Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box [Import] [ゲーム]

The Beginner Box is the spiritual successor to the original Dungeons & Dragons "Red Box" in almost every way, only this time a black dragon assumes the role of iconic, evocative image. Unlike other boxed sets since the Red Box that are within the D&D tradition, there is a complete game here: rules for players, and advice and guidelines -- replete with monsters, perilous traps, and magic items -- for game masters to create their own adventures. And it comes with all the accessories you need to run a game: a blank flipmat, dice, and plastic bases on which you can put the cardboard PCs and monsters. The flipmat and the cardboard pieces are also very thick and built to last. A kid could take this box and find literally hundreds of hours of enjoyment with his or her friends.

The other strength here is that it eases young people into the Pathfinder RPG with extreme ease. The rulebooks are gorgeous and have scores of full-color illustrations. The solo adventure introduces attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws as they come up. The Hero's Handbook makes the character creation process fun and holds your hand through it, with bright-colored letter references to similarly-lettered sections of the character-creation sheet. What is more -- the Beginner Box also comes with pregenerated characters and a first adventure at the beginning of the Gamemaster's Guide, which has maps and clear instructions for how to run every encounter. Erik Mona of Paizo Publishing said they did playtests with young teenagers in which they opened the box and started playing within 15 minutes, and I believe it.

When the Beginner Box was first announced a year ago, I admit I wasn't sure that it could be pulled off. My first exposure to post-3rd Edition D&D was the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, a 576-page tome that condensed 10 years of rules development, in which every word had important meaning (as a lawyer, I actually found its rule set comparable to what I had studied in law school), and which presumed an audience that had already been accustomed to playing 3rd Edition D&D. Part of the reason for its complexity was that the game's foundations are amazingly robust and can handle nearly every situation, including high-level play during which players are summoning dragons, disarming golems, and felling giants with flurries of blows. To create a complete product and fit it all inside one book, they had to create a dense, concise exposition of the rules.

The result was that the Core Rulebook was an excellent reference book, but an awful introduction to the game. Many players on Paizo's messageboards talk about the reactions they get when they try to convince their friends: they excitedly tell them what tabletop roleplaying is like, but once they heft out this massive brick of a book their friends' mouths drop.

Enter the Beginner Box. The Beginner Box limits itself to PC levels 1-5 and to the classic 4 character classes -- cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard -- thus lessening the amount of information that needs to be absorbed. The game designers take out many mini-systems (such as attacks of opportunity, combat maneuvers, armor check penalties) that exist in the core rules and boils everything down to the game's core: attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws. It limits the options to the most basic feats and magic spells, and provides a smaller skills list as well. The cleric and wizard have 34 spells each, and each is explained in four lines. And the Player's Handbook introduces young readers to each new concept one at a time, and in the context of the uber-fun exercises of going through the solo adventure and rolling up a character.

The result is something in which non-beginners might be interested: a "rules-lite" version of the Pathfinder RPG. Wonderfully, at the same time it is also compatible with the full Pathfinder rules, so young game masters who love the Beginner Box can also incorporate what they want out of the Core Rulebook and take from the immensely-rich library of Paizo adventure modules, adventure paths, and other supplements with relative ease.

The final result is a product that is a most-excellent "gateway drug" for the hobby, and we haven't seen one of this quality in over 25 years. Let the RPG Renaissance begin.

A friend of mine bought the 4th Edition Red Box, which I then borrowed and read through. I decided to shop around, and found this nifty box just sitting on the shelf at my local game store. Since we had a group that were willing to try a Tabletop RPG system, but had never had any experience, I decided to buy it as an alternative to the divisive 4th Edition rule set.

This is not a comparison of the actual full systems of D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder, but instead, just a comparison about what comes in the actual beginner's editions: the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Starter Set (or the Red Box) and the Pathfinder Beginner's Box.

Let's compare the two in each of the basic categories:

BEGINNER'S GUIDE

4th Edition: A 32-page manual stapled together on magazine-grade paper. This is less a player's manual than it is a long, single-player choose-your-own-adventure. Some of the rules that one needs to know in order to play 4th Edition are included here, including picking a race and a class, as well as how to roll attacks, but they are casually thrown in during the descriptions of the sample adventure. There are no core rules really listed here, and anyone that would need to quickly roll up a character, research basic attack maneuvers, or find a description of gear, spells, or other abilities is going to be out of luck. None of these basic functions are anywhere to be found in these 32 pages. While a 32-page adventure sounds like a lot of fun, the adventure lacks a real storytelling hook, as most of the backstory and plot is required to come from the player's imagination alone. Frustratingly little context is given by the guide itself. Plus, the guide separates each scenario four ways for each core class (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric), so you're only really playing through an 8 page adventure with very few branched paths. All in all, the book intrigues a new player well enough to stay interested, but as a guidebook, it fails. Once you've read it once and "created" a character, you'll never want to touch it again (unless you're forced to play through the whole thing again in order to create another character, which you will not want to do). Overall, 4/10.

