Pathfinder Is Still Bad

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 10, 2012 5:15 pm

It's important to note that modern RPGs have gotten way too fucking long. An RPG like D&D, whether it's 3e, 4e, or Pathfailure clocks in at about half a million words. That's not healthy. It's longer than it should be. It's longer than it has any right to be. But most importantly, it takes about fifty weeks worth of primary writing just to make that. And that's before you do editing, playtesting, and cross comparison through the document. You can split that up a bit, but not to more than five people in any real way or you'll get inconsistent authorial voice and shit.

So really, you're looking at a solid year to go from "you have a very clear idea of how you want the game to look, what subsystems it should use, and what it should contain" to "you have a complete document". And let's be honest: neither Jason nor Mike are at the stage of having particularly clear ideas about anything.

-Username17

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Mon Dec 10, 2012 11:46 pm

If that's the case, then wouldn't be better to make a smaller, more streamlined RPG and sell that as your stopgap system? Like Essentials, but not shitty?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 1:59 am

I've posted before on how dnd should be structured, but it really applies to any similar game too:
- new from before: maintain your goddam CM. Seriously. when you publish things twice, they need to be identical.
- WotC-style OGL, with open core crunch, closed fluff, aggressively closed pretty pictures.
- publish three core books. Make them longer than 3.5; it doesn't even matter. PHB has fewer spells, but all the items. DMG gets rules on building stuff (armies, towns, etc.). MM has a couple sample lairs/fortresses/whatnot, the sample NPCs, and a smaller set of monsters (more iconics). Ideally, also include a FantasyCraft-style template system.
- publish a small, cheap book that has basic rules only, significantly reduced race and class options (none of which are vancian casters; think Tome fire Mage at most), a tiny spell list (any referenced plus CLW, pretty much), a tiny item list, and a half dozen monsters. Basically, contains /only/ what you'd want a well-prepared newbie to know. Give it away at cons, sell it at cost, make it so cheap that everyone has two. This is what lets you own the market.
- theme your bindings. They need to all fit together on a shelf, different series need to be distinct, but complimentary. White wolf does this well; imitate them.
- release a crapton of cheap, themed book serieses. Make these cheap. Later, bind them. Make those nice. Think comics and trades.

There are basically two problems with super-crunchy core rules: it takes too long to produce, but more importantly it raises your barrier to entry way, way too high.

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 4:50 am

Since this seems to be a good place to ask for actual Pathfinder build advice when not discussing the various flaws of it, I would like to know: which alchemist archetypes are worth taking for a super bomberman style alchemist, who uses bombs and extracts for offense rather than mutagens and melee?

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 5:28 am

The Bramble Brewer (an half-elf only archetype) and the Grenadier bombing-related abilities. Neither of them is game-changingly awesome, they're both "sacrifice small bullshit you don't care about for small bullshit you might slightly care about".

In particular, "being a half-elf" is most of the cost of the Bramble Brewer.

For extracts, there's really nothing much. The Preservationist gets to add Summon Nature's Ally-type spells to his list but it doesn't mesh with Grenadier.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 5:42 am

FrankTrollman wrote:It's important to note that modern RPGs have gotten way too fucking long. An RPG like D&D, whether it's 3e, 4e, or Pathfailure clocks in at about half a million words. That's not healthy. It's longer than it should be. It's longer than it has any right to be. But most importantly, it takes about fifty weeks worth of primary writing just to make that. And that's before you do editing, playtesting, and cross comparison through the document. You can split that up a bit, but not to more than five people in any real way or you'll get inconsistent authorial voice and shit.

This is mostly the case for D&D and its clones. It's due to the legacy of having not one, but three core rulebooks and being a rules-heavy game.

Most other RPGs, such as Shadowrun 4e, Savage Worlds, and Fiasco, are all in one convenient book for reference.

BTW, where'd you get the word count for the products?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 7:10 am

Libertad wrote:This is mostly the case for D&D and its clones. It's due to the legacy of having not one, but three core rulebooks and being a rules-heavy game.

Most other RPGs, such as Shadowrun 4e, Savage Worlds, and Fiasco, are all in one convenient book for reference.

