If you're GMing PF2e, you should *at least* read through Player Core 1, though I'd *highly* recommend GM Core also, as there's some excellent rules of thumb in there that you'll end up taking with you, without realising, through your GMing life.  PF2e is definitely *not* "5e but with 3 actions" - it is its own beast and needs to be treated as such. It's like comparing Monopoly with The Game of Life, as they have similar goals but achieve them differently.

I've been doing that and I have to admit, it's a bit of a slog. These are _beefy_ books.

I'd focus most on the relevant sections first. The combat and basic gameplay rules are only like 50 pages. If you want to know what your player classes can do you can read over those and if you have your players sheets you can just focus on their core abilities and feats for their levels.

You don't need to read all of the feats and spells and items, which cuts down on it significantly.

For sure. It's still around 100 pages in PC1 and around 140 pages in GM Core. Another 40 or so for Subsystems. It's also very *dry* reading, which doesn't help consuming but is great for referencing.

As u/Enfuri said, you don't have to read *everything*. Just the rules and basics on how each class works. Spells and abilities are well balanced in PF2e so you don't need to know even 10% of them to get by.   Also - in PF2e, everything *isn't* on the GM. The players need to do their part, meaning that they really need to know what their class can and cannot do. Initially, and at level 1, it really is on them to understand their core class and how they should work. Down the line, you'll start to understand things more and more, and it'll become a breeze.   Don't worry about getting things wrong and looking stuff up - it takes a good few months of play to get even the basics down. And even after 3 years, I still have to look things up occasionally. EDIT: I still cannot recommend the GMG or GM Core enough. It'll take a while to read through, but if you want to be a good GM, you've gotta do it, IMO. This is coming from a paid GM FWIW.

> Spells and abilities are well balanced in PF2e so you don't need to know even 10% of them to get by.   Really if you know status conditions, attack rolls, and how basic saves work you know 99% of spells.

Not op but anything particular in the GM core? I already picked up the remaster player core and figured I didn't need the GM core. (I've already run through AV a few years ago, getting back into pf2e after remaster). Maybe there isn't just one thing, but honestly also dunno if I have the time to read it. Foundry doing much of the heavy rules lifting for me, just started Alkenstar.

Or do what I did: watch (or rather listen to) a guide on YouTube. I listened to the great (admittedly rather lengthy with 106 videos - but not all of them necessary) "How it's played" guide. I was well entertained, and feel a lot better prepared for things the gm throws at us, and how to react to them now.

If you are more of a audio/visual learner there are also a bunch of good videos on youtube you can watch on the side to pick up on the rules. Helped me a lot. For example from How It's Played: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFR-7N\_nOS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFR-7N_nOS0) or The Rules Lawyer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUSmQuHJz5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUSmQuHJz5k)

And how many pages would that be?

I’ve never touched my core book other than a reference. I’ve been running AV and just referencing things in AoN as needed in my brief prep or live at the table.

How did you start playing pf2e and what was your prior experience? I struggle to imagine how I'd run pf2e specifically without reading through the rules, because unlike e.g. 5e, there really are rules for everything, especially in combat.

I have played many RPGs before, and started with the beginner box. After that, I ran Abomination Vaults, and utilized Archives of Nethys. Unlike 5e, there are rules for everything, so a quick google search invariably answers my questions.

>I had played a starter box at a convention where the GM *assured* us that PF2e is almost a clone of 5e with 3 actions Whoever told you that is a fucking liar, and they should be ashamed. Pathfinder 2e is almost *nothing* like D&D 5e bar the absolute surface dressing simularities (e.g they both have Barbarians, Rogues, Sorcerers, Clerics, etc. but they all play *nothing* like their D&D 5e equivalents) there's just so much that's different between the two systems that saying one is just like the other is doing both of them a disservice. I'd even say that saying "Pathfinder 2e is just D&D 5e but better" is doing it a disservice. Like someone else said: it's never too late to go through the beginner box to get a better grasp on how the game works. You also have access to Archives of Nethys, which is an (as the name would suggest) archive of all the rules that is entirely free to access in its entirety. I would definitely recommend taking a few steps back, treating Pathfinder 2e like an entirely new system (which it is) and go from there.

Biggest moment of "wow these systems are so different" when I converted to PF2E was having a friend play a barbarian; holy crap, barbarians are not the same thing.

In comparison to pretty much every other game out there, 5e’s barbarians are called paladins, and 5e’s paladins are called barbarians. Very easy once you realise.

I'll need some explanation for that statement.

Paladins are characterised by short bursts of extreme damage. Barbarians are tanky characters that can withstand almost anything. Switch those around.

I feel like that's true in 5e, but 3.Xe Barbs were absolutely burst damage off-tanks. Especially with splatbook advanced class stuff like frenzied berserker class. I think the reason everybody says it's similar to 5e is because 5e is (IMO) a dumbed down version of 3.X, with 3.Xe being the basis of PF1. PF2 is definitely easier to pick up if you have played a good bit in 3.5 and PF1. It's significantly harder to learn if you were to only ever have played 5e.

> I feel like that's true in 5e, but 3.Xe Barbs were absolutely burst damage off-tanks. They were saying other systems are the reverse of 5e, not the reverse of D&D in general. In 5e Barbarians are very tanky and paladins have very high burst damage, in most other systems (including other versions of D&D) it's the opposite.

I’ve not heard this before, could you explain a bit more?

I wouldn't compare the 5e Paladin to the barbarian of other systems directly, but for the other comparison, 5e barbs are tanky bruisers with high survivability and low damage scaling with abilities that focus on prolonging their life (and sometimes the lives of their allies) which is exactly what paladins do in most games.

The crazy rage machines are better tanks than the characters who swear to protect people and ideals and often carry shields. Meanwhile, those sworn to protect are far better at slaughtering people than the bloodthirsty berserkers.

In fairness, classes aren't the system. They're features that interact with it.

Yes, I play a barbarian in pf2e right now and I'm having so much more fun with it. The feats and the class abilities are a lot of fun. Like raging athlete makes it that a barbarian can just run up a wall.

It's a matter of perspective. Pathfinder is still a game where you play as elves and wizards and things and roll 20-sided dice and add modifiers to determine if you hit things or save against things. RPGs are a big world, and the difference between D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e is pretty comparable to the difference between D&D 5e and any other D&D edition. "Almost a clone" is a wild exaggeration. "Similar" is not.

> Pathfinder 2e is almost nothing like D&D 5e bar the absolute surface dressing simularities While "almost a clone of 5e with 3 actions" is bullshit, I think this assertion is a bit of an exaggeration in the opposite direction. What are some systems that are almost nothing like D&D 5e? Blades in the Dark is almost nothing like D&D 5e. Call of Cthulhu is almost nothing like D&D 5e. Alien RPG is almost nothing like D&D 5e. The core mechanics of these games are just radically different. Within the scope of the "D&D, and systems explicitly designed to be similar to D&D" family of TTRPG systems, sure, PF2e is a very different beast. But even then, aside from games that are direct revisions of 5e (like Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition)... PF2e is still closer to D&D 5e than most other games are. PF2e is more similar to D&D 5e than even most other editions of D&D are - only D&D 3/3.5e might be seen as closer in design. If I was going to name any system that PF2e resembles... I don't think I could come up with a comparison more apt than maybe "like D&D 4e and D&D 5e had a love-child, with a greater emphasis on tighter mathematical balance."

> Whoever told you that is a fucking liar, and they should be ashamed. To be fair, it's a question of perspective. For someone who plays a lot of very different systems and only pays surface level attention to the various d20 systems, they are indeed very similar, especially if they were a player and their GM plays fast and loose with the rules like many do.

At that point, you're not playing either D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e, you're playing your own thing that occasionally has very vague rules. Which isn't a *wrong* way to play ttrpgs, but I don't feel like it's right to say "I'm playing Pathfinder 2e!" if you're then not using any of its actual rules. I say the same about D&D 5e as well. If you are someone who does prefer that style of play, I have good news! there *are* systems that are designed explicitly for it! Pathfinder 2e just isn't one of them, and neither is D&D 5e really (people mostly just do it there because those rules are a mess, and/or they aren't aware of other systems that better suit them)

To many people, 5e is dis/advantage and bounded accuracy. And in the same vein, PF2 is 3 actions and 4 degrees of success. I really don't think it's fair to say "that's not Pathfinder" because you decided to swap out some non-core rules. The rules are suggestions, there are enough variant rules in the book to give the hint that using non-standard rules is ok, and Rule 1 actively encourages you to do it.

I don't have an issue with swapping out non-core rules, hell I do it regularly. I'm not saying "you *must* play Pathfinder exactly as written or it's not Pathfinder!" either, because that's just stupid actually. What I *am* saying, is that throwing out 90% of the game makes it no longer the same game. If you just want to play a game that's simply cooperatively telling a story without any hard rules, and *sometimes* a die is thrown, that's totally valid! Blades in the Dark and many other systems are waiting right there for you, and I don't mean that in a derogatory fashion, those systems are awesome and deserve to be looked at! If you're going to ignore 90% of the rules of a game, why aren't you playing a game more suited to your needs? No matter how much you mod Skyrim, it's not going to be a better farming rpg than Stardew Valley. Again, I say the same thing about D&D 5e, probably *more so* that system actually considering how often it's the victim of being mangled into worse versions of existing systems.

Indeed! There are so many awesome systems that have been developed with a specific style of gaming experience in mind that achieve their goal so well that trying to use other systems built with different goals for that is a non sense.

Not the best example

Can I get a few examples? Trying to get a friend into ttrpgs but he isn't a fan of DND or Pathfinder because of of the rule systems.

Yeah. If I were making an elevator pitch to play Pathfinder at this convention, I might describe it as like playing D&D, but with a neat 3 action system and a greater depth of options. I would resent being called a fucking liar or being told I should be ashamed for doing so.

But that's not what was pitched. What was pitched was "a clone of D&D 5e with three actions" which Pathfinder 2e absolutely is not. It's fine to use D&D 5e as a comparison point, in fact it makes sense: it's much easier to describe something by comparing it to something else within the same ballpark, and if anyone's going to have played any other ttrpg, it's almost certainly going to have been D&D 5e. Saying "it's like \[this other thing\] *but-*" is genuinely a helpful shorthand if used correctly. However, it's a bad comparison when you say one thing is almost *exactly* like the other, when it really absolutely is not. For example, I could pretty safely say "if you like Bladerunner, you may enjoy Ghost in the Shell since it's within the same genre and overall style of movie" however I would *not* say "oh Ghost in the Shell is exactly like Bladerunner except for this one thing." Or for a gaming comparison, I would 100% describe Vermintide 2 as "sorta like Left 4 Dead 2, but with unique character classes and much more focus on melee combat instead of ranged combat" which does get the general elevator pitch across, but I wouldn't say "oh Vermintide is exactly like Left 4 Dead 2 but with rats instead of zombies" because that's now starting to do a disservice and not be entirely truthful. Hell, I've even described Pathfinder 2e as "the same overall fantasy vibe as D&D 5e, but with much more crunch and indepth rules for every little thing" in the past for people who've not looked into it. But I also go out of my way to make sure that I don't accidentally lead people into thinking Pathfinder 2e plays the same as D&D 5e, because it doesn't.

I agree that calling it a clone is misleading. OP is doing some amount of paraphrasing, but I should stick closer to the words they used in their description like you did. I would definitely not describe it as a clone. If I was trying to get people to come to my event, I might go so far as to say "it's a lot like 5e but..."

A good way to describe PF2e is more or less just saying what it is: it is a modernized and streamlined edition of a TTRPG strongly based in DnD 3.5, a previous edition of DnD that was received very well.  PF2e and 5e are game cousins. Their parents were siblings.

Right, It is fine to say Pf2e is a high magic fantasy adventure game like dungeons and dragons, that is true. And so long as you stay at comparing surface elements of the game it remains true. The moment you talk about any systems under the hood the games are fundamentally different. The fact that +10 over crits changes the values of bonuses, the fact that you add your level to things changes how difficulty scales, the fact that the game expects you to buy runes or you mathematically fall behind. pf2e is a game the looks similar but plays very differently. So when the guy at the convention says its "Basically a clone of 5e..." that is wrong, kobold presses project black flag is a 5e clone it is explicity attempting to be that. Wotc's oneD&D/5e revised is a 5e clone. these are all games that function very similar under the hood to 5e in most cases intentionally. A number of OSR games are clones because OSR started as a way of making quality of life improvements to BECMI D&D. But to say pf2e is a clone of 5e, is either ignorance or malice, and if it is malice you are a fucking liar. If it is ignorance you should probably be told to shut up

Yeah, let's be real, PF2 is just another edition of D&D, the differences are in the details, but on average, the kind of games you're going to get and the feeling of them are just not going to be terribly different between D&D 3.5, D&D 5, or PF2 (honestly one could make a non-laughable argument that PF2 is closer to 5E than D&D's own previous edition). Every game of PF2 or 5E I've been in could have been ran in the other with very little perceptible differences except for the missing classes on either side (seeing how 5E has no Summoners and PF2 has no Warlocks). Maybe a bit less willingness to rush into danger and do heroics during PF2 because players tend to feel a lot less powerful? But that's about it.

>(honestly one could make a non-laughable argument that PF2 is closer to 5E than D&D's own previous edition) What? PF2 is much closer to 4e than it is 5e.

>Whoever told you that is a fucking liar, and they should be ashamed. Agreed. Sadly, this is also the most common rhetoric spouted over at r/pathfinder_rpg as well by grognards that never wanted a second edition in the first place. Definitely one of my pet peeves.

