pathfinder-1e
According to many answers in the related question, D&D 3.5e FAQ has many content problems. Even though it is possible to make a mistake and think of it as an official ruling, it isn't one, so 3.5e FAQ is not a big problem.
However, Pathfinder FAQ is RAW. Does it have the same problems as 3.5e FAQ — e.g. contradicting existing rules, giving untested solutions, etc.? Or is it actually a good and reliable thing to use?
But let's talk about these individually.
Also known as MAD, this has plagued the poor Monk for ages. Monks need Strength for accuracy and damage, Dexterity and Wisdom for their armor class and two saving throws, Constitution for hit points (to be fair, all characters want this) and their last saving throw, Intelligence for skill points and Charisma to make use of their short list of social skills. This is not a good thing, because there's only so many high or even mid ability score numbers to go around. Pathfinder seemed like it was going to help this when it improved the skill system, consolidating many skills and relieving the reliance on Intelligence, but then it turned right back around and made boosting your ability scores with items more expensive, actually worsening this particular issue.
This just straight-up didn't change. Many of the Monk's class features are mutually exclusive with other features, with the use of feats, with the use of skills, or some delightfully awful combination of all three. Additionally, Monk still has problems making use of combat maneuvers (due both to low numbers and the increasing Size rating of stock enemies) and the feats relating to those maneuvers got weaker, cutting off a theoretical avenue of contribution.
Traditional problems with "mundane" or "melee" classes like Monk, but also like Fighter or Barbarian, were not solved by Pathfinder. They still have problems with enemies of all kinds that fly, burrow, teleport, cast spells, use "lockdown" effects like paralysis or poison, and utilize battlefield control (spiderwebs, choking fogs, etc) among other things. Like all melee classes, the Monk is forced to funnel enormous amounts of cash into meeting the increasing demand for complexity as levels and challenge ratings climb ever-higher. Unlike other melee classes, Monks cannot shore up their "primary" role, because...
And, unlike Rogues or Bards, Monks cannot be made into competent generalists because of the aforementioned anti-synergy and low numbers, forcing them to pour resource after resource into badly mimicking another class's role.
Pathfinder did introduce the Archetype system, a refinement on the idea of Alternate Class Features from 3.5e. Some Monk archetypes, such as Zen Archer and Hungry Ghost, work to alleviate some of these issues. Combinations of archetypes, done intelligently, may make for a playable character whose class still reads 'Monk'. Whether or not such a thing is worth the effort is not easily decided, but the options are available.
With that in mind, a word to the wise - Pathfinder gets errata often, and Monk has been the subject of many heated debates and quick rules changes, such as the brief-lived errata to Flurry of Blows. This does not have to affect your table, but if you're participating in a sanctioned table (like in Pathfinder Society) or if your group cares about such things your Monk may find the rules shifting out rapidly from underneath him. Caveat emptor.
Yes, the Pathfinder FAQ is RAW - inasmuch as RAW is definable.
The Pathfinder FAQ is attached to the relevant product pages, it is written by the game designers, and considered authoritative by the community.
Technically the item-pricing formula in the Core Rulebook allows for items like that, but officially the game should only have even-numbered enhancement bonuses to ability scores.
and
Meanwhile, as a house rule (not an official update to the rules), it's fair to allow someone to use the Widen Spell feat on a line spell and actually double its range. You are, after all, increasing the level by +3, and if you're casting lightning bolt as a 6th-level spell, you ought to at least be able to get a 240-foot bolt out of it.
The FAQ system was built to allow players and GMs to draw attention to unclear, confusing, or incorrect parts of the game rules and get official answers from the designers. It is not intended to create official rulings for every possible corner case or combination of the rules. Paizo firmly believes it is the privilege and responsibility of the GM to make rulings for unusual circumstances or unusual characters.
The Pathfinder community considers the FAQ to be official - it is official in Pathfinder Society and other Pathfinder community sources distinguish between the "official FAQ" and other sources. And that's really the most important point - in general real Pathfinder gamers consider it official and therefore people use it for their games. Considering it "not RAW" based on some legalistic argument is your right, but it will go against the expectations of the vast majority of Pathfinder play groups.
Furthermore - it's helpful and well reasoned, and is the only channel for any clarifications short of errata worked into the books themselves. Because of page numbering, the amount of change/clarification that can go into a printed book is practically minimal, meaning that this is the most reasonable path for all publishers to use to clarify their rules short of an entirely new edition.
Therefore using the FAQ is a perfectly acceptable way to answer a RAW question. If the asker, or any other voters, don't like a specific FAQ ruling or consider it binding, they may vote their conscience of course. As stated in The Rules FAQ And How To Use It,
I don't like the answer in the FAQ. What can I do?
If you have found rules that appear to override a FAQ, post about it as a reply to the thread and open up the idea for more discussion. What you found might be an exception to the rule, or it might be the evidence to overturn the ruling. If you disagree with a ruling but don’t have any additional evidence to show that the ruling is incorrect, accept the ruling and move on (restating your points from earlier in the discussion is not “additional evidence”). Remember that you can house rule it for your home campaign.
But it's a fuzzy distinction.
What is "official" or "RAW" really? As a given gaming group, you can allow some but not all books. You can not allow parts of books. You can not allow the FAQ, you can disagree with specific rulings from the FAQ, you can not allow whatever you want. You can say "if it's not printed on paper it doesn't count, I don't care what every single person working at Paizo says or what any other player or GM says." The Paizo staff are very up front about saying it's "your game, your rules" and their interest in having a One True Way From Which You May Not Deviate is minimal.
