Switching from DnD 5e to Pf2e Ressources
Switching from DnD 5e to Pf2e Ressources
Hello, for the last 3 years I’ve been running a Dnd 5e campaign, due to recent events with wotc we’ve decided to stop supporting them and switch to of 2e. Are there any good resources for switching? I’m under the impressions that some systems are similar while others are completely different.
Does something like a switching guide exist or is it best to just start from scratch and learn as we go?
One big difference between DnD and PF on a more meta side is that all the PF rules are legally FREE! Only the lore stuff (Lost Omens) and the adventures are copyrighted, but the rules, character options, monsters, etc are all FREE!
You can read everything on here: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx
And this is a nice free character tool: https://pathbuilder2e.com/
In a nutshell, Paizo wants you to play their games, while WotC wants you to pay their games first of all.
Thank you for the resources, on the topic of character creators and editors. Is there one where you can generate a campaign and the players can create them in there? Best case would be if I could disallow some races as they wouldn’t really fit into the setting like skeletons. It would be amazing to import them automatically into an encounter tracker but I guess that’s asking too much ^^
Is there something like encounter+ though for iOS as I run the sessions from my iPad?
i know that demiplane is working on basicly dndbeyond, but for multiple games, starting with pf https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/pathfinder2e
but idk if you can disallow certain ancestries or anything like that 🤔 and idk anything that would specifically work with apple products
i just use FoundryVTT for everything, but that's specifically a VTT and not very tablet friendly
Pathbuilder has this option, look for Campaign Management in the hamburger menu
Let's you create a campaign and have all the player character sheets in one place. I've never used it on mobile so I can't comment on how mobile friendly it is.
I would recommend starting over at Lvl 1, because characters get quite a lot of options over the levels, so starting with only the Lvl 1 options can simplify things quite a bit. Though I know that some people have done a "You are depowered for some reason" or "You are dreaming of a time when you weren't as strong" period to somewhat quickly level up from one to where you were. If you do this, be aware that characters will end up differently than your 5e versions, and that pf2e expected certain magical items at certain levels, such as Potency and Striking runes for martials and Wands and Staves for Casters.
Yeah the plan is to start at level 1 again as the current campaign will come to an end this or next week (depends on if they die to the bbeg or not)
I am planning to run a completely home brew setting again as I didn’t like running a predefined adventure too much. I’ve created a setting in 5e before wich worked really well.
The setting originally was planned for 5e so I’m just gonna port it over. There was a mechanic planned that heavily used the exhaustion mechanic as a kind of stand in for a really bad disease. The pf2e exhaustion does not seem to have levels like that where it gets progressively worse. How would you create such a mechanic. The idea is that you’ll go from healthy to dead in roughly 20 days, originally I was thinking on giving disadvantage and exhaustion levels at certain points (don’t worry I’m not planning to take pcs out of the action for too long). But I have no idea if that would be too harsh in pathfinder or not. Could someone with more experience weigh in?
The immediately obvious way to make such a disease is to make it an actual disease using the affliction rules. This however would get easier to deal with as your characters level up, since the DC will stay constant but the PCs saves will go up. Another way to go about it would be to have a lost of conditions, which accumulate for each day/week. So on the first day/week you gain Clumsy 1, then also Enfeebled 1, then also Clumsy 2 and so forth. This will very quickly become VERY punishing though, unless you carefully pick conditions that don't affect your PCs very much. The entire list of conditions can be found here. I would probably use Fatigued and Flat-footed for the first few levels and then the ones listed under Lowered abilities after that, maybe even throwing in a Doomed or two along the way. But as I said, this can very quickly become VERY punishing.
Just as a heads up. The pre-written adventures for pf2e are so much better than anything official for DnD 5e it's not even funny.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't run homebrew. Just a heads up to maybe look at some APs.
Pf2e actually does have a dedicated disease mechanic, which is essentially to structure the affliction as a set of stages with defined lengths. At the end of each stage's length, you make a new save against it, and reduce the stage by 1 if you succeed or increase it by 1 if you fail (2 if you critically fail). Here's the existing diseases you could copy from, including for example malaria). In most cases pf2e's DCs are scaled to the level of a creature or effect, meaning that a level 1 character has about the same chance of beating a level 1 DC as a level 10 character has at beating a level 10 DC. What that means though is that +1 and -1 bonuses are pretty strong, and inflicting the kinds of penalties 5e's exhaustion has would probably quickly lead to a TPK. Hope that helps!
As for resources how it's played on YouTube helped me a ton.
Other than that I got one tip for played and one for GMs each.
GMs trust the system. Coming from 5e I was used to having to make up my stuff because it either doesn't exist or doesn't work. In pf2e encounter building works, items have levels and the reward structure works. So before you change stuff, give it as go as written.
Players should know combat is about team work. Even if every individual character is trying to do their individually best thing, it's likely so much worse than having a strategy as a group.
