Talk to me about Pathfinder

So continuing my ongoing mission to expand my horizons I have recently stumbled across Pathfinder. From my understanding it is a version of dnd that was made when people revolted over 4e and continued 3.5e. So are there any thoughts out there about the system? Do you prefer it to its DnD rivals (3.5, 4 and 5e)? What do you like? What do you hate?

Pathfinder rules. It is a logical evolution of D&D 3.5, and is basically the homerules of Paizo, who were major publishers of amazing Adventure Paths for 3.5. it was the best selling RPG for most of the years where WOTC published 4e.

Their system world, Golarion, is really great, too.

For my money, Pathfinder’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. There are so many details that go into building a character, with feats and skills and many many many class and race options depending on what the DM allows for source texts. Combat is very detailed and numbers-intensive. And honestly, I like that. But it seems pretty easy to break the system if you put a little effort into it and the DM isn’t watching carefully. My favorite Pathfinder games have been those where the DM restricts source material, so the party spends less time on hyper-optimized character builds and more time just getting to the game.

Pathfinder cleaned up a lot of the fiddly complexity and unintended wombo-combos of D&D 3.5, and it preserved the more character-oriented aspects of fantasy roleplaying during the gamified cooldown-management of the D&D 4E era. It served a really important role in catering to those who weren't happy with the direction 4E took.

That said, I can't see a compelling reason to play Pathfinder when D&D 5E exists. It's not that Pathfinder is bad, it's just that 5E is very much in the same vein, but does everything better.

Which is the polar opposite of the game we just started haha. Hope you end up liking it!

Pathfinder, to me, is at its best at the character creation stage. As noted by others there's an amazing amount of material out there to help spark your imagination and give you interesting ways to implement your ideas. That being said, I firmly believe you can create most (or all) of the same characters in nearly any system, you just need to be creative and have a DM that's willing to work with you.

It also has a huge number of pre-written adventure paths for DMs that aren't as creative or just plain don't have time to write their own stuff. This, and the fact that the rules/materials are basically free to access online, are the main reasons I've seen people play it.

The downsides for me come in at level 10+ or so. Once you get that high it gets excessively crunchy, even for my groups that enjoy the crunch. There are amazingly complex situations you can find yourself in that give you bonuses and negatives to your rolls, and it just gets silly. There's a reason some people call it "Mathfinder".

Saying one or the other is "better" is clearly a matter of opinion, but my opinion is that it is improved upon 3.5e. I never played 4e. 5e is definitely a more streamlined system that is easier to run and learn imo, but to some it lacks depth. They both have their place in my mind, it just depends on what you're looking for.

Ha! I'm sure it'll be great -- the PBP format lends itself to more RP, which balances the hyper-optimization concerns more. I've been through two major (1st-18th/20th) Pathfinder campaigns. One was "anything Paizo goes" and the other was "CRB and Advanced Player's Guide" plus a few homebrew rules. I liked the latter one better, but my regular group is very combat-oriented, and not much in the way of RP.
I'll second both of these statements. I'm lucky in that the DM for my online real-time group has automated a huge amount of the math involved, but if you don't have that, there's a lot to keep track of. I've only played a bit of 5e, but I found character creation to be a bit flat compared to Pathfinder, even with a limited set of options.

In my experience with my own IRL groups, every player makes woefully inadequate combat PCs, instead opting to explore some weird combination of attributes. I've literally had to give them free bonuses to keep them alive against appropriate CRs.

1. Character customization possibilities are insane. There are so many books and options within those books that you can create nearly anything at all.

2. It's can be overwhelming mathematically, with tons of little bonuses here and there, some of which stack and some of which don't.

3. The rules are very comprehensive. While this creates a great framework for telling many kinds of stories, it can both slow the game down and restrict outside-the-box thinking.

4. They have a lot of pre-written modules, so there are a lot of different types of campaigns you can run depending on your style of gaming.

I have been reading it ocer and from a GM and player standpoint I love how fleshed out the world and character options are. I'll need to keep an eye out for a game.

Edit: The more I look it over the more I want to play a game. I think I might just roll up a random character to see how easy something is to put together.

Pathfinder does some things I like, and some things which annoys me.

