What's bad about Pathfinder?

It's d&d 3.75
Mechanically, it's a new paint job on the same system.

With regards to the setting and published materials, it has a tendency to wander pretty far into what some may consider magic realm. Also, the people in charge have a very affectionate view of slavers as an institution. This, and other moral particulars can be as off putting as extremely high collateral damage genocide being chaotic good (a throwback to 2nd Ed d&d).

So, in short, it's 3rd Ed for /D/eviants.
If you don't love it, you probably hate it.

Largely the same problems as D&D 3.5:
>bad skill systems
>arcane casters outstrip martials quickly
>divine casters outstrip martials almost immediately
>it takes too long to make a character; you can make a GURPS character almost as quickly
>trap options
And some original things PF brought to the table:
>panders to SJWs/tumblr (cf. the transexual lesbian in Wrath of the Righteous and the agender ninja iconic)
>CMB is totally busted and will never work once you reach a certain level
>adds even more option bloat
>developers are asshats who nerf martial classes' abilities because they cannot toss a mouse into the air 3 times in 6 seconds IRL
>a large portion of the playerbase are weebs and ERPers

>A good DM and good players can make any system fun.

Watching Twilight with friends can also be fun. It doesn't mean that you should watch Twilight.

Just go in /pfg/ and see for yourself

It's the poster child for quantity over quality in game design

With all the material that's been published you have thousands of choices to make, but only a few of them are actually any good. What's worse, the bad choices don't look bad until long after it's too late to change anything. The process of testing and refining options to produce something good can itself be fun, but in practice it comes down to either frustrating trial and error spread over multiple games, or just looking online to build on the work of other powergamers.

The one thing I really like about Pathfinder is the scenario design. Paizo actually does a decent job of coming up with fun and varied modules for PFS.

What I mean is that the game can be fun because I can drop the SJW bullshit and options I don't like and play it as an extended 3.5. Nobody's forcing me to use the shit parts of the game or having to strictly abide by things that I think suck. What do you think houserules are for? In a game of pretend they could make the whole setting an erpfest of tumblr abominations and I can just go "they're all regular people now". Who's gonna stop me?

The one point here I might argue is the "option bloat" and character creation time. I could see 3.PF being framed as a super crunchy system-mastery style game, in which case options and extensive character creation are part of the fun on their own. Groups I've been in have had loads of fun coming up with interesting builds and combinations, though this can take hours and players need to know how to avoid the traps. That is to say, while downsides to many players, they're either neutral or upsides to the core player base.

My problems with it as someone who is forced by circumstance to play only PF are as follows:
-no balance/too many options
-encourages roll playing
-combat is a fucking chore (this is the biggest)

Or you could a play a GOOD game instead, like any of the TSR D&D editions.

>Groups I've been in have had loads of fun coming up with interesting builds and combinations
Maybe they should try roleplaying instead of masturbating to mechanical gimmickry.

There's also the fact that Pathfinder owes its entire success to 3.x babbies being butthurt over D&D 4e coming out and not being 3.x. That was the literal fucking selling point for Pathfinder. It rode the kneejerk hate for anything new - and don't get me wrong, 4e has flaws - and said, "hey, wootsie's brought home the new baby? well here at paizo we'll suck your dick like you're an only child."

This guy's got it, plus bloat that's 80% trap options or garbage, and dumb mechanics.

To be fair, it's like others have said and encourages rollplaying, because 99% of those options are garbage or traps. The only way to do anything useful is to basically minmax and look up builds or you will just be useless. The huge amount of options is a drawback in this case because the majority of them are pointless and don't synergize well. It's better to homebrew a few up if the need arises than have thousands of options you will never use because picking them just makes you useless.

Pathfinder's (and D&D in general, perhaps) greatest sin is teaching people that they need to game the system to enjoy themselves, rather than roleplay a fun concept and have the system support that. It gets the relationship completely backwards. The system should work to make the player's character someone that can stand on the stage, not that the player should redesign and redesign their character until they fit in the tiny box that the system will allow.

Yeah, ideally the system would support it but it doesn't. There are a lot of neat options there, but when are they ever gonna be used? So, if you are stuck playing PF you kinda have to do the minmax stuff or just suck at the game. Unless they change shit up to make all of those useful, but I doubt that's gonna happen. D&D seems fine to me. It doesn't have nearly as many options, and most of the fan ones are useful/decent (though you get the rare exception of some horrible homebrewed shit). It keeps it more coherent. PF just shits out a million options, 10% of which are helpful in game.

