(27/41: 2009) JASON BULMAHN
The Man Who Forked D&D
In 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and declined to renew Paizo’s license to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The most popular RPG in history was about to change direction. An entire community of players who loved the 3.5 ruleset was about to be told to move on.
Jason Bulmahn said no.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. He’d been working quietly at Paizo — first as associate editor of Dragon, then as managing editor — and had been tinkering with a revised version of the d20 3.5 rules as a personal side project. When Paizo’s leadership decided they needed their own core rulebook to survive, Bulmahn’s side project became the company’s future.
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game launched in August 2009. It did not invent a new system. It refined an existing one — sharpening classes, rebalancing combat, closing exploits, standardizing language — and then invited the entire community to help. The open playtest that produced Pathfinder’s final rules was the largest in tabletop RPG history to that point: 45,000 downloads, 100,000 forum posts, structured feedback blocks running from March 2008 through February 2009.
Within two years, Pathfinder was the number one RPG in hobby channel sales. It held that position for approximately thirteen consecutive quarters.
A modified fork of D&D 3.5, designed by a former magazine editor, had beaten the original game at retail. It was the most significant market disruption in RPG history since D&D itself.
The Architect from Milwaukee
Jason Bulmahn was born on June 25, 1976, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 1985 in a friend’s basement — the Frank Mentzer Red Box edition — and the game never let go. He attended the Milwaukee High School of the Arts from 1990 to 1994, studying drawing and sculpture, and went to his first Gen Con while still in high school. Milwaukee hosted the convention in those years, and the proximity was destiny.
At the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Bulmahn became a competitive Magic: The Gathering player at the highest level — competing in the 1995 World Championship in Seattle and Pro Tour New York in February 1996, the very first Pro Tour event in Magic history. He graduated in December 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Architecture.
The parallel writes itself: an architect by training who would become an architect of game systems. But the path wasn’t straight.
After graduation, Bulmahn took a position as Associate Designer at American Design Incorporated, an architecture firm in Milwaukee. He held the job for five or six years, but gaming consumed more and more of his time. As he later told Kobold Press: “While it was a good job, I found myself devoting more and more time to gaming.”
The bridge was Living Greyhawk — the RPGA’s massive organized play campaign that mapped real-world regions to locations in the World of Greyhawk. Wisconsin corresponded to the region of Highfolk, and Bulmahn served as a Highfolk Triad Member from July 1999 to February 2002, coordinating all organized play across the state. In 2002, he was promoted to the Circle, the central advisory group overseeing the entire global campaign structure. He held this senior administrative role until October 2004.
The campaign was, by his own description, “a vast organization with dozens of administrators and hundreds of events per year.” He later credited the experience with teaching him “more about pacing, stakes, and improvisation than any book ever could.” Crucially, Living Greyhawk connected him with Erik Mona, who had run the campaign and would later become a key Paizo executive.
In 2004, Bulmahn flew to Seattle to interview for a design position at Wizards of the Coast. He came in second. During that same trip, his Living Greyhawk connection with Mona led him to visit the Paizo offices. When the WotC job fell through, Mona called with an offer. Bulmahn started at Paizo in October 2004 as Associate Editor of Dragon Magazine.
Wizards of the Coast rejected the man who would build their most dangerous competitor. The hobby runs on ironies like that.
The Dragon Years
Bulmahn worked on Dragon issues #327 through #340 as associate editor, then was promoted to Managing Editor in November 2005. He oversaw the magazine through its final print edition — issue #359, cover-dated September 2007. During this period, he simultaneously freelanced on several Wizards of the Coast products: Secrets of Xen’drik (2006, co-authored with Keith Baker), Dungeonscape (2007, co-authored with Rich Burlew, which introduced the Factotum class), Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk (2007, co-authored with James Jacobs and Erik Mona), Elder Evils (2007), and Monster Manual V (2007).
These were competent professional credits within the 3.5 ecosystem. Nothing about them suggested the man writing them was about to build a rival system from the ground up.
Then, on April 18, 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced it would not renew Paizo’s license for Dragon and Dungeon. The final issues shipped in mid-August. That same month, WotC announced D&D Fourth Edition.
Paizo had not been provided advance copies of the 4e rules.
