The Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster Project

 Well this is a fascinating announcement from Paizo. Details are still to come for the most part, but it looks like Paizo is going to redo the first four books in the Pathfinder 2E lineup, and try rebranding them without (I assume) making them look like an edition 2.5 or 3. This also lets them rebrand and remake some material to fit their new ORC license and move entirely away from the old OGL. 

I'm interested to see what they do here, even though I've written Pathfinder 2E off for my own purposes as a viable system of play. I burned out so hard on Pathfinder 2E that it may have killed some of my love for the "D&D genre" at large due to its excessive obsession with meticulous balance in the numbers, which is a real shame because on the level of GM I really do enjoy running the game, but I have very few players (including myself when I play) who seem to actually enjoy it. The game is obsessed with incremental and marginal bonuses as well as a skew toward lower probabilities of success under the misguided notion that increased risk of failure (and critical failure) induces a sense of tactical tension, but then fails at every level to meaningfully provide players* with a sense of reward in its design. 

Though D&D 5E has its issues, the ability to run a game and craft a story through emergent gameplay and improv in D&D is much easier than in Pathfinder 2E, where the game's structured and balanced approach means you just can't be as relaxed when playing, or the play experience will suffer. For players, Pathfinder 2E simply doesn't seem to want players to have fun, and the original core book was endemic of this problem, so I can tell that they are trying to fix that with this newly announced remastered edition....I bet they've seen a lot of feedback to this effect.

There are lots of other complaints I could make about Pathfinder 2E, and I doubt most of these will be addressed in a remastered edition that is really, by the sounds of it, just an effort to remix and restate the rules in a manner friendlier to new gamers. But who knows! I could be surprised by this remaster. But....I will leave everyone with this one thought: Pathfinder 2E has been compared by some to D&D 4th edition, chiefly for its over emphasis on number balance and the fact that its tight design caters best to specific interpretations of the game. As we all recall, 4E had a very mixed reception, and midway in its lifecycle it, too, got a refresh in the form of the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials books, which tried to remaster that edition into something that felt more passable for the broader gaming audience.

So....yeah. Just saying, it seems interesting that Pathfinder 2E is about to get its own Essentials edition. This is quietly adding a lot of weight to the notion that Pathfinder 2E, by design, really did neglect a broader portion of its base in favor of a narrow design than it should have. But...time will tell. We'll see what these remastered rulesets look like when they release. 

Afterthought: There's one way they could shock and impress me with this remaster, and that would be to adopt the "proficiency without level" rules from the Gamemastery Guide. Look it up! It solves literally 95% of my complaints about Pathfinder 2E and moves it from a rigorous, faux-tactical engine with the illusion of choice to a genuinely useful RPG with a window for both tactics and storytelling in a flexible way. It would also remain technically retrocompatible with existing books (in the most technical way possible, sure). Will this happen? Probably not, but I can dream! If they did this I would totally jump back in to Pathfinder.

*Players here being "most of the players I know" as the system seems to cater to a really specific subset; I do have two players who have mastered the level of tactical acumen PF2E demands, but they are two among about 10 people I game with, and even they are quite adamant that the game was written specifically to punish most players rather than make things fun.