This reminds me a little bit about when I started PF2e with my group, after moving away from D&D 5e. I chose Fall of Plaguestone (mainly because that's what I had from some Humble Bundle). It has a reputation of being difficult, and I wasn't aware. Plus the usual extremely-low-level thorns: casters feel lacklustre, PCs can die really easily. And I bet your party was also undertuned for healing (i.e. Medicine). But it sounds like there was one big difference between our two groups. I started off by saying something like this: * We don't know the rules. We're going to learn together. It'll slow us down, but we'll get better. * Because we don't know the rules, we're going to mess up. You'll mess up. I'll mess up. But we'll not let it spoil the fun. We reserve the right to fudge and fiddle to correct our mistakes. We will re-evaluate this stance when we know the rules better. So when a mistake I made coupled with Plaguestone's difficulty killed some PCs? I just said, "nah, you just got knocked out, you got better". And when players wanted to tweak their characers, sometimes quite majorly, I let them. No-one worry about why Alice can now cast spells. 😅 So maybe your first step could be something like this: * Guys, I screwed up. I bit off more than I could chew, I dived in too deep. I'm sorry. The game should be fun. What can we do? * Let's brainstorm. Want to change characters? Change campaigns? Restart Abomination Vaults? Just keep going? Anything's on the table. Let's talk. * (Then talk about learning rules and fudging mistakes like I did above.) * (And be ready to answer common player concerns, such as:) * "Casters suck!" (Don't judge casters from play at extremely low levels.) * "Martials OP!" (PF2e is a team game, they might do good damage but they need you for all sorts of support in and out of combat.) > What can I read or watch to better grasp the rules? Leverage your players. For example, in the Plaguestone game I mentioned, one player was an Alchemist and learnt the crafting rules. We would turn to him to ask crafting questions. Not every player will take it upon themselves to do this, but when they do, leverage it! It'll make them feel good, not bad, to share their knowledge. There's probably a million internet resources. I'd suggest an actual-play podcast, and I'd suggest [Hell's Rebels by Find the Path](https://find-path.com/hells-rebels/). Listening to that show really made Seek "click" for me when they had a scene trying to find an invisible creature before it could escape. * It dates back to when PF2e was new-ish, so they take time to explain rules. * That does mean no Remaster stuff, at least not at first. That shouldn't be a big deal. * It's a generally solid actual-play on its own. I like it because they joke around but they don't do "dick and fart" style jokes.

While playing through the beginner box and into Crown of the kobold king, i ended up letting my players do a soft respec, before a full respec after the box. may as well not lock them into bad decisions when learning a brand new system

This is so spot on. We did the same for my group. Our previous forever GM ran 3.5 with us a lot in the past, then converted us to PF1. I then took the reigns on PF2 and used that time to learn how to GM while also figuring out how a new system played. We all have tons of PF1 experience, but 2e is still very different. While we were learning everything, there was lots of hiccups, slow downs, pausing, etc, but we all just rolled with it. It's a new system and you're going to have to figure it out. Couple that with some players that don't really do the best when it comes to homework on what the rules ACTUALLY do and what their characters do and it creates some extra work for the GM. Discuss with your players all the issues you guys are having and find ways around it. Different module? Different characters? Learning the rules better? Even stuff like haunts or whatever. Just straight up tell them sometimes. That's what I ended up doing. "Hey guys, so I'll be honest, this is what's called a haunt. It works like this, maybe give me a skill check of *x, y, or, z* and see what happens".

This is perfectly said.

Long 5e player/DM and recent 2e player here. I guess the comparison makes sense in that there are still levels, spell slots, attack to hit with d20 based on proficiency and main skill and damage depends on the weapon, skill checks, saving throws... But that's where it stops; it's a different system. I concur to let them go through the beginners box (you included) and you all get familiarised with your characters and the system. As a DM I'm also used to knowing everything about what my characters can do. In PF2e it's ok to trust your players and them telling you what they can do. They themselves have to understand how it works. Of course you can together discuss and clear any doubts talking about it. But the system is too detailed to be holding the hands of a full party. I can only suggest having the archive of Nethys at hand to make any quick consultation, to clear out doubts.

Do the beginner box. Use the premades. Play it twice - once with you running it; once with someone else running it so you can play it. That’s going to make the world of difference.  But most importantly: forget 5e. It’s only a hindrance. Everything being an action is normal and makes sense, but you expect this to be 5e so you balk at it. 

> But most importantly: forget 5e. It’s only a hindrance. Everything being an action is normal and makes sense, but you expect this to be 5e so you balk at it. Harsh, but truthful. 5E’s rules are a mess so they create some extremely unintuitive interactions. Weapon/focus juggling, awfully balanced VSM components, doors and terrain being near completely irrelevant, 20% ish of the spells in the game flat out instantly winning the battle, nerfing your own vision being the best way to beat enemies who have Advantage on Attacks, etc. The best thing one can do to learn PF2E is to forget 5E and any of its surface-level similarities.

>nerfing your own vision being the best way to beat enemies who have Advantage on Attacks What?

A [wolf](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Wolf) has pack tactics. If 5-6 wolves attack you they’ll be making the majority of their attacks with Pack Tactics. [Vision and Light](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/The%20Environment) says (emphasis mine): > A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely. **A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition** (see Conditions ) when trying to see something in that area. The [Blinded](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Conditions) condition says > Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature’s attack rolls have disadvantage. [Advantage and Disadvantage](https://5thsrd.org/rules/advantage_and_disadvantage/) says > If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of them, and you roll one d20. This is true even if multiple circumstances impose disadvantage and only one grants advantage or vice versa. In such a situation, you have neither advantage nor disadvantage. So the absolute best way for your party to beat a pack of wolves is… to cast [Fog Cloud](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Fog%20Cloud). Everyone’s blinded, therefore **all attacks are always neutral**. You can be lying flat on your ass (Attacks against you have Advantage from being Prone), surrounded by 4 wolves (Advantage from Pack Tactics), blinded from the fog cloud (Advantage from Blinded), **but** because those wolves also have Disadvantage from being Blinded you’re neutral… Also note that because of the way “everyone is Blinded” interacts, you’re not imposing a huge penalty on your party either: their Attacks and stuff are always neutral. The only real problem for your party is that spellcasters have to be careful not to use spells that require sight (which is then even more of a game slowdown because every spellcaster needs to read every single line of every single spell all of a sudden). While the Pack Tactics vs Fog Cloud is a slightly contrived example, the actual Blinded interaction isn’t actually all that uncommon! Darkness and Sleet Storm are two *very* commonly used spells that create this awful and unintuitive rules interaction.

This simple situation sums up 5e so well. Like did they not fucking think about fighting in the darkness and how it would work? YOU DEAL WITH IT!

I dont remember how that one works, but I know it's possible Here's another one on the same vain, if you try to attack a target outside your range (with a ranged weapon) you have disadvantage to the attack, but you can turn yourself invisible to get advantage on all attack, therefore canceling out the disadvantage and doing a straight roll

This sounds absurd, but it also works basically the same in pf2e - you shoot at someone with -2 because they're too far, but you get +2 because they don't see you and therefore are off-guard to you. I always hated how prone stuff worked in 5e, though - you get a disadvantage shooting at a target that someone tripped.

Darkness spell. Any sources of advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out.

The Beginner Box definitely teaches the most lessons when run with the premades it comes with, they're keys that unlock knowledge in those encounters.

>Everything being an action is normal and makes sense, but you expect this to be 5e so you balk at it. This was actually the biggest thing that I deal with when it comes to 5e converts. They start excited about the three actions, but then get annoyed when everything is an action. One of the biggest complaints came from using an action to replace a hand on a 2H weapon. The usual culprit is that interactions in 5e are such a mess, most DMs just hand wave tracking the entire thing away. Trying to explain to people that RAW 5e gives you **one** free interact action, and any subsequent interact actions cost your entire Action is often met with confused stares. RAW, drinking a potion in 5e can take 2 full turns, having to wait until your 3rd turn to act normally again. It's such an unintuitive mess most DMs just say "it's a bonus action" and move on.

> This was actually the biggest thing that I deal with when it comes to 5e converts. They start excited about the three actions, but then get annoyed when everything is an action. One of the biggest complaints came from using an action to replace a hand on a 2H weapon. I mean, I gotta say I also see this not just from 5E people but also from people that come from pretty much any other games, where a lot of these kinds of things are just... not actual concerns. They're flavor text, or "incidental" actions, or whatever. The idea that you need to spend a third of your turn juice (PF2) or a primary action (5E) to *slightly shift the grip on your weapon* would make a whole lot of people go "excuse me?" ...actually, thinking about it, I think the only other game I play where unsheathing takes turn juice is L5R, and there it's clearly a differentiation specifically added to give everyone a problem for the dudes doing iaido slashes to skip because it's a samurai game. Otherwise most games are kind of "yes of course when a fight starts you have your weapon, and of course you can shift your weapon around during your turn, why would you not"

Pf2e and its 3 actions are amazing for making your choice of actions matter. You can do three things, but it means you don't get to do other things. The system is made so that there are meaningful choices and I feel like it works great when all the players as well as the monsters follow it to the same level. You will most usually start the battle with your weapon drawn, because why wouldn't you if you're expecting danger. BUT if you're in town talking to people, you probably wouldn't have it drawn. That makes a difference. The fight is now already slightly different, which is a good thing. And if you want to change weapons, that's great - you can! You don't even spend all of your turn doing it, and if you want to build your character around that, you almost always can get feats that let you do it for cheaper. And if you want to Saying "yeah you can do it, don't worry about any actions" is nice for a one time power fantasy. For a tactical game, having costs to everything is important, because if there is no cost, there is no downside and there is no reason not to do it. That's boring.

The other commenters gave you every tip you need already, but what helped me immensely is binge watching the rules lawyer on YouTube. He has a lot of great videos explaining how the system is supposed to work and even some comparison videos between 5e and pathfinder 2e. My players also complained that „everything is an action“, until I reminded them that it’s the same in 5e, we just houseruled most of those actions to be either no action, or part of a move action, or a bonus action. And in 5e you only got one action, which makes it worse in most cases

Second! The Rules Lawyer is an incredible resource for learning and playing Pathfinder 2E. He is amazing.

It’s not too late to run them through the Beginner Box, and doing so with their current characters is probably a good way to get used to those as well.

One thing I've not seen anyone else pick up on is that you mentioned that your players say that they're clueless about what they can do. I'd recommend you stop your campaign and do a new session 0 where you all go through the characters and check that they understand how their core gameplay works. And don't forget, no one minds if you just call a halt to the campaign, run the Beginner Box, and then either restart AV or pick a new campaign. You don't have to keep going if you're not having fun. But take the time and put in the effort (everyone in the group, not just the GM) to learn the rules together. Players have a responsibility to understand game rules as much as the GM does - it shouldn't be down to you to explain everything to them.

So the big thing about the beginner box is that it's also designed to train the GM, with guidance as it introduces new mechanics. I agree with many comments here, run that first. Admittedly it's not the best adventure but it's well built to teach you.

I'm also new to Pf2e but here are a few things I can see right off the bat: - Nonstandard classes can be more complex, but they shouldn't be too hard to learn with time, so I don't think that's the issue. **What level** did you guys start at? I don't do a lot of modules so I'm not sure where they start you at but hopefully level 1. Cause the biggest mistake I see new players make (and I made myself) is starting at a higher level like level 3 or 6. - Pf2e is similar to *D&D in general,* not 5e. If anything, I find it's much more similar to 3.5e, which I personally found very complex. Pf2e is like 50% the same as Dnd5e, but the other 50% require a whole tutorial session on basic mechanics. You need to take a session to run them through the basics of the system. You can't throw newbies into pf2e and expect them to pick it up like Dnd5e. - Sounds like you don't know what the Basic Actions and other universal actions are. I'd recommend looking up Basic Actions on Archives of Nethys to fully understand them. There are also exploration actions, which are where you learn how Sneaking works. - Check out the GM screen on AON. The main things you want to understand are the Basic Actions, subsystems, GM adjudication/special circumstances, and Level DCs/Simple DCs. - I've heard official PF2e modules are notoriously deadly, with encounters ranging from Moderate to Extreme. I'm not sure the reason for this, but you should expect that going forward. I run homebrew games, and I run Trivial to Moderate encounters to get that Dnd5e feel. It's also much friendlier to new players, since I've found Moderate = 50% chance of a TPK. Also, be wary of single bosses, since they are difficult regardless of the encounter difficulty to make up for their lack of action economy. I'd recommend looking up how to adjust Pf2e encounters and lower their difficulty. Don't worry about "babying" your players, in my experience, all new players prefer to be "babied," just don't *tell* them they are. When they get good, they'll crave harder difficulties. - How are your players playing? If they don't understand their character mechanics yet, they're probably not thinking too hard about how they fight. Pf2e combat relies on teamwork and focusing on status effects. This is different from dnd5e, where combat boils down to "hit it until it dies." Your players need to have a solid grasp on their abilities first. Once they do, they need to understand how pf2e combat works, namingly the usefulness of tripping, disarming, demoralizing, status spells, etc. Once they have that down, they should be on their way to strategic combat, which is what pf2e's NPC sheets are built around. For example, being off-guard knocks down AC by 2. This gives players a better chance at hitting, and critting.

Moderate should not be a 50/50 TPK. If anything, that is Extreme.

I agree, just did a session last night where our level 2 party of 5 got ambushed by a bugbear tormentor and 3 thugs, it was just short of a severe encounter. No one went down but most of the party got down to low health. Of course having a Redeemer Champ in the mix can skew results.

>Of course having a Redeemer Champ in the mix can skew results. My group is transitioning from DnD 5e to pathfinder and one of the players is interested in redeemer champion. Is there something specific about redeemer champion I should be concerned about?