How Pathfinder Was Born
Behind the scenes, Bulmahn had been working on something no one at Paizo had asked for — a personal revision of the 3.5 rules. As he later wrote: “In late 2007, it became clear to us at Paizo that the future of the OGL movement was uncertain. At the same time I had been working in secret on a revision to the 3.5 ruleset, hoping to publish it as a side project.”
When Paizo decided to commit to ongoing 3.5 support rather than follow Wizards into Fourth Edition, Bulmahn brought his rules into the office. Monte Cook was brought on as a design consultant. “Paizo took a gamble on my game,” Bulmahn wrote, “and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was born.”
The open playtest launched on March 18, 2008. The Alpha Release included revised rules for four core classes, a new combat maneuver system, and consolidated skills. Two more Alpha releases followed in April and May. The Beta playtest book — a complete 406-page standalone game — debuted at Gen Con in August 2008 and sold out at the convention. The Alpha won the 2008 Gold ENnie Award for Best Free Product, before the final game even existed.
The playtest ran in structured two-week feedback blocks through its official close on February 23, 2009. Bulmahn and his team processed the community’s input and incorporated it into the final design. The result was a game that felt like it had been playtested by an army — because it had.
This wasn’t just good process. It was a design philosophy. Bulmahn understood that the 3.5 community’s loyalty was Paizo’s greatest asset, and that honoring their investment in the system was more important than dramatic reinvention. Pathfinder succeeded because it made the players feel like co-designers. They were.
The Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook — 576 pages, priced at $49.99 — released on August 13, 2009, at Gen Con Indy. Preorders for the first printing sold out before Paizo received their books, five times greater than any previous Paizo product.
Mechanical Innovations: What Bulmahn Actually Fixed
Pathfinder First Edition was not a cosmetic patch. Bulmahn identified specific structural weaknesses in D&D 3.5 and engineered targeted solutions.
The Combat Maneuver Bonus/Combat Maneuver Defense system unified all combat maneuvers — bull rush, disarm, grapple, overrun, sunder, trip — into a single elegant framework. Anyone who ever tried to run 3.5’s grapple rules at the table understands why this mattered. One roll against one number. Done.
The consolidated skill system merged redundant skills — Hide and Move Silently became Stealth, Listen and Spot became Perception — and replaced the confusing double-cost cross-class system with a simple +3 competence bonus for trained class skills. The 4x skill points at first level, a notorious trap for new players, was eliminated.
The elimination of “dead levels” was perhaps the most impactful change. In D&D 3.5, many character levels granted no new class abilities, which incentivized multiclassing and left single-class characters feeling punished. Pathfinder ensured every core class received a new ability or improvement at every single level through all twenty levels, making single-class builds consistently rewarding.
Hit dice were increased for less combat-oriented classes — wizards moved from d4 to d6. Zero-level spells became unlimited use, ensuring casters always had something to contribute. Channel Energy replaced the rigid Turn Undead system. “Save or die” spells were significantly reduced. The problematic Polymorph spell was split into multiple specific spells. A new character traits system added background-driven customization. Feat progression accelerated to every odd level instead of every third.
None of these were individually revolutionary. Collectively, they amounted to a comprehensive engineering revision — the kind of work that requires deep structural understanding of a system’s failure points. Bulmahn didn’t reinvent d20. He debugged it.
Thirteen Quarters at Number One
Pathfinder’s market impact was seismic. According to ICv2’s quarterly hobby channel rankings — based on surveys of brick-and-mortar game stores, distributors, and manufacturers — Pathfinder tied with D&D 4E in Q3 2010, then claimed the number one position in Q2 2011. It held that spot for approximately thirteen consecutive quarters through Summer 2014.
No RPG had displaced D&D from the top of hobby channel sales in the modern era. Pathfinder did it for three years.
A critical caveat: in 2021, former employees of both WotC and Paizo — including Chris Sims, Owen K.C. Stephens, Greg Bilsland, and Trevor Kidd — publicly stated that D&D 4E always outsold Pathfinder in total sales across all channels. ICv2 measured only the hobby store channel, missing mass market retail, Amazon, and D&D Insider digital subscriptions, which peaked at over 65,000 subscribers. The “Pathfinder outselling D&D” narrative was accurate for hobby stores but not for total market sales.
