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.

I will grant that the rulebooks do a good job of declaring that capitalized words have a specific meaning, sometimes further altered by the context in which you encounter them. However, there is no list anywhere in the books or websites that I’ve found to tell me what all the terms are or what they mean. The only reason I’ve been able to figure stuff out is because I’ve been leaning heavily on the index in the back of the physical books I bought. Everyone else has been searching a variety of online sources, which has no ability to differentiate between capitalized and uncapitalized versions of a word. Throw in a few unspoken rules that I’m not certain are actually applicable or if it’s just me trying to find meaning where there is none, and this text sometimes feels outright hostile to anyone without honed reading comprehension skills or a history in languages. A number of times I’ve had to read through something several times to figure out what it means while everyone else discussed and argued about which interpretation of the text was correct, only for me to figure out none of them were, voice my opinion, and then give up because we were still mid-session and I was tired.

It sometimes feels like the game will present rules without a necessary piece of context. Sure, that context is sometimes provided in a tangential section later on, but sometimes it is so far removed that you could easily never find it or connect the two thinsgs. A great example is the Rogue’s Surprise Attack feature, that mentions a benefit Rogues gain if they roll two specific skills for their combat initiative, but you are not told how initiative works or why you might roll any skill at all for initiatve until chapter 9, and there’s not even a note on the page for the Rogue feature that says you can learn more about initative later in the book. Sure, it makes sense that you could only roll your Stealth skill for initiative if you were being stealthy prior to combat, but there are a lot of conceivable ways you might use a Deception skill to roll for initiative and only in chapter 9, six chapters and half the book later, is it explained that your Deception skill is used for combat that evolves out of social encounters. I assumed it was supposed to represent your character yelling something along the lines of “hey, look! A distraction!” and then jumping forward to stab someone. Only three weeks and six chapters later did it make sense to me why one of the skills felt incredibly situational while the other did not. They were both incredibly situational, there was just no explanation that they were until much later.

Other notable misunderstandings include how a lot of spells work, since it feels almost like they tried to eliminate as many words as possible from the book, often to the detriment of clarity. One such event was when the bard was using a cantrip. Part of the misunderstanding was that the player hadn’t read through the entire description and misrepresented it to the group. After that, there was a lot of discussion about the benefits of it and how to activate them. While it was possible to read the text indicating that you could do something with the spell immediately, it seemed to me that you had to spend a part of your turn to gain it’s benefit and that you had to spend that part of your turn on just this one thing to do so. The GM (whose opinion was more in-line with the rest of the players) eventually ruled that as long as you performed an action with the right tags, you got the benefit of the spell since it would be pretty much useless if it worked any other way. As it eventually turned out, when I managed to find someone asking the same question I had in an online forum, pretty much everyone who seemed to know how the game works opined that the spell is useless.

Normally I’d hedge and say something about how my expectations and the greatest part of my experience are based on the monolith that is Dungeons and Dragons, so maybe I’m looking for more than the much smaller Paizo company (the creators of Pathfinder) can give. However, I’ve played a bunch of games produced by much smaller companies (or even individuals) and while they definitely haven’t had the complexity that Pathfinder 2E was shooting for, they are all so much more precise and specific in their text. With the exception of 1-page RPGs, anyway, but most of those get made in a single day and don’t stick around for very long unless they’re super popular (Honey Heist, for example) at which point they usually get an expansion or rewrite to clarify some things. Honestly, it just feels sloppy for something so interested in complexity and customization to lack specificity. I still get headaches after every game since it takes more focus to comprehend rules I’m not yet familiar with than to solve the various puzzles of the adventure we’re playing. I solved all of those in a minute or less, even if it took me five minutes to get the rest of the party to listen to me (I’m playing an intelligence-based character, so there’s in-game precedent for my character to figure exerything out) and just working through the one thing about the bard spell took twenty minutes for us to all resolve and move on with the player’s turn.

Regardless of how things turn out with the group (at this point, most of my frustrations have to do with group dynamics and stuff that is possibly fixed by giving us time to adjust), I’m not sure I’m super interested in playing such a litigious and non-specific game. I feel like every rules discussion is one step away from becoming a court case and that’s not a life I’m particularly interested in living. I get that some people enjoy litigiousness and some people enjoy complex, detailed rules, but I’m not one of them. It was all I knew for a long time, but now that I’ve tasted something else, I’m not sure I’m prepared to give up the freedom and relaxed gaming I’ve come to enjoy. We’ll see if I can hold on long enough that rules issues stop coming up, but I’m really not hopeful at this point. I don’t really like coming out of a tabletop gaming session with a headache, even if parts of the reason I have a headache were kinda fun.