IMPORTANT CONTEXT: My first exposure to D&D was with AD&D. 3rd Edition was a great improvement, it provided many player-friendly changes that streamlined the game experience, the books were styled after sick-lookin' tomes, and there was a TON of cool optional supplement material... it was peak D&D from my perspective.

Unfortunately Wizards veered in the direction of turning the whole thing into a sort of miniatures wargame with cards, and the classes started to look kinda samey. Still cool, but not quite the organic experience it once was.

I was super psyched to learn about Pathfinder. They took 3rd Edition, polished it even further, and wrapped it up in a sublime package with Wayne Reynolds artwork front-in-center and all throughout. Distinctive pre-fab characters representing the "Iconic Classes" was such a great move too. That single Core Rulebook could singlehandedly jumpstart a huge campaign in the style of D&D from what was arguably it's best era, and I'm pleased to own the hardcover as well as it's promotional poster which is still on my wall.

Of course, with D&D 5th Edition out, it was a matter of time before Pathfinder tried to grow and further streamline the oldschool RPG in it's own way to maximize fun and minimize tedium, which I think that was a definite necessity. I really looked forward to what I supposed would be a sort of "Pathfinder Lite" some day... but that really didn't come to pass, and instead, 2nd Edition was an enormous book, over 600 pages, and it's really just felt like they tried to fold way too much shit from the Advanced Player's Guide and stuff into the Core Rulebook, like alternate rulesets and extra classes. Goblins being a core race is honestly really cool... but I just didn't fall in love with the book.

Recently, Wizards has been pulling some real scumfuckery and I think Paizo deserves a healthy dose of respect on their name for taking a very public stand against it, actually putting their words into actions, and rereleasing their products under a new much more permissive ORC license. Paizo is a real gigachad for that.

And largely because of that goodwill, as well as the promise to "remaster" 2nd Edition's Core Rulebook to less than even 1st Edition's Core Rulebook size, I bought the Remaster on impulse and have been browsing through it.

MY CRITICISMS: I really don't like the presentation of this book.

It manages to come in under 450 pages, but simultaneously wastes so much fucking space. Both books (2nd Edition Remaster "2E", and 1st Edition "OG") begin their Introduction on Page 4.

OG Pathfinder takes 16 pages to establish the premise of the book, define some basic concepts, explain how to create a character, and even provide a sample roleplay for absolute beginners to tabletop RPGs.

2E Pathfinder takes 37 pages to do the same thing. Right off the bat, does this seem like we're "streamlining" anything? 2E goes more in-depth into play materials, takes roughly 10 pages to agonize over how to create a character, then another 10 pages spouting off about Golarion lore and listing all the deities they made up? Before we've even touched on Clerics?

Both of these books make a point of "THE FIRST RULE" being that "this game is yours", and yet they frontload character creation with all this shit that they made? Just get out of my way and let me create a character!

OG Pathfinder spends 10 pages covering Races.

2E Pathfinder spends 48 pages covering Ancestries. Fucking why? I can certainly appreciate the addition of Ancestral Feats and different "Heritages". Not all Orcs and all that, right? But they legit waste so much space on these pages. The text is much larger and more spread apart and there's so much more artwork now breaking up the information.

OG Pathfinder unveils the Iconic Classes on Page 28 and succinctly presents each with great fullbody artwork by Wayne Reynolds and, quite honestly, a text wall of all of their vanilla Pathfinder stats, feats, abilities, and progression tables up until Page 83.

2E Pathfinder withholds the Iconics from us until Page 91 and then proceeds to burn literally half of the remaining book with as many as 3 half-baked "sample characters" per class (consisting primarily of non-Wayne Reynolds artwork) and a ton of text padding.

I guess if there's anything I would have wanted them to add, it would be a wider variety of optional racial traits, more class progression choices, and maybe a GURPS-style Perks/Quirks system, but isn't this a bit much? How they've economized space in this book just bothers the hell out of me. I invite anyone to go to Page 20 and tell me they couldn't lay out the same information much better and using less space.

Now again, there are some changes I appreciate; I think the simplification of "Actions", removal of Spell components and Alignment, and how the "Modes of Play" stuff is implemented makes a ton of sense and on the whole I think it's a much better game for it, but I'm still bothered to hell by the presentation.

I'm sure everyone familiar with Pathfinder understands that "fanservice-y" feeling you get when you browse through some module or peripheral like the NPC Codex or something and it's all different artist's artwork (and not all of it is amazing), and it just doesn't feel quite a legit as the Core Rulebook which has that very unifying style because most of the major artwork is either Wayne Reynold's or styled after characters he designed?

It takes nearly a 100 pages before we get the Iconic showcase in 2E which is so much more real estate between the cover and, arguably, the most important part of the book than in OG, and there's so much more artwork too by other artists diluting the consistency of the style Paizo established in OG, so the whole product feels more like a splat book than a Core Rulebook.

It's also completely done away with the "old tome" aesthetic which OG Pathfinder retained in some small way by adding a weathered parchment texture to the background of every page. Now it's just solid white with nearly-solid colored banners on the top and edges.

Overall, the whole book rankles my design sensibilities and especially so because they managed to make it smaller than Pathfinder's 1st Edition and yet still used larger fonts, left more empty space, and included even more commissioned artwork.

I would have been much happier with it if they dumped all the Golarion and deity stuff to the back of the book, stopped treating Chapter 1 like Baby's First RPG, trimmed at least a page out of every Ancestry, cut out all the Class "samples", and didn't redefine the same "Key Terms" over and over, and yeah, a good chunk of the artwork in here doesn't need to be in here.

You could make Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster a very lean mean 300-page bible on how to whip up some awesome original characters for a brand new RPG, but I'm just as annoyed and overwhelmed by how frontloaded and needlessly bloated it still feels since the first iteration of 2nd Edition.