(A) Nobody Talks about Paizo, Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder

 Hey folks! So how about them boys from Paizo? Paizo for those who are unaware own both Pathfinder and Starfinder. Pathfinder 1e was a reskin and expansion of D&D3.5 but the other two are unique. Starfinder feels like a first attempt to truly branch off. The spellcasters only go to 6 levels, it’s a space game so we have lasers, missiles, and spaceships. Starfinder has both hit points and Stamina Points (a thing they floated in Pathfinder Unchained, basically quick HP where as your other HP is much harder to recover.) Although I found it fun I’m not really huge on it’s lore which is very tied to the mechanics and therefore I don’t tend to play it over other Sci-fi games.

 

Pathfinder 2e though is my IRL groups current favorite. It has all the trappings you’d expect from a D&D style game (Paladin has been renamed Champion, Alchemist and Goblin are in the core book. Pathfinder 2e’s sweet mechanic (such as advantage/disadvantage in D&D 5e) is the revamp of the critical system. For any roll if your result is 10 over the target number it is a critical hit, if you get 10 under the target number it is a critical failure. A result of 20 on the dice will increase your result by 1. (so if you roll a 20 with no modifiers and the TN was 20 it increases from a success to critical success, if the TN is 21-29 it increases from a failure to a success.) The same is true in reverse for a result of 1 on the dice, which will lower the result by 1 step. (From failure to critical failure, from success to failure, etc.) This mechanic is great and really fun. The two big downsides I can think of are that the time to buy in is a bit more as each class is more complex, and if you  aren’t aware that your choices at creation impact your options you could end up trying to do things that you have almost no chance at when you reach higher levels.

 

Paizo’s biggest strength in all their systems is two-fold. They release a pretty good size book each year and also at least one multipart campaign. Usually a good one to. (And also a book more tied to their lore like Legend and Lore or various ones based on the regions of Golarian, I recommend the Mwangi Expanse book if you want fun lore bits.) Additionally everything they release was previously released on the OGL and a licensed site Archive of Nethys https://aonprd.com/ which is a great resource for everything Paizo publishes. (The search tool is really helpful.)

Paizo however is still a company and even though they have earned some good will from actions like recognizing their worker union * https://unitedpaizoworkers.org/ ) but even still they apparently pay their freelance artists somewhat poorly.( https://twitter.com/XabiGazte/status/1614008172552900608 and https://twitter.com/rhineville/status/1614309598227316737 ). Again, on the positive they have made some efforts to do things like publish a version of the combat wheelchair (I believe written by the creator of the 5e supplement.) and have made some effort to hire marginalized creators for works that deal with characters from those groups. They also work hard to have various body types, genders, sexualities, and races in their art. However, I also have heard they have issues there too (I don’t have links for this so take it with a grain of salt my memory is not the best.) Additionally, though they were quicker and much more communicative the community did put quite a bit of pressure on the leadership to accept the union and hadn’t commented on a lot of their employees’ grievances before that.