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Nice to see people who got started in D&D earlier then I did(1992).
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Yeah, that counts;)
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I was looking for additional information on 3.5 modules that’s when I realized wizards of the coast was going to fourth edition and then I saw a link for pathfinder, clicked on it they were on the third adventure path, so I looked into them, subscribed, and when the beta testing was done, bought the rulebook and been playing ever since
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Just happened to find the Bestiary in a book store one day. Went online and looked up more about it, and have been interested ever since.
That was like 5 years ago, though, and I'm only just now getting to try my first campaign lol.
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IIRC. DnD 4E just launched, and we were really not impressed. I started in DnD 3.0 and then 3.5, but 4 was a hot mess.
So someone in the group did some digging and came across a playtest for Pathfinder. Back in the days when a cleric's channel was both to heal and harm at the same time. We've been playing Pathfinder 1e ever since.
After Pathfinder 2e came out we tried it a bit, but then explored some other systems (some 40K stuff and more fantasy settings), but Pathfinder 1e is still my all time favourite system.
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I played it first in 2013 when a friend brought the Second Darkness campaign books to our summer vacation. We made tons of mistakes (like misinterpreting the rules and such) but it was fun and we got hooked up :3
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I’ve played Pathfinder for as long as I can remember. One of my first memories was of sitting at a table in a high chair and rolling d20s for my dad and his friends. I suppose that kinda gives away how young I am haha
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I played D&D 3E until the plug was pulled with 4E, stumbled on Pathfinder as I was seasrching about Paizo and the Dungeon ans Dragon Magasines, noticed it was the same system as 3.5, and decided to stick with it since it was a very little convertion.
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Mythikal, it's amazing you can remember rolling dice while still in a high chair.
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I probably read about it on usenet rec.games.frp.dnd. I'd seen 4e and didn't like it, so here we are.
Started in 1981.
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A lot people got there start in Pathfinder because of D&D 4e.
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4e is after all why PF exists, so I guess everyone who has ever played PF got their start in it because of 4e. So it did some good after all, and haters can stop hating now :)
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A lot people got there start in Pathfinder because of D&D 4e.
It's not just that...
- The early 4E announcements didn't please fans, such as replacing gnomes for tieflings.- The Dungeons and Dragons magazines got halted pretty abruptly.
- The WotC message boards were completely wiped and relaunched with a paid subscription.
- The gameplay itself suffered from complicated and convoluted rules, such as the Once per Encounter, the Tiers and the overall damage nerf to players.
- Many staple features took a 2nd or even a 3rd core rulebook to be added back.
- IIRC, the 4E open license was pretty restrictive for creators.
Then you have Paizo, the people behind the magazines, launching Pathfinder, which is 99% like D&D 3.5 with tweaks and without much of a hassle to convert.
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4e was a huge difference from previous editions. You could without too much work convert an AD&D character to AD&D 2e, and an AD&D 2e character to D&D 3/3.5e, because you are adding more options. But 4e meant starting new characters from scratch, and I am willing to bet a lot of people wanted to stick with existing campaigns.
That and WotC’s insistence on defaulting to the worst published setting of any games system, the Misbegotten Renfair Realms.
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That and WotC’s insistence on defaulting to the worst published setting of any games system, the Misbegotten Renfair Realms.
I... see nothing wrong with the Forgotten Realms TBH...
What did happen is that WotC continued Faerun's lore in one direction... only to retcon everything when 5E dropped, as if all events from 4E never occured, and it was in both the core rulebooks and the novels. Instead of the lore going from 1 to 5, it went from 1 to 4, backtracked to 3 and went to 5, as if 4 was "a wrong turn".
My personal gripe with 4E was the Once per Encounter rule. Coupled with the (one die x your tier [1, 2 or 3]) damage revision, it made for some pretty lackluster abilities. While some abilities had interesting effects, so many were about "dealing raw damage". I compare those to video games:
- Imagine if in a FPS, you could reload once per life.
- Imagine if in a MOBA, you could use your spells once per fight.
- Imagine if in a fighting game, you could use your special moves once per round.
- Imagine if in a platformer, you could double jump once per life.
Also, an "encounter" doesn't have a fixed duration. It can last 1 round, 5 rounds or even 20 rounds, and that's if the DM lets players "close" the encounter and not waiting until all targets are dealt with, including that far-off sentry.
Finally, if it was to imitate a MMORPG, your abilities have a cooldown/recovery mode, but you still can reuse those abilities once these are recharged. If Encounter powers had a recovery mode of 1 round/level, that would have been less punishing, especially when missing a roll wastes the power. If cooldowns would have been too complicated, then the damage should have been revised.
