5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds

On this blog, I’ve talked about leaving D&D for Pathfinder, and even a bit about leaving Pathfinder for D&D 5e.  The truth is, my feelings on these two actually mirror my feelings on my two favorite programming languages: C++ and Perl.  I learned C++ first, and I loved it.  Mostly.  But then I learned Perl and it was so much better than C++.  Except there were still parts of C++ that I missed.  And then sometimes I would go back to C++ and I would remember all the reasons I loved it ... and all the reasons I left it.  Back and forth, always missing whichever one I wasn’t using, always nostalgic for the other one.

Remember when I talked about game rotation?  Well, as I mentioned, most of our games are 5e (or variants thereof), but occasionally we dabble in other games.  And, recently, we finally decided to play a Pathfinder campaign, spurred by my eldest’s love of the Kingmaker adventure path.  And I was quite excited to get back to Pathfinder, because there were lots of things I missed about it.  Except now that I’m deep in it ...

You see, as I explained a bit when I originally talked about Pathfinder, it made a number of improvements on D&D 3e.  You may also remember from my discussion of multiclassing in 3e that 3e (and even moreso Pathfinder) has my favorite implementation of multiclassing, and that’s just one of the many ways that Pathfinder makes character creation a joy.  You have so many options ... many people would say too many.

But allow me a brief digression: I will always maintain that you can never have too many choices.  Now, people will inevitably respond with “but ... analysis paralysis!” Yes, indeed: analysis paralysis is all too real, and it can be very problematic, especially when people need to make a series of choices in a row.  And that’s all a roleplaying character is, you know—a series of choices.  Some big, most small, but just choice after choice after choice.  So analysis paralysis can really screw you over when you try to build a character.  But here’s my potentially—hell, probably—contentious opinion: analysis paralysis isn’t caused by having too many choices.  It’s caused by having those choices shittily organized.  Think of it this way:  If I asked you pick from a list of 256 options, there’s no way you could do it.  The analysis paralysis would be crippling.  On the other hand, if I asked you pick from a list of 4 options, that would be trivial.  If I asked you to pick from a list of 4 options 4 times ... still pretty easy.  But, see, 4 to the power of 4 is 256.  To make 1 choice from 256 options is next to impossible (without spending an inordinate amount of time, in any event); to make 4 choices from 4 options each still gives you 256 total options, but they’ve been organized in such a fashion that the chioces are pretty easy.

This is important in the context of TTRPG character creation because, as I said above: character building is just choosing a bunch of options.  Now, I’m not saying that Pathfinder is immune to crappy organization which can cause analysis paralysis.  For instance, the number of feats available in the game is ... overwhelming.  But, they’re all tagged with various tags.  For this campaign, I built a witch character.  We started at 4th level, so I needed to choose 2 feats.  There are (quite literally) hundreds of feats to choose from.  Except a lot of them (like, a whole lot of them) are combat feats.  My witch is not going to be doing a lot of melee combat: she’ll be casting spells, and using hexes (which are like special magic tricks only available to witches).  So I don’t need any of those combat-oriented feats.  A bunch more are “teamwork” feats, which are only useful if two or more characters take them, so I eliminated those as well.  “Metamagic” feats can change the way you cast spells; some of them might be useful for a witch character, but they’re far more useful for what’s called a “spontaneous caster” (as opposed to a “prepared caster,” which a witch is).  So I’ll skip those.  And so on, and so forth, until I’ve narrowed down the list of potential feats from hundreds to a dozen or two.  Still more options than I’d like, and Pathfinder could still stand to add a few more layers of organization for their feats, but it was doable.  And I did it.

So, now I’m playing a witch named Wilhemina Osterdale Bexxancourt—but please call her “Bexx,” everbody does—and she’s a custom race, which is another thing Pathfinder makes it very easy to do via its race builder rules, and she has an “archetype,” which is another thing Pathfinder has over 5e (although, to be fair, 5e has started dabbling in this arena lately: they refer to Pathfinder archetypes as “variants” and use “archetypes” to mean subclasses, which is very confusing for those of us who have to go back and forth).  My race and archetype are based on comic characters, actually: the talokka are based on the Legion of Superheroes’ Shadow Lass,¹ who hails from a planet called Talok VIII, and, while I can’t be sure that the creators of the “tatterdemalion” archetype specifically had Ragman in mind when they wrote it, the fact that he’s often referred to as “the Tattered Tatterdemalion” in the comics is surely suggestive.  So I’m a blue-skinned spellcaster who can manipulate shadows and whose clothes can reach out grab people, who talks to the stars, which grant her her powers, and also to her indigo and lavender fox, which is her companion and mentor.  Also, I’m traveling with a clone of Vexx and a little boy whose stuffed toy shaped like a demon can turn into an actual demon.  In Pathfinder, none of this was particularly difficult to build.  In 5e ... well, let’s just say there would have been a lot of reskinning, refluffing, and handwaving, and it still wouldn’t have been as satisfying as what we have currently.  In my humble opinion.

So, you may say to yourself, sounds like you’re happy to be playing Pathfinder then!  Yeah, you’d think that ...

