I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to take the kids to the beach, but my wife is sleeping in after a rough night and the kids are entertaining themselves in an act of the gods , so I’m going to read the GM Core. This is what the remastered version of Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster calls its Dungeon Master’s Guide. Over the last few weeks I reviewed the D&D Player’s Handbook (2024), and the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster: Player Core, basically trying to figure out how they relate to each other, and whether they succeed at onboarding new players to the game. I also asked questions about their relationships to the changes that have happened to the hobby over the past decade — things like actual play, online play, and the ascension of D&D lore into the pop culture mainstream via the memification of alignment and classes and popular properties like Baldur’s Gate and the recent movie. The goal isn’t to break down rules differences; plenty of places will do these better if you care about the intricacies of action economy. There’s neither right nor wrong with regards to how these things are designed, simply player preference. In terms of players, these two behemoths of the TTRPG scene compete on the stage of character options, but as a referee who stopped running these games in the light of having a family and the scourge of scheduling with other friends in similar situations that have found deprioritising TTRPG time a necessity for survival, I care more about how they compare in terms of referee support? Does the GM Core make me want to run Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster?

Now, I got a bunch of comments on my review of Player Core last week, and I’m going to clarify my opinions on the most popular refrains. Is PF2R in conversation with D&D2024? I think they’re clearly and historically of the same lineage — both descended from 3.5th Edition — and D&D2024 clearly takes inspiration from PF2R and both from 4th edition. PF2 came 5 years after D&D 2014 was released, with D&D to re-entering the popular consciousness with Community in 2011 and then hugely so in 2015 after Stranger Things, the same year Critical Role began changing how people interacted with TTRPGs (which, notably, was a PF1 campaign until this point). Not only are they in conversation with each other, PF2R is explicitly a response to changes in the licensing that are associated with D&D2024. So, no, not entirely separate design conversations. Is Player Core intended to be for new players? The PF2 Beginner Box came out in November 2020, the original Core in August 2019, so it’s bizarre to assert the Core is not intended for new players to the game as the Beginner Box didn’t exist for new players for a year, and in that year there were only new players. PF2R doesn’t have a new Beginner Box, and you can’t tell from looking whether your Beginner Box is updated or not. D&D2024 will, too, have a beginner box also releasing almost a year later, which also doesn’t mean that the PHB 2024 isn’t aimed at new players. So, no, I don’t think it’s a sensible assertion that it want aimed at new players. Is PF2R is in competition with D&D2024? Of course it is, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For people interested in D&D2014, PF and PF2 have long been the primary alternative. You can have different approaches and still be in competition; stating that they have a totally different approach to GM fiat is flatly in contradiction to the the text of the GM Core which says that “it does not require mastery” and “the details will fall into place”, as well as the fact that D&D2024 clearly takes inspiration from PF2R’s approach, as discussed in the Player Core review. Obviously, I’m not reviewing your table, I’m just reviewing the book, but it’s also silly to assert (especially in the context of the disclaimer at the top of every I Read Review), that you can’t review the book of a game without playing it, especially when you’re also asserting that this specific game is supposed to be run by the book. Now, let’s move on.

I’ll begin with the great lie of this book: Despite it being 100 pages shorter than Player Core, and bulk of Player Core’s 450 pages largely being irrelevant to the GM, it requires the GM to buy Player Core for the 40 pages of rules at the back. I know that all the PF2R rules are available for free, but: This is a freaking rule book. Put. The. Rules. In. The. Book. I’d rather pay for the extra pages than google or buy a whole extra book. I know there’s a Player Core 2 on the horizon: If it also requires purchasing the Player Core by not including those 40 pages of rules, then Paizo you’ve completely lost me. Don’t call it Core if it doesn’t contain the Core of what you need to know. Bad start, GM Core.

You might recall the Player Core didn’t have anything much to say about being a GM. GM Core has a lot to say about it, though. The GM: “Tells a story”, “Fleshes out the world”, “entertains” everyone, “prepares through studying”, “improvises” and “makes rules decisions”. But, it’s “collaborative”. Sorry for the snark there, but I hate this it’s even worse than what the PHB2024 says about the Dungeon Master. Absolutely horrendous introduction, basically setting up the GM to occupy all roles from scheduling to hospitality to conflict management. It’s a huge step down from the PHB 2024, which gave principles drawn from other areas of the hobby (to my eyes at least) for both Player and Dungeon Master to follow: PF2R treats players like cats to be herded or tolerated in order to get your story told.

From here, it basically splits into three: A guide for GMs who’ve never run PF2R before, a guide for building your own world and adventures, a gazetteer, and optional rules and treasures. Honestly, with this structure, it seems modelled after the infamously terrible DMG2014. Uh oh.

The Running the Game chapter is a relentless barrage of advice. It covers a lot, making gestures to hospitality and safety of the players; it covers scheduling and how to start and pace a session; it considers sensory processing, attention and disabilities. Overall, this is a very thorough, but incredibly dry, lesson in how to run a game. None of this advice is bad, but it’s a relentless, unbroken stream of how to play that goes for 45 pages. Nothing about this helps with onboarding me into running the game, it assumes — and to be honest it does foreshadow this when it says the GM needs to study in the principles earlier — you’re willing to study this section. At least the only section you need to study are these first 45 or so pages, if you aren’t planning on creating your own adventures. Compared to the graceful education of the Mothership Warden’s Manual, this is a gauntlet designed to weed out the weak. Compared to the annotated examples of play in the PHB2024, it’s abysmal. It feels like something written 30 years ago, just including content for modern sensibilities. If you’re new to running PF2R, this doesn’t provide you with training wheels, it places you at the top of the hill expects you to just start riding.

