Without thinking about it, entirely subconsciously, you are trained by Pathfinder and D&D to safeguard your players. You are taught to coddle them! And when does this subconscious teaching happen? Not in ANY dungeon master resource. It happens before your first adventure, before your very first D20 roll.It happens when you create characters.In Pathfinder, character creation takes a ridiculous amount of time. I ran it for about six years, and I saw it take well over an hour, sometimes going up to two for new players. As a GM who understood the system inside and out, I could get it done in about a half hour. Losing a character in a game with such a painstaking character creation process is absolutely devastating. As a GM, you wonder if that person will bother to make a new character, or if they will just leave, and if they do, who will go with them? Will you even have a game afterwards?And enemy statblocks are the same way. You look at these massive text blocks that include three different saving throws, the type of hit dice, types and sub-types of creature, and perhaps most hilariously unnecessary, ALL SIX STATS. Who on earth looks at all that and dares think “I’ll make some monsters of my own!” Please understand, I’m not saying nobody makes their own monsters. I’m saying that it is an undertaking to make a monster with a statblock like that. Figuring out saves, stats, and heaven forbid you want to get CR correct, good luck with testing out that garbage.
So many GMs don’t make their own monsters. Why would you, when you have 5 bestiaries to pluck from? You end up spending your GMing time feeling like a human calculator, balancing CR, doing 4-6 encounters per day, totaling up XP and gold. You, the GM, are left with the drudge work.Pathfinder, and to a lesser extent 5e, treats the GM like trash. And yet they are wildly popular.There’s systems that are so much better. Don’t want to deviate from 5e? Try Five Torches Deep, it’s a rules-lite, very deadly hack of 5e with lightning quick character creation and really fun ideas on dungeon design. Want a game that’s easy to pick up and play? Try Into the Odd, a surreal fantasy game that mixes up combat by removing to-hit rolls entirely. Want a Sci-Fi spacefaring game? Stars Without Number has a great modular system where you can customize a lot about your universe’s rules, and a ship combat system that every player I’ve run it for has fallen in love with. Mörk Borg, OSE, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dark Streets and Darker Secrets, the Black Hack, the White Hack, Paranoia, Death is the New Pink.There’s tons of great stuff out there with systems that empower GMs and engage players. You don’t have to spend hours working with a system that doesn’t respect you.(A lot of my points here are against Pathfinder, but 5e does all this too, just not as bad)
>>97215768>Five Torches Deep>Into the Odd>Stars Without Number>Mork Borg>Black Hackoh, you're a NuSR shilli've got my retroclones and that's all i needgood taste in paranoia though
>>97215768Pathfinder is unironically one of the worst systems ever made. They took the worst aspects of 3.5e, tripled down on them, and then pozzed it for good measure.
>>97215768>Modern game designPathfinder was released in 2009, bro
I like all the monsters in Pathfinder and 3.5 though.Making your own is fun because you can add class levels to existing ones, advance existing ones, or just homebrew new ones.Stars Without Number is fun, too, I'm playing in a game of it right now. I prefer Traveller but SWN isn't bad at all. I like DMing Pathfinder and D&D 5e,
>Mork Bork
>>972158395e's release is closer to pathfinder 1e than it is to us now>>97215768He's right tho, your problem isn't modern game design, it's WotCslop.
You can tell D&D/Pathfinder sucks because not a single videogame does a straight adaptation of the combat rules.
>>97215768I didn't get in via PF or 5e so I don't have this problem. It is obvious when you talk to those players, mind you.
>>97215768All of my players were eaten by wolves, but they died in battle so that gives them a positive karma modifier on their next character reincarnation roll.
Take the Sword World pill, OP. The japs have it all figured out.
