Pathfinder 2E Announced
Posted on March 9, 2018 by NiTessine
It's the moment many dreaded, few lied to themselves would never come, and I guessed was soon to come when Starfinder came out. Paizo Publishing announced the second edition of Pathfinder. It's to come out at Gen Con next year, preceded by a public playtest period.
For historical reasons, Pathfinder fans have a complicated relationship with new editions. The entire game exists primarily because Wizards of the Coast screwed up with the release of D&D 4E – and regardless of what you think of the game itself, how it was rolled out was a farce. There's also the unfortunate tendency of online gamer communities reacting to the announcement of a new edition like a small tribe of invincible Gauls, convinced that the sky is falling and reacting by punching everything.
I'm not saying I haven't been guilty of that, but it's been ten years since I fought in the D&D 4E flamewars. I'm too old for that shit. I'd rather get worked up about a real problem.
Also, the game's been around for ten years. Few role-playing games go as long without a new edition. Though Pathfinder fixed a lot of the issues of D&D 3E, it was still weighed down by the need to be backwards-compatible. As early as 2011, Erik Mona mentioned at Ropecon how he'd have liked to go further with the changes.
I'm also rather optimistic that Paizo remembers why Pathfinder exists and will maybe not screw this up. I'm optimistic that what they'll deliver is going to be a better game that runs smoother whose math still holds up at higher levels.
It's also nice that they're dropping the word "race" and going with "ancestry". I've been wondering when a major RPG would do that.
They're doing the same thing they did with the original Pathfinder, and releasing the playtest rulesets as print books as well as free PDFs. The deluxe collector's edition playtest rulebook may be overdoing it a bit but hey, nobody's forcing you to buy it.
We don't yet know a whole lot about what the game will eventually be like, but here's Paizo's FAQ on the topic and a Glass Cannon podcast where Jason Bulmahn runs Crypt of the Everflame that he's converting to 2E on the fly.
Meanwhile, EN World is once again shouldering its age-old mission of informing the masses, and has opened an info wiki compiling and sourcing what is definitely known. In the months to come, this and Paizo's blogs will be my go-to source for data. What some dude howls on Twitter or asserts on Facebook may be anything between actual fact and deliberate misinformation, and we've seen how anger and confusion rise out of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Stay informed.
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