Anybody play Pathfinder?

The Game Room
1

My gaming group has been playing Pathfinder for the past couple of years. It’s a non-TSR spinoff of AD&D 3.5. While we complain about how extensive the mechanics are, we have laptops and lots of links to click courtesy of the Pathfinder SRD.

Paizo has instituted zillions of archetypes and class variants to make the ruleset more solid to a particular game environment. In our main campaign, we are all pirates, so we’ve chosen variants that contribute more toward pirate-type skills such as Swim, Profession: Shipwright, and so on. I play a druid, and am finding that those spells druids hardly ever use in other campaigns like Life Bubble, Control Water and Control Winds absolutely kick ass when you’re a pirate.

One of our other players is on vacay for a couple of weeks, so I’m currently running a fill-in campaign for the others, where they all play monks. I’m basing the mini-campaign on some kung fu movies I saw on El Ray network. While the plots haven’t exactly played out the same ashte movies, it’s still been huge amounts of fun. The players at first bristled at playing LG characters, but I told them it’s because they’re the “good guys” and the rival clan that wants to wipe them out is the “bad guys.”

They’re now in the process of going through the secret tunnel under the Emperor’s Palace to liberate the Prime Minister from jail. I made it a classic dungeon crawl full of traps from a scan of Grimtooth’s Traps I found online. With no rogues in the party, they have to use trial-and-error to get through the traps, and being monks, they can practically defy gravity. In some cases, this helps them, but in others, it hinders.

For instance, they came down a hallway and saw a double junction ahead filled with boiling tar, like this: ±+. Grimtooth calls this Mirror Mirror, Oh the Fall. The first intersection has false doors at the north and side ends. The middle corridor has a transparent glass wall running down the middle. The second intersection has the true exit on the south side, but a mirror has been placed diagonally across the intersection to make it look like the door is on the right end. Furthermore, a Magma Ooze lurks behind the mirror in the boiling tar.

The way to the door looks like a horizontal 50’ jump, which is reasonably easy for 9th level monks. One of them was all set to do it, but another one decided to toss a pebble first. They saw it bounce back toward them halfway down the corridor. One of them decided to climb the walls leading to the invisible wall, which is a DC 25. The others held him by a rope tied to his waste. He failed at one point by more than 5, which means he falls in the tar. Monks however, have Improved Evasion, meaning they take 1/2 or 0 damage from damage spells and effects if they make a Reflex save. In addition, a couple of NPC bards were helping them with songs that give +2 bonus to saves, skill checks, attacks and damage. So, although he made it back out unscathed, he was reluctant to try again.

Another monk tried it and horizontal climbed like Spider-Man to the invisible wall. He punched it with Flurry of Blows until it shattered. He then horizontal climbed to the next intersection. He failed his climb check a couple times, but managed to avoid damage and climb back into place. He then announced he was going to horizontal jump the rest of the way and cling to the door. “Sure,” I said as I smiled. At the middle of the intersection, he crashed into the mirror and fell into the tar. He was out of range of the bard songs, so he failed his saves and took 1/2 of 10D6 fire damage. Then the Magma Ooze attacked him and succeeded in a grab attack. He failed another save in the tar, and along with the Ooze’s grappling damage would have reached 0 health if he didn’t use ki to get some hp back. The other monks failed to pull him out the first round, but succeeded on the second attempt and pulled him out just in time, along with the Ooze.

It was a huge comedy of errors, but in the end they survived. It was fun to go outside the “standard adventuring party” mindset and see how other classes do in classic D&D situations.

2

I don’t play, and I only play in an every-two-weeks 4e Epic game right now, but I’ve bought a lot of the books and have been playing with some worldbuilding.

I really liked Beastiary 4.

Oh, and one of the fun things I like to do in playing with a system is to build rival adventurer groups of different themes. One was [del]Super Happy Fun Group[/del] Battle Fury Squad, which was a 9 member team based around a bunch of Monks. The whole group being Human or Half-Elf at 3rd level.

