Pathfinder 2

History
Warning: Satire ahead.

D&D 3e is a mechanical masterpiece, with many, many flaws. You won't find a game with a better overall structure. Period.

After D&D 4e came out to the resounding dismay of tabletop players everywhere, the notoriously unbalanced Paizo team upgraded their episodic fan-letter scribbles to a multi-installment fanfic saga. What they didn't straight-up paste with errors intact was most often derivative or worse, but was nonetheless a D&D 3e expansion, giving new options to the classic player base. I like it. I complain about it a lot, but only because the dark depths of horrible that Paizo can plunge to is a sharp juxtaposition against an otherwise top-tier D&D 3e.

When Mike Mearls, the Great Homogenizer, was miraculously found alive after his seppuku-worthy debacle, he was put in charge of D&D 5e, undoubtedly because the devil contract that got him the job had a minimum duration clause. Learning from his many mistakes, he promptly dug up Gygax's corpse and stitched a skinsuit for 4e, calling it "D&D Next" to point the authorities in the opposite direction from his rusty shovelware. I don't like D&D 5e, not because I think it's bad, but because it's not for me. I'm a D&D player. The marketing department wrote me and everyone like me off as already ensnared, and targeted everyone who didn't play D&D to increase the reach of their money-sucking probosces. It's a fine game. It has the widest target audience it can. The two aren't exclusive. The only thing that bugs me is how ubiquitous it's become, siphoning away desperate 3e players with the fast & easy option so it's harder than ever to find a 3e group, creating an abuse cycle.

Meanwhile, Paizo wanted to make a real game, not an expansion. After copy-pasting D&D 3e into Pathfinder explicitly to give D&D 3e players more content outside the 4e train wreck, they dubbed their new standalone "Pathfinder 2" and copy-pasted D&D 4e mechanics into a 3e skinsuit, abandoning what few improvements they made in Pathfinder 1. The ingenuity is astounding.

Training
For every class, save, skill, weapon tier, armor tier, and magic tradition, you can be untrained, trained, expert, master, or legendary. Each level of training is hard-locked behind arbitrary levels, grants a different bonus, and except for untrained they all add your character level. Additionally, you need to meet training prerequisites not just for taking feats, but for different actions within each skill itself. The whole system is more complicated yet less granular than simple flipping goddam skill points, with all the problems of binary proficiency cranked up to 11.

If a creature is 2 levels higher than you, it automatically gets +2 to everything it does to you and against everything you do to it, as well as more health and damage. This puts them at 271% to 429% of your power (the proportional health difference is lessened at high levels), without accounting for class features, feats, stat increases, or anything beyond basic weapons and armor.

Easy enemies boring because they pose no threat. Tough enemies are boring because you whiff nearly everything. There's a very small window of fun in an ocean of missed opportunity. Do you think interesting non-combat encounters are going to save you? Thanks to the uniform proficiency bonus, characters cannot even anything they weren't already built for. Nobody built a charisma-based character trained in bluff and diplomacy? Meaningful social challenges aren't on the table, because the DCs are balanced for +14 modifiers when you're rolling at +0.

Combat is Ephemeral
In a failed attempt to stave off the "party healer" meta, Pathfinder 2 medicine checks can heal 2d8 hit points per hour per person. Also, several classes can get healing spells on 10-minute cooldowns. Also, healing potions cost 3 gold. Parties can fully heal between every encounter quite easily, making multiple-encounter days far less troublesome.

Oh, but the spell slots! Don't worry, cantrips get automatically heightened to murder the dreams any martial character had of being relevant once the mana well dried up; cantrips also add the caster's casting stat to damage, just to piss on the tombstone that says "RIP Strength".

Everything Sucks
Want to multiclass? There's dedication feats. Instead of your normal class feature at level 2, you can pick up all the worst aspects of a chosen class with none of the benefits, like a druid's aversion to armor, or a paladin's code of conduct. If you give up all your class class features between levels 1 and 8, you can gain two whole spell slots!

Want to take 10? There's a feat that lets you do that for a chosen skill, except it's 10 + your training; no items, no spells, not even your ability modifier.

Want to disrupt a wizard's spell? Fighters get attacks of opportunity, and everyone gets to move before and after their 5ft step.

Want to leap heroically from balconies? Instead of rolling 1d6 per 10ft and risking a 6, you only take 5 per 10ft!

Want to take feats that mold your character into a unique individual with their own personal talents? Many feats offer new ways to use skills everyone has, like intimidating without using a language! One of the best feats lets you auto-succeed at foraging for food in the wild; you only need to spend one silly feat, instead of 2 whole skill points like in Pathfinder 1.

