D&D Essentials Kit

I like starter sets.  Maybe it's because I find the early adventures in a campaign the most exciting, or maybe it's just because I like buying things that are bundled together.  Sometimes it's an economical way of getting several PC-type miniatures at once, along with extra maps and dice.  In any event, I tend to buy every starter set D&D puts out.

While the D&D Essentials Kit doesn't include any miniatures, it still may be my favorite D&D starter set to date.

The box includes:
Abridged rulebook (64 pages)
Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure (64 pages)
Double-sided map (Sword Coast and the town of Phandalin)
4-panel DM Screen
6 blank character sheets
11 dice (1d4, 4d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1 percentile, 1d12, 2d20), translucent red with white numbers
81 cards (magic items, sidekicks, conditions, combat step-by-step, quests, initiative)
A box for the cards
Codes for D&D Beyond content (The included adventure, some follow-up adventures, and a 50% off coupon for the Player's Handbook)

The rulebook isn't much different than the free Basic Rules you can find on the official website.  It has instructions for building a character and advancing them to level 6.  It has four races (Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human), five classes (Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard) with two archetypes each, and five backgrounds (Acolyte, Criminal, Entertainer, Sage, and Soldier).

About the only significant new thing in the rulebook is the sidekick rules (which can also be found for free in Unearthed Arcana).  This is important, though, because it acknowledges one of the biggest barriers to getting a new group together - finding enough players to make a well-rounded group.

Dragon of Icespire Peak is one of the better starting adventures I've seen.  Not because it's a particularly memorable plot or anything, but because it's presented in such an efficient manner that they managed to cram a lot of content into a 64-page adventure book.

When you reach the town of Phandalin, you find a job postings board with three short quests on it.  You can complete them in any order, and after you finish a couple, more quests will be posted.  There are nine quests altogether.  Instead of experience points, the adventure encourages milestone-based leveling based on how many quests you complete.  These quests take place all over the surrounding area, so the PCs will really have a good layout of the land by the end.

Dragon of Icespire Peak will take the characters from level 1 up to level 6.  The included code unlocks three follow-up adventures on the D&D Beyond website, which bring the characters up to level 11.  That's a pretty good value for the price; it's enough to keep the players busy for several sessions.

The included cards are pretty cool, but kind of cheap.  They're not pre-cut cards, just perforated cardboard sheets you have tear apart yourself.  The card box is also thin cardboard that you have to fold into a box.  The quest, item, and sidekick cards make good handouts specifically for this adventure, and the rest of the cards are useful in any campaign, especially for beginners.

My only real complaint is the sidekick cards.  Each one shows a picture of the character on one side, and describes their personality on the back.  I would have preferred their stats being printed on the cards, with multiple versions of the cards for when they level up.  But it's a minor complaint.

The DM screen has some useful information on it.  The first panel has some basic rules - Actions in combat, things you can do on your turn, etc.  Panel 2 has conditions.  Panels 3 and 4 have miscellaneous charts like common prices, light distances, cover effects, sample DCs, and so on.  It's a handy reference, but I don't tend to use DM screens so I probably won't get much use out of it.

Overall, I think this is a great value for new players.  I plan to run Dragon of Icespire peak next time I DM for new players.  I do wish it had included a few minis or tokens and a combat grid, but it's still a good value.  If you're new to D&D and trying to decide which starter set to get, this is the one I recommend.

Pathfinder 2e vs D&D 5e

My personal history with tabletop RPGs goes all the way back to the early 80s, but my experience was sporadic and not very deep.  Back in third grade I used to draw my own mazes and populate them from the AD&D Monster Manual.  Then I would talk my friend through them over the phone.  I don’t think I ever heard the words “Search for secret passages” so many times in a single night.  I didn’t know the rules, but he did, and so he did all the math on his end.  Looking back at how ridiculously overpowered my encounters were, he probably cheated.

After that I played the occasional random D&D session, usually several years apart.  I didn’t really start to get into D&D until near the end of third edition’s life span, and I didn’t start playing it in earnest until Fourth Edition. 