Henry Sanders Human Alchemist 2/Monk 1
S 14 D 16 C 12 I 14 W 14 C 11 NG HP 22 (3d8+3) AC 16 F+6 R+8 W+4
Skills: 16+8
Feats: 3+1
Alchemist Stuff: Alchemy, Bomb d6+3/3 splash 6/day, Brew Potion, Mutagen, Throw Anything, Poison Resistance +2,
Poison Use, Discovery(Explosive Bomb)
Monk Stuff: Flurry of Blows, Stunning Fist
Favored Mutagen: +4 Str, +2 natural armor, -2 Int
Unarmed Attack +3 d6+1 (+5 d6+3 or +4/+4 d6+3/d6+3), Ring of Protection+1

:smiley:

3

Play it AND DM it. I DM a group that’s… challenged. There’s one (1) “regular” character in the group - the halfling rogue. The healer role is tentatively filled by an alchemist with the Surgeon archetype - who can’t actually heal, not really, not in combat. He can heal himself, and he has a billion free health potions, but he can’t feed those to other players mid-fight - they’d have to eat their action too. He throws bombs, too.
Next we have the party’s primary spellcaster, who’s a Bard. Except she’s not really a Bard, she’s a Geisha/Noble Scion. Which means she can’t really cast spells and she can’t sing to buff the party either - well, she can, if they spend 10 minutes doing a tea ceremony. And it only lasts 10 minutes. She does have a lot of money, but she also has even more expensive tastes and runs a museum which claims most of the party’s loot. Oh, but now that they’re level 8 she has an actual wizard servant in tow (who recently got disintegrated, teehee).
Finally, we’ve got the “main tank” - a tiefling monk who doesn’t bother with all that martial arts bullshit - he just punches people right inna face, because he’s more or an irate drunken dockhand when it comes down to it. The distinction is that he doesn’t have ki powers nor flurry of blows, nor much in the way of the halfway supernatural bullshit regular monks get. What he *does *have is sky-high AC and saves (master of many styles coupled with tiefling natural armor will do that), and he can punch right through hardness and DR most of the time. Which is a pain in the ass when you try to lock them in a room because, in his words, “screw you, reactionary masonry !” (he’s a bit of a revolutionary, you see).
As for the halfling rogue, he’s a bit pissed that the group keeps running into vampires that dominate him at the drop of a hat, or elementals he can’t shank well.

So they’re pretty useless all around… and yet they keep effortlessly kicking my butt :o.
It’s uncanny. Literally : there’s only one character in the group who doesn’t have uncanny dodge (the surgeon, who can self-heal as a free action). Which means that any spellcaster they run into who isn’t specifically briefed on them starts chucking fireballs and lightning at them for no effect whatsoever. Then they run into vampires, who naturally try to dominate the “fighter” - except he’s a monk so high Will saves, and anyway he’s a tiefling so technically not a “person”, which means the vamps’ innate Dominate Person autofails. The Bard has something like 50 *passive *Perception and Sense Motive at level 12 due to class & skill fuckery so there are no traps or secret doors or cons, ever. Whenever they run into something they can’t quite hit, the monk grapples it for the others to murder (or just Stunning Fists them - three high-level, would-have-been-recurring big bads thus far have succumbed to an ill-timed 1 on their saving throw). And so on, and so forth.

It’s great to watch. Utterly dysfunctional, but great :slight_smile:

4

I’ve always wanted to try out an Alchemist. The class reminds me of the Bridgeburners from the Malazan books, who continually thwart superior enemies by blowing shit up.

Two of the pirates in my group are tieflings. One is a cleric/gunslinger who can somehow jack his AC into the thirties. The other is a rogue who dies a lot, because he keeps trying out sneak attacks which gets him surrounded by enemies. I keep telling him not to stealth into the middle of a crowd, but he does it anyway. I tell him I’m going to reincarnate him into a kobold, but I think he actually wants it.

I took a level of Mammoth Rider, which makes my animal companion Huge, with 15 ft reach, and capable of 5 AoOs due to Combat Reflexes and dex of 20. The GM hates me and keeps designing scenarios too small to take him along.

5

I’ve played in quite a few Pathfinder campaigns, although I’ve been taking a break for the past few months.

I like their Adventure Paths. Not because they’re necessarily better written than someone’s home-brewed campaign, but because they ease the workload for the GM and that does a good job at helping to prevent GM burnout (in my experience).

6

I picked up a couple Adventure paths from the Reign of Winter series. One of them has Rasputin as the grandson of Baba Yaga. I may get the whole set someday and run it, but our current Pirates campaign has been going on for about a year and half, and the GM says we haven’t even reached the halfway point.

I like semi-historical campaigns. Many moons ago I ran a Rolemaster campaign based on the Roman Empire, and before that ran one based on Attila the Hun. Attila so kicked the ass of medieval Europe, many kings sent their sons to him as wards, so the PCs played those sons.

7

I played it in a group for a year and a half. Coming from a rules light home-brewed version of 1st/2nd edition, it seemed way too rules heavy and cumbersome.

But then again I do not like 3rd edition either.

I disliked many things about it, such as 3 hour long battles that should have taken 10 minutes, challenge ratings and forced magic items per level but ultimately it was the the mediocrity of the DM’s world that made me quit.

