Rann:  And lo, the pantheon of Wizards of the Coast did declare that there would be a new edition, and it was said this would be good. And then lo, the Wizards did say that the new edition would be different. And many minds were fucking lost.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Pathfinder is a project sprung from butthurt. It was made by people that couldn’t stand the fact that 4e was a different beast, and so they liberally ripped off drew inspiration from third edition to create a new system that would be compatible with all your books. So great was their anger at the evil ol’ WotC that they just couldn’t resist liberally lifting pretty much everything about the magic items, combat rules, and so on in what might be the most extreme use of the OGL ever. The foreword is practically one long smirk aimed at 4e, and you can almost see, if you look closely between the lines, the tiny words written “You’ll all be sorry! We’ll show you!”

Now, having said that, Pathfinder isn’t a bad system. Not at all, in fact it has a number of compelling features and improvements over 3e, and an improved way to use all your old stuff is a pretty hefty bonus. And the artwork is exquisite, lush and vibrant and sexy, and just as dungeonpunk, if not more, than 4e wound up being. It makes some certain tweaks to the combat system that make it easier and more compelling to actually use certain combat maneuvers and tactics that in regular 3e would have more often meant a great deal of fiddling around with the rules in the player’s guide and thus were rarely attempted outside of Grapple.

Let’s just say that Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons: Fourth Edition speak to two very different sets of people that had previously played 3e. There’s overlap in these two sets, of course, but nominally the two products are geared for either one or the other.

4e is for the people who were playing 3e because they wanted to have awesome adventures in an Age of Adventure setting. It’s easy for anyone to play any class so long as they’re willing to learn the general rules of the game, and no one player’s experience playing a class is wildly different from anyone else’s. You just pick what you want to play and you go for it. It’s for people that just like RPGs for the fun they provide.

Pathfinder is for the people who were playing 3e because they knew the system, they knew how to work the system, and they liked the system. The classes have wildly divergent play styles, and thus the players will have very different play experiences and going from one class to another will require its own brand of learning and catching up. If anything, the divide between casters and melee characters is even larger, and your tolerance and ability for bookkeeping must be taken into account. It’s for people who set out to MASTER a system, the hardcore players. (Hardercore, anyway.)

See, the thing about 3e (and thus, by extension, Pathfinder) is that it’s crunchy. Always has been. Not as crunchy as, say, Champions thank god, but it’s still going to require you to have more pages to your character sheet than can easily fit in a clear plastic sleeve if you’re going to be playing anything more complicated than a straight melee character or low-level mix character (rogue or ranger). Casters like wizards and sorcerers are the worst about this, with a constant need to update your spell list, mark down what spells you’ve memorized, how many times you’ve memorized it, which have been spontaneously converted into something, what’s memorized at a different level, what’s a bonus domain spell and how that affects casting it, all that sort of stuff. Casters in Pathfinder are virtually identical to their 3e brethren… well, they pretty much have to be, or they wouldn’t really be able to hold up to their promise of “All the other books work without conversion.” The magic items and so on are so entrenched in how the magic system of 3e works that any attempt to refine the casters themselves would either require a conversion process or is simply impossible. So if you played a caster in 3e previously, you know exactly what to do, and if you avoided playing a caster because it felt too much like homework, then you’ll still want to avoid them.

If anything, the divide between the revamped (and revitalized) melee classes parallels the divide between 4e and Pathfinder, if not wider. If you mostly stuck to melee in 3e, you’re going to wind up sticking exclusively to melee in Pathfinder, and vice versa. The gap between the “types” of players you have in your group is larger. In some ways I could see this leading to trouble, with some snarking about “brutes” and “finger-wigglers”, but shouldn’t be too bad unless your group is made up of a bunch of dicks. (And if they are, what’s the matter with you? Get a new group!)

Mostly I want to talk about two character classes that have probably been revamped the most, and to the best effect. These are the Barbarian and the Rogue. Rather than a strange, semi-useful set of abilities, at certain levels they now get to choose Rage Powers and Rogue Talents from a long list, providing a wealth of customization options and a reason to keep on playing them.

The Rogue was already a decent class, but it suffered from turning into something kind of different later on in its progression. It starts out as a melee fighter with a few special abilities, then eventually wanders into being sort of a melee fighter and sort of a spellcaster and still not being very good at either. And as noted, casters are crunchy, so suddenly you go from just managing your fairly small array of feats and abilities to needing to do bookkeeping… not a LOT of bookkeeping, because the rogue spell list was pretty small, but then one winds up wondering “Why have it at all?” Beyond one or two spells, you could do almost anything in your spell list more easily, more effectively, and more often with skills, scrolls, wands and rods.

Now a Rogue stays a Rogue the whole way through instead of turning into a kind of wizard-y thing. You can still get various bits of magic via Rogue Talents, but these become spell-like abilities… something a lot easier to manage and keep track of. You just pick a couple of spells from the list when you take that Talent, and from then on you can cast it a few times a day as a spell-like ability. Easy stuff. There’s also a wealth of other Talents that you can take to get abilities that could previously only be gotten through giving up one of your precious few feats to get them. Instead of being just a way to rack up skill points for a prestige class and grab some sneak attack, now a rogue is completely worth it to play all the way through because it’s only going to get better and more personalized as it goes.

Barbarians are even more drastic than that. In my experience, no one actually played a Barbarian. Barbarian was what you took a level of to get the extra speed before heading into Fighter. You might stick around a few more levels to actually get one or two more of the other special abilities, like more raging and trap sense, but who goes to twenty with a Barbarian? Hell, who goes to TEN? The proof’s in just how few Barbarian-themed Prestige Classes there were… it was rare anyone wanted to stick with Barbarian long enough to get the prerequisites together. You started with a level of Barbarian, you went to Fighter, and eventually you went to something else because your Fighter looked like a limp-dick next to the mage who’s causing stuff’s internal organs to turn into plasma and explode every round by the time you’re in the -teen levels. But now Rage Powers and more special abilities make the Barbarian an attractive prospect all the way up to twenty, with almost as many customization options, if not more, than the old Fighter had with bonus feats. The Barbarian now has a purpose… the straightforward damage-dealer next to the Fighter’s more customizable damage/control/maneuvering possibilities.

I really think all of the classes could have been revamped this way, making them still 3e-ish but more accessible, more desirable. Sadly this didn’t happen, due to Pathfinder’s “no conversion, just compatibility” declaration and just how reliant on the magic system working juuuust so was to way too many feats, magic items, and prestige classes. It’s some wasted potential, and that’s sad. But the other revamps make it worth it anyway, and Pathfinder is definitely an upgrade from 3e for them alone. And crunchy is a little better sometimes… it’s possible for 4e to be a little too streamlined, even though I think overall it’s the better system. If you’re looking for something a little more simulationist and familiar, and wanting to crack open some of the stuff in those old 3e books you thought you were going to retire, Pathfinder is definitely a worthwhile purchase.

EDIT: Durrr, my bad. Rogues don’t get spellcasting, rangers do. I was operating on murky memories of the rogue in the last 3e game I played, who cross-classed like it was going out of style. (Which, I guess, it kinda was.)