Linsolv's page

These "convince me" threads are a colossal waste of time. If you don't want to play it, find something that appeals to you.

Meanwhile, I'll keep playing Pathfinder and effortlessly pumping out new PCs in five minutes with Hero Lab. That's how we roll.

I'm not sure what your point is, I guess. I'm not asking you to convince me, I'm just asking why you all like it, and trying to understand why you like what you like. Convince me or don't, I'm just trying to understand. That said, I feel like you weren't very polite.

I'm not really at a point where I want to throw it at any players, and I'm not about to carve out another several-hour chunk of time to play in another game (I don't know where I would be able to). But in an effort to give Pathfinder a shot, I'm going to try to find a little time to throw at running a solitaire game with 4 PCs against Carrion Crown, and see how that goes. If it sucks then it sucks.

Normally you wouldn't use dice when making a character in Pathfinder. You're not dependent on luck. You use point-buy to make the exact character you want.

However, it's generally not until you've played the game for a while that you can get a feel for it. Without that, it's hard to get excited about making a PC who can trip approaching enemies, but also cast spells, or whatever.

I just meant the act of creating a character. Of course, I don't have Hero Lab, and I'm not about to shell out for it (frankly, I don't have the space in my budget currently, regardless of how much I play Pathfinder in the future), but using PCGen it's taken me a while to make a Druid and a Gunslinger. Barbarian's up next, and then I'll round the team out with some fourth character. So while, yeah, I'm not literally rolling dice, I just meant it in the sense of "rolling up" a character. Idiomatically.

Linsolv wrote:

See, I get a lot of that. Part of my confusion here is that I know a player, though I don't play with him any more, who is STUCK on 3.5. He loves it. Refuses to play Pathfinder because it would invalidate his shelf somehow. He's played other systems; he's even excited to do so. But he always wants to go back to 3.5 after.

So I can sit here and academically say, well, it's because they're stuck in their ways, whatever. But that feels really disrespectful to people. It assumes that they're not being 'rational,' they're letting their emotions control them. For any group, that would be unfair, but Pathfinder and 3.5 players seem to fancy themselves fairly smart folks, and I want to give them at least enough respect to admit that maybe they're seeing something I'm not seeing.

Humans aren't rational, and are controlled by emotions. Doesn't mean they ain't smart.

Also, a lot of sunk cost fallacy, personal investment leading to perceptions of betrayal, and 3.X systems are very mechanically heavy in a way that requires you to invest a lot of yourself in order to build up the necessary level of system mastery to use them effectively. Folks tend to not want to abandon that investment.

So I hope you'll forgive my little diversion here, but like I said above, I put in the same work on GURPS recently. I had a friend, the GM in the game with my 3.5 friend, try to sell us GURPS. Hated it. There were a ton of reasons it didn't work out, only a couple of them the system's fault. But I'm always running into people online who are crazy about GURPS. So I ask my friends, why? What could possibly appeal to them about this system that is, you know, fine at best. And I get the standard answer: Sunk cost.

But then I spent a week, talked to them, got a few big tips on where my game had gone wrong, how I could have fixed it, what I could do in the future to make it work out better, etc.

Is part of it sunk-cost? You're sure right, it is. But something drew them in, in the first place. (As it happens, the answer is 'because GURPS is a chimera that can be anything at all, including rules-light or rules-heavy, and has more supplements even than Pathfinder does,' more or less.)

So here's another question, perhaps one that I should have put in the original post.

How do you dig into the character options, as a newbie?

I'm inclined to think that it's boring, as I've already said, but I was inclined to think that, for example, board games were boring, until I played Ticket to Ride. Then I could take that experience with TTR and translate it into other board games, knowing that there's an anchor of 'fun' somewhere that I can try to tie back to.

If I'm going to get it, then I guess the answer is going to have to be to make a character and be excited to play it at the end. But is there something to this that isn't immediately obvious?