I feel sorry for anyone who has to plan out and DM a battle in Pathfinder.

The art in the books is good though, as is the organization.

8

My D&D 3X days are long behind me and Pathfinder is just D&D 3X+. I don’t have time for any RPG game that takes up more than one 200+ page book now. It’s just… so much extra reading and referencing for exactly zero extra reward.

Still play lots of RPGs, but Pathfinder is near the bottom of the barrel for games I would pick if given the choice.

9

Yes, I agree Pathfinder can be a huge pain in the tuckus, especially when the game comes to a halt while looking up a rule. Completely destroys the momentum.

But, its roots lie in AD&D, which inspired so many other RPGs. At first, it was easy enough to play D&D and jump right in to playing a wizard, warrior, thief, whatever. No other game could compare.

But eventually gamerkind wanted more diversity and not to be pigeonholed into generic archetypes. Runequest came up with the idea of having skills, something D&D only had for thieves. It also introduced the concept that a certain stat could be a strong point in a skill, like intelligence for knowledge skills. D&D became known as a level-based RPG, while Runequest was categorized as skill-based. Eventually, Iron Crown Enterprises developed Rolemaster, which incorporated both. It began as a game system for Middle Earth Role-Playing, using the world of JRR Tolkien. The independent version spun off from that with more rules and features. Everybody screamed at how Rolemaster was so complex, way before 3rd edition AD&D, but it did provide more diversity for engineering role players. Plus, players could always leave out the more complicated parts and get back to them later.

WotC developed new simplified editions of AD&D to appeal to the more generic gamers, while Paizo picked up the ball they left behind and ran with it. It’s a challenge, but once you understand how the engine works, it becomes easier.

My friend KP despises the technical nature of Pathfinder and prefers the RPGs that utilize interactive storytelling, like the Hero Wars system. Before HW, LARPS were hugely popular with Vampire the Masquerade and its various spinoffs. These systems do not use concepts such as stats or levels. They focus mainly on skills, and replace hit points with health conditions. They still are subject to min-maxing and other attempts to exploit the rules systems, but in the long run such things don’t matter as long as the players enjoy the experience.

10

To give people who never had the pleasure of cracking a Rolemaster rulebook, or indeed played that monstrosity as their introduction to roleplaying games (I shit thee not) a quick glimpse into that world : Rolemaster had a separate, full-page damage table per weapon. You heard me. One table for daggers. One for small swords. One for longswords. One for sabers. One for rapiers. Etc… I think there were 150 in all, each with 200x20 results. Plus 10 more for spells (fire, ice, impact etc…)
And if you rolled high enough you scored a critical hit, which meant rolling on another table elsewhere in the book. You could score multiple criticals per hit. AND all of these dice rolls were “explosive”, meaning that if you rolled 95-100 (the game used mostly the d100), you rerolled and added to the existing result. No upwards limits.

Now imagine running a random, run-of-the-mill combat between, so help you god, 4 characters each wielding different weapons.
Hellacious doesn’t begin to describe it. That game had actual algebraic formulas featuring square roots to determine some stuff (shoe size, waist size and weight IIRC). It had a birthing complications table that spanned three pages.

I am making **none **of this up.

On the other hand, using all the rules and tables you could wind up killing yourself by pissing up against a tree or by tripping on an imaginary turtle ; a feat which so far I haven’t seen replicated, or indeed equalled, by any system :smiley:

11

Kobal2 is correct, but the odds of neverending crits is roughly 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/20… The same is true of neverending fumbles.

I loved to scare people by saying “No matter how powerful you are, there’s always a chance a peasant with a stick could kill you instantly.” The chance was like 1 in 10,000, but it was there.

Crit rolls in the 95-100 range were usually fatal. 66 was also a fatal crit, and Ambush enabled adjusting your crit roll to get the most favorable results. So, somebody with 10 ranks of Ambush could have a fatal crit roll of 56-76, and depending on the armor type worn by the victim, could also produce a fatal crit of 80 or above. Pretty heinous.

The players would make copies of their own weapons tables and spell tables, and somebody else would handle the crit tables. There were 20 Armor Types, matched against every possible adjusted dice result. The result was usually a number and two letters, the number being damage done, the first letter was the type of damage done (bludgeon, slash, pierce, etc) and the second letter being the degree of the crit from A to E, E being the deadliest. So, after resolving the damage, you then looked up a crit table for the damage type. Oh yes, there were also Grapple and Unbalancing crits, and the expansions had even more weapons/effects tables such as Plasma, Nether, and Chaos crits.

