I’ve now played two sessions of Pathfinder Second Edition with this new group of people and I’ll have to say that, so far, I’m not impressed. The group is off to a bit of a rocky start, most of which can probably be explained away by varying levels of comfort with the game system we’re playing, most folks being new to the virtual tabletop we’re using, and the as-yet unsettled group dynamics we’re all seeing. I’m also not entirely sold on Pathfinder 2E yet. There’s plenty of crunch and a ton of customization, but it’s been incredibly difficult to adapt to the rules and the way things are explained in the various texts of the game. The only reason I’m doing better than the other players and the GM (at least, as far as I can tell), is because I’ve made a habit of studying linguistic patterns in writing and language (not to mention that I studied literature in college and am good at interpreting language). I write a lot and I do my best to be aware of how Authorial Voice influences writing, which translates pretty neatly to understand the patterns of specific types of texts. Most games I’ve played were written in a way that made it as easy as possible to understand them, so I’ve rarely connected this skill to my ability to read and understand a tabletop game. Pathfinder, however, was not written to be easily understood. It has all the exacting lexiconical precision of a legal document but without the helpful definition of terms section.