Pathfinder 2nd Edition Playtest Announced

Just in time, too...I had been seriously thinking about jumping back in to Pathfinder at least every other Friday (Starfinder is a gateway drug I guess)....those Pocket Rulebooks demand to be played!

I might still run some Pathfinder 1.0, and plan to migrate over to Pathfinder 2.0 Beta when it becomes available in August.

If you're even remotely interested in Pathfinder, D&D alternates, or game design in general then check out the announcement, here and the blog announcement, here. There's a lot of interesting information to unpack.

Most interesting to me is the discussion on the new action economy. Maybe it's just because I've been running Mythras lately, but this sounds a little....familiar....:

"After initiative is sorted out and it's your turn to act, you get to take three actions on your turn, in any combination. Gone are different types of actions, which can slow down play and add confusion at the table. Instead, most things, like moving, attacking, or drawing a weapon, take just one action, meaning that you can attack more than once in a single turn! Each attack after the first takes a penalty, but you still have a chance to score a hit. In Pathfinder Second Edition, most spells take two actions to cast, but there are some that take only one. Magic missile, for example, can be cast using from one to three actions, giving you an additional missile for each action you spend on casting it!

Between turns, each character also has one reaction they can take to interrupt other actions. The fighter, for example, has the ability to take an attack of opportunity if a foe tries to move past or its defenses are down. Many classes and monsters have different things they can do with their reactions, making each combat a little bit less predictable and a lot more exciting. Cast a fire spell near a red dragon, for example, and you might just find it takes control of your magic, roasting you and your friends instead of the intended target!"

I doubt it's anything truly like the action point/combat action mechanic in Mythras, but it bears some interesting similarities...and to be honest, the new concept outlined above sounds like a major improvement to the mechanical process of the D20 system.

Either way, this is pretty exciting. The only game I've run more of than D&D is Pathfinder, and that's without analyzing the lineage of those systems, so seeing Pathfinder get a 2.0 upgrade is going to be really exciting. Official playtest books in August!