Then I heard that a Pathfinder basic set was going to be coming out. Now, I have an odd sub-hobby in RPGs: I collect basic and starter sets. I've enjoyed seeing the different ways that people have tried explaining paper RPGs to newcomers, and I wanted to see the Pathfinder take on it... especially since, as much as I've loved 4th Edition, I both loved and hated the Starter Set that was produced for it. It's been a year since that came out, so surely the Pathfinder people had seen it... and I wondered if they'd modeled theirs after it, or gone in a different direction.
And, of course, as an RPGer, I've idly wondered what changes Pathfinder made, and this ought to be a good way to see what those were. So I bought the starter set and opened it up, wondering how different it was going to be.
The Physical Components
The first impression I had of the Beginner Box came before I even opened it -- it was heavy. This boded well to me -- one of the things I didn't like about the D&D 4 Starter Set was that the box was mostly empty.
Once I got it open (which took a couple of minutes -- the lid was very tightly fitted to the box), the first things that greeted me were two little plastic packages. The first was expected -- a set of standard polyhedral dice. The second was a set of stands for cardboard minis (the box calls them "pawns", which for some reason I keep seeing as "prawns" every time I read the back copy). Under those was was a single, glossy sheet with "Welcome to a world of adventure!" on it, and some quick instructions.
These instructions gave me the option of playing a solo adventure in the "Hero's Handbook", choosing one of the pre-generated characters included, making my own character, or being GM for the first adventure.
Below that were the pre-generated characters -- four of them, one of each of the classic classes (cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard). These were four page foldouts, with nice color artwork, a front piece of "play this character if you want to…", a back with a brief background for the character, and the character sheet on the inside.
On that inside, the character sheet was presented in the middle, surrounded by explanatory text about the different sections (each of which was marked with a large, circled letter, matched to the same in the explanations). Enough rules were explained here that one could simply have the players choose characters, have them look over their sheets, and start playing without them reading the Hero's Handbook.
The introductory adventure in the Game Master's Guide is designed to go with that idea, instructing the new GM to give the players 10-15 minutes to read the character sheets while he/she reads the first few encounters in the adventure (which include a brief explanation of how to run combat) and skims the rest.
Continuing down through the box, there are four blank character sheets. These are specially designed for the Beginner Box, with a sidebar showing the dice and giving their names, circled letters for the sections that match to ones on the brief explanation of how to create a character (inside the front cover of the Hero's Handbook), and having the cut-down list of skills that the Beginner Box uses (about which more later).
Next were the Hero's Handbook and Game Master's Guide. Both are of excellent physical quality -- square-bound, softcover books with full-color interiors, on heavy glossy paper. They're 64 and 96 pages, respectively.
A map is included, on coated yardstick, designed to be usable with wet-erase and dry-erase markers. One side has brown squares on tan, so the GM can draw his/her own maps on it in play. The other has the map for the adventure in the Gamemaster's Guide.
To go with the map, there are 87 cardboard "pawns" that can fit in the included bases. One sheet has the four pre-made characters, plus 24 other characters -- one of each of the possible race/class/sex combinations that can be made with the Beginner Box's rules.
The other two sheets are monsters, with a good mix of low-level ones -- goblins, orcs, zombies, wolves, and skeletons are all expected, but the sheets also include elementals, gargoyles, werewolves, a medusa, and a doppleganger. The "cannon fodder" types of monsters have multiple pawns. Each sheet also has a double-sized token: an ogre, a manticore, and a black dragon between the three of them.
At the very bottom is another glossy sheet, this one with "The Adventure Continues!" on one side, with blurbs for the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, Bestiary, and "Inner Sea World Guide", while the other side is an ad for the "Pathfinder Society".
So, those are the physical contents. What about the game? Well, if you're reading RPG.net, there's a good chance that you already have a fairly good idea of what D&D 3.5/Pathfinder is like, so here's my quick rundown on things specific to this set:
The Good
There's a lot here. The character creation rules give the four basic classes mention above, with three races (human, dwarf, elf). It goes up to level 5 for them, so new players should actually be able to play for a few months before needing to move up. The tokens and map will ease play a lot.
