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How to follow-up Pathfinder? Improve the game, don't radically change its character - Ars Technica

The floor of Gen Con 2018...
Enlarge / The floor of Gen Con 2018...
Aaron Zimmerman

I’ve been an avid player of Pathfinder The Roleplaying Game since its first edition debuted back in 2008 at Gen Con, the great-grandsire of American tabletop conventions. So as I planned to attend Gen Con 2018 last fall, I had my sights set on one part of the schedule in particular. Pathfinder publisher Paizo, Inc. was launching a playtest for what will eventually become the second edition of their flagship title at Gen Con. I knew I wanted to be involved.

Back then, the schedule gods smiled upon me and I had the good fortune of being able to play in some of those first playtest scenarios at the convention. I ultimately played all three playtest scenarios that Paizo ran at Gen Con 2018, and soon after I played and ran most of “Doomsday Dawn," the mini-campaign that the company released last August as a companion to the other playtest materials. I’ve been following and participating in Paizo’s massive months-long playtest ever since.

This week, Pathfinder Second Edition finally makes its official debut, as Paizo is set to release the game to the public at Gen Con 2019 (Ars is in attendance so keep your eyes peeled). That means, as players count down these last playtesting days, it’s time to share some observations and impressions from weeks upon weeks of Pathfinder Second Edition exploration.

Around Ars, we generally wait until the full release of any game before formally reviewing it. But given the hype and interest built around Pathfinder over the last decade—and this extended near-year of playtesting—we can’t help ourselves. If you’re looking for a detailed catalog and analysis of every single mechanical difference between the first edition of Pathfinder and this recent playtest, however, this isn’t the overview for you. Paizo’s design team touched nearly every aspect of the game from my perspective. An in-depth breakdown of that company’s undertaking would be massive (and would require a much, much longer piece).

Instead, these are the thoughts of a longtime Pathfinder player based on extensive playtesting—plus my hopes for what I’d love to see when I sit down at a table in the Sagamore Ballroom of the Indiana Convention Center on the opening morning of Gen Con to play my first official Pathfinder Second Edition game.

The playtest

When faced with any kind of sequel (especially for something as beloved as the original Pathfinder), the name of the game becomes expectations. Is a new release “good” if it essentially mirrors its predecessor? What if it changes everything entirely? The ideal answer probably lies somewhere in between, right?

Luckily, Pathfinder players don’t need to engage in any deep soul searching to set the table for this Second Edition. Back in October 2018, Paizo came out publicly and laid out its own hopes and dreams for a Pathfinder sequel. Designer Jason Bulmahn shared five goals for what Paizo hoped to accomplish, and here there are paraphrased a bit:

  1. Create a new edition of Pathfinder that’s simpler to learn and play while remaining true to the game’s spirit of customization and flexibility, and reward of system mastery.
  2. Make sure the new edition allows for the same kind of storytelling as the first edition, while making room for new stories and worldbuilding.
  3. Incorporate innovations and lessons learned over the 10+ years the team has worked with the first edition.
  4. Create a play environment where every character has an opportunity to contribute and every player has some time in the spotlight.
  5. Ensure that Pathfinder continues to be a game that’s welcoming to all players, regardless of their background or their experience.

Paizo’s publicly stated aspirations provide some context for how to interpret this lengthy playtest, and they make it a bit simpler to evaluate how successfully Paizo did or didn’t execute. While each of those goals have undoubtedly shaped the development of Second Edition, during the playtest I especially felt the influence of the first and fourth goals—make the game easier while still catering to players who love the “crunch” (robust game mechanics for complex and highly customized characters or adventures); and reward specialization (both mechanically and narratively) with a system that lends itself to sharing the spotlight at the table.

Both of these goals seemed to be directly addressed in the playtest’s ruleset. Going in-depth on every single new rule would require a much longer piece, but it’s worth highlighting the changes that I felt were put in place to meet those goals.

The cover artwork for the <em>Pathfinder</em> Adventure Card Game Core Set, featuring the iconic cleric.
Enlarge / The cover artwork for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set, featuring the iconic cleric.

