The History of Vilfinder

Like most GMs, I’ve always had a propensity for tinkering with the rules of the game. About two years ago, I started playing a fair bit of Pathfinder. As most people who have played it will tell you, Pathfinder makes huge improvements over the 3.0 and 3.5 rulesets it’s based on. Quite a few of those same people will also note that the Pathfinder rules are significantly harder to learn if you never played 3rd edition D&D. Vilfinder began as an attempt to address this problem. I took a two-pronged approach to the problem; a major part of the project was to simply reword and reorganize the rules to be more easily accessible. The only significant change I planned to make was to rework the combat action system. As a GM, I had noticed that even veteran players often struggled with the many combinations of full-round, standard, move, swift, and free actions. My intention was to basically merge the standard and move actions, giving the player two equivalent actions on their turn. As I soon realized, this change has far-reaching implications, and the project rapidly expanded.

Around the same time, I became increasingly active on the Paizo forums, where I was exposed to many issues with the existing rules as well as many excellent house rules. Most influential at that time was a comprehensive set of house rules known as Kirthfinder, named after one of the creators. The main goal in these rules was to equalize the casting and non-casting classes, and it featured near-complete rewrites of most classes. A key feature of these rewrites was that all classes received a pool of abilities they could choose from much like the Pathfinder rogue, vastly increasing customization potential. In fact, it increased it so much that I began toying with the idea of a classless system, which would be important later.

As I was developing pools of class talents for my Kirthfinder-inspired version, I began to feel that the implementation was not ideal. The distinction between feats and talents was extremely blurry, and forcing a player to pick x feats and y talents seemed unnecessarily restrictive. Multiclassing was (as it always has been) an ugly mess. Additionally, I realized around this point that these had passed beyond the point of just being house rules. These issues, as well as a desire for simpler character design, led to the merging of feats, talents, other class features, and skill ranks into a single system. This is the current implementation, and I will discuss it at more length in a future post.