The GM's guide follows the introductory adventure with eight pages on "Building an Adventure", which includes the "experience point budget" method for balancing an encounter, and guidelines on how much treasure to give out. Sixteen pages on "Environment" follow, covering dungeon, forest, swamp, mountain, desert, and city adventures. Hazards native to these environments are covered, along with general advice about running adventures set in these environments. To go with these, the Monsters chapter has lists of monsters appropriate to each one. Honestly, when I was a new GM, I could have used a resource like this.
I like the fact that the set includes character creation rules. Neither of WotC's boxed sets for D&D 3.X did, and I disliked that about them -- in my experience, more new players want to create a character than want to play one that's been generated for them.
The Bad
Honestly, there's not a lot to complain about here. Overall, I think the set is excellent. With that in mind, here's my short list of complaints:
The introductory programmed adventure is very short (23 sections). There's no replay value in it -- one successful go-through, and you've probably seen it all. Worse than both of those, though, it assumes you're playing a particular character… but it's not any of the pre-generated characters included, and it doesn't give the stats for the character. The adventure concludes with the character getting a magic item and some treasure, but without an actual character sheet, the player can't choose to continue playing that character.
Second, the skill rules make no reference to the idea of Taking 10 or Taking 20. This may create some repetitive dice rolling and/or frustration in situations where these options would make sense for the characters.
Third, and most significant, there's one major thing that's been left out of these rules that could cause problems for players moving from the Beginner Box rules to the full rules -- namely, opportunity attacks. Now, attacks of opportunity are a bit complicated, so I can understand the desire to leave them out of the beginner rules. However, it could have been done in a better way than it's been done here.
WotC's 3.X boxed sets left out opportunity attacks from the rules, but they did so by changing the rules so that characters weren't allowed to do anything that would provoke an attack of opportunity. The Pathfinder Beginner Box does this partway -- characters aren't allowed to make ranged attacks or cast non-melee spells while adjacent to enemies. The movement rules, however, allow characters to move freely past enemies in combat. WotC's boxed sets required any move to end when you moved adjacent to an enemy, and as long as you were adjacent to an enemy, you could only move five feet at a time.
Adding this to the rules would have only required an extra paragraph or two in the rules -- but since Paizo didn't do this, players using the Beginner Box may become used to the free movement, and be disappointed or angered when they join a group using the full rules.
The Different
Necessarily, quite a few things have been cut from these rules. In addition to the smaller variety of races and classes, I noticed these things:
- The skill list has been cut to about 19 skills, making the list look more like D&D4e's than like the normal Pathfinder list.
- Spell lists are also cut-down, but there's enough for variety -- four zero-level spells and ten each of 1st-3rd level for each spellcasting class.
- The feat list has been cut down to 30 feats. Of these, two are cleric-only. There's only one magical feat that isn't cleric-only, so wizards will have to take some combat feats.
- Class options have been simplified -- there's no mention of familiars, priests have only four gods to choose from, etc.
The Big Question
The big question is this: Does it make sense to spend $35 to buy someone the Beginner Box, when you could buy them the Core Rulebook for $15 more? I'd say yes -- even though it is a cut-down version of the rules, it ought to be enough to last new players a few months… and it includes a battlemat, dice, the 87 cardboard pawns, a short introductory adventure, and monsters appropriate to adventures of that level. Since the core rulebook doesn't include monsters, you'd be looking at another $40 for the Bestiary. Just a battlemat, dice, and equivalent minis would run around $40, if you bought them all separately, which brings the price for the "full" game up to around $120 -- too much to spend for someone who might decide they don't actually like the game.
If Pathfinder is your preferred game, I'd say the Beginner Box would be a good gift to get someone you think might like the game. It'll give them enough of a taste for them to decide whether they like it without breaking the bank, and some of the components will continue to be useful even once they "graduate" to the full game.
