Pathfinder 2E - PF2 Remaster PDFs have been sent out! Talk about/ask questions about them here.
How's the layout and flow of the rules? Does it feel easier to read and learn from?
From what I've seen it feels better. There are small layout changes in different sections that were clearly driven by readability stuff. For example, I couldn't figure out why until I realized they took away the big red text at the top and integrated it into the starting paragraph. It made for much cleaner design. I haven't had too much time to read the rules.
Does the clarification on Recovery Changes and how they work surprise you, or was that how you were running things before?
You mean Recovery checks? Yeah, a bit. It took me a second to realize it, but it feels kind of pointless, tbh. Outside of really esoteric ways of increasing dying without a check, it just recreates the three strikes system of 5E in an unnecessary way. I liked the 4 hard strikes which meant that pop-up healing wasn't a great thing but gave you an extra chance to avoid dying.
How do you get access to formulas for crafting? Are there costs associated with them?
There are several ways detailed, the most obvious of which is simply buying them (they have a little chart from level 0 to level 20 items which are "common"), which you can then copy into your formula book. You can also reverse engineer one by disassembling or studying a version you have: you have to meet the requirements to Craft the item and hit the item's DC on a check.
What set of edicts and ananthemas for different ancestories are your favourite?
There are a lot of neat ones. Of the Edicts, I think I like the Orc's "Share knowledge you won through pain", like a sort of battling scholar.
Overall I like the Anathemas better because I think they are generally more interesting and character-defining at a certain level. I also think they did a decent job of hitting what people wanted with the old alignments without having to put those ideas into a fixed grid.
Dwarves: Leave an activity or promise uncompleted
Elves: Force another creature to do something
Goblins: Trust a horse or dog
Gnome: Slow down to explain yourself
If there was a missed opportunity, it's that they only did edicts and anathemas for the full heritages. Versatile heritages didn't have examples, which is sad because I think those probably would have been among the most interesting.
How does Mixed Heritage work?
Pretty much as it did before, tbh: Select a primary Ancestry, and instead of taking a heritage from that ancestry you take one of the versatile ones. I will say that I feel like you should almost get a free lineage (feats that define your bloodline like a Daemon-blooded person or having a Sea Hag parent that you have to take at character creation) because they are so defining and interesting. Though I suppose it's still possible to do that if you play the Ancestral Paragon variant (which is, apparently, not in the new GM's guide, which is disappointing but doesn't actually eliminate it so I guess that's fine).
That's in 2.0 as well, but it sounds like using it for the (Ancestry) Lore feats is new.
Yeah, it probably was but it wasn't one I saw particularly often. But it's more of a load-bearing one now and I think it really improves the quality of that feat, since it'll automatically increase over time for minimal investment. Same with the Ancestral Weapon Familiarities, which have gone from 3 Feats to 1.
Having done a comparison on all the main races in the book to the original versions, you can see that they simplified some stuff down to make it more immediately useable, and while most feats came back, some more niche ones didn't make it. Most of those seemed to be from the APG and almost all were Level 1 feats from what I could tell.
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