This last bit is, I think, key. I've only dabbled in 5e but that was the biggest change coming from 3.5/PF1e was that it was no longer about optimizing individual character builds but rather playing smart team tactics that change from encounter to encounter. It's hard to make a truly bad character on accident but it can be equally hard figuring out how to contribute during each fight, e.g. you probably don't want to make the third swing at -10.
you probably don’t want to make the third swing at -10.
This, and you should think about then when either creating the character, or at least when leveling up.
Any character has options to support others and can get new ones or improve those they have.
I would personally recommend you start over at level 1, and discard any notions of how things might work that you carry over from other systems (even besides 5e).
In general for TTRPGs in the larger sphere, every system is its own thing, and looking at rules with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions of how it might work tends to help interpret and understand them better without tripping yourself up on what you thought they might be.
The rules are legally free and you can check them out in places like the Second Edition section of Archives of Nethys and PF2eTools (if that name sounds familiar and you have concerns, worry not! They have contact with Paizo to keep them in the clear and avoid content that doesn't fall under the free use rules, and were even present at PaizoCon 2023!).
If you want an excellent tutorial to get started, the Beginner Box is great at teaching as you go. Hope you enjoy the system!
I would personally recommend you start over at level 1
Why is that?
I brought my campaign over from 5e at Level 7, and though it's been a challenge with speedbumps and retcons, there is just no way I'd consider starting the campaign again at Level 1. Not after all of that time dedicated to the characters and their stories.
And that's great that it's worked for you - but for a majority of tables, especially those that only play 5e, it can be a challenge to adapt to another system. There is a tendency to assume things work the same that needs to be carefully picked apart, and one of these things is the split between individual power and party power on the player side. On the GM side, it's the tendency to be fast and loose with encounter balancing.
I've seen a lot of tables try to start playing PF2e carrying over from 5e and if their heart isn't in it with the notion of trying an altogether new, different system (rather than just "D&D but...") then it tends to end pretty disastrously - GMs homebrewing right out the gate in ways that make the game hard-to-impossible to enjoy or building insanely difficult encounters, players building their character exclusively for individual synergy without thinking of the party and showing a lack of understanding of using skill actions to assist each other, or a lack of understanding of how to manipulate the action economy of the enemy.
Any one of these things individually is something that can be slowly learned out of with time, but a lot of times I see these happen at the same time and you end up with lopsided parties that don't know how to assist each other against insanely difficult encounters and it's just TPK after TPK which leaves people with a bad taste and perception of the system, when the system itself isn't at fault here.
I see that you moderate the TTRPGs community over at your instance (which I've greatly enjoyed btw) so I can only assume you have experience with a lot of systems, in which case I can understand why it seems a lot simpler to you. But for tables where people have only played 5e, or have played other systems but in recent memory have only played 5e (I don't know which OP's is, but at the very least the latter given they've played 5e the last 3 years) there can be a lot of friction.
Additionally, I wasn't recommending the characters be carried over except at level 1 or abruptly ending the campaign when I said 'start over'. I was recommending "finish your campaign in 5e first and then start over in PF2e with fresh eyes." Characters in PF2e are very different and people tend to have built expectations of what they can and can't do by now or a specific mix of mechanic and flavor that will be different in PF2e coming from 5e. Some people are okay with that, some really aren't. But everyone is okay with starting a new game, so finishing up your ongoing one rather than swapping halfway is the safe route.
What works for a table might not work for another, and the perspective I got of OP's table is that they would benefit from starting over once their 5e campaign finished.
EDIT: Especially given that OP was already 1-2 weeks from finishing his campaign, wrapping it up was the most sensible thing.
And the Archives of Nethys are found at https://2e.aonprd.com (make sure the 2e is part of the URL, or you might be looking at 1e stuff)
I recently made this switch for the same reason. We've been playing through the Beginner Box. The main resources I've used to learn the system are a combination of AON and the YouTube channel "How it's Played". Also there is a great actual play podcast called "Tabletop gold"
AoN is Archives of Nethys, the official Pathfinder SRD (1e and 2e), which you can find at: https://2e.aonprd.com/ (also linked elsewhere).
Thanks for adding the link! I admit I just kinda assume that anyone who has done any amount of investigation into the system will have heard of AoN, but that's not really a fair assumption.
While the beginner box has been mentioned multiple times, i also want to mention the bounties (1-2 hours quests with a little bit of combat and exploration, easily extendible to 3-5 hours if you add some roleplay opportunity before and after) and what I consider bounty 00: torment and legacy. While the former cost you a few bucks (some of them have foundry integration you can buy alternatively) the latter is completely free and is made for people switching the system as far as I remember.
While "torment and legacy" can be easily switched to wherever you want, the bounties are placed in a specific regions on Golarion, e.g. there's one in Nidal having you fight Kuthonists or one in Osirion dealing with a young Sphinx. My group and I tried around some bounties with different pregens until we were ready to build our own characters and found a region for a longer campaign (avistan/golarion is very diverse in terms of settings).