Pathfinder 2E

They finally made DnD into a game

The year is 2007; Wizards of the Coast fails to renew Paizo’s magazine contracts, preparing for the 4^th edition of Dungeons and Dragons that will begin an era of corporate capture now coming to fruition. Paizo seizes this opportunity by taking advantage of WotC’s last entrapment strategy; the OGL¹, to publish Pathfinder. It carries the mechanical framework of DnD 3.5, capitalizing on fans’ investment in existing material and aggrieved sense of abandonment from their sugar daddy², but they finally made DnD into a game.

A decade later, Paizo unveils Pathfinder Second Edition. 2E seeks not to reinvent the framework adopted and advanced by 1E, but to further refine it.

Respect the Premise  

Pathfinder Second Edition is a fantasy adventure roleplaying game designed by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-Macfarland, and Mark Seifter, developed by Adam Daigle, Lyz Liddell, and Erik Mona, illustrated by Giorgio Baroni, Rogier van de Beek, Yanis Cardin, Sergio Cosmai, Biagio D’Alessandro, Michele Esposito, Giorgio Falconi, Taylor Fischer, Mariusz Gandzel, Igor Grechanyi, Hai Hoang, Roman Roland Kuteynikov, Setiawan Lie, Valeria Lutfullina, Damien Mammoliti, Rob McCaleb, Andea Tentori Montalto, Stefano Moroni, Federico Musetti, Alexander Nanitchkov, Mirco Paganessi, Mary Jane Pajaron, Jose Parodi, Angel Peluso, Roberto Pitturru, Konstantin Porubov, Wayne Reynolds, Kiki Moch Rizky, Riccardo Rullo, Bryan Sola, Matteo Spirito, Matias Tapia, Ben Wootten, and Sam Yang, with additional writing by James Jacobs. It was released August of 2019 and has received a deluge of expansions, settings, and other content.

Pathfinder occupies the unenviable position of not being DnD and being a player’s First Tabletop Roleplaying Game. Caught between the freedom to explain what this genre of art is while satisfying the half-century accretion of expectations, assumptions, and traditions of DnD, it’s a rough teach³. Half a page of fiction describing a single attack in the fight against the Lich King’s undead horde. Seven pages of explaining how the rulebook works, many of them entirely lists of terms. The process is further confused by jumping back and forth between the premise for player characters and the premise for game masters. It is far, far too much for the fresh-faced acolyte and banal information for the 1E veteran.

Golarian; The nexus of Pathfinder’s setting, is a paradox of adventuring potential. It at once implies a depth of world-bending secrets and fantasy pablum that one wonders what the point of all this stuff is. An apocalypse ten-thousand years back obliterated the world which was reforged by a god-king that touched a magic asteroid at the bottom of the ocean. Elves came from another planet. There’s a ghost dimension. There’re alternate realities, hell, double hell, elemental worlds, land of the dead, all the stuff. And yet skimming through the book, you wouldn’t know it’s there.  You’ve got wizards in flowing robes, goblins with knives wearing rags, a druid with a bear. Time and again Pathfinder seems like it’s going to start bushwhacking and then directs you to the traditional fantasy family dungeon experience with your tour guide, Nathan. Elves are from Venus and you’re putting a dragon in a dungeon on the cover?

Pathfinder’s core story is the dawn of the Age of Lost Omens. The aforementioned god-king, instead of ushering in an Age of Glory, has died. With him, prophecies all around are failing. The text hints that some sort of World Dying Event is happening, but it’s quickly abandoned for the regional politics of city-states. The various locales all read like places where the adventures have already happened. Orcs migrated away from the dwarven underground to the surface and founded their own nation. A demonlord tore a hole in reality and has been put down. A spaceship crashed and let loose robots and aliens. The Lich lord has risen an undead army and been defeated. Twice. If anything, it describes the world as a dreary End of History geopolitical morass. Such and such nation suffered some invasion or rebellion in the past and the tyrant was deposed or maybe they still rule. This nation is in a tense stalemate with That nation. This land was beset by undead or demons or magic or storms and now no one goes there. It speaks not of a world where brave heroes need to step up and fix things but one that cynically mirrors our own. A world where nothing changes but everything gets worse.

Golarion, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Ravenloft, does anbody care about these places? Do they have any depth to them besides themes? No doubt players could go on for hours about the stories they experienced in these places. But what stories does the world itself tell? What do they dare instill in the player beyond a vast wilderness full of holes to enter, kill, and loot? Do people fight over which best? Which stories are best told in which continent? Do they have any meaning beyond your preferred brand of root beer?