I basically started with Fate and Savage Worlds in my old group before doing True 20 and finally just running my own Pathfinder game. I wouldn't consider your opinion as "wrong". What might be fun for a lot of other people may simply not be your cup of tea. It doesn't make either side wrong, but some people have more fun playing in one style than another. So I'll try to hit up the points that attracted me to Pathfinder while I was playing Fate. However, it might best be summed up by saying that most of the reasons are mechanical. You mentioned being able to see the character's story in Traveller as you made him. In Pathfinder, it's definitely more about building the mechanics of how the character plays, not so much who the character is. Having an idea and finding the class/archetype that gives abilities to support that idea and the selection of feats to back that up and seeing it all come together can be a journey unto itself, but ultimately it doesn't tell you a lot about who the character is, just how the character plays.

So I don't HATE mechanics by any stretch. But I have yet, at this point, to see how THESE mechanics are great. I'm trying, and I'm just about starting to see that there might be something on the other side of the fog, but as of now I'm still feeling like I'm completely out in the cold.

I recently did this same thing with GURPS and with 4th Edition D&D, both of which I probably had more negative feelings towards than Pathfinder, but both essentially managed to convince me that the problem was, fundamentally, that I had the wrong mindset about what the game was trying to do.

In the case of Pathfinder, I feel like people want the tactical miniatures game of 4e or, say, MageKnight, but they don't want... something about that.

They want the customization of Runequest or GURPS, but they don't want... something.

They want the dungeon crawling of Basic D&D, but they don't want... something.

Mechanical Progression: This is certainly nothing new to most RP systems (D20 in particular), but when advancing a character in the Fate game I was part of, there were no "levels" to speak of so when you progressed it really meant you got better at a skill or two or you had to really talk it over with the GM if you wanted a new perk or the like. In Pathfinder, clearly seeing what abilities I would get at what level and knowing how things would progress allowed me to look forward to leveling up a lot more.

Numerous Races: I honestly have never really cared for the "core" races--the ones that are in almost every Western fantasy setting. Elves, dwarves, some version of hobbits etc. Pathfinder has released a lot of different races suitable for player characters over the years, some with much more in-world definition than others admittedly, and without added rules like level adjustment. As someone who loves the idea of the plane-touched races this was a welcome opportunity....

I can't really say I get the Mechanical part. Part of this is that I like low-powered stuff, where characters feel like humans, or at least starting there to see the characters grow into superheroes, but then that means you don't get to the "real" characters until you've been playing for 6 months because that's when you finally start getting your abilities.

As for the races, though... I'm with you there. I can imagine a world where people like elves or dwarves, but why would you want to play one when you can be a Kenku or Ratling?

Pathfinder is kind of a game built on inertia.

Something you gotta understand is there is a huge part of the fanbase that has literally never played a non-d20 system, and to whom learning a different system seems like an insurmountable hurdle. A lot of people are in gaming groups that are built out of decades-long gaming traditions that are entirely structured around dealing with the specific quirks and flaws that have existed in Dungeons & Dragons from the beginning.

The things Pathfinder specifically has going for it?

Lots of character customization, by the standards of a class-and-level game. Put it next to 5e? In 5e, some characters are literally out of meaningful character customization choices at level 3. You've got your spec. You know what your key stats are. You're done. Pathfinder, you have more freedom... with the caveat that it's still a level-based game. But some people have serious issues breaking that paradigm.

Pathfinder has a large player base. Having players gets...

See, I get a lot of that. Part of my confusion here is that I know a player, though I don't play with him any more (his game is in the late evening, and my son wakes the house at 6 in the morning, so I don't want to be out of the house until midnight!), who is STUCK on 3.5. He loves it. Refuses to play Pathfinder because it would invalidate his shelf somehow. He's played other systems; he's even excited to do so. But he always wants to go back to 3.5 after.

