Design Room: Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide

Hello again! Today we are doing a Design Room breakdown on the Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide. This is not a traditional review, as you can go to the Paizo or Amazon sites and get plenty of those. Instead, we will be breaking this book down from a game design standpoint and discussing related issues with campaign and world design. We will start by covering the basics.

Again, Paizo puts out a beautiful book, a full color 258 page monster of a tome. I will always say, Paizo is the sports team that spends the big bucks, gets the best talent, and they are just a joy to watch deliver. The book is full of new options for existing races, new core races, new alternate races, and a race builder that is the star of the show - more on that later. Art, layout, and content are all playoff quality, as usual.

It is an impressive addition, and very useful in play. I wouldn't say this is an essential book to play with (like the NPC Codex is), as the races in the core rulebook are great and good enough for most every player. If you are a fan of alternate PC races, this book is for you. It really breaks down on you view of fantasy, and how you see the world.

The Creature Cantina

Some people see fantasy as the intersection of the basic D&D races: Humans, Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. This is your pretty typical Lord of the Rings model for a fantasy world, and it works well no matter what rules system you follow. There could be other races in the world, but there is a distinct deemphasis on their importance in the world. The rule is, if the world can exist without them, they are a minor race.

As an example, compare Dark elves in D&D and Warhammer fantasy. Dark Elves in D&D are a minor race, the world can exist without them. Dark elves in Warhammer are a core part of the world, and they are a major player in everything from battles to Chaos magic. In our D&D world, in most cases, you could do without dark elves a lot easier than you could do without normal elves.

The problem with minor races is that they start to feel like those tack-on latex-mask races that appear weekly in shows like Star Trek, or the mess of races in the Star Wars Creature Cantina. Admittedly, Star Wars is doing a better job nowadays integrating and raising the importance of its core races, with the standardization of the big players in games like the new Star Wars MMO. With a plethora of minor races, they begin to feel like 'guest stars' in the game, and they become a bit more difficult to relate to. It is easy to see the problems a dwarf would have traveling through elven lands, but a kenku or a merman?

The Melting Pot

The Forgotten Realms in D&D3.x was notorious for its subraces, and the Advanced Race Guide gives you subraces in spades. In FR, there were a Baskin Robbins amount of elf flavors, moon elves, star elves, sand elves, sea elves, wood elves, and if I looked hard enough you could probably find stone elves and storm elves. The Advanced Race Guide does not go that far with subtypes, they prefer to differentriate with swappable racial traits, a couple new subtypes, favored class options, and new racial archetypes. It is a good balance of making a race different without creating a new ice cream flavor out of them. Paizo chose to go the 'this is an elf, but with this type of background' style of race design. It is a good choice, and keeps elves as a whole able to relate to each other better.

In a game design sense, you need to be careful of creating too many racial subtypes. You have to balance the fantasy trope of 'oh, there is a cool new race that lives here' with 'oh boy, another derivative flavor of the week race - enough already.' Too many racial subtypes and all of a sudden they are not special, and the original race becomes plain and boring. In the Forgotten Realms, who wanted to play a normal vanilla elf, when there were so many cool subtypes to choose from? Too much of a good thing is a problem.

The Drow in a Human's World

We bring up the specter of Drizzt Do'Urden here, and a PC choosing a race that obviously has problems even walking in the normal LotR style world. Admittedly, D&D4 does a good job with this, with dragonmen, tieflings, and even minotaurs being normal members of society. This is a reason why D&D4 felt so strange to many people, it adopted the Star Wars mixing pot model, and elevated minor races to major players. Nerrath was a fun mixing pot, where a half-giant could be the king, with a tiefling paladin and dragonman court mage working side by side.

With a normal world with the major four races, the drow PC all of a sudden doesn't fit in. This goes the same for aasimars, cat people, goblins, and even half-orcs and the like. I have been in a couple games where choosing a half-orc meant you were ostracized from the group, and you did not get as much play or RP time. It takes a skilled referee to incorporate race choices to a game, or be forward enough to tell players to stick to a subset of races when designing characters. It's okay if you want to do this, and actually helpful - if your vision of the world does not include a player's race choice, you will marginalize that PC subconsciously.