Easy to play, not “simple”

One of the ways in which Paizo seems to have attempted to make the game easier to learn and play is to “flatten” a lot of the math—reducing the number of calculations required to determine the success or failure of any given player character action. In keeping with the spirit of its Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition DNA, first edition Pathfinder can sometimes require the addition of a whole string of modifiers to a die roll. But in the playtest ruleset, under most circumstances a player will rarely be stacking more than four modifiers onto a roll of the ol’ icosahedron: perhaps their character’s level, their character’s proficiency bonus, any relevant ability score bonus, and then a possible fourth miscellaneous bonus (something like an item bonus or a circumstantial bonus).

One other major way in which the game was simplified during this playtest was the streamlining of action economy during the “encounter” phase. Gone were the myriad descriptive action types (e.g. free, standard, move, attack, etc.), and Paizo replaced those instead with a three-action turn for each participant in an encounter round (player characters and baddies alike). Some activities take a single action, such as “striding” (moving up to your character’s movement speed) or “striking” (making a single attack). Casting most spells and readying an action to react to a specific trigger are examples of activities which consume two of your three actions. And although a single weapon attack is only one action, any character can make iterative attacks with their remaining actions (at successively steeper penalties, although various character specialization options can help reduce those penalties).

The playtest rulebook, and one assumes the same will be true of the Second Edition core rulebook, clearly labeled every activity it described with helpful arrow icons to indicate how many actions that activity took if carried out in the encounter phase. And during my playtesting, once everyone was used to this streamlined system, it greatly reduced the amount of time spent looking up whether casting a particular spell was a standard action or a full round action, or trying to recall if retrieving an item from a backpack was a standard action or a move action. Those sorts of things have long been the little details that even veteran Pathfinder players can forget, and in the past it would add up and inevitably slow down combat.

So in some foundational ways, Paizo truly did streamline play in a way that sped things up and was fairly easy to learn with this playtest. Some of us veteran players naturally fell back on old habits and had to stop ourselves briefly, but any change inevitably comes with a period of adjustment. For newer players at our table without almost two decades of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and first edition Pathfinder rules ingrained in them, these streamlined rules seemed relatively easy to pick up.

In other ways, however, the playtest made changes to roleplaying game core concepts that had gone largely unchanged since the introduction of the standardized d20 System back in 2000 with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Paizo undertook relatively significant changes to the skill system, how initiative order is determined, and the iconic critical success and critical failure criteria.

Whereas most d20-based games treat a “natural” (i.e. before any modifiers are applied) result of 20 or 1 on a 20-sided die as a critical success or critical failure, for instance, the Pathfinder playtest introduced a sliding scale. Any result that beat the target number (e.g. an opponent’s armor class, or a difficult class for a skill check or saving throw) by 10 or more is now a critical success—with all of the perks that might entail. Likewise, any result that misses the target number by 10 or more is now a critical failure. In my experience, this made a lot of encounters more dynamic. With a moving range for critical successes and failures, it increased the uncertainty with every attack and every saving throw. Both the heroes and the baddies were seeing more critical results in both directions, and it was often less-obvious when that critical moment was about to happen. Things simply got more exciting more often.

Listing image by Paizo

If you want even more firsthand Pathfinder playtest knowledge, the folks over at Game Trade Media filmed a play through with Paizo's Bulmahn as the DM.

Customization and “The Spotlight”

If you haven’t been a dedicated Pathfinder player, maybe the term “crunch” stood out to you. Over the course of this game’s decade-plus, Pathfinder’s famous suitability for endless character customization has become a core attraction. With the playtest, Paizo has retained that while also giving each player character more occasional opportunities to have the spotlight to themselves. The company achieved this balance largely through changes to the game’s skill system, and these seem focused on both the secondary element of Paizo’s second stated goals (rewarding character customization) and their fourth goal (giving every character a time to shine).

In addition to having numeric bonuses to skills in much the same way as first edition (and most other d20-based RPGs), characters can now also achieve tiers of proficiency in a given skill: “Trained,” “Expert,” “Master,” and “Legendary.” Many skill checks can still be attempted regardless of whether or not a character has a special proficiency in that skill, but some now require a particular level of proficiency to even attempt (this is basically a layered expansion of previous editions’ requirements that some skills can only be used if a character is proficient in them; i.e. the player has invested at least one skill rank in that skill). A good example of this would be a particularly advanced trap. The adventure module might say “Thievery DC 16 (Expert)” to describe how difficult it is to disarm a trap, so a character must have an Expert proficiency in the “Thievery” skill and achieve a result of 16 or better on their roll.

