ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

This is completely standard, Paizo have always given the rules for free and made you pay for the stories and lore.
It’s not even a starter set, it’s the playtest, so you already need to be familiar with Pathfinder 2e in order to use the rules. Definitely not a place for a group to test the waters, they’re looking for serious dweebs to obsess over the maths and mechanics so they can refine it - the playtest adventure(s) are just playgrounds for them to do that it.

Yes, exactly - as I put it to my players, a “person” isn’t able to be inherently good or evil. They’ll have their own morals - particular things they always will or won’t do - but alignment is for things literally made of the concept of that alignment.

You know how the tarrasque constantly regenerates? Well what if you harvested it for meat?

The 3.x tarrasque became a joke, but that was a result of the extensive options combined with people’s system understanding - sure a single wizard could kill it, but that still needed to be played by someone who understood the system. It was a system that gave unlimited options, so if you worked out how to combine enough of them you could break the system wide open, and the tarrasque was a great yardstick for that.

Then you come to 5e’s tarrasque and it’s so badly designed that it’s obvious from a glance that a level 1 character with flight can just hover above it and plink it down with a bow. I’ve seen 3.5’s brought up in comparison to that, but not as an example of difficult fights in a vacuum.

No, equating alignment and morality makes them both meaningless. Morality should be tied to outlooks/philosophies etc, a personal matter of how the individual acts in a situation, while alignment with the forces of good/evil/law/chaos should be a matter of absolute determinism. It’s easy to look at D&D and say it’s wrong, but just because something’s bad in D&D doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad.

Understandable - I prefer lovecraftian and fey creatures for alien thought processes, and use devils more as a foil/mirror to the lawful god of cities, merchants, and wealth, whomst I hate and will take any opportunity to drag.

I’d argue Devils, by their nature of being lawful as well as evil, are often interesting villains because of their “species”, but it’s kinda different when it’s a creature literally made from the primordial essence of Evil rather than just a bad dude.

Counterpoint: The overwhelming majority of curses are either crippling or a complete nonissue. Something like mummy rot will quickly kill a character, and curses that impose penalties on stats or rolls either affect something they use, making the character almost useless, or doesn’t, so doesn’t matter. If you don’t want the party remove cursing a specific curse, just make it more powerful than them.
Counterspelling is bad for a similar reason curses are bad, not remove curse - the overwhelming majority of counterspelling mechanics make it either too easy to too hard. Too hard and it’s just not worth trying, and too easy makes combat a matter of who has more casters.

“How do you spell that?”
“I dunno, how do you wanna spell it?”

If you really want the feeling of thac0 at your table you can just do AC - attack bonus to find the number you need to roll over, and bang your head against the table for the rest of the experience.

Mostly it’s just meant that it takes ages - usually time is a big enough price that no other punishment is needed. Their recent actions generated a group of ghosts though, so ghosts wandering through the room while they’re searching is now a thing.

My players like to save their worst rolls for perception checks to find secret doors. Even when they specifically know there’s a secret door and just need to work out how to open it, out comes a parade of 1s and 2s.

Ah yes, the Gazebo problem.

Jesus fuck, just pick up a different system instead of trying to use 5e for everything - OSR or most narrative systems will do this job straight out the box.

I used to think fudging Vs not fudging was a stylistic decision, but as I’ve played more I feel it’s a system issue. If you feel a need to fudge rolls, either to raise or lower the stakes, to force desired plot points or avoid unnarrative deaths, or to fix broken challenge ratings, you’re probably using the wrong system for you and your group.
Think about what issues you’re actually trying to avoid by fudging, and then look for systems that are structured to avoid those issues. If the rolls get in the way of your narrative, switch to a more narrative system. If you’re fighting against the system to build satisfying combat encounters, switch to something more tactical.

It’ll always take a couple of sessions to get used to a new system, but learning one is always a lot faster than continuing to waste time trying to force a system to do things it wasn’t made for.

It’s always difficult finding the balance between in character and out of character knowledge. I recently had to explain to my players that their characters definitely knew about a major historical event in the setting, because while it happened 10,000 years ago it’s important to the origin of several gods, so is a widely known story.

but I mostly just want to be along for the ride until it’s time to roll some dice to hit something and let the other players figure out what to do otherwise

I’d say all RPGs, even 5e, require players to actively engage with the game, he just wants other people to do the active engaging. Nobody wants to play with people like this, because either you want to engage and want to play with other engaged people, or you don’t want to engage and want to play with engaged people you can piggyback off.
A party of players like him wouldn’t get anything done, even in 5e, because they don’t actually want to be playing a ttrpg; they want to hang out with their friends and play something more like Ludo or Snakes And Ladders - roll some dice, move some pieces, go back to the conversation until your turn comes up again. HeroQuest if they really need the fantasy aspects.

Where do you want to start? The player mechanics are way outdated and overcomplicated for what it wants to be, the GM mechanics are functionally nonexistant, the lore is cliched at best and still incredibly bigoted in many areas, the better adventures are just rehashes of 2e and 3.x adventures and still need entire communities dedicated to making them runnable, it’s unbalanced until you get to about level 10 at which point it becomes unplayable, and without pirating it’s incredibly expensive.
Trying to strap every possible setting and mechanic onto a fantasy rule system was one of the issues 3.x ended up with, and 5e hasn’t been designed to solve that.

Most boring take on dragons I’ve ever seen. Dragons have pretty much never been exclusively creatures of fire, with water and acidic bile being common themes across different cultural incarnations. Dragons should be pretty rare, what with their power allowing them to make hundreds of square miles their territory, but otherwise this article is just saying to make dragons the most basic gold hoarding lizards.
I will continue to have cool interesting dragons that hoard things other than gold and have motivations beyond power through fear thank you very much.

Fold into Paizo.

Honestly there isn’t anything in D&D worth saving that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. Making it good requires rewriting the system and lore from the ground up - they tried with 4e, but didn’t have the time to complete either so all the classes functioned like casters and the setting was literally lifeless. 5e has just been a “best of” collection, dressing up like old favourites and reissuing classic adventures.
PF2e alone is everything 3.x, 4e, and 5e wanted to be, has a massively detailed and extensive setting that isn’t filled with cliches and problematic elements, and has only had to undergo minor canon changes rather than universe changing events between editions. It has accessibility, diversity, and inclusion out the wazoo, heavily supports the player community, and a steady supply of high quality adventures. PF2e fits the exact same niche as D&D, while being an all around improvement, even on price.