Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Pathfinder 1e: Still Great

I did a test play of Pathfinder 1e last night, pulling my books out of the closet, and it still works great. I have a full set of Hero Lab Pathfinder 1e modules, and it makes character creation and inventory management so easy. With two shelves of Pathfinder 1e books, I have a lot to choose from and game with.

The variety of characters you can build too is mind-blowing. When you see all your options open up in Hero Lab, you can literally design anything you can dream of. I can make a silver dragon monk. I can make a zombie barbarian (creature template). I can make a wolf bloodrager. A succubus bard. I can mod characters to include thousands of possible changes, powers, additions, and special features. Is any of it balanced like Pathfinder 2E? Heck no, but it is fun.

Yes, Hero Lab is expensive. But very worth it.

The system itself is your typical 3E game, and it works well for the RP stuff and light combat. If you are not power gaming, and just sort of "sim-ing" a character as you adventure, it produces great results. Did I use survival skills last session? Yes! If I level up, I can add a level to it. Did I take more damage than apply skills? If so, the favored class bonus is +1 hit point this time.

Characters can acquire corruption and insanity. The more you buy and unlock in Hero Lab, the better it gets. The basic books work well, but there is a lot of depth here when you start adding third-party material and extra core rulebooks. Most of it is likely unbalanced, but all of it is fun.

The only slow parts are combat, and making sure you obey all the rules for creatures, special attacks and defenses, and conditions. I had a fight with a giant crab, and that crab got a grapple in, and that made me bust out my copy of SORD PF to work out what happens.

SORD PF is still a great reference guide, and you can quickly lookup a condition, special attack, or any other combat-related action and get it resolved by the rules quickly and correctly. With this, I still had no problems with combat, other than the typical "getting back into it" time needed.

If you are looking for a "full experience 3E game" Pathfinder 1e is still it.

The splat-books and third-party material are like walking into a hobby store that has everything. Pathfinder 2E feels still too young to support the diverse options in the game compared to this, and I have a feeling D&D 5E is attracting all the attention these days.


Traditional Skills vs. Unified

Compared to Castles & Crusades, there is not a unified save and skill system happening here. You have your 3E standards, the fort-ref-will saves, and a list of skills you can customize. My cleric is still a potato when it comes to avoiding traps, but she has a lot of other very cool abilities almost no game on the market today can simulate.

And my level 1 character does not feel as stuck in a rut with those 18+ secondary abilities. I know, just take DEX as a primary, and your heroic aspirations shall be fulfilled. But I just don't want to swap primaries around and suck at something else. I have a set idea for her primaries: CON-WIS-CHR.

Why did I feel she was a trap-triggering potato and why did that upset me so much in C&C? In a simpler system, I have higher expectations of someone being a hero. The abilities are not defined, so in my mind, I tend to go all "fantasy art" pulp sort of cleric in chainmail jumping across the chasm as dragons snap at her heels. That is what I see in my mind because there are no obvious statistics telling me I can't.

And in B/X, since you can do straight ability checks, even with chainmail on, you CAN have that.

With a more sim-oriented system such as Pathfinder 1e, I see my weaknesses presented front-and-center. Wearing chainmail, huh? That's 40 pounds, and the weight keeps piling on. A -5 armor check penalty to DEX and STR skills, and encumbrance stacks on top of that (with her backpack she gets an extra -3). DEX bonus is limited to +2. Even with an STR of 14, she is just getting by, and she already wants a mount.

Those numbers I see and understand. This feels like some "hyper-realism" mod in Skyrim. Yeah, I am paying a real price for that chainmail and it's +6 AC. In C&C it is 4 encumbrance value against her light load limit of 16, and there are no penalties to any saves for wearing it, and she never really suffered from encumbrance despite her similar stats.

The armor stats are there for me to see. She gave up chasm jumping for armor. I can't short-circuit that by taking DEX as a primary or hand-waving a DEX ability roll in B/X. What does this tell me? Go roleplay, find a thief, have them jump to the chasm, and both your party roles are protected. Yes, pulp-adventure systems are fun. But if I am going old-school this cleric is going to be my off-tank healer, and I am now looking for a lightly-armored movement and skilled task specialist to fill a role.


Encumbrance Differences

Pathfinder 2 goes the C&C route and uses an abstract "bulk" system (and it penalizes movement less than B/X). In Old School Essentials and Labyrinth Lord, your base move is 90' in light armor, and everyone is limited to the same 1600 coin (160 pounds) maximum. AD&D was the first game that really started adjusting carrying capacity for strength, so if you want to play a "by the pound" gear game then AD&D or 3E/Pathfinder 1e are your best bets.

This could be a whole article, I know.

This is why it was so hard for me to jump to Pathfinder 2. It felt too soft on the old-school mechanics and went with modern abstract encumbrance systems. Character builds took a front seat and everything else felt simplified.

Yes, in the old days we tracked to the pound and figured out the weight of the containers we were carrying. Not everybody likes that, but Hero Lab makes that sort of tracking and management trivial. The funny thing is, "track weights to the pound" is what real-life campers and hikers do, trim the excess borders off maps, get rid of packaging on supplies, keep looking for lighter versions of gear, take only what they need, and it adds up. One hiker's pack is ten pounds lighter than the others with the same stuff and everyone wonders why.


Hero Lab = Easy Mode

The equipment management in Hero Lab makes buying, equipping, and managing equipment almost too easy. It is faster for me to play Pathfinder and use hero lab than it is to sort through a list of B/X gear and write it all down. You can play the "gear game" here quite nicely, and place stuff in a backpack to drop during combat to lighten your load.

Journal management is another huge plus. If you use the tab they gave you, you can record your entire career here and have a character history on your sheet.

One of the strange problems is with a computerized system it is way easier to track and manage inventory. I get the feeling playing Pathfinder is easier for me, despite the complex combat rules, just because if I had to play with pen-and-paper I would be playing games with simplified encumbrance. I get it, but a part of me loves this old-school experience (even in a 3E game) and I actually crave it.

And Hero Lab enables me. Part of me feels if I bought into Hero Lab for Pathfinder 2 I would be more positive about that game, but I love my detailed encumbrance and old-school unbalanced feeling.


AD&D?

For AD&D feeling adventures? Kinda-sorta. It does give me that classic old-school feeling, but it is not B/X or AD&D. It works though if you can stomach the combat, and it can be very survival-oriented and realistic if you want it to be. To me, this does hit that AD&D sweet spot in feeling. The low-level game is there, and the gear management is good (with Hero Lab). Where AD&D had complexity in the lists of modifiers you had to write down, this game requires a computerized design tool to assist in designing (and validating) your character.

There is another bit of complexity around combat.

Once you master those two areas, the game just works like a well-oiled machine. You have real options in combat. You have powers that give you even more options. Your feat choices matter. You don't have to make optimized picks, and I am staying away from the "gimmies" like Improved Initiative unless it is really part of a character build and concept. You got to have some maturity to not pick the most optimized picks here, and if you do you will end up with characters who are less optimized, but they feel organic and real.

I honestly play this like Skyrim and just pick powers, feats, skills, and other abilities like "this is what I did the last session, so I can improve that area when I level up." None of it is optimized, but the character is coming out feeling like a real person with a history.

Despite all the incredible options out there, B/X, 3E variants, AD&D clones, D&D 5, Pathfinder 2e - the Pathfinder 1e game still delivers a great experience.

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