The Far Outs

"But I want to play a gray alien in your 1920's Gangsters game!" Another issue that comes up is the player that wants to play something so far out there it is difficult for them to even relate to the world. Two things can happen: either they become an ignored third wheel in the group, or the entire game centers around them and their wacky misadventures in a world that doesn't accept them. Either way, it's not a good thing. We have had this happen a couple times in our games, and a race guide gives players seeking this sort of attention a lot of ammo to use. I will be frank, I don't like it when race choice becomes a popularity contest. I guess you have to bring it up, since the selection of character race in a carefully crafted world is an important choice, and it can be used to disrupt a game.

There are good sides to 'far out' race selections, otherwise, we wouldn't have the Chewbaccas of the world, and everything would be bog-standard. It depends a lot on the group, theme of the game, and the game world. There is no better answer to talk it out beforehand, before anyone gets set on a particular choice. As a player, you need to feel out what is acceptable, bounce character ideas off the referee, and make sure other players in the group are thinking along the same lines. Selecting a far out choice can work, and not everyone in the group can be one as well.

No LotR Races?

Another fascinating use of the book comes with the Race Builder chapter, and creating campaign worlds. Here is a cool exercise, create a game world using five races. None can be one of the standard four (human, dwarf, elf, or halfling), and one race must play the bad guy. Now try to come up with a story for this world. It is a fun exercise, and it gets you out of Golarion for a while. You could come up with a world full of gnolls, kenku, cat-people, and frog-people - with demonic yeti-men as the enemies. This type of world design forces players out of their comfort zones, and can create a memorable short campaign full of new worlds, savage enemies, and plenty of pulp excitement. It is a favorite game of mine, and a model I used for my interpretation of Golarion's Jade Regent expansion.

My Jade Regent - Races of the Zodiac

To shake up MY Golarion, I reinterpreted the Jade Regent expansion using the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. I used the Advanced Race Guide to design each race, and thrust the players into a savage land where humans are the deposed rulers of the mighty Empire of the Zodiac (the Empress). The land has the following races:

• Ratmen - evil aligned until the tide turned
• Minotaurs (Ox)
• Tigermen - good aligned and used as slaves
• Rabbitkin - neutral
• Dragonmen - initially evil, were turned to good
• Yuan-Ti (snake) - evil
• Horsemen - neutral leaning good
• Goatmen - evil
• Intelligent Monkeys - good, and a fun one to play
• Kenku (rooster) - evil initially
• Wolfmen (dog) - neutral, turned to good
• Pigmen - evil

Granted, that is a lot of races, but not all of them were allied on one side. Some of them were demon-aligned, others persecuted, and others tried to remain neutral. A couple other races made their way in as bad guys, such as demonmen, ravenmen, ghost people (haunts), and a couple other evil-aligned critters. It was a fun game that threw characters out of their element, and forced them to roleplay and think about the nature of the race they dealt with. The goal was to unite the Zodiac's races and put the Empress back on the throne. This game is still going on since it is quite epic and sweeping.

I admit, it also seemed kind of like furry-friendly roleplaying; but hey, it was and still is cool, even if it seems slightly anthropomorphic. This is a great example of using the Advanced Race guide to create a campaign world, or spruce up a part of it you felt was lacking in variety and excitement. I could have done this with less races, but this is the Zodiac, so it was a cool metaphor to use for the conflict.

Overall

The Advanced Race Guide is indispensable for the creative GM world builder. It also allows you to get out of Golarion for a while, and create interesting one-shot worlds with an eclectic mix of races that are out of the ordinary. Sometimes, you need to mix things up and shake up perceptions. For players, this is primarily an options book for character creation, with a big 'check with your group' string attached. Where it shines are in building areas of the world or entirely new ones, and it breaks up the standard collection of fantasy races with a bunch of new kids on the block. Highly recommended for referees, a good buy for players looking for something different.

Design Room: Pathfinder NPC Codex

Serious games need serious supplements, and today we will be doing a design tear down of Pathfinder's NPC Codex. Note that this is not a normal review, there are plenty of those on Amazon and Paizo's site. What we will be doing today is breaking down a game or rulebook on design terms, and bringing up issues associated with game design and theory.