BTW, where'd you get the word count for the products?

There are a couple ways to do it. The old way was to total up the words on some number of sample pages, average, and then multiple by the number of pages with words on them. That's still pretty accurate. But these days, electronic copies of shit are available, so you can just copypasta them into Open Office and take a word count.

Other games of this era aren't much better. Shadowrun 4A is only a single book, but it's a book that is about three hundred thousand words. New World of Darkness is played with at least two core books (the World of Darkness book and the monster book you're using), and the combined total clocks in at a bit over four hundred thousand words if you are doing Promethean and over five hundred thousand words if you're trying to play Mage.

Mask_De_H wrote:If that's the case, then wouldn't be better to make a smaller, more streamlined RPG and sell that as your stopgap system? Like Essentials, but not shitty?

Yes it would. A design is perfect not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That being said: don't hold your breath. It's much easier to make text longer than it is to make text shorter. Especially today with word processors and WYSIWYG typesetting. If something is unclear you can just add an explanatory paragraph and you don't have to type things up all over again or rearrange printing plates or even send it through the printer again. It's all electronic, you just insert type the extra paragraph and you're done. That is amazingly less work than rewriting the paragraphs you already have for clarity. On the printing side, printing long books is cheaper and easier than it has ever been. If you'd asked Gygax if he wanted to do a 320 page DMG with color illustrations back in the seventies he would have laughed in your fucking face. But now it's no big deal.

There's also very little incentive to write better instead of longer. On the customer side, people complain about value when they get books that are less than two hundred thousand words. Many times have I heard that Street Magic (147,000 words) was a bad deal because it was too short. On the author side, authors get paid by the word. If you are contracted to deliver 15k words, you get paid about 50% more than if you are contracted for 10k words. And if the stuff you write ends up being incomplete and needing another 5k words of supplmentation later on? You get paid for that too.

Simply put: not only has the modern era made creating bulging texts astonishingly cheap and easy, it's set up incentives where both the writers and the publishers want to deliver longer books.

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 9:04 am

@Ultimate Campaign, looks like a rules-light book (in terms of crunchy math, it's basically 256 pages of background fluff for your characters), which I might take to infer that their rules guys are busy elsewhere. I don't keep up with their schedule well enough to have an educated opinion there though.

Nice to see rules-light campaign setting stuff like that too, raising armies and having wars, even if that doesn't really work once you throw a dragon or Wizard at it.

@word count: 4e's got a tiny word count. 4e's crap. These two facts are not causally related, as you could write 4e with about 1/4 the word count and it would be significantly better for it. So would 3e most likely, though the attempts I've seen (down to that two-page job) are not generally better for it. True20 not a bad attempt other than the damage saves and strange need to change bunches of stuff for no reason.

@magic items in the PHB: that's madness. The DMG sales are based on hiding the magic items in it, and player entitlement around item allocation is bad for the game anyway.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 12:30 pm

tussock wrote:@Ultimate Campaign, looks like a rules-light book (in terms of crunchy math, it's basically 256 pages of background fluff for your characters), which I might take to infer that their rules guys are busy elsewhere.

I think they're just running out of ideas for new big hardcover books, just like 3.5E did. Now they're at the "DMG 2" phase (e.g. Ultimate Campaign will have rules for running businesses and advice on running a campaign and stuff like that).

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 12:31 pm

tussock wrote: @word count: 4e's got a tiny word count. 4e's crap. These two facts are not causally related, as you could write 4e with about 1/4 the word count and it would be significantly better for it.

What the fuck? 4e's three initial core books are 200k, 150k, and 175k words individually. That means that the three initial core books are over half a million words combined. And those books were released deliberately incomplete - no Frost Giant, no Bard, no Multiclassing, Fox Only, Final Destination. The rules were explicitly intended to require continuous updates, and the authors were dead fucking serious about releasing an extra 450,000 words of iterated new core material every year. Just including the PHB, DMG, MM, and IIs of those, 4th edition's initially planned launch of core material was over a million words. And that's without counting the "everything is core" philosophy they tried to get us to accept books like Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead as a "core" book.

