So, Paizo just recently announced that they are coming out with a fifth bestiary, along with yet another softcover bestiary to tie into Occult Adventures. This is all too much! There's no way I can keep track of every monster in all the books. And it's not just five bestiaries--I also have the Monster Codex, Midgard Bestiary, the Mythic Monster Manual, the Inner Sea Bestiary, ToHC, the Advanced Bestiary, the Book of Monster Templates, 101 Not so Simple Templates, AND the psionic bestiary. And now the occult bestiary and B5.
Add in 3.5 monster books and it's even more obscenely bloated--MM 1, 3, 4, and 5, two Fiendish Codices, LoM, Book of Templates, and Dragonomicon. And 3.0 monster books, MM2 and fiend folio.
There's just no way anyone who doesn't spend their entire life on this game can hope to keep track of and use every monster. I didn't even want any of them beyond the first bestiary, but I had to waste money on them to keep playing the game!
And that's not even counting the insane brokenness and bloat of templates. With just one book full of templates and one bestiary there are more combinations than I could every use. But there isn't just one book of templates, there's several. And several books of base monsters. And they keep getting more complicated with each new tome of bloat. It's too many rules to keep track of when I just want to play a game without having to comb through tens of thousands of pages of cheese.
It's even worse due to the absurd levels of power creep. Just compare any bestiary 4 monster to a same-CR bestiary 1 monster. The new one is obviously far more powerful. Yes, obviously: I shouldn't need to explain what about the new monsters is more powerful, they just are. If you can't see the obvious power creep you aren't looking hard enough. The power creep makes everything in all the old monster books TOTALLY UNUSABLE!
I feel like Paizo lied to us. Way back when they first introduced pathfinder, Paizo promised that they would avoid Bloating the game with power creep and an overabundance of splats. That was suppose to get us to buy into pathfinder. Lisa Stevens promised me, personally, that after the Bestiary 1 they would never release any content every again to avoid bloat. She said that that way, I could buy the core rulebook and bestiary without being forced to throw money away at a never ending stream of more bestiaries. That way, Pathfinder could remain a Living, Supported system without any new content to bloat it up.
Now allegedly, Erik Mona announced as early as January 2009 that they'd be releasing several hardcovers of bloat every year, including bestiary bloat. But that information was hidden. There should have been a warning on the first Bestiary cover saying "DISCLAIMER: IF YOU BUY THIS, YOU WILL BE FORCED TO BUY A NEVER-ENDING STREAM OF MORE BESTIARIES OR THIS BOOK WILL BECOME UNUSABLE!"
It's time for a new edition of the Bestiary to clean up the bloat. Frankly, I think it's long overdue. In the new edition, there should just be like three monsters total. Munchkins who want more can make them themselves--no need to ruin the game with bloat for the rest of us who just want to play normally.
