Hi all, I'm a gamemaster and have been for about a decade. With my campaigns coming out of the traditional January slump, it's given me some pause for thought and reflection on 2023, and considering how central Pathfinder was to that story I thought I'd share it here. I have absolutely no clue if my story is unique, boringly cliche, or something in between.
I've primarily been a Shadowrun gamemaster for many years, but as my players got older, the campaigns started ending. I still wanted to gamemaster though, and that involved bringing in new players. Shadowrun is far too heavy for new players though, so I needed to move to something easy and new player friendly. For that, I went with the "default" choice of DnD. This worked fine for a good few years. I found various bits of homebrew and custom material to cobble together something more in line with my style of gamemastering (sandboxy, open-ended and a lot of improv). Essentially, I was using a lot of sandbox mechanics and systems written by various 3rd party publishers.
Then, the OGL happened. I already had all the material, I wasn't directly affected. It's not like Hasbro were going to send the Pinkertons after me (obligatory lol MTG). It did make me very angry though. I've always felt like people should be fairly payed for their contributions, I don't think that's a controversial take. The fact they were even attempting to shut out people who helped build DnD pissed me off immensely. I followed the whole story very closely.
Then, I read an article talking about the ORC license. That article caused me to go looking at Paizo's products. I vaguely remembered people talking about Pathfinder 1e back in the day when DnD 4th edition came out, but I knew nothing about PF2e. I read more about the system (shout-out to Archives of Nethys and The Rules Lawyer on YT, they helped me figure out how all this stuff works). The more I read, the more I realized that PF2e fixes all my biggest headaches with DnD. From focus points reducing the motivation to have a 5-minute adventuring day, having multiple interesting uses for skills, reducing the necessity of having a dedicated healer, the 3-action system, it all seemed very cool.
I was still worried I'd end up right back at square one with funky corporate shenanigans though, so I started digging into Paizo. I was shocked to discover they're actually a union company. Not only a union company, but one in which the union represents freelance writers too! Going back to my deeply held beliefs about fair compensation, that was the impetus for me to really dive in. I started to prepare a new campaign for one of my groups (slightly more experienced players, so they could help me learn the rules as we go). I'm very lucky that the Foundry Kingmaker add-on dropped right when I was starting to set things up. All in all, I've spent about ~$400 so far, and I couldn't be happier with what I've gotten. I'm still only 3-4 months into learning Pathfinder and am still very much in the process of moving all my groups over, but so far it's been absolutely great. I'm also extremely happy that the money I'm spending isn't just getting vacuumed into Chris Cocks' bank account, but is a more equitable split with the people actually doing the hard work of writing, testing and iterating on these systems.
Also, very small aside, the PF2e remaster looks dope.
So, in conclusion, to any Paizo employees who happen to read this, thank you, stay awesome, and keep doing what you're doing.
