The Gaming Den

Pathfinder is mechanically a deeply, deeply flawed game. This was pointed out many times by denizens of the Den, and a bunch of you were booted out for it.

Pathfinder is a wild success, Pathfinder is the new D&D standard. Best seller, etc. etc. etc. and dog crap rules have not hurt them at all.

But is Pathfinder's mass appeal in its flaws?
Is part of this success owed to ignoring what Frank had to say about the system during 'open testing'?
Would the Den's 'advice' for fixing 3.X have alienated the 3.X fans who switched to Pathfinder? Is the Den's idea of balance only for a niche subset that cannot appeal to the masses? Because the gamers who made Pathfinder number one sure didn't care about what Frank had to say.

What do you think

Nope, it's simply an extension of 3e ... people wanted new nice looking colour hardcovers with decent art but they didn't want 4e, that's about it.

What's the appeal in Pathfinder?
1- It "Saved" 3.x.
2- It was an effort by an established company, with a deep link to "true" D&D
2.5- Said company can be seen as an underdog slighted by WotC
3- It has a cool, truly Dungeonpunk take on D&D, fantasy settings, and the creatures and people that inhabit the fantasy setting
4- It is really pretty.

(5- It's published, and there's still a "bought from an actual company is always better than free from some circle jerkers on the internet" bias.)


There's also one, very large flaw in all the theory craft that gets thrown around here. The Den deals in what ifs, theoretical break points, and statistics, not in what happens in the majority, or even many, games (not a condemnation, just the truth). People don't care about our frank appraisal of the WotC monk as a terrible, terrible class, or that we think player treasure wishlists are a fucking stupid idea. They care that the monk presents them a character that can, supposedly, walk up to a brick wall, and smash it into pieces with one well delivered punch (actual ability to do so not withstanding), and that their gm actually does try to get them the things they want.

It's a game people already liked in attractive packaging. Nobody here is a businessman or an artist. Why are you taking us to task for not running a business or making attractive packaging?

A Man In Black wrote:It's a game people already liked in attractive packaging. Nobody here is a businessman or a professional artist. Why are you taking us to task for not running a business or making attractive packaging?

Fixed that for you.

I have discovered two simple truth during my wandering across the internet:
1/ Many peoples buy Pathfinder but don't read it. They see the problems when they come into play.
2/ Many peoples think the Oberoni fallacy isn't a fallacy. They think Pathfinder isn't broken because they can add houserules, and that the job of the designers isn't to do the maths, balance options, etc. I don't know what they think the designer's job is.

And anyway, Pathfinder isn't that bad. The game is fun, some AP are good. Paizo provide AP, and that's what many peoples want: creating a campaign from scratch is very time-consuming, reworking an AP is far easier.

Let's do this in a series of anecdotes, and then I'll share my synthesis theory. When 3.5 came out, one of their advertised features was that they powered up some of the "tweener classes" (their words), like the Druid. Yes, 3 actual years into the game being out there were still so few people who actually understood how ridiculously powerful druids were that Andy Collins was actually able to use "making druids even more relatively powerful" as an advertising slogan. While I made the Cleric Artjer in 2001 to show how shitty the Arcane Archer was, CoDzilla did not get put into the Urban Dictionary until 2008.

I have spoken to no less than seven people whose monks have been given a non-standard magic item that allowed them to turn into a tiger. Some of them have been online conversations, but I have met people who have had this happen to them in real life as well. Now such a magic item is, when you factor in all the stat, skill, attack, and defense boosts it grants better than every other magic item in the party. In fact, it's usually more powerful than every other item in the party combined. And yet, in most cases this event has been used as evidence that the monk class was not underpowered - because the character with the DM-Pity-Device was pulling their weight. No, I don't know why it is specifically always a non-standard item that turns them into a Tiger, and never a dragon or a bear or something, it just is.

