I haven’t really played PF2e, but from reading it I don’t really love that it does the “numbers go way up” thing. I did 3e and I didn’t like the “I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check” thing. I’m told PF2e has a “without level bonus” mode, but I don’t know if anyone plays it.

I mean, that’s part of why I preferred the Sega & NEC ecosystems in the 16-bit era, and why I preferred the 3DO later, but never bought the full console (I did have the 3DO Blaster). With a Genesis (not a Nomad), you could use the Power Base Converter to play SMS games, plus if you wanted, there were the CD & 32x setups as well. If Sega had looked at the CD & 32x the way they did the Mark 2 & Mark 3/SMS, and hadn’t been so damn beholden to Yuji Naka, it would have been much better. Then again, if they had done the SG-1000 / SC-3000 thing with the Genesis, we could have had another PowerPC based OS in the world.

Plus, the SNES was initially planned with backwards compatibility, but they ripped it out late in development. So, why should I give them money? It’s not like Ninja Gaiden Trilogy plays so much better than the NES carts.

That’s the 4e & 5e sales pitch. No interest then.

Oh, also, I don’t care about the setting. I don’t use Golarion anyway, because Forgotten Realms, Mystara, and Sigil exist.

Eh? It absolutely did not do that thing.

So first of all, if you like D&D 3.x or Pathfinder 1e, I’m glad! It’s a fun system. I have many great memories of amazing campaigns in that system, and I think it’s most important that you play the game you like. But I’ve been hearing this “video game” thing for half a decade now, which means I’ve got a whole big rant prepared. I’m…I’m sorry.

Ok. So. Yes, 5e filed off all of the stuff that was interesting, the big numbers that make people feel powerful, the stuff that made characters unique, etc. in its pursuit of making D&D like a video game. But Pathfinder went the opposite direction.

• You can make 238,140 mechanically distinct level two characters based on ancestry, class, and archetype alone (that’s not a random guess, I did the math); and while they won’t all have the same power level, they will all likely be able to contribute meaningfully. And that’s not even counting all the class-specific choices and options, or the other feats you could take. Paizo is six years into PF2e right now, and even though they had to waste a bunch of time dealing with WotC’s OGL nonsense, they’re up to nearly a quarter million different combinations; but 3.x didn’t get anywhere near that level of meaningful customization until Pathfinder debuted archetypes in the APG in 2010—a full decade after 3.0 came out.

• The 3-action economy is so much easier to play and explain than “wait, what’s a ‘swift’ action again?” (I’ve taught a seven-year-old how to play successfully), but it doesn’t feel like a video game like 5e does because there are actual, meaningful choices you can make with each of your three actions. While 5e (and 3.x before it) often devolves into “conga line of death” (surround the bad guy for flanking, whomp him with your biggest weapon twice per turn, don’t move because he’ll AOO you into powder), you can do essentially whatever you want with each of your three actions and make a difference.

• Plus, where 5e aimed at making things even more same-y with “bounded accuracy,” PF2e leaned into crits so hard that they had to lean into crit fails, too, in order to balance them. You can crit succeed and fail at skill checks, and the APs have rules for what happens when you do. Some weapons are built around crits, and they’re not a 1-in-20 chance anymore. You can do them quite often with the right build.

• As far as setting, the Forgotten Realms were probably interesting back when Greenwood came up with them, but putting a billion authors into the world has made it into the same bland, boring, Wal-Mart-Brand-Middle-Earth that Greyhawk was; but Golarion has something like three different continents for every possible type of fantasy setting you might want (that is a random guess, and probably an exaggeration).

And with the addition of Starfinder to the system a few weeks ago, all of that gets doubled or more.

Plus, it’s so much easier to run as a GM than the 3.x games were. I remember the first time I put a “hard” encounter together for PF2e. I looked at it and was like, “whoa, that can’t be right, I’m gonna have a TPK!” So I nerfed the encounter, and the players stomped it in two rounds. When I built an encounter the next week using the rules as written, it was a fun and dynamic encounter that lasted the entire session. One character went down. Everyone used their consumables and resources. It worked perfectly. Ever since, I trust that the encounter math knows what it’s talking about. When was the last time you were able to say that in 3.x?

Doesn’t help that we’ve got metric tons of content in the old system.

A lot of the really good stuff has been updated for the new system, either officially or by the community.

Why retrofit what didn’t really need fixing?

I mean…3.x was kind of janky. Yeah, it was better than AD&D, and yeah, it was awesome in its time, but it’s based on a 25-year-old system. People know a lot more about game design now, and it shows. Pathfinder 1e did noble work trying to make everything fit together, but they deployed a lot of duct tape over the nine years they were essentially “in charge of” the d20 system. When the “Pathfinder Unchained” classes came out, and you could see the difference between a modern approach and an original approach at the same table, it was like night and day. Some tables even banned Unchained classes because they would outshine the PHB/CRB classes, even though their damage output was still balanced.

I don’t think Pathfinder 2e is a perfect system. But it’s definitely better than the 3.x rules. That thing did, in fact, need fixing.

Just give me more APs.

They have! And they’re great! You just have to play PF2e, or convert them to your system, in order to play them. Or you can play third-party adventures, which are still coming out for PF1e/3.x as recently as yesterday.