If you are planning on running or creating your own adventures, though, the support provided by the section on “Building Games” is absolutely magnificent. Campaign types, frames and themes. Frameworks for individual adventure, detailing number of encounters, scenes and sessions with particular details: “2 conversations with doubtful authority figures” and “avoid trivial or low thread encounters” in a horror-style game, for example. Advice for building sandboxes in a structured system requiring encounter prep. Use of motifs and recurring characters for story arcs if that’s your jam. Encounters have XP budgets, there are encounter quick frameworks if you don’t want to spend time on the nitty gritty, the impacts of weather and terrain are accounted for in the encounter maths too if you want to mix things up. This is all presented incredibly clearly and smoothly. If I wanted to build my own PF2R adventures, it would be very easy to be confident that I’m creating things suitable for my party, or the dungeon level, or whatever I was aiming for. It also covers — after an interjection — building hazards, creature and items with the same level of specificity. The only thing I could do without is the world-building section, and I’ll come back to why. This is absolutely S-tier support.

The interjection is for a GM-only rules sections — this covers optional variants, afflictions which are things like curses and diseases, and rules around environments and hazards. Aside from the variant rules, these are only here because you can’t teach a GM to build a hazard until you’ve explained what they were — these rules should’ve been in the Player Core. Why the variant rules aren’t grouped with the subsystems later is completely beyond me. Those subsystems come at the back of the book — they’re all rules that you engage with only occasionally, but honestly they’re player facing rules and should be in Player Core as well not the GM Core. This reveals a strong lack of thought regarding what rules belong where — if all the rules aren’t in both books, why are player facing rules split between two books? This reveals a either a major flaw in the information design of these books — a lack of clarity regarding who and what they’re actually for — or more cynically, a decision made so that more people have to spend more money on more books because no single book provides everything you need to play.

The section on Golarion itself is a marginally more detailed version of what is in the Player Core — both of these just aren’t enough at all to get a sense of the world in my opinion. There are no characters here, nothing to interact with — it’s all dry description of places and politics. In D&D2014, they chose to focus on a small section of the world, and I think for the purposes of core rule books it’s a much better choice. The Golarion sections in both Player Core and GM Core have been an absolute waste of space, and soured me on the potential of the world.

So, why did I rail against the world-building section? It feels cursory, and contrary to the message that the GM Core is sending from page 1. There’s a massive underlying assumption in the GM Core, and that assumption is that if you’re the GM, you’ve GM’d before. It assumes it has things to teach you, but you know what all of this is already. Like the Player Core, the audience here is experienced gamers looking for a specific experience, not onboarding a new audience. They’re not even trying. In that context, the section on world building seems utterly pointless. In all truth, I think that choosing to target this honestly at their implied audience — people who played Pathfinder 1e, or people who are looking for more character customisation, or a more satisfying and less attritive combat than D&D2014, but are experienced in playing or running games — would’ve made this a far more compelling book.

Because as it is, this is a mixed bag. There’s gold in these hills, but also the organisation of both Player and GM Core are highly questionable in each other’s contexts. A bunch of rules here should be in Player Core, as they’re player facing, especially if it’s expected the GM own both. If the GM should only own one, it should all be here. The advice centred on new GMs is abysmal, a dreary exercise in exposition. But the structures that support encounter, adventure and campaign design are without peer, and make it incredibly easy to create your own stuff, if that’s what you’re interested in. This is one of my big hopes for the DMG2024, was missing in the DMG 2014, and this has it in spades. The optional rules here give a lot of support for a wide variety of play types that are skipped over in both the PC and the PHB2024; but procedural exploration is still missing.

The GM Core is a poorly directed mess, and it fails to live up to the hopes I had placed on it. It does little to nothing to assist me in my first few sessions of running PF2R, although there’s plenty to assist me once I’ve got some experience. It doesn’t systematically support any of my preferred (and fairly classic) play styles, despite having a series of subsystems built into it that attempt to cover the ground; the authors of this appear to have no familiarity with the larger space or are disinterested in broader play styles that you might want to bring to PF2R. And it doesn’t sell Golarion as a place I want to hang out. The biggest strength here is that it supports me building my encounters and campaigns very well — but if I’m investing in the PF2R ecosystem, I’m probably also investing in their encounter paths, so that’s not something I’m likely to be using. I’m a module girl, though and through, so while I appreciate the support for when I need it, it won’t be my primary engagement with the game. This has utterly failed to sell me on running PF2R, but I’ve heard good things about the PF2 starter set, so we’ll see if it manages to do what the GM Core fails to.

There are only a few questions in this battle between the Mean Girls of the TTRPG world, and the next that will be answered is whether the DMG2024 will come out swinging as hard as the PHB2024 did. And then, I think, there’ll be a sizeable break, until the Starter Set 2024 is released — and then I’ll compare it to the updated PF2R Beginner’s Box.

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