Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[Bihlbo]

Regardless of whether it's good or not, Pathfinder 2 is going to sell well enough for them to stay in business. It's a given that it'll look pretty, and when you're standing in a games store thinking about buying it, solid game design is hard to recognize and good art isn't. Then there's the massive population of people who will buy something just to find out what's inside; those people who enjoy reading qua reading. That's the only reason D&D Essentials sold anything, but it sold enough to not keep 5e from happening. Groups will run a PF2 one-off just to see what it's like, gamers want another book for the shelf, etc - all because it's a brand they know. How many of us here purchased the Pathfinder Player's Handbook for that reason? I know I did.

Something tells me that if rpgs were reviewed with the same haughty, threatening standards as novels, we'd get better quality. Instead, all but a small fraction of reviews you'll find are done either because the reviewer is excited and wants to be encouraging, or the reviewer just wants someone to listen to them about something for a change. Bad standards for reviews, and bad standards for the books. Not at all unique to rpgs of course; most food shows are just, "watch me eat something beautiful, amazing, and incredible - we're all smiles and nothing is ever bad!"

[deaddmwalking]

I'm not sure I'm convinced.

I mean, Pathfinder captured a lot of 3.x players. WotC did everything they could to make themselves a villain so 'saving' Paizo was something a lot of people could feel good about. But 4th edition came out in 2008. A lot of people that remember that have left the hobby for a variety of reasons.

A decade later, I don't think the 'hard core' supporters are doing enough to keep Paizo afloat. Some non-zero number would have adopted 5th edition (a lot of people didn't like the fiddliness of 3.x, and they were promised simplified grappling with combat maneuvers). If you're a completist and you're not a millionaire, you're going to have to accept that you can't buy everything they produce. Once you accept you can't have everything, you can be selective in purchasing, which isn't good for them.

Paizo is likely not in a great place at the moment. Unless they are good at bringing new people into the hobby, natural attrition is taking a toll. I'd expect that they had the most players EVER in 2009-2010. And a lot of their releases were aimed at DMs, so a smaller more dedicated segment of the hobby.

Pathfinder 2nd edition is an appeal to have people that stopped playing over the past 3-7 years pick it up again - especially people that have switched to 5th edition. There's some number of players that will gravitate to Pathfinder because it is 'shiny and new', but a lot of them will only come if they believe it is the 'real D&D'.

For Pathfinder 2 to succeed, it actually has to be better than Pathfinder 1.

My official prediction is that it does nothing to stem the bleeding. Paizo will continue a long, steady decline.

[Shrieking Banshee]

It's a real shame as well, because I feel like people will begin to conflate mechanical depth with poor design and it will fade away in place of games I'm fine with people enjoying but are not my cup of tea that are very simplified.

[Username17]

It's a real shame as well, because I feel like people will begin to conflate mechanical depth with poor design and it will fade away in place of games I'm fine with people enjoying but are not my cup of tea that are very simplified.

What the RPG public asks for and what the RPG public wants are very hard to predict. Remember that the entire fanbase of bullshit titles like Changeling is just a few thousand world-wide. There are literally more people who contribute to the Flat Earther movement than there are people who support Changeling: the Dreaming, and the people who actually tell Onyx Path or Paradox what they think they want out of Changeling is a small subset of that. If you spoofed a new email address every day and ranted about ponies to Paradox each day, you could convince them that a super majority of Vampire Fans wanted a My Little Pony Crossover. That is how little contact the typical RPG company with the actual paying customers.

At the end of 3.5, the general belief was that people at least believed that they wanted a more balanced product. Certainly that's what the internet zeitgeist seemed to be about at the time. I don't know if that was true, because the player base of D&D was a few million and the active internet communities were collectively a few thousand. But despite the small sample size, both WotC and Paizo believed at the time that they were chasing an audience that wanted a more balanced play experience than 3.5, and both 4e and Pathfinder sold themselves as that.

Similarly, at the end of Old World of Darkness, the general belief was that people at least believed they wanted a more toned down, street level experience with less craziness and space lasers. And that is what White Wolf promised when they unveiled New World of Darkness.

Now 4e, Pathfinder, and nWoD were all shitty products. But they all were sold based on an understanding of what the fans wanted that was similar to my own understanding at the time. The marketing positions of those games made perfect sense to me, even if the design decisions of the actual games seemed totally insane to me then and still don't make any sense in retrospect.