Pathfinder: A 64-page fully-bounded book with high-grade, full-color pages. Like the Starter Set, this also includes a single-player choose-your-own adventure. However, this only encompasses the first eight pages, as opposed to the entire 32 page-booklet of 4E. You can only play through the adventure as a basic fighter (as opposed to branching off so you can play a variety of classes) but this turns out to be an asset here. As a first-time player, you are actually told a story, one of a simple citizen from a town called Sandpoint called forth from the mayor to stop a menacing foe that is lurking in a dungeon. You learn the basics of rolling dice for attacks and skill checks, and encounter some dangerous traps and a formidable final foe. It's a simple scenario that actually hooks you in with a little bit of adrenaline. Shakespeare it's not, but it definitely hooks the reader to learn more.

Fortunately, the last three-quarters of the book actually functions as a real player's guide, including the basics on how to choose a class, roll up attributes, figuring out ability modifiers, choosing feats and spells, buying weapons and other gear, and learning the basics of combat maneuvers and other functions a beginning player will need to know once they begin a game. You could have someone read the Hero's Handbook and they would be ready to enter a full game of Pathfinder, save for not knowing a few of the more advanced rules that could be picked up on the fly. The art styles are bright and vivid with high-quality artwork, and the writing style is equally compelling. Overall, the Hero's Handbook is a solid resource even after a player has upgraded to the full Pathfinder Core Rulebook. Overall, I'd give this book a 9/10.

THE GAME MASTER'S/DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE

D&D 4th Edition: A 64-page manual that is the same flimsy quality as the Player's Guide. Again, this doesn't really function as a guide book as much as it does an adventure that you're supposed to learn as you play. However, instead of trying to tell a story or investigate a full dungeon, it is instead just a series of battle encounters, separated in a way that feels devoid of a cohesive experience. You'll see an example of how all of the player character's and enemies' pawns are laid out on the map, and then a description of how a battle between these two groups are supposed to play out. You are intended to play through the encounter, and then start over with a different encounter with different enemies, learning a new basic combat maneuver. While this might be interesting to battle game strategists, there is no "Role Playing" here: no storytelling, no character development, nothing that makes you feel like you're actually part of the adventure aside from fighting enemies. Plus, this does again not function as a resourceful guidebook, as once you play through it once, you'll never need it again. There are no tools here for an aspiring dungeon master to craft their own dungeon, stories, NPCs, campaign setting, or any other tool necessary to keep playing after this first adventure. Your only choice is to play through the same encounters again, or shell out more money for the more advanced products, which will make this box seem redundant. I would rate this a 3/10.

Pathfinder Beginner's Box: A 100-page fully bounded book on high-quality paper. As with the Hero's Handbook, the bulk of this manual consists of a full array of tips and tricks on how to become a good game master, with advice on how to create your own stories, battles, and various other scenarios, as well as descriptions of enemies and specialty items galore, with a few advanced rules that are important for an experienced GM to be aware of. However, for anyone that doesn't want to have to deal with any of that nonsense to play a simple session, the manual opens with a mini-module, an adventure with a back story and plot hook that tells of a menacing force killing off local livestock; the players investigate a nearby dungeon to find the source of these disruptions. The game master gets a full ten-room dungeon to have the players explore, and there are a variety of enemy encounters and traps that will use the quick thinking of the players in order to resolve in the best possible way. It's a well rounded experience that will use the talents of all of the classes in order to best the system and make it to the end. More importantly, it's fun, and that's the whole reason we're playing this, isn't it? Again, the manual manages to best the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's guide at what it attempted to do, while still being a resource that actually teaches you the full game. This gets a 10/10.