4th edition and nWoD are the worst offenders against verbosity in the history of the medium. The combined works of the Wheel of Time are short compared to those book series.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 2:37 pm

If game designers (correctly, in my opinion) see the audience as hungering for 250+ page books as the average standard for TTRPGs, why don't they just pad it with artwork, comics, and creative typesetting?

Granted, padding books with artwork and comics is more expensive than just padding it with more text. But while I have heard people whine about games requiring too much reading to grok, I have never heard anyone whine about getting too much artwork -- unless the artwork sucks all that is ass.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 3:10 pm

I actually wonder if people would accept RPGs that weren't so much shorter as less tall. The current RPG standard is a coffee table book that only fits on a tall shelf and has ~800 words per page. I genuinely wonder if people would accept 11x17.8cm paper back format books as their RPGs. I mean sure, they demand 300+ pages from their books, but why can't it be 300+ pages of 300 words per page?

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 3:32 pm

This is just my personal preference, but I'd prefer tall and thin Letter Format pages compared to short and fat. Not least because of artwork and short-and-fat books are marginally harder to use and read.

I own the Monster Vault and Rules Compendium manuals for 4E D&D and they look cheap even beyond the fact that they're softcover. This is despite the fact that the pages are glossy and the artwork density is the same.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 4:14 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Fox Only, Final Destination.

You weren't a fan of the Fox-Shadowlands-RoboCrane RPS?

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 4:42 pm

Archmage Joda wrote:Since this seems to be a good place to ask for actual Pathfinder build advice when not discussing the various flaws of it, I would like to know: which alchemist archetypes are worth taking for a super bomberman style alchemist, who uses bombs and extracts for offense rather than mutagens and melee?

The Grenadier is probably the most applicable one, as noted. Most archetypes replace something in the poison use/resistance/immunity line, so it's hard to find archetypes that combine.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 5:02 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:I actually wonder if people would accept RPGs that weren't so much shorter as less tall. The current RPG standard is a coffee table book that only fits on a tall shelf and has ~800 words per page. I genuinely wonder if people would accept 11x17.8cm paper back format books as their RPGs. I mean sure, they demand 300+ pages from their books, but why can't it be 300+ pages of 300 words per page?

-Username17

I wouldn't mind having RPG splatbooks that small. In fact, it would be awesome. Take for example the Dungeonslayers rulesbook, it's so small it likely fits into your jacket.

Problem is that doesn't work for systems like D&D with bloated (exception-riddled) rules all over the place. Just thinking of D&D 3.5's combat rules spread over pages with 300 words each makes me shudder.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 5:33 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:I actually wonder if people would accept RPGs that weren't so much shorter as less tall. The current RPG standard is a coffee table book that only fits on a tall shelf and has ~800 words per page. I genuinely wonder if people would accept 11x17.8cm paper back format books as their RPGs. I mean sure, they demand 300+ pages from their books, but why can't it be 300+ pages of 300 words per page?

For my money, one important part of picking a format for an RPG book is that it be capable of staying open when necessary without it immediately destroying the spine. So I would be fine with a less tall book if it didn't lose any width, or maybe gained a little. Like, if you have a BattleTech Technical Readout, those books have a great shape for staying open to a particular page. You don't actually do it if you want to preserve them, because the bindings are shit, but that's something that's at least potentially fixable.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 8:47 pm

Antariuk wrote: I wouldn't mind having RPG splatbooks that small. In fact, it would be awesome. Take for example the Dungeonslayers rulesbook, it's so small it likely fits into your jacket.

Problem is that doesn't work for systems like D&D with bloated (exception-riddled) rules all over the place. Just thinking of D&D 3.5's combat rules spread over pages with 300 words each makes me shudder.

I think that would depend a lot on how good your index and appendices are. Done poorly, you're looking at a bunch of meandering diatribes spread across multiple pages with index citations giving you vague page ranges, long lists of indistinguishable pages to possibly reference, or perhaps worst of all: isolated page citations that represented only a fraction of potentially relevant text.

But I don't think it has to be like that. 300 words is plenty enough for a web page entry, and I think you could get something that was usable in the way the SRD is. Encapsulate points onto single pages, have the pages give you page citations in the way hypertext gives links. And have the index tell you the main page citation (in bold) and additional page citations listed in lighter text.

