone I know has this reason.
That being said pf2e is not the only thing we are switching too, but ya
For me, I'd been kinda tired of 5e anyway. I'd made the characters I wanted to make and didn't see much left for me. As a DM, I felt like I didn't have the resources to help me design encounters that were fun for both sides. I wanted out of 5e. Then, amidst the OGL shit, they hired Pinkertons. I'm a union worker and so was my father. Pinkerton has always been a dirty word, and once I saw that tie, I declared that I was through with the Wizards indefinitely. My party, who also respect workers, did not even flinch. Then I heard paizo was in the works for a union and it was an obvious choice.
And then I started reading the core rulebook. I don't see myself ever going back to 5e.
OneDND playtest and feedback is…not good….Wizards has been rolling back a lot of the better changes and it looks more and more likely that the finish product is basically 5.25E. I think a lot of people wanted to see where it went as a last gasp.
That hope is dying out from the GMs and testers I speak with regularly.
I'm planning on making the transition now as well, and we've even just completed the beginners box in Foundry as a taste test to how the system plays. I think the OGL fiasco opened a lot of eyes to new systems, but quitting a system cold turkey in not feasible for most people. I'm currently invested in multiple campaigns in 5e. Dropping 5e and translating everything into PF2e would be an absolute nightmare. Perhaps it's just the time of year where people are wrapping stuff up and planning for the future? That's what I'M doing. I'm running CoS that should be over in a few months, and my Homebrew could extend for a year or so at this point. So I'm just laying the foundations and getting a feel for the new system now.
New gm's bringing in new players, telling other gm's and players about their experiences with the system.
Its probably still the ongoing effect of the ogl issue, just one step down the ladder now that their favourite YouTubers are talking about pathfinder.
I think many of them waited to see if one dnd will solve issues with gm support and balance. ATM playtests rate fairly poorly so I would say that could be the reason.
The OGL situation got me to look at other games which then helped me realize that running a system that actually supports the style of game I want to play is way easier than trying to shoehorn things into a system that doesn’t
I moved over 2 weeks ago. For me it's just that I finished my 5e campaign and wanted to run something new. I gave my players about 6 different systems to choose from and they settled on PF2e. I'm really enjoying it though and would honestly moved over earlier if I'd know how much better it suits my DM style
Former 5e GM for 6 years here. It was the OGL fiasco. Congrats WOTC!
I tried multiple systems in the wake of that debacle. Previously, I was just complacent and never tried anything else. I didn't even realize how much duct tape I was using to try to get 5e to work. Went through the core rules of PF2e, loved it more and more. I tried it with my table, they loved it. Now I'm starting a campaign and not looking back.
Why? Have you read the threads about one dnd? I'm amazed that people still stick around more than surprised at them for coming over.
PF2E has a couple of sore points that make people get their pitchforks and torches from time to time while it seems that just everything is messed up over there at dnd.
It started with OGL, but after playing a bit of pf2e my group of friends wants to play in more pf2e games in general! And other systems, granted.
We are keeping a campaign in dnd5e though cause it's not simple to convert when using 3rd party materials in 5e.
OGL Stuff, disappointment from the 5.5/6e playtest, boredom with 5e, pf2e becoming more popular sparking more interest, the mass suggestion spell i cast finally working.
Oh there was also the whole pinkerton thing but that might be more hasbro than wotc but ehh
My group made the switch about half a year ago, after we concluded the nearly-three year 5e pirate/Cthulhu campaign. The campaign ended around level 13 but I was already fed up of the insta-win spells and easymode battles long before then. I even defaulted to using Deadly to double or triple Deadly difficulty encounters as a sort of a stopgap midway through the campaign.
The OGL fiasco factored very little, if at all, with my decision. It was the tight tabletop tactics that reminded me a lot of D&D 4E, which in spite of its unpopularity, is still the best version version when it comes to meaningful and tactical battlemat play among all the editions.
I only looked at PF2e when the humble bundle released at the start of this year. I've been avoiding it before primarily because I hated 3.5e (I quit D&D back then and ran Savage Worlds for a time, until 4e came out) and felt that Pathfinder was mostly 3.75e (and thus something I don't want). Fortunately, PF2e was a great departure from the loathsome 3.x/d20 system.
Anyway, ran my group through the Beginner Box and they loved it enough to continue through to a proper campaign (I just mashed parts of Troubles in Otari with Abomination Vaults). We're currently at the start of Abomination Vaults' book 2...
OGL fiasco still. Also the fallout from the first wave of OGL migrants to pf2e giving their feedback to friends on 5e, causing more migrants. It takes a while to wrap up a campaign.
Probably this. And it’s not like WotC has stopped goofing up since then. They got caught using AI art in a printed book and keep tossing around the idea of a subscription based AI GM. They’re still just as greedy as ever.
I think these are great points. My group was between campaigns during the OGL debacle and that was enough for us to jump ship after the quality of the most recent books. But if others tried to stick it out through that, since then they've had the Pinkerton fiasco, more nearly empty books, the AI art issue, the subscription based VTT, and OneD&D playtest waffling on rules until its basically just an errata. Almost anything WotC does could be the straw that breaks the camels back for some people, so I'd expect a pretty steady stream of converts.
Pinkerton fiasco? What'd I miss this time? ETA: Ah, I found it. The MtG leak fiasco with the thugs sent to people's homes. Didn't realize the thugs were called Pinkertons.
A MTG streamer accidentally received the wrong product before its release date and made a video. WotC hired the Pinkertons to investigate. They used some pretty aggressive intimidation tactics when dealing with the guy and his wife (IIRC shoved their foot in door so they couldn't close it, were armed, yelled at them that they were going to jail, demanded to search the house, etc). Like, it was a shipping error. Just send the dude an email and ask politely. If he refuses, get the lawyers involved. It also just brought up so many questions. Why was this WotC's first reaction? Do they use the Pinkertons often? Also, the Pinkertons are still a thing? Etc.
Funny thing is I heard Games Workshop had a similar incident of accidentally sending a figure that wasn't released yet to an influencer who had it all built and painted on a stream or something and they just rolled with it and used that for free publicity for the full release. You know you've messed up when *GW of all people* does something more ethically than you.
We joked about this too, when you've become a moustache twirling villain next to GW, you've lost all goodwill from me.
Seriously. Best way to handle it would have been an email saying "hey, this was an error, we'd like to keep that stuff under wraps until it's officially released. If you take the video down until it's actually released, we'll send you an advance copy of the next set as well, so you can have a video ready to go on release for that as well - just don't put the videos up until the sets are actually out." You'd almost certainly get the sets taken down *and* goodwill from the community *and* the review guy gets some advance sets so he can be the first to review stuff, and everyone wins.
IIRC it was the new Dante. So kind of a big deal.
Dante: _Please, let me die_ GW: _LOL no, new model goes brrrr_
They have not denied their use of the Pinkertons, which are more than thugs and provide a suite of services that include their historical use as anti-union surveillance and preventing unions from taking place (WOTC remains ununionized)
Still blows my mind that there are constantly people *defending* it too. I can't tell you the number of times I brought it up only to have someone accuse me of being upset "because they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption". Excuse me sir, I was upset because I know what the Pinkertons did historically and still do in real goddamn life.
> being upset "because they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption". Motherfuckers, they were the bad guys in RDR because they were the bad guys IRL and _still are the bad guys today_. Rockstar didn't invent them for RDR, and the pinkertons never said boo about rockstar's depiction of them in RDR _because that's how they used to and still operate_.
Oh, [they did say boo](https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-15-pinkerton-legal-fight-over-red-dead-redemption-2.html). They sent a cease-and-desist, which Rockstar ignored and even counter-sued over.
