Why Should I Play Pathfinder?

Our d20 tabletop game of choice is Pathfinder.  Pathfinder is built on Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.  We used to play 3.5.  People play D&D campaigns for a variety of reasons.  We feel like Pathfinder gives us the best outlet for the way we like to play.  Some people play to see who can come up with the most overpowered characters.  Some people play to try to create a space to role-play.  Some people want to be immersed in the story and the world that the dungeon master creates.  Some dungeon masters want to do everything they can to kill their players with other creatures of the right level.  Some people treat it as a challenge to try to see if they can mix classes or races that probably would not have existed.  There are many expansions that create different worlds like Eberron, X-Crawl, and my favorite, Forgotten Realms.  Some of them are made by Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of Dungeons and Dragons, and some of them are made by third parties to work with the D&D class system.  We found Pathfinder worked best for us, and these are the reasons why.

Many of the players in our normal group have been playing for decades.  Two of them used to play adventures over the phone when they couldn’t get together.  We do not play very many pre-planned adventures because one of us almost always wants to DM.  We have We play because we like exploring the world that has been created.  I personally like making my DM think on their feet.  I get distracted by shiny things and go off exploring dead ends sometimes.  My husband does not like entertaining these ideas, mostly because he thinks I’m just doing it to be a pain in his butt, but some of our DM’s through the years have created whole new areas and adventures completely accidentally because of players getting into things they shouldn’t.

When we play, our goal is to make the game fun for everyone playing.  We want it to be challenging, and immersive, and we try not to kill characters, though everything has consequences.  If you’re a monkey, and you jump into a barrel, chances are bad things are going to happen.  We have house rules, as do all players, like for us a crit is an auto-pass most of the time, instead of rolling again and adding the results.  As long as you do not send a non-combat pet to do something dangerous, we will usually ignore them in combat.  I personally like balance in classes.  Many of our players have been playing for decades; balanced classes helps newer players be able to keep up with them.  Players who have been playing that long often know how to build a class just right to maximize the power in their favorite class.  Balanced classes lets me do almost as much damage without knowing all of the books by heart.

I have played some D&D 4th Edition.  There are some really cool things about it, like you can just pick up a premade character and step into an adventure you can play for one night  It’s a cool way to get new players a chance to actually play.  Let’s face it, character creation is inventive and can be very creative, but it’s very daunting at first.  It took me probably 6 or 7 games to learn how to do it without asking or looking up what to do next.  (Sometimes, I still forget to figure out my hit points.)  4th Edition skips that step, if you want to, and just lets you get into the action.  It is neat that you can take your character between games and you have an official character sheet if you play at an authorized event.  When Wizards of the Coast decided to launch D&D 4th Edition, we decided to start playing Pathfinder because it seemed to give us more control over inventing our own worlds.

I like playing Pathfinder because there are a plethora of classes and races.  They are consistently play-testing new things made up by the fan base.  I like playing Pathfinder because reading through the class lists inspires entire characters to jump into my head fully formed.  Their books are available through PDF as well.  There is something nice about having the books, to be able to pass around the table and share.  But if you’re going away for the weekend, you may not want to pack 3-10 books to start a campaign.  Having the entire library on your tablet or laptop is really helpful.  With digital dice rollers, it allows a sporadic session almost anywhere.

Paizo’s play tests help keep more classes balanced as well.  There are few if any classes that you can’t keep up with your group.  We had some trouble playing druids the way we wanted in D&D 3.5.  You seemed to be either overpowered or underpowered based on whether or not you took wild form.  In Pathfinder, you keep more of your human stats when you transform.  It means the class is actually playable as a shifter.  This is just one example that played a big part in some of our campaigns.

Pathfinder is consistently working on new things for us, but all of the pieces work together.  They do not have editions, so we don’t have to completely dump our collections every few years.  Sometimes, they’ll change how something works in a new book, but for the most part, we don’t have to go out and purchase new books unless you want something new.

My favorite reason for playing Pathfinder is because of the random charts they have printed in several of their books.  We used them to play a completely random campaign.  The books were designed by players.  You can read more about how you can play your own random campaign in my next D&D post next week.