Orion wrote:Is there an executive summary of this 200-page thread? I last looked at this game during beta, and it looks like many of the egregious problems from back then got cleaned up. Is it now appreciably worse than 3.5,what are the talking points on its badness, and would you take an opportunity to run it?
[*] Pathfinder is more-or-less 3.5E D&D but with a bunch of pissant changes that only serve to make the edition more confusing. You can still hop into it easily enough because the major concepts are unchanged from 3.5E D&D but you'll get tripped up on the tiny details sooner or later. Fortunately, all of the game mechanics changes are frontloaded, so if you were familiar with Pathfinder's stupid changes in 2010 you're familiar with them in 2014. Since then, there's just been more expansion material rather than changes to the underlying core. Discounting stupid FAQ interpretations.
[*] Pathfinder's biggest claim to legitimacy, that of fixing linear warriors/quadratic wizards, is a total sham. They 'fixed' this by taking the nerfhammer to the more egregious spells and removing all of the 'direct' save-or-dies from the game. However, Pathfinder doesn't really grasp why wizards are > fighters so the power level has steadily creeped up such that the caster/non-caster gap is larger than in 3.5E D&D barring a few expansion options.
[*] Pathfinder's team of devs makes Skip Williams' haphazard and arbitrary look good. A frequent topic of complaining is how the FAQ will totally stealth-nerf or stealth-buff certain concepts with little grounding in RAW.
[*] Not all of Pathfinder's changes are bad. They did do some genuine good work like removing XP point costs for spells and item crafting (which makes these options more powerful, but I'd rather make the party uniformly much more powerful than lopsidedly more power) and the archetypes were a genuinely good idea. Playing LA+1/+2 monsters is much more doable in Pathfinder than in 3.5E D&D, mostly because LA+1/+2 monsters are actually modestly overpowered compared to core races -- but it actually kind of works out, since humans/half-elves/half-orcs/plain elves get advantages with the favored class bonuses that make up for it.
[*] Pathfinder's biggest positive contribution to D&D is the introduction of and standardization of archetypes, which takes the sort of inchoate idea from late-3.5E D&D of swapping in and out class features and taking them a bit further. This is awesome because A.) the open multiclassing system of base 3.5E D&D sniffs black mold and the less it gets used the better and B.) people get to play the concepts they want right out of the gate.
[*] The biggest reason why people talk about Pathfinder is its wiki on
www.d20pfsrd.com. Pathfinder not only condones but encourages people to cannibalize their books and put everything up on the wiki. To WotC's surprise this is a hugely winning market strategy because people are still willing to shell out money for early access to books and/or the Pathfinder AP subscription. I myself have spent about 200 USD on Pathfinder product over the past three years.
[*] The bottom line is this: Pathfinder both deserves and doesn't deserve to be industry leader. The corporate culture of Pathfinder is one the best of TTRPGs, even accounting for its market position, and embracing the OGL even harder than 3E D&D is no small part of its success. Still, the actual game mechanics portion of Pathfinder is rather lacking. The d20 engine is in dire need of an update and from what we've seen Pathfinder isn't really up to the task. Nonetheless, it's eminently playable if you liked 3.5E D&D at all. Think of it as getting a 5% pay cut at your current job with no added benefits. That's Pathfinder compared to 3E D&D.