Pathfinder: It's like D&D 3rd edition!

I first played D&D in college with the university "Gamers' Association" at UGA. I had played other RPGs before that, but it never really occurred to me to try D&D for whatever reason. A friend of mine was running a game so I joined up, made a mechanically awful character concept (multi-class Druid/Ranger) and sort of enjoyed it. The basic mechanics of the game were pretty straightforward, and while there are definitely complexities to delve into, on the surface it wasn't too bad. The more I got to know the game, the more I found to dislike about it, though.

I never really got to know it well, but I always had this niggling feeling like maybe I should give it another try. So when D&D 4th edition was announced, I kept a close watch on the previews and such to see if it was going to interest me. It turns out that the designers were turning the focus from the broad array of options in 3rd (and previous) editions to mostly combat encounter-centered mechanics. At first, I thought "Well, that's not a great move." But as I discovered more about the changes and how they were implementing the concepts, I began to think the move was a good idea.

See, I'm not a "one system for everything" kind of person. I like using a variety of games with different focuses and strengths to play a variety of games in settings/genres that utilize those focuses and strengths best. So, where I have games that can be used for generic fantasy adventuring, very few (if any) were oriented towards the tactical positioning and encounter-level resource management. D&D 4th edition looked to be very strongly designed for a particular goal, and now that I've played it for a couple of years, I can say that it is well suited for that goal. But I'll reiterate that it's not suited for every goal. It just did what I wanted D&D to do better than 3rd edition did: give me a lot of tactical and strategic options, a variety of character builds without newbie character creation traps, and keep each encounter as a more or less self-contained mini-game.

Of course, this isn't the be all end all of fantasy adventuring games. Sometimes you want to roam the countryside killing whatever you find, but sometimes you want to have the fantasy equivalent of the A-Team, or maybe a game about a series of murders at a sorcerer's college, or a game about a guild of mercenaries who rise through the ranks of political power and eventually control large swathes of the country or continent. Some of the stuff that 4e cut out of the "D&D experience" was rightly missed.

One company, Paizo, took advantage of the desire to keep playing this kind of D&D in an in-print, currently published format. Even better, they could use the rules for D&D 3rd edition, because they are a part of an open license. The idea was that they could take the rules that everyone already knows and loves, refine them, improve them, and then keep the people who love that broader kind of D&D happy. The result of this was the Pathfinder RPG. And tonight, we gave it a try.

Well, it felt like D&D 3rd edition, with some minor tweaks. Combat was faster than 4e, but it also lacked the options and variety of 4e... but we were only at level one, so it was really hard to see if the speed or lack of variety was endemic to the entire system or if it was just the low level. I wasn't a big fan. We kind of meandered through a dungeon, killed skeletons and ghosts as we found them, and then continued meandering. In 4e, this would be interesting because of the combat system of powers and tactical positioning. In Pathfinder, it wasn't very exciting. Perhaps we might have had more fun outside of a dungeon. Who knows?

I had read a lot about the game before we sat down to play tonight. While some people compliment the improvements made (e.g. fighters have more variety in what they can do, clerics have more flexibility, mages have more at-will magic), there are a lot of people who think that some changes weren't enough and some where too much. One constant refrain from people who want to "fix" 3rd edition D&D is that there is too much of a power gap between magic users and non-magic users. Based on my experiences tonight, I'd say that Pathfinder doesn't do much to address that issue. Yes, non-magic users don't run out of powers and can keep trucking even when a wizard is out of spells or a cleric is out of healing, but in practice, when the magic users run out of "per day" spells everyone rests until they have recovered. So this significant strength of non-magic users is overshadowed...

Anyway, I didn't find it to be much fun. Maybe a higher level would fix that (although I suspect it would exacerbate the magic/non-magic disparity), and maybe knowing the specific fiddly rules would help (although the articles and discussions I've read online don't suggest that it would). I'm just going to chalk it up to "not really my thing." It just felt like D&D 3e with somebody's house rules. So, if you like 3e, you'll probably like Pathfinder. If not, probably not.