I finally ran my first
Pathfinder 2ed adventure - one of my payers had bought
The Fall of Plaguestone adventure, so we figured we could test out the new rules and see what the writing quality was like. It was a very mixed experience. There were some things in both the rules and adventure that I liked, but there were also some rage-inducing issues. It did not leave me looking forward to playing P2e again, either to finish the adventure (we got 2/3rds through it) or to make/run my own adventures for the new system.
For this review I’m going to start by talking about P2e and the characters I made for it (some players didn’t have the book, so I made pre-gens), then go through the adventure itself (there will be light spoilers), and give some final thoughts on the system.
1) Making Characters
In theory the new system is very easy: pick your Ancestry, a Background, and a Class. Choose a feat for the Ancestry and Class, note the Skill Feat your Background gave you. Assign your Attribute Picks. Buy gear, everybody gets 150 silver. Then wrap up the details and fill out a character sheet.
In practice this took a lot more work than I expected. Some of that is learning a new system, though I had made a character before (in this post) so I wasn’t completely new to the system. 8Some of it came from the difficulty of choosing a worthwhile option. For example, the Wizard has 6 level 1 Class Feats…
- Counterspell - counter a foe from casting the same spell you have prepared
- Eschew Materials - you don’t need a spell component pouch
- Familiar - you have a bonded small animal, which can give you a small bonus (but not fight)
- Hand of the Apprentice - you gain a focus spell of the same name. You can make a ranged attack with a melee weapon, once in a fight, and you have to be able to take a 10 min rest before using it again
- Reach Spell - by adding 1 action to the casting you can extend the range of a spell by 30 feet
- Widen Spell - you can add 5-10 feet to the radius of a burst or length of a cone/ line
So Counterspell is mostly useless. You can only counter a spell you have prepared, and you lose the prepared spell to do it. So I can counter a magic missile, which might sometimes save a companion from dying, but I lose the spell myself and only have 3 spells for the day total, so now 2. Eschew Materials is useless, how many times have you lost your spell pouch? (or, how many times has your GM forgotten that you even have spell pouch to begin with?) The Familiar is a semi-decent spy and useless otherwise. Hand of the Apprentice is useless, it’s got a slighly better chance to hit than using a crossbow, damage is the same as your melee (so, pathetic for most low-Str Wizards) but you can only do it once per fight. Reach Spell is the only clear great to have ability, since you can attack with some of those touch spells from a safe distance instead. Widen Spell is maybe okay sometimes if you’re using a battle-mat, but I run “theater of the mind” fights and it’s incredibly hard to translate a slight bonus (5 feet to 10 feet) into a more abstract system like that.
And too many feat choices are like that, a lot of reading new rules for how things work in excange for a bunch of crappy options that may or may not ever see play. Granted, 1st edition had the same problem, there were a whole heaping bunch of crappy options and edge-cases, but at least then you got so many abilities that there was usually one good thing in the lot. In 2nd edition you don’t get as many abilities overall (at least it doesn’t seem like it, and I really don’t want to go through the effort of making several characters to compare).
Adding to the time, I did have to fight with some new character sheets. I absolutely love Dyslexic Studio’s website, but the sheets were not loading properly for me in Firefox (my preferred browser), and the PDFs are not edit-able, so I had to use Edge and download the HTML files, and then everything worked fine (bugs he fixed a few days later, lol). That slowed me down. Still, it took me about three hours to make 3 characters, and it felt a lot longer. It did not seem to be any more streamlined than 1st ed and I did not feel like my final characters were comparable to 1st ed versions. Wizards lose the bonus spells for high Int, no longer get the Scribe Scroll feat extra, and the bundle of Racial Abilities have been cut-up and strung-out in the new Ancestry Feats system (where you only learn how to be a proper Elf around 7th level).
Again, I haven’t sat own and done a point-by-point comparison - but the initial impression was that I was doing a lot of work for little return, and I would have been better off making a DnD 5th character, or just going back to Pathfinder 1e. There was nothing new that made character creation a better experience.
2) The Adventure
I’m going to try and keep the profanity to a minimum, but the adventure was garbage. There were a few okay spots, but overall I was not impressed by the quality of writing Paizo was charging me for. Now, here is where I may vary a whole lot with most other GMs. For example, I had heard tons and tons of great things about the Rise of the Runelords campaign, but when I played/GMed it I thought it was crap. The main villain and overarching plot (ie, the Runelords) are really a side-note lost and forgotten in a bunch of pointless side-quests, most of the big set-pieces like the haunted house and giants attacking the city were boring, there’s a lot of stupid crap where you’re told to make your players “care about” a place or people - yet nothing in the game gives them anything to care about (and that really should have been done before the game by giving each character some hook into the people/ places), and just the overall feel was amateurish - I’ve crapped out campaigns as good or better at 4am without advance warning. For a published product I expected something more.
So with that in mind (that I’m a grumpy old b-stard) I did not like several parts of The Fall of Plaguestone. The characters are explicitly paid customers in a caravan, trying to get to a certain city, when a murder breaks out half-way there and they get roped into solving it and trying to save the town. That’s nothing to write home about, it’s the same kind of plot contrivance GMs have been shoving PCs into since the hobby began. The fight opens with an attack by wolves, several “Creature 0” wolves and one “Creature 2” Caustic Wolf.