Like I said, if you still like 3.x, I’m glad! Enjoy what you enjoy. I think it’s most important that people play the game they like at their tables. But 2e didn’t make it “video game-y.”

To me it feels meaningful in a way that the ludicrous numbers never did in previous versions. The expanded crit system makes degrees of success matter, and they do a great job of making you feel heroic; especially when you go back and fight underleveled enemies and crit on every attack. (Or, alternatively, when you roll a natural 20 and it just upgrades your crit fail to a regular fail. That’s when you know it’s time to run.)

Great list. Totally agreed across the board, and I’d add that they just folded Starfinder into the PF2e engine, which means that it now has a ton more content for it (including some stuff that isn’t sci-fi exclusive).

The companies that produce these games have increasingly co-mingled their staff with video game studios

Like who?

I mean, in the case of D&D, maybe. But PF2e was written by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Mark Seifter; they have a combined zero years of video game studio experience between them. In fact, most of them have been making tabletop RPGs for literally their entire professional careers, including stints at Wizards of the Coast.

For fun, I went to the Pathfinder wiki, which has brief profiles of all of the authors and contributors to Pathfinder; and I can’t find a single person on any of the game’s recent sourcebooks that has worked for a video game company before working for Paizo. In fact, most of them have worked for Paizo in some capacity for 5+ years, or are freelancers who have worked for big tabletop RPG publishers for ages.

They ripped it out because their “backwards compatibility” was literally just grafting an NES to the SNES. I think it even had a toggle switch you had to flip between the two. It was going to make the thing cost tons of money and nobody was ever going to use it, and anyone who cared could just plug their old NES back in whenever they wanted to use it.

But the people who didn’t upgrade never got to play Star Fox. Man, I love Star Fox.

I think one of the biggest things, besides not being owned by WOTC, is that it doesn’t have a million exceptions you have to remember.

D&D5e: Want to use your bonus action? Cool. Is it for a spell? Have you cast a spell this round? Is it a spell that’s allowed to be cast even if you’ve cast a spell?

Pathfinder2e: Do you have enough actions to perform an action? OK, do it.

First edition Pathfinder should be. Second edition is more like 5e, but actually thought out. I don’t think it’s natively compatible with D&D5e though.

Personally speaking, I find Star Fox (and most on-rails shooters) incredibly boring. Visually for the time it’s impressive, but I’ll play Corncob on my PC or any of the Jane’s games because they provide more gameplay.

As far as “nobody was ever going to use it”, that’s incorrect (as the success of the Retron series shows). My parents among others were highly resistant to buying me any console because we were a PC family - Genesis was the only one I could get them to even budge on because it had access to a library of cheaper games in addition to the expensive stuff. Part of the reason I didn’t get a 7800 was because they’d picked the TRS-80 CoCo over the 2600 and we didn’t have the library of software at the ready. If they’d included an NES on a chip, and I could have convinced at least two of my friends to let me borrow their NES carts in addition to SNES stuff, I might have had a SNES.

Oh, 1e Pathfinder is basically 3.75. I have the core book and a few others somewhere, and I lost the 3-ring binder with the thread from the GitP forum laying out the major changes between 3.5 and PF, as well as conversions for books that didn’t exist for PF, and some of the Green Ronin stuff.

It wouldn’t have been just an NES chip. It would’ve had to also include a separate PPU (in addition to the two already in the SNES), a NES cartridge I/O slot, a whole different video out architecture (the NES didn’t support composite out), and maybe more. Those are just the ones I know for sure.

Besides, the SNES was already going to cost significantly more than the Genesis. They were wary of widening that price gap still further when the owners of the older system still owned the older system and could easily plug it back in. Further, they were launching the SNES in North America with five launch titles and eight more on deck over the following month, with a total of thirty games coming out before that Christmas. I don’t think they were worried about having enough content for people to play on that new system.

I’ll play with you.

Seriously.

I haven’t before but I’d love to. Last dnd I played was 3.5. I won’t touch anything else, except pathfinder and other non-dnd games.

How often do pathfinder games do the thing like “The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you’re higher level and I want the math to be challenging”? Because I’ve always disliked that in games. That’s more of a video game trope, but I’ve seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don’t need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.

Yeah. I don’t think 1e is underrated, but I do think it’s over-hated. It’s the system I largely got started with for TTRPGs. It’s really not that difficult, but it does let you make things very complex.

I know why people went for D&D 5e over Pathfinder, but I think it should have been seen as an entry point, not the place you stay forever like it’s become for most people. It’s dumbed down, but also with you having to remember a lot of exceptions and things because they dumbed it down too much and tried adding things that didn’t fit exactly into the rules.

What Nintendo was worried about is almost inconsequential compared to what American parents were worried about. And parents were very worried about the investment they’d made into games that still worked.

You’re probably right for D&D 5e 2024 (or whatever it’s being called). The main focus was the virtual table top subscription service. As the other commenter says though, this isn’t true for most other systems.

Also, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Table top inspired video games. It’s not bad for the influence to flow the other way too. It just needs to be considerate of the format.

That’s down to the GM in any system.