Pathfinder Roleplaying Game

Based on Wikipedia: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game

In 2007, the company that made Dungeons & Dragons—the game that had defined fantasy role-playing for over three decades—made a decision that would accidentally create its greatest competitor.

Wizards of the Coast announced they were releasing a fourth edition of D&D, and they were doing it under a much more restrictive license than before. A small publishing company called Paizo, which had been producing official D&D magazines, saw their business model evaporating. They didn't have access to the new rules. They didn't like the new licensing terms. So they did something audacious: they took the old rules—which were still available under an open license—and made them better.

The result was Pathfinder, a game that would eventually outsell Dungeons & Dragons itself.

The Open Door That Changed Everything

To understand how Pathfinder came to exist, you need to understand something called the Open Game License, or OGL. Back in 2000, Wizards of the Coast made an unusual decision for a company protecting valuable intellectual property: they released the core rules of Dungeons & Dragons third edition under an open license, allowing anyone to create compatible content without paying royalties or asking permission.

The reasoning was clever. If other publishers could make adventures and supplements for D&D, there would be more reasons for people to buy the core D&D books. It was a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats strategy, and it worked. Third edition became enormously popular, and a thriving ecosystem of third-party publishers emerged around it.

Paizo was one of these publishers. Starting in 2002, they held the contract to produce Dragon and Dungeon magazines, the official periodicals of the D&D world. For five years, they built expertise in creating adventures and content for the game. They developed their own adventure path called Shackled City, originally published across multiple magazine issues.

Then the rug got pulled out.

The Fork in the Road

When Wizards of the Coast decided not to renew Paizo's magazine contract in early 2007, the company pivoted to publishing their own adventure line called Pathfinder—still using the D&D 3.5 rules they knew so well. But the announcement of fourth edition D&D later that year created a dilemma.

Fourth edition was coming with a new license called the Game System License, which was considerably more restrictive than the OGL. Paizo's staff were wary. They also hadn't been given access to the actual fourth edition rules, making it impossible to plan content for the new system.

One of Paizo's designers, Jason Bulmahn, had been tinkering with modifications to the 3.5 rules. He had ideas for how to fix what he saw as the system's weaknesses—classes that became boring at higher levels, imbalances between combat-focused and non-combat characters, clunky rules for maneuvers like grappling and tripping. When he presented these ideas to the company, they made a fateful decision.

They would create their own complete role-playing game.

What Makes a Tabletop RPG

If you've never played a tabletop role-playing game, here's the basic concept: a group of people sit around a table (or, increasingly, a video call) and collaboratively tell a story. One person serves as the game master, describing the world and controlling all the characters the players encounter. Everyone else plays individual characters—a wizard, a fighter, a rogue sneaking through shadows.

When something uncertain happens—does your arrow hit the goblin? Does the guard believe your lie? Can you leap across the chasm?—you roll dice to determine the outcome. In games like Pathfinder and D&D, most of these rolls use a twenty-sided die, with various bonuses or penalties added based on your character's abilities. Roll high, and you succeed. Roll low, and things get interesting.

The rules exist to create dramatic tension and fair outcomes. They provide structure for the imagination, giving players meaningful choices with real consequences. A well-designed rule system disappears into the background during play while still shaping every decision.

Building a Better Dragon

Pathfinder first edition, released in 2009, was deliberately designed to be backward-compatible with D&D 3.5. Players jokingly called it "version 3.75" because it felt like an evolution rather than a replacement. You could use your old 3.5 adventures and monsters with only minor adjustments.

But the changes Bulmahn and his team made were significant.

The core issue with 3.5's basic classes was that they front-loaded all the interesting abilities. A fighter might get exciting options at level one, then gain almost nothing compelling for the next nineteen levels of play. Why stay a pure fighter when you could multiclass into something else after a few levels?

Pathfinder addressed this by adding meaningful choices at every level. Classes gained new abilities consistently throughout their progression, giving players reasons to specialize rather than dabble. A twentieth-level fighter in Pathfinder was genuinely more interesting than in 3.5.