I have been told at length in 2001 that Fighters were not underpowered. I have been told at length in 2003 that 3.5 nerfs to Haste, Harm, and Hold Person miraculously made Fighters balanced again (no, I have no idea how that was supposed to work). And in 2009, I was told at length about how Pathfinder solved the Caster/Fighter power disparity.

Here's the first deal: people aren't good at theorycraft. Most people look at a 300 page rulebook and have no idea what is good or bad in it. Here's the second deal: a TTRPG has an MC who is actively patching holes in play. And here's the third deal: most people trust the game designers to a degree that I find incomprehensible. What this adds up to is that when the designers announce that something works or is fixed or something, a lot of people will decide that it is in fact fixed and now working. They won't change that position until they see evidence with their own eyes that this isn't true, and that evidence is really hard to get to players because there is an actual person who is modifying monster tactics and item drops in order to obscure that fact.

So it actually takes years of real time for people to realize that Monks suck ass. Yeah, they might see a monk character get chump shotted by a melee monster or they might see flurry of misses fail to accomplish fuck all against a level appropriate foe, but when the MC sees that shit go down he starts having the monsters go easy on the Monk or starts dropping overpowered monk equipment or something else to make the Monk player perform better. It actually requires looking at lots of monks in lots of campaigns before an individual player realizes that the common element is that the actual monk class is shit. And that takes actual years.

3.5 was drying up. People knew that there were problems in 3.5 and they wanted a new edition of 3.5. 4e came and it sucked, and it actively pissed on everything 3.5 and told the player base to go fuck themselves. And Pathfinder announced that they were fixing the known issues with 3.5. They did not actually do that, but having a good art department and announcing that the problems were solved brought enough people on board to make it the inheritor of D&D for the moment.

Of course, in a year or two, people are going to start coming to the consensus that Fighters and Monks still suck and Wizards are still OP. And then it will be time for a superficial patch like 3.5 to reset the complaints of the "distracted by shiny objects" crowd.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: I have spoken to no less than seven people whose monks have been given a non-standard magic item that allowed them to turn into a tiger.

Though, to be fair, martial artists transforming into ferocious-looking animals is a staple of the magical martial arts genre. In fact there are several video games that revolve around the premise.

FrankTrollman wrote:No, I don't know why it is specifically always a non-standard item that turns them into a Tiger, and never a dragon or a bear or something, it just is.

So it actually takes years of real time for people to realize that Monks suck ass. Yeah, they might see a monk character get chump shotted by a melee monster or they might see flurry of misses fail to accomplish fuck all against a level appropriate foe, but when the MC sees that shit go down he starts having the monsters go easy on the Monk or starts dropping overpowered monk equipment or something else to make the Monk player perform better. It actually requires looking at lots of monks in lots of campaigns before an individual player realizes that the common element is that the actual monk class is shit. And that takes actual years.

Tigers have pounce and before 3.5E came out there were an asston of ways to multiply an unarmed attack on a charge. Duh.

Having a cleric do bad things to you at low level knocked some sense into me pretty quickly, but truth be told I probably would've stumbled back onto my old habits had it not been for the Why Monks? post. I just thought I'd give some insight into the thought process those kinds of players have.

We want to believe, Frank, and by pointing out that our image doesn't match with the reality we'll reject your explanation as long as we can and cling to anything that will let us persist in our delusion. So there.

Correct way to finish the sentence of the thread topic title:

"...through no virtue of its own."

It's not like they have good designers or a neato game or even really awesome ideas on a consistent basis or a coherent approach to the game apart from (make money on it).

Paizo got to it first. Frank's right that people tend to trust game designers because they're 'professional'. Well, professional doesn't mean they're any better at it, they're just lucky. They're a fan who got the job and then, unless they're a complete dickhead to co-workers, they're hard to get rid of. If they're personable fellow who is cool to fans, they're impossible to fire.

As far as I know, there's no courses on game design or places where you can be taught the nuts and bolts of game systems analysis.

Paizo got its position by already being in a good position to begin with. Which is actually how a lot of rich/successful PEOPLE become rich/successful. By already being rich/successful/well-equipped to begin with.