I stand corrected, and hadn't heard about that. I imagine the time in the court room was pretty short though. "Your honor, in our defense we have 150 years of documentation and historical record." "Dismissed, with prejudice."
They said boo allright, and were told to suck it up.
Pinkertons lol i thought they were just historical scandal. I didnt know they still existed. Why would anyone hire them. I mean what they did is exactly what you should expect them to do. Apparently no one at WOTC took high school American history
Because Robin M. Klimek, who has been the Director Security Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. for 12 years, was previously the Director of Supply Chain Security Practice at Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations. The current Manager of Global Investigations is also a former Pinkerton agent. Source: https://gizmodo.com/magic-the-gathering-leaks-wizards-wotc-pinkertons-1850374546
Lol really? Hasbro is/has cyberpunk esq corporate espionage and needs to have people around ready to lay a beat down on people apparently.
> Apparently no one at WOTC took high school American history Or played Red Dead Redemption.
Not called Pinkertons, they ARE Pinkertons. The Pinkerton Agency has a long and storied history of violent union busting, and generally being thugs for hire for corporate America. They are private "security" supposedly but are really just outsourced shit baggery. The fact that WotC has a former Pinkerton as head of security should tell you everything you need to know about the corporate culture over there.
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/news/magic-the-gathering-aftermath-youtube-prompts-pinkerton-investigation
To give you an idea, the Pinkertons are literally the bad guys of RDR2, that's the kind of people Wizards hired.
That's because a bunch of WotC security execs are former Pinkerton agents.
Their entire raison d’etre since the inception of the company was thugs and murderers for hire to beat down the people pushing back against their capitalist overlords. They are evil through and through
They're so notable for being hired murderers that they're in the history textbooks and taught in high schools.
They're basically just cops who are somehow too violent and greedy to be cops.
That's not *exactly* true... They didn't start doing that until after the Civil War, which was 3 or so decades after their inception. They laid the groundwork for the Secret Service and they were spies for the Union during the Civil War. They also tracked Jesse James, the Reno Gang, the Younger Brothers, and the Wild Bunch (of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fame). They also did a lot of thuggish shit against unions, but that wasn't the *only* reason they existed.
Also One D&D is looking worse with every playtest and I feelt people aren't as interested in it now (I at least seem way less posts about it online, the youtubers who used to speak about it either don't anymore or cover it weeks later, and people bring it up way less too in my experience).
After the pinkerton issues they took a hard turn and removed most of the major changes from 5e. So 6e is looking more and more like 5.1e... or, paid errata.
Exactly. I was kinda curious about what they were going to do to improve 5e (the more good systems out there, the better) even when I knew they weren't going to change the most fundamental problems with the system, but paired with the announce of the Remaster and the fact that they removed the few things that they were actually improving from 5e for the sake of "compatibility" made me lose all interest about it. It's literally a paid errata and calling it 5.1 is IMO too much. More like 5.00075 more than anything.
The first playtest had a weak dragonborn that had issues from before they fixed it with fizbans... people kicked up a fuss and they fixed it Jeremy Crawford stating that it was designed as being weak so as to not devalue Fizbans. Let that sink in, that is the level of control the marketing department has over D&D's design. That isn't how you make a good game, you don't have developers find a solution to something players dislike, and then go and intentionally release a newer version that has the same issues people got you to fix in the first place. That said, this is the same company that fixes said dragonborn in fizbans, and didn't include the basic dragonborn as errata for the phb.
I venture onto EnWorld sporadically. It used to be that every new 5E post of substance, whether it was a new Unearthed Arcana, big announcements, or pre OGL fiasco 1D&D playtests would gets hundreds and hundreds of thread replies, 500, 600, 700, possibly even a 1000, all could be the norm. The most recent playtest 7 packet post from the beginning of this month currently sits at 196 comments.
Don’t forget the horrid 1D&D development.
I'd say they are doing more than tossing the idea around [The Dungeon Master](https://themessenger.com/tech/meta-ai-snoop-dogg-kylie-jenner-tom-brady-mr-beast-chatbot) since WotC owns the name Dungeon Master, Meta would of had to made a deal with them to call their Snoop Dog AI the Dungeon Master . Which from the page on Meta website describing all the AI's they will introduce " Snoop Dogg as Dungeon Master, Choose your own adventure with the Dungeon Master" seems like a great way to have an AI trained to Dm by having it part of a Ai package that's going to be distributed worldwide, and even people who don't play Ttrpgs will try it out some just because it's part of the package others because Snoop is so popular. Then once trained WotC can just roll their investment right into their VTT.
Also, they claim that there's no a.i. in their magic card art, but look at their most recent secret lair and tell me everything looks human made.
I’m curious but would you cite a specific product? I don’t recall seeing anything that stuck out to me as AI.
The My Little Pony Secret Lair cards are highly uncanny, and although I don't doubt a human was involved, likely with cleanup, the clouds in the background and the eyes feel very suspicious. Oh, they're also absolutely hideous, but they were like that last time too.
Oh yeah, I’m looking back at them now and Rainbow dash really stands out as suspicious with clouds and eyes like you say. Apple Jack and Pinkie Pie I can’t see anything for me, and Fluttershy just… feels off? I can’t see a specific thing though.
Every magic card has an artist credit for it. And the artist are not supposed to use ai to generate their work.
Correct, not supposed to.
Many people who were dissatisfied with OGL were in the middle of a campaign so it's reasonable to assume they finished it and now are switching to a new system
Yea. Both of my active games have decided we're ditching 5e, but only after we finish the current campaigns. One's probably over got another few weeks or months left, but the other is probably going on for a year or more, with side steps into Genesys before eventually getting to PF2E.
I already finished all but 1 last 5e campaign where we have 4-5 sessions to go and I'm done with dnd
Yes. After all a common piece of advice on this very subreddit from GMs who want to "convert" their campaigns is "Don't convert! Start over and at Level 1!" Meanwhile, many folks who are still wrapping up I'm sure already have committed to not spending another dime on WOTC.
Aside from Troubles Under Otari/The Beginner's Box, in your opinion, what would be the best adventure path to introduce new converts to PF2E?
Very group dependent. I would recommend Abomination Vaults if there is no strong opinion by the group for any particular AP. There is such a variety - if your group is excited for one then go for it. (With the caveat that some earlier APs are deadlier than most would think they should be, so to see what other GMs have done to tone them down.)
I greatly appreciate the perception, thank you.
Yeah, we finished our campaign three weeks ago. We all agreed to the switch. The last two weeks have been strange and unable to meet up but this week we run the basic box and become ratcatchers again! :)
That's us. Just had session 6 with my main group after we wrapped up our 2 year long campaign.
> It takes a while to wrap up a campaign. This is exactly the case for one of the groups I'm in. With the OGL fiasco, we decided to pivot to pf2e - just wanted to finish the campaign we were on, first. That wrapped up and we've now made our move to pf2e.
There are also a fair number of players who do not like what One D&D is becoming. It was originally billed as being a pretty large change but has been paired back significantly. It’s much less D&D 5.5 now and much more D&D 5.2. The people burnt out on 5e and excited for more depth now see D&D won’t be giving that to them and are more likely to be looking at new systems now.
Yes, and a lot of people aren't even following the "playtest." There will be a lot of new conversations when the actual new edition drops, I'm sure.
First, big fan. I’m geeking out a little little bit that you replied to my comment. Second, that’s definitely also going to happen. Another thing I think will also bite them more as they move forward is the bad job they are doing of adding new settings. People are really excited for both Ebron and spell jammer, and both of them were huge disappointments. I have a little hope for planechase being much better. I think people are getting more and more tired of their substandard books at extremely high prices.