4e gets a lot of hate, but I liked it for what it was:  A tactical combat board game with a plot.  As long as you understand that going in, it’s actually a pretty fun game.  Their only real mistake was calling it “Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition”.  If they’d just kept 3.5 going, and marketed 4e as a spin-off product, they might have been a lot better off.  They could have called it “D&D Heroes” or “D&D Tactics”.

But no, Wizards of the Coast abandoned 3.5, leading to the Paizo company using the OGL to release Pathfinder, which took 3.5 and ironed out the bugs, as well as adding tons of brand new, high quality content.   Fans of 3.5 flocked to Pathfinder in droves, and while D&D is currently experiencing a surge in popularity, a lot of those lost fans never came back.

Personally, I liked Pathfinder, but I also found it too complicated.  Creating a character was a chore for me, even when I tried using character creation software.  I liked that it had a lot of additional content, but it had so many options that I felt like I needed to read a dozen splatbooks to optimize my character.  I’m not much of a powergamer, and Pathfinder made me feel like I had to min/max just to keep my character alive.  Your Mileage May Vary on that one. 

When D&D 5e was released, I fell in love.  Character creation was so simple, even an idiot like me could build a character in five minutes.  The background options encouraged roleplaying, and the combat encounters were a lot faster than in Fourth.  Of course, optimized characters are still more effective in battle, that’s going to be true of almost any system.  But in 5e I never really felt the pressure to optimize my character, and I felt a lot more comfortable building my character around their background.

Now, some people complained that the monsters in 5e were too easy, but that never bothered me.  I’m not going for a high score here, I’m in it for the story.  For me, 5e struck the perfect balance between roleplay and combat, and it’s just about everything I’m looking for in an RPG.

Recently, Paizo released Pathfinder 2nd edition.  It makes a lot of changes to the system, most of which seem to be improvements, but also make the game a little complicated for my tastes.  Here's some of the rules that stood out to me.

Now a quick disclaimer:  While I played a couple of sessions of the playtest, I’ve only played one session so far of the final product, so these are just first impressions and I might be wrong about some details.  Also, I can’t always remember which rules are new and which ones are carried over from Pathfinder 1st Edition, so if I make something sound new that isn’t, I apologize.  Also, I covered a lot of this ground during my blog on the Playtest, but some of the rules have changed since then.

Character Creation: I have a love/hate relationship with the character creation.  I absolutely adore how you generate your stats now.  You start with all tens, then you get bonus points based on your ancestry, class, and background.  This is really how all RPGs should generate stats. 

However, I hate the overabundance of feats.  The game seems to have a heavy emphasis on them.  There are ancestral feats, class feats, and general feats.  The section for each class is around ten pages long, reminding me of D&D 4th Edition, except instead of powers, all those extra pages are full of feats.  Don’t get me wrong, I like feats, and I think they’re a great way to customize your character.  But it’s a chore reading through all those feats to pick the ones I want.  

Now that's partly own fault for being indecisive.  And luckily the handbook has some suggested templates for characters based on specific themes.  That’s a real time saver.  If you know what kind of character you’re going for, it takes less time to build a character than it did in 1st Edition.  At least, it did for me.  So that’s something.

Pathfinder 2e, which for the rest of this blog I’m going to call Patooie, now refers to “races” as “ancestries”, which is probably more accurate and more future proof.  I wish there were more ancestries to choose from, but then, knowing Paizo, we’ll have 37 new splatbooks by the end of the year.  I like that Patooie incorporates backgrounds into character creation, just like D&D 5e. 

Action Economy: The new action economy is… well, I *think* it’s easier to learn, but I’m so used to the “Standard/Move/Minor” variations most RPGs use that I have to unlearn what I know to relearn the new system.  In Patooie, everyone gets three actions on their turn.  Those actions can be for anything, movement, drawing your sword, attacking.  But some bigger actions use up more than one action, and certain actions have penalties if you use them more than once on a turn.

