Pathfinder vs The Wildsea
Compare Pathfinder and The Wildsea side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Pathfinder | The Wildsea | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Play Style | Tactical, Crunchy, Character Building, High-Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl, Lore-Heavy | Exploration, Narrative, Ship-Based, Worldbuilding, Character-Driven, Collaborative, Fiction-First, Tag-Based |
| 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. | Roll a d6 dice pool: 6 is a full success, 4–5 is a partial success, 1–3 is a failure. Doubles of any value trigger a Twist: something unexpected happens. Characters are defined by Aspects (gear, abilities, cultural traits) with associated damage tracks. Progress clocks (tracks) are used universally for combat, crafting, healing, and journeys. Drives give characters personal goals that earn advancement. |
| Dice | d20 | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | High | Low |
| Accessibility | Very High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | ORC | Proprietary |
| Cost | Free (ORC) | $$ |
| Publisher | Paizo | Mythworks (Felix Isaacs) |
| Year | 2023 | 2023 |
| 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 exploration-driven campaigns in a wildly original setting: sailing chainsaw ships across living treetops with a diverse crew of humans, cactus-folk, spider hive-minds, and moth-people. |
| 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. | Seven playable species including cactus-folk, spider hive-minds, and moth-people, track system unifies combat, crafting, healing, and journeys under one mechanic, Silver ENnie winner for Best Writing, character creation uses modular Aspects (gear, abilities, cultural traits) |
| 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. | Track-based resolution uses the same clock mechanic for all conflict types, d6 dice pool with doubles-as-Twist is the only resolution mechanic, equipment and aspect lists lack a comprehensive index, setting-specific: tied to the treetop-ocean world |