Trying to adhere to "a RAW interpretation" as if there is a single strict such thing is as logically erroneous as claiming there's "one" fundamentalist literal interpretation of the Bible - that's not how human writing and cognition works. The very question that spawned this was over a rule that pretty much everyone finds to be clear and unambiguous, but there's always one or two people who find the wording to not quite gel with them.
It's the same with the claim that the 3.5e FAQ isn't official. It is useful but imperfect, but some people "don't like it" and therefore exclude it even when it doesn't conflict with the rules. And that's fine.
You can try to make a "RAW but not official" distinction - but why? So you can build CharOpped characters on a board that exploit loopholes in the printed text that have already been clarified in intent by the designers? So that you can "put one over" on someone who hasn't read the FAQ? What exactly is the value of trying to artificially distinguish between "rules the designers wrote here" versus "rules the designers wrote there," except if you don't believe you have discretion over the rules in the first place - which Paizo tells you that you do (see the quote above)? In the end, insistence on some legal-type reading of RAW is not appropriate for Pathfinder by explicit declaration of the Pathfinder role-playing game and its designers.
Best Answer
It has some of the same problems, avoids other problems, and introduces some new problems. In short, because Paizo treats it as official, it takes more care with answers and so answers are less often problematic—but because they are official, the problematic answers that do happen can cause a lot of confusion and headaches that the 3.5 FAQ avoided.
What problems are the same
Answers are sometimes made off-the-cuff and without all the editorial oversight that one would hope for. FAQs have needed to be updated, sometimes repeatedly, themselves, and others should be but never have been. Serious problems with how flurry of blows work, with mounted charges, and with stealth all come to mind as places where FAQs attempting to clarify have only made matters worse.
What problems it avoids
Paizo gives its FAQ official rules status and authority, avoiding the “problem” in 3.5 where the FAQ was basically meaningless and worthless since any contradiction with the established rules should (under the rules) be ignored.
This also means that Pathfinder FAQ answers are often given more attention and thought than 3.5 FAQ answers were. While the Pathfinder FAQ doesn’t entirely avoid such problems (as above), the frequency of such problems is somewhat reduced.
What problems it creates
The problems with an FAQ-as-errata are many:
It is frequently written in the form of an answer to a question, that is, it makes claims about what the rules are. But it sometimes contradicts those rules, which it (per the “official” status) has authority from Paizo to do. The problem with this is that it makes the rules very unclear: should rules similar to the rule addressed also be changed? Or was the ruling specific to that thing?
It causes problems with awareness. The FAQs are very difficult to keep on top of; they are updated frequently and it is not always clear what has changed. That makes it very difficult to keep on top of the “official” rules, which makes it very hard to join a new Pathfinder group—you can’t be too sure that you know the rules, and even if you do, whether they know the rules. This is kind of always true for any RPG, but the confusion about what the base rules are makes it a lot harder to communicate about how a given group runs the game.
Answers have sometimes caused serious “collateral damage.” One FAQ made mounted charges impossible for anyone who isn’t a druid, paladin, or ranger. In 3.5, this kind of damage would be flatly ignored, but anyone attempting to run Pathfinder “by the book” (say, in the Pathfinder Society) has serious problems with that kind of thing.
The FAQ reduces the pressure to produce real errata, which are better suited for the purpose of fixing the rules. Because Paizo stands behind the FAQ as a way of introducing changes to the rules, there is less “need” for errata. But errata are more specific, more clear, and actually change the wording rather than applying an “explanation” of the wording that contradicts what the text actually says, as some FAQ answers do. Having the FAQ means Pathfinder gets less errata, and that is bad.
In general, we have to take the Pathfinder FAQ more seriously than the 3.5 FAQ: it is official, and cannot simply be ignored the way the 3.5 FAQ could (and should). That doesn’t automatically mean it is good, however, or that this avoids the problems. It actually makes some problems worse. But for better or worse, it is official and must be considered, e.g. in answers here. And Paizo treating it as official does mean that problems are less frequent, even if they’re more serious when they happen.
Examples
The following are some examples of problematic FAQ entries, for the sake of example. This list should not be considered exhaustive. Note also that it is not as though every ruling here is an especially bad idea for the game; the problem may be more to do with how that ruling came about and was promulgated than with the ruling itself.
Monk flurry of blows—An FAQ ruling being necessary to correct for prior rulings, after the whole “flurry is two-weapon fighting” fiasco.
Stacking ability modifiers—Nowhere in the rules is there even the slightest indication that these bonuses didn’t stack prior to this FAQ. Worse, the explanation for why things are this way is basically nonsense, and attempting to apply similar logic elsewhere is quite problematic. This change also significantly changed the relative value of various different options in ways that were very unlikely to have been evaluated by those making the ruling.
Mounted charges and action usage—Another outright rules change, this one completely breaks mounted combat. It says that the rider needs to use the charge action him-or-herself in order to charge while mounted—but that is a full-round action, and ordering a mount to do anything requires a move action. Very few characters can spend a move action and then still have a full-round action available. Realistically, the only way to charge here is to have a special bond to your mount (e.g. as with druids, paladins, and rangers), so that you don’t need to spend the move action to order the mount.
Note also that this FAQ entry promises that future printings of the CRB will be updated to reflect it. That was four years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet. That means for four years the last word on the subject has broken the functionality completely for most characters, and there has been no update, reprinting, or errata to address it. A great example of how having an FAQ reduces errata and how that can be very bad.
Finally, this chat room was created to discuss this issue, if you want more detail.
Tripping and trip weapons—Another example of the FAQ having to correct itself.
Armor spikes and offhand attacks—The explanation is complete and utter nonsense, and contradicts numerous prior FAQs. We even have a lengthy answer that addresses this confusion, and on top of that there was an even-lengthier chat about it.
(many thanks to @Forrestfire for helping me track down each of these.)