It kind of gets me to thinking I must be broken or flawed for just not getting it.

The ruleset is horrifyingly complex and I don't see a particular reason why this needs to be so.

For what it's worth, I don't find 18xx games, on the whole, to be complex. They're long, there are many levers to pull in regards to timing and turn order, but the rules are, on the whole, simple.

Pathfinder seems to require an absurd amount of arcane knowledge to even get started.

I get that an RPG is not the same thing as most economic games, where there are rigid rules for how things work. I guess that's really what I need in this... rules that are clear and easy to understand.

This might actually go some distance to explaining why Fiasco is quite enjoyable to me, but Pathfinder really isn't.

I think there's also a significant factor in all of this that boils down to "I really just don't care about the lore all that much."

Give me Mark Twain or George Saunders, not Neil Stephenson. My brain just doesn't work on the right level for all the prose.

Anyways, I don't mean to harsh on what anyone else likes. There's plenty of people who like Pathfinder... far more so than people who like 18xx. Likewise, plenty of people are into lore-rich novels in a way I'm not.

I just wish there was a somewhat more utilitarian way to get into storytelling games. Fiasco is good... I hope there are others that are as easy to pick up and run with no pre-game studying.

That's my rambling for the evening... I swear, I'm done now!