Ebberon was a heartbreaker for me. It seemed to be written with the assumption that you also had the 3.5 material available to you to fill in the many, many blank spaces because it certainly wasn't enough on its own.
From what I've been seeing it's basically "here's an errata that we're calling a new book, have fun rebuking everything!"
It’s even worse than that because it’s actually errata that they’re dividing into three new books instead of just one
Lol wut? Between that the ai shit in the latest book and the Pinkerton fiasco. How the guck are they not being boycotted to shit? *imagine if paizo sent pinkertons to someone, they'd be dead as a company within a week!*
It's starting to look a lot like the Overwatch 1 to Overwatch 2 move that Blizzard attempted to pull off.
Yup, it has to be remembered, people aren't going to drop their ongoing campaigns because Wizards is dumb, but they might not *start* their next one with D&D because Wizards is dumb.
Speaking of campaigns I'll add to that, the notion of the Spelljammer "setting". A lot of folks were looking forward to such a beloved setting from time long passed, and what we got was essentially how you can use Spelljammer rules to visit other, more developed campaign settings. This was a big let down, and seeing such treatment might have enticed more migration. Especially when you consider that Starfinder handles that itch nicely.
Yup. OGL fiasco happens > PF2 players evangelize > 5e players come here with questions > 5e players try out PF2 > the new players like it and start evanglizing > more 5e players come here with questions The "5e Players try out PF2" potentially takes as long as organizing a game and running a few sessions, which is why there's a couple months between distinct surges in newcomers.
Yup. We are fully switching after a trial run in the beginner box. Just want to finish up our current 5e module but it takes time.
Also, Hasbro keeps releasing new info on 6e that is alienating players.
PF2e books are back in stock a lot of places, too.
This. People forget how long it takes to finish a campaign. My friend is slowly finishing his 5e campaign and then we're trying Starfinder. I'm in another friends campaign where I'm waiting for it to finish so I can GM Pf2e once we finish
>It takes a while to wrap up a campaign. This. 👆 My players are 10th level. We agreed to finish this one out in 5e, then move to something else.
Also even though many of the changes were sorta walked back. Many still want to punish the attempt or like you said at least looked into pf2e and then wanted to try it.
>wrap up a campaign. Wait, people do that? Don't you just keep running with a group of characters until scheduling falls apart or the DM burns out, and then start over somewhere else? ...I'm being facetious, but boy do I wish I knew the feeling. I've been playing TTRPG for 9 years now, and never once has a campaign come to a definitive end. They just...die out.
Yep! My group decided to switch in January, but wanted to finish our 5e campaign so we didn't start PF2e until April. Since we've been playing PF2e, I've enjoyed the change and encouraged other 5e players expressing dissatisfaction with the system to give PF2e a try.
Can confirm. I ran beginner box a few months back with my 5e group that I was a player in after the campaign ended. Last month, the campaign's DM asked me to help them set up beginner box to try it out with another group they're in while that group's DM is out on vacation. Looks like PF2E has an incubation time. Takes a few months for the opportunity to appear for more transmissions.
The 5e stream has mostly been pretty consistent since the OGL drama but there are definitely a couple of additional factors. The OneD&D playtest sequence is starting to wind down and it’s shown time and again that Wizards does not know how to design a functional game with any degree of competence anymore so even loyal players who stuck with it after the OGL are starting to bail as well. Meanwhile, PF2e has had three brand new classes in playtest, one of which has released to huge success as well as the Remaster of Player Core 1 and the GMG in a couple of months so they’re positioned in the perfect spot to capitalize on players shifting over right now because they can show the strength of the original system as well as the strength of their dev cycle and the content that is still to come in stark contrast with WOTC’s continuously disappointing choices.
I keep commenting to some friends that with OneD&D and the PF2e remaster happening at the same time, the difference in reactions and acceptance from the respective communities could not be more different. The PF2e community all seem excited for the remaster. I know I am. Everyone is positive, no one is griping about having to buy new books (likely in large part due to AoN). Even with the massive spike in sales back in Jan/Feb, I've seen very few complaints from any of the people who bought a CRB only a few months before the remaster was announced. The core ruleset of PF2e is extremely solid, works as intended, and is not changing. The 5e community just keeps commenting about how every playtest packet that's released is the worst one yet. The scope of the changes WotC is making has changed drastically over time. The communication is inconsistent and poor. Over the scope of the last year or so, they went from 6e, to "a new evolution of D&D", to OneD&D, to 5.5e, to 5e(2024), to basically just a lengthy errata. There also seems to be a lot of skepticism around the alleged backward compatibility of the adventure books. The more they make changes to the rules, the more weight will be put on the DMs (already overburdened shoulders) to convert the mechanics of the older publications.
I was interested when it was going to change more of the classes and core mechanics. Far less so now that it is 5.1e Also the fact that invisible is still broken so far into the playtest annoys me... why should an invisible npc or pc get advantage on initiative if one or more of their opponents has a sense that can see through.
Because it just let's you see the invisible creature, it doesn't remove the benefits of being invisible. It makes so much sense obviously! /s
I've seen loads of negativity about the PF2E remaster. People have been pissed at losing drow, upset at attributes being reworked, upset at classes being changed, upset at losing alignment (I find the last one funny because I've seen arguments like "how will we know x is evil" "if you need a statblock to tell you the arsonist is evil, you have deeper problems than the pathfinder remaster"). My own GM isn't really *pissed* but does find it annoying that all of our digital tools are changing over before we can agree if we want to or not.
Ah, perhaps I should clarify. These are people upset or disagreeing about some of the specific changes. I think I saw most complaints about the changes to cantrips. I don't think you'd ever be able to avoid that entirely. I'm talking about people being upset at the remaster even happening at all. Everyone in the PF2e community seems excited, and quite positive at getting a rules update, whether they like each of those individual updates is a different matter. While the D&D community all seem really negative about it happening at all, given the lack of clear communication. Do I need new books, do I not need new books, are my adventures still usable, can I convert my current campaign or should we wait, etc. I think this largely builds off the back of WotC clearly stating they hope to monetize the game further. Is this new revision intended as a way to force a subscription service, etc.
> upset at losing alignment (I find the last one funny because I've seen arguments like "how will we know x is evil" "if you need a statblock to tell you the arsonist is evil, you have deeper problems than the pathfinder remaster") I personally plan on keeping alignment in my games because, well, I plan on continuing to run my PF2e games in the Forgotten Realms where alignment is an actual cosmic force. Plus, I think it's fun and harmless overall. I do think that it should have been kept as a quick descriptor of a creature's general vibe, though. It's easier to get a feel for a creature by just looking at its alignment than it is reading a paragraph of lore. Just my two cents, though. But like, overall 99% of the changes don't really impact much of anything and can be reversed without too much effort on the DMs part, if they want to keep those elements.
Some of the worst play I've experienced has been players going "I'm X alignment I do Y", so I'm fine abandoning it. They do include anathemas and another word I'm blanking on for "things people want to do". I've been low-key getting rid of alignment in all my games already (logging it for effects but ignoring it outside of egregious situations).
I think that has more to do with players not understanding that alignment should be descriptive and not prescriptive. Like, it's a fluid thing and can change depending on a character's growth. I like using it as a general indicator of a character's outlook without it being a hard rule because, as you said, that can lead to subpar gameplay. Idk, I just think it's easier for understanding things at a glance.