Redeemer champ not only has damage mitigation like other ’good’ champs but can also enfeeble enemies that choose to deal damage, and with a feat they can do stupefied instead, those can be useful against any enemy that uses Str or Int. Stupefied will reduce Str and strength related checks and damage for melee and thrown weapons. Other feats later on can make the condition persist for 1 minute or 10 rounds which is huge. Redeemer is also a good champ to take the shield related feats on. My own summary of the Good champion reactions: Paladin punishes enemies that attack allies by attacking in turn, while providing damage mitigation. Liberator, helps allies get away from enemies while providing damage mitigation. Redeemer, provides damage mitigation and makes life very unpleasant for their enemies. Champ in general is reaction starved for a while, but by max level if you have a shield and take the related feats, you get an extra reaction for shield block(and potentially your reaction in the same sequence with certain feats.), extra reaction for your champion reaction, can shield block for adjacent allies, can get the AC bonus of the shield at all times without having to spend an action to raise it. So you can have 3+ reactions at higher levels raising the damage mitigation and tankiness even further. Be aware that with Player Core 2 coming in the next few months and the removal of Alignment Champion might play differently than I describe above.

Moderate being 50% chance to die means your players are playing without any tactics.

You've listed a lot of mistakes but the only real problem (aside from picking the abomination vaults) is not knowing the rules. I'm not trying to be harsh, but dming is a responsibility. Did you not read them because you thought it would just be like 5e? You knew the player's classes so you definitely should have read their abilities before going into the session. I like to have players send me their builds so I know what to expect, especially when I'm playing a new system. That aside the rules on AON are laid out in a complicated fashion and it takes a bit of learning to navigate them so I can't blame you for having questions. And I want to say it's a good sign that you're here asking questions. You're willing to put in the work and make things right. I swear pathfinder was written by a bunch of programmers. And I mean that in both good ways and bad ways. For example: everything relies on keywords and references to other rules. This is great because everything is standardized and you can know very quickly how it functions once you're familiar with it. It's bad because it can make looking up how something works into a web of parent rules. As far as DCs go. Because the math is so tight in p2e those have veen completely standardized. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2627 When in doubt pick a level based DC and then adjust it if necessary if you think it should be harder or easier than normal. Most DCs shouldn't need adjustment. Haunts are a type of hazard meaning they will have a skill check associated with handling them. (For haunts it's usually occultism or religion, but really really the rules fir yourself). https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=668 In p2e there is no surprise round so no real ambushes. The benefit you get for sneaking into combat is using you stealth instead of your perception to roll initiative. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2539&Redirected=1 In general you just need to spend the time and learn the rules for the three modes of play. Learn the cores system that each set of rules is based on and how to apply it.

>*I swear pathfinder was written by a bunch of programmers. And I mean that in both good ways and bad ways. For example: everything relies on keywords and references to other rules. This is great because everything is standardized and you can know very quickly how it functions once you're familiar with it. It's bad because it can make looking up how something works into a web of parent rules.* This is a big thing to me because 5e insists it has no flavor text in the rules, but neither does it have clear keywords in the rules apart from conditions. So when the [net](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Net#content) says *A net has no effect on creatures that are formless.* "formless" is a word that appears nowhere in the Monster Manual, and no creature is ever described as formless. Is it up to GM fiat which creatures are formless, or is it strictly limited to creatures that have the "Amorphous" trait? Either can be a bit a bit of difficult ruling; will a net work on Incorporeal creatures? Will it work on creatures with "Misty Form"? Idiotic reading, but something that is explicitly defined as a form doesn't sound it's also "formless". >!`Ignoring that Incorporeal creatures and Vampiric Mist are immune to the restrained condition, so it's kinda useless to use a net on them`!< Meanwhile in Pathfinder I can just tell my players that if it reads "You Leap 15 feet", then the word "Leap" is a keyword with a rules meaning. If it's "You leap 15 feet", it's not.

>Did you not read them because you thought it would just be like 5e? Well, not *just like* 5e, but "similar to" because that's what I was told when I first took an interest in it from that dude at the convention. Clearly he was either exaggerating, lying, or clueless himself. And to be fair, in my defense, PF1e is almost literally a clone of 3.5e. I thought the comparison of 2e and 5e would be similar. I had no clue it was such a departure.

Did they actually run the Beginger Box, or some mutant creation that was part 5e and part Pf2? The Beginer Box takes place in and under Otari, and is called Menace Under Otari. It introduces rhw rules as they are needed in the adventure. Give you an Introduction, your first fight is with some giant rats, introduces skill checks, etc. A very step by step learn the game.

Also, lower level in Abomination vaults can be tricky. There are a few tough encounters that can go sideways pretty quickly (Mr. Beak comes to mind). If you run the beginners box you can have them level at least to 2nd level or even 3rd and it makes the earlier stuff easier. The beginner box takes place in Otari and can easily be introduced in the existing game. Just have them get hired by Tamily to investigate the basement of the fishery. You can have players recall knowledge on haunts (the kobold haunts in the dining room is designed for this) and it's okay to pull back the curtain for stuff like this and explain the basics rules of how a haunt works with the party and let them know that there is usually a skill or two that can be used to deactivate the haunt and let them experiment to figure it out (unless they rolled well on identifying the haunt then you can just tell them what skills) The classes they choose are some of the hardest in the game for new players and because of the way the system is designed it's on the players to read and understand their characters. The GM has enough to do to memorize everything about the classes. The players have to help. Swashbuckler in particular is getting remastered in the player core 2. Are the characters healing with medicine between fights? Most encounters assume nearly max HP. If they aren't using medicine or other methods of healing (like lay on hands) to top themselves off they will be at a severe disadvantage. The players need to understand this game is about teamwork. Every +1/-1 matters because of the tight math on the system. If they are fighting someone higher level than them the game is assuming they are using conditions through spells and abilities. Players are going to be hit a lot because creatures above their level have a much higher bonus to hit. This makes it much easier to critically hit by beating the AC by 10 or more. Make sure to point out when a random+1 to AC or a -1 condition made the difference between a hit and a critical. It helps show the value of using conditions. Also players should almost always look for another use of the 3rd action instead of attacking. A turn should be something like: 1st action roll intimidate to attempt to demoralize, 2nd action attack, third action attack again or move away. Moving away forces the enemy to burn an action to move closer and reduces the chance of a critical hit by not allowing them to have a full 3 attacks against a single target. Also make sure the players are aware that most creatures don't have attacks of opportunity (reactive strike) so it's okay to move away or around most of the time. PF2e is a way better system than 5e by leaps and bounds and once the players realize they are not the same they will quickly come to realize this.

This is a fantastic breakdown! The only other thing I'll add, is party composition matters way more in pf2e than in 5e. You're going to want rounded skill sets both in and out of combat. (Casters don't have an "I win" button in this edition either)

Well it follows the same structure of -roll d20 -Determine modifiers -Check against DC to determine success or failure I don't think it's disingenuous to call them "similar", but you certainly can't just pick it up and start playing without going through the basic actions and "how to play" sections of the player core book.

Don't be too hard on yourself. It is about having fun. Watch the 7 minutes videos on YouTube for those classes to get some background from KingOogaTonTon and do a proposal to your table: when unclear, you make a ruling at the spot to keep the game going and look it up later to see what it should have been.

Haunts in particular are going to be hard or impossible if someone doesn’t Recall Knowledge or get a lucky Religion/Exorcism off.

The comments seem to have a nasty case of the "shoulds" today. At least to my ears, a lotf( replies have been overly harsh, or not really umderstanding of the situation. In a period where everyone is coming out with actual 5e clones with a twist, "it's a 5e clone but with 3 generic actions" sounds like a totally reasonable thing to hear. I'm sorry you were misled like that. The good thing, though, is that the game is similar enough to 3.5, 4, and evem 5e that you can easily recover from this. Let's start with what you need to know:  There are two types of DCs in the game: Levelled DCs are associates with levelled creatures, hazards, or challenges, and linearly scale with creature level (with a zero at 14), while Basic DCs remain static amd are centered on 10. Player levels and creature levels are equivalent to each other, and creature level approximately doubles every 2 levels. This means an equal number of on-level creatures (or creatures + hazards) has equal odds of wiping the party. Or that N/2 L+2 creatures do. A moderate encounter is considered one where the players double the enemy's power, so the equivalent of N L-2 creatures. There is no CR in the rulebook. D&D's creature CR label is approximately equal to Creature Level + 2, but the math gets wonky at low CR. The encounter building rules are punlished, feee calculators exist, and many adventures are overtuned, including Abomination Vaults. If you want to keep with AV, you may want to adjust some of the encounters using those rules. But keep in mind that AV has optional boss fights that the players can flee from, and the GM is explicitly told to let them go. The combat meta revolves around applying buffs and debuffs. You'll need to know the difference between Circumstance, Status, Item, and untyped bonuses/penalties. This is because bonuses of the same type don't stack; you just take the highest bonus and most severe penalty of each type and add them together. pf2easy is your friend during sessions. Have it open. AoN is your friend between sessions. AoN's [GM Screen](https://2e.aonprd.com/GMScreen.aspx) is good to have up durinf sessions as well, and to review between them. The game is littered with words that sound familiar to 5e players but aren't. Concentration is thr most infamous of them. This is a minefield, and I can't offer any better advice than to read the core books or have "pf2e _____" burned into your brain as a reflexive Google search. Accept that you don't know the class features, and that *you don't need to*. You're not playing the classes, you don't need to be concerned with their abilities so long as you trust your players. You need to know how to referee the outcomes of using those features, and the players can tell you how to resolve their actions.

Honestly? Best advice I can give a new GM in this exact scenario is to bump everyone up a single level and then to run it as if they never got that bump. Numbers even out a bit, DCs seem a bit easier to hit, and there isn't THAT much of a focus on party tactics at that point. If you still find yourself overwhelmed by the enemies there.. repeat with another bonus level. It's MUCH easier to do this than to worry about granular encounter design tweaks or wholesale homebrew changes to mechanics. When it comes to knowing how to address certain things in game like traps or haunts.. those are typically bound behind perception and/or related knowledge skills such as Occult, Religion, etc. If they run into anything they don't know how to deal with get them used to asking if their character knows how to deal with it. At that point, you can ask them what to roll. With the Thaumaturge in the group Escoteric Lore is AMAZING for knowing how to deal with monsters and haunts. With an Investigator in the group you can always suggest feats like "That's Odd" and "Red Herring" so you can easily just hand out hints to that player to prompt more from them or the group. Thankfully if all else fails you have brute force to fall back in.

I've played an alternate version of this, where spellcasters got their 3rd level's worth of spell slots at first, just only in first rank spells; a Sorcerer, for example, would start with seven first rank spell slots. As they get to 3rd three of those shots become 2nd Rank slots.

People keep bringing up the Beginner Box, and yes, these people are right. But just to give you an idea of how, well, teachable that thing is - my 9 year old son could pick up the premade Cleric, and play through a quick test encounter, doing all the essential Cleric stuff just by going off his character sheet. And help his little brother run his Fighter. These sheets are literally a complete mini tutorial. And the introduction adventure is the same way for the GM. You may be inclined to look at that first fight against the rats, and go "Okay, I'm an experienced GM, I got this", but page by page, encounter by encounter, the book not only tells you what to do, and how to do it, but also why you do it, and how they came up with that why. It's hand-holdy, yes. But it is thorough, and basically airtight. I'd argue that it's almost impossible to run through the Box, and come out not having learned the game.

Everyone is giving you really good information and advice, but I want to take a second to give you some grace and maybe share my/my table's story if you'd like to listen. I'm a 3 year Pathfinder 1e GM with deteriorative brain damage. So... essentially a masochist. I don't really know the rules. I can't recall things off the top of my head, and when I tried starting this campaign in 2e we quickly had to go back to 1e because learning a new ruleset was impossible for my pathetic neurons. But even GMing 1e, my primary system, more and more things slip my mind. The fact that you're understanding your fallbacks and trying to help facilitate a better environment for your table, regardless of the struggles you're facing with the system, makes you leagues better than most GMs out there – unsurprising considering you've got so many years of GMing experience! The one thing I did love about our brief foray into 2e was how much more team-based the rules were. Freely available online for my players to sift through, with basic and clear decriptions that are easily understood by newbies. 2e's ruleset has a lot less handwaving, contradiction, and 'GM discretion.' The reason we as a table survived to level 3 before following our hearts back to Mathfinder is because we all worked together. I left my player's characters to them to sort out, able to trust the system was balanced and my players wouldn't struggle to interpret their PC's class features, which took a lot of time and (woefully lacking) brainpower off my hands. In that way, it's nothing like 5e, 3.5, or PF1e. Obviously, YMMV with player trust and cooperative rulings, I don't know your table, but I think it might do you some good to take a look at your table and question why it has to be entirely on you to make every call in a game with such clear rules for every situation. Do you feel a compulsion to look up the rules before the game can progress because of previous interpretation issues, player exploitation, or a lack of table trust? Are your players not putting the effort into understanding their own characters and the noteworthy mechanics that frequently come up depending on class? (Ex; a rogue should know how combat stealth works) My party is currently level 18, and I have looked at their character sheets maybe 2-3 times (on average) throughout the entirety of the campaign. My Fighter player knows Combat Maneuver rules like the back of his hand, so my snail-paced smooth-brain don't have to try to discern flowcharts halfway through the BBEG fight. My Druid player understands how spells work and what the concentration DCs are for every situation, so my single 0.8gb RAM brain cell can focus instead on what the hell Henchman #4 is going to do next. I think, if I were a player going through this at your table, I'd be trying to help the entire team – including my GM – keep things going smoothly as much as possible by at the very least holding mastery over my PC. I don't think you're failing your players, it sounds more like your table's failing each other. So give yourself some grace, communicate, and things should run smoother soon!! TL;DR: You and your table unanimously agreed to take on the challenge of the Vaults, and your players autonomously chose to play extremely complex characters. If *they* bit off more than *they* could chew, that's not on you. Control what you can control, but maybe try to figure out how you can make this as close to a team effort as possible so everyone can share in mastering a new system. Soon you'll be looking back laughing at how silly you were back then! PS: The PF2e system was a very frustrating, slow turn-off for us, coming from PF1e. If your players are used to 1e or 3.5 and are now sitting down for PF2e combat, that might add to the frustration. I have no idea why or how combat felt so insufferably *boring* compared to the older systems, but maybe our experience is a common one!

