Pathfinder vs Rock & Stone
Compare Pathfinder and Rock & Stone side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Pathfinder | Rock & Stone | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Tags | Tactical, Crunchy, Character Building, High-Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl, Lore-Heavy | Classic Fantasy, Comedy, Dungeon Crawl, Fast-Paced, Heroic, High-Power, Random Tables, Rules-Light, Strong GM Support, Theater of the Mind |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d20 + modifier against a DC. Four degrees of success: critical success (beat DC by 10+), success, failure, and critical failure (miss by 10+). Each turn grants three actions to spend freely on strikes, movement, spellcasting, or other activities. Multi-attack penalty (-5/-10) discourages repeated strikes and encourages tactical variety. | For a test, roll a d20 and add the relevant skill; a total above the GM-set difficulty succeeds, while an exact match succeeds with a complication. Natural 20s and 1s produce especially heroic successes and fatal failures. |
| Dice | d20 | d20 |
| Complexity | High | Low |
| Accessibility | Very High | Very High |
| Runnability | Very High | Low |
| License | ORC | AELF Open License Version 1.0a |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Open and compatibility licenses | Commercial publishing allowed — AELF Open License Version 1.0a |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | Free | Free |
| Publisher | Paizo | Sebastian Hahn |
| Year | 2023 | 2025 |
| Best For | Groups who want deep character customization, tactical grid combat with meaningful turn-by-turn decisions, and a richly detailed fantasy setting with free rules. | Groups who want a fast, rules-light dungeon crawl about unusually capable dwarven mercenaries, with a compact setting and a ready-to-run starting adventure. |
| Highlights | The three-action economy gives every turn the same three actions to spend on strikes, movement, or spells, so each turn is a fresh tactical decision. Characters customize through ancestry, class, skill, and general feats gained at nearly every level, letting builds diverge sharply within a single class. Four degrees of success, set by beating or missing the DC by 10, turn each roll into a range of outcomes rather than a binary result. | Gold committed to the dwarven hoard pays for levels, tying treasure recovery directly to advancement. Archetypes grant selectable active and passive abilities, giving each dwarf a distinct role within the shared skill system. Carousing turns a between-adventure roll into complications and opportunities that can seed later expeditions. |
| Considerations | New players must learn the trait system, conditions, and four degrees of success before combat runs smoothly. Multi-attack penalty and numerous combat actions can slow turns for indecisive players. Character creation draws feats from ancestry, class, skill, and general pools at every level, making each build a slow step. | Characters are built around the last-dwarves premise, although the rules permit other heroes. Advancement grants its largest skill and ability gains through level four, after which levels add only hit points and one skill point. Spells are fixed archetype abilities with limited daily uses, so groups seeking open-ended magic will not find it here. |