I'm not happy with the Pathfinder playtest. I wanted to be, really bad, both for my sake and because I am a big supporter of Paizo. They saved D&D 3.0/3.5 and turned into what it should have been. Now I know there will be those of you who will not agree with me, I understand that, but this is my story, my point of view, so bare with me.
I believe that Paizo is headed by good people. I do not think that there is any sort of evil plan. I do feel though that they are being a little disingenuous about the possibilities of this playtest. I've seen interviews where it was made to sound as if major faucets of this game would be changed during this playtest if we wanted it to be. Is that the case though? I do not think so.
It is more than likely that Paizo wishes to release the game at Gen Con 2019, which begins on August 1st, 2019. That is 10 months and 21 days from when I am writing this. I assume they will need to be pretty much finished and off to setting and printing at least 3 or 4 months before that, so that amount of time comes off the almost 11 months, giving the playtest and any changes that will be made to the rules, about 6 or 7 months. I do not see where that leaves this playtest much room to make an impact other than bug fixes and small rule changes like the new death rules.
Had the powers that be at Paizo had been serious about making that game that we want to play, they would have sent out an extensive questionnaire asking us what it was that we wished to see in a second edition BEFORE they even started, perhaps 3 or maybe even more years ago. But that never happened. They got together at their HQ and wrote the game that they wanted to sell us. Not the game that we wanted to play.
The playtest is not a bad game. I am sure in 5 years it will be pretty good. But it is not what I think that the questionnaires would have asked for. The system is not easily backward compatible, players have spent a decade sending their money to Paizo and we have in our hands a veritable mountain of books containing rules that will no longer be useful or easily transferred to the new system. Sure, the setting and all the lore is there, the wonderful Golarion. Thank the gods that they are not going to pull a Spellplague on us... right?
But the rules. The rules are changed in a serious and fundamental bunch of ways that makes using content from the first edition problematical at best. They took away so many classes and so many races (ancestries now) that we are not going to get back for years. Instead of talking to us and maybe hearing that this game should come stock with race creation rules that actually work and make sense, they made the game that they wanted and are asking us to debug it for them. Not to actually have a hand in it from the start, but to be beta testers for something that is fundamentally finished.
They are nice people at Paizo, but doing that to us is a mean move. Perhaps they figured they had no choice. Perhaps their priority is to pull things closer to what the upcoming generation is used to with the new edition of D&D. Perhaps we are not as much of a priority as we thought we were.
I know... I am not forced to play second edition. I can stay with first edition and be happy with that. It is just that when I imagined a second edition, I imagined a Pathfinder that would incorporate all the great strengths that Pathfinder had, while fixing it's weaknesses. Instead, I have in my hands a book that does not fix the weaknesses and actually, in a lot of ways, fixes what is not broken while reinventing the wheel.
I've ranted enough. I know there will be a lot of you who will dispute everything that I have said and maybe even call me an idiot. But please don't. This is not meant as an attack, it is a lament. I am sad for the second edition that could have been, had Paizo really wanted our input. If what I've written makes you angry with me, I'm sorry.
