Pathfinder: the Lowdown
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2009 7:05 pm
So there's a fair amount of discussion about Paizo, because they are the only major publisher who is still putting out new 3rd edition compatible stuff, their art is good, and they are shifting everything over to "Pathfinder" which makes people wonder if they should switch their games over to Pathfinder as well. As it happens, they should not. But there's no shame in asking why. So to act as a sort of "go to" thread about why you should not make the switch to Pathfinder, we're making an FAQ of sorts. Common questions can be integrated into it and given coherent answers with a minimum of hyperbole.
I heard that Pathfinder is compatible with 3rd edition rules. As such, does it really make any difference if I use pathfinder or not?
Unfortunately, it does. Pathfinder makes a lot of minor rules modifications that really add up to being quite confusing. It even calculates defenses and hit points slightly differently so that monsters out of the monster manual are not usable as-is. With almost inconsequential changes to almost every spell as well as the basic monster combat routines, you'll be running into something you have to look up almost every combat round - and that seriously slows down play. Pathfinder is less compatible with 3.5 rules than 3rd edition sourcebooks or d20 modern sourcebooks are. Quite a (negative) achievement for something for which compatibility was supposed to be a life goal.
Didn't Pathfinder do the biggest open RPG playtest in history? Doesn't that mean they solved all of D&D's problems?
No. In this case, the "playtest" was a lie. Destructive playtesting was not only not encouraged, it was actively and specifically rejected. The Paizo leadership only wanted to hear about whether people had fun or not. Which means that the most pried playtest reports were seriously ones in which the players spent all night in immersive roleplaying or where the fun centered around "awesome" artifacts that broke the rules. In short - things that didn't use the rules at all and didn't demonstrate anything. People who actually ran apples to apples comparisons, same game tests, or repeated experiments to get controlled results or regressed bugs were not only ignored, they were banned from their forums.
Their playtest was a marketing ploy and nothing more. It was never intended to uncover problems or produce real results.
Doesn't Paizo's system address some of the most broken parts of D&D?
Not really, no. If you talk to 95% of the D&D players who are aware of balance issues in the D&D game who don't eat paste they will probably describe the most central issue as either "Fighters suck" or "Spellcasters are broken" - these statements are mostly speaking logically equivalent in terms of central balance issues because they both describe the relationship Wizards > Fighters. So to make D&D less unbalanced, it would be logical to either make spellcasters less powerful or sword wielders more powerful. Pathfinder does the opposite, and mysteriously makes spellcasters more powerful and fighters less powerful. Thus, it's more unbalanced.
How are spellcasters more powerful? Aren't a bunch of spells nerfed?
First of all, nerfing "a spell" doesn't actually do anything to spellcasters in terms of overall power as long as there is still at least one spell that still makes them win at the same level. It makes spellcasters less interesting to have less spells they want to use, but it doesn't make them any worse to use spell X to win instead of spell Y. While many staples of the wizard arsenal (like Glitterdust) have gotten nerfed to make them severely less good, and the literal death spells have been reduced to inconsequential damage dealers, there are still spells that remove enemies from combat at every level. The fine folks at Paizo even added some.
OK fine, I understand that spellcasters aren't any less powerful casting ghoulish hunger instead of finger of death, but you said they were more powerful. How can that be?
Well, Pathfinder gives out more feats (which helps caster DCs), gives everyone a +2 to a mental stat (which means higher caster DCs), gives single classed characters (like spellcasters) bonus hit points or skill point for no reason, raises the hit points of the caster classes, and gives spellcasters bonus free class features to "encourage them to not take prestige classes" - except that these class features start at level 1 so you get bonus free swag even if you jump ship for a PrC at the first possible opportunity. Also all the changes seem to miraculously benefit spellcasters. Specialist wizards can now use wands and scrolls out of their "banned" schools, and even make those items without penalty. Specialist wizards essentially don't even have spell selection limits anymore, but they still have bonuses. It's good to be the king.
More feats? Doesn't that help warriors too?
Not really. Anything you'd want to do with combat feats costs more feats now. The +4 bonus from Improved Disarm has been divided into two feats, for example. Spell Focus is unchanged of course.
