On the other hand, DMing also involves a lot of homework, so it’s completely understandable that someone might want to switch to doing homework for a different subject on occasion.

PF1e was effectively 3.75, but PF2e is a considerably different game from PF1e. All that said, it kind of sounds like you aren’t a big fan of D&D, either, so I can understand not enjoying Pathfinder.

Honestly, PF2 is kind of what I wanted from D&D 5e. The 3-action combat system feels good and offers a very understandable and easy to explain to new players way to handle action economy, the character advancement is more fun (you get a lot of small things to pick at basically every level - there’s never a level-up where you just increase a couple numbers by 1 and have nothing else to do, and the choices you make feel like they matter more. The bigger numbers also make things feel more impactful, while still being very balanced against itself. It just feels better to see bigger numbers on a character sheet… you feel like you’re getting noticeably stronger as you level. I don’t know. It’s a small thing, but the numeric normalization in 5e always irked me.

The fact that WotC is stealing concepts from PF2 as they update 5e is really telling.

I can confirm this to be correct.

You know, this would actually be rad if the DM started using it as a plot point. Extra-dimensional police start hunting the PC for multiverse-level crimes, or some dunamancer in another reality kills an NPC in the PCs’ reality to heal one of their friends, and the PCs have to do some dimension-hopping to hunt them down and get them to stop.

Meanwhile, "Let’s see… anthropomorphic mosquito… Let me see that ID. You’re 2 hours old? That checks out, here’s your bourbon.

Exactly that. I wish I was kidding.

This was pre-5e; we were playing 3.5e, where that’s actually an official thing you can do:

Changing others’ attitudes with Diplomacy generally takes at least 1 full minute (10 consecutive full-round actions). In some situations, this time requirement may greatly increase. A rushed Diplomacy check can be made as a full-round action, but you take a -10 penalty on the check.

They never really went into detail, their whole argument was that if you wanted to use Diplomacy, you did so by default at a -10 penalty (for doing it ‘rushed’), or it would guaranteed fail, for the above reason. :(

Strategically placed near every door, window, sewer pipe, and vent the DM put an Antimagic Field device.

I once played with someone who argued that Diplomacy would never be usable on any important person because, since it requires 1 minute of uninterrupted conversation to use, everyone who is important enough would have a jester or aid or someone they’d hire specifically to interrupt every conversation they were involved in every 9 rounds. Absolutely infuriating person to play with. This anecdote is completely unrelated to this post, but your suggestion just made me remember it again, and it irritated me all over again.

Fuck ‘clever’, this is brilliant.

I’m not from the EU and don’t have the context to really understand the history of this decision, but this just seems so unnecessarily divisive.