Scott Ruggels

Since people liked the last one. I will share some more:
 

It is absolutely "D&D" 3.x down to its very bones. However, you tend to get a sectarian answer from people based upon what sect of "D&D" they personally think is "the one true D&D". Is the Lutheran church "christian"? Ask a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Baptist, one or more atheists, and your choice of adherents to non-Abrahamic traditions and you'll experience the same effect ("narcissism of small differences") ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality ) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law ).
 
Pathfinder unquestionably started as Jason Bulmahn's house ruled D&D 3.5 game, that happened to get professionally published by a group of people with professional publishing experience. The history of paizo the company and the game is well established. When WotC didn't renew paizo's license to produce and publish Dragon magazine, Dungeon magazine, (the official D&D gaming periodicals of yesteryear and fond memory) etc, they were left in a jam and faced their company going under. Scrambling to survive, they started publishing "Adventure Paths" in a periodical fashion with Rise of the Runelords, using the Open Gaming License, as a 3.x compatible supplement. They were already set up to do this because they originated the concept with Adventure Paths published in Dungeon magazine (which they produced at the time), large episodic adventure campaigns loosely set in the World of Greyhawk. Erik Mona in particular was a die hard Greyhawk fan and had started from there on the GreyTalk mailing list back in the day (which I lurked on and occasionally posted on as well, coincidentally) as a super-fan and then eventually managed to go pro...and during his time working on the magazines there was a noticeable uptick in Greyhawk related material, though it was mostly presented in a somewhat generic / loose form. Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide were the original three Adventure Paths published during this time for 3.x in Dungeon, nominally set in Greyhawk but not very anchored and easily portable to  other settings.
 
Shannon Appelcline's "brief history" from all the way back in 2006 when paizo was first emerging is still up on rpg.net ( https://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory2.phtml ) and is worth a read as his historicals typically are (many of them were published by Evil Hat as Designers & Dragons https://www.evilhat.com/home/designers-dragons/  which is a great read if you are interested in the history of rpg's and the companies that make them). You can also find various accounts from some of the core early group of paizo, though I think you'll find going back to sources from the mid-2000's you'll get a much more unfiltered version of things as they were when they were happening rather than the more marketing driven corporate spin doctored version you'll tend to find after over a decade of independent aggrandizement.
 
They needed a setting, so they hacked together Golarion from bits, and shipped. I don't have perfect recall, but I was an original subscriber to the Adventure Path; my existing subscriptions to Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine rolled over. I wasn't interested in Golarion at the time as I was still running an off again / on again Greyhawk based campaign with a continuity I maintained across gaming groups and years, starting back in the late 80's, but I liked paizo at the time largely due to my appreciation for Erik Mona's Greyhawk torch bearing. So I have a lot of the early Pathfinder material from the first couple of years in storage, modules, rulebooks, settings, etc. It absolutely was D&D, and there was a relative glut of 3rd party OGL D&D compatible material at that time of which they were just the latest iteration of. However, they published the Advanced Players Guide about a year later, and started to really differentiate themselves from the rather packed field of OGL D&D 3.x successors. And it just snowballed from there.
 
Anyway, the point stands that historically, Pathfinder is without a doubt an D&D successor, and it really can't be factually disputed.
 
....I'm going to break this into separate posts for readability, I accidentally cast "Wall of Text", Maximized, as an involuntary action.
 
 
 

So, I had no real interest in Golarion myself. When I did D&D, I did Greyhawk D&D...though after over two decades of house ruling and continuity retention my home version of "GH" was not a purists form. Like a lot of long running campaigns, the lore and practice of playing within had grown to the point that it was difficult to incorporate new players. Also Greyhawk itself had been cast aside by TSR in favor of Forgotten Realms and other later settings, so it was difficult to get material for it, and only players of a certain age were still into it. After I got out of the military, my gaming group of the time dissipated over time as players, who were mostly military, also got out and went back to wherever they were from or were redeployed elsewhere. At some point, I had gotten fed up with AD&D 2e and moved the game into the Hero System and that had been very successful. I did that for several years with an expanding an contracting pool of players as a large group of people came and went or were back from deployment, or whatever. 
 
So, I needed new players, and it was just too difficult to lure people in with the bizarre cocktail of a mostly defunct D&D setting using a homebrewed hack of the Hero System (4e) which we referred to as GreyHERO and over 20 years of a shared continuity over something like a dozen different campaigns, which had seen somewhere approaching 50 players and a few hundred PC's over the years traipsing thru it; those of you who have run or played in large, long running continuities know how hairy and difficult to relate that kind of shared lore can become. Not a very elevator pitchable game.
 