This matters for historical precision. It doesn’t diminish the achievement. No other RPG has led hobby channel sales against D&D for even a single quarter, let alone thirteen. Pathfinder proved that a d20 fork could sustain a company, a community, and an entire third-party publishing ecosystem.
D&D 5th Edition’s launch in Fall 2014 reclaimed the number one position. Pathfinder settled into a consistent number two — the only RPG that has maintained that position for a decade.
The Three-Action Economy
If Pathfinder First Edition was Bulmahn’s proof of concept — showing that d20 3.5 could be refined into a market leader — then Pathfinder Second Edition was his actual design statement.
The signature innovation first appeared as the “Revised Action Economy” in Pathfinder Unchained (April 29, 2015), where Bulmahn served as lead designer. The system replaced D&D’s complex standard/move/swift/full-round/free action structure with an elegant framework: each character gets three actions and one reaction per turn.
Three actions. Spend them how you want.
Moving costs one action. Attacking costs one action. Casting a spell might cost two. Want to move three times? Done. Attack three times? Possible, but with escalating penalties. The decision space is wider precisely because the framework is simpler — every turn presents genuine trade-offs between positioning, offense, and defense.
Attribution for this innovation is collaborative. The core PF2e design team comprised four designers — Jason Bulmahn (Lead Designer), Stephen Radney-MacFarland (Senior Designer), Logan Bonner, and Mark Seifter — and no single person has publicly claimed sole credit. The concept emerged under Bulmahn’s leadership and was prototyped in Unchained, then refined over several years. Bulmahn authored the March 2018 blog post “All About Actions” that first publicly revealed the system for PF2e, and he consistently uses “we” language when discussing its creation. Seifter has described himself as “one of the four creators of Pathfinder Second Edition.”
The PF2e playtest launched on August 2, 2018, with free PDF downloads, limited print editions, and the multi-part adventure Doomsday Dawn. Feedback was accepted through January 1, 2019. The PF2e Core Rulebook — 640 pages, credited to all four designers with Bulmahn as lead — released on August 1, 2019, at Gen Con.
It won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game.
PF2e also introduced a unified proficiency system replacing the +1/+1/+1 Base Attack Bonus progression, a four-tier success framework (critical success, success, failure, critical failure on every check), and a tag-based system for spells and abilities that improved rules clarity. These weren’t individual innovations in isolation. They were an integrated architecture — each piece reinforcing the others.
Bulmahn framed the broader design vision in a 2023 Q&A: “About 6 years ago, we quietly started working on a new version of Pathfinder, stepping away from the 3.5 rules set to create our own, unique game engine, based on a 3 Action economy, scaling proficiency system, and an action resolution system that created 4 degrees of success.”
Second Edition did not replicate First Edition’s market dominance — D&D 5th Edition had captured the mainstream audience. But it established Pathfinder as the hobby’s primary alternative to D&D, a position it has held through the OGL crisis and beyond.
The OGL Crisis and the Remaster
In January 2023, a draft of Wizards of the Coast’s proposed OGL 1.1 leaked, revealing plans to deauthorize the original Open Game License that had underpinned third-party publishing for over two decades. On January 12, 2023, Paizo announced the Open RPG Creative License — funded by Paizo, designed by Azora Law, and owned by no single publisher. Over 1,500 TTRPG publishers backed the ORC, including Chaosium, Kobold Press, Green Ronin, and Roll20.
As Director of Game Design, Bulmahn was a senior leader during the crisis, though the public-facing response was led by Paizo owner Lisa Stevens and president Jim Butler. His primary contribution was on the design side — participating in the April 2023 livestream announcing the Pathfinder Remaster Project alongside Logan Bonner.
The Remaster was driven by the crisis but extended beyond it. Four new books replaced the original core line under the ORC license: Player Core and GM Core (November 2023), Monster Core (March 2024), and Player Core 2 (August 2024). The Remaster removed all OGL-dependent content — the alignment system was replaced with edicts and anathema, D&D-originated creatures and spell names were changed, and tieflings and aasimar became nephilim.
