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Pathfinder is no longer for me. I'm sorry. I'm out. I wanted to love it but I just don't.
I bought the hardcover pre-order, because they emphasized that it would ONLY be available thru pre-order and if you didn't order early, you WOULD NOT GET ONE. I knew it would only be good for a year, but I still bought one because I love how Paizo came along and rescued my group when D&D 4E came along and (just my group's opinion) "ruined the game." So I bought it mostly out of optimism and gratitude. Now of course my beautiful hardcover is stuffed with about 50 pages of addendums and corrections, and more yet come! ugh... Why did I do this again?
Well... my regular gaming group (about 9 people when everyone shows up) sat down with the monster that Paizo spit out at us and we tried to play 2E. And we tried to love it... we really, really tried. It was an exercise in futility. The rulebook was so badly written, so badly organized, that my players complained frequently about not being able to find needed information. The rule changes seemed arbitrary in many cases, with little or no explanation as to why they were being changed, or what the "fix" was attempting to actually fix. It was rather like watching a train wreck but really trying to enjoy it, but being unable to really enjoy it because, after all, you are in fact inside of a train wreck.
By the 2nd chapter of Doomsday Dawn, we were done. My group had lost interest, I lost two players to frustration, and the remaining ones were only going thru the motions out of loyalty to me. Then a new player commented that a lot of these changes felt like the new edition of D&D. I asked him to clarify, and he cited several new 2E rule instances that seemed to mirror D&D 5E. I checked out D&D 5E for the first time online, and found myself agreeing with my player: it indeed did feel like PF was trying to take several aspects of WotC's 5E and incorporate them into a new PF version. Some of the similarities were just too uncanny to be coincidence.
So... we switched. After 10+ years of riding the Mathfinder train, we are now happily back to our first love. We are now playing D&D 5E and we truly love it... the fluidity, the relatively open concept, the lack of excessive math and number crunching to make effective characters. Not to mention that it's been out for about 3 years now so any wrinkles have more or less been removed already. We love how combat seems to move so much faster now! Where we used to be able to maybe get 2 or 3 encounters run in an evening with Mathfinder, now we can successfully conclude 3 to 4 times as many encounters in the same amount of time! And yet the game doesn't feel diluted or overly simplistic. It's the right level of simplistic.
Anyway I don't want to go into a huge essay on why I love D&D, or what specific issues I have with the new PF rules... here in the messageboards you will easily find dozens of others who make the exact same complaints that I would make. My point is that unfortunately, Pathfinder has lost me. I enjoyed the ride up till now (even though rules bloat and excessive math made high level adventures nightmarish at best). But now due to this overly complicated next version, Pathfinder has lost me as a customer and my entire game group as well. I don't think they'll miss us... there is always balance for such things, and no doubt some other group will step up to buy the products that we will now forsake. I'm just sad that we ended our journey with Pathfinder in a train wreck.
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I felt the same about 5e at first but then after our first campaign we just found there really wasn't enough character diversity. So we decided to switch back to pathfinder. Nice to see you like it though. Playtesting isn't for all of us. Hopefully you check out 2e again when it releases. So far all of the changes have been really bringing it in the right direction and the devs are really listening to our concerns.
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Then a new player commented that a lot of these changes felt like the new edition of D&D. I asked him to clarify, and he cited several new 2E rule instances that seemed to mirror D&D 5E. I checked out D&D 5E for the first time online, and found myself agreeing with my player: it indeed did feel like PF was trying to take several aspects of WotC's 5E and incorporate them into a new PF version. Some of the similarities were just too uncanny to be coincidence.
The dev team actually did comment (in one of the Twitch streams, as I recall) that this was basically the same reaction they had when 5E came out.
Turns out when you're both angling for simplicity and have years of experience designing in the same field, you come up with similar answers.
Director of Game Design
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Maveric28,
Thank you for your honest feedback on the playtest. We hope that you will check out the final game when it is done, as hopefully many of the rough spots you noticed will be addressed.
Until then, good gaming.
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