Having ran PF2e for about ~40 sessions and listening to several actual play podcasts using it, I absolutely love it, and I would be hard pressed to come up with any reason to pick DnD 5e over PF2e.
As a GM, it provides a ton of useful tools that are either broken or straight up missing in 5e, for example when creating encounters, calculating the difficulty of encounters based on the monster’s challenge rating actually works, all the magic items have an explicit cost, all the player races have actual lore and “this is how others percieve you” that you can work off of instead of just “you make it up :)”, the monsters have actual interesting abilities instead of just being big sacks of hitpoints, and a solo boss monster can still be seriously dangerous instead of just immediately being overwhelmed by the action economy.
The language in the rules is more technical, but in doing so it drastically reduces the room for misinterpretations. The trait system also helps this, for example most undead have the “mindless” trait, which means they are immune to any spell effect with the “mind affecting” trait. Everything being tagged, and interactions being spelled out in this way, just makes resolving spells so much easier.
On the player side, PF2e offers you meaningful choices at every level, and not just picking class, race and subclass and then being stuck on train tracks like in 5e. The action economy is simplified, and instead of action, movement action, bonus action, interact action you just have three actions. Those can be spent on anything you want. Skills like athletics, acrobatics, intimidation, diplomacy, deception and probably more I’m forgetting right now have actual codified uses in combat instead of requiring on the fly house rulings from the GM to be useful. Martial characters actually scale well into late game and aren’t just completely overshadowed by casters.
Finally, I just want to note that our group uses FoundryVTT to play our games, and the way the system is implemented there is just incredible. So many useful Quality of life features that I never even knew I wanted until I had them, and now they’re glaringly absent in other systems. Foundry and PF2e really go together like PB & J.
Most people who I see saying they prefer 5e say that it’s more “rules-light” and roleplay oriented, but it really isn’t, at least by RAW. It’s only rules light when you ignore half the rules. And there’s really nothing in the rules that directly facilitates roleplay either. So if that’s your preferred playstyle, there’s other systems that would suit your preferences better than both 5e and PF2e
Having ran PF2e for about ~40 sessions and listening to several actual play podcasts using it, I absolutely love it, and I would be hard pressed to come up with any reason to pick DnD 5e over PF2e.
As a GM, it provides a ton of useful tools that are either broken or straight up missing in 5e, for example when creating encounters, calculating the difficulty of encounters based on the monster’s challenge rating actually works, all the magic items have an explicit cost, all the player races have actual lore and “this is how others percieve you” that you can work off of instead of just “you make it up :)”, the monsters have actual interesting abilities instead of just being big sacks of hitpoints, and a solo boss monster can still be seriously dangerous instead of just immediately being overwhelmed by the action economy.
The language in the rules is more technical, but in doing so it drastically reduces the room for misinterpretations. The trait system also helps this, for example most undead have the “mindless” trait, which means they are immune to any spell effect with the “mind affecting” trait. Everything being tagged, and interactions being spelled out in this way, just makes resolving spells so much easier.
On the player side, PF2e offers you meaningful choices at every level, and not just picking class, race and subclass and then being stuck on train tracks like in 5e. The action economy is simplified, and instead of action, movement action, bonus action, interact action you just have three actions. Those can be spent on anything you want. Skills like athletics, acrobatics, intimidation, diplomacy, deception and probably more I’m forgetting right now have actual codified uses in combat instead of requiring on the fly house rulings from the GM to be useful. Martial characters actually scale well into late game and aren’t just completely overshadowed by casters.
Finally, I just want to note that our group uses FoundryVTT to play our games, and the way the system is implemented there is just incredible. So many useful Quality of life features that I never even knew I wanted until I had them, and now they’re glaringly absent in other systems. Foundry and PF2e really go together like PB & J.
Most people who I see saying they prefer 5e say that it’s more “rules-light” and roleplay oriented, but it really isn’t, at least by RAW. It’s only rules light when you ignore half the rules. And there’s really nothing in the rules that directly facilitates roleplay either. So if that’s your preferred playstyle, there’s other systems that would suit your preferences better than both 5e and PF2e
Awesome reply; thank you!!