As I’ve continued to learn how to play Pathfinder Second Edition, partly because I already bought the book and partly out of a dogged desire to find the fun in a system that some of my friends enjoy immensely, I’ve begun to slowly see the patterns and rules underpinning it. I know I’m fairly late to the game, especially with the revised or remastered version of PF2e coming out sometime soon (maybe later this year, if what I saw was correct?), but I can see why people like it. Systems within system. Slowly stacking benefits as your character gains levels, eventually giving you massive numbers for everything you do and making you incredibly capable of some absolutely devastating actions. When the Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons said “what if we kept all the numbers within an expected range so that very little is impossible if you’re lucky,” PF2e said “What if everyone got absolutely banana pants numbers and you could eventually do a whole bunch of stuff super well if you built your character right, but only a few things at a time because there have to be SOME limits?”

To be entirely fair, earlier versions of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder asked the same question that PF2e does, but they were all about multipliers and giving yourself an increasingly ridiculous ability to do so much stuff more in the same six-seconds you’ve used during every turn since the beginning of the game. PF2e, however, keeps you restricted to the same action economy for the entire duration of the game and while you might be able to blink out of existence with a stealth check at twentieth level thanks to all your feats, you still have to spend the same number of actions doing it that you used to hide behind a pillar at level one. The big difference I’m noticing is that, especially as a rogue, all of the numbers feel like they’re going up very quickly. If I roll my initiative using stealth (which I should do pretty much every time) with the level five character I made for a game last weekend, I’ll have a bonus of fifteen to my roll. I will probably go pretty early in the turn order. Also, my attacks and most of my main skills have a bonus of thirteen added to them, which is still pretty high even if its not fifteen. All of which is offset by the fact that defenses work much the same way. Sure, attack and skill numbers rise faster than defense numbers, but they will also rise eventually.

Most of the other characters will have similarly high numbers, though few will be as high as mine. Almost everything gets bigger and bigger bonuses to pretty much everything else as the game advances and most of the game’s maximization comes in the form of finding ways to get your numbers to go up faster or how to use your best numbers in cases when you’d be forced to use less powerful ones. I understand why people like this, since big numbers are tons of fun, but it feels kind of pointless to put so much mechanical work into making big numbers only to still have more or less the same chance of succeeding at the kinds of tasks you’ll want to undertake as you level up. Sure, you’ll be able to do the basic stuff better than ever, but the basic stuff stops really happening as you level up. Or at least it used to in the other big-number games I played. It is entirely possible that the three action system of PF2e will keep players performing the same basic actions even as they level up and only their foes will be increasingly difficult. I haven’t really looked that deeply into what higher-level PF2e gameplay looks like, since I’m still working on understanding the lower-level stuff. There’s time enough for that eventually.

Still, it’s weird to try to approach this game in the way that I approached Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and PF1e, of finding my niche(s) and just focusing on that to the exclusion of all else. In PF2e, you can definitely build more broadly than that and are encouraged to do so by the pacing of the mechanical advancement available to you. Sure, you can do a lot of stuff at the early levels, but it is really the slow stacking of benefits over time that really gets you into the ridiculously big numbers. PF2e is a large, square-based pyarmid while PF1e and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was a series of spires. Honestly, PF2e is clearly the better system for the kind of mechanical play they’re encouraging, but it is still pretty overwhelming considering the fact that making a mistake during the early layers of your build is going to have some pretty nasty repercussions later on unless you’ve got a kind GM or spend downtime retraining things. There’s just so much to fill in on the ealy layers. It is exhausting. The higher levels get easier since you’re constantly narrowing down your build options and the wealth of tools available for Pathfinder Second Edition make it easy to find and implement that stuff. I mean, Pathbuilder2e.com is literally the only reason I’ve been able to make it this far with building my characters. It just supplies me with the available options and shutters everything else down below where I can find it if I want it but where it will not get in the way of me picking what is actually available to me based on my current abilities.

As exhausting as it is, though, it is still pretty satisfying. I might not stick with this character in the longer term, since the party I joined already has a rogue, but it was definitely an interesting and educational process, putting them together. I learned a lot about the game as I dove deeper into leveling up and it will hopefully be easier to build other characters in the future. We’ll have to see, though. I’ve yet to actually do that so maybe I’m just making assumptions based on my experiences with other games and actually building a character that uses different mechanics as their core will be an entirely new and still-exhausting process in Pf2e. Only time will tell, but I’m willing to give it a chance before I make up my mind. It definitely helps that playing the game with a more competent group of people that I get along with better made a huge difference for me. I enjoyed this experience a lot more, even if I find the idea of making further tweaks to my character incredibly daunting.