On the flip side, Shadowrun 5th Edition is made to appeal to an insular clique of douchebags who took over an online forum and then used mod powers to kick everyone else out of the treehouse. They achieved epistemic closure by refusing to talk to people who had opinions who weren't theirs, and the marketing position of SR5 seems totally incomprehensible unless you personally know the weird ass fetishes of Bull and Hardy. What evidence is there that their weird hangups have any constituency outside of their immediate circle of friends and hangers on? Probably none.

In the aftermath of the disaster that was 4e and nWoD, the people in charge still drummed all dissent off of major internet message boards. the 4vengers made discussing non-4e RPGs very difficult on the WotC forum, and that forum is now defunct after a mass exodus. The supporters of nWoD literally became the mods of RPG.net and regularly banhammered people who didn't talk respectfully enough about the various White Wolf sinking ships. I genuinely have no idea what the popular conception of why 4e was bad is, because the large forums where people would express a diversity of opinions were scrubbed of anti-4e sentiment before a consensus could emerge. And same for nWoD. We know it failed, and we know the fanbase didn't like it, but we don't really know what the popular conception of why is.

5e D&D and Vampire 5th Edition are basically vaporware, with material coughed up so slowly that one dedicated fan could exceed the entire output on their own just by writing a fucking blog. There isn't enough of that content to even have a popular reaction - even if there was some place we could get a reasonable sample of what that popular reaction was, which we can't.

-Username17

[Nirallus]

I genuinely have no idea what the popular conception of why 4e was bad is, because the large forums where people would express a diversity of opinions were scrubbed of anti-4e sentiment before a consensus could emerge.

The prevailing opinion I've heard from my gaming groups, random people at the FLGS, /tg/, and the Paizo forums (I know) can be summarized as:

"4e is WoW on the tabletop. Classes are grouped into tank, healer, CC, and DPS but each plays in more or less the same way: Press one of your 6 hotkeys to activate one of your named powers with highly specific effects. If it's a hard fight use your long cooldowns. Battles take forever, partly because of the emphasis on fiddly tactical positioning, and partly because enemies have too much AC and HP. Emphasis on combat rules, 'gamey' language, and dumbing everything down in general reveals it's a ruleset made for video gamers, not roleplayers."

Of course some of these things are applicable to other editions of D&D, and some are just plain wrong, but that is what I always hear.

[CapnTthePirateG]

You forgot a big one - back before the purges of EnWorld and the WotC forums there was a $e meme going around because of the obvious splitting classes across books, "everything is core", and shovelware quality of the product.

[Username17]

I agree that there are certainly a lot of narratives as to why 4e was shit that you can pick from. It's just that I don't think that there's a consensus And I don't there's going to be one.

The issue is actually kind of large and multifactorial. Essentially I think that the internet as a whole has fundamental problems relating to discussing the flagship products of niche hobbies when they aren't good. Yes, it's great at collecting sick burns on shit products from niche actors in niche hobbies (people loves them those FATAL reviews!), but when the latest season of a cult TV show is crap or the next edition of a major RPG is shitty, the whole system kind of falls apart.

Major message boards, reddits, facebook groups, twitter circle jerks youtube comment threads, and whatever else the internet throws up for followers of niche fandoms to talk to each other are inherently pro-establishment in their leanings. You don't become a moderator on RPG.net by being a good person or being especially competent. It's not a meritocracy, it's a clique. You become a moderator on RPG.net by saying things that the current mods like hearing. And this is a feedback cycle because a lot of the mods are either employed directly by the organizations whose products they discuss or hoping that sempai will notice them and give them a job.

And the thing is, people get those jobs. I got my work into Shadowrun 4 books by saying nice things about Shadowrun 4 on Dumpshock. Rich Burlew got his work into D&D 3.5 by saying nice things about D&D 3.5 on the WotC boards. A bunch of people who did work for Onyx Path got dredged up from randos who said nice things about nWoD on RPG.net. It wasn't unreasonable to expect people like Titanium Dragon to get writing credits in 4th edition D&D if it didn't crash and burn before that was a possibility. For fuck's sake, RPGPundit got some of his stupid musings into 5th edition D&D by saying nice shit about 5th edition sight unseen.

