I’m afraid we’re going to need to use … math.

“I ran a high-level Pathfinder campaign, I’ve personally seen what happens. It can be tedious, and it can be ugly.” –Sean K. Reynolds, July 22nd 2014. These words are not mine, but they could be. Now this discussion has come up around the table so much in the past few months I finally had to put thoughts to print. I’m not opposed to math for crying out loud, and I completely agree Pathfinder is an outstanding game with many benefits. I truly look forward to running it in the future, but enough has been happening recently that I feel the need for some transparency in my decisions….things that have to change for me to continue enjoying it. NUMBERS: Some players, even the strongest of Paizo’s supporters agree the math just becomes too unwieldy after level 14. There are so many bonuses it’s truly likely that some sort of bonus or penalty is forgotten every single round of combat because there’s just too much to track. In the past 6 months characters have died, permanent descriptions have been made and the world irreversibly changed, until someone forgot “the +3 bonus up on the whiteboard” causing us to reverse everything. BLOAT: We end campaigns and folks turn in magic item cards and the two most annoying aspects of that are 1) Each person is turning in up to THIRTY magic items they were carrying around, and 2) every single person has one they have no idea what it does or simply forgot they even had it. Magic items are just special tools, there’s nothing truly “magical” about them. Next, powers. There are now about 760 feats, 2,400 spells, 3,900 traits, and it just keeps growing. I had a god-damned NPC last week straight from a Paizo sourcebook with a class power called “Power of the Gods +20”. +20 to WHAT? It didn’t say, it didn’t point to where I could find it and after my friends and I searched databases and the Paizo website we came up empty. I’m tired of spending hours of my time tracking down these obscure rules, bonuses, spells and feats to find out how to run a 10-minute combat. TIME: If I totaled up the countless minutes or hours folks spent leveling up their characters (only to forget some detail in the process) to the hours spent selling and looking up pricing for the mother-load of magic items you get every adventure (and then selling them, and then going out and buying others) we’d have days upon days where we could be telling a story and playing rather than paperwork. That’s no longer a part of the game I consider fun. STORY: You’ve already heard from me verbally plenty on this but it bears repeating. As Pathfinder has gone on I’ve had to spend more and more of my time hacking up their adventures because they load them with ‘experience point filler’. The editors tell the writers: get the PC’s to this level so they’re ready for this threat. So what do we get? Endless mindless, uninteresting combats so you’ll gain XP’s. The second part of this is I’m tired of the damn training wheels already. Enough with the friggin’ railroads. It’s very nice that Paizo’s editors think that 95% of players left to their own devices will stand around staring at the walls instead of going on adventures but this carrot-and-stick approach is getting old for me to run and staunching my creativity. I miss the days where players can turn friends into villains and foes to allies with creativity and roleplaying and so much of those days are lost as NPCs and story is written in stone. I’ve sold off nearly every Adventure Path once I’ve run it as opposed to the two or three fantastic sandbox ones they’ve produced. So now the challenging difficulties are before us. How to fix these things you ask? Ah, that’s another 666 words methinks…