The designers also tackled balance issues. Classes that weren't focused on combat—like the rogue or the bard—received more hit points per level, making them less fragile. The skill system was streamlined. Complex combat maneuvers like grappling, which had been notoriously confusing in 3.5, were rewritten to be more intuitive.

Before the final release, Paizo did something unusual: they published the rules as a public playtest, letting anyone download them and provide feedback. This open development model built community investment and caught problems before they became permanent.

David Versus Goliath, With Dice

Paizo wasn't sure how the market would respond. They were a small publisher going up against Wizards of the Coast, which was owned by Hasbro. Dungeons & Dragons had been the dominant force in tabletop gaming for thirty-five years.

The response exceeded all expectations. Preorders for the first printing sold out before Paizo even received their copies from the printer. They rushed to print a second run.

Over the next few years, Pathfinder's sales grew steadily. By spring 2011, it had become the best-selling role-playing game on the market, a position it held intermittently through summer 2014. For several quarters during that period, Pathfinder actually outsold Dungeons & Dragons—something that would have seemed impossible when the project began.

This wasn't just about rules. Paizo had built something D&D's fourth edition lacked: an engaged community that felt ownership over the game. The open playtest, the OGL licensing that let third parties create content, the responsive development process—all of this created loyalty that pure brand recognition couldn't match.

The World of Golarion

A role-playing game needs more than just rules for rolling dice and tracking hit points. It needs a world to explore, and Pathfinder delivered one: Golarion, a fantasy setting that drew on mythology, history, and classic adventure fiction while developing its own distinctive character.

Golarion is a high fantasy world—magic is real and relatively common, fantastic creatures roam the wilderness, and the gods take an active interest in mortal affairs. The technology level resembles medieval Europe, with swords and armor rather than guns and cannons (though there are exceptions in certain regions). Players might explore ancient ruins, navigate political intrigue in decadent cities, or venture into completely alien dimensions.

What set Golarion apart was the depth of its development. Paizo produced extensive setting material, detailing different regions of the world with their own cultures, conflicts, and adventure hooks. The Pathfinder Society, an organization of explorers and adventurers within the setting, became the basis for organized play programs where players could take the same character to different gaming groups and conventions.

The Expansion Years

Between 2009 and the mid-2010s, Paizo expanded the game significantly through a series of supplements. The Advanced Player's Guide in 2010 added six new character classes and introduced "archetypes"—variant versions of existing classes with different abilities and themes. Want to play a fighter who's specifically trained to protect others? There's an archetype for that. A bard who specializes in courtly intrigue? That too.

The concept of archetypes was genuinely innovative. Rather than creating entirely new classes for every concept, archetypes let players customize existing classes to fit specific character ideas. It was elegant game design that other systems would later imitate.

More supplements followed: the Bestiary series, cataloging monsters and creatures; Mythic Adventures for epic-level play; Occult Adventures with supernatural character classes like the psychic and the medium; Pathfinder Unchained, which offered experimental alternative rules for players who wanted to tinker with the system.

Third-party publishers contributed their own content. OtherWorld Creations (later Super Genius Games, then Rogue Genius Games) became particularly prolific, releasing new Pathfinder content weekly at one point. The OGL allowed all of this to flourish without licensing fees or approval processes.

Starting Fresh with Second Edition

By 2018, first edition had been accumulating rules for nearly a decade. The system worked, but it had become complex, with interactions between hundreds of options creating edge cases and confusion. Paizo announced they were developing a second edition.

The new edition, released in August 2019, made significant changes while trying to preserve what players loved about Pathfinder. It wasn't backward-compatible with first edition—a clean break was necessary to address fundamental issues.

The most notable change was the action system. In first edition, like D&D, characters had different types of actions on their turn—a move action, a standard action, sometimes bonus actions or swift actions—and keeping track of what you could do required understanding complex categories. Second edition replaced all of this with a simple structure: you get three actions per turn. Period.