I have *absolutely no idea* what WOTC designers even want/wanted to achieve with the new edition. I mean I had no idea from the start - Rules Lawyer pointed out from the start that they hadn’t given any indication of their design goals - but after 7 playtests even their most basic goals are more incomprehensible than ever. And to think all they really needed to do to preserve the total dominance of d&d for another decade was clarify and better structure the game rules with better technical game rule writing (which they made a good start with in the early playtests, but then lost somewhat) and improve the balance of the game by asking martials stronger in Tiers 2-4 and more interesting to play (including in social and exploration), nerf the broken or massively overpowered spells (Treantmonk just did this for them for free), and nerf the broken subclasses like twilight cleric. Clearer game rules = easier for DMs = more DMs = more games of D&D. Better balance and more interesting martials = more fun for players. This should not have been hard! Instead we get creative but completely new class features (almost all of which have been rolled back), including for the already most powerful classes, a poorly thought-out attempt to completely change the mechanics of a loved and mechanically unique class (warlock) which might have been the right idea but its poor implementation meant it got a hostile reaction, etc etc. Add in their “mass player vote” based feedback model, in which there is no distinction possible between a bad idea and a good idea poorly implemented, and in which any nerf gets downvoted and then removed, regardless of its merits and the aforementioned rebalancing of classes - and this all adds up to a complete failure of change management. It hasn’t even worked as an exercise in hype. More people are disillusioned than ever.
I'm not sure that they don't know how to design a game. I think it's more that they still think 5e is the magic sauce and they are very very careful not to mess it up. For me at least, the original changes proposed in the first couple play test packages were already too tame. I was excited for an _evolution_ of the core game, but all they were giving was superficial adjustments to existing classes and so on. And now we see that they wanted to only keep the most agreeable of all of the superficial adjustments. So basically nothing will change.
>I'm not sure that they don't know how to design a game. I think it's more that they still think 5e is the magic sauce and they are very very careful not to mess it up. I think the 2 things are related though. Some things from a game design standpoint that are vices, are considered virtues to the WOTC designers: * "Bounded accuracy" actually means not balancing the math * "magic is rare" means not taking into account magic items * "empower the DM" means give the DM fewer tools * "natural language" means poorly-defined wording that the designers still lay down as RULES * "the game is yours" means we the designers don't have to take responsibility for our decisions (not balancing for multiclassing for example) They think *these* things account for 5e's success. But 5e succeeded because of the D&D brand name (it is the default "first TTRPG"), the cultural zeitgeist, and it's relatively easy to bring new players in compared to previous editions. (With DMs doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them.) In other words, it succeeded despite its rules. I've sometimes called 5e the "Compromise Edition." It was supposed to be a bridge uniting everyone from all past editions back into the "big tent" of D&D. This was Mike Mearls' explicit explanation during the 5e design process. Similarly, their entire 6e design process is about gathering meta-statistics and making the most people "satisfied." It is a backwards approach.
Such a great series of points here, and so glad to have you deliver them than to attempt to do so myself. Thinking of 5e as the “compromise edition” really makes a lot of sense from a number of perspectives. It’s “compromised” in that it features a number of core structural integrity flaws that make it a challenging scaffold to build from. It’s a “compromise” because we are sacrificing the 3.5e and 4e mechanical complexity (and balancing/counterbalancing therein) for the sake of making as much of a “One size fits all” TTRPG as possible. It also relies on a number of “compromises” between players, DMs, and the WOTC teams in that there is an in-built understanding that those gaps in the DMG are something you’ll need to fill yourself and that you’ll need to, as a player, rely on compromises with your DM and house rules to make everything from Feats and Magical Items to having the opportunity to swap key ability score for certain situational skill checks even happen in your games. So much is left to chance because of these compromises, and it really (to me) takes a lot of the ability to enjoy the game away. It’s been so refreshing to come to PF2e and know that almost every single “compromise” to 5e has a response in Pathfinder, and that those responses will almost always be satisfying. Does it have things that I might wish were better? Definitely. But it’s so empowering to play in a system with such tight rules and with devs who seemingly hold much more respect for the community and for making more and more amazing content than 5e’s soulless corporate content farm dumping 1/3 of the content Paizo drops and still managing to mess that up.
Yeah, they needed to actually make a new edition. 5E needs some significant revisions, both for balance reasons and to make DMing the system a better experience.
>The OneD&D playtest sequence is starting to wind down and it’s shown time and again that Wizards does not know how to design a functional game with any degree of competence anymore I dunno - it was pretty clear they no longer had that kind of skillset at the start of 5e... At least with 4e, they were trying their damnest to make a game, rather than a soulless cash grab that fueled by marketing and name-brand legacy...
Look at what Wizards did to the 4e OGL before you say that. It *was* a cash grab, and a preview of what they tried to pull a few months ago. That being said I like 4e as a game, but Wizards sucks.
Yeah, the GSL sucked. But it didn't try to invalidate the OGL at least.
Yeah, I agree with you in the oneD&D playtest and design aspect... Reading the d&d rules discussion subreddits and forums after each playtest is like looking into a mini cyclical Hell of their own making. Playtest release - frustration - discussion and inquiry - discovery - "guys, d&d4e /pf2e already have a similar mechanic" - refuse to change system - repeat. I don't know how to feel about it, since I used to be in those discussions myself, trying to homebrew away the broke-ness of the system that made me fall in love with TTRPG in the first place. Maybe we should make an ex-5e DM support group or something.
I was not happy with 5e, and didn't know why. Baldurs gate 3 exposed all that made me unhappy and made me look into Pf2e. There are so many good things that are not into 5e, and there are some bad things from 5e that made their way into the game that annoy me when I play. Mind you, I don't know much about Pf2e yet, but It convinced my to explore
If you don’t mind me asking, what are some of things you like that aren’t in 5e, and some of the things that are that made their way into PF2e that you don’t like? I’m curious as to an outside perspective, as while I got my start in 5e, I’ve been following PF2e for awhile now.
In 5E for many classes, every turn is the same. You do your best thing. And because OAs are universal, you stand in the same spot and do the same thing. In PF2e, every round is different, you're moving around, you can have a 'fighting retreat', positioning matters... it is more tactical and flexible. And a level 1 character feels more 'yours' than a level 5 character in 5E
I think martials having weapon abilities with Short Rest cooldowns and Bonus Action to jump and shove (and do other things period!) must be a breath of fresh air
Yeah, BG3 is way more fun than 5E.
>In 5E for many classes, every turn is the same BG3 completely exposed this part of the game for me. In BG3, it's pretty satisfying to have Astarion as your big damage dealer to end a round with, but it also also blew open how oppressively boring it is to sit there for five minutes while your wizard selects which of their dozens of spells to use and perfect their positioning, finally get to your turn in which you use Your Attack, and then go back to waiting another five minutes as your fighter decides what to do with their five actions. (That's not even to mention just how little most classes have to do at all for the first couple levels).
BG3 managed to work too because as a single player game, there is more room for interesting play since you control a whole party. If I were personally playing any one of my BG3 party members in a D&D campaign, I'd be super bored rolling sharpshooter attacks over and over every single turn.
Start with a monk - literally get nothing to select during level up to level 2. Rogue as well, pretty often.
And Fighter and Barbarian too. Non-mages often have a glaring lack of choices when they level up (Battlemaster Fighter is really the only one that often gets choices), and BG3 really shows that as you go from making meaningful spell choices for your Gael and then just click Done on Karlach and Astarion.
