Pathfinder RPG Advanced Race Guide

Paizo's latest add-on to its collection to its Pathfinder RPG line is the Advanced Race Guide (ARG). This is not a book for DIY would-be dictators to guide the master race to take over the world, but rather an in-depth exploration of the various character races available in the Pathfinder RPG and setting lines. I find it an interesting supplement, although not necessarily a must-have for everyone. GMs who want to tinker with their races for their homebrew worlds will definitely want a copy, as will players who want some more unusual race options (provided their GM allows the book of course). For those who largely stick to core material or don't do a lot of homebrewing or want to use unusual races, it may not be worth the expense (if in doubt, get the $10 .pdf). There is some degree of repetition of older material, as the ARG is to an extent a compilation of races featured in previous Paizo publications, although the purpose of the book is also of course to expand in depth upon them all. And of course there is an extensive section on how to build brand new races as well.

The ARG builds upon concepts originally introduced in Advanced Player's Guide (APG), and I would say that Paizo largely expects you to own and use the options in the APG if you want to use the ARG. The ARG uses alternate racial abilities, alternate racial favored class abilities, and archetypes, all introduced in the APG first, and the archetypes available include archetypes for the APG base classes as well as the base classes introduced in Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat. I take this as a blessing and a curse, a sign of "supplement bloat" to a degree. If you own and use all the options in the APG, then you'll have no problem further supplementing your games with the ARG. If you don't, the book may be largely useless to you. My own personal dilemma comes from the fact that I do not use any supplementary base classes in my home games, so all the archetypes that reference the APG, UM, or UC classes are useless to me and I feel like I have less content available to me. I realize there is a rock and a hard place situation here--if no prior supplementary material is referenced, then those who do use those materials also feel short changed. I will give Paizo credit that they explain what all the new concepts are so that if you don't own the APG you will still understand how the various alternate abilities and archetypes work, but this book, more than any other supplement to date, has rung to me as "you must have collected all four to be able to use this book properly." This situation is very much YMMV, and I point it out simply so that others may be aware.

The book is divided into four sections, the first three of which are basically variations on the same theme. Every race depicted in these three sections gets new alternate racial abilities, favored class abilities, archetypes, as well as race specific feats and equipment. There's also extensive flavor text for all races, and lovely art to accompany it.

The first section looks in depth at the core races, dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, and human. It expands upon their description text from the core rulebook, and it adds more alternate racial abilities and favored class options than what are listed in the APG, although what is listed in the APG is also repeated. Every core race now has a unique favored class option for every core and base class available in the game. Core races also get three new archetypes per race. I appreciated the extra detail in this section, although I did feel to a point like I was re-reading stuff I had already in the core rulebook or APG, but the new material is also valuable. I especially enjoyed most of the new feats and equipment.

The second section basically does the same thing for non-core but popular races for both PCs and NPCs, such as familiar "savage" humanoids like goblins, kobolds, and orcs, as well as the various races oldschoolers would collectively refer to as "planetouched," like tieflings and aasimar. This section goes into a little less detail--although what is there is still comprehensive, and each race has only two archetypes and less new material. Likewise the third section repeats the formula for very uncommon races, including a number of "animal-folk" like catfolk and tengu, as well as some unusual planar influenced races like the suli (jann-descended) and the wayang (shadow-descended). My understanding is a lot of these races originally appeared in Pathfinder setting material (I don't usually buy from the Companion or Chronicles lines so I can't speak to how much new is introduced). These uncommon races get only one archetype and again less information in general, but are still presented with well written descriptions. I did feel short changed on the amount of abilities--in particular, I think at least the races in the second section could have used more racial abilities and favored class options, to match the first chapter. I would have been willing to sacrifice some archetypes from the first or second chapters for the extra space. In fairness, for racial options, I generally prefer the alternate abilities to race-specific archetypes, but that's in part because I grew tired of racial class restrictions as far back as the 80s, and it's a concept I have no desire to see return to the descendants of AD&D.

The final section is the race builder, a system to allow GMs to build brand new races from scratch. It uses a point based system to build races, with "standard," "advanced," and "monstrous" races as categories for how many points you should use to build a certain race and how many abilities they may be able to have. The system includes a strong caveat that the race building rules are guidelines, and that the entire section is to be used at the GM's will and with the GM's discretion, which I do think must be borne strongly in mind by any and all users. I participated in the ARG playtest and review and I think the designers did take some of the most important feedback to heart -- for example, that not all core races needed to be shoehorned into a 10 point build, when obviously some core race abilities were truly more or less valuable than what the developers originally tried to assign them to be to make them fit a mold that they'd never been put into in the first place. This makes some of the point costs and assignments more sensible than they were than in the playtest, and at least I am fine with the fact that some core races come out to more or less than 10 points. From what I recall from the playtest, I think few will protest.

Still, I wish more player feedback from the playtest had been taken into consideration for the final product. My particular, though minor, peeve is that there are too many too-specific abilities -- a racial ability that grants you the ability to work with stone, but no such thing for working, say, with metal or clay or leather. Of course you can substitute in such things yourself, but I would have preferred many of the choices to have been made more generic to begin with, rather than force us to wing it in a system that already presumes a fair amount of "winging" to start with.

