I like pathfinder(2e) more in every way except less people play it
I’ll play with you.
Seriously.
I haven’t before but I’d love to. Last dnd I played was 3.5. I won’t touch anything else, except pathfinder and other non-dnd games.
I’m looking to DM kingmaker on pf2e! Let me know if you’re interested.
i do have a group that we’ve been playing since covid lockdowns via roll20 and later foundry and Unfortunately i don’t have blocks of time for more games (i wish i did!). My comment was mostly just aimed at that all local my friends play d&d and don’t want to switch.
But if you’re looking to play pathfinder2e online there are communities like the pathfinder2e subreddit which has an active discord community. Foundryvtt has a very active pathfinder2e community (but LFG is done through main foundry discord).
And if you’re not opposed to Organized Play (paizos version of adventurers league) then they have in store and online one-shots you can join. It’s actually how i met my group but we branched off and did our own thing.
I haven’t really played PF2e, but from reading it I don’t really love that it does the “numbers go way up” thing. I did 3e and I didn’t like the “I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check” thing. I’m told PF2e has a “without level bonus” mode, but I don’t know if anyone plays it.
I think the level scaling fits Golarion, since “becoming a god” is a semi realistic goal for someone to set for themselves :P
But people who want to play in grittier settings do use the proficiency without level rules, and from what I’ve seen all the major third party tools support that option. As a gm, It can be hard to balance for though! The +level to everything mostly serves to give your level 10 cleric a fighting chance on their stealth checks, and without that boost there are some actions some characters just can’t perform.
I think the level scaling fits Golarion, since “becoming a god” is a semi realistic goal for someone to set for themselves :P
First you get really really drunk.
And then you take the Test of the Starstone. As a joke, of course.
Accidental ascensions are never the punchline to a joke. :D
To me it feels meaningful in a way that the ludicrous numbers never did in previous versions. The expanded crit system makes degrees of success matter, and they do a great job of making you feel heroic; especially when you go back and fight underleveled enemies and crit on every attack. (Or, alternatively, when you roll a natural 20 and it just upgrades your crit fail to a regular fail. That’s when you know it’s time to run.)
How often do pathfinder games do the thing like “The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you’re higher level and I want the math to be challenging”? Because I’ve always disliked that in games. That’s more of a video game trope, but I’ve seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don’t need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.
I have never seen that happen in PF2e printed adventures. A lot of the time they use monsters straight out of the Bestiary without modification, and when they don’t they usually put the statblocks in the back of the AP so that they can all be referenced from wherever they need to be.
I just pulled down my copy of “The Enmity Cycle” (the closest Paizo adventure I have at hand). It’s a level 4-6 adventure published in 2023. I haven’t read it since shortly after I bought it, but the encounters go like this:
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The first encounter is with 4 bandits, and it references the Gamemastery Guide directly for their statblocks (though you can also get them on AoN). There is a note about a change to their favored terrain and what skill they roll for initiative (in PF2e, you can roll different stats for initiative depending on what you’re doing; usually it’s perception, but in this case, the bandits roll their stealth for initiative). It also notes their tactics (they try to threaten the party before attacking, and if you kill or capture two of them, the other two flee). This is standard for any encounter.
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The second encounter is with two sand wolves, the stat block for which is printed in the back of the module.
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The third encounter is with four gnoll hunters, taken straight from the Bestiary, page 178. If this were a more recent, post-OGL book, it would’ve referenced the Monster Core instead (page 208).
Then the party enters a temple (read: dungeon). Here the encounters are themed, but they don’t pull any shenanigans like you mentioned. There are encounters…
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with two Scorching Sun Cultists (stat block inline with the adventure, mechanically and visually distinct from previous enemies) and a Filth Fire (Bestiary 2, page 110);
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with three cultists (this refers GMs back to the statblock printed above);
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with two cultists (again, reference back to the previous page) and a named priest of the cult (who is similar to the cultists, but also has some unique features befitting his position);
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with an atajma (an undead cleric monster who honestly looks super cool; reference to Book of the Dead p112, though I can’t find it on AoN for some reason), and two more cultists;
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and an elite poltergeist (reference Bestiary, page 264). “Elite” is a template you can use to make a regular poltergeist more scary, so in fairness that is a way that they could do what you’re saying, but they don’t here.
