Pathfinder 2E Gamemastery Guide - Essential Book

The 2nd edition Gamemastery Guide has been out for a couple weeks now and I've already been abusing it. I've spent more time reading and re-reading this book than the Core Rulebook, which may or may not be a good thing....but the Gamemastery Guide has so much useful stuff it's hard not to want to absorb its magnificence as much as possible.

The big change from 1st edition to 2nd edition is, in my opinion, the essential nature of the Gamemastery Guide. Key to this change is the fact that the rules (guidelines?) for how to make monsters and NPCs are in this tome, a change from the old form where all those rules were in the back of the Bestiary. A second change is that many of the more interesting magic item rules are now located here, rather than in the Core Rulebook, which means the core rules contain only "useful items a player might be privy to knowledge of," but the GM alone gets access to things like artifacts, relics and cursed items. Trust me: you will want these rules.

The original Gamemastery Guide identified interesting NPCs and the 2nd edition is no different, with about six stat blocks for various common encounters. It's a much needed supplement to the Bestiary. The stat blocks have shifted in tone a bit from the 1st edition, or at least include a few more familiar archetypes that are reflective of the changing times: torchbearers, plague doctors, masterminds and demonologists are reflective of the useful range of stats for NPCs.

There's a whole intro section on setting up, running and adjudicating games and handling players, a generally cleaner and more engaging section than was in the 1st edition GMG (I always thought the 1st edition advice section was a bit droll and boring to read). This isn't really going to be too useful to veteran GMs but the content on handling downtime and is priceless and helps flesh out those mechanics that are now baked in to 2E.

Also of interest is the advice on world building, which conveys information over several chapters. From designing your towns and cities (with full stat block rules) to wilderness hexcrawls this book provides some very useful content, and extremely practical; lots of useable material and not a lot of unnecessary exposition.

The most intriguing part of the book is the section on alternative and experimental rules. The ones which I found perplexing (or interesting but not suitable for my table) included valour points, stamina rules (e.g. Starfinder hit points/stamina), and alignment variants (neat but too fiddly for my needs). Other methods of stat generation allow a GM to bring the core rules back to a more familiar ability generation process. Magic Item variants let you set up rules for scaling magic items in games where you want fewer and more meaningful magic items (or alternatively no magic items).

The alternative rules which are most interesting to me, and which I will likely want to try out sooner or later included zero level characters (simultaneously a way to start a very early career campaign, a way to introduce new players with minimum fuss, and a way to run funnel style dungeons ala Dungeon Crawl Classics using Pathfinder), alternative skill point rules which bake the older skill point mechanics back in to the system, and a very interesting "Proficiency without Level" mechanic that in about one page gives you the complete rules for turning Pathfinder into a bounded accuracy system ala D&D with minimal conversion headache. Indeed, the notion of Pathfinder as a bounded accuracy system with all of its interesting implications sounds like it would be a novel experience to try out, at least once.

Overall....very happy with this book. Now that I have the finalized monster and NPC stat design rules you may finally see some more game-specific content from me soon. I am hoping I'll have some time and energy to do some conversions of existing monsters soon; I am seriously considering a Chirak adaptation, too, though I had only made it 70% of the way through my D&D 5E conversion so not sure I have the energy for that just yet, we shall see.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition in 2020 So Far

Source

We're seven months in to the wholesale release and conversion of my gaming gangs to Pathfinder 2nd edition....I had expected to have at least one regular night of Pathfinder 2E going forward if everyone liked it, but instead every game night (one weekly saturday group and two rotating Wednesday groups) have gone full Pathfinder. For my purposes this is fine....and after seven months the Saturday group has crept to 11th level and we all feel we might reach level 20. I have taken careful effort to plot out material to insure they they achieve this goal, and the Pathfinder leveling mechanic, which is flat and contains no larger hills that must be overcome to advance as it did in prior editions, insures that somewhere around 18-25 sessions or so the entire party (or those who survive) should all make level 20.

Clever design, that....I know that as far back as D&D 3.0 there was a design notion that the average group played for 1 year, maybe 2, and that the leveling/XP should pace for campaigns that lasted this long, but the reality proved to be less stable than the spherical cow teams that WotC used to design the game at that time, with most groups getting exhausted by the complexities of high level mechanics around level 10-12. Even today, D&D 5th edition, which I feel has an advantage of easier play at high level while suffering from a dearth of high level content for the GM still requires a bit of an XP slog to advance....less than prior editions, yet more onerous than contemporary gamers care for. Or any gamers, really.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition, by flattening the progression to just 1,000 XP/level, has created a reward mechanic which lets the GM easily pace the game at a consistent speed with regards to leveling, which is cool. I've experimented a bit, and found that 2-3 sessions per level is quite comfortable, but a stoic and determined GM could pace it out to four or more sessions using the RAW and could even for a gonzo "13th Age" approach and do a "20 sessions, 20 levels" kind of campaign if they wanted to. PF2E can handle it.