Here is the Number One thing I hate about this adventure and Pathfinder 2nd edition - the new CR system sucks @(!$!($#@%(!$^)@%(^@^@ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I only had 3 players, one of them bowed out at the last minute. So the party was a Cleric, Rogue and Wizard. There was no front-line fighter-type/ tank. I wasn’t sure what the combat was going to be like, being new to this adventure and the game in general. I figured I’d run the combat “by the book” so I could see how it worked, even if it made the fights a little hard, I was just going to be very generous about death saves and recovery time if needed. And I needed it. The Cleric’s limited spells and no Wis bonus meant there was very little healing the party could do. So I thought. Actually, I was remembering the old healing skill from 1st edition, the new Medicine skill (which the Wizard had) is actually very good at healing people - arguably better than the Cleric Heal spell (well, no, it is better - and wands are useless to low level characters, potions are expensive - a 1d8 heal potion is 40 silver or your starting 150).
So healing sucks, no big deal if the PCs have decent Armor Classes, right? Problem is, while the CR0 wolves had only +6 to hit (which was pretty good), the CR2 caustic wolf had +11 to hit - which is incredible. For my Cleric PC they had a +3 attribute, and another +2 for being trained with a weapon, so +6 to hit at 1st level. At second level that would go up to +7. At 3rd level +8. 4th level +9. 5th level they get an attribute boost, so +11. The Rogue was slightly better, with an 18 Dex and a finesse weapon, so he had +7 at 1st level. Then +8, +9, +10 up to 4th level. At 5th he got the attribute bonus and went Expert with his weapons, so a whopping +14 to hit at 5th level. Which means the CR2 monster was hitting like a 4th or 5th level PC - but they were fighting it at 1st level.
And that adventure did it constantly. There is supposed to be a CR2 boar that attacks in the town. Well, the PCs figured town was safe, and so they split up to investigate a murder, which meant only a single character was there for the boar fight. They would have died. Period. They could have ran away, but what good is that? They live, they don’t get any xp since they didn’t defeat/ neutralize the enemy, and all we did was waste several minutes at the table. A non-winnable fight is only good for flavor (you guys are in a very scary place) or to kill the PCs. Otherwise it’s a time-sink.
Which there was too much of already. There is a murder the first night at town, and the PCs have to solve it so the movie can happen. It the murder the plot? No, the plot is somebody trying to kill the town. Which, had the bad guys just done that and not tipped their hand with the random murder, would have succeeded and all the PCs would be dead. Literally the bad guys derailed their own plot, it wasn’t the quick-thinking work of the PCs.
So the first act has 14 enemies CR 0 or 1 and 5 enemies CR 2 or 3. A quarter of the fights need all the players, and still might get someone killed. Remember though- this act is framed as a murder mystery, not a combat slogfest. There are also 5 traps, and 4 bonus xp actions. Which all told comes out to 862 XP per player at the end of act 1. It takes 1,000 XP to level up. The party needs 4 more on-level encounters (CR 1) to hit next level. And they really need to level up, because in act 2 there are 8 CR 0s (no prob), 6 CR 2s (decent fights), 2 CR 3s (hard fights) and 2 CR 4s (really, really hard fights). I don’t count xp, so I had everybody level up to 2nd and gave one player a Ranger (also level 2) to give the party some more combat power. Even still, the last CR 4 fight they had to run away from because they were losing it badly. As level 1s? They wouldn’t have made it to the last fight.
Finally, as GM the writing was meh. It usually told me what I needed to know, though some spots are not laid out well. You have to own the Bestiary for some of the monsters, and flip to the back form some of the stat blocks, which I hate. Wish they had just added 5-10 pages and printed everything in the book, I was overcharged anyways. The story isn’t that interesting, the pacing is off (act 1 is too long and slow, act 2 too short), the characters are boring (I re-wrote some NPCs on the fly to make them more interesting to me, since I had to act them out). For the players the Cleric was mostly useless, the Wizard had somewhat better cantrips for damage-dealing, the Rogue had a ton of skills, but the skills don’t always come into play. The special “Exploration actions” didn’t get used, I forgot about them and the adventure didn’t remind me or help me incorporate them. So if this is your first time as a GM or PC, not very helpful.
3) Pathfinder 2e and Me
Why the hell did I pay $100 for this? That was just for the Core Rulebook and Bestiary, my player added another $23 for the adventure. And it’s mediocre at best. I cannot find anything in this game to convince me to play it instead of Pathfinder 1e or Dungeons and Dragons 5e. The few things I like (attribute picks, streamlined action economy, a few spells and spell mechanics) could all be house-ruled into either of those two games for little effort. I was excited when they said they were working on a second edition, even with the massive time and money sink we had in the dozen+ 1e books. Then when I saw the playtest materials I was doubtful. Having now made 4 characters and GMed 2/3rds an adventure, I don’t want to play it again. Maybe I’ll steal a few things for house rules, maybe I won’t bother, but this game is not getting any more money or time from me.
