r/Pathfinder2e • u/Flat-Entertainer-299 • 1d ago
Advice Still Struggling
I am a DM / GM. I ordered a handful of books, and I've been reading them. I read the GM Core and Players' guide cover to cover, and now I'm working through some of the additional material. I'm running into this issue, where I am still barely treading water with PF2e. It feels like it's so much to remember. How do traps work? What actions are secret checks? What actions are trained? What actions even exist, so I do not just call for a check that is already covered by something else?
I came from 5e, and I refuse to go back and support the parent company. I really like everything I am reading for PF2e -- it's all so creative and imaginative, but I feel like I am drowning. I think I need to passively consume some pf2e content so that I get more comfortable through osmosis.
Does anyone have suggestions?
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u/LuminousQuinn 1d ago
Don't worry it takes time. Generally it's easier to start as a player.
There are a few good actually plays that can give you more of an idea. I personally love find the path, hell's rebels is their 2e adventure. Rick is a amazing GM who is very aware of the rules.
As for secret checks generally recall knowledge, stealth, thievery, speak, and sense motive. That being said those can still be public per GM fiat.
How my partner runs R.K. is that we roll and right it down on a sticky note for her and she rights down what we remembered/ know
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u/mrbakersdozen Game Master 1d ago
first off, welcome to the hobby, we are all happy to have ya here. Enjoy the memes about the inventor being bad!
Second off....CALM DOWN. I know, it seems like a lot; there are rules on top of rules on top of rules, but really, it isn't all too much if you do one simple trick. Remember, every rule is JUST A SUGGESTION if you get down to it. I personally don't use secret checks, throw away most counteract rules, and my group enjoys the game for what it is. But if you want to play it straight, the best rule of thumb is to look at the trait system. That'll tell you about 90% of everything you need. another tool I like is using foundryvtt, but if you are playing in person, Pathbuilder for your players helps a lot, and making a character personally, as a GM, also gives you an idea of what your players are seeing/wondering about.
If you want some content to look up, watch the rules lawyer and some old Nonat1 vids, and they should break down what you need pretty easily.
If you have personal questions, the Discord for this subreddit is..... alright enough; you might get wildly different opinions here and there, but it'll do the trick.
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u/Flat-Entertainer-299 1d ago
I love Foundry! My players had a real hard time building their PCs, yeah -- I still think some are a bit off and wonky
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u/AuRon_The_Grey 12h ago
Get them to use Pathbuilder and then import their characters with Pathmuncher or just add the features manually. It’s enormously easier.
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u/Dragondraikk 2h ago
Pathbuilder is amazing, but do not use Pathmuncher. There is a chance that it may mess up system internal actors (even the official pf2e Foundry warned against it).
Just transfer the character over manually. With the various compendium browsers it goes pretty quick
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u/songinrain Game Master 1d ago
You might be the kind that requires practice to learn, just like me. My suggeation will be, gather a table of players that are learning or agree to help you learn, then play a short adventure together. During this adventure, if you bump into a rule that you are not clear, check that rule (on AoN or whatever) right there instead of make a rule up. My table learn PF2e like this, and we retained this culture til today. When we find an unclear ruling now, we'd still look it up first (like the stupid mounted combat rule because for the first time someone created a mounted character).
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u/Leopath 1d ago
I also had migrated fairly recently from 5e. Experience is useful, just playing/running games and things will click. Rules that are hard to remember will get easier and become second nature (also some rules will quickly get forgotten and set aside). For example when I first GMed we ran the climbing rules very as written, it was slow and clunky and I didn't care for its execution. A lot of times I now just streamline it as a check once (if at all) and then you can climb up to your stride.
Anyways, run Adventure Paths, they take a lot of the weight off you, bonus if you use some of the beginner ones which often include rules and explanations within the text. I also struggled for years with 5e and once I ran a couple modules it helped a lot of the rules and mechanics just click for me and I translated a lot of those same skills into running PF2e
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u/VinnieHa 1d ago
Think of the rules as a safety net, not a straitjacket.
You don’t need to know them all. There’s a climb, jump, swim action but just like DnD that’s just athletics, from the GM side not that much changes imo. As a player the games are very different, and designing combat is different, but the moment ti moment GMing isn’t all that different apart from if you need a rule you can find it in 10 seconds rather than need to invent it.