In terms of game campaigns I have done the following:

Oman'Hakat and the Lands of Osinre and Harkuum:  I have spent most of my effort in a campaign setting of new design which I call "Oman'Hakat," the Final Realm. It's a strange bedfellow to my most venerable setting, Ages of Lingusia, and one of the overarching plots is how the two worlds connect (and why). The setting is aimed at a land of archaic kingdoms and a budding empire, with a period of deep religious upheaval and fear of prophecies spelling doom for the world. A major part of the mystery is dispelling the fiction from the truth of the game's own history and folklore.

I started this campaign in D&D 5E in the months leading up to Pathfinder 2E's release, setting the 5E games in the Osinre region of the world (based on Egyptian thematics), with the joke being that the distant, ominous empire of Harkuum would be to staging ground for Pathfinder 2E games. So far this is exactly what has happened, though when we do finally revisit Osinre it will also be in Pathfinder 2E. Either way....with any luck I'll start posting some of the massive amount of content on this setting I've worked out on the blog soon for general and free consumption.

Ages of Lingusia: I have revisited the Age of Strife era in my oldest campaign once more in one of the every-other-week campaigns, focusing on a gritty, dirty corner of the world about ex-soldiers seeking to recover from the traumas of a war which the were on the winning side of, but at great cost. It's proving to be very fun, and I love that Pathfinder 2E's more visceral approach to fantasy with a clearer level of risk and grit makes for an excellent fit in the world I originally created for AD&D 1E.

A Brief Return to Enzada: My exotic campaign I devised specifically for use with Pathfinder when it came out, designed to invoke all sorts of anti-tropes for fantasy, played out in a quiet revisitation over a few months before I decided I just wasn't feeling the impetus to see where things went and we migrated to Lingusia. Still, it's nice to explore old setting now and again.

Chirak: I haven't yet done anything with Realms of Chirak for Pathfinder 2nd, though the temptation grows by the day. I am biding my time, waiting for that moment of inspiration to spark; I ran a lot of games in Chirak over the last decade, and the venerable setting has earned a break. I am tempted to keep it with D&D 5E, too; I put a lot of work into upgrading it to that edition, after all. But D&D 5E just doesn't feel right now that I've been playing Pathfinder 2E so much.....still, I may go back and revisit, see how I feel about it with some actual play at some point. But no rush; Chirak's many lands still need a break.

Anyway, with one group going from level 1 to 11, another group creeping along from 11 o 13, and a third starting at 5th and migrating up from there (plus one campaign that ran from 1st to 5th now retired), we're already gotten in a ton of Pathfinder gaming with no end in sight. I am really looking forward to the release of the Gamemastery Guide 2nd edition next week, a much needed tome for GMs which I am keen to explore. I'll provide more info once I have my copy next week!

AD&D 2nd Edition House Rules: Removing multiclass restrictions and bumping humans up the food chain

Humans: generating XP for elves who hit them hard enough since 1974

My Saturday group is now rotating with me running D&D 5E (or 13th Age after the 5E scenario concludes) one week and my long time friend and host running AD&D 2nd edition for the first time in ages. It's been a lot of fun, but as I have been perusing my nice Premium edition AD&D 2nd edition books I was reminded of the key issues I always used to have with the game. Even more amusing than the rules with problems was the fact that --let's face it-- they were problems even back when 2nd edition released, enough so that the authors spent some time in the DMG or PHB explaining why the rules were there, with what amount in retrospect to some pretty amusing rationales.

The rules I refer to, of course, are multiclassing (and the even more restrictive dual-classing rules), level limits and the implicitly squishy nature of humans. If you're not an OSR fan or you are somehow under the age of 30 you might not be old enough to have jumped into the hobby at a time when multiclassing was a thing and the idea of a non-human paladin was anathema. Here's a summary of the rules that I have never particularly liked:

Racial Class Limits: Paladins as humans only; dwarves are never mages....stuff like this

Racial Level Caps: demihuman player races have hard level caps for most classes

Multiclassing: demihumans alone can multiclass

Dual-Classing: humans can only dual-class, and even then only if you are rolling exceedingly well for stats to begin with; almost statistically improbable you would ever see a dual-classed character in play without using a lot of trickery of cheating to get the numbers you want

All of the above were wiped out in 3rd edition and will never return. Going back to AD&D (either edition) requires either accepting these as given or hacking them off like the weird barnacles they are.