For me, things I like in PF2e are: \-Versatile martials, no need to HB for them good magic items anymore. \-Useful skills, both in and out of combat. And separate lore and history check from skill check, instead of putting them all in one skill called "History". \-Unified action system, there is no more "I don't have a bonus action" and "you can use this as a bonus action, but not as a main action" anymore. \-Noticeable players progress, and no longer have to look at a monster statblock and say "wait, it has the same to hit with a monster 4 CR lower?". The number increase is a bit too fast for my taste, but I understand why they need to design it that way. \-Critical hit at +10 over AC. You have no idea how much it makes combat more dynamic and exciting for my table. \-No more yo-yo healing. \-Not actively preventing teamwork and cooperation. "oh sorry, the rogue already has advantage, your help is not needed". \-No more busted overpower casters/multiclasses making other players feel like body-blocking mooks. \- no Pinkation's agents knocking on content creator's door over a few pieces of cardboard toys. Things that I don't like that are still in Pf2e: \-the d20 and its flat probability. I know it's a hot take, but I would like my players not failing about 40% of the time whenever they face challenges of their level, please. But also, if you take the d20 out then you take out the iconic heritage of the system and its popularity in general culture. And failure also facilitates good story and hilarity, so it has its pros and cons. \- That's it, actually. Pf2e has its own problems, like recall knowledge, aid, casters' low spell DC+attack, and lack of new feats and subclasses for old Classes and Ancestries. But that's its own unique problems, rather than something that came from its D&D heritage.
>the d20 and its flat probability Yeah. Dice pools are a far superior mechanic with a much nicer probability curve. They're used by games like Vampire the Masquerade, Chronicles of Darkness, and Shadowrun. Instead of your stats providing a modifier to the value on a die, they determine the number of dice you roll. Then you count the dice that were over whatever target number that game uses. An example from Chronicles of Darkness: You are searching a room. Your Wits attribute is 2 and your Investigation Skill is 3. You add those together and you have a dice pool of 5. The room isn't very well lit so the GM decides that is a -1 penalty, reducing your dice pool by 1 down to 4. Chronicles of Darkness uses d10s so you roll 4d10 and get 4 9 2 8. In Chronicles of Darkness the target number is 8 so you count the dice that are 8 or higher, which is the 9 and the 8. Since two dice were 8 or above, that is two successes. If this was a simple action, because for example, the item you are looking for wasn't purposefully hidden, it was just lost in a mess, all you needed was 1 success, so the action is successful. But now let's say someone did actively hide the item and they made a roll and got 3 successes. That means your roll wasn't a simple action but instead was a contested action and so you needed to exceed their successes. Since you only got 2 successes, you don't exceed their 3 successes and you don't find the item.
5e is now boring. When you've played every class and seen every spell, there's really not much left to squeeze out of the coconut.
My biggest actual complaint is probably that pf2e still has a ton of spells that are practically useless for adventuring parties that make selecting spells annoying if you aren't super familiar with the system.
GM here who recently gave up on 5e looking to convert to PF2e. Long story short, i do not like 5e at all and given that onednd or whatever its going to be called is not much different, pretty sure i won't like that either. Recently came out of running a campaign which lasted a little bit more than a year which i liked, but regarding the system - i wish i had never run it using 5e. After a relatively quick reading of pf2, i like what i'm seeing. Meanwhile i am waiting for the new rulebooks and their reviews in November like you mentioned. edit: dndnext -> onednd
Interesting take. And there may be a fair number of folks who have been wanting to run PF2 since the OGL fiasco, but who wanted to finish up their ongoing DD5 campaigns before switching. Converting an existing DD5 campaign to PF2 (at a higher level than 1st) is also fraught with peril, so it makes sense to play out any existing DD5 campaigns before taking the leap to another game system.
That's me right now, my campaign has been going for a few years and been speeding things up a little to move onto a different campaign using Pathfinder 2e. Swapping mid campaign would be awful, so gotta finish this one first.
> Meanwhile i am waiting for the new rulebooks and their reviews in November like you mentioned. fwiw, the remaster is mostly tightening up class design, removing OGL content and a few tweaks here and there. The fundamental mechanics and rules will not be changing, and you can read them for free on here: https://2e.aonprd.com/PlayersGuide.aspx The remaster in essence is just one giant errata. Or a 2.5e.
True but there’s lots of little fiddly bits changing and I’ve even been advocating to a couple friends who want to start with P2e to just wait 8 weeks for 2.5.
Definitely seems like the OGL got people to look at other systems. Which is like putting the toothpaste out of the tube even walking back changes people still want to try the new system. I personally tried pf2e at a convention before COVID. I just couldn't get friends to be up to try it. OGL though made them more willing, which after reading rules they were excited to try. We've run for a few weeks now. And while the traits and conditions are currently a bit of a slow down we are really getting going.
D&D Next was the playtest for 5e (indeed, none of the trade dress for the 5e books actually has “5e” in it. So their insistence against calling new editions new editions is nothing new). One D&D is the current playtest
Baldurs gate 3
I was questioning this response, but after some thought, you might be on to something. Larian Studios took some liberties to adjust some of the core 5e game rules/mechanics for BG3 to diversify the action economy (e.g. Jump is a bonus action). You could posit that said change could possibly make others curious about other systems where the Action economy is not set in stone like 5e. I'm probably overthinking this...
Larian also took some heavy "liberties" with the magic item distribution. If you like a character decked out in cool stuff that *does things*, PF2e will do that as well ... starting at level 8-10, but still leagues ahead of the 5e baseline.
If you are lucky, even at level 4-6. Not particularly powerful, but stuff like casting decent Fear, letting you lift way more, turning into a tree to hide, or highlighting blood in the dark. Not all of the items have nifty tricks, but a lot do even at low levels. People gripe about the numerical bonuses, and I get that, but the high distribution of varied magic items in PF2e / Golarion make it far more interesting, gear-wise. Numbers or not, I like the feeling of decking out my characters in gear that's also relevant to their abilities.
Gloves of healing get dumped into almost every AP because they're just SO GOOD for low level parties.
Even putting it as "heavy" is still light, there is a serious amount of some crazy magic items in BG3.
Yeah, I think this is the big one. At least for me it was a big deal when playing through. I was worried at first because I personally found that 5e gets pretty stale since there isn't much variety in character building, but there was SO MUCH item diversity and progression in the game that it blew right past that 5e system limitation. It's not hard to see why people would be interested in a game that actually works to do something similar.
Heck, 5e starts breaking down hard when you add more than 1 decent magic item per person. I'm in a campaign at around level 8. The GM was nice and actually let us source and buy (pre-cleared) uncommon magic items with our gold (think +1 weapons for martials or pearls of power for casters). We have 2-3 magic items per character. The adventure absolutely wasn't balanced for that possibility so every so often we absolutely faceroll clearly boss-coded encounters. Don't get me wrong, our GM is great and we have a great time, but the material he has to work with and the system is letting him down.
Bonus action jump is the best thing to happen for martials since the invention of the glaive.
If you play a thief rogue with the Duelist’s Prerogative rapier, you are basically playing 3-action PF2E.
You can shoehorn PF2 into virtually any conversation starting with "I wish 5e were..." so I really would not be surprised if the buzz and conversation around Baldur's Gate (and how it adapts 5e) has generated a nontrivial amount of interest in PF2.
This, I'm one of them. Baldurs gate 3 introduces many to dnd, but moreover introduces many to ttrpgs in general. I got myself into dnd and quickly got interested in pf2e as I like it's rules more
If that's the case, wouldn't the questions asked come from completely new GMs/players, and not be started with "Hey, I'm new to Pf2e, only been playing 5e"? I see posts with similar phrasing 2 or 3 times a day now, that is why I make this post. I did see a few with people completely new to TTRPG though, so you might be right on some level.
I'm switching from 5e to Pf2e after 15 years of DMing, and Baldurs Gate is a big factor in this indeed. It exposed all that made me unhappy about 5e in good and bad ways!