About this time D&D 3e hit the shelves; it was a big deal. I remember leaving work early that day to drive down to a game store with a co-worker who was also one of my last remaining former military buddies and players in my games who had stayed in the area. We cracked open the PHB over really good food at a Chinese place in the mini mall the game store in, and we decided that we should try it out. So me and the last couple of holdovers from my last group accumulated new players interested in trying out the new D&D rules and started a new Greyhawk campaign set within my shared continuity, but in a different part of the setting and we just sort of alluded to / had callbacks to earlier events as sort of easter eggs or references that the old hands understood. That started a string of followup campaigns over the next few years. During this time, D&D 3x was getting created in front of us. Splatbooks and rules supplements and then a trickle and then a flood of 3rd party material was descending upon us as it was published. At first it was cool, hey look interesting new stuff! But all too soon it turned into a glut, a feast, a veritable typhoon of content. Way too much.
 
After having run a few campaigns, I had come to the opinion that the core game was broken at higher levels; it worked ok from somewhere around 5th level and stayed basically stable into the early teens, but the low level play experience sucked (as it always has in D&D based games unless you just really like XP grubbing to level up to the point you can actually do something interesting), and the high end was off the rails with very brittle rock paper scissor characters (save or die was still a thing) and a top-heavy pile of stacked bonuses and class features that gets more ponderous with each level. And as supplements started to rain down, the quality and power level were all over the place. And there was just so much of it. It got harder and harder to keep up with and commensurately more difficult to run the game as the GM. I finally got fed up with it, and had curated a good group of players, culled from the bones of other campaigns, whom would stick with it out of love for the evolving narrative rather than attachment to the game mechanics. So I converted that group over to the Hero System (5e) and resumed running the campaign using the Hero System which I greatly preferred. We lost a player who just did not care for HS, but the rest stuck and we were able to get several more years of games set in my weird Greyhawk variant using HS 5e. 
 
Meanwhile Wotc and the D&D bubble had burst. Hasbro happened. D&D 4e happened. Paizo's entre as a OGL 3x spin off was a side effect of that. Disgruntled 3.x players and GM's reaction against the vicissitudes of WotC post-Hasbro and eventual dissatisfaction with 4e drew many to Pathfinder which people started to un-ironically refer to as D&D 3.75. Paizo was able to hold on to the tiger and parley initial interest into a successful brand, and eventually grew to first compete with WotC, and for a good stretch of years dominate that sector of the market. I don't pay attention to these things the way I used to, but I have the impression that WotC has made some kind of inroads in retaking some of the market share with 5e, and now paizo is responding with a revision of Pathfinder, but I've lost interest in that space and tuned it all out.
 
 

Today, depending on who you are talking to, "Pathfinder" can mean various things.
 
There's the rules themselves, which are basically settingless in the same way that D&D rules have always been settingless. You can use them to run a D&D-esque game in a setting of your own making. The default setting of Golarion may be referred to as idea anchors or examples, but the core classes and monsters and what not are pure D&D. Anything that they were able to repackage, legally speaking, got repackaged. In some places where something was explicitly not OGL permissible such as Illithid some other thing takes the place of that (broadly, aboleths or cthonians fill a similar niche) or a wink wink nudge nudge SRD equivalent is available (for instance, paizo can't publish stuff with Beholders, but if you wanted to run an old D&D module using Pathfinder rules you could easily drop in an SRD "Evil Eye"). It is d20 compatible, and while there are some idiomatic differences between them, it takes very little experience with either variant to translate between them.
 
Pathfinder offers variant implementations for D&D core classes, and then a whole bunch of other additional classes riffing on the same ideas in various ways. So, a D&D 3.x Wizard and a Pathfinder Wizard are not 100% line by line identical, but they are clearly "the same". Overall, the Pathfinder classes are famously more powerful than their D&D 3.x equivalents. Power creep across the board is a common theme. Of course the monsters also tend to be a bit powered up, so it's basically a wash. A rising tide lifts all boats. Some classes of course benefit more than others, and disparity in class power balances are rife. There are rather famously issues such as "Multiple Ability Dependent (MAD) vs Single Ability Dependent (SAD)", "Martial - Caster Disparity", "Wealth Per Level issues" and so on which are relevant to all of D&D 3e, D&D 3.5, and Pathfinder.
 
