I ran a third session using the Pathfinder 2 playtest rules yesterday, as I was joined by three of my friends and continued to take them through the level 4 adventure.

After the third combat of the afternoon, we stopped and looked at each other, and we started to express how much we weren’t enjoying the game. Even Warren, who is a great fan of the original Pathfinder system, was struggling.

The three characters were a cleric, a rogue and a bard.

In combat, the rogue could attack up to three times with his shortsword, dealing 1d8+4+1d6 damage each time. The spellcasters could cast one cantrip (taking two of their three actions) that dealt 1d8 damage.

The first fight was against three gnolls, two had 30 hit points, the other had 70 hit points. The rogue out-damaged the spellcasters, even when the spellcasters expended half of their spell slots casting damaging spells. (We were using the 1.5 errata, so at least their damaging spells did more damage. Without it? Ouch). Their cantrips remained sucky beyond belief.

In a later combat, the monster was immune to criticals and precision damage. It still had a lot of hit points. We sat there, grinding away at their hit points.

Fun?

More than anything else, the Pathfinder 2 rules were reminding us of D&D 4E. Monsters having too many hit points. Combat grinding on. Unfortunately, all the things that 4E did to make combat interesting – the useful cantrips for spellcasters, the extra effects on standard attacks, the utility powers that made miniatures a joy to use – all of those were missing in PF2.

Other design decisions were puzzling. One of the most strident criticisms of 4E, especially by Pathfinder adherents, was how you added half your level to every check, so even in skills you’d never studied, you still were much better than new characters. Well, you add your (full) level to every check in PF2!

This also leads to areas of unbelievable stupidity. In 4E and 5E, healing surges and then hit dice are used to help with the problem of healing between combats; dealing with the cure light wounds effect of 3E. In the current errata to PF2, the solution is to allow a healing kit to restore hit points, as long as its user makes successful Medicine checks. However, the difficulty of the check scales with the level of the treated creature in the current version. So, if you try to treat someone much higher level than you, you’ll likely fail! Whee! Don’t bother going to the village doctor!

This session also gave us a view of a couple of interesting monster abilities. One of them is clever within the context of PF2. The other is boring.

Disperse. When this creature takes damage, it disappears until the end of the current turn, then reappears within 30 feet.

Crumble. When this creature takes damage, it burrows into the earth. (It can’t use this two rounds in succession).

Disperse is clever. It stops the “use all 3 actions for attacks” from one character, but it still lets other characters participate.

Crumble is boring. Once someone hits with one attack, no-one else can participate until next round. At least it can’t be used two rounds in a row. (The real wording I found confusing, but that’s what it means).

Standing around waiting for a monster to reappear?

We were missing the barbarian this session, so we got a much better view of how bad the spellcasters were. Combat would have been even slower, but the rogue misread how damage worked and often did more damage than he should have.

This session killed any enthusiasm we had for the playtest. The good ideas in the system are overwhelmed by lousy balance, stupid decisions, and a basic system that doesn’t work.