Felonius Orlando's page

First of all, Pathfinder totally pwnz me. In every way. I haven't felt this excited about a core rules system and campaign setting in a long, long time. I'm constantly thinking of new / better ways to use the stuff I have, and I now understand when people on these message board moan about taking another hit in the pocketbook (Seriously, the Gamemastery Guide? Advanced Players Guide? Yeah,that's 80 bucks already spent.....)

But I do have one comment to share about the PFRPG core rulebook.

A few weeks ago I introduced my brother-in-law and his 13-year-old son to the game. My brother-in-law is a lapsed 2e player (hadn't played in over 20 years), and my nephew had never played.

And even though I'm fairly conversant with the 3.x / Pathfinder rules, I had a tough time moving them productively through character creation without a lot of stopping and starting. I was constantly going back and forth between sections--"Should we do skills first, or what about feats? Or, oh crap, I forgot about their racial modifiers and skill bonuses....."

Obviously we got through it okay, but I know the process would have gone much more smoothly if there was a short side-table/paragraph somewhere in the first 10 pages of the core rulebook with a numbered list of the best way to go through character creation.

Just a suggestion! :)

Any well built fighter (including the one in this group) can easily handle his role- it's that the way he does it can be boring.

This was always my problem roleplaying fighters. In real life, fighters would be interesting people--the whole "tough it out" mindset, battle tactics, the psychology of facing an opponent time and time again....

But in the "milieu" of D&D/PFRPG, none of that really translates mechanically into the system. As long as you're in battle, and battling "stuff" that fits your feat trees, you're having fun. If you're not, you're useless as a fighter, especially OUT of combat. PFRPG is much better than 3.5 in allowing a little more skill diversity, but given the choice, I'll play a ranger or a rogue 10 times out of 10 before I'd play a fighter, because I know that I"ll simply have more options. I'm not pigeonholed into "bull rush fighter guy," or "great sword uber-cleave guy."

To me, fighters were always the least enjoyable class to actually play in-game, and from a roleplaying perspective, that shouldn't be the case.

In some ways, I've almost always felt that there should be two sub-classes of fighter--

1. A Warlord, which is a combat-oriented battle tactician and leader. This is your classic Maximus/Spartacus types. Yeah, they're individually pretty kick ass with weapons, but they're more interested in getting others to be kick ass as well.

or

2. A Weapons Master. And when I say this, I'm referring to the archetype from one of Terry Brooks' novels, the Weapons Master named Garet Jax--A guy who can literally use any weapon, has studied so many individual combat maneuvers with each weapon type that he/she can maximize any tactical strategy with any weapon. Thus, the tactical standpoint comes from which weapon they choose to use--and they can switch weapons mid-battle to totally change how they approach a fight.

Really, most fighter "paths" as I see it follow one of these two archetypes, and both seem to me to leave more options for "fun," both in and out of combat.