That’s the end of chapter one. Characters are supposed to level up around this time. In chapter 2, you fight:
- four elite nuglubs;
- a named jinkin boss;
- elite jinkin mooks;
- Usij cultists;
- sand wolves;
- several Scrapborn;
- two Scrapborn with the “weak” template;
- a named Ceustodaemon;
- a clockwork soldier;
- and a named gnoll priestess
…in various configurations, both before and in the dungeon. All of the enemies here refer to the same statblocks each time they appear, with the exception of the ones that have the “weak” template (which is like the “elite” template above, but in reverse). The sand wolves are the only repeated monster from chapter one, and they seem to be used as a power level indicator to show how much stronger you are, so they also appear with the same stats.
In chapter three there are more sand wolves and more cultists, some new creatures, some creatures that have been seen before, but none of them are reskinned soldiers dealing suspiciously different damage.
That was fun, incidentally. Makes me want to run this adventure I bought two years ago. Alas, the enemy of every campaign is the schedule.
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Either you send mega-goblins, or you send MORE goblins.
A lower level party might fight 3 goblins fair and square, so 4 levels later they confront 6 goblins and 2 lieutenants.
The idea that the same enemy stays a challenge despite the level increase is actually what I despise in D&D. My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?
My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?
I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat?
D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way.
D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight’s armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there’s decent odds. But he certainly won’t be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power.
Other systems are more deadly.
Personally, I don’t like the “these goblins can’t even touch me anymore” mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat
PF2e tries to have it both ways:
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If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit.
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If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss.
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Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit).
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Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail).
In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D.
But when you’re out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe not, and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it’s time to run.
Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.
Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it’s a pretty elegant system.
That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.
That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.
I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that
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That’s down to the GM in any system.
Ehh, not really. In D&D 3e-like games, a low level goblin that attacks at +4 can barely hit a mid level character with AC 30. You could have a thousand goblins, and they’d only hit on natural 20 (and for regular, non-crit damage).
What are some highlights that make you feel that way? I’ve never played.
Here’s my list:
- It scales very well from level 1-20. The math just works at all levels of play.
- 3 action rounds
- Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
- All of the classes are good, flavorful, and have interesting options
- Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
- Martial/Caster/Support balance
- Degrees of success/failure
- Easy, free access to the rules
- The ORC license
- https://pathbuilder2e.com/
- Pathfinder Society Organized play is well done and well supported by Paizo
- The rune system for magic weapons/armor
Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn’t have giant blank spots that you’re expected to fill in for a few levels. They’re switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn’t shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.
Great list. Totally agreed across the board, and I’d add that they just folded Starfinder into the PF2e engine, which means that it now has a ton more content for it (including some stuff that isn’t sci-fi exclusive).
I don’t know if I agree that all classes are good.
Oracle and Gunslinger have always (at least in my mind) seemed to be overly weak. Like, Gunslinger seems like if should be a high damage output class, but lack of Dex to Damage really seems to hinder him from being a hard hitter. Lol, not to mention, guns just feel really weak.
For Oracle, her curse seems a major downside without a compensating upside (at least until late levels; haven’t built one above lv 5).
I’d love to hear counterpoints of anyone has any.
To be clear, 95% agree with your takes though.
but lack of Dex to Damage really seems to hinder him from being a hard hitter.
This is offset by nearly every firearm having the lethal trait, where on a crit their damage dice increase in size and they get an addition damage die.
The class is built around crit-fishing, and it works well. Granted, it gets hard to reliably crit higher-level enemies, but that’s easily offset by the party working together
Wait, your party works together??
Wish mine did that.
I’m a gunslinger in one of the games I play in, and yeah, I don’t do barbarian numbers, but I hold my own, and it is a FUN class to play. I built a dual-wielder with the hopes that it would play like Han Solo running down the hallway shooting back at stormtroopers, and it delivers.
Plus, being 60 feet away means that I can help everyone do damage at once. It makes the party happy, too.
Re: oracle
Being a divine spontaneous caster fucks; your entire spell list is Heal if you need it, and literally anything else if you don’t. And trading a spell/day and slightly smaller repertoire for some extra durability is generally worth it in my experience.
Also Divine Access means you can pretty much pick whatever spells you want, and more as more gods come out or you and your GM make some more.
I liked the focus spells more back when battle oracles weren’t hit with the nerf bat and could literally just be the juggernaut whenever they got cursed
Two big things I love:
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Three action system: every “activity” (strike, stride, cast a spell, etc) has an action cost. On a standard turn, your character gets 3 actions to spend on those various activities. This obviates the need for DnD’s rules about spending a whole turn running since you can just spend multiple actions striding.
