This last weekend, me and some friends finished the playtest for the new edition of Pathfinder. Overall, I enjoyed the new edition’s simplification of the original Pathfinder, a derivative of D&D 5E. The feat-heavy system initially felt hard to navigate, especially since I was using a large PDF to navigate the character building system, where as I usually rely heavily on websites that distill and organize the information so that I can have things opened in several tabs with easily accessible links, to build 5E characters. Not that that’s a bag thing for the new system, but that was my original experience before things started getting structured third-order style.
But as we kept building and building characters, it got really easy and it was fun to create distinct and different characters, as opposed to D&D 5E’s system of sub-classes. Consequently, though there were a lot of role play based feats, the playtest didn’t really highlight that in favor of quickly getting through the playtest using as many different characters and classes as possible to test the combat mechanics. I would’ve preferred some role play heavy missions, where finding information was key to even finding the fight, much less knowing enough information to be able to fight it correctly.
One handy mechanic I found very useful was in spells, there was defined differences between a success and critical success, and a failure and critical failure. It made fighting the heartier characters extra difficult, not even counting for their better stats.
All in all, the playtest felt well rounded to showcase the system’s extremely hands on but much more simplified version, as Pathfinder has always felt more combat oriented than D&D 5E’s narrative focus (by comparison.)
Video Games Deconstructed 