> The rules are significantly more crunchy, building a character without assistance - both from people, and from software - is virtualy impossible, remembering all of the rules as a new-ish player is difficult, and I would not even want to try running a campaign with all of the rules, conditions, interactions, etc.
This is a mindblowing paragraph to read
Yes, I've been playing D&D a long time
Yes, I used to make 3e characters by hand without any software, which are much more complex than 5e or PF2E
From my perspective, 5e and PF2E are around the same level of complexity
I strongly suspect that if you think 5e doesn't have a similar amount of rule complexity, you are ignoring a ton of 5e rules without even realizing they exist, or playing them wrong
Here's a question:
In 5e, can you drink a potion as a bonus action?
In Baldur's Gate 3, you can
But no. Drinking a potion in 5e is an action
However, you can ready a potion from your pack or belt to drink, as a bonus action, as long as you have a free hand to hold it with
Bet you've been playing that wrong, most people do
You're not wrong - I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of 5E. (I do know the potion rule, because I've homebrewed the potion thing in every game I've ran - bonus action to drink, full action to administer. I'm doing it "wrong", but in my opinion, and those of my players, it makes the game better.)
But consider just the conditions between 5E and Pathfinder2 - 5E has 15 conditions, most of which are fairly understandable (although things like "is a grappled character also incapacitated?" is an annoying issue that comes up more often than I'd like.)
Pathfinder has 42, and a lot of them feel like gradations of a single condition. What's the difference between Hidden and Concealed? (I'm sure you know, and I'd know too if I spent the past decade playing Pathfinder.)
But PF2E is, I would say, and objectively crunchier and more mechanics-heavy ruleset than 5E, and to go back to conditions, a lot of player actions (spells, attacks) mechanically impose conditions on enemies, and you as a DM and a player had better know what they actually do to play the game effectively. 5E is much less dependent on conditions affecting gameplay.
This is a mindblowing paragraph to read
Yes, I've been playing D&D a long time
Yes, I used to make 3e characters by hand without any software, which are much more complex than 5e or PF2E
From my perspective, 5e and PF2E are around the same level of complexity
I strongly suspect that if you think 5e doesn't have a similar amount of rule complexity, you are ignoring a ton of 5e rules without even realizing they exist, or playing them wrong
Here's a question:
In 5e, can you drink a potion as a bonus action?
In Baldur's Gate 3, you can
But no. Drinking a potion in 5e is an action
However, you can ready a potion from your pack or belt to drink, as a bonus action, as long as you have a free hand to hold it with
Bet you've been playing that wrong, most people do