The debacle in January 2023 with the OGL license and Wizards of the Coast pushed a lot of people away from Dungeons and Dragons, towards other role-playing games, particularly Pathfinder 2nd edition. I reviewed PF2e here and here.?Recently, I...
The debacle in January 2023 with the OGL license and Wizards of the Coast pushed a lot of people away from Dungeons and Dragons, towards other role-playing games, particularly Pathfinder 2nd edition. I reviewed PF2e here and here.?Recently, I also picked up the new Remastered edition, shown above.
The Remastered edition is Paizo’s clean break from the OGL license and anything related to Dungeons and Dragons mechanics.?Classic staples such as alignment, and ability scores, are simply gone, and with it some aspects of Pathfinder 2e have been streamlined.?The old ability scores (0-18) are simply replaced with ability bonuses, starting at 0.?This actually makes a lot of sense. The only thing we care about are the bonuses anyway, and the old numerical ability scores were more relevant in older versions of D&D where the number didn’t just dictate a bonus, but also dictated other factors (ability to be resurrected, chance of failure to cast a spell, avoid traps, etc).
Removing alignment also makes sense, since it’s been 40+ years, and still no one can agree on how to interpret alignment anyway.?
But it also removes some of the artificial guardrails placed on characters and allows greater diversity in motivations and personalities.
With the removal of alignment, this also affects religiously-inclined character classes such as clerics, and focuses on the particular anathemas and religious edicts of each deity.?As with character motivation, this does breathe more life into each deity and religious characters path, but it’s also a bit of an adjustment for old-school players like myself.
Further, these changes also mean that some aspects of the Pathfinder character sheets have been streamlined.?Previously, my kids character sheets were up to 6 pages long, but the newly designed sheets are 4 pages at most.?This is on par with D&D 5th edition.
Finally, let’s talk about the book formats.
The old Core Rulebook, Advanced Player’s Guide, and GameMastery Guide have been all sliced up and recombined into different books.?For example, the new Player Core book (special edition cover shown above), combines elements of the old Core Rulebook and Advanced Player’s Guide.?By default, one can play a Witch for example, but remastered Champions (paladins) aren’t available yet, pending further remastered publications.?The GM aspects of the old Core Rulebook have been combined with the GameMaster Guide to form the new GM Core book.
What you get is a more logical division between the two books: a player-centric handbook and a GM-centric one.?The old tome, the Core Rulebook, thus has been broken up into two logical divisions with newer content added into them.
Further, the format of the books themselves is way more readable than before.?Much of the content will look familiar, but is significantly easier to find thanks to book structure, and also due to the handy sidebar on each page.?Some rules have been slightly modified to address inconsistencies that have arisen.?Other rules have been simply rewritten for better clarity.?I can’t tell you how much easier it is to find things on the fly as a GM now rather than stopping the game to flip through a book for 10 minutes then give up and search online.?The GM Core in particular does provide more helpful content for planning and designing campaigns, and I found this part particular fun to read. It was previously scattered elsewhere (and similar tough to find), but now I know exactly where to turn to.
No joke, I struggled a lot with the old Core Rulebook to find things so I had to buy some tabs at a game store to mark the chapter out:
The updated books make this task a lot easier.
Finally, the spell list.?In order to make a clean break from the OGL, many classic D&D spells have been renamed to non-OGL ones.?For example, the iconic Magic Missile is now Force Barrage.?Magic Weapon is given a cooler name of Runic Weapon, and some spells are given names that are more intuitive such as Gentle Repose becoming Peaceful Rest.?Mechanically, very little if anything changes, but having to remember a new set of names is probably the biggest challenge for both GMs and magic-using players.
In any case, part of me misses the Pathfinder tie-back to old D&D, so it’s bittersweet that this connection is finally severed at last, but on the other hand, the remastered Pathfinder 2e is a significant improvement over the original 2e in terms of streamlined mechanics and streamlined publications.
On the other hand, it does feel like Pathfinder is finally getting out of the shadow of D&D and maturing as a role-playing game in its own right, and I salute these updates, and will be looking forward to more games with the kids (or maybe finally getting off my seat to check out the local Pathfinder Society).