They differ in details, but the broad strokes are clearly the same. D&D 3.x has far more in common with Pathfinder than it does with either AD&D 2e or D&D 4e. 
 
Aside from the rules, you have the setting of Golarion and the adventures set within it...most notably the Adventure Path's themselves which are 6 issue adventure arcs with a theme which usually but not always start at level 1 and end around level 20 and present themselves as a thing where you in theory start running the campaign when the first book drops, and keep pace with them so that your group is ready for the next part of the adventure just as paizo is releasing the next book in the cycle. That's a conceit which is held over from the early desperate days of paizo trying to leverage their periodical publishing model to get some product out the door to keep making payroll; I don't know of anyone who actually starts a new Adventure Path on release and tries to keep up with the release schedule. In reality, the Adventure Paths remain available the same as any other gaming book, and it is much more common to buy into a past published Adventure Path and run it. None of the Adventure Paths are 100% perfect, some of them are highly regarded while others are not, but somewhat similar to how Magic the Gathering themed blocks roll out year after year, basically two themed Adventure Paths roll out year after year. If you don't like the current one, just wait six months and maybe you'll like the next one. There's a subgroup of players who just play Adventure Paths, and that's what they think of when you say "Pathfinder".  In some cases, there are players who do exist who have only ever played in Pathfinder Adventure Paths and don't really know much about gaming beyond that...asking such a player if "Pathfinder is D&D" may well draw a blank stare. 
 
Then there's Pathfinder Society, which is a thing unto itself. It's an "organized play" model, and the bookkeeping involved to keep things "fair" and allow characters to be portable is quite tedious but makes sense if you understand what its trying to prevent. It evolved into its own sort of ecosystem, and for some players PFS play is all they know and this is "Pathfinder" to them.
 
So, Pathfinder is a D&D variant. Mechanically it is of the 3.x era and thus is dissimilar to the current rules system that bears the D&D brand, but that doesn't invalidate it's D&D pedigree. Conceptually, the ideas of the Pathfinder setting and the metaplots within that setting and the expressions of protagonists / antagonists within the race / class / level semantics intrinsic to D&D and its successors are purely "D&D" and only make sense in that odd niche of fantasy fiction spawned by D&D. However, if your first experience with D&D was 4e or 5e, then Pathfinder may not seem like D&D to you...maybe. Many people can't separate a game mechanic from the fluff draped around out, or the content of a fictional setting from its mechanical underpinnings. That speaks more to their own imprecision of thought than to the actual facts of the matter however.

At some point in the last few years my son happened to get into my boxes of Pathfinder stuff and became fascinated by it, particularly the art. About the same time, I was getting into Fate. Of those two contemporaneous occurrences was born my Pathfinder Fate Accelerated hack ( http://www.killershrike.com/Fate/Fae/Pathfinder/Menu.aspx ) and over the years I've run a few adventures set in Golarion using my hacked Fate Accelerated rules. We played yesterday, as a matter of fact.
 
I don't particularly love Golarion. It's ok, for me. But the maps and art and material is copious and well done. I'm not whipping out difficult to replace Darlene Greyhawk maps or trying to scrounge player copies of resources that exist only in out of print books. It works out because its convenient and I happen to have a pile of content and pdfs for it and can easily acquire anything I happen to be missing if I decide I want it. For instance, when we played yesterday the binding gave out on my physical copy of "Magnimar, City of Monuments"; if that had happened to my nearly 30 year old physical copy of "The City of Greyhawk" I would have been quite incensed. But, whatever, if I care I can get another copy of Magnimar, City of Monuments, and if not I've got the pdf in cloud storage.

I crib the main bits from Adventure Paths and modules set in the Varisia region, and we go. It is a Pathfinder game in the setting and metaplot sense, and very much not a Pathfinder game in a mechanical sense. Does it also qualify as a D&D game? Sort of. In an existential sense, it is. In a historical sense, it wouldn't exist in a vacuum as it is entirely a derivative. In a practical sense, it isn't really as you would not be able as a player to drop into a D&D game of any edition and apply any of the mechanical knowledge attained from playing in my game.
 
I think that's the crux of it...is D&D a set of mechanics or is D&D a set of ideas or is it the combination of both that constitutes D&D? I'm of the opinion that the essence of D&D is the set of ideas, and the mechanics are largely irrelevant. People who agree will probably agree that Pathfinder is D&D, and those who don't won't. 