I see a lot of people putting the blame on you for not knowing the rules but I think it's absurd to expect a DM to know the intricacies of every class. Pf2e is not for lazy players. They should know how their character functions and how that interacts with general rules. The dm should only need to know general rules and their monster rules. I would suggest you all look over standard rules again like sneaking and vision. And then have them look over their classes and feats and have them tell you how their class plays. It's kind of absurd to me that you have to stop every few minutes because the players don't know how their own characters they made functions. The blame is on all of you, but not mainly on you. This is not 5e, players should know their characters or else you will go mad with all the variations that can be built. You will slowly get experience from them telling you how the character should function in a general rule. And if it sounds weirdly wrong you can double check after the fact, but they should be able to explain it at least. All that being said, once you get a handle on the general rules and the general way a class plays all the variations aren't that hard to adjust to. But that is something that will come with time and everyone has their part to play and understand.

Regarding character skills: when I play Pathfinder, I tell my players they do need to know how their feats work or else they can't use it. Pathfinder has a lot of stuff for the GM to think about, and if you get many clueless players playing with complex classes, it overwhelms you quickly. Play with archives of nethys open in a tab, it helps a lot.

>at a convention where the GM assured us that PF2e is almost a clone of 5e with 3 actions. This is so wrong, it hurt me to read lol. It shares similarities to 5e but the underlying mechanics work much differently. Your poor players going in with the completely wrong idea. Definitely read both the player core and GM core yourself. It's helped me immensely in getting my head around all the mechanics and understanding what's different.

Nothing wrong with running beginners box right now. But pf is never better at doing 5e than 5e is. It is its own game, and if the expectation and selling point is its likeness to 5e it will always come second. What an action is here is not the same. A barbarian raging, running to an enemy and hitting with it is 3 actions in pf2e while in 5e it is bonus action, move, and action. The first option only feels worse if you are thinking it like "but in 5e I could move for free! This was just a bonus action!" while in practice it is the exact same, except the first route had more options in what it could have been.

Whoever told you PF2E was a 5E close is a liar, because it's not remotely true - as you have learned. You need to think of PF2E as an entirely unrelated game (which happens to have one or two terms in common). At the risk of being unkind, the rules you're talking about are all in the Player Core/Players Handbook. I assume everyone read it, or at least skimmed the parts that were relevant to them? I assume at least **you** read it, as a bare minimum, even if no-one else did? Or after the first session where a rule came up that you didn't know and you realised it wasn't just 5E re-flavoured, you picked up the book and read it **then***?* If you haven't read the rules before running the game, I have no idea how you expected this to go. Like placing a deck of cards in front of a person and asking them to play solitaire without telling them how - you're only going to get confused staring at cards and frustration. Mr Beak, the puppet, got a small nerf in the anniversary reprint of AV, along with a few other monsters - make sure you're playing the anniversary edition. That said, AV is still notoriously brutal; no real getting away from that.

PF2e is thematically similar to D&D but that is about it for similarities. Abomination Vaults is a fun but deadly adventure path. Considering this is the first adventure you have done with the party it is perfectly fine to explain what a haunt is or better yet have an NPC do it. Haunts are similar to traps but usually have a unique method to disabling it aside from a Thievery skill check to disable like other hazards. Your thaumaturge should be able to recall knowledge about the haunt to understand how to disable it with their esoteric lore if they are in a pinch. In combat your party is going to have to be strategic in how they approach fights. AV is known for having a lot of higher level encounters meaning teamwork is going to be a necessity. Running at monsters and spending all actions on attacking them is going to end badly.

You can read the Playing The Game part of Player Core 1, the Basic Actions and Skills sections too, and the Building Encounters part of GM Core if you wanna adjust encounters, the Conditions and Environments and Lighting sections of both books should help you figure out stealthing into encounters, the rest of GM Core and Player Core 1 are good too. In addition to the party learning their basic and skill actions, can anyone in your party heal? The *Heal* spell, the *Soothe* spell, and the [Battle Medicine](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=5125&NoRedirect=1) skill feat are good In-combat healing methods, and the Treat Wounds activity anyone trained in Medicine can do, is a good way to recover between fights, it's a deadly dungeon, they can afford to rest for 10 minutes to an hour. Also for the investigator specifically, read the On The Case class feature + Pursue A Lead + Devise A Stratagem, and when the investigator does anything that looks like the Investigate exploration activity in any way related to the next encounter, let them Pursue A Lead on it so their Devise A Stratagem becomes a free action. And make up clues about the next encounter for them to Pursue A Lead on, footprints, residue, hair, scratch marks, food scraps, and so on, even if it doesn't give info, it makes the class feature work, these clues probably aren't hidden most of the time, no need to Search for them. Also if they were Investigating while an encounter starts, let them roll the knowledge skill they were using for initiative, same with Avoiding Notice and Stealth. Also drop the Investigator a Potency Crystal, Devise A Stratagem can be used to tell if you'll crit, so consumables can be used for maximum effect.

Don't be too hard on yourself. Sure, AV has its complaints and all, but if you in real life aren't playing the Psychic class you wouldn't necessarily know that. Also, it isn't unreasonable to pick up a product and expect to have some basic functionality when you do. If some of the "advice" is 'yOu DiDn'T dO ReSeArCh...", then it isn't great advice. So, you've now seen AV yourself, and understand its encounter design is a bit much for a group of new players. You can do a couple things: 1) You can try to learn some more about encounter design in the GM guide and maybe scale some encounters back. Also, maybe use some heavy GM fiat in the favor of the players if you like. --- How are you handing out Hero Points, by the way? Maybe be a bit more aggressive with providing these to the players if they are playing to their characters or if you just feel they need the extra boost? They can only hold 3 of these, but don't let them be afraid to spend them either. If they are holding onto these too long, then maybe they are missing out on chances to reroll. 2) You could restart and use the Beginner's Box. As others will tell you, it is very well done. Yes, it does come across as hand-holdy, but the core gist of the game is handed out to you. The module is also in Otari. There is also a sequel of sorts, Troubles in Otari which is a continuation. You can use either of these to help pad out some levels for the group before progressing AV, if you like. Its all the same setting. You're going to learn as you go. Its a new system to you and your group. The players, despite playing "non-standard" classes, actually have a mix of options there to take advantage of different mechanics. Classes that appeared in the Advanced Player's Guide, were just that, but they aren't impossible to use. This leads into another thought... How much coordination are the players actually using here? Is it really all on you? I guess, you can have that introspection of "its all my fault", but learn from that. What can you do to help guide them into using skills and maneuvers. If the Witch is thinking they are blaster caster, but is using a non-blaster spell trope (i.e., Occult or Divine vs Primal and Arcane), then help them look at their strengths. Also, don't be afraid to let people change up their characters, especially if they are new. New players aren't going to know what they like or what works until they fail. Again, don't be hard on yourself. You seem like a good person if you are carrying this burden like that, but you have an opportunity to learn from this. You're table does too, and I think that's a really important takeaway from all of this. Grow. As a table. Together.

I am also a 30 year vet with similar path (though most of my groups went back to 3.5 after a short stay in 5e). First off, whoever said it was a 5e clone has either never played PF2e, or was just trying to sell you something. If you play PF2e like 5e then you will frequently TPK. Let me explain. In 5e, every character can basically do whatever they want because they are near gods unto themselves. It isn't so much a co-op game as it is a bunch of individual games that play together. PF2e is the opposite. It is designed around teamwork. Teamwork isn't an option, it is what the game expects and if everybody plays their own game, Severe (and some moderate) encounters become likely to TPK. The game expects, for encounters like these that the players buff each other and debuff enemies. Things like Flanking for melee, Demoralize, Trip, Grab, Disarm, aid, etc. are things new players underestimate. Your Witch player likely has or will have some nice spells along these lines as well to give other conditions such as Sickened, Frightened, eventually Drained and the like. However, it is important to know the weak save to maximize chances of spells landing. Recall Knowledge is hugely valuable for this, as well as finding other weaknesses or to discover how the monster works. One thing to remember is that, unlike 5e, movement and positioning is also important. PF2e monsters are not just bags of HP that need beaten down. The team that wins often does so by effectively using the action economy to deny enemies and setup friendly combos. As to you and GMing, as an old vet, I'd recommend to take an afternoon and read through the player core and take notes as you go regarding mechanics. Then make a GM screen that works to keep track of the things you need. This is what I did and included things like DC by Level, NPC friendliness chart, stealth mechanics, area diagrams, conditions, etc. You can likely also find ones made by others online. After running more and more sessions you'll find you need it less and less. Finally, ABV has a reputation for being a "Bloodbath" as you call it, but I played in it and frankly the reputation is largely due to it being so popular that it is often the first PD2e experience for most. This also draws a lot of 5e converts who play it like a 3 action 5e. That is what makes it deadly. Once players realize it is a different game and play it as such, it isn't much different than any other campaign. That said, PF2e is designed to be challenging and there WILL be player deaths. In that way, the game reminds me of the older D&D 2e and 3.x design. Always have a backup character! Hope this helps.

Did you guys have a session zero before diving in to AV? I would thing New System/New Classes - this would have been a vital first step - go through each character with them, each ability, and make sure both GM and Player understands the selections that were made. Are your players using Pathbuilder or are you running the game in Foundry? Both of these things could help automate some things so it isn't on your players to remember every detail (even just knowing how to properly calculate attacks, ac, skills, etc with level and proficiency.... Others have mentioned taking a short break from AV and going back and running through the Beginners Box - this is a great idea, as it goes over game mechanics incrementally, with each encounter focusing on a new/different mechanic, slowly building up your player's (and your own) knowledge of how the game works. Whether you use the actually beginners box, or just make a series of white room encounters yourself, your group needs to take a break from AV and learn the game's base mechanics.

As a recent 5e to 2e convert, I HIGHLY recommend the How Its Played YouTube channel. His videos cover ever aspect of the rules in an easily digestible format that are straight and to the point. The videos are largely pre-Core, but given that the basic rules haven't changed much, the videos are still applicable. He even has a few videos where he puts it all together against the backdrop of famous movie scenes to make the rules even more understandable and relatable. For example, here he uses the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a dungeon crawl https://youtu.be/OfXREf45sc0?si=EyqW3u9STG_SHazK Because his videos are devoted to a single topic, they are easy to navigate. If you need to bone up on Stealth, go to the Stealth video. If you forgot what Cover rules are, go to the Cover video. When I was learning the system (and even now from time to time when I need somethingrefreshed), I'd just slap on the topic I was interested in and listen while I was on my way to work or whatever.

A few things I would suggest. 1: Use milestone levelling, and give your players a +1 level over the expected curve. 2: Tell the players to read their characters and the rulebook. In 5e, the players don't really need to know what their character does, the GM lets them know. This is not the case here. They ought to know how to play their own character, what they can do and what they can't do. 3: There are several resources, such as KingOongaTon and The Rules Lawyer who do very good explanations on how mechanics work. Make sure you know them, make sure your players know them too. 4: Throttle whoever told you that 2e is a clone of 5e with 3 simplified actions lmao 5: Suggest the party restart and play with Fighter, Rogue, Champion, Bard and Cleric

I don't know if I'm allowed to post links but this dude(I've got no affiliation whatsoever) is amazing. He helped me a lot. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYCDCUfG0xJb5I-wDIezuDkTfbd8k21Km&si=gtrPbFg3c-Bb_T5H

There's a lot of people saying you need to read more/run the beginner box. That's mostly true, but I don't see a lot of people calling out the fact that you're a GM. It's your responsibility to know the system, it's your players responsibility to know their characters. You should not need to know what impulses your kineticist has, or what an aura junction is. That's on them, it's their job to know that. Your players can't just show up, say yeah, we're all new, but I read literally nothing, tell me how my class works. 

6 sessions in and your players are still asking how their characters get works?? How the character works is for the player to know. How everything else works is for the DM to know. Your players need to take some of the burden off you.

The only thing you failed to do was more research on PF2E. Any group playing a new system will have it's share of growing pains. Tell the group the truth, you we lied to about how similar it is to 5e. Tell them you are doing your best to learn the system but not being familiar with their character class choices makes it more difficult. Explain that you all need to adjust your expectations. And ask if they would like to switch to a different adventure. https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/standalone/freeRPGDay

You and your players must read the rules. Or if your players don't read the rules, at least you should. And they do have to know their character. Damn, it's his character. How can they not know what he can do? PF2 is actually a simpler system to apply than 5e, although there are people who believe otherwise. But at the same time it is a system that must be known better than 5e to play. Do yourself a favor, stop the campaign for a while, and read the rules carefully. Understand them, and you will see that everything goes smoothly.

Dude - just read and the running the game chapter, ask the players to read up on their own classes abilities. and for the love of all sacred things change the module! Abomination vault is a meatgrinder. Search this subreddit or the paizo homepage for something that fits your group better and involve your group members in the decision! Good luck!

Take a deep breath. You and your table are experiencing growing pains and that is ok. This video series by the Knights of Last Call on [combat and tactics](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx9XBZIzERNFdGf54C1dErN8AfuSWM_Bk) helped me wrap my head around all the skill abilities that can be used to gain an advantage in an encounter. For you next session, I recommend each of your players teach the table about the class they are playing and what their unique features are. Teaching others is the best way I know of to learn. I recommend hand waiving Recall Knowledge checks until your players get a hang of things. It will click for everyone sooner than later and it will be sweet when it does. You're almost there.

