After many months of discussion via the comments on Facebook posts and, eventually, in Facebook chat itself, I got to play a game with the person who convinced me to give Pathfinder 2nd Edition a shot beyond the unfortunate group I’d begun playing it with. Which isn’t to minimize the work another friend did, but they just fell short of a fully compelling argument. The other friend, though, managed to convince me that I should keep trying by absolutely nailing why I was struggling to understand the game system without me even knowing that I was having one specific problem (well, one problem that functioned as the root of all my other problems). So, when she offered to run a game for me, to help show me why she loved Pathfinder 2e as much as she did, I made a promise to myself that I’d find a way to make the scheduling side of it work. Plus, I’d never gotten to play a game with her before this and tabletop games was most of what we talked about online. I wanted to meet some new people, play some new games, and try to expand my horizons a bit.

As it turns out, I was absolutely correct to want to do this. I had the most fun I’ve had in Pathfinder 2e with her and her group of players. Not only was the session great, but she was incredibly helpful and supportive as I tried to scramble a character together in only a couple days (I had two weeks to do it but, in a departure from my norm, I did not start on it until the Wednesday before the Sunday afternoon game). She was patient, she clearly understood the rules well, and she was able to explain things in a way that made sense to me. If she couldn’t explain something herself, she had a link to a resource that did a great job of it (one of which she created herself). Then, in the game session itself, not only did she prove her mastery of the rules, but proved her mastery of the tool we used to play online (Foundry VTT, after the latest updates to incorporate the changes to Pathfinder 2e). While not everything went smoothly, even the roughest patches were no more than a bump in the road as her patience, humor, and knowledge carried us to victory. Without her at the helm of our little group, we likely would have gotten bogged down in quirks of the virtual tabletop (which is what VTT stands for) or in trying to figure out what rules and mechanics applied to some of our more risky maneuvers.

I was puzzling over how to explain why this game felt so different to me from the ones I played in the past until just this morning. You see, it is easy to explain why this game feels so different from the Sunday game that started all. I was the most knowledgeable player in that game and I had no idea what I was doing and was spending all my quiet moments in the game looking up rules and stuff for my future turns. When it comes to the other occasional game I’ve been playing it, the explanation is much less clear. After all, both GMs seemed to know what they were doing. Both GMs were prepared and ready to explain things to their players. Both were encouraging of their players. It was not immediately apparent to me what was different between the two games (aside from, of course, the fact that there were different players and different GMs, which definitely have a large impact on one’s experience of the session but should not have been able to hide any mechanical difference between the two games), but something someone said to me last night, at a Dungeons and Dragons game I was playing in, eventually provided the missing thought I needed to clear it all up.

Last night, while my fellow players and I were destroying the GM’s carefully prepared session, one of them managed to roll a crit while attempting to destroy a magic item/interface. As the palyer was gathering up dice to roll, I suggested he dish out a smite on top of it, since he was playing a paladin and could decide to dish one out after he learned he’d hit. A crit was, after all, the perfect time to add some smite damage into the mix, since it got automatically doubled as well as the weapon damage. Since we hadn’t had a full combat session in a while (our weird, charisma-based bungling theft prior to this event never quite reached combat), the player was uncertain of how his Smite ability worked. While he was flipping pages, I casually rattled off how it worked, what type of damage it did, and how it might be further altered if the magic item was fiendish or undead, and then confirmed that this damage got doubled as well. As he rolled his dice, he remarked that it was impressive that I could just rattle that off, despite it not being related to my character. I informed the table that I’d played a lot of 5th Edition D&D due to the pandemic, mostly as a GM, and that I knew this stuff like people knew baseball stats.

This was not the first time I’d done something like this, either. I frequently had a lot of answers to the questions the players were asking during that session and even the GM (a past player of mine who was familiar with my encyclodpedic knowledge of the game) occasionally asked me if I remembered a rule or for confirmation on one thing or another. When it came to this specific event, though, I was able to chime in because I just know the game so well that I’m able to anticipate the information the player needed and provided it succinctly without making anyone feel bad that they didn’t know something. After all, I was just saving them some time or, in the GM’s case, helping to reassure them when they felt uncertain or by saving them the time they’d spend looking something up. I was never controlling how the other characters were played or demanding that the GM follow my lead. I was making my vast knowledge available to them all and doing so in a way that preserved the game’s momentum without coming off as commanding or domineering.

Which is exactly what my friend was doing as the GM of our little PF2e one-shot. She knew when someone was hesitating because we were looking something up. She never hurried us, instead choosing to step in with some useful information. She never punished us for asking questions, hurried us along if we hesitated, or made us feel dumb for not knowing something. She was able to share her knowledge without it ever feeling domineering, demanding, or controlling. Some amount of this ease, between players and GM, can be chalked up to familiarity (everyone knew the GM super well except for me, who has mostly gotten to know her online after a long lull in our relationship between connecting on Facebook fairly recently and when we worked together eight or nine years ago) since it was clear that everyone had strong communication skills, but not all of it. It takes skill to be able to step in with the right information before a player knows they need it. It takes a great deal of experience and practice to be able to maintain momentum as players get bogged down and uncertain. It was honestly super impressive, even if I didn’t notice most of it at the time. ESPECIALLY because I didn’t notice most of it at the time. The whole game ran so smoothly and enjoyably that I rarely had times I wanted to mentally step away and look at the game from the outside. It was just too much fun to want to take myself out of my character that much.

I would play with her again in an instant. I really hope that, someday, I can return the favor and run a game for her as well. Everyone was so welcoming and friendly, which I really appreciate, and I can honestly say that I understand why people like this game. It can be a lot of fun, once you understand it, and I managed to finally grasp the buff/debuff stacking rules thanks to her help. I was also able to effectively use them in a combat encounter, contributing significantly to my party’s success thanks to boosting my party’s defenses while lowering our enemies’ offenses. It was a great bit of gaming and I’m ready to take what I’ve learned and use it in any other Pathfinder 2e games I play. Which I’m now, notably, actually interested in doing. All thanks to my friend and her invitation to a one-shot.