Is Pathfinder the most complicated cRPG...

[William]

in terms of rules, mechanics etc? Thoughts? (cRPG newb here, just curious!)

[Duder]

It's by far the most complex RPG video game I've ever played aside from actual PnP Dnd and such
I like that. Some people find it overwhelming, I can get that.

[asame_akio]

The two Pathfinder CRPGs by Owlcat are based pretty directly on Pathfinder 1e, a pen and paper RPG that’s certainly among the most complex to be released in the 21st century. They can be a lot of a lot for newcomers.

[fourfourtwo79]

If you're familiar with anything D&D, not as much. For a start, the maths behind D&D is elemntary school level. As for combat resolutions for instance you have your defense stats (armor class typically for physical attacks) which eventually need to be matched by a dice roll with a 20 sides dice plus attack modifiers. If that's the case, then it's a hit. We're dealing in simple addition and substraction here in general.

As Pathfinder was derived from D&D, they've added a bunch of stuff on top of that. But the basics are exactly the same. Pathfinder 1E is also derived from D&D3ish, and there's a bit of bloat too.

So you have tons of feats and talents that basically boil down to gaining a +1 on combat resolution rolls (in a D20 system, this equals to a +5% chance on the next hit roll). As defensive stats become increasingly higher, that means there is a ton of such buffs and feats that need to be stacked on top of each other to do anything useful. So there's quite a bit of "bloat" too, as opposed to genuine mechanical complexity. By as early as mid-game, your character sheet will be chock full of talents and feats picked.

The same goes for a few classes. Mind, I like the choice. Thinking about what to pick is part of the fun. But many classes are hybrids of other classes -- and then each of those classes and hybrids has sub classes as well. There's no way you can design this without creating some overlaps, eventually. A lot of the complexity comes with the many spells available, and you're going to need them unless on lower difficulties (though there is redundancy here too, such as a billion healing spells doing sameish things.) Can't blame the game for that, that's just Pathfinder. That said, Wrath Of The Righteous has a lot more class options than Kingmaker (haven't played the Enhanced to check what they've added since).

[MOK]

No, Pathfinder isn't so comparatively complex. It's basically an old edition of D&D. The core ideas are pretty straightforward, although Pathfinder does throw in a lot of exceptions and fringe stuff. The near relatives in cRPGs are about the same in complexity.

There's lots of P&P's that are more complicated. I always found Shadowrun a bit over the top. Exalted was a pretty crunchy one that I had really wished would make it into video games someday.

For a CRPG it's kinda up there, but I feel like much of the crunch could be made more elegant with a couple good tutorial graphics and better tooltips that are consistent. Basically reducing how much you gotta reference the wiki would streamline it for new players quite a lot, and I think that's pretty doable.

[Drake]

Yeah shadowrun is a little crazier on the rules, one that got very obscure is a small pnp game called Chill (it's modern supernatural horror, I played the third edition, took me sereval tries to actually understand how gameplay worked, especially magic). The main issue with pathfinder isn't the maths, it's the quantity. There is so much material, you need hours just to decide what features to pick for your build.
It was a little bit of a relief at first with pathfinder 2e, less material, cleaner class mechanics, but now after a couple of years it starting to be the same all over again, they just won't stop writing...
I'm DM'ing starfinder games and even with a smaller team they manage to release tons of stuff every year (the games you can build with the rules is just stupid, space opera campaigns, gundam mechs, ship racing, space horror, cyberpunk, full sandbox management, world exploration with full environmental hazard rules, they just put every sci-fi stuff they could find in it).

[fourfourtwo79]

I only played Shadowrun on my computer, e.g. the latest video game adapations (Returns, Dragonfall), but I didn't find it that complicated there. The fact that there aren't any classes as such (and thus no class specific stuff) actually contributed to that some. Additionally, on level up, you invested in points on a scale, rather than aquiring named feats and talents that would eventually unlock other feats and/or pile up on top of each other (thus doing the exact same thing -- just less convoluted, like weapon specialiizations in D&D / Pathfinder).

https://guides.gamepressure.com/shadowrunreturns/gfx/word/530216.jpg

Don't know how faithful those were, of course. edit: Just googled, and it seemed a heavy compromise -- which I didn't know (nor cared about when playing).

Pathfinder /D&D3e is actually pretty simple at its core principles. It's just set up to be that way with the many (minimal) bonus and stacks being applied atop each other and proabably a bit more of a hassle to play in tabletop as opposed to a computer... ;) https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Pathfinder-sometimes-derogatorily-referred-to-as-Mathfinder

“Okay, Dan, roll your attack.”

“Hold on, I’m making sure my bonus is right.”

“For the love of… don’t you have that written down?”

“I have my normal bonus written down but right now I’m raging, flanking, and enlarged… those all stack, right?”

“Yes. So that’s +2 for rage, +2 for flanking, and… how much for enlarged? Your version makes you Huge sized, how much Strength does that give you?”

“Plus 6. So that’s another 3 points.”

“No, only 1; you get a -2 penalty from the increase in size.”

“Wait, I have Outflank, don’t I get +4 for flanking?”

“Just +2; the person you are flanking with doesn’t have Outflank.”

“Okay. Oh! I forgot that we leveled up. So that’s another +1 for base attack bonus, plus I raised my Strength so another +1 there.”

“Aren’t you playing a 3/4s BaB class? I don’t think your base attack bonus went up this level. Also, are you still fatigued? That’s a -1.”

“Oh yeah. …Wait so what was my total bonus again?”

[Zzyl_tsw]

(Very nice/funny answer from @fourfourtwo79 )
As many said in previous posts, it depends on what you call "complex".
Most of the rules in PF are not really complex, the "issue" is they are many,
So you need to be aware of them, to remember them all, and to apply/add them (and to know what stacks or not)

Plus it seems there are many books with "additional/enhanced" rules, so having a a synthetic view is not so easy

[Orion Pax]

As someone new to D&D based games, but not strategy or RPG games, I'd say maybe not complex so much as not easily transparent oftentimes, and requiring attention to detail. Perhaps more attention than one might expect when trying to remain immersed in a game. Understanding what means what, where things are (on map or player screen), what leads to what, and just how to read icons and such. Just requires time, and for many of us much checking with folks on forums like this. Fortunately lots of helpful people here in my experience.

[Corridian]

DnD 5e is a very watered down and overly simplified version of DnD. Pathfinder is 3 to 3.5 then beyond. It become complex with all the modifiers and the fact that it is a buff fest to do a fight. So to be fair, yes it is pretty complicated.

fourfourtwo79 did a fairly good job of representing the discussion of a single attack roll in Pathfinder. You have 10x the feats, skills mattered more, multiclass builds were more complicated. All in all, it is much more complex than say BG 3 which is more or less DnD 5.

Shadowrun was not at all complicated on the computer.

[Drake]

To be fair for pathfinder on pnp, usually you don't do that in a fight. What you do after some time and experience is make a buff table with what you know most of the party will use and just read values to speed it up. I even do prerolls for several monster and hazard checks so that I don't have to do rolls while gm'ing, I just read values up in order as effects trigger.
Nowadays you just get computer assistance. I usually just use foundryvtt even on real tabletop to have the calculations done already and just have the players do their rolls.

Shadowrun is on computer is easy, the computer makes all the checks, on pnp you have to do all of the calculations and it can get out of hand pretty quick.