- At-will: (die x (level/3))
- Encounter: (die x (level/2))
- Daily: (die x level)
On a sidenote, someone told me that "4E is good if you change the rules", but when I need to do that, it just means that the established rules are broken.
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On a sidenote, someone told me that "4E is good if you change the rules", but when I need to do that, it just means that the established rules are broken.
Great point. I liked your whole spiel on 4e. I agree with those criticisms. At the time, I was more aggravated by the fact that gnomes, druids, barbarians, etc. weren't in the PHB. And how regimented and boring magic items were.
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On a sidenote, someone told me that "4E is good if you change the rules", but when I need to do that, it just means that the established rules are broken.Great point. I liked your whole spiel on 4e. I agree with those criticisms. At the time, I was more aggravated by the fact that gnomes, druids, barbarians, etc. weren't in the PHB. And how regimented and boring magic items were.
There were some good ideas, but those were poorly executed.
I double-checked 5E to be sure... and I haven't seen "once per encounter" stuff. You have features that you recharge after a short or long rest, but at least it's far more logical to rest up to regain them than to magically get them back on the second fight with the BBEG's minions.
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I just want to forget that 4e ever happened at all. But at least one good thing happened because of it....Pathfinder 1e.
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I just want to forget that 4e ever happened at all. But at least one good thing happened because of it....Pathfinder 1e.
Well, like in all things in life, we need to make mistakes, learn from them and make it better when giving another try.
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Yet we are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again.
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I just want to forget that 4e ever happened at all. But at least one good thing happened because of it....Pathfinder 1e.
Yep. Disappointment with 4E led to me giving Pathfinder a try. But what really hooked me was the quality of the Rise of the Runelords AP. It was easy to become immersed in the story and the wonderful town of Sandpoint.
Thanks Paizo for making great adventures. I haven't had a homebrew ever since.
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Well the game mechanics/class abilities really sold me on Pathfinder but yes, the APs are fun as well.
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Well it has been several months.... time to revive this one.
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What i like of paiso is that they take consideration of the player, in game like forgotten realms is hard to say how that world changed to much if you don't read the novels, but Pathfinder is better they not only tell you how the world of golarion change, they let you be part of they history by playing the AP the give the change of the world and is for this that the game still be my favorite, they now how to get to the player
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Greetings first of all.
I learned it through Owlcat's games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, as most people lately I can imagine.
I'm a videogame-only guy as you can imagine and I have only ever taken 1 taste of trpg many years ago in summer camp. I think it was DnD. I like Pathfinder and its world thus far and I would be interested in further exploring it in a tabletop fashion.
Although to be honest, I'm also looking forward in playing BG3 (or a BG game in general) in order to get roughly accostumed to the DnD setting as well.
But I started with PF1e if that says something.
All in all, I'm in exploration mode and I'm happy to be here.
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Your the first one I have seen who posted on this site that found out about Pathfinder from the video games.
Your the first one I have seen who posted on this site that found out about Pathfinder from the video games.
Really? That's quite peculiar to me.
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Subscribed to Dragon Magazine for over a year, and loved Paizo through that. One day, I was using a less than reputable website to find a D&D 3.5 resource I had apparently lost, and saw: "Pathfinder DnD 3.75 pdf" and was like... Wait, what?
Knowing nothing of it (it had literally JUST came out), curiosity got the better of me. After scrolling through the first 50 or so pages...
"This is like 3.5 but WAY better! The art is sweet too and kinda familiar. (flips to specific page) ...and they even improved Fighters?! Who the heck made this?! (checks back cover) Paizo. That explains EVERYTHING!"
Within 30 minutes of stumbling upon the Pathfinder Core Rulebook for the first time, on accident, I was on Amazon ordering a copy. I didn't need to read more of that shady data. I could wait til it was in my hands! Never turned back.
Been with PF ever since, and still run 1e for friends and even some 2e for a few conventions, but as an always GM, the sad fact is that I only got to actually play non NPC characters a handful of times in all of 1e's lifespan, and most of those were short lived, so I still very much want to be a player in 1e to this day. LOL
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I acquired the Basic D&D red box back in 1980, but due to cirumstances was unable to find a group. So I was reduced to making the occasional character and sighing in dramatic despair. :)
When I started university in 1986, I found an 1e AD&D group and bought a few books for that system. I still have the contents of the original grey Forgotten Realms box (the box itself is long gone) and a few other FR sourcebooks.
Then 2e rolled around, followed by the Player's Option series and a proliferation of settings beyond Oerth and Toril. Loads of fun! My university gaming group was quick to adapt to 2e as it loosened a number of shackles on character creation, etc. I still have a good selection of material from that period, mainly FR, Al'Qadim, and Ravenloft, with a sprinkling of Spelljammer, Planescape, Maztica, Kara-Tur, and other settings and/or systems.
