Danny Quach: Hello everyone, my name is Danny and I’m the Community and Social Media Manager for Roll20. I’m super excited today because I get to hang out with Mik and learn about Pathfinder.
Mik Holmes: Hi, I’m Mik Holmes. I am a Content Conversion Producer at Roll20. My job is to take all of the really cool Pathfinder Adventure Paths and character options and plug them all into our system so you can have the best Pathfinder experience you can get.
Danny: You’re my go-to person at Roll20 whenever I need to deep dive into any mechanics or lore. So, what do you love about Pathfinder?
Mik: Pathfinder is my go-to system. I’ve run about 80 campaigns. That’s exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. It’s a high fantasy system. It’s not unlike D&D, but unlike D&D, it’s a bit more crunchy, a bit more stats based, a lot of character options, tons of ancestries, tons of backgrounds.
Mik: All of the classes are feat based. Every two levels you get a feat that changes up how you play your class, and I think that that combination of mechanics and lore is really cool. I’ve been playing Pathfinder Second Edition since day one, and I’ve been playing Pathfinder First Edition since I was probably 16 years old.
Mik: I have a game of Kingmaker going right now. It’s an Adventure Path where you essentially start your own kingdom. You pick one of the players to be the ruler, and you are a council of rulers that protects this land called the Stolen Lands. We recently had three out of the five party members die because they were exploring and I was like, hey, you guys are exploring in a very dangerous looking location.
Danny: Recently, the Remaster has come out for Pathfinder. So now we have Pathfinder Core. I know you started with Pathfinder First Edition and now we’re in the Second Edition. I know Core isn’t a new edition, but can you tell me about what Core brings to the table?
Mik: The Player Core and GM Core have taken all of the errata and filled out the entire Player Core handbook with remastered rules. You can still run a game using either system. The remaster just has softer edges, if that makes sense. One of the things they’ve done is they’ve remastered the witch class. The witch class used to be in the Advanced Player’s Guide, and now it is in the Player Core book.
Mik: What they’ve done is they’ve made the familiars a lot more integral to the class. The class has always been that you have a familiar that is a representative of your patron, that talks to you, and essentially is your spellbook. So you have this raven on your shoulder that whispers spells into your ears.
Mik: Now they have more familiar abilities that are sort of unique to your patron’s theme. They generate a passive effect every time the witch casts or sustains one of their hex cantrips. An example they give is that a familiar granted by the Silence in Snow patron is forever cold to the touch. And every time you sustain one of your hex spells, frost will form next to your familiar, creating difficult terrain.
Mik: The ancestries are an interesting thing. They’ve added in leshies as one of the core ancestries. They are little plant spirits. You can play as essentially a pumpkin, a gourd, or a leaf spirit, or a cactus leshy.
Mik: Yes. I want to be a succulent. So bad. Historically, in D&D and in previous editions of Pathfinder, there’s been half orcs and half elves, which are half human, half orc, or half human.
Mik: Half elves are now called aiuvarin. And they’re not limited to humans. You can be any ancestry that is the child of an elf and whatever ancestry you’d like. So you could be a dwarf elf aiuvarin. Similarly, half orcs are now called dromaar, the orcish word for “drummer.” It’s something to do with them being the war drummers in a war band of orcs, which is a very highly honored position in orc culture.
Mik: I thought that was a really cool choice. They’ve added in suggestions to play as any ancestry that is a combination of two. There’s not any special feats that you can get for every single combination, but it opens up a lot of character concepts that I think are something we’ve never really seen in the RPG world.
Danny: That’s really cool, and like you said, it really opens up building that character backstory and background and you can immerse yourself. That just shows you the breadth of what kind of character you can create in Pathfinder, which is really exciting.
Danny: Have they changed anything for Core mechanically?
Mik: They really wanted to make sure that Core was compatible with all of the old Adventure Paths – all of the legacy things that they’ve fiddled with a few things to make certain actions easier, and they’ve added in one action that I really like.
Mik: It’s called Sleek Reposition. Essentially, as an athletics check, you can move a target creature 10 feet on a critical success or 5 feet on a regular success. I want to get this guy into flank with my rogue, so I’m going to literally shove him into place. That is something that never was available in the original rules, but it was something that a lot of people did anyway.
Mik: You can do that to allies, too. So if you want to get an ally out of dodge, you can literally reposition them as an action, pull them near you. Because it is a forced movement trait, it doesn’t trigger reactions. So no opportunity attacks trigger on moving your friend out of the way. This could be done like the rogue’s gone down and you need to get him out of the way of the fireball that’s coming next turn.
Mik: One action, drag him around. That is now in the rules. It’s a great way of adding in narrative actions that increase the things you can do that aren’t just attack or just shove.
Danny: I love that they’ve streamlined rules on how you can be more tactical and use those mechanics in storytelling while you’re in battle.
Mik: Previously, you used to have a specific proficiency and attack DC with each tradition of spells. So for example, if you were a cleric multiclassed with a wizard, you’d have to track your divine and arcane traditions separately. Now, they’re all one proficiency bonus on your character sheet. It all just uses one DC, so there’s just one entry on the sheet that you have to worry about.
Danny: I love that it encourages people to multiclass so that they don’t have to worry about tracking two or three different things. They can just focus on whatever they want to focus on. How does Roll20 help you play Pathfinder, especially when it comes to either Second Edition or Core?
Mik: All of the classes, ancestries, backgrounds, items, everything you need to play is in our Compendium search. Just like with any game system, you can get to the game faster with our Roll20 VTT. Dynamic Lighting and maps and tokens speed up and enhance the quality of your game. We’ve got tons of Paizo map packs ready for you to just drag into any game and explore these beautiful illustrations.
Danny: If you had to pick one Adventure Path, or something for someone to check out on Roll20, what would it be?
Mik: Kingmaker is amazing. It is, like I said, a massive adventure where you take the role of leaders of a kingdom. But another one that I really, really like is Strength of Thousands. It takes place in a magical university in the Mwangi Expanse, which is informed by African storytelling traditions and folklore.
Mik: They blend a mixture of arcane and primal magic. You take a multiclass of either wizard or druid. I thought that was a really cool way of taking this mechanical spellcasting and turning it into this is a unique identity of this campaign.
Danny: For anybody on the fence, what’s a one or two second or two sentence pitch that you would give them?
Mik: Check out Roll20 Characters. We’ve got Free Basic Rules that have all of the game rules that you need to play, and an expansive list of options of the four main classes: the cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard. You can make free characters up to level five using basically everything from the book.
Mik: Roll20 Characters now lets you make Characters outside of any game that you can bring into any Pathfinder game.
Danny: Free Basic Rules lets you dive into the different crunchy mechanics that you were talking about without feeling like you’re jumping into a full blown campaign, which is exciting.
Check out the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition character sheet and send us your feedback!