Zack Snyder?

If you ever wanted to see what a jump in a tech level (tech tree) looks like, here is the Royal Norwegian Warship Karlstadt in Trondheim harbor during this month’s NATO excercise. Similar angling of Hull plates as the Zumwalt class. It is smaller and probably stealthier than the Americans ship. Contrast it with the 20 plus year old vessels behind it. 
 
https://strategypage.com/military_photos/military_photos_20181026122859.aspx
 
 

Egggggzacley!

If you ever wanted to see what a jump in a tech level (tech tree) looks like, here is the Royal Norwegian Warship Karlstadt in Trondheim harbor during this month’s NATO excercise. Similar angling of Hull plates as the Zumwalt class. It is smaller and probably stealthier than the Americans ship. Contrast it with the 20 plus year old vessels behind it. 
 
https://strategypage.com/military_photos/military_photos_20181026122859.aspx
 
 

Some more inspiration...

Thanks. But I may want to introduce players to fourth edition. It appears I have to learn 6th edition, though so as to get the book out. I did like the short PDF on how to play Fantasy Hero that was cooked up last summer. That was a good primer on Hero combat.

Some more inspiration...

The Iron Giant, actually. Optimus Prime was voiced by Peter Cullen. 

I dislike having to do this, as I think short, punchy quotes work better, but forgive me for having to provide a bit of set-up.
 
A few weeks ago, my youth group players had gone through a scenario where they were ambushed by a food truck in a drive-by orchestrated by someone they are getting too close to.  As machine gun fire erupts from the truck, Magnificent put himself between the service window and any civilians.  Attempting to Presence Attack, he heaved the truck over his head, all the while bragging to the men inside.  He's not as bulletproof as his player thinks, and another volley of gunfire pretty much to the face laid him low, knocking him out and dropping the truck on top of him (flipped over onto its side, conveniently, as I had hoped for smarter action on the part of the player that would have resulted in the overturning of the truck anyway).
As the other characters see about securing civilians and routing those few villains who attempted to flee through the back doors, I made certain one of the bystanders announced "Oh, thank God he flipped the truck over so they can't shoot at us!"  (Remember, they are young and inexperienced.  This "attack" was intended as a chance to roll dice in an action sequence and provide a small hint as to tactics).
 
 
Tonight, later in the investigation, the heroes are at the local prison, interviewing a captured double for the man they _thought_ they had captured.  A prison transport bus arrives at the prison to take the prisoner.  Knowing the Warden had arranged for postponement until this could be sorted out, the heroes leap into action.  Essentially, the Taco Truck Incident had been planned as training for this particular scene: an armored bus with a dozen heavily armed bad guys are going to either pull of the transfer deception, or attempt to take hostages of the guards at the gate and demand the prisoner.  If all fails, they intend to shoot their way out and escape.  During the fracas, three prison guards are mortally wounded (Don't worry!  Kinetica is an actual MD, and used her skills to miraculously stabilize all the guards (seriously: I saw more natural 3s during this session than any other in my life.  And thanks to Killer Shrike, she has enough Epiphany Points to buy herself up from 13- to 15-, all in this session.  I was actually very proud of how the player got into her role: she actually cried a little bit when it was looking like she might not save the last guard).
 
I had already arranged a "visiting HERO" who was here for unrelated reasons, just in case the players needed help or advice.  Clearly, Magnificent's player had forgotten the "they can't aim through the floors" schtick of the taco truck, and visiting HERO is still too far away to .. well, to detract from the player's fun, but close enough to yell "They can't aim through the floor of the bus, Sweetie!"  (Visiting HERO is Rook: a sixty-eight year old woman with a 90 STR.  And _looks_ like she has a 90 STR!  )  The light's go on in Magnificent's player's eyes.  "All right," he says, flatly, "but if a taco window opens up on this thing I am NOT putting my face in it!"
 

Oh, then well, on with the show.

a few more.
 

Since people liked the last one. I will share some more:
 

What's Eating Gilbert Grape Ape

a few more.
 

this was the Humans are Great! post on Tumblr and Imgur.

Still is fun!

Still is fun!

Some of the landscapes I have collected over the years as background references.

Lately I've been on a low fantasy/SF kick. The campaigns I've created in recent years have been populated solely with humans. I know I'm in the minority here, but that's how my tastes run.

Some of the landscapes I have collected over the years as background references.