When 3e came, I was living in a different country and had a new gaming group. Again, we adapted fairly quickly. And yet again when 3.5 turned up. I bought many rulebooks, etc. for 3.5 and expanded my FR collection where possible. By that point I was running a "homebrew variant" of FR. Also, when White Wolf got the license to publish the 3.x version of Ravenloft, I grabbed what I could there too. (There was a particular sale on their website where I got the bulk of my WhW RL sourcebooks. Much money was saved there!)
During the years of 3.5 I also dipped my toes in the d20 (revised) Star Wars pool and took a deeper plunge into the Saga Edition Star Wars pool. (To my eternal regret, I didn't move fast enough to buy the Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide. That book sold out incredibly quickly!) This brought me to the message boards at WotC. At the same time, I was also buying both the Dragon and Dungeon magazines more frequently and had noticed a series of connected adventures. "An adventure path, you say? Let my buy some more Dungeon and Dragon issues!" The Savage Tide AP bowled me over; I still want to run it some time - or even play it!
Then the 4e announcement hit and the Grand History of the Forgotten Realms was published. Yikes! While I appreciate deeply the work that went into most of the GHotFR (the original free PDF which was the basis of that project is still one of my most treasured PDFs), the "future" years described were grim tidings indeed, including character assassination - both literal and figurative - of many deities.
For 4e, I have precisely 2 books: the PHB and the FR Campaign Guide. While I did participate in a few sessions of 4e, it was more for the companionship than for the system itself. (No offence meant to my 4e GM! It was the system, not his game, that turned me off.)
I do recollect someone from a FLGS showing me the first two issues of the RotR AP at a local gaming convention in the autumn of 2007, but I didn't bite immediately. Instead, it took some posts on the WotC boards (before everything was wiped) to lead me to Paizo's website in 2008 where I found CotCT being published and news of an upcoming AP with drow. It was (and still is) a very friendly place. I haven't looked back to WotC since.
So now I have all the PF rulebooks, most of the Golarion sourcbooks and APs in one format and/or another, a bunch of single adventures, several decks, many boxes of pawns, and multiple maps and map tiles. Plus I dropped a load of cash on HeroLab's system so as to be able to print out character sheets which included spells and other necessary class features.
PF2? No, thank you; I've invested enough in PF that I don't feel like moving on to yet another (and not so compatible) system. I acknowledge that PF has some warts after ten plus years of rulebooks, etc., but I'll stick with it for my standard fantasy RPG gaming. After all, I have enough material to run games for the rest of my life! :D
Note: this description of my history with D&D/PF does not include most of my other, none-D&D game experiences (Call of Cthulhu, FFG Star Wars, Hero System/Fantasy, Savage Worlds, etc.).
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It has been so long since Dragon Magazine was a thing....that brings me back.
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A few years ago there was a deal for a set of pathfinder pdfs (rulebook, bestiary, modules, adventurepaths) on Humble Bundle for a few bucks.
I thought why not, even if I never use them it would've costed me only a few bucks.
Well, they were used and the shelf containing all my print-version rulebooks, pawns, battlemats, self made terrain and props, etc. might well be worth thousand bucks or so by now... :D
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Sometimes a impulse buy can give you something greater then most planned purchases.
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My Dad got me into it when I was around 7 and by 11 I knew more about it than he did.
Yeah, I got my son into Pathfinder when he was 6. I wrote about it on these boards at the time.
By the age of 9 he knew the game better than I did. I remarked about it in this post.
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Nice to see some more people posting how they got started.
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I was a subscriber in the end days of Paizo's Dragon and Dungeon run too. I stopped playing D&D for a long time after that because of mental health issues, but when I started again, the most obvious route for converting Eberron was not 4e, but Pathfinder. Eventually Paizo got me full time into Golarion with Wrath of the Righteous and I never looked back.
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Another old school Dragon/Dungeon magazine reader, cool.
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So how did you first fine out about Pathfinder?
How long have you been playing?
I heard bout PF at the LGS we frequent. I was playing a table game that day when the Owner said "hey, we need another body to play this fantasy game, I know you play D&D". That was bout the time it had just hit the shelves. Been playing a minute- 1st ed of D&D.......
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I was here back in the Dungeon / Dragon Magazine days. I'd been reading Dragon Mag since before there was a Dungeon Mag. But I started picking up Dungeon regularly during my return to D&D in the 3.0/3.5 era. The magazines were so good that for the first time ever I subscribed!
And I stayed subscribed when the magazines ended and switched over to something called Pathfinder Adventure Paths.
I have all of the rulebook hardcovers from 1e as well as all of the APs up to the end of HELL'S REBELS.