So I can sit here and academically say, well, it's because they're stuck in their ways, whatever. But that feels really disrespectful to people. It assumes that they're not being 'rational,' they're letting their emotions control them. For any group, that would be unfair, but Pathfinder and 3.5 players seem to fancy themselves fairly smart folks, and I want to give them at least enough respect to admit that maybe they're seeing something I'm not seeing.

Edit: So I could give you a whole heaping list of things I just assume a priori about 3.5 players. Reasons that I assume they do things. There are a lot of people on the internet who'll do that, and I'm sure I'll go on to do it eventually in other places, if I can't get my head around things.

But I'm doing my best to put aside my presumptions and come to this in an honest, empty-cup kinda way, and hopefully come out of it understanding what's so fun about having to pick out feats and track my AC, touch AC and flat-footed AC, so that I can have a guy who shoots a six-gun that casts spells (which I'll admit is, without the paperwork stuff, a fun concept).

The appeal is that you get to play a system that doesn't baby or belittle you. While there are definitely some idiots who enjoy this game, it's hard to understand for less intelligent players. And system mastery is very rewarding for those who are clever enough and focused enough to learn.

For example from what I understand of 5E, many of the conditions like low ground, dazzled, blinded, etc. have been reduced to DISADVANTAGE. You roll twice and take the lesser result. Compare this to my hex crafter magus who can give you a disadvantage like debuff, reduce your STR, lower your attack rolls, lower your ac, saves, blind you, etc.

Pathfinder lets patient and well read people do very powerful, very specific things. 5E promises simplicity and mediocrity for everyone.

So what, though, puts Pathfinder over other systems that don't particularly baby you? Why not GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, or Mythras Classic Fantasy? They offer a lot of the same things (highly customizable characters, rapid resolution at the table) but they're completely different, and people tend to prefer one over the others.

In this case, why would someone prefer Pathfinder over, say, 250-point GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, where you have characters that are as heroic as, say, 5th or 6th level characters, and scale up (or down) as-needed?

There are many ways someone might have fun creating a character.

Maybe they'll be paging through various classes and subclasses and options and see something that inspiring.
"A character who is permanently haunted by ghosts who both help him out and play tricks on him? Intriguing!"
"A frog-girl who uses her tongue as a weapon? Suddenly I realise that's what I was looking for all along!"

Or it could be about finding interesting combinations that allow you to do something unique.
"So by level 8 I could be permanently invisible and riding a tiger and I could use ventriloquism to make it look like it's the tiger talking when I speak? And I can use all my spells to make the tiger better at fighting?"
"If I save up for this magic item... I can turn into a songbird, and stab people with my beak, and still get my sneak attack damage!"

Or it could simply be about finding ways to maximise the power of a new type of character.
"By becoming a Barbarian Alchemist, I can make myself literally stronger than a giant... I'll be looking at a DPR of 178.4 against median CR+2 AC."
"By multiclassing occult with gunslinger, I'll be able to have my demon familiars reloading a dozen guns for me simultaneously, allowing me to fire more rapidly than anyone else!"

This is something that allows players to get creative in the manner of their choosing between gaming sessions, with no need for the GM to get involved.
"I can't wait until next week! But that's OK, we're nearly at level 5, so I can start choosing my next feat now..."

I'll have to try doing this; as it stands, it feels like the actual rolling of dice and generation of stats just sounds like doing your taxes. I know, because I've met them, that there are people who like doing it. So, again, I must simply be misunderstanding something. I try to take responsibility for it. But if I'm going to understand, this is where I need to figure out how to adjust my mindset.

Linsolv, there is a thread you might find helpful: What makes the game Pathfinder for you. I hope that helps!

I'm reading through now, and hopefully it does provide some clarity! I'm a stranger around these parts and didn't really know where to look for this kind of thing; after scrolling through 'general discussion' for a moment I didn't really see another thread, but I was sure I'd left something on the table.

Reasons to play Pathfinder:

1) You can make a character and take it to just about any and every RPG convention and play it there. You can also do this with 5e.