Though I'd love if there was a way to make them all work or be viable, there just isn't. No idea why they even bothered with all that shit in the first place when you can't use it.

>D&D seems fine to me.
(Prestige) classes, man. So much good fluff, so much wasted potential. It breaks my heart to see Truenamer, Soul Knife, Dragon Disciple, etc. and love their fluff, but they wind up being utterly shit unless you do some crazy multiclassing charop.

Pathfinder has a serious problem with shitting out anything and everything without an ounce of forethought. It's only gotten worse over time. I got out shortly after whatever it was with the Arcanist dropped. I was getting really sick of the system by that point.

It's 3.butthurt edition made by people who outright refused to listen to criticism, and shut down criticism by banning playtesters. The core rules are heavily plagiarized, and there are almost no fixes worth mentioning.

When 4e was released, the devs went into a huge autistic rage and basically CTRL+C and CTRL+V'd 3.5 and did almost nothing to fix its most glaring faults, added new ones, and so on.

Also the setting is a fucking theme park.

Spending the hours poring over sourcebooks to make a half-competent PC is more entertaining than actually playing that PC.

For half the game, the dice dictate everything because your modifiers are too low to reliably complete basic tasks. Then your numbers bloat too high and suddenly the dice are irrelevant.

It had decent ideas in some places (skill changes, CMB, teamwork feats), but had utterly awful crunch. It's really sad when the best way to play a system is to load it up with variants and only use 3rd-party character classes.

>People say that Pathfinder is bad.
I've had fun when I've played Pathfinder with my group.

>People say that 5e is good.
I've never had fun when I've played 5e

I think there are some redeeming points of pathfinder. Not /pfg/ though, those guys are fucking weird.

Like 3.5, it has a magic that rapidly outstrips casters, a core fighting mechanic that falls apart under it's own weight at high levels, system bloat, and an overreliance on numbers. If you keep it low-level it still works pretty well

Unlike 3.5, it doesn't corrale these problems at all.

Late-game 3.5 classes were generally a lot less bloated and a lot more balanced with other classes, with things like Dragonfire Adept usually considered on par with a well-made Fighter and very light on bookeeping for a magic-user.

Pathfinder's classes tend to add new abilities every level, track things by round, and escalate power. Summoner is notably overpowered, and combines this with a complex subsystem for building your Eidolon summon. Most occult classes have an incredibly rules-heavy moveset that make the game more annoying to play. It also strips away a lot of the flavour of existing classes for no real reason, such as making removing the Cleric's Turn Undead and replacing it with an AoE Heal.

So basically it bloats an already-bloated system and adds stuff to unbalance and already-unbalanced system, while stripping away a lot of the flavour that made those unbalanced and bloated rules compelling.

If you want a 3.5 clone, there are far better games out there. I've heard great things about the Monte Cook 'sequels,' such as Arcana Unearthed

The core mechanics of it are like, really really pointlessly restrictive.

Some of my greatest frustrations are that the CR values are very lackadaisical and misleading, which makes developing encounters that aren't dangerously skewed is very hard, and that the writing of the pre-made adventures is just... confusing. The trains of thought intertwined with the "plots" are often bizarrely irrational or just uninspiring.

Some people hate it because Players can be overpowered. Those people are afraid to step out of the game's "balance" (good meme) and make free form creatures to challenge their players. A lot of DM's end up frustrated that people min-max, those people don't get the system that is why they are mad.

Pathfinder is a good rule system, it has amazing rules, magic items, spells, classes and feats. Sure players are broken, they are supposed to be Cato Sicarius, not Failbaddon the Harmless.

Well, it's not GURPS.

The problem is unless everyone knows all the trap options or is readily informed and told their whole character idea has to be scraped because of it you can have over powered PCs with ones who are useless.

I've only played 3.X, but if I'm not mistaken my primary beef with it holds true in Pathfinder as well:

The endgame pulls up too fast. The game is "over" well before 20--possibly even before 10--which has a sort of 'compressing' effect on the early levels. Since you don't want to be left in the lurch, you HAVE to build well early or you're fucked.

A lot of people dislike pathfinder because it promised to fix 3.5. Which it didn't. It grasped the problem in another way, but didn't fix anything.

If you've played 3.5 and enjoy the system, you will probably enjoy pathfinder as a system too.