So Ogre's thrust is something like "So they must being doing something right and you have no room to complain because you're not as successful as them so you're just whining because you'll never do anything." When that's the exact same argument used by Republicans to justify rich people feeling good about society and to write off poor people as some variety of sub-human not worth listening to.

Maxus wrote:="...through no virtue of its own."

Paizo has done a fair few things right with Pathfinder, particularly in throwing a lot of money at good artists and good layout people, and catering to their particular audience. These are virtues, in a sense, and are worth studying if you're intending to run a successful RPG business. They just don't make it a well-designed game.

Maxus wrote:As far as I know, there's no courses on game design or places where you can be taught the nuts and bolts of game systems analysis.

Well, it's primarily concerned with videogames, but there are some things that could be relevant to designing TTRPGs in this major...

TNE never congealed. The Tomes lost focus. Frank wrote up with a couple of good games in the mean time.

OgreBattle wrote: But is Pathfinder's mass appeal in its flaws?

In a way, yes.

Pathfinder is to appeal to the 3E crowd, which is to say that it's going to make a game where casters own and fighters suck. If you go with a more balanced route like 4E where casters can't do all the amazing stuff people are used to, you lose that crowd.

Of course, they also can't make fighters as complicated as mages, because then there's no newbie class, so the goal is to make minimal changes to "balance" magic users, while not really upsetting the status quo. It's game design, republican style, where they pretend like they're creating balance, but leave magic users enough loopholes to dominate and not feel like they lost much. So while glitterdust and finger of death got nerfed, casters still have stinking cloud, flesh to stone and baleful polymorph, so it didn't change a heck of a lot.

But hey, I mean pretty much the people Pathfinder is appealing to are those afraid of change, because they're the kind that didn't move to 4E or another RPG system. So they want a new coat of paint on 3.5 and the illusion that something big was changed. That's just the audience they're appealing to. And lets face it, that's the kind of audience that thinks that change is scary.

D&D players don't like change, but 3e didn't have the trouble 4e had in transitioning the player base ... 4e simply sucked too much, this is what opened the window for Paizo.

Now Paizo didn't have the official D&D brand, can't blame them for sticking close to 3e ... can blame them for introducing lots of trap options, making non caster class character progression boring as hell again by taking away the PrC system without putting anything much in it's place and actually regressing the game in some ways (completely ignoring the steps forward taken in MIC for instance).

The title is inaccurate. Yes, Pathfinder is more successful than anything I or anyone else on the Den ever will make, but it isn't more successful than anything we could make. A lot of us only need access to professional art and layout people to make a game that would sink Pathfinder like a rock, but those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a conservative estimate, so don't hold your breath.

FrankTrollman wrote:No, I don't know why it is specifically always a non-standard item that turns them into a Tiger, and never a dragon or a bear or something, it just is.

Perhaps it's because they, like me, could have sworn there was a published item that did that. (I just checked four books and couldn't find it)

MfA wrote:D&D players don't like change, but 3e didn't have the trouble 4e had in transitioning the player base ... 4e simply sucked too much, this is what opened the window for Paizo.

A lot of the sucking of 4E that most people complain about was basically just bringing the wizard down to earth.

Now Paizo didn't have the official D&D brand, can't blame them for sticking close to 3e ... can blame them for introducing lots of trap options, making non caster class character progression boring as hell again by taking away the PrC system without putting anything much in it's place and actually regressing the game in some ways (completely ignoring the steps forward taken in MIC for instance).

About trap options... it's pretty silly, but people are in many cases less outraged if you include a class that sucks rather than not putting it in at all. They would rather have a shitty monk rather than the promise of a good monk in a later supplement.

Whether it's 4E or 3E, people seem to prefer quantity over quality. Personally I'd rather just see four classes done well, but I'm in the minority.

Chamomile wrote:The title is inaccurate. Yes, Pathfinder is more successful than anything I or anyone else on the Den ever will make, but it isn't more successful than anything we could make. A lot of us only need access to professional art and layout people to make a game that would sink Pathfinder like a rock, but those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a conservative estimate, so don't hold your breath.