MAPS/PAWNS

D&D 4th Edition: The maps that are used for the dungeon are made of folded up paper that is separated into different sections (each section sets up a different encounter). While the paper looks nice enough, it's not something you're going to be able to reuse after the game is over, and it's really only printed to be a use-once-and-discard kind of item. The pawns here are circular pieces of cardboard that are multisided, so that once you flip a pawn over, it represents a different character. If you're setting up a new encounter, you will find yourself in a position where you must choose between two different enemies simply because they both take up real estate on the same avatar. When playing the game, you are simply looking at a bunch of miniature coins set along a flimsy piece of paper. You do get access to a bunch of playing cards (think Magic: The Gathering) with spells and abilities listed in detail on them. While these are an appreciated touch, that they are needed at all makes the combat system seem overly complicated, and less like traditional D&D than a different game. Overall: 5/10

Pathfinder Beginner's Box: The box contains one 20" x 30" flip map. One side contains a fully rendered dungeon to go with the sample module in the Game Master's Guide, while the other side is a blank, beige mat that can be used with a dry-erase marker to make your own dungeon. You could also use this side for general battles or other encounters. The great thing about this flip map is that it's pretty impervious to dry-erase markers, tape, window markers, or any other device that you might want to use to hide portions of the dungeon or make adjustments as seen fit (My suggestion is to use Glass Chalk or a similar window marker to cover up the full map, using a washcloth and Windex to "reveal" new areas when the players explore them...post-it notes or taped construction paper could provide a similar function). The pawns are impressive, as they are double-sided figures that stand up. Not quite as satisfying as plastic miniatures, but are a lot more dynamic and decipherable than the tiny coardboard coins that come with the 4E set. The pawns are also numerous, with approximately three times as many options than the D&D set. Overall: 8/10

DICE

4th Edition: A set of 6 black dice, including one of each die (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20).
Pathfinder: A set of 7 red dice, the above six and one 00-90 ten sided die for easy percentage roles.

CHARACTER SHEETS

4th Edition: A handful of single page character sheets that use a simplified ruleset than the actual 4E one.
Pathfinder: A similar number of double paged character sheets, with listed skills, as well as plenty of room for spells, equipment, and abilities. Also included a four pregenerated character sheets, containing two double sided pages that describe the basic functions and options for each character. This makes it even easier to just jump into a game, even when a couple players don't know all of the rules yet.

DOWNLOADABLE ADD-ONS

4th Edition: A single "adventure encounter" that consists of an all-too-brief setup and single battle. While this is, from a storytelling standpoint, a step-up from the basic Red Box books, it still has no real value from a role-playing standpoint.
Pathfinder: Four downloadable expansions: (1) A "Beginner Box Player Kit", which gives the setup to a fifth class (the Barbarian, in addition to the Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard already included), plus other tips and other rules left out of the basics in the main manual; (2) "Beginner Box GM Kit", which contains a second adventure that, while not as good as the included one, is nice to have on hand for free, as well as some other general useful information; (3) "Beginner Box Bash Demos", which is a series of mini-adventures that are usable in extending a campaign with those that want more value out of their basic kit; (4) "Pathfinder Society Character Creation Guide", which includes basic rules to create a Pathfinder character usable at an official Pathfinder event.

In every single category, the Pathfinder box clearly trumps the D&D 4th Edition set, with the lone exception of price. I hate to say it, but this is another example of "you get what you pay for", as when you buy the Pathfinder Beginner's Box, you'll still likely find use in the two guidebooks, flip-mat, and pawn-figures for months to come, if not longer. If you give the Beginner Box to a couple of 12 year old boys, they may be able to entertain themselves through many play sessions with only what's included in the box. If you bought them the 4th Edition Red Box, they would likely be amused for a few hours before either becoming bored or clammoring for the next product in the D&D essentials line (the more expensive Dungeon Master's Kit).

I heartily endorse the Pathfinder Beginner Box. I actually bought a second one, just for the reference material and extra pawns alone. If you're brand new to RPGs, this is a great place to start.

Paizo has taken the crown for best introduction to Role Playing. The ole Red Box used to have this title, but Paizo just surpassed this achievement. Used this product to introduce my skeptical wife and 4 year old daughter to the wonderful hobby of Fantasy Adventure Role playing. They laughed shuddered and cheered. Easily the best time I've ever had Game Mastering and my girls absolutley loved it. They were talking about their heroics for days afterward. The are literally hundreds of hours of adventuring available in this beginner's box. Pathfinder is the best D&D based campaign setting that I've played in a long time. This product is sure to get kids role playing in no time. Hoping this starts a traditional RPG renaissance.