Pathfinder vs The Black Hack
Compare Pathfinder and The Black Hack side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Pathfinder | The Black Hack | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Play Style | Tactical, Crunchy, Character Building, High-Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl, Lore-Heavy | Rules-Light, Dungeon Crawl, Hackable, Beginner-Friendly |
| 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. | Players roll d20 under their attribute scores to succeed at actions. Advantage and Disadvantage (roll 2d20, pick best or worst) modify difficulty. Armour provides a pool of d6 Armour Dice that absorb damage. Consumable resources use a Usage Die chain (d20→d12→d10→d8→d6→d4→gone): roll 1–2 to downgrade. |
| Dice | d20 | d20 + d4–d12 |
| Complexity | High | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Very High | Very High |
| Runnability | Very High | Medium |
| License | ORC | The Black Hack Open Game License |
| Cost | Free (ORC) | $ |
| Publisher | Paizo | Gold Piece Publications |
| Year | 2023 | 2018 |
| 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 wanting a fast, hackable OSR dungeon-crawling game with modern design sensibilities: roll under attributes, abstract distances, and usage dice that track resources without bookkeeping. |
| 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. | Highly hackable: spawned an entire subgenre of 'X Hack' games, core rules fit in about 30 pages, Usage Die tracks resources without inventory math, armour-as-dice-pool adds a tactical layer, conversational writing style makes rules easy to learn |
| 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. | Only 4 classes (Warrior, Thief, Cleric, Wizard) in the core, limited character customization beyond class and background, no setting included, light on GM guidance compared to larger games, may lack depth for long campaigns |