Chris Braga's page

A party-based solo version of Pathfinder is a great idea. The author obviously has turned it into a labor of love, with some interesting concepts and more tables than you can shake a stick at. However, the game has two enormous problems that kill it for me.

First, while the author acknowledges the difficulty for one player in leading a party of PCs lies mainly in keeping track of all the paperwork, he worsens this problem by basing his system around a party of 6 PCs. Why not just use the normal size of 4?

Second and most important, the writing. OMG is it sloppy. There are typos everywhere, trains of thought just trail off, the internal organization is a mess, there is no index... it goes on and on. This is not a finished product. It's barely a first draft.

I'll give it one star for the idea and another for the effort, but as it stands this should definitely be avoided until the publisher hires an editor and brings out a second edition.

The plastic can't stand folding. Unless you always play at your own place, you'll have trouble keeping the mini's from falling off due to the bobbling. Would have been five stars had it been printed on cloth or some other material that doesn't suffer from folding it/rolling it up.

It works. It fixes everything that was wrong with 3E. The books are beautiful. And yes, it's still D&D.

No soul? The players provide the soul, the rules provide the mechanics.

Characters lose their uniqueness? The powers all look alike? Yeah, right. A fighter with Comeback Strike is a completely different animal than one with Villain's Menace. And how does any of his powers "feel alike", say, a Ranger's Split the Tree, a Paladin's Radiant Delirium or a Rogue's Blinding Barrage? And that's just at level 1. All the classes still do what they did in 3E, except now they get a new option every level. How can that feel more limited? If you call it a Tactical Feat, it's da bomb, but if you call it a power, it's a board game? Please...

The life sucked out of it? Tell that to my jaded group of players who had the time of their life fighting half a dozen kobolds.

No roleplay in the game? That's hilarious. Do you need the core rules to roleplay? Or would you rather have imaginative players and adventures filled with RP opportunities? How much RP was there in the 3E core books anyway? That's what I thought.

I don't care if anyone else plays this game and I'm not trying to convince anyone to switch. But please, judge these books for what they are and leave your preconceived notions (MMORPG wannabe etc) out of it.

Bottom line: it's a great game. 'Nuff said.

Should have blasted us away. No doubt great fun to play, but flimsy paper, inkt that smudges, typo's, cookie cutter villains and a complete absense of a plot fail to make this appetizer the knockout first impression it should have been. I'm sold on the system, but I miss the production standards, attention to roleplaying opportunities and lovingly crafted plots of Pathfinder.