My main gripe with it is that it is so needlessly bloated. Especially when you look at feats. I also dislike spellcasters in pathfinder, I find them too strong at too little cost.

Others in this thread have mentioned the bloated rules and features, but for me it was the people who drove me away from it. Everyone I've met who plays pathfinder regularly does two things:
>They ignore, forget, or heavily houserule at least half of the actual rules (EG a player who claimed to have used PF for years and favored barbarians didn't know that a sundering check was).
>If any other system is suggested, they flatly refuse to try it because "pathfinder is the perfect system"

It's the player base.

A bunch of autistic screeching about sticking to an old system + game support for animu-fetish races.

/pfg/ is a containment thread on this board.

>didn't know that a sundering check was
Who uses sundering anyway? Sundering was a mistake.

>agender ninja iconic
Kinda makes sense that a fantasy ninja wouldn't care about sex.

Pretty much , nearly identical problems to 3.5 for a nearly identical game. There are some minor improvements, but also new and exacerbated problems.

From personal experience, starting at level 1, the swingy d20 versus negligible modifiers leaves most things to chance. You won't have a sense of character expertise until ~5th level+. And yet, by only 10th level, the game's power level is already off the rails. Modifiers completely overwhelm the d20, save-or-die effects everywhere, magic supremacy for pretty much everything but damage.

Pathfinder has problems, some inherited from 3.5 and some new, and would requires extensive and involved houseruling to improve.

OP asked for problems, not redeeming qualities

user..what you describe is an asexual ninja.

An "agender" ninja means he has no gender.

Whatever the fuck that means.

Boy you're a repetitive poster.

Make up your own damn mind - if you have the capability of doing so.

It's not bad. Just a matter of preference. Like if you prefer ass, tits, or anal circumference

I don't care about traps, imbalances, or bloat.

The core mechanics are fucking shit is my problem. 5ft step and full attack centric combat prevents you from doing so much shit, skills are boring and feel binary before becoming useless, spellcasting is unintuitive and inconsistent. Seriously, fuck it.

>>They ignore, forget, or heavily houserule at least half of the actual rules

I think that's a result of having too many rules. The more rules there are, the harder is is to remember them all, especially the ones that apply to rare situations. For example, sundering rarely comes up, especially in an active combat situation (and out of combat it's normally just a simple binary "you can't damage that"/"you eventually break it after [time period]"), though granted sundering is one of the simpler to understand rules (compared to say, grapple, which I'm pretty sure nobody ever remembers and has to pull out the chart every time to fully understand all the mechanics going on).

It's not terrible, but it's just a different flavor of D&D 3.5 with all the pros and cons that implies.

It has a bad reputation on Veeky Forums because /pfg/ is pure cancer.

Being agender is a useful trait for a ninja. They can easily adapt any gender role they need for the mission.

This. I play it because my DM only does it, and he's good value and a good friend. I would rather play a rules light system, but there is fun to be had building a character using the incredibly large toolbox provided, and the combat can often feel both epic and fun. My flying dwarf gunslinger was killing dragons dead, and I loved it.

Any fuckwad can do that

>What's bad about Pathfinder?

The playerbase. You can have a perfectly fine time with the system but Pathfinder ardents are Veeky Forumss variation of Smash Bros. players.

In my opinion, the worst thing about Pathfinder (or just D&D/d20 in general) is how it makes you develop habits that are bad in most other games. Even a year after our group dropped Pathfinder, one of our regulars who started off with it constantly talks about making optimized builds and party roles like DPS even if we're playing something like FATE.

>What's bad about Pathfinder?

"System Mastery".

Ya but some people have personal dispositions towards and against certain acts. Being psychologically agender could actually make you more self aware of such predilections.

Here, I quickly whipped this up.

Not doing much to help your case

Every paedophile I've met at the game table has been while playing Pathfinder.

>ne of our regulars who started off with it constantly talks about making optimized builds and party roles like DPS

Those people are just bad players IN GENERAL.

Pathfinder brings out the worst in them.

>If you think these rules are complex...

>...they're actually simple! Ha ha, tricked ya :^)

Here's a tldr version in case that one has too much reading for ya.

Pathfinder has a module for Furries as well, as an official product.

Want a good example OP?

app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/74565/overlewd-a-story-of-dastardly-conduct

That. That is what /pfg/ is cooking up. They held application tryouts, and in the end the GM just picked the dumbest characters then got all autist when defending choices.

