Well, just ran the first 3 rooms of it, at least.
It’s my step-son’s 10th birthday this weekend, and for it he requested that we play “D&D”. I… I’ve not been an active player since the pandemic started, and the whole debacle with the OGL really made me decide I didn’t want to spend money on the 5e DMG. So, with his blessing, I went with Pathfinder instead.
There were six of us, three adults playing iconic, two 10 year olds playing custom characters, and me behind the screen. Of us all, only the 2nd kid - my step-son’ s cousin - was an active D&D player. The rest had dabbled over the years, but hadn’t played in a while.
I’m surprised how well the 10 year olds took to it. I’ve heard people complain about the game being a little more frustrating for people with less patience, due to the abundance of described mechanics, but the 3 generic action point system made combat… Well, not a breeze, since the oversized party still struggle deith the first encounter, but much less co fusing than the “3 separate action pools” of 5e.
I did hand wave away a few rules, just because I wasn’t about to tell the birthday boy that circumstance bonuses don’t stack when he and the party are struggling to make contact with some ROUSes, but for the most part it went spectacularly well.
It took 3hours to get to the end of the 2nd encounter, but the kids seemed to have a blast, mad were putting up a fight when told we had to pause the game for bedtime.
Ok the whole, I’m very impressed with the whole experience. I can’t wait to continue the box!
Does the box come with reference cards or the like for easy viewing of key words etc.? I find the best way to get new people into any system is to have pre-printed reference cards for info.
Yup! They’re pretty nice, though perhaps could use some extra colour to help highlight important terms.
Was there any roleplaying happening during your game? I found that to be the only real weakness of the box adventure.
I’m happy they liked it. In my opinion PF2e is a fantastic system to introduce new players to DnD adjacent TTRPGs. 10 years is a good age to get started too. Do you plan to keep playing? Or will the kids keep playing on their own?
I wasn’t sure if the kids, and especially my step-son, would want to keep going, so we didn’t commit to it. But apparently it’s presence has been requested this afternoon, so…
It was a pretty RP light environment. The kids really like the “we can do whatever we want” aspect of things, so it’s a little hard to keep them roped in and remembering their characters. The adults engaged in some, though, which was nice.
I haven’t made it through the beginner box but I definitely liked how it eases into the rules, especially as someone who always did pf1e
