Pathfinder Is Still Bad

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:53 am

Ice9 wrote:Smiting (at least Den-style) only works when you outnumber the target. Even then, it's a toss up whether they actually change their position, just stop talking about it, or get angry and leave.
It can be entertaining, at least. But some threads here have way the fuck too much - like pouring a whole salt shaker on your food. When every second post is about how the other posters are malevolent retards, that gets old fast.

Lich Loved. Your argument is invalid.

Xur · Post by **Xur** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:29 pm

Check this out: http://lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=565

But if your game is simpler, like say 3rd edition D&D (and most of my audience of game designers is producing games which are way simpler than 3rd edition D&D), you should have determined and fixed all rules holes well before they reach playtesting, not only because it is insulting to your testers and wastes their time, but because playtesting is simply a bad way to find rules holes.

It's possible that your game has a lot of complicated interactions and nested cycles, in which case you may not actually be able to handle this. In this case, there are a couple of strategies. First, you could simply run through most of the common of the interactions, confirm that they basically work, and hope that no exotic ones come up in later play.

This guys cannot, under any circumstances, be serious. Please no.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:35 pm

Call Paizo, we've found their next hire.

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 4:08 pm

From that link:

Here is a short sampling of the things that I regularly see people use playtesting for, but are terrible, no good, horrible ideas: Identifying rules and textual errors, mathematics and probability analysis, marketing and advertising, developing or finishing your game

Underlinked parts that cause brain hurt when combined with rest of sentence.
Identifying rule/text errors isn't the place apparently.
1. Text

No one actually reads RPG texts. No, seriously, they're just not part of play. Whether or not your rules cohere in play has much more to do with your game's similarity to other games that they've played, and very little to do with the contents of the text. Your text could be totally complete and clear, and many RPG groups will muck it up anyway. Contrariwise, your text could be riddled with procedural and textual holes, and most groups that would playtest for you could make it work correctly

What?

2. Rule problem:

Let's unpack that. Why is playtesting a terrible way to find rules holes? Simply put, unless you test exhaustively, you're not going to find all the rules holes and problems that are present in your game. This is almost tautological, but playing can only test the combinations and interactions which come up during play. All other possible combinations and interactions and rules uses are going to remain untested. Any rules holes or rules problems in that set are going to remain, often with detrimental effects on your game once it gets out in the world and all those unexamined holes are revealed through play.

So he decides since we can't find all the problem playtesting to not solve any of them. Slippery slope dude.

He then has some good ideas about looking over rules, but his initial statement is stupid.

3. Math is hard?

4. Marketing:
I agree here, but Pathfinder did succeed weirdly with playtesting as marketing.

5. Development:

Playtesting is an awful means of revising or developing your game rules. A lot of people seem to think that the process of playtesting is about revision, but in fact most rules revisions should come well before playtesting (see above), and the few remaining rules revisions should come well after playtesting. Never, under any circumstances, should a playtest group be revising the rules of the game. Neither is it a good practice to revise the rules of a game during a playtest.

Wait, so you ignore the playtest?

I'm pretty sure playtests are the time to consider if a rule needs revising...

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 5:48 pm

This is true. Playtesting is largely overrated and near useless. Learn 2 designer, failroy. If you want to balance your stuff you've written, what you do is...

1) Look at each rule individually, compare to what people "should" be getting at that level from your big designer chart. Adjust anything that's obviously out of whack.

2) Write up a bunch of sample characters, trying to optimize, optimize super heavily, not optimize, lightly optimize, etc. Make sure these all perform according to standard. Compare the number of these characters to the power of challenges.

3) Run some of these same characters though Same Game Tests, or similiar. This will highlight almost all of the balance issues.

4) Play an actual playtest campaign. At this point, you're looking for balance issues that you missed to a very light degree. But what you're REALLY looking for are rules that are too cumbersome in play, confusing, or that people will interpret differently than how you meant.

Numbers 1-3 solve actual balance issues. But 4, "Run an actual campaign", does NOT. There's too much variance, from the DM doing stuff wrong, the DM taking steps to balance the party in his game (you know, like he's MEANT to), the DM running the game in a style different from how you care about, etc. Anyone who runs actual playtesting campaigns is an idiot - THAT'S why pathfinder is bad. And now you've been smited, failroy.

Post by **fbmf** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:57 pm

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Enough with linking Paizo threads.
[/TGFBS]

K · Post by K » Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:00 pm

Xur wrote:Check this out: http://lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=565

But if your game is simpler, like say 3rd edition D&D (and most of my audience of game designers is producing games which are way simpler than 3rd edition D&D), you should have determined and fixed all rules holes well before they reach playtesting, not only because it is insulting to your testers and wastes their time, but because playtesting is simply a bad way to find rules holes.

It's possible that your game has a lot of complicated interactions and nested cycles, in which case you may not actually be able to handle this. In this case, there are a couple of strategies. First, you could simply run through most of the common of the interactions, confirm that they basically work, and hope that no exotic ones come up in later play.
This guys cannot, under any circumstances, be serious. Please no.