Actually, we only need access to capital since good artists and layout people can be hired if you have money.

Give me 500K and I can get you a new and better edition of DnD in under a year, playtesting, promotion, printing, and all.

K wrote:

Chamomile wrote:The title is inaccurate. Yes, Pathfinder is more successful than anything I or anyone else on the Den ever will make, but it isn't more successful than anything we could make. A lot of us only need access to professional art and layout people to make a game that would sink Pathfinder like a rock, but those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a conservative estimate, so don't hold your breath.

Actually, we only need access to capital since good artists and layout people can be hired if you have money.

Give me 500K and I can get you a new and better edition of DnD in under a year, playtesting, promotion, printing, and all.

Kickstarter it. Seriously, if money is all you need (even if you need half a million dollars), then start a kickstarter campaign.

Btw, Pathfinder's design has nothing to do with it's success.

It's a decent knock-off of a successful product that is no longer being made. Abandoned customers is the entire reason for its success.

I mean, it's a compelling story to talk about how the designers ignored all the criticism and through their own infinite wisdom somehow made a successful product, but it's not a true story. The true story is that anyone with the same art budget could have made the money from selling 3.x since the customers of 3.x had been abandoned.

I mean, it'd be like suddenly pulling all the MP3 players off the shelves and then starting a MP3 player company.... the customers still want MP3 players, so whoever is making them is going to make money.

Prak_Anima wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:No, I don't know why it is specifically always a non-standard item that turns them into a Tiger, and never a dragon or a bear or something, it just is.

Perhaps it's because they, like me, could have sworn there was a published item that did that. (I just checked four books and couldn't find it)

Phylactery of Change. RttToEE.

Prak_Anima wrote:

K wrote:

Chamomile wrote:The title is inaccurate. Yes, Pathfinder is more successful than anything I or anyone else on the Den ever will make, but it isn't more successful than anything we could make. A lot of us only need access to professional art and layout people to make a game that would sink Pathfinder like a rock, but those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a conservative estimate, so don't hold your breath.

Actually, we only need access to capital since good artists and layout people can be hired if you have money.

Give me 500K and I can get you a new and better edition of DnD in under a year, playtesting, promotion, printing, and all.

Kickstarter it. Seriously, if money is all you need (even if you need half a million dollars), then start a kickstarter campaign.

I wish that Kickstarter was the answer, but the site seems to be designed to get $5-10K together and not much more.

A decent piece of art for the cover can run you $5K, so funding an actual Pathfinder-killer/DnD-killer on $10K seems like a non-starter and getting more together seems just as unlikely.

Heck, just starting a Kickstarter page needs a decent piece of art, so that means I'm $5K in the hole before the begging for money even starts.

K wrote: A decent piece of art for the cover can run you $5K

Where are you shopping for your prices?

If I had $1K worth of money and a week to troll deviantart I could find someone awesome for that amount of cash. Hell, I could probably find someone who'd make something at least as good as every 4th Edition D&D cover (including the Monster Manual 2, the only one I liked) for just 500.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

K wrote: A decent piece of art for the cover can run you $5K

Where are you shopping for your prices?

If I had $1K worth of money and a week to troll deviantart I could find someone awesome for that amount of cash. Hell, I could probably find someone who'd make something at least as good as every 4th Edition D&D cover (including the Monster Manual 2, the only one I liked) for just 500.

I was looking at established artists.

Bad artists are wicked cheap. I mean, part of the cost-cutting at WotC was obviously the art budget and the editing and I think we know where that leads.

We talked about this a bit in the Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker thread. Apparently you can raise $50k for a random wuxia/western adventure game. The record kickstarter was nearly a million dollars for ipod wrist watches. I think that if you advertised "D&D 5 done right" and got some hype going you'd be on your way.

I bet that you could also boostrap this. Start with a $5k project for "we want to do this, but we need a piece of really good cover art for our real kickstarter".