Encumbrance: The Encumbrance system is... interesting.  Patooie uses a “Bulk” system rather than have you add up each item's weight.  It tries its best to make this simple, but doesn’t quite get there in my opinion.  

Basically, you can carry an amount of Bulk equal to 5 plus your Strength modifier.  Large items are assigned Bulk values based on their size, weight, and how awkward they are to carry.  Smaller items are just labelled “Light”, and 10 light items equals one Bulk.  So a longsword would be 1 bulk, 10 daggers would be one bulk, a suit of plate armor is 4 bulk, and the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Players Handbook is 10 bulk.  Really small items, like shurikens, are weightless as far as the rules are concerned, which sounds like an exploit waiting to happen. 

Is this really easier than just adding up the weight of all your items?  Well, I hate to admit it, but probably. Once you get used to it, anyway.  I’ve never been a huge fan of encumbrance rules anyway, unless your party has one of those loot-obsessed players who try to carry away everything that isn’t nailed down.  

Math: Patooie uses a Proficiency system a bit like 5e, except they went the complete opposite direction on the math.  D&D 5e was built around the concept of “Bounded Accuracy”, which is a fancy way of saying, “We’re actually going to pay attention to the math this time.”  Some editions of D&D let the numbers get out of hand, and at epic levels you’d be adding such high numbers to your attack roll that the d20 barely made much of a difference.  Fifth edition reigned that in, and keeps the numbers much smaller and more controlled.  

Meanwhile, Patooie uses a proficiency bonus that includes your level as part of the math, which pretty much guarantees high attack roll bonuses as the campaign goes on.   I haven’t looked at a high level character sheet yet, but I bet it’s pretty scary.

Initiative: You don’t have a dedicated initiative score any more.  Usually you roll perception, but you might roll something else based on context.  For example, if your rogue was sneaking around when the fight started, they might roll their sneak skill for their initiative.  To me, this rule right here represents the essence of Patooie.  This is a rule that makes perfect sense, to the point that you may even question why RPGs did it the other way before.  But at the same time, it very slightly slows down the game, since some players will have to confirm with the DM which skill to roll. 

It only adds a few seconds, but that’s my point… Patooie is full of rules that make a lot of sense but add an a few extra seconds to gameplay.  No single rule really slows down the game, but combined?  I mean, I probably shouldn’t say this until I’ve played it more, but it nickels and dimes you with tiny extra rules, until the whole game feels too complicated. 

Secret rolls: The DM makes certain player rolls in secret now.  So if the rogue checks for traps, the DM rolls the skill check for them and lets them know whether they think it’s safe.  This way PCs don’t treat high or low rolls as out-of-character knowledge.  For example, let’s say you roll to see if someone is lying, and the DM says, “Well, you think he’s telling the truth…”  In other RPGs, you might respond, “Yeah, well I got a 27 on my insight check, so I’ll trust my instincts.”  But in Patooie, you don't know what you rolled, so you don't know how confident you should be.

This rule makes a lot of sense, but at the same time I just don’t like giving up control that way.  Also, I can see it slowing the game down.  Before, if you rolled really low, you might ask another party member to check as well.  But if the DM rolls for you, then players can no longer be confident about these checks, and they might ask fellow party members to duplicate every secret check.

Besides, I’m not convinced the results of these rolls would actually be out-of-character knowledge.  I think most people, when they attempt something, know to some degree how well they did.  Roll high on your insight check, and you can say you’re almost positive he’s not lying.  Roll low and you can say that the guy has one of those faces that’s hard to read.  But if the DM rolls in secret, you don’t know how your character feels about their attempt.  But I’m probably making too much out of it.

Crits: You now get a critical hit not only by rollling 20s, but also if you roll at least 10 higher than the target DC.  Likewise, you fumble if you roll 10 or more lower than the target number, as well as when you roll a 1.  In addition to attack rolls, a lot of skills have extra effects that go off if you crit or fumble.  I think that’s a good system – I’ve always thought it would be cool if there were a difference between just barely hitting someone’s AC, and obliterating their AC.  But it also means you'll want to keep the Players Handbook nearby in case you forget what happens when you crit with a specific skill.