Wow. Willful ignorance on that kind of level is actually kind of impressive. I knew that the bias towards thinking that game designers were perfect and infallible was a widely-held belief, but this is so epic it has to be parody.

It probably isn't parody though because it goes on too long. He seems to be totally serious about with this advice that cannot produce good games.

Xur · Post by **Xur** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:51 pm

I am still totally amazed how he comes to his conclusions... I agree that playtesting isn't everything in the process but this is just insane. Especially him saying "3E is an easy game." I think he means that the system is not hard to get, but making decent stuff for a system where changing a single detail will have cascading effects is not easy. I would very much like to see the stuff he made.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:38 pm

Here is his site

http://swingpad.com/dustyboots/wordpress/

Something on his game Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_%2 ... ng_game%29

Gnosticism Is A Hoot · Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:58 pm

Polaris is...interesting. It's more of a structure for co-operative storytelling than it is a roleplaying game, and it's about as focused as its possible for an rpg to be. I'm not surprised that it's author has no fucking clue about how to balance more robust systems.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:06 am

DragonChild wrote:Learn 2 designer, failroy. And now you've been smited, failroy.

Dude, wtf?

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 5:23 am

Roy wrote:
Lich Loved. Your argument is invalid.

Your anecdotal evidence is shitty and anecdotal.

Vnonymous · Post by **Vnonymous** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:18 am

I think Roy's coinages are shitty and dumb, but Failroy has to take the cake for the dumbest new compound word of the year

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:23 am

Vnonymous wrote:I think Roy's coinages are shitty and dumb, but Failroy has to take the cake for the dumbest new compound word of the year

That was kind of the point. I was trying to be a Roy parody, but I guess it didn't come across overly well.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:46 pm

DragonChild wrote:
Vnonymous wrote:I think Roy's coinages are shitty and dumb, but Failroy has to take the cake for the dumbest new compound word of the year
That was kind of the point. I was trying to be a Roy parody, but I guess it didn't come across overly well.

Still wondering what the fuck any of that has to do with me.

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:38 pm

I think he included your name because he respects you. Sort of an honor he is bestowing.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:28 pm

Slade wrote:I think he included your name because he respects you. Sort of an honor he is bestowing.

Right...

Bobikus · Post by **Bobikus** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 10:31 pm

As someone that doesn't know PF much to begin with, what all really changed to cause the large split I've seen between PF fans and other 3.X fans that I see on most boards?

LR · Post by LR » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:04 pm

Bobikus wrote:As someone that doesn't know PF much to begin with, what all really changed to cause the large split I've seen between PF fans and other 3.X fans that I see on most boards?

Not much. There are a lot of little changes that make the game slightly worse overall (just like 3.5). People just don't want to get all new books that are largely incompatible with their old books (except the Spell Compendium).

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:13 pm

Bobikus wrote:As someone that doesn't know PF much to begin with, what all really changed to cause the large split I've seen between PF fans and other 3.X fans that I see on most boards?

Basically they took 3.5 and made it worse in every way, they lied about it, they lied about their intentions, and they completely failed to meet their own design goals. That's the short version. For the long version, look around.

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:29 pm

Roy wrote:
Bobikus wrote:As someone that doesn't know PF much to begin with, what all really changed to cause the large split I've seen between PF fans and other 3.X fans that I see on most boards?
Basically they took 3.5 and made it worse in every way, they lied about it, they lied about their intentions, and they completely failed to meet their own design goals. That's the short version. For the long version, look around.

Actually they did improve the Monk/Sorcerer/Rogue (sans sneak attack as they nerf methods to access that), not a lot but they are better.
If you undid the blink, grease, etc nerfs to sneak attack PF Rogue is better than 3.5 Rogue.
Monk isn't worse (okay TWfing is worse than Flurry since it requires two things and 3.5 flurry just increase attacks) and can now spend ki for extra goodies.
Sorcerer has no downside except you must choose a flavor.

Bobikus · Post by **Bobikus** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:43 am

What changed in regards to magic/spell lists? I tend to hear from some people that casting was reigned in somehow from being as gamebreaking, but hear other people claim the opposite.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:59 am

A select few spells were nerfed. The larger issues weren't dealt with.

Bobikus · Post by **Bobikus** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:02 am

Psychic Robot wrote:A select few spells were nerfed. The larger issues weren't dealt with.

Just taking a guess... the nerfs were along the lines of "As long as Wish, Gate, and Polymorph aren't abused it's fine?"

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:04 am

Bobikus wrote:Just taking a guess... the nerfs were along the lines of "As long as Wish, Gate, and Polymorph aren't abused it's fine?"

Basically. The team actually did a decent job with polymorph, but, as far as I can tell, they nerfed it into semi-uselessness by splitting it into multiple spells that are each about a level too high to make use of. I never had a chance to really try it out in the only Pathfinder game I've played it.