This tweak not only encourages deeper specialization and customization, but it also has the effect of rewarding players who have invested in particular skills by giving them dedicated time to shine. And Paizo’s choices here discourage what I call “skill check bloat,” where every character at the table attempts the same skill check—making the character that’s specialized for that skill feel, well, less special (and also potentially slowing down the game, or making a challenge less challenging). There are certainly a plethora of ways for a gamemaster to introduce this same effect at their table (for example, I will typically simply say which characters are able to attempt a skill check based on what makes sense for the situation), but it’s nice to have it baked directly into the rules. That whole concept of critical ranges also plays a factor here. Even if they can technically attempt a skill check, a player may choose not to if they feel their bonus in that particular skill is low enough that they may be risking a critical failure. So as with combat, Paizo has added a dynamic element of uncertainty.

Along those same lines, the introduction of “modes of play” and a change to how initiative order is determined allows for eve more rewards to those investing in specialized characters.

Many of you are probably familiar with a concept in tabletop RPGs called the “three pillars of play”— roleplaying, exploration, and combat. The Pathfinder Playtest codified the latter of these two modes as “exploration” and “encounter” phases. Normal gameplay—roleplaying between characters, interacting with NPCs, etc.—occurs just as it always has, with die rolls only coming into play when necessary to provide a resolution for a specific situation. But when the players decide that they are actively exploring their environment, the game enters the exploration phase. Each player describes to the GM how their character is behaving during this phase, things like searching, defending, or literally just wandering through. How you describe your character’s behavior not only determines what happens during the exploration phase, but it can also influence how you enter the initiative order if and when the encounter phase begins.

As the name implies, the encounter phase begins when the players encounter a challenge—maybe a hostile creatures appears to signal the start of combat (classic tabletop) example. In most d20-based games, every character has an initiative modifier. This is usually based on the Dexterity attribute in some way, with various specializations available to increase it further. But in the Pathfinder playtest, there was no static initiative modifier. Rather, how each character was behaving during the encounter phase determined which skill modifier they added to a d20 roll to determine their initiative score.

In practice, this turned out to be the Perception skill most of the time. But if a character was choosing to move stealthily during the exploration phase, the GM might ask them to roll their initiative roll using their Stealth bonus. There’s really no end to what could be applied. I used it as an opportunity to allow players to “pitch” me on some other skill their character might use to gain the initiative over their opponents (Deception or Intimidation, for example). Things still came out as Perception most of the time, but having a built-in set of circumstances for players to use their characters’ specialized skills in order to influence the start of an encounter was a welcome addition.

An illustration to promote <em>Pathfinder</em>'s new The Ruins of Lastwall set of miniatures.
Enlarge / An illustration to promote Pathfinder's new The Ruins of Lastwall set of miniatures.

The more things change…

All together, my playgroup and I encountered oodles of modified rules during the Pathfinder Playtest featured—plenty beyond the major ones discussed above. Again, the Paizo design team touched nearly every aspect of the game. All indications are that the finalized Second Edition will be just as different from its predecessor as the playtest was.

But to be honest, this wave of changes served to make the playtest “feel” more like Pathfinder, not less. It felt like it was angling for the same kinds of player interactions and the same kinds of storytelling as the first edition. In that respect, I enjoyed many of the changes Paizo introduced in the playtest. Not all of these tweaks will make it into Second Edition, of course (more on that in a moment), but this edition of Pathfinder improved the game without radically changing its character.

As part of the playtest, Paizo asked players and GMs alike to fill out surveys for each part of “Doomsday Dawn” mini-campaign. And refreshingly, the company tweaked the playtest rules along the way to respond to that feedback, ultimately issuing six errata documents between August and November of last year. Some new concepts were tweaked; others were scrapped entirely.

One example of something left to the cutting room was the much-maligned “Resonance” concept, in which characters had to use points from a resource pool to use magic devices. Intended to prevent characters from becoming magic item multi-tools, this idea was widely panned by players. We didn’t really have a problem with it during our playtest, but I can see how it would become a problem in a long-term campaign as characters collect magical trinkets and doo-dads. But in the end, Paizo listened to everyone living out playtest campaigns—the company has long ago publicly stated that the Resonance mechanic would not be present in the final version of Second Edition.