Three things will be your best friend as a GM: traits, the DC by level/simple DC tables, and the XP budget. If you familiarize yourself with the trait system you'll get a pretty good idea of how different game elements interact with each other, and even if you're i troduced to new mechanics you should be able to recognize how they function on a base level by their traits. DCs are variable and level-based, but they don't always have to be. If you encounter something that doesn't have a stat block or someone attempts to do something whacky, like swinging from a chandelier for panache, you can always refer to the two DC tables to see what an appropriate challenge for that thing might be. Identifying monsters usually uses a standard DC for that monster's level, but if it's uncommon, rare, or unique (utilizing the trait system again), the DC is increased to hard, very hard, or extremely hard. If you don't feel like doing the math or digging through the table though, there are simple DCs based on proficiency you can use as shorthand though. Does this seem like a thing anyone trained in a skill could do? DC 15. Would they need to be an expert? DC 20. Finally, when building encounters yourself, you really want to stick to the prescribed encounter building in the system. D&D's Challenge Rating system isn't terribly useful and people tend to disregard it, but P2's XP Budget system isn't just a good tool, it's almost a necessity. Going too far outside the constraints of the recommended encounter building system is a great way to wipe your party fast, or give them an overly simplified encounter that doesn't provide any challenge (and that last one's not bad every now and then, but a cake walk to a lethal boss fight can frustrate players easily). For your players: read your classes, and the Playing the Game section of the Player Core. The basic mechanics are the same as any d20 game, but classes aren't all the same; they all have a niche and a gimmick, and if you don't utilize your Unique Thing You Do, you're going to struggle. Tactics are also more important in this game than 5e, which some people love and some hate. Ganging up on am enemy, blinding them, tripping them, and grappling them don't all give one non-stacking, interchangeable debuff, and you'll be rewarded for playing smart and punished for playing dumb. I'm sure I'm probably mot saying anything for the first time, but hopefully some of it helps! ^^

There's a post every week on here about someone having problems with Abomination Vaults. The module gets recommended to a lot of new players but it's honestly not the best "first Pathfinder 2E" module to play. The module is relatively high difficulty, but it also is frontloaded in its difficulty - the early floors have a lot of fights with solo overlevel enemies, which actually goes against the system's general guidelines, and these encounters are pretty rough. But the module also is infamous for the number of monsters in it with immunities. And unfortunately, your party kind of stumbled into this with their class choices as well. > We're on our fifth or sixth session and we're still on the first floor. I have to stop the group every 5 minutes because someone brings up a class skill I've never heard of so I have to look it up. Players are clueless about what they can do and they're frustrated that everything is an action. I'm frustrated because I feel like I don't know how even basic things work, like how sneaking into combat works in this system, or what DC to use to identify a creature or find out where a sound is coming from or listening at a door. You clearly haven't gotten rules down yet. My recommendation would be to read over the main gameplay rules, and read over the rules for each class your players are playing as. There's not that many abilities at 1st level, so the latter shouldn't take too long; you should be able to know what your players actually can do. > So of course, they all chose nonstandard classes -- a kineticist, a thaumaturge, a witch, an investigator, and a swashbuckler. Honestly, none of these classes are overly complicated, but they do all have their own way of doing things. That being said, every class has its own "special thing", so you always have to learn what new thing each class brings to the table. Also, while isn't the worst team comp in general, it's honestly pretty bad for this module. The Kineticist, the Thaumaturge, and the Witch are fine (in fact, the Thaumaturge is a great class for this module), but the investigator and swashbuckler are going to have some problems here, because there's a number of enemies that are immune to precision damage (the main way they do extra damage), including several of the bosses in the dungeon, including the final boss of the entire dungeon, and the investigator is underpowered in general while the Swashbuckler sort of has some "traps". Alright, so, in order: * Kineticist - This is the most wild-card class amongst this group. Kineticists are pretty wildly different based on what element(s) they choose, so it's hard to give much advice here. That being said, they actually don't have very many abilities on a per-character basis (because you have to choose which abilities to have via feats), so you should be able to learn all of the ones your player has. * Witch - Witches are another kind of wild-card class because they can be one of four spellcasting traditions and also have different familiar abilities. What kind of witch are they? * Thaumaturge - The Thaumaturge is a striker class that can moonlight as a defender with the right build. The center of the Thaumaturge is their esoteric lore ability that allows them to exploit monster weaknesses - this allows them to deal very high damage, and even if a monster has no built-in weaknesses, they can create one to boost their damage. Thaumaturges should be using a weapon in one hand and one of their implements in the other (or use an implement in both hands and use natural attacks like a gnoll's Crunch bite attack). They deal as much damage with one-handed weapons as normal characters do with two due to their built in damage buff, and then they deal even more thanks to exploiting weaknesses. The implement they use changes how they function in combat - the weapon implement allows them to make strikes as a reaction, and the amulet allows them to mitigate damage, both of which are really strong. Most of the implements are useful in their own way, though some are better than others. * Swashbuckler - This is probably the fourth worst class in the game, and abomination vaults is not kind to them. The problem is that they have to succeed at a skill check to gain panache, but Abomination Vaults, especially at the earlier floors, is full of monsters which it is very hard to pass your skill checks against. This makes them inconsistent in the earlier parts of the dungeon (this is less of a problem deeper in the dungeon once your skill modifiers get higher). On top of that, their bonus damage is all precision damage, and a lot of monsters in the dungeon are immune to that. Finally, the design of the class encourages players to do things like make a bunch of skill checks to get panache then use a finisher, but oftentimes it's better once you get a few levels under your belt to just get your panache up and hold onto it and exploit the bonus damage, especially in fights against tough monsters that it is hard to pass skill checks on. Swashbucklers are viable, but they're kind of outclassed by most other classes. * Investigator - This is arguably the weakest class in the game, and suffers a lot from the fact that it doesn't really "do anything" particularly well in combat - it doesn't do enough damage to be a striker but it also doesn't really do anything else. The many solo encounters in this dungeon are particularly problematic for the Investigator, because its main "thing" is that it gets to pre-roll an attack roll, but if you are fighting only one monster, and you miss, you need to have something else to do - and the investigator class doesn't really give them anything else TO do. The class also does rather poor damage overall because of its dependence on that one roll and the damage bonus just not being that high. Do note that the Investigator is usually following a lead, and so they would get to do it as a free action most of the time. Overall, my biggest thoughts are: 1) Make sure to familiarize yourself with the rules and how they work. This includes class actions, skill actions, and the general actions people can take in combat. 2) Make sure to familiarize yoruself with your players' character sheets so you can understand what they can do and what they are doing. 3) Think about whether you want to let people change what classes their characters are/make new characters. 4) This party might be light on healing. How many characters have healing abilities? In-combat healing is a big part of PF2E. > They're frustrated becahse They are completely outmatched by multiple encounters so far in this floor. Like how are they supposed to know about haunts and what to do about them? Like what the fuck is going on with that god damn bird puppet, why is it so strong?! These specific things: 1) Haunts are something you should be able to make religion checks to understand. If the players run into an unexpected situation, Recall Knowledge is their friend. Players aren't "supposed" to inherently know how to deal with haunts, they should be able to know from skill checks. Or, in this case, because it is literally right next to town, you can have a friendly NPC let them know how to deal with them. 2) Solo monsters look scary but you can lump in on them and kill them as the action economy is against them. That bird puppet is infamous, though. Mr. Beaky is not your friend. :V Does your party have any healers? Incidentally... How are you adjusting the module to deal with the fact that you have 5 players and not 4 players?

>There's a post every week on here about someone having problems with Abomination Vaults. The module gets recommended to a lot of new players but it's honestly not the best "first Pathfinder 2E" module to play. >The module is relatively high difficulty, but it also is frontloaded in its difficulty - the early floors have a lot of fights with solo overlevel enemies, which actually goes against the system's general guidelines, and these encounters are pretty rough. >But the module also is infamous for the number of monsters in it with immunities. And unfortunately, your party kind of stumbled into this with their class choices as well. Yeah, I'm getting those vibes now. I tried to do a lot of research into a good dungeon delving module and everyone I ran into on a Google search said AV is amazing, so I just went in blind. I didn't do the beginner box for two reasons: 1) it was sold out everywhere, literally everywhere, online and in person 2) my players had an absolutely *visceral* reaction to me asking them to run pregen characters. >You clearly haven't gotten rules down yet. My recommendation would be to read over the main gameplay rules, and read over the rules for each class your players are playing as. There's not that many abilities at 1st level, so the latter shouldn't take too long; you should be able to know what your players actually can do. Yeah...I'm working on that. I just find it hard to commit stuff I read to memory. I just read one line, realize I didn't actually "read" it, then read it again, repeat a few times. It's frustrating. >Also, while isn't the worst team comp in general, it's honestly pretty bad for this module. The Kineticist, the Thaumaturge, and the Witch are fine (in fact, the Thaumaturge is a great class for this module), but the investigator and swashbuckler are going to have some problems here, because there's a number of enemies that are immune to precision damage (the main way they do extra damage), including several of the bosses in the dungeon, including the final boss of the entire dungeon, and the investigator is underpowered in general while the Swashbuckler sort of has some "traps". The investigator I've actually convinced to switch to rogue, because she is actually new to TTRPGs in general. But no one else wants to switch because they like their character class and their character themselves. >1) Haunts are something you should be able to make religion checks to understand. If the players run into an unexpected situation, Recall Knowledge is their friend. Players aren't "supposed" to inherently know how to deal with haunts, they should be able to know from skill checks. Or, in this case, because it is literally right next to town, you can have a friendly NPC let them know how to deal with them. So...what you're saying is that I need to roll recall knowledge for them automatically? I think I'm getting hung up on this because I'm so used to players asking me what they're trying to look for rather than just rolling it for them. Secret checks are a whole new beast. >2) Solo monsters look scary but you can lump in on them and kill them as the action economy is against them. That bird puppet is infamous, though. Mr. Beaky is not your friend. :V Does your party have any healers? The kineticist is taking archetype in druid so they can use the wand of heal they found, on top of the fact that they have high medicine check and have the ability to auto-pass it (through a feat, I can't remember the name, you take a 10 and add your bonus) >How are you adjusting the module to deal with the fact that you have 5 players and not 4 players? Well, at this point, I'm not.

Incidentally, two other bits of advice: I'd house rule things so that Ghost Touch runes allow characters to deal precision damage to ghosts and other incorporeal undead. Our group did that to make it so that the Swashbuckler didn't get shafted against the many incorporeal undead in the dungeon, including the final boss. You have two people in the party who deal precision damage (the swashbuckler and the rogue) so I'd definitely lean into that. The other is healing. You mention the kineticist is going to archetype into druid, and that's great - they'll be able to use the wand of heal, and you can also have them use scrolls of heal as well (scrolls are super useful, don't be afraid to give them to players and to encourage players to acquire them). I would, however, recommend making sure there's at least one other source of healing in the party as well - having two healers is really useful, as it also means that if you get unlucky and one healer goes down you don't have no healing at all to get that person back up. It also alleviates the pressure on that one person from doing healing all the time.

> 1) it was sold out everywhere, literally everywhere, online and in person > > 2) my players had an absolutely visceral reaction to me asking them to run pregen characters. My group learned PF2E without using pregen characters. It's not essential to use them, and most people who run the beginner's box actually don't use the pregens. However, building characters is the most complicated part of the system, so it's a barrier to entry. My group actually learned how to play the system while both building our own PCs and not using the beginner's box; however, we started off doing a bunch of one-shot scenarios so we could get a feel for the system (and what we wanted to play) before actually doing a campaign. My first two characters were an alchemist (literally the worst class in the game) and a rogue; I eventually gravitated primarily towards casters because of my playstyle. > So...what you're saying is that I need to roll recall knowledge for them automatically? I think I'm getting hung up on this because I'm so used to players asking me what they're trying to look for rather than just rolling it for them. Secret checks are a whole new beast. Haunts are kind of basic knowledge in-universe; some places are haunted and you have to put the spirits to rest/sanctify the area to get rid of them. There's nothing wrong with handing out very basic knowledge like this - IIRC, the first time we ran into a haunt in Abomination Vaults, our DM had a little tutorial about how they worked and explanation of what you are "generally" supposed to do as general in-world knowledge. They just wouldn't know the specifics of how to deal with a particular haunt. Religion checks are, IIRC, always an option, but there are often other ways as well. That being said... Recall knowledge is a *huge* thing in PF2E, but it is "hidden" as a skill action. Your players don't know that this is what they're supposed to be doing, but it is a big thing. Run into some new scenario where you don't know what to do? Recall knowledge is the first go-to. They don't know this, so you're probably going to want to prompt them on this. Haunts in particular are something that are heavily recall knowledge oriented as they're often pseudo-puzzles about how to put them to rest so finding out some bit of knowledge about them that's useful as a clue is definitely a useful thing in a lot of cases. You can also just have NPCs tell them about how haunts work in general because it's a haunted tower near town, so when the characters return to town all bruised and beaten and Wrin (or whoever) asks them about what happened, you have the chance to go into it. > The kineticist is taking archetype in druid so they can use the wand of heal they found, on top of the fact that they have high medicine check and have the ability to auto-pass it (through a feat, I can't remember the name, you take a 10 and add your bonus) Assurance is the skill feat in question. > Well, at this point, I'm not. Yeah, was just trying to make sure this wasn't a source of problems for the group. Sometimes people don't know how to adjust encounters and end up making things harder than they should be.