What? Tell me more about how warriors got the bad touch? Improved Disarm sucks and it's difficult for me to imagine that being two feats.
Well part of that is the decision to "streamline" all the optional combat maneuvers into "not working." Apparently, someone at Paizo really doesn't like trip fighters, grapplemancers, or dungeoncrashers. I'm not super clear why, since by most accounts those represent rather limited but at least functional warrior characters in 3rd edition rules. A Tripstar may be boring, but he's no more boring than Sir Chargealot and at least he's differently viable. No more in Pathfinder. The core is that instead of rolling against an opposed roll, you now roll against a static number that happens to be what you'd need to have rolled if your opponent rolled a 15. Also, all the things that gave you +4 on these tests give you a +2 instead. Also the rules on trip, grapple, disarm, and bullrush have been changed slightly so that that they aren't as penalizing for the character it happens to, further disenfranchising the maneuver specialists.
Ouch. What if I wanted to make a "does big damage Fighter" like the Sir Chargealot that you mentioned instead of one of the maneuver specialists? I mean, that is also a standard character in 3.5 and it can work OK. I heard they gave Fighters bonus damage and AC or something?
Well, they nerfed Power Attack.
What?
Yeah. Power Attack, they nerfed it. Also, Cleave was apparently too powerful. You can kind of keep up on the damage train as specifically an archer, because like everyone else who ever wrote up a bunch of combat feats they couldn't resist the siren's song of adding extra feats that boost your rate of fire, and like all the others they all stack and you do get more feats. But the lancer and the grinder suffer big time. They need more feats sunk into doing more damage just to keep up with their old damage. More extra sunk feats than they get extra feats. Did I mention how it hoses multiclass characters (like, you know, warriors)? Yeah, it does that.
Are things at least clearer?
Oh heavens no. Not only are the rules specifically in a state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff with and without blog messages to that effect all the time, but a lot of the stuff that just makes no sense. I can't tell you how grappling works in pathfinder either, but it seems to actually be a super bad plan for the grappler.
So why would I use Paizo's rules?
I can't answer everything man.
How does Pathfinder address bookkeeping? Bookkeeping is annoying and I don't want to do it.
Pathfinder likes to force people to keep tracks of rounds per day. Seriously. Bards and Barbarians have to keep track of individual rounds of power usage. Also, a lot of things have very short and even nonstandard durations. How do you feel about tracking a 3 round buff? How about a seven minute buff?
So are Bards somehow more weak sauce than they were before? Is that even possible?
Well, kind of. Yeah. They are a lot more annoying, and they basically can't give their skill songs for a take 20 anymore because they have a limited number of rounds worth of singing for the whole day. Boosting someone while they take 20 on a task runs you through 20 rounds, and you have to be a seriously buff dude to have that many rounds of song. But the real meat of the matter is that bards were already a really weird case where in order to be an effective bard you had to eventually choose a direction to go with it and take one of the bard paths like Snowflake Wardancer or Sublime Chord that sacrificed attempting to compete in one or more of the many areas that Bards gradually lost level appropriateness in exchange for being level appropriate in one or two fields. Those options don't seem to exist in Pathfinder, so every Bard is doomed to gradually lose ground to mediocrity and finally obscurity in all fields and never justify their existence or regain the spotlight in anything.
Is Polymorph Fixed Yet?
No.
I hear great things about the skill system. What's up with that?
Well, the condensed some skills. Some of that goes too far and some of it doesn't go far enough. Gather Information is now part of Diplomancy, but Spellcraft and Knowledge Arcana are still different skills. Whatever. The big deal is that they took away the class skill/nonclass skill difference in rank price and gave people a +3 bonus on all trained skills that are class skills for any of your levels. That means that they can and do drop the stupid 4x skill ranks at first level, so over all it's an improvement. It's not original and they handle it kind of clumsily (there is no difference between putting a skill as a permanent class skill and having it be a class skill for one measly level and there are no synergy bonuses anymore), but it is probably a net gain over using the 3.5 skills out of the box.
