I’ll admit I’ve never played one of their published campaigns, but a lot of this sounds GM-dependent. I tend to naturally run things a bit on the easier side, to where it feels like unless I’m going out of my way to provide a really serious threat, it’s always felt pretty much the same difficulty as my D&D games. I can’t relate to the idea that players just “scrape by” at all.
I wanted to move away from D&D anyway because I didn’t like the direction they were going (removing lore, breaking promises about supporting multiple play styles, etc.) and then the OGL debacle happened, as well as WotC’s other corporate bs. But I came to love Pathfinder for its 3 action economy and 4 degrees of success systems, which just feel so satisfying to me compared to the lacklustre D&D systems.
I’ll admit I’ve never played one of their published campaigns, but a lot of this sounds GM-dependent. I tend to naturally run things a bit on the easier side, to where it feels like unless I’m going out of my way to provide a really serious threat, it’s always felt pretty much the same difficulty as my D&D games. I can’t relate to the idea that players just “scrape by” at all.
I wanted to move away from D&D anyway because I didn’t like the direction they were going (removing lore, breaking promises about supporting multiple play styles, etc.) and then the OGL debacle happened, as well as WotC’s other corporate bs. But I came to love Pathfinder for its 3 action economy and 4 degrees of success systems, which just feel so satisfying to me compared to the lacklustre D&D systems.