And they didn’t even get full 3-actions economy.
Honestly, PF2 is kind of what I wanted from D&D 5e. The 3-action combat system feels good and offers a very understandable and easy to explain to new players way to handle action economy, the character advancement is more fun (you get a lot of small things to pick at basically every level - there’s never a level-up where you just increase a couple numbers by 1 and have nothing else to do, and the choices you make feel like they matter more. The bigger numbers also make things feel more impactful, while still being very balanced against itself. It just feels better to see bigger numbers on a character sheet… you feel like you’re getting noticeably stronger as you level. I don’t know. It’s a small thing, but the numeric normalization in 5e always irked me.
The fact that WotC is stealing concepts from PF2 as they update 5e is really telling.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.
*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.
PF1e was effectively 3.75, but PF2e is a considerably different game from PF1e. All that said, it kind of sounds like you aren’t a big fan of D&D, either, so I can understand not enjoying Pathfinder.
I’m with you there having played it a bit. PF2 is cool, does a lot of stuff better than 5E, still has a few things that irk me. Like how training seems to outscale ability scores so fast that the latter is essentially irrelevant to any checks you make. But better than 5E.
Unfortunately 5E is the one that my friends know how to play, and I have not yet persuaded them to try other things. Ultimately I just want to have a game wth my friends, even if I think the specific game is a bit shit. I like the look of LevelUp’s A5E a lot and borrow mechanics from it as “homebrew” in 5E quite often
I started a game of Fate this year and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s less crunchy and tactical than D&D most of the time, but it handles social conflict and losing conflicts much better. And does other stuff I like.
I tried to get my old D&D group to play other games but it didn’t go super well. In retrospect, there were game agnostic reasons why I didn’t really gel with that group, so it’s for the best I left. But I think converting people who only really play D&D and close relatives to something else is hard.
