Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is proving relatively good after its attention-grabbing, deliberately shallow first act pandering to snowflake cretinism. Aside from its own problems however it does also showcase some ways the Dungeons&Dragons, twenty-sided dice-rolling system is stretched unavoidably thin. On "core" difficulty, the game's obviously padded for length by raising the level (and especially armor class) of all monsters until they're almost impossible to hit, forcing reload after reload until you're blessed by the randomizer. I'm sure fanboys must already be revving up to call me a scrub noob loser who just doesn't know how to stack hit chance bonuses. For shits and giggles though, I've been playing around with my newfound lich powers and "repurposing" monsters to throw them against their former fellows... with the conclusion that no, bullshit, my stats aren't the problem. They cannot even hit each other!
Now, while yes, I did pick monsters from a zone abounding in high armor class for that demonstration, they're hardly statistical outliers in a game where only statistical outliers count.
You might notice their outlier status in another sense: cyborg implants in a fantasy game. Fictional universes incorporating both tech and fantasy more or less need to be built around that schism between top-down creationism and bottom-up rationalism. Golarion, much like Toril, comes across as an intrinsically top-down setting with feudal governance and precepts of morality flowing from multiversal constants of law and goodness. Which is fine... so long as you stick to it. But every time some genius sputters forth the a-may-zing idea of shoehorning a wacky computer-hacking side trip into Middle-Earth, or any other anachronistic garbage just as an episodic adventure with neither heads nor tails to be made of, it cannot come across as anything but the mindless junior-high fanfiction primadonna bullshit it is. We don't need more modron mazes.
Inability to hold to a theme is neither creative nor a virtue. You're not thinking outside the box. You're just a kindergardener throwing transformers onto the chess board because formal operations defy your undeveloped brain.
But worse than both those issues is the class system.
Fighter, wizard, thief, cleric. For a couple of decades that was the rule, during which time the odd druid, bard or barbarian could fit the interstices between those archetypes. However, the proliferation of new, redundant, overpowered or otherwise nonsensical classes around Y2K was, if memory serves, one of the principal causes for many to abandon D&D in favor of... among other things, Pathfinder. Can you see where this full-circle revolution is headed?
My character is a "witch of the veil" which is to say a generalist wizard with several free spells from feats. It also gives you infinite casts of combo invisibility / teleportation, two of the most powerful spells in the game even individually, once a round... as a swift action. Yeah. At level 8... yeah...
While of the scores of such subclasses available in Wrath (tantalizing as they are, I'll admit) not all might be so laughably broken, they do demonstrate the difficulty of expanding the class roster while clinging to the old archetypes. If you want to build a class around something as game-breaking as that, it can't also be a rogue or enchanter.
New classes were needed, undeniably. The system needed to grow. But, in order to clear room for new growth, sadly the old growth must be pruned. Fighters can't be masters of all martial trades and still leave room for classes specializing in rapiers or halberds. If you want a combination rogue / wizard as a basic class, then there's no point in the arcane trickster prestige class. If you want witches and oracles and skalds and shamans, then you need to redefine, to limit wizards and clerics and bards. Druids can't be nature magicians and shapeshifting autoattackers and healers and crowd control and summoners and nukers if you intend to build individual classes around each of those roles. At least not without scaling back.
Slapping a couple of overpowered bonus feats on old clases and calling them new isn't getting anywhere. And yeah, I know I'm not saying anything which hasn't been rehashed a million times over on RPG discussion boards for the past thirty years... so why are we still stuck here? D&D cannot grow, even rebranded as Pathfinder, while fanboys cling to the nostalgia for old labels, the one-size-fits-all fighter/cleric/wizard/thief which prevent finer definitions.
We need to hold to the precept of tactical cRPGs... but we're also twenty years overdue to adopt new systems in place of the thirty years outdated, roll-to-miss, fitfully anachronistic, generic baseline.
Either overhaul it for meaningful complexity or let it die. And, sad to say, the past couple of decades have proven that D&D's own munchkin fanbase will prevent a meaningful revolution.
There must be better tabletop systems out there waiting for a computer adaptation.
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