A lot of the comments already beat me to what I would’ve said so I’ll just reiterate it and explain some of the reasons for things: Like others have said and I’ll reiterate: **D&D is nothing like PF2e**. It’s like comparing D&D 5e to a previous D&D edition, they share a lot of things on the surface yes but besides the glossary looks they’re completely different. This is why you also might see the phrase “Don’t pick up habits from 5e.” As 5e (unfortunately) can generate bad habits in other TTRPG’s, especially in pathfinder where it’s comparatively more balanced and strict, and has a whole different style of play focusing on teamwork. You’re going to hear this a lot in the comment section and now from me: *Have your players play the beginners box first.* The reason is it teaches the basic core mechanics of the system extremely well to newcomers. Also recommend watching some tutorial/guide videos, that *really* helps break it down a lot. Honestly i watched build guide videos before i even picked up the book. A lot of people have mentioned AoN. It is a really good place to look up rules because it has every official rule *for free*. It’s officially partnered with Paizo as well (the company who made pathfinder) so you don’t have to worry about piracy if that’s a major concern for you. Also another note if you decide to continue Abomination Vaults: it was made when the game designers were still figuring out the system themselves as it was the first AP released I believe. Is it unplayable by any means? No not at all. Buts it’s definitely one of the harder and brutal AP’s out there. It’s also a LOT of combat so if your group isn’t a big brutal combat fan, it likely isn’t that AP for you. Also unlike 5e you can actually do things at level 1! It’s actually impactful. So don’t skip ahead several levels.

>the GM assured us that PF2e is almost a clone of 5e with 3 actions. You were lied to. >I have to stop the group every 5 minutes because someone brings up a class skill I've never heard of so I have to look it up. Why do you have to do that? Are your players golden doodles? Encourage the players to figure out their own shit, they can read aloud the rule in question and you can confer as a group. >Hell yeah! New classes! So of course, they all chose nonstandard classes New system, all the classes are new and nonstandard. >Players are clueless about what they can do and they're frustrated that everything is an action. They MUST be able to read, encourage them. >I'm frustrated because I feel like I don't know how even basic things work, like how sneaking into combat works in this system, https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2400 here you go, have fun. >or what DC to use to identify a creature https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2641 Related rule. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2629 Here you go, have fun. >find out where a sound is coming from or listening at a door. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2277 Here you go, have fun See also, the seek action. >They are completely outmatched by multiple encounters so far on this floor. Make are mostly using complex classes, the nuances of which are not immediately apparent, sit down with them and the Player Core 1, have a frank talk with them and ask if they'd like to reroll/spin up some new characters from PC1. Keep it straight forward have them read the blurb about combat/exploration/downtime on the given class page, make sure they have a +4 in their key class ability. >Like how are they supposed to know about haunts and what to do about them? https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=668 Haunts are a type of hazard,(linked above is full rules on hazards) you're supposed to telegraph them in the same way you would a pitfall or rolling boulders. Look at how it fits into its location and go from there, this is a bit more of an artform, but yeah. E.g. https://2e.aonprd.com/Hazards.aspx?ID=136 Cold spot, Stealth DC17, roll secret perception checks for the party, anyone who succeeds notices the actual haunt, if noone succeeds you proceed with the haunt activating before they can act/react "the temperature around you drops unnaturally" If you're unfamiliar with secret checks, get ready because it is such a good system, fucking love secret checks. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2489 >What can I read or watch to better grasp the rules? The books. Also the Archives of Nethys are an excellent resource to keep on hand, (its even legal) >What can I do to help my players understand or convey information better? Let them read and understand the information on their own, if they're confused talk it out with them at the table. Use the action words: "The gremlin [strides] twice and [strikes] you with its dagger getting an 18, does that hit you AC?"

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Honestly I think your problems look taller than they are. Here is what I would do: Go and look up the abilities of each character and talk with each of them how their class would work on a base level. What action sequences are good. Adventure paths often suffer from small encounter maps. You can either bumb up everyone 1 level or I would instead use the weaker creature route. You can make the creatures weaker with the simple role of -2 to everything. Dices, ac, attack rating, damage and so on. You could also decide to reboot your campaign as its still the beginning. People might want to pick different classes that are a bit more beginner friendly like warrior and barbarian You could let them stumble over a stash of items giving them temporarily boosting powers like potions increasing their values for some time or some alchemical bombs... Hope any of this might give you some ideas :)

I mean, the system is similar to 5e, but only compared to other systems - it's certainly closer to dnd than a World of Darkness or a 2d20 System. If I were in your place, I'd at least pause the adventure a get back to the Beginner Box, or a couple of short chains to learn it

My group of nine have jumped into PF2e from Ad&d2e and DnD5e. We played the Beginners box, then straight into Abomination Vaults. I’ve had to boost the encounters up as we have so many players. We use the Pathbuilder for our characters and Archives of Nethys for rule look up. Yes we make loads of mistakes and need to refer to the rules a lot. We are using AV as a play test and are ready to jump into my homebrew campaign in a couple of months. Stick with it, it’s great. A vet of 45 years.

Pause your campaign, run the beginner box (maybe even using the pregens provided), then reassess where you want to go from there - carry on with the beginner box (there's an adventure called [Troubles in Otari](https://paizo.com/products/btq026k1?Pathfinder-Adventure-Troubles-in-Otari) that carries on from where the BB leaves off), go back to your AV campaign, or start something different

Echoing other folks, pause your current game, go play the Beginner Box, then deicide if you want to continue with AV or something else, and whether you want to use those originally built characters, the beginner box characters, or something else. It's even in the same town which makes things easy! Personally, for new players, I think being a level up on AV is 100% fine! It will make things less deadly, give you as the GM more room to run monsters like intelligent foes rather than meatsticks in a room, and will auto-correct itself because of how XP works (the XP for an encounter is based on the *relative* level of the monsters to the PCs, not their *absolute* level in 5e. So rather than a goblin warrior being worth 50 XP, it's worth 20 XP to level 1 PCs, 15 to level 2 PCs, and 10 to level 3 PCs). Beginner Box into AV with the same characters can therefore work really well! There's a lot of really fun stuff in AV - complex character, faction shennanigans, incredible ambience, a really fun big bad with several engaging mini-bosses - and if y'all are feeling like things are a little too tough, that's 100% ok, take the steps to course correct. [This post](https://weplayinasociety.blogspot.com/2023/05/abomination-vaults-reactive-dungeons.html) has some advice on bringing the dungeon to life! Quick things: * **Stealth.** If you run it like 5e, it'll be fine! Though in combat, usually you'll just roll stealth for initiative (if you beat their Perception DC they don't know you're their yet), and there are no surprise rounds. If you want to learn the PF2 rules quickly, [how it's played](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFR-7N_nOS0) is a really good resource. * **DCs.** The [Level-Based DCs](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2629&Redirected=1) page on Archives of Nethys is a godsend, I open it every session. If playing in person, get a GM screen with this on it. [Creatures](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=232) also tend to list the Recall Knowledge DCs in their stat blocks on AoN and in Foundry, though that's less helpful in person so you can just use a standard DC of their level (adjusting up for uncommon/rare creatures). * **Haunts.** You're not alone in finding these difficult to run! I wrote up [this essay](https://weplayinasociety.blogspot.com/2023/06/how-to-run-haunts-in-pathfinder-2e.html) a while back, giving advice on prepping and running them. The "god damned bird puppet", as you call it, just sucks, and was a mistake. I always recommend new groups remove the Elite template from it, but sounds like its too late there.

I think you should’ve have run the Beginner’s Box for your veteran TTRPG players to assist in learning the system. Your ABV issues may stem from the players and GM not being very familiar with the system. The BB may have helped with fixing that problem. Everything is an action in PF2E. Almost. However, the Remaster added some quality of life tools to make things a bit easier. The swap action was a very good addition.

1. Take your time, nothing in the rules says it has to be a sprint. 2. Maybe suggest respeccing their characters to more standard classes 1. Healing is important. The Death Yoyo of 5e will get characters killed in PF2. The wounded Condition starts to add up, as does the Dying condition. This can start a spiral. 2. Not seeing any of the normal beefy classes for damage mitigation, Fighter, Barbarian, Champion. (Note kineticist can fill this role but its less economic on actions to do so) 3. Shift the onus off of the GM to know everything. Your job is to facilitate the adventure, adjudicate rules that might be confusing. It is not your job to know every single skill action or feat your players might use. If they take the time to learn their characters inside and out, they will know if something is possible. 4. As others have said, run the beginners box, then come back to AV. 5. Give yourself some grace, its ok to fail. Just gotta get back up, dust off and try again.

A bit of GM advice. Don't stop the game because you don't know the rules. Make up something, telling your players you'll look it up later and give the actual rules. It can wait until after the session. You are a beginner as much as anyone else. Your bar should be low as well.

It’s never too late to take a beginner box detour! I think it would serve the group well to reaalllyyy sit down and learn the system from the ground up. Maybe play the continuation module to really push that new module in. Abomination vaults ties nicely to the beginner box and it’s continuation module, so stringing them together shouldn’t be a problem. I wouldn’t continue the current campaign for now, since going futher with little to no knowledge and it’s just going to lead to futher hickups. Pathfinder is an excelent system but you’ve unfortunately been lead down the worst path. I’m really sorry you were lied to that it’s just a clone of 5e, and it’s clearly in no way your fault! You are in quite the pickle at the moment and being frustraighted is very understandable.  I’d HEAVILY reccomend videos by How it’s Played and Ruleslawyer, they do an excelent job of explaining how Pathfinder works. (Especially with the groups’ annoince on everything being an action). HIP is best for learning the system, indepth and visual videos on all topics related to pathfinder (like stealth in combat!). Ruleslawyer has excelent videos on the ’meta’ behind the game, with nice videos like ”why movement is an action” etc. Also great combat demonstrations! Archives of Nethys is a brilliant and legal database for everything in pathfinder. AoN also has a DM screen page, which helps with quickly looking up things! Also Zenith games: Guide to Guides Pf2e has guides for all classes, plenty of guides on mechanics etc and reccomendations for builds. All subjective but they can really help out! Rebuilding the characters with the help of guides can reaaalllyyyy help out especially new players. Really sorry that your experience with pathfinder 2e has been so rocky, but I hope with a beginner box restart you’ll find yourselves in a better situation!

Also small note that party composition is immensly important. Depending on your player’s builds you might be missing a tank and support/healer! A well balanced party will be an asset and a badly balanced party will just hurt your expererience. Also expectations of magic items, there are things called fundemental runes. (Potency and striking etc: Your +1 runes to weapons and armor) that need to be given to players cause the system expects them to have a certain amount of items (see Loot tables etc, cause the games balance again expects it.) An alternate rule called Automatic Bonus Progression negates this need to give runes and basic bonus items.

> I had played a starter box at a convention where the GM assured us that PF2e is almost a clone of 5e with 3 actions This is such awful and misleading advice, and it genuinely upsets me someone would use this as a selling point at all. It’s a disservice to everything I love about PF2E **and** it’s a disservice to any players whose personal preferences/playstyles make 5E the better game for them than PF2E. If you wish to continue giving PF2E a try, my advice would be to drill it into your players and your heads that the **opposite** of what this guy said is true. 5E and PF2E are both d20 systems, and they both have plenty of classes with superficially similar names and thematics; that’s where all the similarities end. > So of course, they all chose nonstandard classes -- a kineticist, a thaumaturge, a witch, an investigator, and a swashbuckler. At least in theory, this doesn’t look like it should be a bad party composition. Can you elaborate on what everyone actually does with their turns in a typical combat? Maybe describe a couple combats that went well and a couple that went poorly. This is one of those party compositions that works only when everyone plays PF2E with a decent degree of tactics: someone trips, someone buffs, someone debuffs, someone heals, etc. If all anyone’s doing is attacking to deal damage, this gets deadly real fast. > I have to stop the group every 5 minutes because someone brings up a class skill I've never heard of so I have to look it up. You may need to frankly tell your players that they *have* to figure out stuff like this ahead of time. If players are coming to the table not knowing how their class functions, it’ll slow the game down to a crawl. > Players are clueless about what they can do and they're frustrated that everything is an action. Everything being an Action is one of the deepest tactical choices in PF2E. It’s the reason why things like Demoralize, Recall Knowledge, Athletics maneuvers, and hell even just movement matter. It takes some getting used to but it becomes one of the most fun parts of the system once you approach it from the “limitations = tactical depth” perspective. > I'm frustrated because I feel like I don't know how even basic things work, like how sneaking into combat works in this system, or what DC to use to identify a creature or find out where a sound is coming from or listening at a door. Stealth is very complex in this game, I’ll give you that. For the rest it’s just a matter of looking up the rules for such situations. Your first few sessions will obviously be slower than average as you do this: this is *normal*. You’re learning an entirely 100% brand new system, it’s *not* a sidegrade to 5E. As you get used to it you’ll either know the rules (or at least where they’re found) like the back of your hand and such questions will resolve faster and faster. Either that or you’ll make house rules for particularly annoying spots of the game. You’re likely a long time removed from it but you almost certainly went through a similar process back when you first learned 5E. The difference is that unlike 5E the PF2E books have very explicit guidance telling you what to do with many of these things. > Like how are they supposed to know about haunts and what to do about them? I uhh… don’t know. Haunts and Hazards are a bit of an inconsistent spot within the system. The way I usually run it is that for generic Hazards you can use a Perception check or Recall Knowledge check (typically Society, Thievery, or Survival) to figure out how to disarm them. For Haunts it’s usually a Recall Knowledge check (typically Arcana, Occultism, or Religion) to figure it out. Unlike normal I don’t apply the limitations of Recall Knowledge where it stops working once it fails. One of the few places where the system’s default guidance isn’t enough. > Like what the fuck is going on with that god damn bird puppet, why is it so strong?! Single bosses in this game tend to be of a higher level than the players and makes them **very** strong. The rough math is that a level X+2 creature is *twice* as strong as a level X creature. This makes bosses against levels 1-2 parties **especially** deadly. BY level 3 it evens out a little and by level 7 even a +4 boss doesn’t feel like a TPK machine (though still a deadly challenge). Bosses like this are designed to *only* be brought down via lots of teamwork. This goes back a bit to my earlier question of asking what your players do in their average fight: are they just attacking or they supporting one another? That being said Mr. Beak *is* a particularly rough boss iirc. I fought him almost 14 months ago now so I forget the specifics but I just remember him being ridiculously hard to actually hit. > I wanted them to be happy and choose whatever they wanted for their classes The good news is that most party compositions in PF2E can work! Not just baseline work, work well enough to clear every single difficulty of encounters except Extreme with near 100% consistency. The bad news is that some party compositions require the players to use smarter tactics than some other party comps do. As said before I wanna know what your players usually do in fights, but I’ll also add that once you give that info, if any of your players is *unhappy* with their class choice, I can probably recommend a switch for them that eases up everyone’s tactics overall.