See, the problem is that the character creation is only one part at the beginning at the campaign.  It’s a huge part, don’t get me wrong ... but still only one part, and it’s over before you even start playing.  Then you get to the actual gameplay, and that’s where 5e really shines.  Simple example: as a prepared spellcaster, I know a certain number of spells, and, out of the ones I know, I can “prepare” a certain number of those spells to have on hand on any given day.²  Now, in 5e, I would be able to prepare, let’s say, the spell cure wounds.  Once it was prepared, I could cast it as many times as I liked.  I could also cast it at either 1st level, or at 2nd level³ ... whichever the situation called for (i.e. depending on how bad the wounds I wished to cure actually were).  In Pathfinder, I have to have two entirely different spells: cure light wounds, and cure moderate wounds.  I need to know both of those, and, if I want to cast both of them, I need to prepare them both.  Worse, if I think I may need to cure some moderately severe wounds more than once, I have to prepare cure moderate more than once.  This felt perfectly normal back in the days when I played Pathfinder exclusively and 5e was just a rumour known as “D&D Next.” But, now that I’ve been playing 5e for, at this point, years—maybe even longer than I played Pathfinder, now that I think about it—this seems utterly insane.  And limiting.  And just ... annoying.

Of course, the obvious thing to do is to play some hybrid Frankenstein system where you would build your characters using Pathfinder rules and then play them using 5e rules.  Except that you can’t really do that, because everything is so intertwined.  Take my example of cure wounds above: that works in 5e because they revamped the entire magic system, collapsing similar spells into one, and adding “upcasting” effects for when you cast a lower level spell in a higher level spell slot.  That was a lot of work.  Pathfinder characters are all built on the assumption that you’re using Pathfinder spells; if you suddenly said, no, we’re using 5e spells instead, what would that do to the power levels? the spell slot progressions? the tables of spells known? class spell lists? what about domain spells for clerics and patron spells for witches? some of those are Pathfinder-only spells—what do we do then?

And the magic system is just one place where character creation and character play intersect: what about the alignment system? the skill system? the feat system? the differing methods of increasing ability scores, both as a racial feature and during level progression?  There are just two damn many moving parts here to successfully combine the two into any semblance of something that would actually work.  Well, without putting massive effort into it, and it seems foolish to devote that much time into something that you have no idea what the chance of success is, or how useful it would be even if you do succeed.  So I kind of feel like I’m stuck wishing I was using Pathfinder when I’m building characters for 5e, and wishing I was using 5e when I’m actually playing Pathfinder.  And it’s a bummer.

I don’t know if this tension will ever get resolved.  You may recall my talking about looking forward to Pathfinder 2nd edition (a.k.a. “P2”), but that turned out to be a bust.  They really blew it, in my opinion.  Not only did it devolve into each class being a huge list of powers like D&D 4e tried to do,⁴ but they also completely removed multiclassing (again, like 4e tried to do).  You know, for all the hate that 4e got (and I’m guilty of quite a lot of it myself), 4e did a lot of things right.  But it screwed up in (at least) two fundamental areas; the idea that Paizo (the makers of Pathfinder) would look at 4e and go “let’s only take the parts that really failed!” is just incomprehensible to me.  If I wanted something entirely different from the D&D lineage, I certainly have lots of great choices.  My eldest is particularly fond of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” sytem.⁵  But I don’t want something entirely different.  I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.  I love the D&D system and mythology and even some of its little weirdsies,⁶ like saving throws, or high-level characters being able to survive falls from orbit.⁷  I just want the thing I love to be better, not to abandon it entirely.  I’m not sure if there will ever be an answer here.  P2 didn’t do it, and, while “6e” is mere conjecture at this point, it seems a safe bet that, even if it does arrive one day, the amazing success of 5e taught its creators that “simpler is better.” Of course, I don’t believe that.  But simpler gets more people to try out the game, and (strictly from a business perspective) having a steady stream of new customers is way more important than catering to those few customers who have grown sophisticated enough to want more options.  So a future hypothetical 6e probably won’t address it either.  It may just be an insoluable problem.

And that makes me sad.  Not completely depressed, of course, but just a bit bummed out.  Maybe one day someone will solve this dilemma.  Until then, I’ll keep playing the one and missing the other, and swapping back and forth just to keep myself appreciating whichever one I’m not playing at the moment.  It’s still a lot of fun either way.

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1 Shadow Lass was later renamed “Umbra” when the naming convention of “So-and-So Boy” and “Such-and-Such Girl” fell out of style, but that was well after my time reading comics.

2 Yes, I know that, as a witch, I’m not constrained to a limited number of spells known, as a bard or sorcerer would be.  That’s not really relevant to my point here though.

3 For this campaign, our characters are starting at 3rd level, so I have access to 2nd level spells.

4 The fact that “powers” was spelled “feats” did nothing to alleviate that impression.

5 That’s the one that is used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, etc etc etc.

6 To steal a phrase from Judge John Hodgman.

7 For those who didn’t realize that, the issue arises because there’s a maximum amount of falling damage one can take.  The reason there’s a maximum is to represent (sort of) the concept of terminal velocity.  The problem comes in because maximum falling damage is anything but terminal for most characters once they get up around 15th level or so.