You mention Diplomacy, is it fixed?
No. It's still broken, it just also gives you the kinds of plot exposition that you used to get from Gather Information. Paladins come with spy networks now.
Are Sorcerers still getting it in the earhole?
Well, yes. All the spellcasters get class features to go with their bonus save DCs, bonus hit points, free ranks in Concentration, and so on and so forth. This is supposedly to encourage them to not take PrCs. Protip: you still take PrCs, you just also get some bonus class features. Wizards get fat bonuses to various cool shit and Sorcerers get a blood line. Yeah, you get to celebrate your extraplanar bad touch by getting special powers related to your power source. These have a tendency to be shit like demon claws that are frankly really lame. So while the Necromancer wizard gets a free doubled control pool on his skeleton horde, the Sorcerer gets his choice of a wide variety of flavors of bullshit melee combat schticks that he will literally never us because he's still a fucking arcane spellcaster.
Monster Levels? Is that fixed?
No. Like pretty much anything else that you'd really want someone to do a giant overhaul on because the original system didn't work and no one uses it or integrates it into other subsystems, Jason pretty much ignores it. He's too busy nerfing rogues.
What?
Yeah. He went off on this big rant about how it was broken that rogues in the 8th-10th level range were investing in rings of blink and sneak attacking at range. Apparently if you do anything other than tumble into position to deliver a flanking dagger sneak attack you are being "cheesy." The Pathfinder Rogue is outdamaged at high levels by evoker wizards. True story.
Many things in D&D are broken on the face of it. Like rolling for hit points or having different definitions of "day" for purposes of recovering spell slots. Is any of that addressed?
Not really, no.
So my Cleric of Pelor still prepares spells at dawn and my Cleric of Lolth still prepares spells at dusk?
Don't be silly, those gods are copyrighted. Pathfinder has a whole slew of new gods that you don't give a fuck about. But don't worry, they aren't just different in when their priests prepare spells - they have concrete and distinct easter egg bonuses for you to collect. If you're a Dread Necromancer you can cast remove disease spontaneously if you happen to worship that goddess whose name starts with U - so all of them presumably do. It's all written by Sean K Reynolds, the man who has never written a balanced or decent book in his whole life, so you know it's totally fucking unfair and inexplicable at every damn turn.
-Username17
I heard that Pathfinder is compatible with 3rd edition rules. As such, does it really make any difference if I use pathfinder or not?
Unfortunately, it does. Pathfinder makes a lot of minor rules modifications that really add up to being quite confusing. It even calculates defenses and hit points slightly differently so that monsters out of the monster manual are not usable as-is. With almost inconsequential changes to almost every spell as well as the basic monster combat routines, you'll be running into something you have to look up almost every combat round - and that seriously slows down play. Pathfinder is less compatible with 3.5 rules than 3rd edition sourcebooks or d20 modern sourcebooks are. Quite a (negative) achievement for something for which compatibility was supposed to be a life goal.
Didn't Pathfinder do the biggest open RPG playtest in history? Doesn't that mean they solved all of D&D's problems?
No. In this case, the "playtest" was a lie. Destructive playtesting was not only not encouraged, it was actively and specifically rejected. The Paizo leadership only wanted to hear about whether people had fun or not. Which means that the most pried playtest reports were seriously ones in which the players spent all night in immersive roleplaying or where the fun centered around "awesome" artifacts that broke the rules. In short - things that didn't use the rules at all and didn't demonstrate anything. People who actually ran apples to apples comparisons, same game tests, or repeated experiments to get controlled results or regressed bugs were not only ignored, they were banned from their forums.
Their playtest was a marketing ploy and nothing more. It was never intended to uncover problems or produce real results.
Doesn't Paizo's system address some of the most broken parts of D&D?
Not really, no. If you talk to 95% of the D&D players who are aware of balance issues in the D&D game who don't eat paste they will probably describe the most central issue as either "Fighters suck" or "Spellcasters are broken" - these statements are mostly speaking logically equivalent in terms of central balance issues because they both describe the relationship Wizards > Fighters. So to make D&D less unbalanced, it would be logical to either make spellcasters less powerful or sword wielders more powerful. Pathfinder does the opposite, and mysteriously makes spellcasters more powerful and fighters less powerful. Thus, it's more unbalanced.