Good:
• Made every classes relevant.
• Got rid of dead levels.
• Made epic levels which didn't sucked.
• Streamlined feats which desperately needed it.
• Turned many old 3.X classes into archetypes instead limiting the huge lists of classes available and making it more manageable.

Bad:
• Some weird skill choices (why do I learn a new language each time I want to get better at deciphering scripts?).
• Turned all the classes "up to 11".
• Some weird feat choices (like why splitting Improved trip/disarm/bullrush/etc. into 2 feats instead? they already worked the way they were...).
• A bit too many bonuses for my taste...
• Some of those archetypes are WEIRD...

From what I have been reading as well the classes seemed to be waaaay more effective which is what I am guessing you mean by turned up to 11 Kalajel. For example, I ended up making a half-orc druid that hung out in the Katapesh desert on his own. As a level one character, this guy could pretty much survive and navigate in the desert with his animal companion (a camel) except for food as required. If he settled down, he could easily build an oasis and shelter himself with very little equipement. Not only that but he could grow a type of magical healing berry, which I could see him selling or trading for any equipment he might need. Now the RP options with this guy have me basically salivating and once again this is at level one.

Yeah, when I think of a 1st level D&D-like character, I don't picture someone who can do all that. At 5th level, maybe, but 1st? I think they gave each classes too many goodies...

This is all assuming that I haven't read something incorrectly...

Just to give you an example of the higher level complexity I mentioned, I made a cheat sheet today for our ranged character in my home game. He is Level 11 with one level of Bard and 10 levels of Ranger.



Edit: here's a link since the embedded image is too small to read.

Sounds like a game that begs for a VTT

Yeah okay thats pretty crunchy. Still though might be worth it to play characters turned up to 11.

This could be handy for you!

Awesome! Thanks so much!

I just bought that bundle, too. Mostly to get Starfinder, but also for the Shattered Star adventure path and all the great Golarion setting books.

I'm running a Shattered Star game right now. Super moderate spoilers that don't really ruin anything, but: It's fun though, we're in Book 4

Thanks for the heads up. I'm glad that it is fun, despite that focus.

There was an interview with Paizo a while back on a the rpg.net irc (also reposted on a blog called the hard-boiled GM, or something like that. As part of the Q&A, the designers were asked why they said that Pathfinder didn't fix things like the caster/non-caster imbalance (and in same cases made it worse) and their response was, "It ended up being harder than we thought so we just didn't try."

It shows.

Well, being based on the premise of keeping fans of 3.5e, it would have been hard to fix anything that big.

That's true. But Paizo said the reason it was going with Pathfinder instead of making stuff for 4e was so that it could fix stuff like that. That's why I stopped playing it. It's more unbalanced, more unwieldy.

There were ways to fix it though that could have been done without a LOT of problems. Both 4e and 13th Age fixed that caster imbalance in ways that Pathfinder could have (although 4e introduced new problems).

Interesting. Most opinions seem to say that it's a bit more streamlined and a bit better balanced.

Personally, I am wholly uninterested in perfect balance, which is why after playing 4e, I felt no reason to adopt that system. It's not that I look for loopholes, it is merely that if it is perfectly balanced, then your character creation choices don't matter and a whole part of the 'game' part of roleplaying has just been eliminated.

That's what got me away from 4e too. Still, when you've got a party of 'normal' builds and one or two 'optimized' builds you have to present the group with lethal threats just to scratch the two tougher ones (and when one of those is a specialized caster it's even worse), so it gets really hard to make balanced encounters.

Balance is nice to a point but only so that it does not make a players characters useless. As long as people are having fun and can enjoy their PC, it is not as important. I see it as a problem only when certain classes get to a point that cause them to be able to do everyone's job in the party better than the one's created for that role. A GM should be able to modify or create adventures that give each PC a role to do in it and have their moment to shine.

As a GM I do tend to discourage min-maxing of characters and work with my players on whole character development which includes the areas that don't have stats as well.

I prefer to be able to focus on story as well. But these players I was talking about weren't even TRYING to min-max, they just wanted to play a class that seemed cool to them. Unfortunately, they picked ones that were inherently stronger, and so they were getting bored and I was actually trying not to one-or-two-shot other characters.

(Don't get me wrong, I don't mind killing characters. I just want to do it through their choices, not my encounter math.)