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Keyword system: PF2e leans more onto standardized keywords and uses them appropriately. Everything (all actions, weapons, items, even statuses) has a set of traits that (usually) briefly explains how the thing acts. It allows for standardized templates for interactions between different elements of the game. This takes a HUGE burden off the GM during game play, esp for modules that weren’t written to think about each other. All the examples I can think of would take several pages to explain, but you can look up some things on Easy Tools and see their traits.
Bonus thing I love: all the rules are openly published, leading to TONS of extra tools that just make the game easier to run. (That said you should buy a set of books to help the publishers after you’ve been converted).
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I think one of the biggest things, besides not being owned by WOTC, is that it doesn’t have a million exceptions you have to remember.
D&D5e: Want to use your bonus action? Cool. Is it for a spell? Have you cast a spell this round? Is it a spell that’s allowed to be cast even if you’ve cast a spell?
Pathfinder2e: Do you have enough actions to perform an action? OK, do it.
That does seem nice. One of the many reasons I DM 5e from a “does it make sense” perspective over a rules as written perspective.
Not OP but the top 3 for me are
- Martial - Caster balance
- 3 action economy
- A much better framework for GMs
As a GM i love the balance. Martial-caster balance is overall pretty good. Player options across the board seem fairly well balanced. And as a GM i love that the creatures/hazards are all balanced as well. They have this whole set of easy to use guidelines on how to build an encounter based on the party level and how challenging you want it to be. I don’t have to keep throwing monsters at the party to see what sticks, i can instead craft an encounter in a minute and know pretty darn well how tough it will be for the party. I cannot express to you how amazing that feels to take the guess work out of things. It makes my party going off the rails easier to manage because i can create fun and challenging encounters on the fly
That does seem like a big upside!
3 action economy for me, I also like that the rules are much clearer and more balanced to more play styles.
2e did the 5e thing of filing down a table top game to a video game.
Doesn’t help that we’ve got metric tons of content in the old system. Why retrofit what didn’t really need fixing? Just give me more APs.
It’s only a TTRPG if you can win it in character creation. Everything else is just sparkling video game.
Eh? It absolutely did not do that thing.
So first of all, if you like D&D 3.x or Pathfinder 1e, I’m glad! It’s a fun system. I have many great memories of amazing campaigns in that system, and I think it’s most important that you play the game you like. But I’ve been hearing this “video game” thing for half a decade now, which means I’ve got a whole big rant prepared. I’m…I’m sorry.
Ok. So. Yes, 5e filed off all of the stuff that was interesting, the big numbers that make people feel powerful, the stuff that made characters unique, etc. in its pursuit of making D&D like a video game. But Pathfinder went the opposite direction.
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You can make 238,140 mechanically distinct level two characters based on ancestry, class, and archetype alone (that’s not a random guess, I did the math); and while they won’t all have the same power level, they will all likely be able to contribute meaningfully. And that’s not even counting all the class-specific choices and options, or the other feats you could take. Paizo is six years into PF2e right now, and even though they had to waste a bunch of time dealing with WotC’s OGL nonsense, they’re up to nearly a quarter million different combinations; but 3.x didn’t get anywhere near that level of meaningful customization until Pathfinder debuted archetypes in the APG in 2010—a full decade after 3.0 came out.
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The 3-action economy is so much easier to play and explain than “wait, what’s a ‘swift’ action again?” (I’ve taught a seven-year-old how to play successfully), but it doesn’t feel like a video game like 5e does because there are actual, meaningful choices you can make with each of your three actions. While 5e (and 3.x before it) often devolves into “conga line of death” (surround the bad guy for flanking, whomp him with your biggest weapon twice per turn, don’t move because he’ll AOO you into powder), you can do essentially whatever you want with each of your three actions and make a difference.
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Plus, where 5e aimed at making things even more same-y with “bounded accuracy,” PF2e leaned into crits so hard that they had to lean into crit fails, too, in order to balance them. You can crit succeed and fail at skill checks, and the APs have rules for what happens when you do. Some weapons are built around crits, and they’re not a 1-in-20 chance anymore. You can do them quite often with the right build.
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As far as setting, the Forgotten Realms were probably interesting back when Greenwood came up with them, but putting a billion authors into the world has made it into the same bland, boring, Wal-Mart-Brand-Middle-Earth that Greyhawk was; but Golarion has something like three different continents for every possible type of fantasy setting you might want (that is a random guess, and probably an exaggeration).
And with the addition of Starfinder to the system a few weeks ago, all of that gets doubled or more.
