 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and today we're going to be going into a parallel world where I decided to teach people how to play the world's great, good role-playing game, Pathfinder. Specifically, I'll be going over the first edition because I am not qualified to talk about second edition. I am qualified to talk about Starfinder though, so maybe one day that one dude in the comments who always asks for a sci-fi game will finally be satisfied. I gave you Star Wars, what more do you want from me? As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I could never understand the complexities of fantasy role-playing, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So Pathfinder is a game where you play as a powerful adventurer, blazing a trail through a fantasy world filled with elves, knights, magic, and monsters, while dodging the most dangerous monster of all, copyright infringement. Originally published in 2009 and getting a completely overhauled second edition in 2019, Pathfinder runs in the same system as third edition D&D, making it a very easy alternative for fans of third edition who are looking for something else to try, because Pathfinder can be very easily summarized as D&D 3.75. In fact, my first introduction to the concept of role-playing games was by going to my school's D&D club, playing third edition once, and then immediately switching to Pathfinder, because my dirty little secret is that I like Pathfinder more than 3.5. It makes sense though, Pathfinder came out way after 3.5, after fourth edition got released and people realized, hey, wait a minute, this is bad, so with the benefit of hindsight from seeing exactly what 3.5 did well and what the player base wanted to see done better, and after the botching of 4e made people yearn for something that was similar to 3.5 but just updated, Paiso, the company behind Pathfinder, pretty much had the secret to a better game laid out for them, with the perfect circumstances to make it popular. This technique did not work so well for them the second time around, but hey, we're here to talk about the first edition. Now, call me presumptuous, but I'm going to assume that your role-playing experience is limited to 5e, and if it is, then you have a ballpark understanding of how Pathfinder works. All the core mechanics are here. The game is the same, yet different. AC is reflex saves, bonus actions are swift actions and don't do as much, feats exist but are way weaker, but also come around every two levels instead of four, a million different subclasses are instead a million different classes of their own, and all of your favorite classes, like the Wizard and the Barbie, were recasted as either buffed or nerfed versions of their 5e counterparts, depending on whether or not you got magic. If you think that magic is powerful now, you really have no idea, because magic used to be busted. Also, Pathfinder was the game that gave us unlimited cantrips, because even though 4th edition did it first, nobody played 4th edition, so we're giving the credit to Pathfinder. As far as the reasons why you would want to play it over 5e, one of the biggest criticisms of the world's greatest role-playing game is, for all of its simplicity that managed to bring in a massive new fanbase, the game is just that simple. There are like three real choices that you have to make in 5e, your ace class and your subclass, and I guess the afterthought of the background counts too, so four things. This is a huge advantage for new players, but once you're not a new player anymore, you might find yourself restricted by the solid walls of character creation, and Pathfinder represents the exact opposite of that. With Pathfinder, almost every level brings a list of choices that can make it so that your character feels unique to you, and a lot of the fun in the game is mixing and matching all the different options to create the strange Frankenstein's monster of your imagination. There is a huge reward for going through and memorizing all the different options, because the difference between a normal character and an optimized character is crazy wide. You can look up the Godzilla for this concept taken to its extreme, but there are plenty of rewarding combinations besides that. Plus, the core premise of Pathfinder isn't all that dissimilar from 5e, so outside of the culture shock that you'll get from the specific mechanics being different, you actually do have a good base of understanding the game before you even play it. Of course, there is a flipside to that coin. It's no secret that while Pathfinder isn't complicated to learn, per se, it is by no means the open door that 5th edition is, and the amount of options available to you from the get-go is a huge contributor to that. I remember trying to learn the game when I was a kid. I spent half of my games just writing random shit and hoping it worked out. Meanwhile, my friends would be making character named Titan, the man who could kill gods. If you're playing casually, you better hope that your friends are fine with playing casually as well, because there is no hand-holding here. You are in the wild west of mechanics, and if your friends know what they're doing and you don't, you're done, son. You're better off making a bard and having its special power be that it has a long line of relatives that look and act exactly the same. And speaking of making a bard, another reason to try out Pathfinder is due to its diversity in both race and class options. Not to say that they're better or worse than D&D, but there's plenty of creative ideas rolling around for your paths to find. Like the Samsonan, a race of blue people who reincarnate when they die so that their soul always lives on through the ages. Or the Ratfolks, small-sized mouse beats that like to hurry scuttle around and steal your metal shinies. In fact, the races of Pathfinder often come with swappable racial features, much like how the Skag tried to do with the half-elves and the tieflings. And every race has a variety of classes that they're naturally attuned to, giving them some mechanical bonus for playing them. Although to work that out, you kind of have to decipher Pathfinder's unapologetic terminology. As for classes, there's all the classics, and then there's things like the Blood Ranger, one of many hybrid classes that casts polymerization on two classical classes. In this case, taking the Barbarian and the Sorcerer and giving the resulting child so many anger issues that their blood literally boils like a red lantern. Also, if you like the idea of subclasses like the Samurai, Pathfinder makes a lot of those subclasses into its own class, with its own gimmicking mechanics, although that's not unique to Pathfinder. It's actually a very new thing for variations on the same base idea to be made into archetypes of one main class, which has the drawback of some classes being lame as hell if their gimmick isn't very useful. But all the different mechanics means that you're more likely to find something that's tailored to you, and since they're not subclasses, you don't have to just grin and bear it if the main class has a feature that you don't like. Another notable change from D&D is that the world that it all takes place in is a mismatch of dozens of different ideas from all over pop culture, thrown together in a melting pot like the lies we learned from Schoolhouse Rock. See, where D&D has many different worlds like Greyhawk, Dragonlands, and the only world that's been given love in five years, the Forgotten Realms, Pathfinder went in the direction of having a catch-all world where everything from every book could be absorbed into one world. You can check out the lore for yourself, but the gist of it is that Galarian was the name of a continent where everybody was good and happy until the singular god of humans went and died, and what was widely regarded as a bad idea, without him to keep things on track, every single bad thing that could happen did happen, from the implosion of empires due to politics to tears in the fabric of reality that annihilate all the barbarians to motherfucking pirates that just start coming in and saying, your booty is mine. Due to the melting pot nature of trying to cram all of your stories into one confined space, pretty much every adventure you can think of could be had on Galarian, and every book released by Pathfinder is set in this incredibly conflicted continent, and the setting was loved so much that it was reused for Starfinder, wherein it reached the natural conclusion of all this chaos and just blipped out of existence. Nobody knows what happened to it, nobody can remember what happened to it, it just silenced its ass out of its own setting. Overall, Pathfinder is a good alternative choice for those of you who like 5e, want something very similar to 5e, but want it to be more complicated or just have a different range of choices for you to pick from, and who knows, maybe in the future I'll talk about the second edition of Pathfinder, although to get that done I might need to call in some help from a friend. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, ring that bell to keep the notifications coming, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can make my entire life revolve around Pathfinder. But yeah, Davie out.