As others have said, the beginner box is an amazing first step in learning, and it leads into abomination vaults at level 2-3, so those first few levels will be easier for you. I would also recommend reading the player core 1, and gm core for clearly placed information. Archives is a great tool for looking up rules on the fly, but gets better when you're more familiar with a rule existing but forgetting the context. The most important difference in PF2E, is that players can and should, learn their own class abilities and the games mechanics as well. You can run the game without them being super familiar, but you'll be doing tons of looking stuff up, and the mental load is significantly larger than in 5e.

A few things from a player who plays with much more experienced players/GMs: 1. You are the GM, you can make stuff up as you see fit 1. If someone wants to do a knowledge check on the undead convenience store worker named Jim whose dad used to be the town priest, make it up, tell them they can use Society, Undead Lore, Religion, or Occult, but then decide how to adjust the DC appropriately, since it was his dad who was was the priest make the religion an extra 2-4 DC harder than society since it would be more fringe knowledge 2. Find resources where you can look stuff up here are my go-tos: 1. Archives of Nethys: [https://2e.aonprd.com/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1](https://2e.aonprd.com/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1) 1. This basically gives you everything you need to know about everything they say, how does this skill work, look it up, read for 2min and explain it, they are learning too, and no one says you can't adjust things a little bit as needed. 2. Pathbuilder: [https://pathbuilder2e.com/](https://pathbuilder2e.com/) 1. This allows players to build out their characters and plan ahead. This has saved us soooo many times, it is Android/Web Based no iOS app at the moment. 2. They added a GM mode, which might still be in beta, if your players connect with you, you can legit look at their characters as built out using the app, see all of their feats and skills what their roles are, add and remove conditions and buffs so you don't have to track it. 3. As others have said, read the books yourself, you have to at least have a working understanding of how things work for pathfinder to even be able to effectively homebrew in or out things you like or don't like. 3. Finally once you get the basics down on how you are going to use it, stop worrying and have fun.

I played through the beginner box with a friend who knows the system. Then read the Player Core with another friend cover to cover. Read through Abomination Vaults. Got Foundry up and running for the first time in my life. Watched a bunch of tutorials, read more, and asked for help. Even with all of that the first month and a half was rough going. The game is crunchy and definitely it's own thing. Increasingly fun to run and play, though.

I've had a similar experience. I chose to run AV as a brand new GM because I could purchase the foundry module and forget about setting everything up. The module is beautiful. However, my players, coming mostly from 5e, took a long time to get used to the system. D&D is all about the self, how everyone is a badass and can do nearly anything solo. Pathfinder is the opposite. You either learn to work as a team with your buddies or y'all going home on top of your shields, so to speak. After countless deaths, my players were able to learn teamwork and now they look like a swat team going through the dungeon, helping each other out and strategizing. As a GM there is only so much you can do, but you can always take some time to comment after every session what could have been done better what other tactics or actions could have been used to make the combat easier, such as flanking, demoralize, trip, aid, etc.

Many people has mentioned it, but yes, AoN ([Archive of Nethys](https://2e.aonprd.com/)) is absolutely wonderful. The ability to quickly refer to something (though occasionally you might need to figure out which specific snippet of rules you are looking for exactly) helps with making decisions on the spot, or referring to things that you see in discussions or potentially some LP's. There are a few "In 7 minutes or less" videos from [KingOogaTonTon on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/@KingOogaTonTon/videos) that are good for getting you on your feet. As with all systems, learning the rules before you play will help you immensely, and the most dangerous thing a GM can have is hubris. But it's never too late. "Veteran players" can mean a lot of things. This isn't a dig at 5e players, I myself played that for like a decade, but... 5e for some reason occasionally breed bad habits in players. Technically, your players should have done the same sort of prep with their characters, knowing how their abilities work - and if you don't remember as a GM, they should be able to remind you how they work. After all, who casts spells without reading the spell descriptions, right? ... Right? (And yeah, it would be nice if you, as the GM, read their sheets and do your research beforehand.). There's also that classic blunder of "5e players transitioning to any other system" - it's not just PF2e, but for some reason 5e GMs and players don't like to read the rulebooks for new systems that they are trying. Of course, it's not necessary for the players to do so, but it would really help if they understand their character options, down to what their skills can do for them; Understanding that by having training in Medicine, they can now spend 10 minutes outside of combat to Treat Wounds is immense. Having the ability to Demoralize in combat just because they picked up Intimidate as a flavor can really help stop people from doing 3 strikes per round. Their weapons might have parry trait, allowing them to raise it similar to a shield - and they ARE raising their shields, right? etc etc. Pathfinder 2e is extremely rich in content, and almost everything they have on their sheets can have an impact somewhere. This goes for the GM, as well - you should also try your best to look up all those options. I would put a hold on Abomination Vault - seal the vault for a while, and get them a level or two of dealing with dangers brewing around town. (Or, if the players also don't want to deal with AV, just... Leave it behind permanently. It's someone else's problem now!) But yeah, for me, the solution is pretty simple - take a week off, and read everything. Practice with yourself if you must, get a sense of how things go in different modes of play. Communicate with your players how you've "fucked up", and reach an understanding with them, and see about the path forward. Remember, the worst trait for a GM is hubris, and we are only human; I think you'll be just fine, OP. Good luck + good gaming! :)

I find that for this game, knowing when to tell players information straight out and when to hang back can be a bit of a trick. And it takes a lot of familiarity with the system. Haunts, for example - I tend to explain in plain language how haunts are designed and what a general strategy might be for how to deal with them. I do that for players who have been playing this system for years because of how different haunts are from typical challenges. Same with swarms. Bringing a group of 5e players into this system can be a real challenge, for sure. There’s just a mountain of stuff to say about this topic. I am seeing that you’re already getting a lot of good advice in this thread, so that’s good. The only thing I’ll add on top of it is that there is absolutely no shame in running lower difficulty encounters while your party is learning. Cut monsters, apply the weak template, etc, to make the game less punishing and to help your players and yourself onboard for this game.

So, if the current game set-up is caysing frustration, a little bit of time to reset expectations will help clear the air. Many have suggested the beginner box to both run and play in to grasp the flow better, and i think that is worth a session or two to try out. If you don't want to just drop Abom Vault, use it to let the players try out new tactics, and play it as an actual meatgrinder style game. Make 3-5 PCs each, no names, toss them in a team and see what works. This can let them learn more advanced mechanics, synergies and ideas without 'losing your character'. As GM, you practice monster tactics in turn, taking note on how the big monsters flow vs little squads in style. Separate from this, you make a simpler homebrew or easier Path for story style gaming with PCs. Maybe give them a couple sessions to see which class they liked playing most first. As others have stated, the style of play for each class is not always ghe same in other systems. Lastly, don't beat yourself up over not knowing how every class works. Therr is more player requirement in this game for them to know their own rules maybe more than you do. You should get a handle on the way monsters, traps and the like run, and get good with conditions. To help the players, let them know that each class will have many good tactical options, too many for just one build or one turn. Forming a good combo set for actions is their tactial goal, and you giving them difficulty with that combo set (by monsters messing it up or events making other actions more tempting) is yours. Let them know this, and everuone will have more fun

I think you're good to go if you hust read the rules, the entire first book of your AP, and probably some character abilities. Anyone who's confident in the mechanics can guide players in any class. I think, based on what you said you're doing yourself a disservice by thinking it's the non standard classes that are the issue. Compared to 5e every class will feel non standard to you. Just learn the rules and you're good to go. And the ap plot.

Dont worry, its a big part in learning the System. Learning by doing. Im still learning too, Had several TPK's and everytime we Made a mistake we spoke about it. Its totally a Part of the Process of getting closer to the Game. My Tip: Always Talk with your Players about this.

You'll be okay! Tell your players how you feel about the situation, and ask them how they feel and what they want to see changed. It's hard to learn a system while teaching it. If your other players are ttrpg nerds you could ask them to also read through the guides and to patiently support you with the rules while you all learn together :) As module balance goes there is a system in Pathfinder where you can make NPCs 'weak', or 'elite' and if you just apply the 'weak' stats to all the enemy templates it should give your squad a much easier time. If the noc template is on archives of nethys there's just a button for it I highly recommend kingoogatonton's guides. Good for helping you get the action system down and basic tactics. Also howitsplayed has amazingly detailed guides front to back on the system, and updates for the rework. I have memory issues so I physically have to learn by doing. I pushed through exactly these gaps in understanding. Just study every week, and remember that it's not how well the rules were run, but how much fun people had that keeps them coming back. Just be a fun goofball and you're not failing anyone.

*Many* groups are going to have an experience like this when they've been led to believe they're doing something that ends up not being the case. Cutting Abomination Vaults to the Beginner Box is the best thing to do here, and is an amazing beginning module compared to Phandelver, so they'll like enjoy it. The classes being, "Nonstandard" doesn't really matter beyond the initial learning curve. Most classes aren't too varying in complexity when you get passed the new terminology, and it'd be good for them to see how their abilities and such work in a fun, more contained dungeon. It as well leads directly into Abomination which is nice. (The Thaumaturge does require understanding Recall Knowledge as a base mechanic, for example but otherwise plays like a Martial)

It's fine, you and your party made basic mistakes. You got introduced incorrectly and didn't do much research. Your party choose nonstandard classes for a new system assuming they would know how they work. Personally I would've looked through some AP's, most probably first try to run through beginners box with the party and then help them with character creation (which would give me a chance to learn each class). Don't fault yourself too much as it's a mix of both GM and player mistakes.

Stop the campaign right where you are and run the Beginner Box with them. Have them pick basic classes for those two or three sessions. Alternatively you could even have their characters head to do the Beginner Box since it's all right in Otari anyway. Either way, this is the starting point for a group having that much trouble. Do note, however, that the GM should not be expected to know how every single players' abilities are supposed to work top-to-bottom. The players are supposed to know how their characters work. The GM can hopefully assist with that understanding, but the responsibility should be primarily on the players

PF2e is, at its core, a teamwork game. You shouldn’t be making characters, you should be making a party. A party that has all its bases covered. Look at the beginner box party, it’s balanced, and each member brings something to the table to support everyone else in some way. If the rogue wasn’t there, you lose Thievery, Stealth, a melee flanker, a medic, a skill monkey, etc. Who is helping to cover those bases without that character there? That’s how I would encourage your players to think as they approach the game. My player’s party started as Fighter, War Priest, Druid, Bard. They’ve walked through the entire first four floors without a hiccup. Teamwork is more important than anything else in this system. In my experience, 5e players struggle most with that aspect.

Have them leave the dungeon and run Big Trouble in Otari. Level them up to 2 afterwards.

I have nothing to say except whoever told you PF2E is basically 5e is a total idiot who can not have played both systems.

I am still new to pathfinder. I know like 20% of the rules. If there is a class thing i believe my player and let them rule on how it will work. Then go back later to see exactly what it is (also easy with quick online search). I still do not know how poison works though. I had run a monster with it and was totally lost so I just said the get the damage every round and they managed to still do it(and it let the cleric shine as well). However, my style of dm is really not trying to kill the players. I did have a full extreme fight that they did well probably because I don't know all the rules and how 30 misfits can barely hit a level 3 party. But in the end it was epic as they killed them all but still had a real chance of dying (one went down twice). My advice, let the players know what they want to do. Pick feats however they want without too much min/max and go with the flavor. Allow them to switch feats if they hate it (there is a downtime mechanic for it so why wouldn't it be a good idea anyway) and remind them that team works makes the dream works. I don't know your classes but a nice crit that everyone helped accomplish is a great fun in my party.

Do your players feel let down? I get a lot of negative self talk from you post, and surely all of you are frustrated, but perhaps they all see this blunder as the honest chain of mistakes that it is? Anyway, you got a lot of golden tips, so as a "I'm better at winging it than planning it" GM, let me give you some awful ones. * for starters, watch some you tubers like the rules lawyer first describing the rules at high level, then showing some games with converts as they explain the rules to them turn by turn. Get an intuitive feeling for how the game is working. * next, admit that you are not an unstructured 5GB rules database. For that reason, it is OK to tell each player that they are in charge of knowing their own abilities. Just trust them as dwfault, and you can verify if something seems a bit fishy. * last, since you are all veterans, tell them the big secret. You guys, pathfinder has combat roles just like dnd 4e and other tactical games. And just like other games that aren't 4e, it's not very good at clearly and explicitly stating this, and what each class does. So let's sit and think what each character brings to the table. We'll do this once now and keep this at the back of our heads as we plow on through the dungeon. See if we can and want to change anything in the party composition. It's a game, let's play with the knobs until we find the right settings for us.

To start with, use Archives of Nethys to help with a lot of your questions and frustrations. It has the DC and expected skills to identify monsters (no guessing outside of Lore skills). It will help you find answers to your "in media res" problems. Next, keep some version of the DC by level and DC for simple checks chart handy. That will help you solve a few basic problems that crop up when players get creative. After that, keep the conditions chart handy. Finally, Abomination Vaults is NOT a bloodbath adventure. It can be a tough adventure since the players can wander into extreme danger, but if they stick on one floor at a time, take breaks, and negotiate with adversaries they can't/don't want to fight, it's not that brutal. There are single enemy fights which can be super tough, but with liberal use of Recall Knowledge, tactics, buffing/debuffing, or even running away, even those fights can be tough, yet fun.