The crits usually involved even more paperwork. Results could include stuns, stun & unable to parry, bleeders (damage per round), damaged limbs which decrease stats, paralysis, burns, you name it. That’s the reason why spell descriptions were often just one line. Directed spells such as firebolt were handled the same way as weapons. You developed skill in the spell just like a weapon. The effects were all listed in the crit tables.

Once you knew how the system worked, it really wasn’t that hard to execute the rules. It just involved so… much… page-flipping. Making an online version of Rolemaster would take years.

There was a lot to Rolemaster you could exclude, but if there was any little game detail you wanted to thoroughly explore, it was there.

12

That’s even discounting the amount of minutiae you need to sift through just to make a character.

Oh man, MERP was SO AWFUL. Like, it wasn’t the greatest game system to begin with, and then you look at it from the perspective of “do the games that you play in this system have any resemblance to Middle Earth?” and the answer is “Well, the names are the same…”

I’m going to be frank - I’ve never been a fan of the idea of “Take a game that has waaaay too many rules and then just drop the rules you don’t want” because either A) Those rules will be connected to other rules, and you’ll make a huge mess or B) Those rules aren’t connected to other rules, in which case it’s probably a pretty terrible game, composed of unrelated rules mashed together, in which case, you should probably just find a better game.

That’s the thing. I played D&D 3.0 and 3.5; I’m not speaking from inexperience here. I’m just saying that I can have an experience that is the same or better without spending hundreds of dollars on huge books full of unbalancing game options and learning a ruleset that requires constant referencing.

It’s not that 3X/PF doesn’t “work” it’s that it produces pretty much the same results as a bunch of much simpler, less cumbersome games. The only advantage is has is if you LIKE playing with 400 fiddly little knobs and levers as part of your character build. And some people do. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I discovered after a while that fiddling with all the little knobs and levels meant that I was paying way more attention to the knobs and levels and feats and not enough to the actual game.

13

I just imagine the guys making Rolemaster sitting in some dark, dirty office in a mostly empty strip mall, drinking Jack, smoking weed and saying “How absolutely ludicrous and impossible can we make this game system and still get those idiots to buy it?”

14

I think the reality is even more depressing.

15

Wow, you people really hated Rolemaster didn’t you?

I’m not one for trying to figure out complex rules systems either, but both RM and PF can be considered variations of D&D. If you played D&D, you already understood the concept of levels, hit points, skills, stat values, experience, character class, and many other formerly complicated concepts that are now integral parts of many video and console games being played today. PF and RM enable players to customize characters further than cookie cutter archetypes. That’s what most of their rules cover. If that’s not your cup of tea, fine.

16

I actually liked it back then - but of course, I didn’t know any better.
And it would actually be a half playable system today, in our days of automated character sheets and iPad apps. You could force it to work, I think.

All in all though, the final analysis is that it’s a needlessly complex system that has a very high entry bar and learning curve for little pay-off. You know, unless you’re the kind of person who *wants *to check if their sword got chipped every time they hit something with it (yup, also a thing for which there were rules).

I think the difference between PF and RM is precisly that PF is rule-heavy for the “right” reasons. Yes, you have boatloads of feats and spells to choose from and that gives you a great breadth of variation you can apply to your character. But in-play, it’s a pretty fast system ; most of the complexity and the maths are dealt with around or before sessions. RM involved semi-complex calculations and consulting tables every. step. of the way. for every action or situation that the group might run into.

In PF, if you want to jump your horse above a fence, the GM pulls a difficulty out of his ass, you roll 1d20, add your Riding and there you go. Either you did it or you didn’t, and the play goes on from there.

In RM first you have to puzzle out whether it counts as a Static Manoeuver or a Dynamic Manoeuver, fish out the relevant table, roll your exploding dice, add your Riding, add the various bonuses that apply (they’re listed in a table), substract the various maluses that apply (they’re listed in a different table, on a different page), check the result of your action, and then apply the results of those (which, in many cases, involve more dice rolls). Oh, and work around any absurdity that might come up from the table’s result (such as stabbing someone in the back resulting in a broken leg)

You could, of course, dispense with much of that nonsense and simplify the system extensively - I think everybody who played *Rolemaster *did just to keep on this side of sanity. My group sure as hell did. But then, first of all you’re doing all that simplifying work yourself, which defeats the purpose of buying a commercial RPG system instead of coming up with your own ; and second of all you’re not really playing *Rolemaster *any more, are you ?

