Pathfinder Second Edition!

Hey all! Real life has been getting in the way of blogging, but luckily not of gaming (at least not too much).

Paizo came out with Starfinder late last year. It looks nice, but I’m not really interested. I like hard sci-fi, I like fantasy… But the “Spelljammer” type of crossover always leaves me flat.

I’m still running my super long Pathfinder pirates campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate. Other than that we’ve kinda stopped playing PF and have been playing a variety of other games – one shots, a number of Powered by the Apocalypse games like Dungeon World and Masks, and now a campaign of Unknown Armies second edition.

But then out of the blue, news of a second edition of Pathfinder! They’re dumping info now on paizo.com and a playtest version of 2e will be available for free in PDF on August 2. Or, you can buy it in book form! We played a whole campaign using the original Pathfinder beta playtest, so that should sell well I bet.

So am I into it?

Some random thoughts.

Well, most of the changes they’re mentioning are good. A couple of the ideas don’t seem well baked (“resonance” to power your magic items? Lame and gamey. Goblins as a core PC race? Ridiculous, given the flavor of Golarion goblins.) but in general I will bet it’s a better Pathfinder in the end. They are smart, they are playtesting, many of the changes promise to reduce complexity…

I didn’t care about extreme 3.5e compatibility with PF 1.0 and I don’t care now. On the Know Direction podcast, Erik Mona was talking about the new version and said that it’s not about slavish devotion to a ruleset, it’s about being able to tell the kinds of stories we want to tell with D&D (something D&D 4e scuttled hard). And while some of the more autistic Pathfinder people can’t understand or accept “winging it” (some of the host comments on that podcast really made me wince), I’ve run previous edition adventures with PF just fine even if they’re not 3e. It’s not hard. Rules compatibility isn’t important, storytelling compatibility is, I’m totally with Mona on this.

I own nearly every single Pathfinder product – I’ve been a subscriber to all the lines except like minis and trinkets since the beginning – every AP, every campaign setting and player book – just not like special editions and cards and whatnot. But I don’t mind my investment taking a hit, the campaign setting stuff is the best and it’ll all be usable.

But am I excited? I don’t know. Erik clearly says it’s still going to have the complex rules detail PF does now. And as I get older, my patience for the OCD min-maxing crowd goes nowhere but down. I don’t mind having more character options per se (Paizo’s classes are all brilliant, unlike the muddled mess of 3e’s Complete series…). And I can get being an “Advanced” Dungeons & Dragons – in a way, 5e is the Basic and Pathfinder is the Advanced, in old D&D terms. But… It’s just so God damned fiddly. And then that attracts the fiddlers, and then they cater to that more and more in their products. I played Pathfinder Society once… Once. No one gave a single crap about roleplaying or story, it was all a tactical exercise in optimized combat. I mean,even RPGA organized play events came off better (Living City in D&D 2e, Living Greyhawk in D&D 3e).

It’s definitely time for it. I was just about to cancel my Player’s Companion subscription – I held on for a long time but now it’s like “I need another dozen random feats why?” +2 to something, whoop de fucking do. So it’s possible to recapture my attention. I mean, I am still running a PF campaign.

So, I’ll definitely check out the playtest. As for whether I’ll then play it… I don’t know. Like, I like D&D 5e, I think it’s better than 4e by 100% and probably better than 3.5e. But I’m not playing it, because it’s still complex and time consuming. “Ooo look at me take my 5 actions in my turn.” And PF is doing some of the same things in 2.0 – 3 actions instead of 2 per round. Bah. 1e/2e were great, you took one swing and on to the next guy and then your turn came back around in less than 30 minutes.

In general I’m buying Pathfinder for the great adventure paths, interesting class and monster ideas, and the great campaign setting and its lore. I read the comics and the books (which I guess have stopped? I subscribe to Pathfinder Tales but haven’t gotten one in quite a while). But Moar Powerz and more minigames are not interesting to me. And I don’t know if that’s really the majority of their customer base, or just the ones that then spend their time spamming their message board all day, but they seem to think the money lies that way.

TL;DR – I’m ambivalent. I think it’ll be better, and I’ll definitely check it out. Can they re-fire my desire to play it? We’ll see, I’m open to it!