General
We are looking at a hefty 320 page book, with over 300 NPCs, the Pathfinder iconics statted out at various levels, animal companions, and a lot more. It's a nice book, lavishly illustrated, with a ton of useful info. I am more happy with this book than the Equipment Guide, but then again, I like character books, since they give me personalities to fill the world with (in the design and theme of the world's creators).

The NPCs have level-appropriate gear, and this is folded into the stats, which is nice, and makes the NPCs 'pull of the shelf' and useable. Only classes from the core rulebook are included, which is good, since if all you play with is core, you don't have things you can't use. This also opens up a Codex 2 and 3, with expansion book classes, which honestly, I wouldn't mind. From a design standpoint, including only core classes and races is fine with me, since it creates no dependencies on other books, and people not interested in ninjas and gunslingers don't have stuff they can't use. My bookshelf and backpack may complain, but hey, that's why they sell PDFs.

The NPCs are designed with a specific race for each, but it not too hard to swap those out with another race, different gear, or new feats and powers. If you play like we like to, and drop PCs into a 1-20 world, this book will be a very valuable addition to your Pathfinder arsenal of referee tools. In most cases, a nice piece of art is given, along with a sample character write-up of a personality in the world. This is a very nice touch, and I love to see the creativity in these designs and backgrounds. This is almost the next best thing to getting 300 new iconic characters, and plenty of drop-in personalities for your campaign words. Top notch, and thank you Paizo.

Tactics
Another big plus to this book is they give sample tactics for each NPC in combat. Monster tactics started way back in D&D2, when monster complexity started to creep up, and the monster manuals started adding tactics sections in the monster stat blocks. This continued in D&D3, and started to include things like feats, special powers, resistances, and a bunch of other stuff. Monster complexity in both D&D3.5/PF and D&D4 is up there, and referees need to pay attention to these blocks, or the monster (as designed) fizzles out in combat when it should have been special and memorable.

I am mixed about needing tactics blocks in games. In one case, I am happy to have them. In another, I feel it is a symptom of a complex game where someone needs to lay out things that should be readily apparent to those using the monsters. It is almost as if referees need 'monster training' and the tactics block is a way for that to happen. In many games, and most OGL old-school games, they don't need this, and what monsters can do is simple and apparent. Again, Pathfinder is a complex game, and this help is appreciated. Your taste and complexity tolerance may vary, but the goods outweigh the bads here.

Complexity
I can't review an NPC book without making a comment on character complexity. The sheer number of options, gear, builds, and equipment available in Pathfinder, along with the long list of skills and feats, makes higher-level characters quite complex. This comes with the territory, if you play Pathfinder, you are looking for that complexity, so it isn't a bad thing. Since OGL alternatives exist with simpler characters, you can play those. Pathfinder is a cleaned-up 3.5E, so the characters can grow to be quite large in terms of character sheets and power blocks. This leads to large entries in the book, which can slow down reference during play. Myself, I prefer simple characters and powers without the need to reference secondary books, but the NPC Codex does a good job of trying to make the characters easy to play, which is a plus.

Another design thought. The game ends up needing a book like this just to give referees and idea of power level of all the characters in the game. This is an important point - up until now, it was hard to judge power level without a computer program to generate NPCs or NPCs from modules or supplements. This book is invaluable for designing adventures and doing dry runs of combats, since pretty well designed standard templates exist across many character levels. Some community-created standards existed (if you know where to look), but none to this level of completeness and coverage.

Build Optimization
I should note that some of the more experienced character designers are starting to critique some of the builds. It is understandable, but I am of the feeling that not every build needs to be hyper-optimized. If you wanted to, you could tweak them yourself, swap ability scores, or use your favorite mix-max adjustments. For most people, I feel that the scores given are good enough, and reflect average NPCs, not hyper-optimized ones. In fact, I'd prefer average, and make the tweaks myself.

