I have enough to say about Gen Con that I’ve decided to break it up into multiple posts. I already posted about Iron GM, only because I had a lot I needed to get down while it was swirling in my head. This first post is about the Pathfinder Second Edition Playtest, which debuted on Thursday.

Erika and I were scheduled to do two games of the Pathfinder 2E Playtest, but our first was on Thursday afternoon, and we missed it because I had to pick up my badge at Will Call, which involved standing in line for about an hour. We still did a demo in the exhibitors hall on Thursday afternoon, and I picked up the rulebook in paperback form, deciding against the more expensive but fancier hardcover or leather-bound editions.

I felt I had a decent enough idea of the way the game works to try running the first playtest adventure for Erika and my friends from Skybound Games, Ben and Ares. We gave it a whirl on Friday night, spending about half the time stumbling through character creation and half the time playing. We didn’t finish the adventure, but still got the game on its feet enough to get a good sense of it.

Erika and I played a full session on Sunday morning in the giant Pathfinder room, the Sagamore Ballroom at the convention center, with one of their volunteer GMs, the second session we had signed up for. This GM told us that it was his eighth time running that adventure that weekend, and I’m not sure how that’s possible, given that each session was scheduled for five hours.

The adventure was pretty well crafted with a mix of combat, skill challenges, story development, and roleplaying. The system felt pretty effortless, and I didn’t get any of the fatigue from Pathfinder 1E and D&D 3.5 of tracking endless modifiers. It’s possible that the character builds were simpler though, and possibly more complicated spell selections would have made it just as tricky.

There were three players at the table beside Erika and myself, one of whom, named Dan, we both agreed we did not like very much at all. He always seemed to be showing off or just being a smug little bastard. He also seemed pretty upset when I clarified a rule that didn’t go in his favor. The GM, for his part, expressed his appreciation that I chimed in when I knew a rule or looked it up that he didn’t know off-hand, because I had already been thumbing through the rulebook a bit by then. Dan’s principle offense is probably only that his playstyle—tactical and optimizing at the expense of story—doesn’t match well with my own, which I won’t genuinely hold against him, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy just a little bit nerfing him.

Overall, I’d love to try out the Pathfinder 2E Playtest some more. It scratches that itch of endlessly poring through the books looking for different ways to build your character. Oh, what if I took this ancestry and combined it with this class feat? That would be fun! It seems like the kind of game where there’s always more there in the rules for you to discover.

Likes

• Unification of actions: Three actions and one reaction per round, which you can use in all kinds of ways.
• Building characters through feats: Allows so many choices for how to build your character. This was what I always loved about human fighters in Pathfinder 1E/D&D 3.5.
• Rules for shields: You have to have your shield raised to get any benefit, and if you want to increase that benefit, you can block an attack with your shield, but it damages the shield and potentially destroys it. I love this, because shields do get damaged and destroyed in real combat.
• Degrees of success and failure: Critical successes and critical failures are no longer achieved only (and always) when you roll a natural 20 or natural 1, respectively. Sparing the details, they are more common now, and so more is built into them, with many actions having different outcomes when you critically succeed or fail.

Dislike

• Difficult for new players: If you’re trying to introduce your non-gamer friend to your hobby, this is a tough sell. The game has a steep learning curve, just as with 1E Pathfinder and D&D 3.5.
• Rules organization: Some things are hard to find in the rulebook. I’m sure they’ll do some reorganization and clarification of the rules in the final version, but on Sunday morning, figuring out how to use dispel magic was very difficult.

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Next post will be about my disappointing experience with Dungeon World at Gen Con.