Plus, it’s so much easier to run as a GM than the 3.x games were. I remember the first time I put a “hard” encounter together for PF2e. I looked at it and was like, “whoa, that can’t be right, I’m gonna have a TPK!” So I nerfed the encounter, and the players stomped it in two rounds. When I built an encounter the next week using the rules as written, it was a fun and dynamic encounter that lasted the entire session. One character went down. Everyone used their consumables and resources. It worked perfectly. Ever since, I trust that the encounter math knows what it’s talking about. When was the last time you were able to say that in 3.x?
Doesn’t help that we’ve got metric tons of content in the old system.
A lot of the really good stuff has been updated for the new system, either officially or by the community.
Why retrofit what didn’t really need fixing?
I mean…3.x was kind of janky. Yeah, it was better than AD&D, and yeah, it was awesome in its time, but it’s based on a 25-year-old system. People know a lot more about game design now, and it shows. Pathfinder 1e did noble work trying to make everything fit together, but they deployed a lot of duct tape over the nine years they were essentially “in charge of” the d20 system. When the “Pathfinder Unchained” classes came out, and you could see the difference between a modern approach and an original approach at the same table, it was like night and day. Some tables even banned Unchained classes because they would outshine the PHB/CRB classes, even though their damage output was still balanced.
I don’t think Pathfinder 2e is a perfect system. But it’s definitely better than the 3.x rules. That thing did, in fact, need fixing.
Just give me more APs.
They have! And they’re great! You just have to play PF2e, or convert them to your system, in order to play them. Or you can play third-party adventures, which are still coming out for PF1e/3.x as recently as yesterday.
Like I said, if you still like 3.x, I’m glad! Enjoy what you enjoy. I think it’s most important that people play the game they like at their tables. But 2e didn’t make it “video game-y.”
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Hey everyone has their preferences but these posts gatekeeping what’s called an ttrpg always confuse me. And I’m even more confused by choosing to call it a video game. But you do you. Pf1 wasn’t a fun system to me 🤷♂️
these posts gatekeeping what’s called an ttrpg always confuse me
This isn’t gatekeeping. This is authorial intent. The companies that produce these games have increasingly co-mingled their staff with video game studios, with a very intentional and explicit eye towards making the conversion to CRPGs easier.
Mechanics in the system that are fuzzy to implement in a video game environment get cut or edited into a numerical effect. Characters and monsters that exist or behave in ways that are difficult to conceptualize as a computer game get re-engineered. Non-combat features and more artistic roleplaying elements get beveled down. And the end result is a game that ports much more easily to a digital medium.
I don’t begrudge the studios for the transition, particularly given how much more money there is digital gaming. But when I’ve already got a stack of older edition books and mods and half-written home brews, there’s no rush to jump ship. Not when I’ve got my eye on an even older stack of Unknown Armies and 2e Mage: The Ascension books and I’m hoping to wrangle some players into a game that’s even more abstract and esoteric.
You’re probably right for D&D 5e 2024 (or whatever it’s being called). The main focus was the virtual table top subscription service. As the other commenter says though, this isn’t true for most other systems.
Also, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Table top inspired video games. It’s not bad for the influence to flow the other way too. It just needs to be considerate of the format.
As the other commenter says though, this isn’t true for most other systems.
It was true for 3.5. Nevermind 4e, which was a naked play to shoehorn D&D back into the then-lucrative war-gaming miniatures market.
Also, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s bad either. I just find it’s a design decision that shifts how the game is played.
You lose a lot of the more avant guard aspects of table top RPGs in favor of a ridge, easier to export system.
D&D is one system.
The companies that produce these games have increasingly co-mingled their staff with video game studios
Like who?
I mean, in the case of D&D, maybe. But PF2e was written by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Mark Seifter; they have a combined zero years of video game studio experience between them. In fact, most of them have been making tabletop RPGs for literally their entire professional careers, including stints at Wizards of the Coast.
For fun, I went to the Pathfinder wiki, which has brief profiles of all of the authors and contributors to Pathfinder; and I can’t find a single person on any of the game’s recent sourcebooks that has worked for a video game company before working for Paizo. In fact, most of them have worked for Paizo in some capacity for 5+ years, or are freelancers who have worked for big tabletop RPG publishers for ages.
Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?
Pf2e is a different system mechanically and setting wise than dnd 3.x, and this unfortunately got even worse with hasbro tried to flip the table on the OGL. That caused paizo to create their own irrevocable license and strip all ogl content from their future books now called pf2e remastered. I’m not sure your 3.x stuff would be of much use there without needing to convert things yourself.