Opportunity Attacks: You provoke an opportunity attack if you move while in an enemy’s threat range.  This is reasonable, but it’s going to be hard for me because I’m used to 5e, where you only provoke when you leave their threat range.  But Patooie does allow you to step one square without provoking.

Diagonal Movement: By default, it uses the 1,2,1,2 method for calculating diagonal movement.  This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and I could probably do a whole rant on that one rule alone.  But to sum up, I prefer simple rules and ease of play over stark realism and simulationism.

Non-Magical Healing: Healing is a divisive issue for players.  Some people – usually old school gamers - prefer slow healing, because it turns it into a resource management game.  Does the party really want to risk going down another dungeon level when their hit points are down 25%?  Other players – usually the ones who grew up playing video game RPGs, prefer to recover all their hit points by resting after each battle.  This helps the game move along faster, and prevents you from going back to town every twenty minutes. 

I can see both sides of the issue, but personally I prefer fast healing.  At least if the campaign has a lot of combat in it.  A few years ago I was in a Pathfinder First Edition campaign, and my character got injured, and she had to stay in bed for several days while the rest of the party went out on cool adventures.  At first it looked like Patooie was going to be the same way. 

But then I learned about the skill “Treat Wounds”.  Basically, it allows you to make a DC15 check once an hour, to heal 2d8 hit points.  For a game without any form of healing surges, this is a game changer.  I can see this becoming a “must have” skill for any class that allows it.  I can see some DMs disallowing the skill, or at least restricting the number of times it can be used per day. 

Hero Points: Every system has some version of action points, inspiration, bennies, or whatever.  In Patooie, Hero Points are points you get that only last for the session, that you can trade in to reroll bad checks, or to keep you from dying.  Since they can save your life when you’re making death saves, it’s risky to use them up on anything else, and I imagine most players will always save one for emergencies.  Heck, it’s worth it just to avoid having to look up the Dying rules, which take up nearly two full pages in the Player’s Handbook.

To Wrap-Up: Patooie is a decent system, but I do have some concerns about its future.  Like I said earlier, the original Pathfinder’s fan base was made up of people who didn’t want to leave D&D 3.5 behind.  So, now that Pathfinder is no longer a clone of 3.5, are those fans still going to stick with it?  Or will they keep playing Pathfinder 1st Edition?  Or will some of them take this opportunity to give D&D 5e a try?  Only time will tell.

Some of Patooies rules seem… all over the place.  This is just my impression and feel free to disagree, but some of the rules don’t feel like they belong in the same RPG.  Every time I think the game it too complicated, I’ll come across something that’s been elegantly streamlined.  Some elements of the game are as simple as tic-tac-toe, while some entire pages read like tax code.  I never can tell if the PCs are supposed to be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or if they’re supposed to be medieval superheroes. 

I have a fundamental problem with the Players Handbook that is hard to put into words… but basically, the information I’m looking for is rarely where I would look for it.  It’s like the writers and I just can’t agree on how you should organize a book. I can only read the Player’s Handbook in small chunks, because my brain keeps getting full.   I kept finding rules that made me say, “Awesome!  But… I’ll never remember that option exists.”  It’s like being at a buffet full of thousands of delicious desserts, but you’ve already filled up on steak and couldn’t eat another bite. 

Overall, I think Pathfinder 2nd Edition is an excellent game with a lot of creative features.  However, I also think it’s a bloated system and unnecessarily complicated in places.  It would not be my first choice of RPG, maybe not even my fifth… but I would still play it, and probably enjoy it.

Bottom line: There’s a lot to like in the newest version of Pathfinder, but it’s far from perfect.  Personally I prefer D&D 5e, but Patooie is good enough that I’m happy to play it when I can’t find a 5e game.