Pathfinder Second Edition Player and GM Core Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review the Pathfinder Remastered system from Paizo Publishing. These books take the Pathfinder system and give it a fresh coat of paint and a few under the hood upgrades.

I’ve been playing Tabletop RPGs ever since I got to experience Dungeons & Dragons in eigth grade. Getting to explore the worlds my friends crafted through the eyes of Lidda, the Halfling Rogue changed my view on gaming and storytelling forever. Fast forward to today and I’m still seeking experiences that capture the wonder and awe I first experienced in my high school’s cafeteria. When I got the chance to review Pathfinder 2nd Edition’s Player Core and GM Core books, I knew I had to take it and see if I could recapture that magic.

Pathfinder, as a system, is not too dissimilar from other d20 systems (like Dungeons & Dragons). To do almost anything in the game, players will roll a 20-sided die, add any modifiers based on guidance from the Game Master (the person who is running the adventure), and watch the results unfold. If you’re attempting to sneak past some guardsmen who are watching over a treasure chest and you succeed in your Stealth Check, then congratulations, you just got much richer! Fail that same Check and you might be looking at a combat encounter once the guards realize you’re there.

While this framework may not be much different from a plethora of other systems, the differences in the details are what makes the game.

Pathfinder games take place in a default setting known as Golarion. Unlike most other systems on the market, Golarion, because of the immense amount of work that the designers have put into all of the descriptions and attributes on each and every page of these books, feels so much more alive than any other setting I’ve used in any game. Yet, crucially, these books do not seek to describe each major location in heavy detail: that detail is still left up to the GM to create, and for the players to explore. Instead, we get beautifully short descriptors, filled to the