Tabletop Dungeon Gaming

My "truth" in gaming is the same as when my brother and I played D&D 4E. The search for that "perfect" dungeon tabletop game. We loved D&D 4E's tactical dungeon chess gameplay. The game blew up at the 10th level, just like anything else Wizards makes. The monsters were bags of hit points, and once the characters locked in on turn-denial mechanics, they were helpless as the players beat them down.

My art, not AI

One combat we had lasted more than sixty turns, most of them spent knocking a "plant creature" boss monster over, beating on him, and repeating the next turn. Sometimes, they wouldn't knock the beast over, and a few attacks landed, but it wasn't often. We watched the game break in real-time before our eyes, and the "illusion" was over. We quit 4E soon after.

The game failed us.

We saw 5E coming a mile away, and this was D&D 4E's Essentials line as the driving design theory of "back to basics" - but it wasn't back to basics. 5E abandoned the tabletop play we loved for story gaming. When Tasha's came out, the game changed again with silly, tacked-on mechanics, and we lost interest. I gave 5E two or three chances in the last few years and even Open 5E, but it is still all the same game.

This is soft, theater of the mind, multiple action type, interrupt-based gameplay. D&D 5E sucks for DMs. You play this solo, and your player side is having fun, while your DM side dreads the next session and just wants the campaign to end, so the pain stops.

And Pathfinder 2E killed the Open 5E clones 5 years ago, and the OGL fiasco nailed the coffin shut. Pathfinder 2E is exclusively map-based, and I gave this another look after returning to D&D 3.5E to cleanse my palette of "modern gaming" and rediscover a game built for the tabletop first. Pathfinder 2E works; it was tested, the exploits are very rare, and the game works from level one to twenty.

It delivers on the promise.

I prefer D&D 3.5E to any version of D&D that came after it. This is still "true D&D" built for that tabletop ideal. The book has battle maps and examples of movement and cover, and the manual sometimes resembles a wargame ruleset. This is good, "true to D&D" gaming. If you are not "proving your build on the table," you are just "theory gaming" and playing a story game.

D&D 3.5E has the last, best, first-party content produced for all the classic TSR settings; Greyhawk, the Realms, Dragonlance, and Eberron are all there. You have world-specific character options. You have real gazetteers. You have on-the-table miniatures rules. This is the last "real" edition of D&D.

Oh, and it is also broken past level 10.

When D&D 4E came out, they leaned into the tabletop rules and wargaming part, which we enjoyed. But they changed the game too much. The math could have been better. Something needed to be done right, and the game became endless stacked +1 to +6 magic-item charts, with a few of the thousands of options being any good from that sea of garbage choices.

Pathfinder 1e put a bandage on the bleeding and kept D&D 3.5E alive for the next 10 years. My brother did not like this game, but I embraced it. This was "true D&D" to me since it kept the embrace of tabletop play alive and all the adventures shipped with battle mats. You were still expected to play "on the table" and "prove your build."

Pathfinder 1e suffered from the broken nature of D&D's high-level play. The game became complicated and slow past level ten. It wasn't worth playing at the high levels.

I still liked D&D 3.5E, if not for its different focus, which was more on tabletop play and less on adventure paths. D&D 3.5E still felt like the "random dungeon game" with skills made for dungeon exploration. The outside world was a little less critical, and that was cool. The wealth of world-specific material was also a reason to love D&D 3.5E.

Pathfinder 1e was less broken past level 10, but there were still so many exploits and cheese builds. They inherited a flawed system and did the best they could, and this is still one of my S-Tier games.

I like Pathfinder 1e for Golarion and 3.5E-era gaming. I still like D&D 3.5E for the TSR worlds. They are the same game, but they have different goals and feelings.

GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy are in here, too; this is a fun, realism-based, hex-grid tabletop combat game. You can still get that "tabletop tactical gaming" hit from this game, too, so it remains on my most-played shelves. It is not a "level game" but simulates a level 3 to 9 run versus relatively reality-based monsters in that range. You get a lot of great character designs and tactical crunch, but there are still exploits.

OSRIC will last; this is and isn't in the tabletop tactical gaming genre. It isn't as profoundly detailed and tactical, nor are the character builds affecting the map too much. A wider variety of options needs to be added. But it is another S-Tier game, possibly the best of all time. This is a far better choice if you are content playing "theater of the mind" with 5E. This beats any rules-light dungeon game and gives you enough detail and depth to satisfy.

So, with the Humble Bundle of PDFs, I am reading the Pathfinder 2E Remaster. I bounced off this game hard the first time I tried to learn it, and the original 2E book having so much in it did not help. There was no way I was learning twelve classes, not with a few of them being conceptually complex, like an alchemist. There was way too much information in the first book, and it was too big, there was too much in it; the information seemed like a wall to climb and I needed help to get over the learning curve.

My original Beginner Box had a terribly biased D20 that would not roll above a 6. I would go 7-8 rolls in a row, averaging 5. I know that is a silly reason to quit learning a game, but I put that mountain of information to sort through after dealing with this horrible die, and it seemed like it was not worth the effort. I know, I have plenty of d20s. But, at the time, Open 5E was hitting its stride and attempting a take-off, which never happened. I needed to see the hype and promise of Open 5E. When I saw Open 5E failing to gain traction, the Pathfinder 2E remaster was announced, so I held off for a year to let the game settle and the errata to sort out.

The goal is to return to the tabletop, figures, and tactical play. Story gaming is something that I play solo, and it feels meaningless to me. Putting a map down, a bunch of monsters, and playing each side to their best? That means something. There is a winner and a loser, and how I build characters affects the result.

Playing on a map with figures feels real.

Pathfinder 2E, with the remastered books, is getting another look.