By this era, Bulmahn’s role had evolved. He remained Director of Game Design with company-wide oversight, but Logan Bonner had effectively become Pathfinder’s day-to-day Lead Designer. Bulmahn is co-author on Player Core and Monster Core but credited only as additional writer on GM Core. In July 2024, he was promoted to Director of Games — a role explicitly designed to free him from day-to-day Pathfinder management to focus on new games, including the cooperative dungeon-crawler board game Pathfinder Quest.
The crisis also proved Pathfinder’s cultural resilience. Paizo sold eight months’ worth of PF2e Core Rulebooks in two weeks, exhausting warehouse stock and requiring an emergency print run.
Minotaur Games and the Engine Experiments
In 2013, Bulmahn founded Minotaur Games — the name a playful nod to the phonetic pronunciation of his surname. The imprint serves as what he calls “my playground, where I can turn an idea into a game in a very short period of time and with the freedom to make sure it comes out the way that I want it to.”
Products include several Pathfinder-compatible PDF lines — the Monster Focus series, the Iconic Locations series, and the Rule Zero series — plus the Pirate Loot card game, Kickstarted in September 2014 with art by Eisner/Harvey-winning cartoonist Scott Kurtz.
More significantly, Minotaur has become the vehicle for Bulmahn’s experiments with the PF2e engine. Hopefinder (October 2022) is a modern zombie apocalypse hack of PF2e set in a near-future Seattle. The Kickstarter print edition ran February–March 2023, raising $24,355 from 694 backers against a $4,000 goal, funding in 43 minutes.
Hellfinder (2025, BackerKit) pushes further — a modern horror hack of PF2e featuring sealed-packet/legacy-style campaign design, stress and trauma systems, and inspirations drawn from The X-Files, Hellraiser, and Alien. As Bulmahn explained in a 2025 interview: “Beneath the high fantasy elements is a very tidy game engine with a simple proficiency system, an elegant combat engine, and a robust action resolution mechanic that has degrees of success built into the core of the game. So if you change the character advancement system and present entirely new monsters based on that system, you can fundamentally alter the pace and feel of the game.”
This is the test of PF2e’s architecture: can the engine Bulmahn helped build support genres its original designers never intended? Hopefinder and Hellfinder are early data points, and they suggest the answer is yes.
The Honest Limitation
Jason Bulmahn did not invent the d20 system. He did not invent the class-and-level structure, the d20 resolution mechanic, or the fundamental grammar of how modern fantasy RPGs work. Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams created the d20 System in 2000. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created the class-and-level framework in 1974. Pathfinder First Edition was explicitly a modification of D&D 3.5 — brilliant refinement, not creation.
The three-action economy is a genuine mechanical innovation, but it operates within the d20 tradition rather than breaking from it. It’s the most elegant action-economy solution in modern d20 design — but it’s an innovation within a framework, not the creation of a new one. And its attribution is collaborative: four designers, not one.
Bulmahn’s genius is architectural, not inventive. He takes existing structures, identifies their failure points, and rebuilds them so they work better. The community co-design methodology he pioneered — open playtests at scale, deep engagement with player feedback, iterative refinement based on actual play data — was genuinely new to RPG development at the scale Pathfinder achieved. But it’s a process innovation, not a mechanism invention. Under this methodology, process innovation is harder to score. It matters — it changed how RPGs are developed — but the rubric measures what was designed, not how.
Starfinder also requires accurate attribution. Bulmahn was a design team member on Starfinder First Edition (2017), not a lead — that role belonged to James L. Sutter (Creative Director) and Robert G. McCreary and Owen K.C. Stephens (Design Leads). He is not credited as an author on Starfinder Second Edition (2025). His involvement was executive oversight, not hands-on design.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6):
The three-action economy in PF2e is a significant innovation that opened new design space within the d20 tradition — a meaningful simplification that increased tactical depth and solved the action-type bloat that plagued d20 since 2000. It is being adopted by other systems. The four-tier success framework was a meaningful variation on binary pass/fail resolution. The open-playtest-at-scale methodology was a process innovation that influenced how RPGs are developed. PF1e was excellent refinement — the CMB/CMD system, skill consolidation, dead level elimination — but refinement of existing forms, not invention. Multiple innovations, all within established frameworks. Score: 6.
