| Mekkis |
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After reviewing the Pathfinder Beta and Pathfinder Alpha playtest documents over the past week, I downloaded and flicked through the Pathfinder Playtest.
The first impression was the layout: simply put, it's terrible.
The spells section is just a flat list of spell names, without the Short Description that's available in Pathfinder - and D&D3.x.
The spell descriptions - and power descriptions - are intermingled - which makes it frustrating to find what you're after. And in their descriptions, there is no indication as to which classes - or which spell lists - are able to cast them, so you need to flick back to the spell list section.
Realising that this was a similar issue with 5e, I tried to look up something that will doubtlessly come up in play - how does one jump?
Looking at the Index, there was no entry for Jumping. (In 5e, there's a slightly more useful note saying, "see movement, jumping"). Under movement, there was nothing either.
Okay, time for some Ctrl+F. Jump appears many, many times. Finally, I find myself looking at the Athletics skill, that explains that it is a DC30 check to perform a high jump of 5'. What?
Eventually I look at the table under it, which explains that no, on a success you get the 5', on a critical success you get 8', and on a failure you get "what you would get on a Leap".
Time to Ctrl+F "Leap". Except that there are about 100 results. Back to the index - which leads you to the Movement section and lets you know that you can do a long jump of 15' or a high jump of 3'.
This is unusable.