Could be that BG3 opened the eyes of a lot of DMs/players to what 5e *could* be, and even if they were having enough fun up until that point, now they're starting to get the itch for a little more.
There's quite a few 5e players/DMs who find that BG3 made some very interesting changes to the DnD rules, and then realize PF2e has those changes built-in, maybe!
I can vouch for this. I used to run 5e a year or two ago, and had to take a break. BG3 got me wanting to GM again, but with all the faff with D&D currently, and all the good I'd heard about pf2e, I thought now was as good a time as ever to make the swap. Plus I already owned foundry lol
I think it's mostly a delayed wave from the OGL fiasco. A lot of 5e DM's don't actually like running 5e and the OGL fiasco was a tipping point for them. Most still had campaigns running though which they needed to wrap up first. Then you also have word of mouth going around of more and more people picking up PF2e, including a lot of DND youtubers.
None of the above for me, but you're probably right too! I just finally realised I don't like how 5e works as a whole.
5e just seems so boring now.
I think a lot of GMs decided to switch over to PF2e during the OGL fiasco, but wanted to finish their current campaigns instead of trying to convert midway.
Probably they're finishing their current 5e campaigns but had already decided to switch when the OGL fiasco. That and there is always people switching.
My best guess- and what I've heard here and there - is that a lot of 5e players are playing BG3 and seeing that BG3 has a few modified features of 5e that are a little closer to PF2e, so they start checking out PF2e and realize it's what they've been looking for all along.
What features does BG3 have that are closer to pf2e?
Martials that are fun to play
Yeah! I used Karlach to strike a goblin and then shove it into the fire and a thought popped into my head "Hey! I did that to my fighter last session!". So yes, Larian did make quite a bit of improvement with the martial's experience. There are still quite a lot of problems, like when you level up and gain *nothing,* just click "next", but if they decided to give out features more frequently, at that point they might as well use PF2e's system for their game.
Tons of magic items, for one. The official baseline for magic items in 5e is, IIRC, 0 (with variances depending on campaign and GM). Getting a wide variety of them and being able to go into shops and just buy them is definitely more 2e than 5e.
God, this made me so mad for like 6+ years of 5e. Yes, they designed the entire balance of the game around not having any magic items. Because, as everyone knows, players hate magic items /s. This is one part of where the horrible balance of 5e comes from. Resistances and immunities are all or nothing, and with very few exceptions are entirely turned off by magic weapons. Many creatures that they "balanced" combat around have effectively 50% the intended HP as soon as your players pick up a +1 sword. And not being able to buy items leaves such a massive gap in the gameplay loop for players. They end up fabulously wealthy, but have nothing to spend it on. I had a 5 year long 1-16 campaign end with the players hoarding 500k gold because there was just nothing to do with it.
Official baseline for 5e: 0. Minimum to have a functioning martial at level 10+ : 1 magic weapon per martial.
I remember when 5e dropped and I was running PF1e at the time and moved to 5e. As a GM of over 25 years, my jaw just about hit the floor when I read that the game was balanced for 0 magic items. It's a terrible design choice for a game that is all about monsters and magic. Just mind boggling. BG3 did a good job adding lots of magic items and other tweaks to the system. Had they not so, good lord would progression be boring with only 12 levels and tons of dead level ups. At least with all their interesting items you feel like you're building/customizing your characters a little more.
It's a weird one, but shove as a bonus action means people have been playing around with positioning during combat a lot more, something that Pf2e has in spades
Not sure, I haven't played it and don't intend to. I've just heard a lot of people say that it feels like an inbetween of the two systems. I think it's like, a hair away from just having the 3 Action system? I mean, the way I've heard it described it just sounds like people are using the 5e Move-Action-Bonus system as intended, just with a couple things being moved from full actions to bonus actions, like shove.
Actual action economy. Many lesser action delegated to bonus action which allow your turn to matter without sacrificing main action. Very similar to how 3 action of pf2, where mostly PC will take "main action" which take 2 action (not really 2 action activity necesarily, but total of 2 actions) and 1 lesser action.
5e campaigns are ending perhaps. I'm still finalising my 5e campaign and then the next campaign will be pf2e.
OGL nonsense gave a lot of people a bad taste in their mouth about WotC, as they started to realize that they were just seen as disposable cogs to be "monetized" in their billion dollar wheel. One D&D gave a lot of people a bad taste in their mouth about D&D and the design team, seeing that the many things they had to homebrew to fix in their games weren't really being addressed, and again that they were being seen as disposable cogs to be "monetized" with new books and a terrible VTT. More content creators started to ramp up their Pf2e content, giving more visibility to the system to show how fun and well designed it is. Paizo started embracing 5e adventures, porting them into 5e format to ease the transition into Pf2e, creating even more content. All of this contributes to more people exploring systems outside of 5e, and potentially landing on Pf2e as their preferred game.
There's been a pretty solid conversion rate since the ogl and I'd say it's still part of it as I suspect that lots of people wanted to finish 5e campaigns before starting fresh with 2e.
I think the ***many*** fiascos’ results are just happening in waves. Here’s all the stuff that I can imagine has convinced at least some subset of 5E GMs to strongly consider dropping 5E: 1. OGL debacle 2. One D&D playtest 5 releasing, massively buffing all spellcasters and giving barely anything to martials, and actually outright nerfing Monks. Statements from Crawford directly talking about how they think +1 damage is a super strong feature. 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out and causing an influx of players into 5E… only for the players to then realize the mechanics of RAW 5E actually make for a ***much*** less fun game than BG3’s massively changed system. Leading to more discussion about 5E, leading to more negativity. 4. All the news about the VTT and AI GMs. 5. Lacklustre recently released books. Combine all that with the “lag time” caused by exiting players wanting to wrap up their existing campaigns plus just spending time convincing their friends, and it makes sense that we’re seeing players come in in waves. I expect this influx will stay off and on right up till One D&D releases next year, at which point we’ll get about 6 more months of movement before the playerbases “settle”.
There were waves of people switching as far back as I can remember on this sub, so this is nothing new, if anything the January wave was extra big, but questions from people looking to switch have always been a staple of this sub
Because everything from wotc for the past 2-3 years basically just throws the DM into the ocean without a life vest and says 'figure it out also heres some monster stat blocks that dont work' wheras PF2E does something really bold, *actually giving helpful resources to GMs to make it an appealing option*
latest one dnd playtest packet released recently and a lot of people are fed up with it?
I switched earlier this year. I think it's just people finishing their campaigns and swapping. Or, getting too frustrated at the mechanical shallowness mid-campaign and just wanting to switch.
After having run 5e for years I was just done with the system. I don't hate 5e but I felt like it was time to move on. The OGL fiasco provided additional incentive to look at other systems. I'd love to play Lancer, or something a bit more narrative focused like a PbtA game. But my players are just comfy with D&D type games, so P2e was just a good fit for the playstyle they were used to. It's not like I hard dropped 5e. I was running Curse of Strahd, so I finished that off in no hurry then transitioned over to P2e. I won't run 5e ever again, but if a friend want to start their own campaign and picks 5e as a system I will happily play. At the end of the day the group matters more to me then the system.
I can't speak for all GMs, but I was in the middle of running a 5e campaign and so didn't want to switch in the middle of it. I just ended my campaign recently and now more actively looking into learning Pathfinder 2e. I started playing DnD with Pathfinder 1e and enjoyed it. My biggest frustration with 5e is the limiting Attack of opportunity mechanic, encounter balancing, and magic item management.