Moving costs one action. Drawing a weapon costs one action. Making an attack costs one action. More complex activities might cost two or three actions. The elegance of this system is that it's intuitive—you don't need to memorize categories—while still allowing for interesting tactical decisions. Do you move once and attack twice? Move twice and attack once? Stand still and attack three times?

Critical hits were reimagined too. Instead of only occurring on a natural twenty (rolling the highest possible number on the die), critical successes now happen whenever you exceed the target number by ten or more. This made highly skilled characters feel more competent and created more dramatic moments during play.

The second edition also introduced the concept of critical success and failure on saving throws and skill checks, not just attacks. If you roll extremely well when trying to resist a spell, you might suffer no effect at all rather than just reduced damage. If you roll extremely poorly, the consequences are worse than normal failure.

The Licensing War of 2023

In early 2023, the tabletop RPG world was rocked by controversy. Wizards of the Coast announced plans to revise the Open Game License—the same license that had allowed Pathfinder to exist in the first place. The proposed changes would have imposed royalty requirements on larger publishers and given Wizards more control over derivative content.

The community response was furious. The OGL had been treated as essentially irrevocable for over twenty years, and many publishers had built their entire businesses around it. Wizards eventually backed down, but the damage to trust was done.

Paizo responded by helping to create a new license called the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC. Unlike the OGL, which was controlled by Wizards of the Coast, ORC was designed to be owned and maintained by a nonprofit foundation, making it immune to similar corporate changes.

This transition required Paizo to remove certain game elements inherited from D&D—specific monster names, spell names, and the alignment system that had been part of D&D since its earliest days. The result was the "Remaster Project," a set of four new core rulebooks released across 2023 and 2024 that remain compatible with existing second edition content while being fully independent of Wizards of the Coast's intellectual property.

Beyond the Tabletop

The success of Pathfinder the game spawned Pathfinder the media franchise. Paizo published over thirty novels set in Golarion, beginning with Prince of Wolves in 2010. Dynamite Entertainment produced comic book series, including crossovers with characters like Red Sonja and Tarzan. Big Finish Productions created audio dramas. Video games were developed, including Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which brought the setting to players who'd never rolled a physical die.

There was even a card game, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, designed by Mike Selinker. Rather than simulating the full role-playing experience, it captured the progression and treasure-hunting aspects in a more streamlined format—you'd build a deck representing your character and face scenarios that could be completed in a single session.

Actual play shows—where people record themselves playing tabletop RPGs for entertainment—became a significant promotional tool. Paizo partnered with Geek & Sundry to produce Pathfinder: Knights of Everflame, featuring game designer Jason Bulmahn running adventures for a group of players.

What It Means

Pathfinder's story matters beyond the world of tabletop gaming. It's a case study in how open licensing can create opportunities, how community engagement can compete with brand recognition, and how a small company can challenge an industry giant by simply making a better product.

It's also a story about what happens when corporate decisions alienate a community. Fourth edition D&D wasn't a bad game—it had genuine innovations and many loyal fans—but the licensing restrictions and the break from backward compatibility drove players toward an alternative that respected their investment in the previous system.

When Wizards of the Coast tried to change the OGL in 2023, the pattern repeated. The community had learned from Pathfinder's origin story that they weren't powerless, that alternatives could be created, that open systems protected against corporate overreach.

Today, Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition has reclaimed the top sales position, buoyed by the mainstreaming of tabletop RPGs through shows like Critical Role and Stranger Things references. But Pathfinder remains consistently second, a permanent presence in the market with a devoted player base.

For many players, that's exactly where they want it. Pathfinder offers crunchier rules for those who enjoy tactical complexity, deeper character customization for those who like building mechanically interesting characters, and a setting that's been developed with unusual care and consistency. It's not trying to be D&D. It's trying to be the best version of itself.

And it all started because a company was told they couldn't make Dragon magazine anymore.