Pathfinder a Bite at a Time: Presentation
Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 01:31PM Unsure about Pathfinder? Not quite ready to lay down hard gp for yet another 3.5 product? Wondering if it’s worth the scratch?
As a longtime 3.5 player and DM, allow me to be your guide to the good and the bad of Paizo’s Pathfinder in this, the first in my series of Pathfinder reviews, a bite at a time.
The Core Rulebook and Campaign Setting
Presentation
The Pathfinder Core Rulebook looks and feels great. It is 576 perfect-bound glossy pages smashing the PH and DMG together into one package that is just a few millimetres wider and taller than previous sourcebooks. Years from now I’m certain the corners will be mashed, and more than a few pages ripped or bent, but this is a quality product that will last with a bit of care.
The layout and decorative art are similar to previous incarnations of the ruleset, but with an updated look and feel that may be refreshing simply because they’re new. The interior pages are packed with text, stylized headers, folios, and margins. The index is 4 pages long, so time will tell if it’s as useful as we’d like it to be, but everything is easy to read and familiar to navigate.
Great art and a familiar layout.
The art is very pretty—a stylized realism that combines clean lines with tons of detail. Each chapter starts with a two-page spread of the Pathfinder archetypes in action, accompanied by a dramatic description of the scene.
The art is close, if not equal to, the core 4E art, and overall the re-imagined ogres, goblins, and characters look awesome. I’m especially fond of the half-orc-assassin, gnome bard, small druid, and elf rogue, each of which is done in a style that is Pathfinder’s alone.
Art, Pathfinder, Review in 3E, Monster Art, Pathfinder 
Reader Comments (7)
Got my rulebook in the mail yesterday. It's got awesome weight with a +4 vs. small dogs.
I'm hoping my group will get to play this puppy in October!
Please accept this in the spirit it's intended, which is just a sharing my opinion and not an attempt to change yours. Thanks in advance for having me as guest here and rest assured that I have no desire to be perceived as rude or in-gracious. I disagree with you on several points though.
Stating that the book smashes the PH and DMG together is an over-simplification and seems sort of mean-spirited. (I'm going with the assumption that you meant OGL content, rather than the copyrighted equivalents.) Just a cursory glance at the GM section yields that the writing and organization are fresh and original and not at all just a repeat of requisite D20 SRD sections. The SRD does not contain a section on weather and environment for example.
I find your "re-imagined" comment about Pathfinder art puzzling? Since you mention 4E art all I want to say to this is that 4E does far more "re-imaging" in what seems to be a revisionist effort to sketch out the perceived "goofiness" of classic D&D art, particularly monsters. Art in general is a subjective topic but the Pathfinder art is definitely not a "re-imaging" of prior art. You do later say that Pathfinder has a style all its own so I'm not sure what you mean.
I also can't really agree with the "blurb" under the photo saying there's a "familiar layout." There is a whole lot of change in the layout. I've avoided mention of this on my own blog, but Paizo appears to have identified the mistakes of past 3E products and avoided repeating them.
I'd like to extend an invite to you to have a look at the granular treatment I'm giving Pathfinder on my own blog: Random Generation
Glad to see you posting updates again!
My first impression of the pathfinder beta product centered heavily on the art. The styles the races were drawn in: familiar, but new, and kind of gritty. It just seemed to me to capture what pathfinder was supposed to be.
I'm a little too invested in 4e at this point to go that route, but I'm happy to hear that it's living up to the expectations that people had for it.
Hey all,
As always, Johnn, let me know if you need an on-call player! I'm running a Pathfinder game, and intend to start another to introduce it to some interested folks here at the office, so I would really dig into a chance to play on the other side of the screen.
Heya Wizard, thanks for stopping by (and no worries on ruffling my feathers—I appreciate your comments)! Many apologies for the miscommunications, too. You definitely got a few things from my post here that I didn't intend.
1. My comment on smashing the PH and DMG together was certainly a simplification, but not meant to be mean-spirited in the least. In short, those are the roles that the PF Core Rulebook cover off, and nicely (as far as I can tell so far, anyway), but I never meant the comment to mean it was just a rehash. Frankly, I'm still combing through the book, so I'll reserve judgement on the content for later. As a general description of the book, however, I think my comment serves to explain the value to those unfamiliar with it.
2. On art, Pathfinder takes the established critters—critters I've grown used to seing drawn with a particular style for the last decade—and changes them. Goblins look a bit more like little green animé men; ogres are slack-jawed hills of flesh; dragons are spikier and maybe even more reptilian. The halflings and gnomes I've seen, like the goblins, have exceedingly large eyes and slightly larger heads, which again reminds me of animé.
PF has changed the look of these iconics, and I like it.
3. I disagree—the layout hasn't changed much at all. You have headers and text blocks and statistics blocks and high-quality art arranged in a readable fashion. It's all very familiar territory. I suspect we're talking about different ideas here, though, so I invite more comments from you, and I will be certain to follow your discussion of Pathfinder as well. :)
Swordgleam! What's shaking? How's the tutelage of Yax and J4 coming along? I missed their deadline myself, but may take them up on it in a few months when I start hitting brick walls with my current ideas. ;)
I agree on the art—I had pretty much the exact same impression. I know you love your 4E, and I'm not sure how well that would translate to rules that you might find not nearly as streamlined in PF, but I urge you to pick up the Core Rulebook or have someone run you through a game if you haven't played 3.5 or PF before. I'm a big fan.
Martial Flavor is coming along great, though as usual I'm driving myself crazy trying to do ten things at once. The new members have given some more life to the Gamer Lifestyle forum, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes.
The problem with picking up PF is that we already have a 3.5 variant going - Iron Heroes. And I don't think my group would want to put up with three different d20 games going on at once. Unfortunately, there are no other gamers nearby except the ones I already game with, and a bunch of people I don't like. No FLGS or anything of that sort.
Oh yeah—I forgot you had an Iron Heroes game going. From what I remember you were really having a great time with it, too. Good stuff. And here I thought you were missing out on 3E D20 entirely. :p
pretty cool stuff here thank you!!!!!!!