I personally hate it when I have to houserule, it makes me appreciate the fact that pathfinders rules can be used in most any scenario.

I don't think Pathfinder is that controversial. I think a lot of the controversy surrounding it started when 4th edition was released. There was a lot of froth and anger around which was better 4th or 3.5.
Ultimately 3.5 won out after Pathfinder breathed new life into the system, whether that was good or bad, the simple fact 4th has all but fallen off the face of the planet is evidence of Pathfinders success.
But I think that as a result of that clash between 3.5 and 4th a lot of people still really dislike pathfinder especially since pathfinder didn't solve most of the problems the system had.
Overall I think pathfinder is a fun system and thanks to the edition wars there are now all kinds of variations of DnD so people can find one that they enjoy.

Damn, that sounds cringey as hell.

>simple fact 4th has all but fallen off the face of the planet is evidence of Pathfinders success.

Capitalizing on anger at Wizards for taking over D&D and trying to balance magic classes maybe.

But Pathfinder is dying since 5e is beating it in every metric that matters.

Can't do waifus as good in 5e.

The most annoying thing about it is how people pretend it's not just a 3.5 system with some houserules and everyone who has played 3.5 knows most GMs that don't want some types of bullshit happening already houserule as much as PF does anyway

PF players just love to pretend it's way better and that it fixes a lot of wrong stuff with 3.5 without significant changes. If you can get a group of players willing to fix the issues for tiehr system you can have fun.

Only thing bad about pathfinder is the sheer amount of people that like to shit on it for reasons that never matter.

I have both GM'd and played GURPS and I'm telling you that the shotgun rules are symptomatic for what is wrong with GURPS at its very core: It's needlessly fucking autistic.
There's no fucking reason to have multiplication as part of the damage resolution of a simple bloody shotgun. There is no reason to have a chart as an integral part to shooting the bloody thing. No, multiplication isn't hard you faggot, and neither are charts, but it's needlessly autistic. And that's the very core and soul of the game, it's one of the original "MUH VERISIMILITUDE" games, it just turned out a lot more playable than the horseshit that wanted to be D&D but REALISTIC.

But let's not get off track here, we are here to talk about why Pathfinder is shit. And it's shit because it's a copy of a haphazard patch to the worst edition of D&D. Wizards had no fucking idea what they were doing at the time and it shows.

I personally hate it when our game freezes every time we have to look up a particular rule, often times the rule being no better than what could've been made up on the fly. Hard to sustain that sense of action and suspense when gameplay slows to a screeching halt on a semi-regular basis.

At least when it comes to my group, I've recognized that a system of comprehensive rules bogs things down, and makes improvising and houseruling more cumbersome.

It is, and inner circle community bullshit takes up like half of /pfg/.

I think it should be said that the playerbase that frequents Veeky Forums is not an accurate representation of pathfinder's playerbase as a whole. Almost all of the pathfinder games I have been in have been more or less standard fantasy campaigns, not the fetish-obsessed furry/waifu mess that /pfg/ would have you believe.

>There's no fucking reason to have multiplication as part of the damage resolution of a simple bloody shotgun.
You get a bonus to hit based on the number of shots you fire. Shotgun shells have multiple pellets in them, so that it's easier to hit with a shotgun than with a single bullet. 2x9 means that, for every shot, you fire 9 pellets. You look that up on the universal rapid fire bonus table and find your bonus. It isn't specific to shotguns. It's for all guns.

You clearly haven't read GURPS.

That doesn't stop it being a dull, overcomplex and pointless mechanic that'd be better off abstracted. Simulationism is bullshit.

Why is /pfg/ like that but other systems that have generals aren't as gay?

No, we literally get off to character concepts that are little more than rpg mechanics interacting to become Rube Goldberg machines on paper.

>dull, overcomplex and pointless mechanic that'd be better off abstracted.
More dakka bigger bonus. How is a hail of lead dull? "I fire ten bullets, which gives me +2 to hit." How is that overcomplex? More bullets means it's easier to hit. How is that pointless? You don't understand the rules at all, or maybe you think that everything should be some sort of milquetoast narrativist game where it doesn't matter what you do, it all gives the same +2 bonus.

I find that it is okay if you were a 3.5 fan and it solves more problems than it creates. Personally, I liked 3.5, so 3.75 was fine for me. It could definitely use an update, though, and I wish more people would try the unchained variant rules.