And, ultimately, RM didn’t really differentiate characters all that much in terms of abilities. I mean, you pick a weapon and a race and you add as many ranks in Hitting People Over The Head With That Weapon as you want ; and that’s about it as far as making a fighter goes. In PF you can be a tanky fighter, or a feinty fighter, or an area-denial fighter, or a charging fighter etc… - and that’s just with the Fighter class ; the broader concept of “armed melee fighter” being also covered in more granularity by plenty of other classes, each with their specific sort of flavour - ranger, monk, paladin, cavalier, etc…

17

I own the main rulebook (still reading through it in my spare time), but haven’t played yet. I want to play; just need to find a group and the spare time.

Pathfinder attracted me because it’s based upon the D&D 3.5 rules, which I really liked. I used to have a regular D&D 3.5 group, but I eventually dropped out because I wasn’t having fun. It wasn’t the game, it was the DM. He had been playing and DMing since the original D&D, and had this really bad habit of interpreting 3.5 rules in the context of his 1.0 experience. I always got stuck playing the party wizard or sorcerer, because nobody else (i.e. the players who had more experience with this DM) wanted to do it (which puzzled me because, back before I ever played an RPG, the people I knew who did play always wanted to be the wizard).

I eventually figured out why nobody wanted to play a wizard/sorcerer: The DM’s habit of interpreting rules through a 1st Edition filter rendered spellcasters practically useless. But I don’t think the other players ever realized what the problem was. I suspect they just thought that arcane spellcasters sucked in 3.5. But I had this “annoying” habit of reading every damned word in the rulebooks, especially the Player’s Guide, and for all intents and purposes, I had memorized the rules (I knew going in that everybody else in the group was more experienced with the game than I was, so I read everything in an effort to “catch up”). My command of the English language helped me to recognize the wording pattern used in each rule, so I could interpret them literally and accurately. I was also the only player in the group who spent a lot of time on the Internet, and on the official D&D forums, researching and seeking clarifications on rules that puzzled me.

So part of my decision to leave the group wasn’t that I just wasn’t having fun, or disliked the DMs “style”. I didn’t want to turn into the “rules lawyer”, ruining everybody else’s fun. I just couldn’t sit silently by while the DM and other players horrifically misinterpreted the rules. Example of one case where I finally spoke up: one player in our group played a ranger who used “Two-weapon Fighting”. The DM’s interpretation of the TWF rules, followed to its logical conclusion, would have resulted in the ranger, by level 20, making 16 discrete attacks per round. That’s right, 16 attack rolls per 6-second round. That, combined with the ranger’s Cleave and Greater Cleave feats, he could have had in excess of 20 attacks per round. I finally stopped the game and called bullshit, and forced the DM to actually look at the wording of the various TWF feats.

This happened a couple more times, with regard to the DM’s interpretation of spellcasting rules. Mostly where he kept saying, “casting a spell is a Full-round Action, so you can’t move” and me saying, “Bullshit! It says right here in the spell description that this spell requires a Standard Action, which means that I can move and cast the spell, or vice-versa!” Or the way he made it completely impossible to cast a spell at all, by requiring Concentration checks after my sorcerer took damage in the previous round, before I could cast a spell in the current round. GAH! I finally came to the conclusion that the DM had done little more than “skim” the 3.5 rules.

Anyway, sorry, rant mode off. I loved the 3.5 rules (except for the Grappling rules), and I liked the idea that Paizo had taken the 3.5 rules and improved/streamlined them. So, I’m eager to find a Pathfinder group.

18

Yes, Paizo did improve on the Grappling rules, and although they’re a bit clearer and make more sense, they’re still kind of a pain. :slight_smile:

My druid likes to wildshape into tiger and octopus forms, both of which have grab attacks. Usually an attack has to be declared as a grapple, which adds CMB instead of melee modifiers. With grab, it’s resolved as both a melee attack and grapple (I think). Problem is, both the grappler and the grapplee are considered nonmoving and both have -2 to non-grappling attacks and -4 DEX. Normally, I’d be content to just sit there and do continual damage per round, but the grappling conditions are such a bitch when there’s more than one opponent and they can whack on you while you’re essentially helpless. So, I’ve taken to releasing the grapple as a free action on my next round so I don’t suffer the penalties.

Furthermore, my GM says even though in my octopus form I have 8 attacks (plus a bite), I don’t have 8 grappling attacks. So, I make it 7 melee attacks plus a grapple. Probably easier to resolve anyway. This isn’t exactly making a case against the PF haters. :slight_smile:

Mister Rik, have you checked MeetUp for Pathfinder games?

19

I play, and run, Pathfinder games from time to time.

20

Any issues/hate/love for Pathfinder, CG?