Top 10 Reasons Pathfinder 2e is EASIER to run than D&D 5e!

Brand-new 11th reason. The WotC OGL is now extremely predatory towards people who share their homebrew, Pathfinder 2e is not affected by this.

One point that’s rapidly escalated in my favor for PF2e, and it sounds kind of niche so bear with me, is clear and concise Troop rules. Once you get them down, they are an absolute blast for running huge combats against massive numbers of weaker enemies while lets players flex their power.

My only complaint as a 2e GM is that I was not expecting such tight math after experiencing other systems. LOL Wait, "Severe" actually means "Severe?" Weird.

2e is amazing from a character creation standpoint.

In the case of "Higher Level play works" 100% agreed I've had to hold back on certain encounters so that I wouldn't completely mess up the encounter for my GM, not because the encounters were bad but because I just had stupid good ability

save/suck becoming degrees of success and failure definitely deserved to be on the list probably near #3 but maybe this one rule change was too focused for this video. Loving your videos btw.

I have seven players. The hoops I had to jump through to make 5e encounters challenging became ridiculous the higher the levels became. All of that faded away in Pathfinder 2e.

Funny enough I switched from pathfinder one to D&D 5e specifically because of the massive rules crunch. That and the fact that prewritten adventures had the habit of having necessary information in parts of the adventure that came after the actual encounter or event in the book. This despite the fact that the beginning of each portion actually had a section for important information like a summary. I will have to give Pathfinder 2e a look.

You basically echoed most of the reasons that I've been giving to my players as to why we are moving away from 5e and into PF2e. I wish I'd found this system a long time ago.

Pathfinder 2E sounds pretty amazing honestly. I'd love to be able to try it. But my D&D group is already super super casual and it's already a challenge just to get them to put in a little effort as is. Not to mention all we have are people that would rather be players and no one that wants to commit to being the DM forever.

ADDITION: Because Paizo is generous with the use of its materials, if you use Foundry VTT and get a PDF of a published PF2e adventure, you can import all of its maps (with all walls drawn) and artwork with a single click! See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlTjzFhQAU4

Finished a Curse of Strahd campaign not to long ago and while it was extremely fun for the most part the final battle against Strahd was anti-climactic the fighter pretty much one shot Strahd in 1 turn just shows how some lvl 10 characters can easily outshine others and how quickly broken 5e can be

This is a really enjoyable video! Thanks for putting it out, it’s made me genuinely interested in considering switching over to Pathfinder! As a DM of 5e for 3 years, what I’ve discovered is that 5e’s simplicity is an illusion. It’s a rules-heavy game in practice, with massive holes in the rules that gives it a facade of being rules-light. What eventually happens is you end up creating the rules that the game doesn’t provide anyway. Sure, at first it’s an on-the-spot ruling. Then it happens again, and again, and then for the sake of consistency it becomes a houserule. To make sure that new players (or GMs) also know it, it gets added to a document. That gets bigger, and bigger, and ultimately you have a massive 60-page houserule document (speaking from experience) where you might have been just better off playing a game system with a complete set of rules to begin with (like PF2). This happens because 5e isn’t designed like a rules-light game like OSR products. It has strict rules for action resolution, character building, combat, and all of that invites players and GMs to use these rules to resolve these situations rather than something more free-form and creative. Problems then start to arise when the GM realizes that these rules are filled with balance issues and unclear mechanics. You can’t depend on these rules and yet the game asks you to anyway, which is what makes 5e incredibly difficult to run as a GM. At least for PF2, it seems to be the case that when you do look up the rules, it’s clear and precise and there is a well-defined answer to any problems that crop up. That’s what makes the game so much easier to GM than 5e.

One thing I think goes in pf 2e's favor as well is that while the game is complex, a lot of the mechanics are "self running"; you dont have to sweat really hard about balance because if you use level appropriate numbers (provided by the handy dandy screen), it's immensely easy to do things on the fly with good results without concerns if it'll be too easy/hard/game breaking

I’m a D&D 5e Player and GM. As someone who has been doing a lot of reading into Pathfinder 2e, I am very impressed with how many problems I have had with 5e is for the most part resolved by other mechanics of 2e. This video does a great job at summing up the core problems and resolutions. I’m going to be running a Pathfinder 2e oneshot to make sure I have most of the rulings down, but in addition to the reading I’ve been doing I also use FoundryVTT which I think will be an amazing tool for my players to also learn the game. My players are very excited with Pathfinder 2e because of the customization options they have had - and the Pathfinder sheets on Foundry have proven to be very effective at making learning the system less daunting. I will probably still run 5e games, but depending on how this oneshot goes, I may move over to Pathfinder 2e for the majority of the games that I run! The more I read into it - the more I fall in love with the system. It is definitely a breath of fresh air.

Completely agree, and I'd also add that on the player's end, while character creation is more complex, figuring out what you can do with your turn in combat is much easier. 5e's action economy seems less gamey on the surface but when you dig in you realize it's ridiculously overcomplicated compared to having 3 actions.

Yup having DMed both systems I have far more confidence when I build a PF2e session that it will play out in a certain way, when I build a 5e session it can go off the rails pretty unpredictably.

My group dropped 5e almost immediately when pf2e became available. Never going back. Good video.

I've been GMing 5e since 2015, and I definitely feel anchored by the sunk cost fallacy. Your videos have largely swayed me towards considering getting into PF 2E (especially with my dissatisfaction towards the One D&D packet they put out). I think the hardest part is that many 5e players (which many of my friends are) tend to be hard to convince to switch systems.

Very good summary! I'm just now looking into Pathfinder (because of the 5e OGL fiasco), and this was both encouraging and educational. I took my shiny new Pathfinder 2 book and skipped through a lot of sections as you made your points. It looks very intriguing.