System Operational Reference Digest for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game
From the introduction:
Dear Reader,
You don’t need this book! unless... you want to play your Pathfinder Role Playing Game faster - with more complexity than ever before and STILL have fun. If you are a player, you will become reckless using those strange rules like Overrun and Grapple. You will gleefully Demoralize your opponents and deliver the Coup de Grace they so richly deserve. If you are a Game Master, you will casually take each new idea thrrown (sic) your way and run the combat as if you were playing checkers. Nothing will scare you!
This is a dangerous book. It attempts to take the richness and complexity of the Pathfinder Role Playing Game combat and make it easier to run in a session. That is a tall order and every gamer is sure to have unique ideas on how it should be done. SORD’s success in the marketplace is entirely dependent on how well I can communicate a new shorthand to the Game Master and Player. That is what makes this work so dangerous; my reputation is on the line. If I fail to communicate clearly, this project is sunk.
My goal is simple: Speed combat by at least 15 Minutes per encounter.
If you read my earlier versions of this product, you know its history,
so I won’t go into the grapple issues and all that drove the formation of the original work. Anyway, the authors of the Pathfinder Role Playing Game have addressed many of those frustrations in their expansion of the 3.5 SRD. In fact, I personally wondered if SORD was even viable after the release of the rules set, but quickly put my questions to rest after seeing the final product. There still is room for a concise help for both players and game masters.
Now, after a thorough re-tooling for the Pathfinder Role Playing Game, this work represents a compendium of the rules that pulls in all the special exceptions to the core combat rules and points them out as a ‘reminder’ during play. It still resembles the old SORD editions, but I have made every effort to make sure each page reflects the significant changes to the gaming experience from the original 3.5 SRD rules.
It has taken awhile to get to this release, but I hope it is well worth the wait.
