Hello! I have been running table top rpgs for over a decade, starting with Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition when it first came out. I always saw my dads old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books growing up, and even though I had no idea (and still don’t know) what a THACO was, I was enthralled by the art and the descriptions of the monsters and even though I didn’t know how to play, I knew I wanted to. In high school I managed to gather up a group of friends who, begrudgingly gave it a shot, and before we knew it’s all we wanted to do, all we talked about was when was the next game night.

Over time my tastes started to shift. I got interested in more in depth rpgs and squad tactics video games (X-Com 2 is my most played steam game by several hundred hours.) I loved the feeling of a plan coming together, understanding each characters moves, figuring out my enemies weaknesses, and watching my success or my failures play out as a consequence of tactical decisions and a bit of luck. D&D wasn’t giving me that anymore, but, Pathfinder 2nd Edition was just around the corner.

When I got my hands on those books it was like it all finally clicked. A system that was well balanced, with a multitude of player choice for creating your character and combat actions, and the monsters, oh those stat blocks are a thing of pure beauty. Every creature had more abilities than 2 types of “Hit the thing” and “Hit it twice.” Diving into P2e was an amazing experience, but the stat blocks could be unwieldy and hard to navigate at times, and that variety of actions became daunting as I tried to run a fun game and keep it narratively interesting while using those stat blocks to their fullest.

It was shortly after this time that I was introduced to the blog “The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.” That blog is aimed directly at 5e, but reading some of the posts and picking up the authors book, I saw the value in what he was doing. Analyzing a monsters nature and motivations to make them act in a way that was real to the narrative the monster presented and keeping them a real threat, after all, if they’re picking a fight, they should know how to fight. I was inspired to bring a similar idea to the Pathfinder community, breaking down the dense stat blocks of monsters and presenting them in a way that’s much easier to understand the best tactics available to a given creature.

I hope that this site can become a resource for anyone out there looking to run a Pathfinder game who is just daunted by the prospect of the combat system, hoping that together, we can put those 3 actions to use!