After 32 sessions (on average one 3+hour evening session a week for around 8 months) I’m saying auf wiedersehen (until we see again) to Pathfinder and switching to the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons for my regular game.
In fact, I would have done this some time ago if I had been easily able to switch the previous party seamlessly, but one of my players was a summoner and there’s not currently a good analogue in D&D.
The main motivation for this move is that Pathfinder is complex! Not only are the core rules detailed and nuanced but there are also tens of additional official books (let alone 3rd party material) released with more coming out several times a year and each time a player wants to use an option from one of those books the surface area of rules I need to be at least passingly familiar with increases. As a GM for a Pathfinder game I spent a good portion of my preparation time trying to make sure I had a reasonable grasp on the rules that are likely to come up in the next session.
Worse, at least from a story telling perspective, in a 3hr session we were very rarely able to include more than one fight if we wanted any chance of developing the characters and their story. We’re here for the stories but the fights are fun and the players want to feel challenged by them without them taking an entire session to manage one encounter.
Pathfinder is a very comprehensive system with a bunch of interesting mechanics, but it’s just too complex for me to be able to run it confidently with the limited amount of time I get to spend on session preparation.
I had originally planned to lessen complexity and mitigate some unbalanced mechanics in my campaign (featuring two Barbarians, a Summoner, a Cleric and a Paladin) with the release of the Pathfinder Unchained book and yet, while I still may yet purchase and read the Unchained rules, I’ve ended up switching to 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons instead.
The rules are extremely simple, when compared to Pathfinder/3.5e, yet easy to pick up for people with a little d20 experience. More importantly the flavour and mechanics in 5e are much closer to the home-brew system my group used for almost 20 years prior to Pathfinder – 5e feels much more familiar and enables us to continue telling the tales we’ve been telling for almost two decades with less effort for all involved than Pathfinder.
The only downside here is that there’s actually a lot about Pathfinder I like and new interesting content being added all the time – the Unchained book looks to include both balance for the Core classes and a handful of new and interesting mechanics to simplify play and the new classes and options in Occult Adventures sound like a lot of fun.
As a long-time user and developer of open source software I am a big fan of the Open Game License and I will miss having multiple comprehensive hypertext reference documents and a wide array of applications to use when planning and running my game.
I won’t, however, miss having my players derail the adventure in order to read the rule as written from one of those pages when they disagree with my interpretation or an off-the-cuff judgement when I don’t fully remember the rule.
Finally, to round this article out, if I ever pick up Pathfinder again in future as a GM there are a few things I will definitely do differently:
- Lower point buy, especially for an experienced group – we decided to follow Pathfinder Society (PFS) rules where possible and ended up defaulting to the 20 point (high fantasy) ability score purchase at level one. My group have played together for years and thus are both experienced role players and adept at working together – with five High Fantasy players working as a cohesive party the standard CR mechanics were way off and I spent an inordinate amount of my session prep time trying to work around this.
- Classic XP & level progression – we also ended up using the PFS level advancement rules; 1 point per adventuring session and level up every 3 points. This was great in giving us exciting, powerful, characters to play and allowing us to see what the system had to offer but introducing new mechanics every 3 sessions was too much for my players and me to handle. We rarely knew what the PCs were capable of and I had to figure out new and interesting combat encounters for increasingly powerful characters each week – I feel I ended up using far too broad a cross-section of the Bestiary in a relatively short amount of time rather than being able to utilise monsters over and again to explore their flavour.
- Unchained – after seeing how much the Summoner, and to a lesser extent the Barbarians, dominated combat in my sessions I would definitely look at using the the new rules in Pathfinder Unchained to bring back some balance to the class options available to my players.
Thanks for some good times, Pathfinder. May our paths cross again when I have far more time to enjoy your complex rules.