Pathfinder - Manuel Des Joueurs (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
I've honestly only played one real session with this setting, but found it to be one of the most satisfying platforms I've ever used. Your character feels both powerful and powerless, and the system has steep penalties for power gaming (as compared to D&D 4E, which basically allows any character to do anything they want, totally destroying the feeling of being a unique asset to the party). The rogue rogues, the fighter tanks, the cleric heals, and not everything every character can do is combat related.If you find yourself longing for an updated D&D 3E or 3.5E, this alternative breaths just enough new life into the style and mechanics that you'll want to play all night. And so, I have finally buckled down and read this weighty tome, which has become one of the standard-bearers of the modern role-playing game hobby and industry. I have nibbled at the edges of d20 rules systems for a few years now, but I decided to just dive in and read Pathfinder because I figured even if it's not my kind of game, knowing why that is will be good for me. Plus, I love Pathfinder books; they are beautiful pinnacles of production.The Pathfinder rules are fairly simple at their core, and I'm not going to try to explain them to non-gamers because, well, that's what this book is for, innit? For those already familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, which this book is derived from more or less, the rules are pretty straightforward and the concepts holding them all together - rolling a twenty-sided die plus various modifiers against a target number to determine the outcome of a task or an action - is a solid one. What Pathfinder does best is it streamlines all of the eleventeen billion various details that comprises D&D and it unifies them into a really consistent framework. Versions 3.0 and 3.5 of D&D did this first, of course, and from what I understand, Pathfinder took that work one step further, but having no experience with 3.0 or 3.5, I can't tell the difference. All I can really compare this to are the old-school versions of D&D I used to play, namely Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and The Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal Dungeons & Dragons. And against those old standards, the difference is huge.Now, what's worth noting is that right now, there is a revival of these old rules going around, and the thing about these old rules, particularly AD&D, is that those rules were at times very uneven, hard to decipher, and all-around led to people adapting which parts they liked/understood and ejecting the parts that didn't work for them. This made early RPGs like AD&D a personal experience. My AD&D was not your AD&D was not his AD&D and so on. As time wore on, role-playing games tried to address this with more complete rules, rules written more skillfully and in plain English. But D&D being what it was, sort of resisted this. You already kind of knew the rules, so a fullbore rewrite was never quite in the cards. Here's the thing, though: nowadays, there are plenty of new RPGs, such as Castles & Crusades, that are modern re-writings of those old, wonky-as-hell D&D rules, right along side modern games like Pathfinder, which are rather a bit different evolutions of those old rules. For a grognard like me (look it up, kid), the question largely comes down to this: I like D&D. I like it a lot. I don't want to feel like I have to fix the rules so they work as I want them. To that end, do I want to play a retro-clone like Castles & Crusades, or do I want to play Pathfinder? And in that direction is where my review of Pathfinder must go.Pathfinder is an immense rulebook, nearly 600 pages. It is festooned with all kinds of detail, much of it designed to give you an extraordinary degree of customization for your player character. Magic spells are presented in an orderly fashion, as are the massive array of magic items to include in the game. Combat rules are, at their heart, fairly simple to execute, as their rules conform to the essential D20+modifiers vs. target number mechanic. But there is something about the combat I disliked intensely, and it was the volume of rulemaking devoted toward resolving combat in a tactical, almost wargame-y fashion. It is coupled with exhaustive descriptions for how lots of specific combat situations are to be resolved. The whole thing looks and feels very complete, but for a guy like myself, who wants to keep combat simple and resolved almost in a narrative sense, rather than in a really detailed gamist sense, it all felt like too much of a good thing. It felt, if I can be honest, like an effort to finally codify the best GM responses to every single rules lawyer bitch, gripe, moan, and dodgy move ever conceived since 1977 or so. These are all things that GMs figured out to handle over years of play. Now, there is an official rule for everything, and that isn't always a great thing. I saw this approach also in the GM section, in which adventures and encounters are actually budgeted by the GM, removing from the game a great deal of the randomness that characterized older versions of the game. That randomness often produced weird or silly results, but it also was fun as hell. Pathfinder seems to have rejected the randomness of old to such a degree that the whole game is meant to be finely controlled from the outset. And in that, I have to say, Pathfinder works really, really well. But it also feels like it has stripped away that DIY aspect of role-playing that I so enjoy. In its effort to cover every contingency, Pathfinder seems strangely...sterile. I suppose it feels like actually going to a foreign country and seeing it for all it's worth, the good and the bad, versus going to the Disneyworld imitation of it. The Disney version is perfect in every way, and it's ideal for a guaranteed good time. But you can't actually say you've had a bona fide cultural experience. That's the feeling I get by comparing Pathfinder versus simpler, looser rules that require you to kind of wing it a little. And that is why I wonder if ultimately, Pathfinder might not be for me.
What do You think about Pathfinder - Manuel Des Joueurs (2000)?
The core rulebook to my favorite fantasy RPG.
—Corinneb