How are spellcasters more powerful? Aren't a bunch of spells nerfed?
First of all, nerfing "a spell" doesn't actually do anything to spellcasters in terms of overall power as long as there is still at least one spell that still makes them win at the same level. It makes spellcasters less interesting to have less spells they want to use, but it doesn't make them any worse to use spell X to win instead of spell Y. While many staples of the wizard arsenal (like Glitterdust) have gotten nerfed to make them severely less good, and the literal death spells have been reduced to inconsequential damage dealers, there are still spells that remove enemies from combat at every level. The fine folks at Paizo even added some.
OK fine, I understand that spellcasters aren't any less powerful casting ghoulish hunger instead of finger of death, but you said they were more powerful. How can that be?
Well, Pathfinder gives out more feats (which helps caster DCs), gives everyone a +2 to a mental stat (which means higher caster DCs), gives single classed characters (like spellcasters) bonus hit points or skill point for no reason, raises the hit points of the caster classes, and gives spellcasters bonus free class features to "encourage them to not take prestige classes" - except that these class features start at level 1 so you get bonus free swag even if you jump ship for a PrC at the first possible opportunity. Also all the changes seem to miraculously benefit spellcasters. Specialist wizards can now use wands and scrolls out of their "banned" schools, and even make those items without penalty. Specialist wizards essentially don't even have spell selection limits anymore, but they still have bonuses. It's good to be the king.
More feats? Doesn't that help warriors too?
Not really. Anything you'd want to do with combat feats costs more feats now. The +4 bonus from Improved Disarm has been divided into two feats, for example. Spell Focus is unchanged of course.
What? Tell me more about how warriors got the bad touch? Improved Disarm sucks and it's difficult for me to imagine that being two feats.
Well part of that is the decision to "streamline" all the optional combat maneuvers into "not working." Apparently, someone at Paizo really doesn't like trip fighters, grapplemancers, or dungeoncrashers. I'm not super clear why, since by most accounts those represent rather limited but at least functional warrior characters in 3rd edition rules. A Tripstar may be boring, but he's no more boring than Sir Chargealot and at least he's differently viable. No more in Pathfinder. The core is that instead of rolling against an opposed roll, you now roll against a static number that happens to be what you'd need to have rolled if your opponent rolled a 15. Also, all the things that gave you +4 on these tests give you a +2 instead. Also the rules on trip, grapple, disarm, and bullrush have been changed slightly so that that they aren't as penalizing for the character it happens to, further disenfranchising the maneuver specialists.
Ouch. What if I wanted to make a "does big damage Fighter" like the Sir Chargealot that you mentioned instead of one of the maneuver specialists? I mean, that is also a standard character in 3.5 and it can work OK. I heard they gave Fighters bonus damage and AC or something?
Well, they nerfed Power Attack.
What?
Yeah. Power Attack, they nerfed it. Also, Cleave was apparently too powerful. You can kind of keep up on the damage train as specifically an archer, because like everyone else who ever wrote up a bunch of combat feats they couldn't resist the siren's song of adding extra feats that boost your rate of fire, and like all the others they all stack and you do get more feats. But the lancer and the grinder suffer big time. They need more feats sunk into doing more damage just to keep up with their old damage. More extra sunk feats than they get extra feats. Did I mention how it hoses multiclass characters (like, you know, warriors)? Yeah, it does that.
Are things at least clearer?
Oh heavens no. Not only are the rules specifically in a state of flux, with Jason going in and rewriting stuff with and without blog messages to that effect all the time, but a lot of the stuff that just makes no sense. I can't tell you how grappling works in pathfinder either, but it seems to actually be a super bad plan for the grappler.
So why would I use Paizo's rules?
I can't answer everything man.
How does Pathfinder address bookkeeping? Bookkeeping is annoying and I don't want to do it.
