The Paizo team put out a blog entry recently about how they’re handling spells for Pathfinder II. I though I’d say a few words on what their approach means for the game.

Caveat: I’m not a fan of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This will come out in this article. I think that if you enjoy Pathfinder, you’re an excellent person who should keep playing games you like. However, it’s not a game I enjoy very much, unfortunately.

One of the questions I’ve been considering is this: Who is the Pathfinder II RPG for? The original Pathfinder had as its original goal to attract players of Dungeons & Dragons 3^rd edition, which had been discontinued and replaced with 4E, a game that was a great departure from the approach of 3E (and previous editions). So, Pathfinder was designed to attract as many of those people as possible. And it did a good job, especially as 4E was not (by D&D-terms) a great success.

Pathfinder had the opportunity to fix a few things that were wrong with 3E, but – due to the incompatible goal of keeping 3E-fans around with backwards compatible material – only a few things got fixed. And, along the way Pathfinder became the D&D variant that had Lots of Options. So many feats, classes, prestige classes, archetypes, traits and other ways to modify your characters! They may have produced fewer hardcover books per year than 3E, but I think they exceeded 3E for options – the books were jam-packed with them. And it became an incredibly complex game.

Now we’ve seen the Heal spell, we know who the new version is pitched at: People who like complex and versatile mechanics. However, I don’t feel it’s pitched at the casual gamer; those who have flooded to D&D in the last few years.

Have a look:

This is an unbelievably complex spell. It’s easy to miss how it works. A couple of notes: “Heightened” is the same as in 5E casting a spell with a higher-level slot; so for every slot level above 1 you use, you gain the benefit; and you have three actions in PF2, the spell has more effect the more actions (Somatic, Verbal, Material) you use to cast it.

Read it. Read it again. You’ve probably missed something. Read it again. Now imagine a new player trying to work out what it does!

Here’s the thing about complexity: It’s easy when it adds something. It’s very difficult when it replaces something. This is partly a formatting concern: the designers have described the spell in as few words as possible. Comprehension suffers as a result.

I read it through several times before I realised that the amount of healing/damage for the 3-action version is only your Spellcasting modifier.

Is the spell a touch attack or a Fort save? Is it touch, ranged or area? How many dice do you roll? How many dice do you roll with a 5^th level slot? There’s a lot of complicated adjustments to make depending on how you use it, and it’s very easy to miss things.

There are players who adore using complex mechanics in their games. However, the success of D&D recently has entirely been based on the ability to role-play and tell stories with the game. The mechanics are there, but they mostly fade into the background with streaming shows. For such a core spell, this says to me that “you need to enjoy mastering mechanics to play this game”.

The thing is that there has been a time in my life that I would have adored this approach. The time when I spent hours learning the rules to Advanced Squad Leader, Dungeons & Dragons 3E and many other games. But I was always an exception in the gaming group, not the rule.

I’ll be getting the Pathfinder II playtest game when it comes out. I’ll run a few of the playtest adventures. It’s always interesting learning new mechanics and seeing other approaches to things. However, based on the example of this spell, I’m not exactly sanguine about its prospects with me!