I've been lurking in this thread for a while and would like to chime in. 😁

I've been playing Pathfinder for a few years, and if I had to say which game is my favorite system, then I'd probably pick it. As for imbalance reasons, hmmm... See, I'd say most of us don't see it as something bad, necessarily. In fact, I would argue that the fandom tends to see it more as a feature than a bug. Independently of the reason that Paizo may have created Pathfinder for, I feel like it relatively became its own thing. Undeniably based and inspired on 3.5, but still its own thing.

As for the caster vs martial imbalance itself, I do think it's healthy/wise to define why it exists. I'm 80% that if we put a, idk, lvl 15 fighter and a lvl 15 wiz on the same room, the fighter does have a very good possibility of emerging victorious. The imbalance lies, I feel, not on how many die can the wiz throw when he maximizes and empowers his fireball, but because the game theoretically rewards specialization. And casters - Many casters powers lie on the flexibility their spellcasting grants them. See, while a Rogue needs a fairly high Climb/Acrobatics to jump a large ridge or scale a dangerous mountain, investing a lot of skills points on those respective skills, the Sorcerer can simply cast fly. A powerful enemy that it's clear that they won't be able to fight? Dimensional Door. Good luck to the Paladin whose speed is only 20ft. Casters can trivialize a lot of challenges.

And I insist - I don't think that's necessarily something bad. Because while the Wiz has to prepare, guess what spells are going to be useful, keep track of their spell slots and all of that, my fighter can still reliably hit enemies for 60 points of damage. And for the good or for the bad, combat is something that is normally very prominent in PF.

All of that said and considered, what really made me fell for the game was its setting. See, it got me to a point where if I'm not playing in Golarion, I'm not sure that I'm all that interested. And not only with PF as well but in most systems made for generic fantasy, unless the idea of the game is something relatively different(Like Warhammer Fantasy). And I've heard other people say similar stuff about Golarion as well. x)

Having never played it I cant really comment but I do hope to give it a go one day.

That is where fudging the rolls come in. I try not to do it much but if a stupid roll is going to derail a game, throw it out or instead of it being so bad throw in a complication instead of a kill.

I sometime have enemies focus on the stronger characters as they are not dumb and use tactics. So if they can tell a PC is stronger than another or demonstrates it, I have no trouble sending extra bad guys at them. It frees up the other PC to try some stuff as they have more options while making the other stronger PC sweat as they have to deal with more attacks to just stay alive.

The reason that the imbalance between fighters and wizards bothers me a bit is that, if the wizard wants to, he can be a better fighter than the fighter, a better rogue than the rogue, etc just by selecting a few spells. With the number of spells that a wizard can memorize at high level, it's not hard to have something on hand for every occasion.

The one time I played in a high level D&D campaign (3.5), we found that our double wizard, one monk team was unstoppable... if we had a day to prepare. If we were attacked by something powerful but unknown, we'd probably be spending 25,000 gp for at least one True Resurrection.

You have to be creative sometimes as a GM. I was running a Rolemaster game and one of our players could cast invisibility and used it a lot. One time I had him enter a dungeon passage where a guy wearing glasses holding a crossbow sat at the end guarding it. Well he decided to just walk up and grab the glasses off him. What he didn't know is I gave him glasses that could see invisible objects, He was surprised when a crossbow bolt sunk into him halfway down the hall.

Another way in pathfinder to keep mages from recuperating their spells is to not give them the rest to do so. After a couple times of that and they regulate their spells usage more just in case. Have their spell book stolen and other things to make them less likely to just blow their spells or at least make them learn a variety of spells because they need to be more careful in their selection. Use things that cause them not to be able to cast such as silence or other means to make it hard for them to cast those spells. Trust me you can always beat you players as a GM. The goal is to make sure that all can have fun playing. Using my RM example above the player loved it as I got him good but he enjoyed the challenge.

The setting is definitely worth using.

As far as comments from others, they're not wrong, but for me, I'd rather put my time into prepping story, and be able to rely on the mechanics to do their thing without me having to regularly intervene. If I have to spend time thinking about why an encounter is going to break, that's less time I have to think about plot, and plot is where I like to live.

This type of creativity is great. But it doesn't help fix Pathfinder, I'm afraid. With about half of all possible builds in PF, the caster wouldn't care if a crossbow was fired at him at all b/c it would have no chance of doing anything even if it hit him, which would be near-impossible.