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I consider myself an RPG nerd, as in 20 years of continuous playing experience, but I don’t know much more about any of these rule sets than their name.
I played only 2 rulesets in all this time, mostly sticked to one, and only recently branched out to an alternative ruleset for the same world.
Hello rpg nerds!
If I want a very simple d20 combat ruleset, very easy to understand, what should I look into?
The problem is they’re sort of right, because the average person to show up in their nerd stores are also nerds. Just not necessarily ttrpg only nerds, I for one have played a few campaigns over the past 11 years and knows;
DND, pathfinder and Dagger heart. I’m that average person in the nerd store.
The average person on the street however, might have heard a podcast of people playing DnD, but not actually having played it themselves.
DND and Pathfinder however are sluggish machines spending too much time in battles and leaving too little focus for RP
Gonna be honest, I consider myself pretty into TTRPGs and even I don’t know what the deal is with Pathfinder. I looked at it when the first edition came out and it seemed like “D&D 3.75” so I didn’t see a reason to bother with it when I already had so many books for 3.x. I have heard the current edition is doing its own thing but haven’t bought the book to see what that thing is.
So first off, don’t take my word on it, without buying the book you can look up all the rules for free (and legally) at the Archives of Nethys (link to the Beginner’s Guide).
In short, while Pathfinder 1 is indeed “D&D3.75”, with some fixes to some elements that break in 3.5, it’s mostly more of the same and a lot of PF1e players use(d) 3.5 material to add to their games. It was still enjoyable like 3.5 but if you already own 3.5 stuff there’s no real point in changing outside of wanting to change (because of WOTC being asses or whatever). They also later brought Starfinder, which is mostly Pathfinder 1 in space, with a couple new rules (mostly Stamina as a secondary, easy-to-recuperate, second health bar). Quite enjoyable also.
Pathfinder 2e is pretty different, but also similar. As others mentions, everything is much tighter (“every +1 counts”, only 3 possible types of bonus), so you will not have munchkins breaking the game and forcing an arms race on the other players and the DM; and also, the encounter calculator works! As a DM, it’s much easier to prepare for. They kept the large customization core, which differentiates it the most from it’s main concurrent D&D5/5.5e, so you still have at least one choice at every level up, usually two. As a player, I really enjoy how you can make the same class/ancestry (race) combination feel very different. And there’s like 28 classes now. Technically even more since Starfinder 2e is also out and is mostly cross-compatible.
There are of course some weak points, and I’ll gladly expand upon them and any other points it if you’re interested. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in PF2e on both sides of the screen and consider it my TTRPG of choice currently, even as a 3.5 Grognard.
2e is well made, and if you read tabletop systems for fun it’s worth knowing in passing, but it’s not going to inform how you play other systems the way Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu might. Half the core book is conditions, traits, and spells.
I do encourage people interested in modern fantasy games to learn it to play it. For gamers who want crunch I much prefer it to 5e. Paizo’s #2 for a reason.
That’s the whole point. Pathfinder’s origin is a collaboration of people looking at DnD4 and thinking “we can do better”… And for quite some time they were right as DnD’s 4th edition was really that unpopular.
Thats not quite right - PF as much originated in 4e existing at all, as 3.x was promised to be the definitive system you could use forever (admittedly this was never going to be true) and 4e dropped the OGL, so Paizo, which includes some of the original OGL writers and 3.x designers, could no longer produce materials for it.
It was only when they were designing 2e that they looked at 4e and decided they could do better, taking many of the underlying mechanics and combining them with 3.x’s range of choice.
As far as I know, Pathfinder 1E was a continuation of D&D 3.5 after they moved on to D&D 4E. I think Pathfinder 1E is compatible with D&D 3.5, but don’t quote me on that. Pathfinder 2E is a much more tightly balanced system, and is probably best for its 4 degrees of success, where 10 over a DC is a critical success and 10 under is a critical failure.
Also, Pathfinder has way more options to customize your character as you level up compared to D&D 5E.
Pathfinder 1e was compatible with 3.5e in practice; my group based everything out of Pathfinder books and sprinkled 3.5e in occasionally.
2e’s four degrees of success/failure and the three action system codify the sorts of things 5e players always seem to want to squeeze into the D&D rules. The three action economy takes a few minutes to learn and then removes a lot of back and forth negotiation. Say a player wants to untangle a rope, swing on it past the chandelier, and kick a target in the head in one turn.
When I played 5e it often seemed to go like this: “Is freeing the rope from its anchor my action? I wanted to attack at the end. Is swinging my action, like a dash? Do I need to use my movement, or is the rope doing the moving, I feel like the rope would make me faster and I want to move after I land. I have multiple attacks, so after I drop the first one I’m going to move to the next enemy and attack. Wait, can I use my bonus action now?”
It’s not even necessarily that a DM is a killjoy, most of the time they let players do little extra stuff, it’s just that it kind of has to be discussed.
In Pathfinder, easy. That’s three actions. Grab, swing, attack. Next player’s turn.
Purely customization. Long-term players of 3.5 started doing wacky multi-class combos to make their character more unique. WOTC chose to keep it simple with 4th ed and i think successfully streamlined the rules in 5th. Pathfinder chose to add greater customization to each player class so that while multiclassing is still an option, a straight class PC can still be quite distinct.
Honestly, as someone who was all for a new contender in the rpg crawl/slog category, PF 1.0 certainly seemed like D&D 3.75. (and it didn’t hurt that a number of OGs had left D&D to help launch it.)
Apparently, many felt that it was better at D&D than even D&D at the time, though I’ve since become an indifferent fan of it at best.
Same slog, same crunch, same vast array of “options” without much in the way of lowering the myriad barriers to entry, etc. Meh.
Good thing now there’s Daggerheart, Blades in the Dark, Powered by the Apocalypse, Worlds/Stars Without Number, et al! 🤩🤘🏼
I mean, that was the intention. It was designed specifically for the 3.5 people to have more 3.5 to play after WotC decided to move on to 4th edition. That was the entire goal. There was also a big OGL scandal because WotC was trying to make an proprietary in-house VTT with 4e’s rules coded into it, and as such they needed the rules to be legally Theirs. Paizo was in a place to take advantage of that misstep, and so they did.
Oh, believe you me, I was there on the front lines, fighting the good fight from GenCon to PAXW. Fuck WotC and their OGL fuckery —and the fetid spunk mephit that is “4.0” doesn’t even come close to the flagrant fraud they were trying for. We’re in agreement, yep.
