The Pathfinder RPG - Now Official
I got my (monstrously huge at nearly 600-page) copy of the Pathfinder RPG Friday.

Now I can quit being all jealous of those 4th edition players and their shiny new game system and active support from the publisher and third parties. As if I did not have enough previously-published support material to last me a lifetime with Dungeons & Dragons 3.x...

I'd already checked out the official "Pathfinder Reference Document," so I have already caught up on some of the now-final rules changes. While I'm still not fully studied up on the new rules, I thought I'd share some initial thoughts:

#1 - It's Pretty Open.
Kudos to Paizo for really opening up the game system. If you can't afford the full monstrous hardcover rulebook (or can't find it - it has already sold out of the first printing), there's a PDF version for only $10 - which is way cheap in an industry that often charges nearly as much for the PDF as the physical copy. And then there's the free reference document, with the stripped-down bare-bones rules - intended more for license adherence purposes than for actual use in-play (but it will serve if you are severely cash-strapped or just interested in checking it out first). They have a very generous, player-friendly Community Use License for non-commercial products appearing online, and what seems to be a very reasonable Compatibility License for more commercially-minded endeavors.

#2 - It Still Seems An Evolution of D&D 3.x
The game has been jokingly referred to as Dungeons & Dragons 3.75, which Paizo itself is not allowed to joke about but the rest of us can. And it's really no joke. It's about as different from Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 as 3.5 was from Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition. Which is to say significant, but still compatible. All the old 3.5 stuff (much of it still available in PDF form via Paizo, RPGNow, and DriveThruRPG) can still be used as-is with minimal conversion (and you could probably get away without any conversion, and the players are likely not to notice that their foe was shy a couple of skill points. ). And, to a lesser degree, even the old 3.0 stuff will still work almost as-is. Old-school 2nd edition and 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons materials will require a significantly greater amount of conversion, as usual (but less than you'd need to convert 'em to 4th edition, IMO).

Besides getting years of playtesting experience among third edition players, they also had what was perhaps the most extensive open playtesting phase for this new rules system that has ever been done in the dice-and-paper RPG industry. And interestingly enough, it seems like they've reigned in some of the differences from the alpha / beta rules testing period, and brought them closer to the 3.5 original.

#3 - Core Classes Have Been Enhanced / Rebalanced
The biggest changes seem to have been in the classes. Once again, the core classes have been beefed up. Significantly. The basic idea was to have made them back into balance with the slightly power-inflated prestige classes and alternative core classes that appeared later in 3.5's publishing cycle. To make the core classes "more fun to play all the way to level 20," the classes get a lot of higher-level love. Druids get the more powerful shapechanging options earlier. Bards get more songs and more kinds of performances (including a level 20 song that literally causes enemies to die of joy or sorrow). Barbarians get a bunch of additional options to use when they rage. Sorcerers have cool new bloodline options. Fighters get a ton of new abilities beyond their bonus feats. And so forth. There were a handful of minor "nerfs" here and there too - such as clerics losing Heavy Armor as a class ability (you now have to spend a feat to wear plate mail).

Some of the original prestige classes from the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide have received some attention and boosts in power and flexibility, too. I personally don't think a class like the Mystic Theurge really needed a boost - but since core casters have received some nice enhancements, I guess it lost a bit of relative power in the balance.

But are wizards and bards and barbarians and rogues and rangers finally more balanced with each other? MMmmm-maybe. They seem better, at least.

#4 - General Character Inflation / Options
Besides the benefits the core classes, it seems that there was a general shift in power to the upside, which concerns me a little. For example, the lower-end hit dice has been elevated: Magic users now use a D6 instead of the D4 for calculating hit points, and rogues have gone up to a d8. Many of the weaker feats (such as the ones that give bonuses to skill rolls) have been enhanced (Toughness, in particular, now scales with hit dice). Skill points go a bit further. Feats come more quickly (every other level instead of every three levels). And every race gets a net total of +2 to their attributes. Some of these should affect monsters as well. The net effect (I expect, having not played it yet) is that the game should be slightly more survivable at lower levels, and the game should feel a little more skill-based influence overall.

#5 - Some General Rules Streamlining.
XP loss (with raise dead or other effects, or manufacturing magic items) seems to be out. Polymorph spells have been (again) cleaned up. Some of the uglier rules - like tumbling and grappling - have been fixed to be either more believable or slightly simpler to use. The XP gained per encounter is once again fixed by the difficulty of the monster, no longer factoring in the party's level - a throwback to pre-3E versions of the game.

#6 - A Tiny Handful of New, Interesting Twists
Staves (they are calling them "staves" again, like the old days...) have been completely overhauled as a new kind of magic item - and I like what they've done with them. The Pathfinder Chronicler is a new Prestige Class that is interesting from a plot standpoint, though I doubt many players will ever take it. There are also a number of new feats that have been injected into the core rules which will be fun to see how they work out.

Turning undead has been a long-time trouble spot in D&D rules. The all-or-nothing nature of turning undead meant that there was a very thin, sometimes random line between a TPK ("total party kill") and a trivial encounter. A major change in tradition appears here, with the ability converted to a "channel energy" effect which acts as an area-effect damage spell against undead - or an area-effect heal on living creatures (for good clerics, at least). This is a pretty fundamental change, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out (though I think evil clerics got the shaft on it...)

#7 - Pretty Pictures!
Okay - it must be said. The book is really, really pretty. The artwork is outstanding.

I'm still going through the rules and can't render a full opinion on the game system yet. And reading them doesn't hold a candle to trying them out in actual play, and we're not starting a new campaign with the Pathfinder rules for a couple of months. It's definitely remains a more "hardcore" game system for players who aren't afraid of rules and customization options... which would be, uh, ME.

I'm one of those people who really LOVED what they did with the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I guess I'm something of a game mechanics nerd, and the 3.5 rules were (and remain) something of a wild playground of possibility I never felt I'd come close to fully exploring. I was unwilling to sacrifice that to jump over to 4th edition D&D.

I guess the big kicker for me will be to see what kind of support it gets from third parties now that the game is official. But that's not critical. Tentatively, at this point, I'm gonna have to call myself a fan. It really comes down to whether or not I stick with 3.5 or migrate to "3.75". So far, the changes seem mostly positive, interesting - and most importantly, fun.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

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