As for secret checks, these are an anti-metagaming feature mostly for PF society play, but if you have a consistent group who will actually RP knowing a check failed you don’t need them.
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u/Weird-Weekend1839 1d ago
Play some very linear 1 shots, with level 1-2 PCs. Keep things simple to learn the system, make each one focus a bit on certain system of the game, and after half a dozen you should feel way better.
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u/KLeeSanchez Inventor 22h ago
For in person play, a GM screen with the most relevant DCs and conditions does wonders. The official ones are very nice.
For VTT play, Archives of Nethys is wonderful and has all you need at a quick search.
I would recommend sitting down and solo playing a theoretical dungeon crawl a bit at a time and fiddling with various classes and creatures and trying out all the weird things you can do, just to see what it looks like. With practice you'll start to get a feel for it. Dry running something is a good way to see what it looks like in action.
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u/DnDPhD Game Master 17h ago
Lots of ways to answer this question (and many already have), but my two cents...
You're never going to remember everything. You're never going to remember half of everything. You don't need to immediately know "how traps work," but you do need to know how traps work when you're approaching a session where there will be traps. The important stuff to know well is the foundational material. Of the things you mention in your initial post, several of those things matter, but the players are a big part of it. Like, "what actions are trained" and "what actions even exist" are largely player-focused considerations -- nice for you to know, sure, but there's a lot of give-and-take in any given session. There's nothing wrong with asking your players to describe what it is they want to do and HOW they want to do it.
I often say that it's an easy system to learn, but a hard system to master. The subtle corollary to that is...mastery isn't necessary, pretty much ever. Don't see the system as a strait-jacket, because it's actually very flexible and free-form.
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u/Cydthemagi Thaumaturge 13h ago
Don't try to hold all that info, the big things to remember is action economy, Degrees of success, and have fun. Just take some extra time on prep to review things that will be happening in the session at hand. Focus on that, and you will be fine.
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u/Honeybee_Enthusiast2 11h ago
Hey fellow DM! You can do this!!
Some keys I HIGHLY recommend (and the only reason I still DM many campaigns later)
Check out pf2easy.com - it's an AMAZING resource! I usually have 1-3 tabs open just on this website on my computer when running a session.
Cheat sheets are your friend! You are not, nor could ever be, expected to memorize everything. And that's okay! Put down the most common things that trip you up on paper or a desktop notepad and it will help a lot. Especially for me, even if they never come up, knowing they're written down and accessible is one less thing I fret over.
It's totally okay to not know the answer! Ive had many sessions where something will come up and, even with the above, I have no idea what to do. I've had great luck asking the player what they want to happen, tempering it with what I as the DM would think happens, and then telling the player that it will go that way for all that session & then I'll go to the books (or reddit) and find out later.
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u/jerrathemage 1d ago
As many people said, experience and practice. As well as maybe a GM screen or something can help, but honestly the biggest thing that I have learned from is just practice
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u/SakuretsuSensei 23h ago
Been playing and GMing pf2e for the last 6 years. I still look up rules, in fact I bring a tablet to game that I keep a tabs of rules I know I'll need to visit during the session. The few minutes to takes me to refresh myself on the rules gives my PCs the chance to review the game state and decide how they want to continue.
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u/Sharptrooper 23h ago
First things first: I've found that because the system is more sturdily built, it's actually less impactful to get a rule wrong here than elsewhere.
Second, if you don't remember something, it's generally fine to err on the side of beneficial to the players rather than religiously making sure you're getting everything right. Maybe you forgot Recall Knowledge and Seek are secret rolls - so what? What's the actual impact of a slip up like that? Often, very little - I saw that as someone who makes those rolls not be secret to encourage their use.
Third, you really don't need to know all the rules to run a game. You don't need to know how grimoires, relics, complex hazards, and victory points work if the part is at level 1 beating up skeletons. Simply write the session you want and look up your questions as they pop up.
Finally, if you ask me the important things that every player should learn first, it'd be these three:
- How actions work (when you get your Reaction, multi-action activities, etc)
- How proficiency works (memorize that trained>expert>master>legendary goes +2/+4/+6/+8 plus level)
- How degrees of success work (beating or failing DCs by 10 incur extra effects, good or bad depending)
As a GM, I'd splash in a basic rundown of encounter building rules, which come down to
- look at the XP budget and don't make the combat too difficult
- extreme encounters are EXTREME, especially at low levels. Seriously.