Pathfinder likes to force people to keep tracks of rounds per day. Seriously. Bards and Barbarians have to keep track of individual rounds of power usage. Also, a lot of things have very short and even nonstandard durations. How do you feel about tracking a 3 round buff? How about a seven minute buff?
So are Bards somehow more weak sauce than they were before? Is that even possible?
Well, kind of. Yeah. They are a lot more annoying, and they basically can't give their skill songs for a take 20 anymore because they have a limited number of rounds worth of singing for the whole day. Boosting someone while they take 20 on a task runs you through 20 rounds, and you have to be a seriously buff dude to have that many rounds of song. But the real meat of the matter is that bards were already a really weird case where in order to be an effective bard you had to eventually choose a direction to go with it and take one of the bard paths like Snowflake Wardancer or Sublime Chord that sacrificed attempting to compete in one or more of the many areas that Bards gradually lost level appropriateness in exchange for being level appropriate in one or two fields. Those options don't seem to exist in Pathfinder, so every Bard is doomed to gradually lose ground to mediocrity and finally obscurity in all fields and never justify their existence or regain the spotlight in anything.
Is Polymorph Fixed Yet?
No.
I hear great things about the skill system. What's up with that?
Well, the condensed some skills. Some of that goes too far and some of it doesn't go far enough. Gather Information is now part of Diplomancy, but Spellcraft and Knowledge Arcana are still different skills. Whatever. The big deal is that they took away the class skill/nonclass skill difference in rank price and gave people a +3 bonus on all trained skills that are class skills for any of your levels. That means that they can and do drop the stupid 4x skill ranks at first level, so over all it's an improvement. It's not original and they handle it kind of clumsily (there is no difference between putting a skill as a permanent class skill and having it be a class skill for one measly level and there are no synergy bonuses anymore), but it is probably a net gain over using the 3.5 skills out of the box.
You mention Diplomacy, is it fixed?
No. It's still broken, it just also gives you the kinds of plot exposition that you used to get from Gather Information. Paladins come with spy networks now.
Are Sorcerers still getting it in the earhole?
Well, yes. All the spellcasters get class features to go with their bonus save DCs, bonus hit points, free ranks in Concentration, and so on and so forth. This is supposedly to encourage them to not take PrCs. Protip: you still take PrCs, you just also get some bonus class features. Wizards get fat bonuses to various cool shit and Sorcerers get a blood line. Yeah, you get to celebrate your extraplanar bad touch by getting special powers related to your power source. These have a tendency to be shit like demon claws that are frankly really lame. So while the Necromancer wizard gets a free doubled control pool on his skeleton horde, the Sorcerer gets his choice of a wide variety of flavors of bullshit melee combat schticks that he will literally never us because he's still a fucking arcane spellcaster.
Monster Levels? Is that fixed?
No. Like pretty much anything else that you'd really want someone to do a giant overhaul on because the original system didn't work and no one uses it or integrates it into other subsystems, Jason pretty much ignores it. He's too busy nerfing rogues.
What?
Yeah. He went off on this big rant about how it was broken that rogues in the 8th-10th level range were investing in rings of blink and sneak attacking at range. Apparently if you do anything other than tumble into position to deliver a flanking dagger sneak attack you are being "cheesy." The Pathfinder Rogue is outdamaged at high levels by evoker wizards. True story.
Many things in D&D are broken on the face of it. Like rolling for hit points or having different definitions of "day" for purposes of recovering spell slots. Is any of that addressed?
Not really, no.
So my Cleric of Pelor still prepares spells at dawn and my Cleric of Lolth still prepares spells at dusk?
Don't be silly, those gods are copyrighted. Pathfinder has a whole slew of new gods that you don't give a fuck about. But don't worry, they aren't just different in when their priests prepare spells - they have concrete and distinct easter egg bonuses for you to collect. If you're a Dread Necromancer you can cast remove disease spontaneously if you happen to worship that goddess whose name starts with U - so all of them presumably do. It's all written by Sean K Reynolds, the man who has never written a balanced or decent book in his whole life, so you know it's totally fucking unfair and inexplicable at every damn turn.
-Username17