Architecture (8):
Pathfinder supported a decade of continuous publication — dozens of hardcover sourcebooks, adventure paths, and third-party products — while maintaining internal consistency. The system scaled from first level to twentieth without collapsing. PF2e’s integrated framework (three-action economy, proficiency scaling, four-tier success, tag-based traits) improved rules clarity substantially while maintaining extensibility across genres (demonstrated by Hopefinder, Hellfinder, Starfinder 2e). Over 200 design credits. The architectural achievement is building a d20 ecosystem so robust that it sustained a company and a community through a market-leading run and an industry crisis. Systems are elegant, internally consistent, and extensible at enormous scale.
Mastery (8):
Twenty-year career (2004–present). Lead designer of the only RPG to displace D&D from hobby channel sales in the modern era, holding number one for approximately thirteen quarters. Over 25 ENnie Awards, including Product of the Year four times. One Origins Award. Diana Jones Award finalist (2014). Director of Game Design, then Director of Games at Paizo. Created the open-playtest-at-scale methodology that influenced subsequent RPG development. PF2e’s three-action economy is being adopted by other systems. Pathfinder video game adaptations — Kingmaker (2018) and Wrath of the Righteous (2021) — reached mainstream gaming audiences. The OGL crisis proved Pathfinder’s cultural resilience: eight months of stock sold in two weeks. Bulmahn’s work shaped how an entire generation of players experienced d20 fantasy RPGs.
Adjustments (+5):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: +1 Published designs from 2006 (Secrets of Xen’drik) through 2025 (Hellfinder). Nineteen years of published work. Just short of 20+ threshold.
- ■ Full-time career: +1 Paizo employee since October 2004. Game design, editing, and production has been his primary profession for over twenty years.
- ■ Awards: +1 Over 25 ENnie Awards including Product of the Year four times. Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game (PF2e). Diana Jones Award finalist (2014).
- ■ Branded name: No. “Pathfinder” is well-known among gamers but fails the grandmother test. Non-gamers have not heard of it.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 RPG (Pathfinder), card game (Pirate Loot), board game (Pathfinder Quest). Three distinct game formats.
- ■ Commercial success: +1 Pathfinder line held #1 hobby channel position for thirteen quarters. Core Rulebook at $49.99 plus hundreds of supplements, adventure paths, and accessories over fifteen years. Well exceeds $10M lifetime retail.
- ■ Design propagation: No. The three-action economy is being adopted by other systems, but adoption is still early and the innovation is collaboratively attributed to four designers. Conservative call: not yet documentable at the threshold the methodology requires.
The Fork and What Followed
Jason Bulmahn’s legacy sits at one of the most consequential decision points in RPG history.
In 2007, the d20 community faced a fork: follow Wizards of the Coast into Fourth Edition, or stay on the 3.5 road. Bulmahn built the road. Millions of players took it. For three years, it was the main road.
That’s not invention. It’s architecture. It’s knowing which walls are load-bearing and which ones you can move. It’s understanding that the players aren’t just consumers — they’re co-designers, and the system belongs to them as much as it belongs to you.
The three-action economy proved Bulmahn could do more than refine. He could simplify. He could look at twenty years of accumulated complexity and say: three actions, spend them how you want. That’s the kind of design clarity that only comes from deep structural understanding of how systems actually play at the table.
And now, through Hopefinder and Hellfinder, he’s testing whether the engine he built with three other designers can power games beyond its original genre. The architect is still building.
What Remains
Pathfinder — the fork that led hobby channel sales for three years. The game that proved a d20 alternative could sustain a company, a community, and an entire third-party ecosystem for over fifteen years.
The three-action economy — the most elegant action system in modern d20 design, collaboratively designed, now being adopted by other systems.
The open-playtest methodology — 45,000 testers, 100,000 forum posts, the largest community-driven RPG design process in the hobby’s history, copied by subsequent designers and publishers.
The CMB/CMD system — the fix for grappling that every d20 player wished they’d had in 2000.
Twenty-five ENnie Awards. Product of the Year, four times. An Origins Award.
Director of Games at Paizo. Twenty years of continuous design. From house rules to industry standard.
The man who forked D&D — and proved the fork could carry the weight.
Total: 27 points. Year: 2009.
The man who forked D&D — and proved the fork could carry the weight.