During the recent Gencon convention, my son and I had the opportunity to do a short playtest of the new mechanics being rolled out for Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Nothing super fancy, just a basic combat scenario with low level characters, to see what the differences were. We were teamed up with 3 other players, two of which had practically no experience, and one of which was another experienced gamer. I played the revised Kyra, Cleric of Sarenrae, and George played Fumbus, the Goblin Alchemist.
The scenario was a simple setup – having tracking villains into the forest, we arrived at the camp to discover undead skeletons and zombies, and then had to dispatch the leader cleric in a second wave. Overall, I would say the fight was a reasonable challenge, though the Rogue did end up falling due to lucky critical results.
As a positive, the game certainly still feels like Pathfinder – the classes, races, and basic mechanics are still there. There are some differences – there is much more of a focus on the details of your actions, and it feels perhaps a bit more mechanical in nature, but not necessarily in a bad way. Spells still operate the same, and most of the common actions are still there, though they are now defined in different terms. I particularly liked how they changed up the initiative mechanics. Fundamentally, it is still the same process – initiative bonus plus dice is your turn order. However, your initiative bonus can now be based off of a wide variety of skills, based on your general approach before the combat starts. Sneaking through a castle when you are discovered by guards? Use stealth for initiative. Arm wrestling at a bar when a fight begins? Use Intimidate for initiative. In some ways it may take some explanation, but it is a nice way for the player to make the decision rather than having an arbitrary value.
Unfortunately, there were several aspects that I found troubling or problematic. As I mentioned, actions are now more mechanical in feel – gone are the standard, move, and free actions, replaced by a generic 3 actions. Each of these can mimic the prior set, or they can double or triple up. You can move, draw a weapon (now an action, not free), attack, or if you want, you can simple attack three times with no movement. Although there are multiple attack penalties, given the range of numbers on a d20 vs the available ACs, you can quickly eliminate foes (or be eliminated) if the rolls are decent. Spell casting is hampered somewhat by this mechanic, as each spell now takes one, two, or three actions, with varying effects based on the number of actions. It adds variety and options certainly, but also can slow down the game quite a bit trying to maximize your options.
Criticals are now available for any natural 20, or if you simple succeed by a margin of 10+, which is fine (and the reverse is built in for fumbles officially now), and the corresponding increase of damage (doubling the dice) works just fine. However, the change in magic item mechanics makes this very deadly – each plus of a weapon now adds the plus to hit, but the plus in dice to damage. A sword does 1d8, a +1 sword has a +1 to hit, and does 2d8 damage. With a critical, both rules apply – that +1 weapon now does 4d8 damage. And a rogues sneak attack adds in to that as well, making the damage dice much higher and deadlier.
Balancing somewhat, hit points are now starting higher – you have race based HP (called ancestry now) and class based HP. For our group, the HP for a 1st level character was in the 15-20 range. And healing is more plentiful, as a Cleric, I received a bonus of free healing spells (equivalent to channeling bursts), which I could use as either single target touch, single target ranged, or area effect burst, depending on the number of actions used – all this in addition to any memorized spells and skill uses.
There were a number of other miscellaneous changes that I spotted, but much of the rest we just didn’t have time to really dig into. Most I feel are more a matter of preference, each system does things their own ways, but none are specifically “wrong”. I am sure I will post a few more summaries as I dig further into the rules, in approach of the full release late next year.
If you are curious, you can download the full Playtest materials from Paizo for free as of this week. Visit Paizo.com for more information.