I know that not every playtest participant had the same largely-positive feelings that I did about the experience, but I found my Pathfinder sessions fun. And on top of that, it felt like I was genuinely helping to improve the next edition of one of my favorite games with Paizo so publicly incorporating feedback.

The necessary (but dreaded) comparison

Inevitably, Pathfinder Second Edition is going to draw comparisons to its bigger cousin—the wildly popular fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D5e was released in 2014, and it has been widely credited with the resurgence of fantasy RPGs (and rightly so, in my opinion. Sorry Stranger Things). Given D&D5e’s success, there were relatively wide-spread concerns in the Pathfinder community that Paizo would seek to mimic some of the qualities that have made D&D5e so successful: namely its famous ease of play and friendliness toward new players.

No one will know exactly what Pathfinder Second Edition will look like until the tabletop world descends upon Indiana. But as someone who has played and run the first edition extensively for a decade and participated in the playtest for Second Edition—and as someone who also plays and runs D&D5e regularly—Pathfinder Second Edition and Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition are attempts to solve the same problems in different ways. For example, D&D5e came at the issue of endlessly-stacking bonuses on rolls by (mostly) eliminating them in favor of its advantage/disadvantage mechanic. The Pathfinder Playtest (and one assumes the Second Edition) comes at that same problem by flattening the game’s math into a finite set of bonus categories.

At the end of the day, I’m a “system agnostic” tabletop player. I tend to think that most fantasy stories can be told in pretty much any fantasy RPG system. I’ve run and played a half-dozen editions of D&D, two editions of Pathfinder at this point, and lots of other fantasy games like The Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game, The One Ring RPG, and a flood of “old school revival” games. I’ve yet to find a system that I couldn’t use to tell the story I wanted to tell.

But there’s no denying that some games lend themselves better to certain types of play. Although I think it’s perfectly possible to onboard a new tabletop RPG player using Pathfinder, that’s a place where I’d first opt for D&D5e these days. And while you can absolutely run a very tactical, “crunchy” game with loads of character customization and specialization using the D&D5e ruleset, I’d probably go with Pathfinder if I were getting together a bunch of players for that express purpose. I find “edition wars” tiresome and generally like to just sort of play everything, but different systems have different strengths.


If the playtest and the information that’s come out about Pathfinder Second Edition are any indication, I honestly don’t expect that landscape to change much. I hope and expect that Second Edition will remain strong in all of the same areas where its predecessor was strong.

So although I haven’t gotten my grubby mitts on a copy of the Pathfinder Second Edition core rulebook at the Paizo booth on the Gen Con tradeshow floor just yet, there are some reasonable predictions to make based on the playtest. Given the changes Paizo introduced for the playtest, how the company reacted to feedback, and what it’s released so far, I think this new release will largely be successful in achieving those five goals laid out by Jason Bulmahn back in October. Whether I’m right about that and Second Edition joins my game library as a regular staple, or this whole thing goes down in history as a fun, but ultimately failed, experiment, I know this testing period has me excited to sit down at that table on August 1. It’s high time to roll some dice and find out what Pathfinder Second Edition ultimately has in store.

Sam Ferguson's day job (or night job, in this case) is to keep an eye on the cloud for a large SaaS company. But in his spare time, he enjoys playing table-top roleplaying games, collecting fountain pens, listening to thrash metal, and reading, watching, playing, and opining on a wide range of sci-fi and fantasy media. He last wrote for Ars Technica about the Star Trek universe. And encourages readers, "Hey, if you happen to be at Gen Con, and you happen to be in or near the Sagamore Ballroom, and you happen to see a big fellow who looks like Hagrid if Hagrid were also a roadie for Iron Maiden, come say hello."

Sam would also like to thank his very good friends Ben and Eric, who have been near-constant gaming companions for almost 20 years, through many a campaign and many a Gen Con. He’d also like to thank the other folks who joined in for the Pathfinder playtesting last summer and fall: Aisha, Chris, Marc, Soren, and his friendly local game store, Family Time Games in Indianapolis. A nerd couldn’t ask for a better place to roll dice.

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https://arstechnica.com/features/2019/07/how-to-follow-up-pathfinder-improve-the-game-dont-radically-change-its-character/

2019-07-30 11:30:00Z
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