But 3.x as i understand it was more closely aligned with pf1e. There might be some compatibility there but i never played 3.x or pf1 so I’m not sure
But… BUT… hear me out… all of the pf2e game rules, character options, and monster statblocks are available for free on archives of nethys, an official site so no high seas sailing.
Game setting info beyond some basic blurbs in those rulebooks are not published online for free, but those aren’t needed if you want to homebrew your own setting. Prewritten adventures also aren’t typically available for free, but a few are released from free rpgday . And they also have their version of adventuerers league (called pathfinder society) which you can get those adventures to run for free if you go through a participating game store (or convince a game store to participate).
All that is to say its pretty low risk to try it out.
And if you’re open to spending some money the beginner box is exceptional-- uses real rules and introduces rules to the GM and player when necessary. Available physical box, digital download, or in virtual tabletops
Game setting info beyond some basic blurbs in those rulebooks are not published online for free, but those aren’t needed if you want to homebrew your own setting.
There’s a caveat: there’s some extra character options in the APs, and not all of them are covered in Archives of Nethys. I had a new player join in on the Gatewalkers campaign I’m running and spent feats to pick up Verdant Core deviant abilities, which aren’t on the site.
Granted, the root cause was Pathbuilder not having any filter for which deviant feats a player can take, but not having it on Archives of Nethys or my physical copies of Dark Archive and Gatewalkers made it so much harder to unfuck
Oh, also, I don’t care about the setting. I don’t use Golarion anyway, because Forgotten Realms, Mystara, and Sigil exist.
3.x was not some perfect, untouchable version of the game rules. PF2e isn’t either, but acting like 3.x is this finely-tuned specimen of the game is ludicrous. That game was janky.
If you like the game (and I did!), that’s fine! If you like the jank (and I did not), that’s also fine. But don’t act like 2e isn’t worth your consideration just because it’s a different game. It sounds just as ridiculous as refusing to consider a SNES because you poured “all this money” into an NES. Just say “eh, I like what I’ve got, it’s enough for me” and move on.
I mean, that’s part of why I preferred the Sega & NEC ecosystems in the 16-bit era, and why I preferred the 3DO later, but never bought the full console (I did have the 3DO Blaster). With a Genesis (not a Nomad), you could use the Power Base Converter to play SMS games, plus if you wanted, there were the CD & 32x setups as well. If Sega had looked at the CD & 32x the way they did the Mark 2 & Mark 3/SMS, and hadn’t been so damn beholden to Yuji Naka, it would have been much better. Then again, if they had done the SG-1000 / SC-3000 thing with the Genesis, we could have had another PowerPC based OS in the world.
Plus, the SNES was initially planned with backwards compatibility, but they ripped it out late in development. So, why should I give them money? It’s not like Ninja Gaiden Trilogy plays so much better than the NES carts.
They ripped it out because their “backwards compatibility” was literally just grafting an NES to the SNES. I think it even had a toggle switch you had to flip between the two. It was going to make the thing cost tons of money and nobody was ever going to use it, and anyone who cared could just plug their old NES back in whenever they wanted to use it.
But the people who didn’t upgrade never got to play Star Fox. Man, I love Star Fox.
Personally speaking, I find Star Fox (and most on-rails shooters) incredibly boring. Visually for the time it’s impressive, but I’ll play Corncob on my PC or any of the Jane’s games because they provide more gameplay.
As far as “nobody was ever going to use it”, that’s incorrect (as the success of the Retron series shows). My parents among others were highly resistant to buying me any console because we were a PC family - Genesis was the only one I could get them to even budge on because it had access to a library of cheaper games in addition to the expensive stuff. Part of the reason I didn’t get a 7800 was because they’d picked the TRS-80 CoCo over the 2600 and we didn’t have the library of software at the ready. If they’d included an NES on a chip, and I could have convinced at least two of my friends to let me borrow their NES carts in addition to SNES stuff, I might have had a SNES.
It wouldn’t have been just an NES chip. It would’ve had to also include a separate PPU (in addition to the two already in the SNES), a NES cartridge I/O slot, a whole different video out architecture (the NES didn’t support composite out), and maybe more. Those are just the ones I know for sure.
Besides, the SNES was already going to cost significantly more than the Genesis. They were wary of widening that price gap still further when the owners of the older system still owned the older system and could easily plug it back in. Further, they were launching the SNES in North America with five launch titles and eight more on deck over the following month, with a total of thirty games coming out before that Christmas. I don’t think they were worried about having enough content for people to play on that new system.