Ideas
The NPC Codex is just brimming with ideas. Do not discount this! NPC after NPC, the designers chose to include a wide variety of 'slices of life' throughout the book, giving you infernal champions, cave stalkers, and tons of other fun ideas for opponents, cultures, locations, and parts of the Golarion game world. You can crack the book open, find a NPC, and design an adventure just around the ideas presented there. They give a good overview of many different specific character types, and fit these into the world quite skillfully. Without these, the book would have less value, since page after page of bland character stats has been done before, and frankly any computer can do this. Taking the world and meshing it with character designs, along with a little bit of color and background, makes this a greatly useful book.

Comparisons With D&D4

Ben, "I felt a great disturbance, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in anger. I fear something terrible has happened."
Luke, "What happened, Wizards release another NPC guide for the Realms?"

But seriously, this is a major difference between Pathfinder and D&D4 - how the games treat NPCs. In D&D4, most NPCs are really supposed to be designed as monsters with the standard monster stat-block, 'hero' classes do not exist outside of the PCs and a select few NPCs. In Pathfinder, everyone follows the same rules, and monsters are statted realistically. You can even take a bobcat, make it semi-intelligent, and give it a couple levels of ranger if you want. You just need to do the math (D&D4 wins on simplicity of monster design).

Like Ben and Luke mention, there seems to be an outright hostility to powerful NPCs in D&D4 and all the official D&D campaign worlds (compared to previous editions). We are talking design here, and this is an important point. D&D4 is designed to encourage that the PCs are the only major heroes in the world, and everything else is a monster class. Later modules and adventures may contradict this, but the flavor of the original books is pretty clear. This even extends into D&D4's world sourcebooks, where it is very hard to find stat blocks for powerful friendly NPCs. A decision was likely made that 'powerful friendly NPCs ruin the experience' so they are discouraged and even written away in the guides. In D&D4, the PCs are the heroes - and the game is designed around that.

Is this a good thing, design wise? Possibly, since there was a supposed sentiment that the 'Realms was unfun to play in' because of powerful NPCs. Eliminating all powerful friendly NPCs from your source material is one way to fix this, and put the emphasis back on the PCs. It seems a bit heavy handed to me though, and not really the way I like to play. I like a world full of powerful good, neutral, and hostile NPCs - with no one possessing plot immunity. Powerful NPCs can fall, be replaced, or disappear like anyone else - a giant soap opera of characters interacting, coming, and going as the referee desires.

Pathfinder is different - the world is supposed to be filled with powerful NPCs, since that is how the world works. How many of them are 'friendly' and how active they are are up to you, having the level 20 paladin "Horace the Honorable" ride in and save the day every time for the PCs is really bad refereeing, and not really a design failure. D&D4's elimination of powerful allies in the game world is a design solution to a supposedly common refereeing mistake. Again, the design of Pathfinder is different, and continues the D&D3.5 treatment of NPCs - everyone is equal, and the referee is responsible for balance and smart use of them. I like D&D4's focus on the heroes, but I don't really like it forced in the game material I buy - this is personal preference that crosses over into the design realm.

Quality
Paizo is like the pro-sports team that pays big money, and consistently gets the great players who make incredible plays. The quality level in this book puts many games to shame, with full color pages, glorious artwork, interesting writing and flavor, and a sharp attention to detail. This high quality level can take an average release, such as the Equipment Guide, and knock it into the win column, just through presentation and detail alone. The NPC Codex is an example of a great release knocked into the stratosphere by quality and attention to detail.

This is another important design consideration - quality matters. Just one bad piece of art can sink your product (ask us), and maintaining a 100% devotion to quality in art, text, and content really pays off. If you have a choice between releasing your game now, or spending that extra time polishing art, text, rules, and layout - spend the extra time. You will be on the shelf next to these guys, and you literally want to bring your best game.

Overall
I like the NPC Codex, and design-wise, it is a solid book that I wish would have came out earlier. The way we play, this is an essential book. Highly recommended if you play Pathfinder, and even worth a look if you don't. You could pull ideas for hundreds of NPCs, enemies, and other characters from this book - and even possibly a new PC or two. This is a solid design, with a number of extra design elements hidden in the mix to make the book a lot more useful and fun. You can buy a PDF too to save you shelf space, and give your iPad or Android tablet a workout, and your shelf a respite. Overall, 5 out of 5 stars.