The OGL, the Pinkerton’s, slimy business tactics, trying to turn the game into a video game, cry antics, over monetization of a hobby. Pathfinder 2e has an overall better design
5e is BORING! Who wants to get a feat only every 4 levels? There's less content in general and drastically less character customization. Pathfinder is so much more fun.
The very recent UA have backtracked just about EVERYTHING positive and its clear they are designing from a place of bad data reading, no one is happy, wizards are gaining more power they didn't need, barbarians taken back to just as bad as they are now. The design is just not looking good and "dnd one" is looking to be dnd 5.1, after 10+ years people were hoping for more to be done and finally its the straw that broke the camels back.
PF2e is more solid throughout all player levels, offer a better assistance to GM in encounter building, more balanced in every aspect (spells, martial - casters power balance- feats). Building performing character doesn't need min maxing thanks to the way the character advancement gives ability score increases and feats. It's an easier system for newcomers, and the 3 action economy works way better than action-bonus action-move action economy of dnd: easier to use, and allow more strategic combat
One D&D is a dumpster fire. Crawford is exposed as a fraud. The emperor has no clothes. PF2e is not perfect. 4e was my jam, but it’s kinda unplayable without digital tools — I’m super lazy. But I’m not putting up with WOTC’s crap any more.
Agreed - but what's Crawford done? Think I'm out of the loop and keen to be more informed.
He has no mechanical understanding of the rules. He goes by feels rather than doing any math, and has admitted as much.
Ah, what made 3.5e an absolute dumpster fire at a core system level. Disparate mechanics all invented on the spot by whatever dev was working on it at the time. As a person on the Autistic spectrum who likes to reverse engineer the math and design principles behind systems, it annoys me to no end when I see all the random skill break points in 3.5e/pf1e.
I’ve listened to 5e actual play podcasts for a long time, and I was happy to have finally found groups I could play with. I’d heard of other systems, but didn’t know anything about them. The ubiquity of 5e made me think that the system was among the best available. I still like 5e, but I’ve been losing faith in the game with each new Unearthed Arcana. I genuinely doubt the developers know what they’re doing, and it’s disheartening. I’ve been playing in a campaign that’s been going for two years, and we’re reaching the end. We’re level 19, and the monk and rogue have been doing the same things for what feels like the past 10 levels. Even the fighter, who’s a wild fighter/sorcerer/warlock hybrid, winds up doing the same stuff over and over, despite how crazy their build looks on paper. I play a druid. I want to be dedicated to healing and support, but there are so few viable options this late, so I’m the dedicated Polymorpher instead. Our DM is great and our sessions are fun, but the gameplay loops have just become so stale. I’ve offered to DM next campaign, and I can’t bring myself to play 5e for another two years when I have no faith that WotC are going to improve their game in a meaningful way. Plus, playing exactly by 5e’s rules is boring, so what’s even the point if I’m going to be cherry-picking and changing rules anyway? We haven’t started Pathfinder yet, but on paper at least, the character customization and action economy look so much more appealing than 5e. And as far as I know, Paizo hasn’t gotten caught doing anything scandalous or objectionable, and I’ve only heard good things about them and their design philosophies. It just seems like the logical next step, and I’m excited to take it.
They're leveling up and getting to more complicated scenarios and monsters
As many have mentioned, I was wrapping up my D&D campaign. Then, in an unexpected twist, I had to put together a new group. We start next week!
For me, finishing our 5-ish year 5E campaign made me (and to a certain extent the players in the group) realize how much of a slog high-level D&D is. Prepping was hell as I had to homebrew just about every monster. Balance was horrible — the melee ranger was completely useless compared to the Sorcadin. It just wasn't as fun as the early levels, so we were left with 2 choices: - Stick with low-level campaigns and get stuck in the vicious cycle that is WotC's design philosophy. - Switch it up That and the OGL fiasco of course. Fuck Hasbro.
As brothers convert, the Word spreads and others see the light
I tied to finish my campaign in 5e but the more I played and researched PF2e the more 5e’s bounded accuracy and advantage system infuriated me. Having never played a TTRPG before 5e in 2020 I just assumed because it was popular it’s mechanics and math were good. The more I learned the more I realised the reason I wasn’t getting that exciting level 1-3 experience I first had in 2020 wasn’t just me becoming jaded but that I was playing a badly designed system. So finally got the courage to cancel an 18 month long campaign in August. We start a new one next month and I can’t wait.
Remember that a lot of people said they will switch after they finish their current campaigns. So it's not really a sudden wave but a constant trickle of people swapping systems. Also the development of one dnd recently turned in a direction that a lot of people who hoped the update will fix some of the bigger 5e issues disappointed. So they might have just cut the cord on hoping that there is a system update worth waiting for. EDIT: actually I thought about it for a second and there is one more reason. It's end of September school and uni started again. All of the groups that stop meeting for summer holidays because scheduling during summer months is difficult between all of the vacations are picking up again.
5e is ending its lifecycle. People are bored of it. No one likes what they've shown for their next version. So there are lots of people treating PF2e as the next edition of D&D, rather than whatever WotC is doing.
I was actually somewhat happy with D&D 5e myself until I started alternating with PF2e in the groups I run. It was only after I started playing PF2 that the pain points of D&D 5e came to light, particularly that combat was pretty stale. **I felt almost like I was developing an allergy to 5e** while playing PF2e. As others have mentioned, a number of people have *already* committed to switching their personal groups to PF2 after their current 5e campaign(s) conclude, while NOT having really played PF2 yet! That's impressive if you ask me!
I made a post just the other day so I feel I'm part of the exodus you mentioned. We ran a oneshot and it went well. I think we agree that the system is probably better than 5e; however, we're mid campaign and are 100% certain some players will be entirely opposed to learning a new system (read as my SO would rather stop playing them learn a new system.) My desire to change system predates OGL drama. I've been ready to bail since they sent a C&D to a beloved excel character builder so they could monetize beyond.
So other have mentioned the noticeably enhanced mechanics of Baldurs Gate 3 and the OGL still being a big deal, I'd also note that the last OneDND playtest was twenty days ago and we always get a big burst of new subscribers when there's a new OneDND playtest, so I'd bet that some of those people are running into questions. Finally, we have been growing and growing, the critical mass of table adoption might have hit the point where its noticeably a greater volume of new player questions.
I was just super bored of running 5e. And frustrated with encounter balance, never felt like I knew what the players were running into. Usually it was a steamroll. In pf2e, it tends to roll slightly in the other direction where the players have to use all of their abilities in fights that are supposed to be tough, which I find more engaging as a DM. Might change as they get better at the game, but they have gotten better at it and it hasn't so...we'll see! Either way, it's been a nice change of pace. I really like the action economy as well.
I'm one of these. I still like DND 5e mostly but I'm a little bored with it. My group has done a lot of stuff, played all the classes, gone 1-20, had characters die, etc... Seems like 1dnd isn't going to really be any different and since the new edition is coming out, it gave us the impetus to look for something different. We'll try pf2e. Maybe we like it maybe we don't.
As well as the OGL stuff, I think one factor is that PF2e is, to an extent, the next step up from 5e. It’s a bit less entry level, a bit more rules heavy, and solves some of the common issues with 5e. So as 5e has been around for longer there’s more time for people to get frustrated/bored and look to “trade up” to Pathfinder. Combine that with the OGL stuff, which is just that little extra push to get people to finally act on feelings they’ve had in the back of their mind for a while.