Want magic items that improve your stats and make you better at the things you do? A level 14 character has access to the equivalent of Boots of Striding and Springing, and a level 17 character can get a Headband of Intellect +2!

The Incapacitation Trait
This needed its own entry apart from "Everything Sucks", because it sucks so hard and in so many ways it puts the rest to shame.

The descriptive text of the trait basically reads "this effect is good, which isn't allowed, so we made it bad". If the target is a higher level than you, or more than twice your spell's level, your effect is downgraded 1 step. Them passing a save means critical success, failure becomes success, and rolling a 1 gives them a normal failure.

Mechanical Mayhem: Even freakin' Charm is an incapacitation effect, which already gives +4 to the save if used in combat, and ends if combat starts. Charm is perhaps the most unusable spell because it can destroy situations where you really can't fight the target, and they slapped Incapacitation on it so you can't even attempt it on half the targets you don't want to fight. As you level up, you'd even need to spend higher-level spell slots on it just to affect same-level targets.

Objectively Obtuse: This trait directly nails "character level" to extremely impactful in-world effects, without even using ability scores or training as padding. If someone is a higher level than you, some of your effects are nigh-unusable against them, full stop. You can now find a character's level in-world through experimentation, making it a concrete value like the acceleration of Earth's gravity.

Practically Appalling: Players shouldn't be expected to waste their time on futile efforts just because they don't know their target is 1 level higher than them. Unlike more variable values like armor class, this binary state destroys a player's agency with hidden information and punishes them for ever deigning to ever use an Incapacitation effect on exactly the type of target it would be relevant on.

Divisively Detrimental: Due to all of this, players are incentivized to metagame, whether in avoiding Incapacitation effects their character would have wanted to learn, or using player knowledge to avoid high-level targets with them... which is completely understandable! Against a fire elemental, is the wizard going to be tossing Scorching Rays? This mechanic is the same, only for the player instead of the character, because the character should never be aware of a character's level as an objective measure, but a player should never be expected to waste time and resources on something they don't want to do. And so, metagaming becomes necessary as a way to ignore a rule that makes the game mechanics, gameplay, roleplay, and player experience worse.

Everything is Actions
Like D&D 4e's list of several thousand class abilities, Pathfinder 2 applied that concept to both class features and magic items. Nearly every fighter feat is its own action, incompatible with any other, so instead of getting better at anything you only get more and more and more and more options for how you can spend each individual turn, slowing the game to a crawl unless you've memorized all 20 actions you can take by level 4. Even the Heavyload Belt equivalent takes two actions to use, so you only move at 1/3 speed while hauling 2.5x your load instead of passively carrying 3x around no sweat.

I know options are power, but when your only power comes from options, you have a game where 90% of the content is unusable and decision paralysis hits psychotic levels.

Magic is Redundant
In D&D lore, creatures with spell-like abilities (and their sorcerous offspring) are the original arcane casters. Wizards, bards, warlocks, and every other creature tapping into the ambient magic of the universe (the Weave) mimic them, through different traditions learned in different ways. Clerics ask these arcane creatures for spell effects; divine magic is simply any spell channeled through you rather than coming from you. Druids are literally just clerics of nature gods; one canonical druid deity even allows metal armor. In short, "arcane" and "divine" are "from you" and "not from you", covering every magical possibility. Psionics is basically a brand of spell-like ability, just not using Vancian magic mechanics.

In Pathfinder 1, they introduced "occult" magic and "psychic" magic. Psychic magic is like psionics, except Vancian again. Occult magic is like arcane, except it prioritized being special over being versatile. Both heavily rely on mind-based effects, because arcane covered everything physically possible pretty well and each wanted to be different... in the same way.

In Pathfinder 2, they dropped psychic magic as superfluous but kept occult, adding "primal" to round out the symmetry of two arcane traditions and two divine traditions with no other reason to exist except to homogenize every class into four spell lists. That's right; there are only four spell lists, each overlapping heavily with the others, with arcane on top and its edgy counterpart on bottom. But don't worry about uniqueness; nearly every class gets a handful of focus spells that are like worse cantrips on cooldowns 100x longer.

The End Result
One of the many things Pathfinder 2 copied from D&D 4e is that both D&D 3e and D&D 5e are better and more fun. One of the things copied from Pathfinder 1 is that everything not pasted or derivative is worse.

If you're going to use a d20 to roleplay, play D&D 3e. If you want smoother mechanics and a lot more content, add the Pathfinder 1 3rd-party rules. If you wanna hit things in fantasy land and don't care about depth in any sense of the word, play D&D 5e.

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