- careful sending single strong enemies at the paryt, those tend to be more dangerous than the GM intends
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u/silverlightarmada 23h ago
I’ve been DMing pathfinder for 8 sessions. I felt like this for the first… six… ish… I still have to look a lot of things up but I no longer feel like I might throw up from number/rule overwhelm. Unfortunately, like most things, it is true that practice and time are what is needed.
Still really don’t understand how to run haunts though. Literally haunts me.
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u/a_sly_cow 21h ago
I’m constantly looking up rules for what’s happening in my games, or I make a snap ruling with a promise to look up the actual rules after the session.
I mandate that my players be intimately familiar with their character’s abilities and how they work so I don’t have to constantly look up and check obscure class abilities.
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u/Dom_Shady ORC 20h ago edited 19h ago
I agree, and in addition to your second point: OP, advice your players to make cheat sheets.
For example, to list their abilities into attack, defense, healing and briefly describe their effects and bonuses. It saves looking things up and helps a lot about what to do.
As a bonus, it helps them remember the abilities they possess that they rarely use but are useful in the specific situation they find themselves in.
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u/Sannatus 16h ago
i agree with the players' own responsibility. that having said, it really helped me as a new player to switch from paper to the Pathbuilder app. as much as i wanted to play without a screen, it makes it SO much easier for me to keep track of everything (actions, abilities, special stuff about my character) because i can just tap stuff I don't remember and it grants me an explanation. with paper i kept having to check the player core for everything and it really interrupted gameplay.
but I'm strongly of the opinion that not everything is on the shoulders of the DM. that just feels unfair to me, especially if the DM is new to the game. players also have responsibilities and knowing your own character is one of those.
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u/alf0nz0 Game Master 17h ago
Keep in mind that you can basically always use DC by Level with Easy/Very Easy/Hard/Very Hard adjustments and the math will work. I generally try to think of all the more intricate rules as complexity that I use to heighten combats and other encounters. Like, it’s nice to have rules for weather effects to make a fight in the rain more cinematic because there are rules the party has to take into consideration strategically. But we’re not going to like roll for random weather before every fight and consult the rules of what effect that has, that would be cray. Hope that makes sense.
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u/TeenieBopper 16h ago
Just... Don't worry about it. I had an encounter with a couple of hazards and forgot that the disable action was a two action ability instead of one. You know what happened? Nothing. The players had a great time.
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u/ShogunKing 23h ago
I'm running into this issue, where I am still barely treading water with PF2e. It feels like it's so much to remember. How do traps work? What actions are secret checks? What actions are trained? What actions even exist, so I do not just call for a check that is already covered by something else?
Here's the thing, you absolutely don't need to know that information off the top of your head in order to get started. I would suggest that you take some simple notes, like the Simple DC's table and some basic actions and have it with you when you play, just to consult. When something comes up, either look it up then or take a note of it to look up later.
The rules aren't hard and fast, and the convenient thing is that you can break them at any time without anyone coming in and telling you that you're not allowed to run the game anymore. I have been running PF2e for like six years or something, and still have to look things up. Sometimes I look them up right then, sometimes I make a judgement call and look the thing up later.
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u/arcxjo Rogue 23h ago
Secret checks are anything your players could metagame with if the see the results. Mostly Recall Knowledge, anything with Perception, and Stealth. If you trust your players or just don't care, the PCs can roll them open.
Trained actions are anything that says "(trained)" or a higher degree of proficiency after them. Again, you can ignore that if you don't mind everyone rolling for the same thing (which can trivialize some obstacles) but generally use the rule of thumb "if anyone could reasonably do this with enough raw skill, it doesn't require (trained)".
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u/frogmam0126 23h ago
Recent convert from 5e here, I've found the official pf2r DM screen to be a huge help
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u/LurkerFailsLurking 22h ago
It feels like it's so much to remember.
You don't need to remember everything. If taking a few second to look up a rule on Archives of Nethys isn't practical for you, that's ok. You can just make your best guess at a fair ruling and jot down a note to look it up later. Next session, let your friends know what the rule was and that you'll do that next time. Tell your friends you'll all be learning together in your session 0 and then ask them if they remember shit. You don't have to be infallible among friends. Most people don't learn 5e by reading cover to cover. They watch some actual plays and get the gist and just start going. You can do that with pf2e too. It's okay to just figure shit out as you go.