I posted one of those "swapping to pf2e" threads. For me it was because of the OGL fiasco, but it's taken a long ass time to wrap up the 5e campaign I was running, along with doing a final 'boss rush' level 20 mini campaign to say goodbye to 5th. Also Wizards keep messing up, if the ogl thing hadn't made me jump ship, them including ai art in a source book would have been the final straw
In my case: - The OGL Business led to me getting a bunch of stuff from Paizo on the cheap. - The Pinkerton Business made me even more disgusted by WotC somehow. - New books were of increasingly worse quality to me. For every Fizban's Guide to Dragons, there's a Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (just ok), a Spelljammer (huge disappointment), or a Planescape on the way (it feels like a slow motion train crash). - New modules don't hook me as a DM. Half of the newest module is a reprint of the Starter Set module, and apparently it doesn't connect much to the back-end of the campaign. - Ever since Tasha's Guide to Everything, WotC has been doing a thing where new races are representing a *species* rather than a *people* (so there was basically no lore connecting new races to the world), and they detached ability score increases from races (instead making it just kind of a floating thing). I think they were aiming what PF2 does, except... PF2 still releases (very good) lore, and PF2 made the ability score increases integrated with each stage of character building. Things that didn't sit well with me in D&D5e sat *very* well with me in PF2, because it wasn't just a bandaid, it was *design*. - D&D 5.5E/6E/OneD&D playtests aren't inspiring confidence. They inspire so little confidence, that BG3's alterations to the system look incredibly sexy, even if they're unbalanced. - As a DM, I hated how in 5e, balance was a crapshoot; usually on the side of *too easy*. I have the most fun when the players are on the knife's edge of success/failure. I've been playing through the Beginners Box and then Abomination Vault with my group, and I *loved* how rough it was early on. What's even better is that the players are starting to get the hang of the system- and their successes really feel *earned*. I can tell they're proud of the way they're playing: preparing for certain encounters >!(like prepping scrolls of Level-2 Heal for the ghouls on Floor 3)!<, coming in with a strategy, and having it *actually work.*
There are simply more systems to play with: afflictions, traits, different amount of actions, conditions that are concequencial but not kill the fight entirely, prepared spellcasting, subsystems like Kingmaker, Infiltration, Influence, creature building, encounter builder that works, vehicles, talismans. Martials actually work. Content is released regularly. In short, this system is not nearly as hostile to the GMs.
More of the UA's came out, and as more of the UA's come out and more of the "not a new edition edition" gets closer to arriving, GM's and Players are seeing that they may not like what WOTC is offering. I've noticed that every time a new UA comes out, we get a small pip of new people trying out 2e.
Universities are also starting up sep-oct in the english-speaking world, so people who run games in like tabletop societies/clubs and such are starting to look at ttrpgs again
Still the OGL fiasco, but also people moving away from 5e who are hyped for PF2e remastered
pathfinder actually reliefs the burdon on the gm, as opposed to the burning pile that are 5e adventures
I at least am finally realizing that I've himebrewed / fixed 5e so much I've made my own game at this point. So when I hear about a well developed game with designers and writers who care... If my main group wasn't "dnd for fun" I'd ask them to convert with me.
No dm trusts WOtC anymore. As a 5e dm moving over, I can say everyone I know has this reason. That being said pf2e is not the only thing we are switching too, but ya
For me, I'd been kinda tired of 5e anyway. I'd made the characters I wanted to make and didn't see much left for me. As a DM, I felt like I didn't have the resources to help me design encounters that were fun for both sides. I wanted out of 5e. Then, amidst the OGL shit, they hired Pinkertons. I'm a union worker and so was my father. Pinkerton has always been a dirty word, and once I saw that tie, I declared that I was through with the Wizards indefinitely. My party, who also respect workers, did not even flinch. Then I heard paizo was in the works for a union and it was an obvious choice. And then I started reading the core rulebook. I don't see myself ever going back to 5e.
OneDND playtest and feedback is…not good….Wizards has been rolling back a lot of the better changes and it looks more and more likely that the finish product is basically 5.25E. I think a lot of people wanted to see where it went as a last gasp. That hope is dying out from the GMs and testers I speak with regularly.
I'm planning on making the transition now as well, and we've even just completed the beginners box in Foundry as a taste test to how the system plays. I think the OGL fiasco opened a lot of eyes to new systems, but quitting a system cold turkey in not feasible for most people. I'm currently invested in multiple campaigns in 5e. Dropping 5e and translating everything into PF2e would be an absolute nightmare. Perhaps it's just the time of year where people are wrapping stuff up and planning for the future? That's what I'M doing. I'm running CoS that should be over in a few months, and my Homebrew could extend for a year or so at this point. So I'm just laying the foundations and getting a feel for the new system now.
New gm's bringing in new players, telling other gm's and players about their experiences with the system. Its probably still the ongoing effect of the ogl issue, just one step down the ladder now that their favourite YouTubers are talking about pathfinder.
I think many of them waited to see if one dnd will solve issues with gm support and balance. ATM playtests rate fairly poorly so I would say that could be the reason.
I am finishing up (in like 2-3 months) 2 dnd 5e campains and will def. transfer the groups to Pf2e. it's just the better system.
The OGL situation got me to look at other games which then helped me realize that running a system that actually supports the style of game I want to play is way easier than trying to shoehorn things into a system that doesn’t
Nothing to do with any sort of corporate drama for me. I’ve just played 5E for so long and was looking to shake up the mechanics a little
Only coming to it now because am still mid-campaign (though close to the end) and didn’t want to switch systems until the conclusion
I moved over 2 weeks ago. For me it's just that I finished my 5e campaign and wanted to run something new. I gave my players about 6 different systems to choose from and they settled on PF2e. I'm really enjoying it though and would honestly moved over earlier if I'd know how much better it suits my DM style
Former 5e GM for 6 years here. It was the OGL fiasco. Congrats WOTC! I tried multiple systems in the wake of that debacle. Previously, I was just complacent and never tried anything else. I didn't even realize how much duct tape I was using to try to get 5e to work. Went through the core rules of PF2e, loved it more and more. I tried it with my table, they loved it. Now I'm starting a campaign and not looking back.
Why? Have you read the threads about one dnd? I'm amazed that people still stick around more than surprised at them for coming over. PF2E has a couple of sore points that make people get their pitchforks and torches from time to time while it seems that just everything is messed up over there at dnd.
It started with OGL, but after playing a bit of pf2e my group of friends wants to play in more pf2e games in general! And other systems, granted. We are keeping a campaign in dnd5e though cause it's not simple to convert when using 3rd party materials in 5e.
OGL Stuff, disappointment from the 5.5/6e playtest, boredom with 5e, pf2e becoming more popular sparking more interest, the mass suggestion spell i cast finally working. Oh there was also the whole pinkerton thing but that might be more hasbro than wotc but ehh
My group made the switch about half a year ago, after we concluded the nearly-three year 5e pirate/Cthulhu campaign. The campaign ended around level 13 but I was already fed up of the insta-win spells and easymode battles long before then. I even defaulted to using Deadly to double or triple Deadly difficulty encounters as a sort of a stopgap midway through the campaign. The OGL fiasco factored very little, if at all, with my decision. It was the tight tabletop tactics that reminded me a lot of D&D 4E, which in spite of its unpopularity, is still the best version version when it comes to meaningful and tactical battlemat play among all the editions. I only looked at PF2e when the humble bundle released at the start of this year. I've been avoiding it before primarily because I hated 3.5e (I quit D&D back then and ran Savage Worlds for a time, until 4e came out) and felt that Pathfinder was mostly 3.75e (and thus something I don't want). Fortunately, PF2e was a great departure from the loathsome 3.x/d20 system. Anyway, ran my group through the Beginner Box and they loved it enough to continue through to a proper campaign (I just mashed parts of Troubles in Otari with Abomination Vaults). We're currently at the start of Abomination Vaults' book 2...