According to the Rules

The real improvement of Pathfinder over DnD is that if you follow the rules and processes laid out in the rulebook they actually work. Where DnD seeks to elucidate through vibes, Pathfinder communicates with facts⁴. As much as Pathfinder reproduces the structure of Dungeons and Dragons, it does so through material reinterpretation. Rules are intuitive. Character options are proper choices, not a hidden subgame of “avoid making an incompetent character”

Pathfinder’s insistence on procedures, structure, and systems builds a game suited for pick up and play. The well-defined breaks between fighting, exploring, and camping with genuine quality of life features like changing feats and skills gives the game a modern feeling that betrays it’s retrograde aesthetics. PF 2E abandons the perpetual conversation about how do we play this game and allows everyone to focus on play. Perhaps anathema to the kind of player perpetually fascinated with the very concept of playing pretend; but a decade of sales implies there is a market for games.

Backgrounds are a desperately needed addition to the dungeon delver genre. They encompass histories and professions characters possessed before turning to a life of mercenary grave robber. Paradoxically, they are pregnant with and empty from meaning. Why would a noble turn to a life of adventuring? A miner? A town guard? You are equally free to answer these questions as you are to ignore them. You are encouraged to think about these things only as much as they have meaning to you. If a farmer is as likely as a merchant to learn a spell that lets them time travel, or find a sword that burns with eternal flame, why aren’t they all doing it? It is a framework that asks you to pay no attention to the mechanics behind the curtain. It is a struggle to inject your own sense of care in a way that impacts the world or even other characters. It is an existential loneliness that creeps into your soul. Does any of this matter? Do I? Am I making a difference?

This line of questioning is not defeated by asking it of every ttrpg you come across. It comes up precisely because there are so many games that draw meaning out of their players, that let you revel in raw imaginative play, expression, and connection with other people using a mere fraction of the word count. There are so many games that weep meaning from their seams that I wonder how we can spend so many words on procedures and then ask you to bring your own meaning.

We experience games as art

Credit to Wayne Reynolds for taking the incestuous aesthetics of DnD and giving them an identity. While Pathfinder does not abandon the sludge of Fantasy Adventure Aesthetics, it is brave enough to look away from Tolkien and Howard to ask “what does a dungeon delving adventurer look like?” Like the kind of person who hordes every bit and bob they find. Like a multifaceted wanderer; their silhouette overflowing from the adventures they’ve made. 2E regrettably simplifies these characters, perhaps to ease the burden of repeating the “core” cast in so many images. Nevertheless, their identity still shines through.

Unfortunately, Pathfinder does not escape the hoary grip of its ancestor. It pulls the game and roleplay closer together, but does not bind them into a cohesive whole. You have unprecedented freedom to make a character within DnD’s oeuvre, but they are still trapped within the shell of combat machine that can talk. You will come across so many dead-end paragraphs within the character section; things that imply a person but mean nothing⁵. Your character can worship a god if they wish, perhaps their class requires they do, but it nothing more than a choice to make. No more consequential than the color of one’s armor. Something that has the implication of mattering, but probably won’t.

So much of Pathfinder’s writing exists in wastefulness. Hundreds of pages to describe things that everyone already knows. Dwarves hate orcs, elves are graceful, goblins are dirty. It is a text that cannot reconcile its dual requirements of introducing a wee babe to “fantasy” and being the DnD You Yes You Are Looking For Dear Veteran. The corrections, improvements, and adjustments are a pathfinding of sorts, but one in which home base is never out of sight.

What paths are being found here? What road less taken? Despite bringing the archaic mainstay forward, Pathfinder is comfortable retreading the thoroughly beaten path. It’s putting up trail markers, securing loose rocks, adding guard rails, but it’s the same path; the same sights and sounds we’ve been repeating for years. The enjoyment I draw from these pages is a nostalgic contentedness; knowing less people will experience this artform for the first time in a completely esoteric and unpalatable way. But I hope those inspired by Pathfinder will ride that wanderlust past the borders of the theme park and into the woods.

1. All Licenses Are Bastards

2. this is a terrible metaphor, sugar daddies are supposed to buy stuff for you

3. To completely misquote John Carmack, “explaining ttrpgs in a rulebook is like explaining why the characters have sex in a porn movie. It’s expected, but it’s not that important.”

4. Excerpt from the Planning a Campaign section of Chapter 10: Game Mastering - “You can estimate how long a campaign will take by looking at the amount of time you actually have to play, or the number of character levels you intend the characters to advance. It typically take three to four session for a group to level up… playing once a week for a year results in roughly a 14-level campaign…”

No matter what I say about Pathfinder, know that I have nothing but utmost praise for this paragraph. This is the sort of clarity that every ttrpg, regardless of complexity, should strive for. This is a level of respect for the player’s time that staggeringly few games show.

5. Pathfinder’s ethnicities are barely there. There is hardly any description of religion (unless it’s an evil god), food, art, music, architecture, anything that could define a culture. Little more than a location and skin color. In the pursuit of detailing a diverse cast of potential adventurers, the pages are bizarrely phrenological.