Rambling on Pathfinder

Over lunch of Saturday, Doug & I were talking about various versions of D&D, and for a while he was explaining how 4th Edition spawned off Pathfinder.  I got the Pathfinder beta about 2 years ago, groaned at how dense it was and it had no sample adventure to try, and tried reselling it with the stacks of game books I list on various groups from time to time.  Somehow, when I checked facebook later that day (which I hardly ever do anymore because it has become such a flood of ads), there was an ad for a Humble Bundle of ... you guessed it ... 28 Pathfinder books in PDF format for $30.  Technically, it was $25 or pay what you want, and I don't want to be the cheapest guy on the planet, so I always click the second or third payment amount button on these.  I don't know how the webz knew it had come up, but sure, $1.50 went to some charity and I got about 1000 more pages of PDFs to clog my brain.  It was a little misleading, though, since some of those PDFs were different versions of the same book (all in one vs chapter by chapter).  And I had to get them from the Paizo site and dig up my old old password.  I do like those bundles, they've got a good system.

So I took that physical playtest edition book off my "for sale someday" shelf and gave it another look.  Yup, it's dense.  I liked the sections on new magical materials, learning formulas and extended crafting rules.  But again, due to the density, will it be worth an hour or two to make a few new PCs just to see if that makes sense in the end?  At least now I have a few playable modules to look at to get oriented.

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