Sadly, doesn't really help me all that much in my particular situation. I can bully my players (kidding) into playing almost anything at least once. And if I can make it come off well, they'll be fine continuing. If not, I'm comfortable running on Roll20 and while it might be hard to find a GM for [insert system here], it's rarely hard to find 3 people to play it with you.

2) The quantity of character options in the core book alone means you can make a very wide variety of characters.

I think this what I'm not getting. Is it fun to do this? How do you have fun doing it?

Like... I must sound very stupid asking this question. For me, it's obvious how making a character in, for example, Traveller is fun. It's literally storytelling with dice, even if you have to read into the dice rolls to get anything interesting out of it.

But is it that interesting to say "what kind of life did my person lead? Were they a... *checks list* fireman, policeman, or astronaut?" What can I do to make this more engaging as a player, or to help my players to make it more engaging as a game master?

3) The Pathfinder Compatible community is is alive an strong.

Like the SRD, this feels like a big bonus for people who are on the fence, but if you're standing on the other side of the fence, it doesn't feel like something that pushes me into climbing over.

4) The default setting is designed to cover a wide variety of play styles.

I do like this point. It helps me to understand the view you're taking. Normally, I look at the whole setting, and Golarion doesn't make a lot of sense and is very overwhelming. Which also turned me off of Forgotten Realms, though I also have a player who knows everything about FR and would be correcting me on every little thing if I played in it. Thinking of Golarion as a 'bundle' of a dozen different settings helps a bit!

5)Adventure Paths. If you want to run a long term campaign, Paizo publishes a set of 6 adventures that form a whole campaign.

I've read a little of Rise of the Runelords and liked what they were trying to do, but at the same time, my experience with written adventures is only the first adventure or so of Horde of the Dragon Queen, and my players HATED it. Too many leaps of logic where the writer just wanted the players to be herded like sheep, when any game master will tell you they're not sheep, they're cats.

Have I given Paizo's writers unfair judgement in presuming that APs, like other adventures I have read and HotDQ in particular, are railroady and presume that players are just going to 'do me a favor and go with it'?

The problem is that you are looking at Pathfinder through the lens of 10 years of bloat. You can pick up the Player Guide & Bestiary and be ready to run. It doesn't take an hour to set up a character... that additional time comes from buying additional source books and grossly expanding your options (Pathfinder inherited this tendency for ever-expanding options from D&D 3.0/3.5).

Well, sure. But imagine you're talking to someone who is thinking about joining the hobby. What would you tell them to convince them to play Pathfinder?

What I've heard from others when I asked, though they weren't especially helpful in making me understand, was that it provides options. 5e characters, they said, tend to all feel the same (a sentiment I would agree with more than disagree).

The SRD is a nice benefit, too. But I could also get access to a Delving Deeper SD and play 0e, or Swords and Wizardry and get some kind of strange 0e/AD&D hybrid. So it's great to have if you were, for example, arguing for Pathfinder over 3.5, but it's not unique.

So you might not win me over, but I'm not so much looking for reasons my preconceptions are wrong. I'm sure they're wrong. What I want to know is what makes you love it and why that's something you love, without falling back on nostalgia or the fact that you already own the books, because I have neither.

So some background info: I've been running games for five years or so, off and on. I've played/run Savage Worlds, Apocalypse World, Fate, d100 games, OSR games, and 5e. In no particular order.

Now, you'll notice two big omissions there that seem to define the internet discourse surrounding Pathfinder: Pathfinder itself, and the game people came to Pathfinder in protest of, 4th Edition.

As a result, all I've got is second hand info, almost all of it hard to trust, and a good deal of it negative.

So I wanted to understand from the horse's mouth, so to speak: What is it that makes you love Pathfinder?

Why play a game where making a character involves an hour or more of pouring over options? To me, with no experience first hand, and negative second hand reports, it sounds tedious. But I'm a firm believer in a world where, if someone thinks it's fun then it's usually because it is. So very probably, I'm the one who's wrong here.

Thank you for your time and consideration.