Everytime Pathfinder seems to have a cool idea, they scare themselves out of doing something cool with it

    Pathfinder design is designed to make things take actions, take longer, and take time. Every action is met with a consequence. Every reward is limited, and difficult to abuse. Every decision is mitigated, limited edition, and useless unless perfect. It also seems to want to "realistically" spend your time, by making some unrealistic demands of your time.

    Which comes across my latest learning block of character building. Which is Talismans. Talismans in PF2e are single use, items that attach to specific gear and have special boosts to your different skill rolls and attacks. Its like a little safety vest in some cases, or like a glow stick. You get the effect, it gets used up right away or it lasts for a short burst (usually a single fight or event) and then you need to not only put a new one on, you have to take equal time taking the old one off, or else the whole thing becomes muted.

    There are so many other ways to run this to make it more fun, more valuable to players and without even needing to let it be abused. Thing is, that what I'm about to say, can be done for 10 extra minutes and more in game gold. Just let a player spend 10 minutes "recharging" the thing. Maybe as some sort of "focus" procedure, maybe not. Either way, it allows you to pick one up, and just keep using it. It gives great value to the Talisman archetypes and classes, and makes getting two a day that become inert at night much more valuable and not feel like a waste of a feature.

    I consistently feel like Pathfinder 2 is afraid of power. Its afraid of ease of use. It consistently asks me as a player, to suffer for my fun. And that makes it hard to want to build or play the game. Which is hard to feel, when so many GOOD ideas are included alongside these terrible wastes of energy and time. So much good design and effort is paired up so poorly. 

    And I know they have Runes for things that are a much more permanent effect, but this temporary effect didn't have to be a money sink and time sink all in one that also means that the feats for getting them also feel like so much less, when the feat also only gives you talismans of half your level, which is fine at level 2 and way less powerful at higher levels.

    Suddenly though, it makes sense why at level 16 they are willing to let you have... 6 free half level talismans per day for free....which is 600gp for free per day. Or you can also spend 1800gp to get one, that ... helps you confuse a monster that grabs you, once. Maybe for 1 round or less, maybe for 1 minute. That's not bad, but maybe its because Pathfinder 2e actually has a plan on how to give you money, and pays you well, and doesn't have the same issues with money spending that D&D5e has.

    Maybe that's the key. Because they plan for you to have money to spend, so that you can have a stack of 5 1800gp single use talismans. This is why I want to learn more, because its obvious the design is there for a reason. In 5e this is terrible design. But in a game that plans around your gold income as a metric for the functionality of items, maybe that is a lesson to learn. So what is your income like in Pathfinder vs D&D? Does anyone look into that at all?

Trying to Learn Pathfinder 2e

    Over the last few years, as I've been working on Anarchy Realms, I've tried learning several other TTRPGs. I don't want to be talking out my ass about things and then not have experienced different games. But all TTRPGs come with a difficulty to establish. As in, the group is already mid campaign in a D&D 5e game. There already are other groups doing that game (but they are mostly full and play on the same days as your game). There are barriers, and limitations to trying out a game.

    So  when I started learning Pathfinder 2e, I started with online videos. And my goodness are the PF2e creators passionate about their game! Look at this cool thing! This is an awesome thing! Rank this! Talk about that! Mix and match here!

    D&D 5e content creators are always, "Hasbro has doomed the game! WotC is using AI for everything including the DM, which is you! You are now AI!" etc, etc, etc. So there's a lot of attraction TO pathfinder in that way. Not only that, there are certain slices of the game where they REALLY show how much love they put into the game. With design ideas and detailed expansion of concepts.

    But as I learned more, and the more I looked into the math, the more .... worried I got. But hey, I haven't played the game yet, and some of these ideas, rock really hard when used in 5e. So I'm gonna borrow column A and B, leave C and just maybe come back later for the D. Anyways, that is to say, I took what felt good and I experimented. I experimented with a 10 over to critically hit system, but in 5e it ... over power and over guarantees certain things. I tried the Doom condition as a curse (that both high level fear applies and just existing near a powerful elite monster can create). I even converted backgrounds into a ersatz archetype system.

    In the end, some things worked, and somethings didn't but it made me want to explore Pathfinder 2e even more. So, as I started to get ready to do character creation in Anarchy Realms, where some of the steps felt similar to how I had read the character creation for PF2e was, I decided to go to Pathbuilder, and build a character.

    Now this was my first deep dive, and making a level 1 character is EASY, FUN, and consistently gave me results I was excited to explore. But then I made the mistake of trying to plan the character. I tried to level up. And that's where all my glittery eyed optimism for Pathfinder started to fall apart. When I started to actually dig and brush away the sand of this beautiful dinosaur bone, I realized that what I was coming across was coprolite.

    So, first of all, the class that caught my eye was the Thaumaturge. In the end its not perfectly what I wanted, but it was super close to perfect (to be fair, there's no single class in d&d that is perfectly what I want, but between the broadness of d&d and multiclassing, I can usually get the character done).

    So first things first. I build characters to be a pun, reference or joke. For example, making an Orc Pirate Sea Druid for a forest campaign. Too niche? How about designing a Wild Magic Sorcerer named Kows M Waldo (Chaos Emerald) who uses Chaos Control to create wild magic surges. The game is taken seriously. The actions are done to be included with the group. But the character is designed to be a joke. If I go for funny, I'll end up with serious.

     So I read through some things, and I saw that the Thaumaturge had the ability to fly on their implement, and use a whip and bell and I could choose to play a Minotaur (love Minotaurs). So here I am designing flying bullshit and I get feats (skill feats, general feats, class feats etc) all the time! So many decisions! But, with few exceptions, the decisions don't feel good. Not only that, but without reading the books and referencing things, its hard to see that a decision I'm planning at level 1 or 2 or 6 suddenly locks me out of something. How I have to pick what will be a legendary skill for me, even if my design wants both. But that's fine, cause I believe that a game is a series of interesting decisions, and so planning this level up, is itself a game, and part of the game.

     But that's the thing. Most of the time, my decisions weren't interesting. And if I didn't get Acrobatics, or reach Master in a skill on time, I don't get to actually do some of the interesting things there are. Furthermore, so many skills are so limited, that they are boring. Then you start getting your class feats, but not all the class feats are fun, but some feel "essential" to how the class to work. But then you don't get them all, so you start adding archetypes to find that hole your character is missing, but that also gets complicated between all the options. But again, they aren't "good" options. They are slanted this way and that, compared to the other option. So, I can't just pick what I want. Sometimes, I have multi level gaps of useless feats, that don't do anything, may never come up, or should have just been a thing, cause why is this minor feature a feat?

    While in D&D5e, once I level up a class, all the necessary features get added, and my decision is in feats and multiclassing. So I have to decide if getting my ability score up is worth not getting some feats, and in many cases, with the all feats now having an ability score improvement with them, the decision is often easier to pick the feats. As for multiclassing, because of how the game gives you all your class features at level up, you can easily split focus and even plan around good cut off points.

    Pathfinder player choices are instead leaning more towards gritty realism, incremental improvements, and quirky funny choices, that aren't quirky or funny. Every increment and edge helps because the game is designed to keep you at a 50% hit rate (if you don't upgrade your stuff, upgrading and magic items are vital to pf2e).  Magic items in d&d5e are all, boosts and fun. You don't NEED them for a build to work, or to have fun.

    I kept not having fun after the first level of making characters in Pathfinder 2e. But this experiment is still ongoing. I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out there.