What Nintendo was worried about is almost inconsequential compared to what American parents were worried about. And parents were very worried about the investment they’d made into games that still worked.
No, but it is much improved and streamlined
That’s the 4e & 5e sales pitch. No interest then.
Not really, PF2E is its own system that is in the D20 family but no longer directly compatible with 3.X. However, since encounter balancing is easy, if you want to convert 3.X adventures to PF2E the work is pretty simple.
First edition Pathfinder should be. Second edition is more like 5e, but actually thought out. I don’t think it’s natively compatible with D&D5e though.
Oh, 1e Pathfinder is basically 3.75. I have the core book and a few others somewhere, and I lost the 3-ring binder with the thread from the GitP forum laying out the major changes between 3.5 and PF, as well as conversions for books that didn’t exist for PF, and some of the Green Ronin stuff.
Yeah. I don’t think 1e is underrated, but I do think it’s over-hated. It’s the system I largely got started with for TTRPGs. It’s really not that difficult, but it does let you make things very complex.
I know why people went for D&D 5e over Pathfinder, but I think it should have been seen as an entry point, not the place you stay forever like it’s become for most people. It’s dumbed down, but also with you having to remember a lot of exceptions and things because they dumbed it down too much and tried adding things that didn’t fit exactly into the rules.
Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?
While technically the answer is “no”, people who emphasize the difference don’t apply the “Rule of Cool” as liberally as I did.
I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.
Sure, we absolutely shouldn’t just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.
But I didn’t find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.
Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn’t tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages “for good role playing” can scale an encounter’s challenge down.
If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw “Rule of Cool” at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.
I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.
I don’t mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don’t like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.
All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I’m not sure any of my players have ever noticed.
No
Then it’s totally useless to my interests or needs.
I responded separately but did want to point out this is a sunk cost fallacy. I.e. you said you wasted all this money on 3.5. That money is no longer relevant. The relevance is what you enjoy. If you enjoy 3.5 and don’t want to try anything else then that’s your cookie and you can eat it all you want. If you’re open to trying different things that might be better (or might not!) then the wasted money shouldnt be part of the equation
You’re probably right. But I prefer to play the games I’ve already got material and experience with. Though that may be because I tried Apocalypse World and Dungeon World after loving Dogs in the Vineyard, and dislike PbtA systems so much that I’ve gone out of my way to support K. N. Obaugh’s DOGS; and I’ve tried 5e. The only version I can tolerate of it is Black Hack. Shadowrun 6 sent me back to Anarchy, and there is no game that captures what GURPS 3 or Marvel FASERIP do.
I wish GURPS had taken off more.
I’m doing my part
I was curious about this some years back.
Are there any published materials on how to run a game in a GURPS system?
There’s literally a book called How to be a GURPS GM that’s a pretty good blend of system agnostic and GURPS specific advice. Additionally, Chris Normand has a pretty good Intro to GURPS video series on YouTube
GURPS Lite is available for free, and includes the basic rules on how to do things, combat, etc. It doesn’t include the introductory “What is a GM?” stuff to save space; though that does show up in the Basic Set. You can extrapolate quite a lot from just what’s in Lite - a lot of the stuff in even the Basic Set that’s not in Lite is corner cases (how far can I jump? What can I shift or drag, instead of lifting?), clarifications (how long does it take me to dig a hole?)… and lots more skills and abilities!
Mook has some very basic combat examples worked through here
In a little different vein, Feral Sword Wielding Wizard has some fight scenes from movies he’s gone through and labeled with GURPS combat maneuvers, so you can see how they work! (Just keep in mind this is with a bunch of optional rules!)
If you like Actual Play shows, the Film Reroll podcast plays exclusively in GURPS. They play a fairly light version of the rules, but still make custom mechanics for various settings that show how modular of a system it is.
The show takes the premise of a movie and plays it out as a roleplay campaign. My favorite is Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, in which the GM tells the players they’re playing an obscure teen romance from the 80s so that they wouldn’t know they were in a horror movie. I probably wouldn’t recommend that for a table, but the actors know to expect tricks and it works very well as entertainment.
Me as a changeling the dreaming main washing my hands of the dirty pathfinder main.
Did D&D polymorph into a faucet?
OSR: oh you guys are having uh, ill see myself out
Meanwhile, non D&D players are like: they’re the same picture.