The internet generation seems to like getting their information and rules in bite sized chunks. And I don't think it would be terribly difficult to format things to be manageable that way.

-Username17

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:22 pm

I'm of two minds on that. Smaller books can be more convenient to carry, but being able to open a book and have it lay flat on the table - without setting things on top of it - is more important, IMO.

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:33 pm

Ice9 wrote:I'm of two minds on that. Smaller books can be more convenient to carry, but being able to open a book and have it lay flat on the table - without setting things on top of it - is more important, IMO.

Bibles both are small and can be laid open without losing the page. You just need the right kind of binding and thin enough paper (which may itself be a dealbreaker).

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:51 pm

Seriously, there's an easy answer: print both.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:59 am

What I care about is how easily I can read the pdf version on my pad. I don't really care about the printed version much anymore.

GâtFromKI · Post by **GâtFromKI** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:53 am

virgil wrote:There's a bit of debate about the Mythic rules on the playtest forum in Paizo here: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2p7vl?Missing-the-Myth

OK...

So, peoples are arguing that "it's mythic because a level 1/tier 1 character is more powerful than a level 1 character. A gestalt character or a character with 25 in each ability are also more powerful than a normal character, but those character aren't mythic for some reason".

I still don't see the new things those shitty mythic rules (*) bring to the table.

(*) Short summary of the mythic rules: "a mythic character has mythic feats and mythic powers, allowing him to mythically fight mythic foes (i.e. foes with the mythic template, like mythic kobolds or mythic squirrels). Such a mythic character has a mythic destiny far mythicier than non-mythic destiny, and will mythically confront many mythic challenge and mythic trial in a mythically mythic way. Therefore it's very mythic and provide mythically mythic myth for mythic mythically mythic players who want myth mythical mythically myth myth mythically mythical myth mythic mythic myth mythically myth."

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:45 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
tussock wrote: @word count: 4e's got a tiny word count. 4e's crap. These two facts are not causally related, as you could write 4e with about 1/4 the word count and it would be significantly better for it.
What the fuck? 4e's three initial core books are 200k, 150k, and 175k words individually. That means that the three initial core books are over half a million words combined.

Hmm. I'll dig up my old work on that.

tussock wrote:AD&D PHB: 31 artworks, covering 9 pages of 128 (7.0%). ~130k words at 1100/p.
3e.5 PHB: 81 artworks, covering 28 pages of 317 (8.8%). ~320k words at 1100/p.
4e PHB: 78 artworks, covering 30 pages of 317 (9.5%). ~200k words at 700/p.

There is more art, and it takes up more of the book, but the big change came with 4e’s (and later 3e books) growth in white space and font size. If 4e had the same fonts and page usage, it’d only be 200 pages, and then it’d be 15% art.

More art? Maybe not, but far less content in 4e for what art there is.

OK, so 4e's bigger than 1st edition, but way smaller than 3e core, and also smaller than 2nd edition if you include the gigantic Monstrous Manual.

Yeh, 4e's still a big beast though, isn't it. Heh. Tiny, no. Sparse, yes. What was my point? I forget. Ah well.

Frank Trollman wrote:And those books were released deliberately incomplete

So was 2nd and 3rd edition. They all drew the line somewhere, in part to give them something desirable to include in the class splats and follow-up monster books. 4e and 2nd edition both have 8 classes on launch (half of which don't work in both), 1st edition only had 10. Of course, they all had multiclassing, which helps. ....

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 1:52 pm

Your system of counting is bad. Were you really just treating all those pages full of tables, whitespace laden spell descriptions, and quarter-page art inserts as if they had as many words as pages full of dense text? Because they totally don't. As it happens, the entirety of the 3.5 PHB is available is searchable, countable plaintext format: it comes in at about 250k words. That's more than the 4e PHB, but it's also more than the 3e PHB by about the same amount.

2nd edition AD&D's PHB is also available in countable plaintext. The revised edition is about 240k words. The 2nd edition AD&D DMG is about 190k words.

-Username17