In many ways, Iām the ideal Pathfinder customer. I own almost all the major books that Paizo has published for its tabletop roleplaying game since 2009. I regularly buy Paizoās corresponding miniatures and Iām an avid player of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Iāve run Pathfinder for a podcast and I play the game as often as I can. And itās for all those reasons that I just wasnāt excited when Paizo formally announced the books it will be releasing for Pathfinder Second Edition in August.
Iāve been here before. In the lead up to the 2008 release of Wizards of the Coastās Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, my friends spent a lot of time going over 3.5 Editionās well-known flaws. Classes were unbalanced, healing was boring, some spells could break the game. ā4th Edition will fix everything,ā was our joking refrain. But it didnāt really fix anything. The two editions were so fundamentally different that we couldnāt possibly convert our characters to the new system. While we bought the new 4th Edition books and started up a campaign using them, we still kept playing our 3.5 characters and just made up our own fixes to the broken rules.
We wound up finding some actual solutions when Pathfinder launched. We started integrating some of that systemās rules into our campaign. We tried a new hybrid game blending rules and character options from both systems. Then we abandoned 3.5 altogether and started just playing Pathfinder. We werenāt alone. Just a few years later, Wizards of the Coast declared 4th Edition dead and Pathfinder became the top-selling d20-based RPG.
Pathfinderās still not perfect. Classes are much better balanced, but other problems inherited from 3.5 have never been dealt with. Weāre still using a system of house rules to try to fix them and theyāve grown so complicated that they have their own Google Doc. I canāt blame Paizo for wanting to start from scratch rather than continue to be saddled with a nearly 20-year-old set of rules. But I also question the wisdom of following Wizardsā example and producing another system that isnāt backwards compatible.
Pathfinder designer Mark Seifter said he knows that not all current Pathfinder players will make the transition. Seifter also said Paizo is planning to keep releasing books to appeal to those players who donāt make the jump. But just as the end of 3.5 Edition led my friends to become loyal to another gaming company, Pathfinder Second Edition is likely to cause even more fragmentation of the market. Thereās no telling who the primary beneficiary will be. Pathfinder Second Edition is meant in part as an answer to the success of D&Dās 5th Edition, but Pathfinder players asked to invest in new books might throw their money at that game instead. Or they could just spend years without buying new content. Iām actually still playing in a 4th Edition game even though I havenāt purchased a book for that system since 2011. They could just keep buying Pathfinder books produced by third-party publishers or turn to whatever new fantasy game comes out next year.
I suspect that the Pathfinder Second Edition rules will solve some of the problems in Pathfinder, leave some existing ones, and create entirely new ones. I also already know that I wonāt be able to convert my current Pathfinder game to the new system. Two of the characters use classes that wonāt exist in the core book, so weāll presumably have to wait for a new version of the Advanced Playerās Guide to see rules for them. Pathfinder has been publishing content for a decade and itās going to take a long time until Second Edition build up a similar wealth of character options. Like with 4th Edition we might start a new game when Second Edition comes out, but weāre not planning on giving up on our current adventure. That divided loyalty will keep us from being the ideal customers Paizo needs for this new venture to succeed.
On Friday my gaming group wrapped up the first book of the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path, where our heroes spent an eventful week trying to protect a city from a demonic invasion. āIt feels like itās been a year,ā one for my friends joked, because itās actually been longer in real time. Wrangling the schedules of six adults is hard, and a few minutes of in character time can take a full night of our own if that time is spent in a hard fight. We kicked off the second book in the six-book series the same night, and fully expect it will take years for this game to wrap up. Weāre OK with that.
Published: Mar 11, 2019 04:04 pm