Nonetheless, it is a solid system that will give race tinkerers a lot of content to work with--again as long as all is taken as firm guidelines than laser-etched rules. I also like that the section provides some advice for how to deal with races of different power levels. Since Pathfinder did away with the problematic "level adjustment" concept from 3.5, the race builder rules offer different alternatives for having very racially "mixed" adventuring parties. The basic rule of thumb is generally to take a powerful race and remove abilities so that they match core more closely, or alternately to use the race builder to add abilities to weaker races so they are better balanced with stronger ones. Some may not like the idea as much as I do, but I appreciate firmly getting away from the character level issue entirely.

Production-wise, the book matches the high standard of quality that other PFRPG hardcover books meet. It is a good length, printed cleanly and clearly on glossy pages with beautiful artwork that enhances but does not distract from the text. The spine is solid enough, and I ordered mine from Paizo directly, whose dutiful golems placed corner protectors all over the book so there was no chance of it getting battered in shipping. My one layout nitpick is that for each race listed, the standard racial abilities are listed in a separate box at the bottom of the page. The way the pages are designed, it is very easy to read the race's description and then go straight into alternate racial abilities before you've managed to read the standard racial ones first, and makes it hard to cross reference between the two.

The ARG is a very nice supplement, with a well-organized and vast amount of information on Pathfinder character races. While I wouldn't consider it required reading, if character racial options are what's up your alley, then it's THE go-to sourcebook for Pathfinder.

Greetings and the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide

Hello, my name is DeathQuaker and I am a gamer geek. Like many of my fellow gamers, I like being able to mouth off about games and other things I like, and thus this blog has come to be. My hope is to use it to publish occasional thoughts and articles on my gaming experiences and reviews of game products I've enjoyed (or not, as the case may be). I do have a livejournal (DeathQuaker Has an Opinion) but decided to put my gaming materials over here specifically.

And to start off with a bang, I received my .pdf of Paizo's Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide this week! And WOW is it amazing!

By way of prologue: I have been playing the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game since its open beta, and loving every minute of it. I was one of the gamers who loved D&D 3.0/3.5 but agreed it needed some tweaking--but at the same time, I was disappointed by the direction Wizards of the Coast chose to take with 4e. Paizo made the changes I was particularly looking for in its Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, a revision of 3.5 that focused on boosting and re-leveling core race and class power, rebalancing and adding new feats, and overhauling the skill system to make it even easier to build the fantasy characters I envisioned. By no means will I say Pathfinder is for everyone, but the system serves particularly my fantasy gaming needs extremely well, and I've been delightedly running a high-level Pathfinder game over the past year.

The Advanced Player's Guide is Paizo's one-book answer, in many ways, to the "Complete" series of 3rd Edition. Overflowing with alternate abilities and builds for races and classes, new classes, new prestige classes, feats, spells, and other mechanics, it allows experienced Pathfinder players to take their game to an even higher level of character customizability and complexity than even what the core rulebook provides. I think this is the first time I have found that the advertising copy didn't hyperbolize the content of a gaming supplement--if anything, the marketing understates what is in this book, if only because describing how very much is in this book is very difficult to do.

Most Pathfinder players are already aware of the six new classes in the book, as Paizo ran an open playtest of the Alchemist, Cavalier, Inquisitor, Oracle, Summoner, and Witch classes presented. The final versions take the originality of the beta classes and have successfully polished them to an effective shine--they are potent classes on their own, and will work well in many settings along with the core classes; they also help fill niches for more exotic fantasy settings where, for example, your pointy-hat wizard seems out of place, but a pact-magic witch would do just fine.

I have to say though, that the new classes are the least of what I'm really interested in for the APG (well-written though they are). My current campaign works with the core rules and the new classes don't have much of a place in my homebrew setting for right now. However, the APG spends a great deal of time taking what is core and also throwing it into all kinds of new directions, which is both more useful and very interesting to me. Every core race gets alternate class abilities (your campaign world has dwarves who war with elves rather than giants? Swap out "Hatred" for "Ancient Enmity" and be done with it). This allows for a bit of customization for campaigns and concepts without needing to rewrite whole new races. It also helps overcome some of the minorly annoying issues I've had with some of the standard racial abilities--for example, while I love that half-elves are good at multiclassing because of Adaptability, but what if I want to play a single class half-elf? There's a racial feature that's no use to me--the APG fixes that by offering a number of abilities to trade for that one.

Likewise classes get a number of alternate paths, trading a few class features for whole new ones. While the overall feel for the classes are unchanged, this allows trickier concepts to be built--without unnecessary and overwhelming class bloat. Want to play a swashbuckler, but the core Fighter/Rogue/Duelist didn't cover it for you? Both fighters and rogues have finesse and swashbuckling paths that make that a lot less fiddly. Want to play a monk of the "Drunken Master" style? Done. Want to abandon the disciplined monk entirely play a powerful brutish pugilist? There's a barbarian path that's perfect for you. Those who wanted to see the bard turned into more of an arcane warrior will be pleased, as will those who have been begging for an antipaladin. My only "problem" (and it's not really a "problem") is that I'm very tempted to call these alternate paths "kits" (if you don't get that joke, then you're probably much younger than I am).