The 2E DMG provides optional rules for allowing various demihumans to advance past their level limits, but warns at length that being overly kind here will make humans obsolete....literally!....and turn the game into not just a story about elves, but the entire fantasy world. It's a weirdly amusing piece of logic because it implictly assumes that you can't or wouldn't be able to impose in-game restrictions (such as low birthrates) for species like elves who would then by default still find themselves at a disadvantage of the rabbit-like humans of fantasyland. But I suppose it's not worth arguing....this was a contention presented in the DMG in 1989, and its interesting because its clearly there to reinforce the design parameter set out by AD&D which survived to 2nd edition, and is not actually aimed at seriously considering all the implications of a fantasy world that is literally run by physical laws defined by the game rules as presented (cherry picking, if you will).

So what would be the harm in ditching these four limitations in AD&D 2E? As I see it, there are no real arguments that support the issue. You have the multiclass guidelines allowing any class combination you want, you know humanity's greatest threat is not elves unlimited but quick-breeding orcs and goblins, and as DM you can continue to enforce design limits on players like I used to.

I once had a methodology for player guidance that worked like this: I'd give the players 10 points to spend as a group on their racial options. Humans cost 1 point, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and half orcs cost 2 points and elves cost 3 points (elves were fabulously popular in the 90's, there is no contesting that nightmarish fact). 10 points was what could be spent among 6 players, typically. This meant that they could all play humans (6 points), but with 4 points left over up to four of them could upgrade to a demihuman choice. If the group wanted to be elf-heavy this meant that no more than 2 of them could be elves, meaning you could have 4 humans and 2 elves instead (total 10 points).

That method was how I kept my 2E games from being elf-heavy from 1990 to roughly 1994 when I stopped caring and let people play parties 100% comprised of entries from the Humanoids Handbook JUST BECAUSE.

Today, I'd do it like this:

Eliminate the Restrictions: No more class restrictions for any race. No more multiclass restrictions for any race. No more level restrictions either. Dual-Classing is allowed because if you meet the qualifications and want to, then more power to you.

Human Bonuses: Humans, however, should get some sort of compensation for being so awesomely human, though. As a result, humans can get a bonus proficiency slot, a +1 bonus to an attribute of their choice for being so awesomely human (but they still have to meet ability cap maximums) and, most importantly, I'd let humans multiclass. I know the DMG explains that humans are woefully short-lived creatures who can't absorb the lifetimes of discovery necessary to juggle two or more classes simultaneously, but alas for that logic the 2000's happened and now those arguments make no sense.

So, the advantages? Now you can build almost anything you like in AD&D 2E without restriction, which might not fly well for certain worlds and styles, but in settings like I run where my world of Chirak has seafaring dwarven hydromancers and minotaur ranger-wizards it should greatly facilitate the style of world that allows such madness.

Removing all those multiclassing restrictions as well as pumping up humans will go a long way toward providing an easier model of the actual weird fantasy that D&D always stemmed from....maybe not the Gygaxian way, but Appendix N will thank you.

AD&D 2nd Edition Premium Excerpts

Wizards of the Coast has some sample pages from the Player's Handbook up over here to look at. It should could as no surprise that the Premium books are internally going to be reproductions of the 1995 second prints with the black border covers and the revamped color interiors. The druid excerpt provides a sampling of the artwork from that edition. It's generally regarded as inferior to the 1st printing books (I agree) but it's not bad....just not as good, unfortunately.

I imagine it was a lot easier to reprint these books, as I am sure the art and layout assets were sitting around in a WotC vault somewhere, and who knows what the print-ready condition of the original 1st prints look like these days.

Either way I am looking forward to these reprints. At $50 apiece I may have to cave and order through Amazon rather than my FLGS (much as I want to support my FLGS these premium edition reprints are just too pricey to shell out full price for), but this is the edition of AD&D that I spent the most time with and found the most enjoyment with. As I've said before, my entire gaming career in the nineties was defined by AD&D 2nd edition pretty much (followed by a handful of other games like Cyberpunk 2020 and GURPS), so for me these are must-haves.

The AD&D 2nd Edition Premium Covers

So the AD&D 2E reprints will have these covers. Very nice, I like this look a lot and it makes better use of the famously atrocious art in the revised editions (still not as good as using the pics from the original first printing covers, but a nice leatherette green covering it all up is still a better way to go!