Thread by @Delafina777

Well, while hanging out having cocktails with some other people who are not at Gen Con, we decided to take a look at Pathfinder 2e.

...choices were made.

So this thing's been in development for what, four years now? Possibly more? I've been gone from Paizo for two, and I think it had been in the works for at least two year while I was there. Concepting started before work on Starfinder.

Starfinder, ironically, was intended to be sort of a stalking horse so that there would be a major release at Gen Con while the main work on 2e was happening, and to dismiss suspicions that another edition was in the works.

What that meant in reality was that Starfinder got a more experienced team and ended up becoming a more polished product.

Obviously, there were hopes that it would be a success, be able to support its own continuing product lines, and so on, but at the end of the day its purpose was to hide the fact that 2e was in development.

Shades of ArenaNet here--I keep ending up at companies trying to hide the fact that a major product is in development, and requiring the same output on the old product while continually draining resources away from it instead of hiring up to where they need to be.

So, with 5e out there doing well, Paizo had two realistic options to compete:

-challenge 5e on its own turf--that is, attempt to create a system that was MORE elegant and had a lower barrier to entry
-go the opposite route and go system-heavier, more simulationist, etc.

oops got a call--bbiab

As I kept saying while I was there, not that anyone in charge listened: the thing that might kill Paizo quickly isn't anything WOTC does. It's Blizzard or Marvel deciding to do a very easy, low-barrier-to-entry, non-grognard-y RPG.

But anyway, those were the two options, at least for significant change--be easier to pick up and play than 5e, or double-down on the complexity and simulationist aspect and go full decker-in-Shadowrun.

There was a third option, of course.

And that was to take a page from the Call of Cthulhu playbook: treat "new edition" like "textbook edition." Evolution rather than revolution: fix a few things, polish the whole thing a bit better, release, and do it more frequently.

And given that Pathfinder exists largely because it initially went for an audience that doesn't like change, that would have likely been the safest option.

Instead, after 4 years of work, what they put out was something that looks a lot like it did while I was still there: a sort of patchwork that appears to be trying to split the difference between what 5e is and what PF1 is. Except, not in any sort of blended way.

I like the backgrounds/heritages thing. The magic system, on the other hand. Oof. It was already baroque in 1e. It's even more baroque now. Why stick with two parallel types of spellcasting (arcane/divine) when you can have four (add occult/primal)?

The term I kept hearing when I was there (and afterward) from employees who were playtesting was that the system felt punitive.

Which is, y'know, what you want in a *game* that's all about playing to fantasies of empowerment.

The organization is... something else. I think it was somewhere in the 400s (out of 600-some pages) that we finally got instructions on, y'know, how to play the game?

Like, I dunno, has anyone with any say over the book's structure so much as cracked open a book on UX? Or, hell, even read an ARTICLE on it?

Looked at a fucking heatmap of where people's eyes go first on page?

Like, take a look at the character sheet. Tell me where your eyes go.

(Mine bounced all over for an excruciatingly long time before finally ending up on... the AC box.)

Also, have they ever opened up a spreadsheet!? Number columns in tables are *centered* instead of right-justified, but I mean, why do numbers the way people have been doing them for like, a millennium, because it's easier to read

like this entire thing is just a usability nightmare

I mean, actually going back to the drawing board of how these sort of books are designed and coming up with something innovative there...

...something that would mean that if you picked this book up off a shelf or table and flipped through it, you'd have a macro sense already of how it's played, like if you pick up ANY OTHER SORT OF INSTRUCTION BOOK...

...would have been, y'know, an innovation that might have made this thing able to compete successfully with 5e. The fact that RPG rulebook organization is so, just, BAD drove me nuts the entire time I was in TTRPGs.

Anyway, I have no idea who the target audience is for this book, other than the core-iest core of Paizo loyalists.

I can't imagine that if you hadn't played either, and you saw this and the 5e player's handbook on a shelf or table, that this would be the one you pick up.

And assuming that you pick up and skim through both of them, I can't imagine that this would be the one you take home.

And assuming that you've been playing 3.5 or PF1e for a while and want to move on to a new edition, and take a look at both this and 5e, I can't imagine you choosing this.

The entire system, as described, just feels disjointed. The book doesn't have current shelf appeal. The art feels... old, but not in a nostalgic 80s or 90s way. Just like, c. 2000.

(and let's not even get into the bestiary, which seems to have taken Gears of War 3's "but what if everything was brown" aesthetic as a guideline)

I've never wanted, as a thought experiment, to give an RPG book to a non-RPG designer and UX team and say, "hey, make it look like this was designed by Apple" so much. And then ramp it back from there, but like, START there.

and like the H1 level is a serif font which I actually like--it's very easy to skim the page and see where new sections start--but the H2 level is a DIFFERENT font and a sans serif one, and H3 is back to (I think?) the first serif font but smaller...?

*sobs*

like I haven't even been at the company for 2 years and I still feel like I should go make atonement offerings at Tufte's grave

anyway flipped through it for like an hour (shout-out to the "see page (XXX)" that literally still says "XXX") then realized there wasn't enough booze in the world to justify spending more time in this trashfire and moved on