I am disappointed by a few of the core class adjustments. While many of the classes get myriad new paths, Clerics and Wizards get left a bit in the dust. Perhaps that's only fair--they're pretty powerful and somewhat adaptable classes to start with. What they DO get is pretty neat--subdomains and subschools. Both of these swap in specific themed abilities into standard domains and arcane schools--for example, a cleric in an ancestral worship religion with the Repose domain can take the Repose "subdomain" of "Ancestor," swapping out one of the standard Repose abilities for the ability to speak with the dead. I like these, but these subdomains are all they get. Particularly for clerics, I would have liked to have seen some alternatives maybe for channeling energy. It would look less out of place, if, say, Barbarians only got new rage powers, but Barbarians get both new rage powers AND new alternate paths. Regardless, all the stuff that IS included is really exciting.

The APG also introduces several new mechanics--new combat maneuvers, like the dirty tricks maneuvers; Hero Points, which work a little like d20 Modern's Action points; and Traits. Well, Traits aren't exactly new--Paizo has used them in their campaign products for a long time now. The APG brings Traits officially to PFRPG--basically, they are "mini feats" that help customize your character further according to their history, religion, and home region. They aren't powerful, but are great ways to help reflect a character concept more thoroughly and effectively. On top of that, there are new feats, spells, and magic items I've only barely been able to pore through--many of which are to provide extra support for the new classes and alternate abilities presented in the book.

The only part I'm really disappointed in are the Prestige Classes. While I am not one of those people who wants a billion prestige classes, I do like to have a few meaningful ones to choose from when it seems appropriate. Prestige Classes help fill niches, and I'm personally not especially interested in the ones many of the APG PrCs provide. We have the Battle Herald, the Holy Vindicator, the Horizon Walker, the Master Chymist, the Master Spy, the Nature Warden, the Rage Prophet, and the Stalwart Defender.

The Horizon Walker is an update of the 3.5 core PrC--a class I'm not sure anyone needed an update; they beefed it up a little but the terrain mastery that is iconic to the Horizon Walker still seems very circumstantial. Likewise, the Stalwart Defender is a race-free update of the Dwarven Defender, and while statistically, it rounds out the class nicely, it's a little redundant to abilities available elsewhere. The Battle Herald is a Prestige Marshal, sort of a battlebard, which is cool, though again, I could probably build a Bard or Cavalier that does much of the same thing (indeed, I think the real purpose of the Battle Herald is to have something for the Cavalier to Prestige into, which seems antithetical to Pathfinder philosophy--base classes should be cool on their own, and you shouldn't need a prestige class for everyone). Likewise, the Master Chymist is just a prestige Alchemist and has no broader purpose.

I am most disappointed by the Holy Vindicator--it's a "holy warrior who is not a paladin" Prestige Class. It could be cool, but its key feature, stigmata--the class literally bleeds its powers--are a bit off-putting to me. Maybe it's just because I've never been able to find the perfect PrC for my Fighter-Cleric of the Goddess of Love, maybe I'm just taking it a bit personally. Or maybe it's that it's evocative of a particular religious imagery I'm not comfortable seeing mixed into fantasy. I'm not sure, to be honest; all I can say it sets me the wrong way.

The Nature Warden and Rage Prophet on the other hand are pretty cool, and allow for some unusual character types. My favorite of all of them by far is the Master Spy, which accomplishes what many roguish PrCs tried and failed to do: make a great infiltrator/investigator PrC.

What is also blindingly disappointing is that there are still very few prestige classes for sorcerers, wizards, and clerics that want to focus on spell casting, but want a little more flavor/specialization than the standard single class route can provide. I assume they're saving those for their PFRPG Magic book I know is in the works, but it would have been nice to have one or two things in the APG, especially as more are likely to buy the APG than the specialized Magic book (or maybe that's just me). And especially in place of lame ducks like the Horizon Walker.

All that said, the book is astoundingly full of wonderful things to learn and try, and is probably the best RPG purchase I've made this year--and I say this as a GM who tends to prefer "fluff" far more to "crunch"--but I think I even like this more than the Game Mastery Guide.

I do have to make one huge caveat--which is not a complaint, mind. The Advanced Player's Guide is called that for a reason. While the options offered are astounding--they are also massive, many, and overwhelming. I do not recommend this book to people just starting PFRPG, especially if they're relatively new to d20-based systems in general. It is a lot to take in, and I warn GMs to review it thoroughly before they decide to incorporate it into their games. Again, this is not a negative thing in and of itself--complexity is good and I am sure many Pathfinder players will delight in the new options the APG provides. But just be warned to take the title fully into account before you dive in.