While I’ve been packing, most of my free time (aka, my breaks) has gone towards learning Pathfinder Scond Edition since I’ve joined a group as a player. We had a session 0 two weekends ago, which accounted for most of my Saturday breaks during my main packing weekend, and our session 1 is this upcoming Sunday. To be honest, learning PF2E has been more mentally draining than packing has. Not even dealing with the “box of things I don’t want to think about” was as draining as my regular dives into the incredibly dense rulebook and mechanics of the system. It is a very complex game full of proper nouns, what feels like an overwhelming number of character creation options, and an overlycomplex path from character ideation to final creation. I understand that this is probably not as true as it feels right now, since I’m learning the system as I’m trying to get ready to play it (and I remember just how incredibly obtuse and confusing learning to build characters in 3.5 and Pathfinder First Edition was back when I first played in 2010), but it is still more of a headache than I expected.

The entire system seems to have embraced every player who has ever complained that Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition didn’t have enough options, since I have now spent three hours mulling over all of my options for just the basic information of my character, like ancestry, heritage, background, and class. Once all those are picked, I’ve got to pick extra feats to tweak my character, an incredible number of skill proficiencies since I’m planning to play a Rogue (as of writing this, at least), potentially a multiclass archetype feat since I’m thinking of playing an Elf who gets one of those as part of their heritage, and then all the other more mundant things like any potential spells, gear, and so on. Mix in not knowing the mechanics well enough to understand the repercussions of all my attribute allocations (a system built on adding bonuses to a base score rather than on rolling them, which is great for probably everyone but me who has a knack for rolling high numbers on any dice ever) and I feel like my brain is melting every time I stop thinking about packing long enough to track down my notes on character creation.

Most the feeling of being overwhelmed will fade as I make decisions and come to understand the various proper nouns of the system. After all, most spellcasting is probably the same [editors note: it is not], I just need to figure out how it differs enough that I can make a choice between the various types should I want to dabble in it. That, plus all the other feats, makes the system incredibly robust when it comes to creating unique, build-forward characters. I tend to stick with broad strokes in the other games I’ve played so I can narrow down their life experiences as I play them. PF2E ties a lot of mechanical benefits to your character’s life experiences, though, and the feats you pick tend to show quite a bit of who your character is since they reflect an amount of time your character spent acquiring a skill. That, plus the greater importance placed on positive numerical bonuses has me worried about picking a less useful option for flavor. The general crunch of the system seems to imply that a certain degree of min-maxing is required if you want to be an effective character and everything I’ve looked up online seems to support that.

It’s entirely possible I’ve gotten an incorrect read on the system. I’m aware, after all, that most people talking on the forums I tend to look at are power gamers, trying to eke every advantage out of their play experience that they can find. It is possible that this sense of the game is just a reflection of those influences rather than the mechanical underpinnings of the game. I, unfortunately, will not have the time to figure this out before my first session since I’m going to be busy moving, settling in to my new apartment, and resting beween now (writing this on May 30th) and our first session on June 11th. The GM has already told us that he’s not going to be punishing and that we’re going to do a “get a feel for the game” style dungeon first, so I’ll be able to figure it out before I have to commit to a character for an entire campaign. Who knows, maybe we’ll all wind up playing something entirely different once we get through this early dungeon. All of us, GM and players alike, are new to PF2E, so at least we’ll be learning together (most of the group has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games for a few decades now, by the sound of things, so I believe in our ability to figure it out eventually).

All that said, there is a degree of comfort to be found in this level of mechanical specification. I learned to play in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and Pathfinder, after all, so this level of crunch is familiar. Those games lauded themselves as having rules for everything and they basically did. It could get in the way, sometimes, since you needed to find wherever the table containing the information you needed was hidden so you knew whatever arbitrary numbers applied. That’s less of an issue in this day and age, though, since you can just search keywords in any number of online databases to find the rules you need and the in-book glossaries are much more thorough in the PF2E book than they ever were in any of the 3.5 or PF1E books were.

I don’t know if I’m going to enjoy this, though. The level of grind required to stay on top of mechanical changes and new rules is pretty high. I moved away from crunchier games for a reason, after all, and I kind of enjoy being able to make things up and play within a narrative space rather than a strictly mechanical one. Only time will tell, of course, and I’m trying to avoid getting too wrapped up in my head about this, but I can definitely feel my current burnout and weariness weighing heavily on me after splitting my attention between this blog post and character creation research during breaks at work today. If it stays this taxing, I don’t think I’ll last very long. If it stays even half this taxing, I probably won’t be able to cut it in the long-term. Hopefully it gets massively easier once I understand the system and have a character made.