I didn't really enjoy last night's Pathfinder game.
I should hasten to add that this was nothing to do with the GM, the style, the other players, or the adventure, and had very little to do with the system (though more below...). Rather, the source of my annoyance was one of the ongoing banes of my existence:
Dice.
The bulk of last night's game was taken up by a fairly lengthy combat, which spanned five rounds, and in which my character was able to attack twice a round. So, rather conveniently, that's ten attacks, which makes for some nice easy probabilities.
It's also worth noting that the opponents' AC was such that I was able to hit with a '7' or better on the die, which amounts to a 70% hit chance.
I managed a grand total of 4 hits in the combat, with 2 of those being the last two attacks in the combat, after about an hour and a half of frustration. Worse still, the second of those hits, which came an hour into the game, was immediately followed up by a roll of minimum damage.
(The situation is actually even worse than that. Each of the other players had a set of lavishly detailed, and therefore necessarily quite lengthy, combat actions. It therefore took about 15 minutes to get around the table. By contrast, it took me all of ten seconds to describe my action, roll the dice, and fail to hit twice.)
Sigh.
The thing is, the problem isn't that I have dodgy dice - the dice I have are quite capable of rolling high numbers, while the problem seems to follow me around whichever dice I use. And, of course, it only ever seems to apply to rolls that somehow matter.
Though in fairness, last night wasn't the worst example of the problem - the last time I played 5e I had a barbarian who would hit on a '6' or better and still missed almost every attack. In fact, there were some attacks I arranged to hit on a '3' and still missed. And, worse, because of the structure of 5e with it's Daily/Encounter/At-will powers, I ended up wasting all of my best powers on attacks that missed, which meant not only did my character utterly suck in that combat, but he'd then hamstrung his capabilities for the rest of the session as well.
There's not really any upshot to all of this - it's just a complaint about a sucky experience. Except for a couple of things...
First up, RPGs have a bad habit, and have done since the very start, of giving additional bonuses to people who don't need them. Way back on OD&D, the ability scores actually gave almost no in-game effect, except for one: if you were lucky enough to roll a high prime requisite, you got a bonus to earned XP. In 2nd Edition (which is more or less where I came in), rolling high ability scores, in addition to the benefits inherent in those scores, also gave access to more exclusive classes that were, of course, more powerful. 3e (and Pathfinder) tended to get rid of such things, mostly, but they were replaced by more situational bonuses - you got powers like "two-weapon rend" where characters who scored two hits in a single round got to do extra mega-damage. Which is great for that player... and really bloody sucks for the guy who can't buy a hit...
What I think is needed is actually to turn that on its head - rather than getting additional fun bonuses for the player who already rolls really well (or just outright cheats), there should be more care to ensure that the player who doesn't still gets to have a decent time. Some sort of accumulating token that can then be used to buy a hit, or to reroll a bad die, or boost damage, or something.
But the other thing that really bothered me concerned character building. Pathfinder now allows players to tweak their character's concept in about a million different ways to get their character just right. Which is great, except that if you do that, and all the other players also tweak their concepts to suit them, you run the risk of ending up with a character who is utterly and completely mediocre - on paper, he looks absolutely fine, but then you find that everything he can do someone else in the group can also do, and do better. So your two-weapon fighter is overshadowed by the rogue who also does two-weapon fighting (but has the same AC and bonus to hit, but does more damage per hit - and that before you factor in your crappy dice). Your animal-training ranger is overshadowed by the horse-lord who has all the same riding skills, and does them just that bit better. And so on - nobody does everything you can do, but for everything you can do, somebody does it better. Making your character utterly redundant.
I don't really know what the solution to that one is, except to note that in a class-based system like Pathfinder there shouldn't even be a need for a solution - the whole point of having classes is to enforce archetypes and therefore build in niche protection.
To date, the only game I won't play again is Shadowrun, on account of a really bad experience I had running that game. Pathfinder is very rapidly earning itself a spot on the same list.