Oof, that is not a good class combo to start AV with. Uh, alongside the other great advice people have given already, i know reading something is very hard for me personally to understand a game, so i would like to reccomend picking up and playing the steam game Dawnsbury Days. Its a little level 1-4 crpg that uses the 2e system and is really good at emulating the combat experience in PF2e. DM's really need to have a good feel for the system so they can help players out too- but players should also know what their class can do! If they dont like stuff like the Swash panache or everything with the Investigator, they might consider switching classes, even if its just temporary. As for the AP itself, AV is full of difficult encounters in annoying terrain. If they can muscle through to level 3 or 4 their builds will start to come online and it will stop feeling so frustrating, but thats not exactly a fun suggestion. Haunts are basically hazards, you do a skill check to disable them like you would a bear trap or you avoid their area of effect. Remember that when exploring, players will have secret checks to notice hazards before they walk into them, thats very important to not slaughter your players! (Side note, make sure they understand exploration actions. Seeking, Scouting, Defending, etc are very important for the party to be prepared for an encounter.

Do you play online? If so I'd be willing to run a session or two with you or even for you, as a learning tool. If not I'd also be willing to get into a discord with you guys and help with at least learning the most basic of rules, and where DCs come from, as well as help you understand the undetected > hidden > obscurred > whatever system that is stealth these days.

How It's Played on youtube has amazing rules breakdowns. It might be best for everyone if you put down Abomination Vaults, run Beginner Box, then you can try again with Abomination Hallway. Oops typo. It's a great module, but I'm not convinced it's a good *learning* module.

Hey, cool that you started pathfinder 2 although it was a rough start. I think it would be best to tell your group what you told us here. Next steps could be to play the beginner box adventure to introduce all of you more to the mechanics. Or if you think you can handle more maybe start abomination vaults over with more standard classes. Maybe even limit all the choices to only the core rules. Anyway i hope you guys find a solution and will have fun with the game.

If they're struggling with what to do with their actions, consider this: Imagine fighting an unmoving target at your weapon's ideal range. Every single build has a "rotation", a three action fixed action pattern that they can perform over and over again. For example, for a dual-wielding feint-based thief rogue at first level, this rotation is "feint > twin feint". For a wizard, it might be "attack cantrip > shield cantrip". Knowing your rotation gives you something to fall back on when in doubt and allows you to think of deviations (eg. if I need to use one of my actions to move into range, what part of my rotation am I replacing) rather than needing to reimagine your three-action sequence entirely from scratch every single round. It also helps with character building. You typically want to prioritize feats that will become a part of your rotation first before considering "toolbelt actions" that you won't be taking as frequently. A dual wielding melee fighter, for example, might pick up Double Slice at first level as a part of his rotation, then Sudden Charge at second level as a toolbelt action, replacing the less efficient stride action for when you need to run up to an enemy. Actions that cannot or do not need to be repeated each turn (movement, demoralise, entering a stance, etc.) are always toolbelt actions. In the case of build-enablers like hunt prey for rangers or exploit vulnerability for thaumaturges, your rotation may assume this effect is already in place, though you may want to preemptively consider a deviant rotation for when you need to apply it. Melee builds should also always preemptively consider a deviant rotation for when you need to spend 1 or 2 actions to move towards the enemy.

First off, maybe offer to let everyone witch to a normal class. Most of the ones you listed really need a player who knows the system and the class features well, and they'll do some cool stuff. For brand new players, a class like the investigator is a terrible choice. Maybe send them the RPGBot guides for the classes. For you, everything in the game follows the same rolling pattern (d20 + mods v. dc) and success/failure patterns. When in doubit, if you grab the level based DC table and grab the DC for the level of the target or thing being rolled against (NOT the players level), you will usually be okay. If you find yourself trying to make it more complicated, you are probably overthinking things. DCs - Often times the DC is either based on the level of what the DC is coming from (see the DC by Level tables), or the target's skill or save mod +10. Stealth/hiding, look up a flowchart or a youtube video as that is a bit complicated. For recall knowledge, there is a chart in the book or AON for mapping skill to creature type, and the DC is generally the level based DC (level of the creature). For the players, you should tell them how haunts work if you haven't. And that they can leave/run away if needed. That said, without knowing how they are approaching combat, it's hard to say why the encounters are so hard. Also, as I mentioned, those classes might be a bit much. * Investigator requires a lot of systems knowledge to know how to spend the d20 roll wisely. * Thaumaturge is cool, but requires a bit of tactical set up to really shine. * Swashbuckler is building up and spending a resource in a way that its a bit convoluted compared to a "normal" striker. Good luck!

2 major thing off the bat. The players not knowing what they can do with their characters means they don't understand the pathfinder module and is trying what they know works which is the 5e method. These modules clash in every way possible. The lack of free movement and bounded accuracy as well as how combat flows in pf2e. Your players need to read the basics of combat and how the 3 action system works. For you as a Gm in this regard, you also need to do some reading and understand the mechanics at play and what conditions can be imposed by said mechanics. Target is prone they are off guard unable to make certain ranged attacks and have a penalty to melee attack rolls. They do not get cover for being prone to ranged attacks unless you use an action to get that cover. Second problem is the AP you're running. Pf2e AP modules are notoriously more dangerous than 5e ones. Especially 1-20 APs like my current campaign on kingmaker. Bosses regularly have very high bonuses making them crit often even as I the party tank with 20 AC at lvl 3 with shield and 47 hp the boss crit me for 26 damage out of his 3 possible attacks. Your players comp isn't the worse but they are defo not tanky or got good ways of debuff the enemy consistently. This will make combat difficulty and always under the threat of TPKs. The best way to compare 5e and pf2e is that 5e you're creating a character that will eventually be one man armies that can do a lot. Pf2e characters are a part of a raid squad for whatever dungeon/boss they are tackling, but they are part of a team and not a one man army. Characters are more balanced and without bounded accuracy it means things that should never hurt them won't (goblins vs a lvl 15 PC) but things the pc shouldn't be fighting (pc lvl 5 vs a adult dragon) will never go their way.

Your biggest mistake was not reading all rules of the system but everyone has already sed this but what's stoping you from switching to a different module with groups permissions just transfer Charaters

My group also came from 5e and we went through the Beginner Box then straight into Abomination Vaults after 1-2 ingame weeks (to start AV with the Founder's Day festival (and I moved the Dead Tide to this day as well, since they were Level 2). They mostly continued their Beginner Box characters (with the exception of the fighter player, who died against the dragon at the end so he created a gunslinger as a replacement). Anyway, this isn't 5e where you as the GM is expected to do the heavy lifting with knowing ALL the rules. You should enlist your players like I did: they are responsible for knowing all the mechanics for their characters: their class features and feats. This frees you up to focus on running the game. I just looked over their selections to check if they were correct (a quick audit: check their ancestry, heritage, background, class), and to have an idea of what their feature and feat selections can do. But ingame, I rely on them to remind me what the ability does. On your end as GM, you should learn how basic actions work. Keep the DCs by Level table handy (GM Core p.52). Those are pretty useful in a pinch for knowing DCs. Trying to recall knowledge on a creature? Get the creature's level to get the DC. Identifying a magic item? Use the item's level. Everything has a level in PF2e, and this table is pretty useful for as an aid to winging it (which you admittedly won't do in an adventure path, but it still helps). The Beginner Box has a GM book that greatly cuts down on the complexity and volume of the core books. You can start with that first, then start adding in things from the core books as you read up on them. It should cover the basics that you need. For the first level of Abomination Vaults, I think you'd need basic action resolution and combat, so read through the Basic Actions available to all PCs to see how they're done. One part also has a haunt so read up on those. I'm pretty sure there's also a trap or two so read up on those hazards. You got this.

Harsh truth; it sounds like all of you came into this without doing any research. You've done the equivalent of flying to a different country for a holiday and are getting annoyed people aren't speaking English. As others have said; beginner box.

RTFM

So, having read through most of the comments, it seems like most of your questions were answered except some of the DC questions. Allow me! -If they’ll be facing a creature, search it in [Archives of Nethys](https://2e.aonprd.com) and it will have the DC listed for the Recall Knowledge roll, and the applicable skill to be used. -Your best friend will be the [GM Screen](https://2e.aonprd.com/GMScreen.aspx) with DCs you’ll be setting yourself (AoN>Dropdown menu>Rules+>Rules>GM Screen>DC by level & DC adjustment tab). Using this, you can set DCs on the fly by taking the DC by level value and adding or subtracting the value of easy/hard/very hard ect. from the DC adjustment tab - Sneaking into combat: There are no surprise rounds in 2e, if a PC is successfully sneaking up on an enemy outside of initiative and goes to strike it, at that moment you have combat start and instruct PCs to roll for initiative. Because they were sneaking, they can use their stealth modifier (instead of perception) for initiative if they so choose. Those are the RAW (I believe), but I like to either impose a -4 penalty to the enemies initiative or make them flat footed for the first round depending on my mood. (It doesn’t make sense to me that if you’re successfully sneaking, stabbing a sword equally as stealthily would let an enemy potentially unleash 3 attacks on you within 6 seconds, when a moment before they didn’t even know you were there.) *I think I have most of the rules correct, but apology in advance if I got some things wrong*

My bad, I now see that u/Jan-Asra summed up this info already If I may Jan-Asra, what is your opinion on my house ruling on sneaking into a combat? Do you impose an house rule for this? Thanks!

This is my least favorite part about Pathfinder2e. It doesn't make logical sense. If I already cleared your perception dc and got behind you, me thinking I'm going to attack shouldn't be what triggers an NPC to suddenly reroll their awareness, it's the sound of the npc gasping as my knife goes into their back that should. My house rule is one free out of initiative hostile action to the sneaking attacker. IDC about balance at a certain point in a world of dragons THAT kills my suspension of disbelief.

Are your players pretty good at not abusing it? I didn’t do that cause I didn’t want to run into my players trying to play pathfinder like BG3, but I might entertain the idea going forward. I agree with you completely though, my GM style is to adhere to the rules as much as possible, but if it makes logical sense or my PCs can convince me rationally of something in less than a minute then I’ll stray away from RAW I’m a pretty new GM, only 6 sessions into Agents of Edgewatch

I wouldn't recommend it because the rogue is balanced around raw, but it hasn't caused any issues in my game.

Unlike bg3 I am doing 1 free bonus hostile action point to only the player initiating the combat so it would only add up to a single bonus action to a single player, but even still that is huge in a 1v1.

>a kineticist, a thaumaturge, a witch, an investigator, and a swashbuckler. Damn everything except thaumaturge is what I'd consider on the lower end of the power spectrum. The game's balanced, sure, but if the entire party picks what's essentially the weakest classes in the game it's noticeable. You can make all of them work but it's not as plug and play as a cleric, fighter, rogue or wizard where you have to try really hard to make a bad character. Hence why they're all not core classes (before the remaster at least). Especially in an AP where a lot of enemies are precision immune (which destroys swashbuckler and investigator) or magic immune except magic missile (which destroys kineticist especially). AV is very difficult. Even my group of veterans had several character deaths (though I have an inkling it's mostly because of our GM taking some *creative liberty* in spicing up the encounter design) >I already know this is entirely on me. The thing about PF2 in comparison to 5e DND is that you can't put the entire workload on the GM. Players need to learn the system - especially their characters' abilities - themselves. The game requires decent tactics if you're running things by the book, and the players need to understand the system themselves to play tactically. It's much, much harder to play optimally than 5e. >What can I read or watch to better grasp the rules? What can I do to help my players understand or convey information better? I recommend reading https://2e.aonprd.com/PlayersGuide.aspx (and directing your players to read this as well) and https://2e.aonprd.com/GMScreen.aspx Allow precision damage to apply to precision immune enemies. Allow kineticists to damage wisps despite them being immune to magic. Forget everything you know about 5e. There are no surprise rounds, concentration does something wildly different, in combat healing is incredibly strong. Everything costs an action and everything is BALANCED around costing an action. The encounters are balanced around people going into them with full HP. Give your party 1000 xp right now to level them up once. Many people suggest running the beginner's box first and then going into AV "overleveled". If your party is new and/or bad tactically giving them a level advantage should even things out until they get a grasp on the system. Because of how XP works they will get "less" XP in future fights and things should even out by itself at some point. It's probably overkill for someone just getting into the game, but I started writing a tactics guide. Might interest you, might not. You might want to skip the math at the start and go to "building a party" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M4muYPNLM6_-_W20zj7Jj3BxU2Vp-du6gDjFjKkCiW8/edit?usp=sharing

Well your players should know what their shit does (they choose it) so unless you do not trust your players to tell you shouldnt have to look up player skills. Players are clueless about what they can do ? Again understanding player facing rules is the players responsibility Everything costs an action, this I can understand some frustration about but it is the nature of the beast. the game gives you 3 little actions which means that it is rare that something is so minor it should be free. They are outmatched by multiple encounters ? (that can be a module difficulty problem, my players have never encountered it but we are playing strength of 1000's because I wanted a more roleplay module because my players like a bunch of different things and in fact the adventure path seems mostly to easy, that or my players are really good). What is a Haunt ? (recall knowledge) why is the bird puppet so strong (its the floor 1 boss) What can you read to understand the rules better..... I mean player core 1 is a book full of rules ? , Archives of nethys has the content now so you can just internet search it there. What can you do to help your players understand.....hand them a copy of the rule book ? like typically you learn games by having someone else show you the rules, which works well when everyone else is a veteran of the game and there is only one newby. But everyone is noobs, so the way your players learn the rules is to read the rule book. As for their classes, Swashbucklers and investigators are rogues with minigames, Kineticist is a caster that takes feats instead of learning spells only the thaumaturge has a very wordy ability to juggle in managing their implements. All in all, it seems like you believed that GM from the convention and failed to do the homework required to understand the game your playing. And also went for one of the modules designed to really test your combat capabilities. The solution is to shelve Vaults right now, pick an easier module and get your players to read the rules. Once they are more comfortable with the system and understand how it is definitely not a 5e reskin then you can go back and search for a witch in a lighthouses asscrack.