I have to say this as a Pathfinder fan, though - I do not like PFS.

OP, it is passable if you had a thing for 3.5 or if you want something 5-like but with lots of options.

/pfg/ isn't all of the Pathfinder community, but /pfg/ certainly isn't unique among them. I don't know which came first, but there's a large community that uses the game as a vehicle for sexual "agenda", and the company behind Pathfinder acknowledges this and releases supplements with information on NPC romances, bonuses incurred during "intimate physical contact", and options that implicitly cater towards certain fetishes here and there. It's well known that among their staff are the kind of players talked about in fetishy That Guy posts.

You're both missing the point here. Yes, it's needlessly complicated, and no, this isn't a problem, because I presume that your shotgun will generally be firing the same types of shots, therefore having the same amount of pellets, therefore meaning that you only need to figure out the modifier once.

If it's not innately broken and doesn't bog down actual gameplay time, it's probably a fine mechanic.

For an example of a bad mechanic, see 3.pf grappling, or the ten thousand situation modifiers and rules in PF.

All these fools complaining about Pathfinder for giving them too many options...

Useless options, though.

You can have limitless options, but if at the end of the day only 2-4 are viable and the rest is shit that you should never ever use, it's a shit system.

System mastery, though. Ivory tower design, though. Building the character you want should involve sifting through hundreds of pages worth of material to find the nuggets of gold. Granularity and customization should have layers of obfuscation over it. How else could it be rewarding?

The balance isn't great, it's very rules-heavy, and it's preposterously easy for a character to become brokenly powerful if they can survive to level 3.

Other than that, it isn't bad. I've had a lot of god times playing Pathfinder. Just gotta play with normal people and not the autists it attracts.

All of which are design flaws, some of which were cited as inherent flaws of anything with a large number of options (eg. the larger the options the greater likelihood some options will always be better than others) and they are not supposed to be intentional, consciously added to the system.

It's like saying because you can never design a truly 100% efficient engine that it is somehow ideal to build a fuel guzzling pile of junk. You should always strive for the best design possible and be at peace with the fact a perfect design is impossible.

How to build a good to great character should be readily apparent. It is breaking shit that should be highly involved and convoluted.

Pathfinder is bloated with thousands of feats, In actuality perhaps 5% of those feats are even REMOTELY worth taking, and of that amount half of them are total must-haves and the others are build dependent.

If more was always better than you could dump the salt shaker on something to improve it by several orders of magnitude.

Pathfinder is great if you like sucking Paizo's cock.

Did my sarcasm not quite carry over?

I concur that those are actually serious design flaws.

Of course, plenty of Pathfinder players either don't think about it, or believe those are virtues of the system. But much sadder are the players who know it's a problem, but refuse to try alternatives, likely in part because their experience with Pathfinder makes them think learning any new system would be just as cumbersome. That's a tragedy.

It does was it's made to do decently well. Though at this point I would say if you do want to get in theres ALOT of it, books on books. Just be prepared for a lot of reading.

It was a product of autistic screeching and so much goddamn whining. The devs are total dicks and SJWs.
It's a game system ruined by all of the above shitfisters, fuck them.

Can you really be said to ruin something that was already as awful as 3.5?

that sums it up succinctly and, of course, it's a post that gets ignored

At least 3.5 had ToB, Incarnum, the binder class, vestiges, Eberron and a bunch of weird and wonderful stuff, Pathfinder is a festering pool of rancid filth. And I'm not even talking about the playerbase.

>Pathfinder is a festering pool of rancid filth
Amen.

Fair. PF does have some decent third party content, like DSP, but that does nothing to redeem the system in itself.

It's neither better nor worse than 3e or 3.5 because they are all largely the same game. They are all garbage, but trying to argue that one is more garbage than the other (as many here do) is silly.

However PF-3.5 autistic edition is objectively the worse edition, because of how poorly it's designed, the fact that the devs can't design themselves out of a wet plasticbag and blatantly ignore feedback and playtesting because they smugly know best and because of the goddamn autistic player base.

Don't be fucking retarded, see
>3.5 had ToB, Incarnum, the binder class, vestiges, Eberron and a bunch of weird and wonderful stuff.

Although Eberron started in 3.5 I feel like it's fairer to give it to 4e. The setting felt like it had been made for the edition.

And yet Eberron worked well in 3.5.