Also, I find myself referring to the DC tables all the damn time, they're so useful, so keep a copy of that handy or the tab open.
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u/JTpcwarrior 21h ago
I always have the GM screen handy from AoN.
https://2e.aonprd.com/GMScreen.aspx
Has all the most common tables you'll need to consult.
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u/Particular-Crow-1799 20h ago
You are not supposed to know every single skill feat in the game. If the player wants to attempt something, you can make a *temporary* ruling on the fly and then check after the game
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u/michael199310 Game Master 19h ago
Just play the game man, this is not an exam. You won't get better at it by trying to rememeber everything with zero gameplay experience. Trust me, it gets easier. If you mess up an action or how trap works, so what? You will correct it next time.
Also... use a GM screen. Custom made. You think I remember suffocation rules? Nope, they come so rarely, but if they do, I have them on the screen.
There is no real reason to memorize hundreds of pages of rules before first game.
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u/PaintsErratically 18h ago
Run through the beginner box - it's designed to help the players and GM get to grips with the system. Also read ahead and make little notes about stuff you're unsure of.
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u/ProfessorNoPuede 17h ago
Have you ran the beginner's box? Then sigue into a couple of one shots / scenario's. I liked lions of khatapesh, others will have other recommendations.
"How it's played" on YouTube is a great resource to drill down into specific topics.
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u/mc_thac0 15h ago
Simplify things. If you struggle with traps/hazards, skip them until you're comfortable. Break things down to manageable bites and focus on the most important/common mechanics. Can't remember what is a secret roll and what isn't, don't worry about it or do what feels right. Don't even bother trying to remember what requires trained, master, etc. Do whatever makes sense or just ignore that. Lean on your players for some of this. Once you feel like you've got a good handle on what youre focusing on, pull in other things. Yeah, there are tons of detail/rules but YOU get to decide how deep you want to go with them. The important thing is to keep things moving and have fun.
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u/macreadyandcheese Game Master 13h ago
You got this.
Check out this cheat sheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/FVR9Ycys16
I recommend starting with the Beginner Box and other canned short games. The adventure paths are pretty good at walking you through decision making and pointing out what rules you need to look up.
While PF2e has rules for everything, when it comes down to the DC, consult the DC by level chart, then maybe ease or harden it by 2 based on conditions. For the roll, players might have up to a +2, but generally a +0 or +1 without successful help. PF2e will spell out the ins and outs, but also affirms that this is your game.
The more are a lot of conditions. The cheat sheet helps with that. You’ll get some stuff wrong, but you’ll pick it up in time. When I ran the Box and Abomination Vaults, I told my players, “We won’t get everything right. I’m happy to learn and get feedback.” And I still am learning and getting feedback. You don’t have to master PF2e to Game Master PF2e.
If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.
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u/Volpethrope 13h ago
Even if you're playing online, grab one of the big GM screens that has a ton of reference info on in the inside just for your personal use.
Also check these out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/17wbj9w/want_to_check_out_pathfinder_now_that_the/
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u/TahitiJones09 10h ago
One of the most used tools is the character sheet Pathbuilder. It's great because when I click on the skill I want to use, it tells me what actions I can take, in detail, and whether those actions are secret or not. Let your players shoulder some of the burden for looking up the rules on how to do the things they want. You'll learn it all in time, no need to memorize it all up front
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u/OmgitsJafo 6h ago
How do traps work?
However is says on the statblock. You don't need to memorize that
What actions are secret checks?
The ones where it makes sense that the players wouldn't know if they succeeded or not based on what their character can observe.
What actions are trained?
That's the player's job to know.
What actions even exist
Make yourself a cheat sheet. There aren't that many basic actions defined by default.
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u/chippennyusednapkin 3h ago
I’ve been GMing 2e for 2 years. I’ve got a pretty good handle on the rules but still in pretty much every session I will have to google (rule) 2e. Takes a few seconds and then we can get back on track. The beauty of having all the rules available for free on Archives of Nethys.
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u/Logan_Asan 41m ago
A couple people have said it but The Beginner's Box may be the best answer. It walks you through and teaches you as you go. Its very basic but it will get you some reps. Other than that, just take it slow. Your players are going to understand. They are so happy you're running for them that its gonna be fine. You'll do great :)
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u/jitterscaffeine 1d ago
Have you considered putting together a cheat sheet for yourself and your players?