So the mods of these big sites are disproportionately people who lay the smack down on people who don't say nice things about Dear Leader, because they are recruited from the ranks of forum warriors who consistently side with Dear Leader. And because of that, the big forums develop editorial styles that are very hugbox towards the big official titles whether those titles deserve it or not.

The diversity of opinion you are allowed to see is always and forever skewed towards people who like whatever the latest edition is. Which means that when an edition is genuinely popular and well loved by its fans like 3rd edition D&D or 4th edition Shadowrun, you get some pretty good insight into why people like it. But if an edition is crashing and burning because the fans don't fucking like it like nWoD or 4e D&D, the web forums will just as naturally perform giant purges of anyone who wants to have a reasoned discussion of why that might be the case.

-Username17

[Kevin Mack]

So Goblins as core Drizzet syndrom or heading all the way straight to Kender?

[Orca]

So Goblins as core Drizzet syndrom or heading all the way straight to Kender?

Could be like Drizz't, could not, but killing annoying goblins is acceptable in most parts of Golarion. Kender syndrome should be avoided.

Edit: Well, unless you get your RPG fix from Pathfinder Society (aka organised play) games.

[Chamomile]

It wasn't unreasonable to expect people like Titanium Dragon to get writing credits in 4th edition D&D if it didn't crash and burn before that was a possibility.

Hold up, are we talking about the same Titanium Dragon who is saying stupid things on Reddit to this day?

[phlapjackage]

Hold up, are we talking about the same Titanium Dragon who is saying stupid things on Reddit to this day?

Can't find a slow-clap emoticon, so I downboated/upboated appropriately...

[Chamomile]

Titanium Dragon - the one I found on Reddit, at least - seems like the kinda guy who'd freak out over being downvoted, so the gesture is appreciated. I'm mainly curious if anyone familiar with the guy Frank's talking about can confirm that yes, I just so happened to run into this guy on Reddit a couple days before he came up in conversation here. I take it he was a loyalist regular on WotC's forums?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I can't confirm, but the asshole in question posted here 136 times, so I'd just check his style against your random encounter.

[Chamomile]

From a skim of his posts in the skill challenge thread, I'm uncertain. The stubborn commitment to being wrong is there, certainly, but the Poe-level unaware hypocrisy and grandstanding is missing even when under heavy pressure. I'd say they probably weren't the same person if these were coterminous posts, but maybe he's just gotten a lot more confident in being wrong since 2009. On the other hand, "Titanium Dragon" isn't an extremely unique username, and a crippling inability to admit to being wrong despite having no evidence to back up one's claim isn't exactly rare, either.

[Shrieking Banshee]

You know its funny because 4e was my first RPG and I liked it for a while but I moved away from it on my own after I felt like no matter the level gameplay was always the same.
It really did feel like in so many ways an MMO. Yes you could handwavium or gm-fait the elements that 4e didn't cover but the issue was: That's the most interesting parts.
Whilst interesting tactical combat is neat, thats like 1/10th of what makes TTRPG's special or good.

It's like a bread sandwich. "You can always imagine the insides of the sandwich!". The very nature of the system discourages it mattering.

[RobbyPants]

Is TitaniumDragon the "hundred of thousands > millions" guy?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Is TitaniumDragon the "hundred of thousands > millions" guy?

Yes.

[Axebird]

Is TitaniumDragon the "hundred of thousands > millions" guy?

The what guy?

[Username17]

Is TitaniumDragon the "hundred of thousands > millions" guy?

The what guy?

I never quoted that guy's figures, I used him as a link to the court case where WotC said under oath, that their total sales of Core Books were in the hundreds of thousands. As in, more than 100,000, less than 1 million. That is the sales range they gave to the united states legal system.

Depending on the phrasing, that could well mean more than a million.

Source.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

But the bit that Koumei will never let down is actually below what has been quoted and linked (emphasis mine):

Depending on the phrasing, that could well mean more than a million.

You wish us to believe that WotC went to court over the 4e leak and didn't use the most impressive sounding numbers they could legally get away with?

Thats a seriously fanboi thing to say.

Or... you know, they said that because it did sound bigger. I'm not sure that "hundreds of thousands" doesn't sound like more than "over a million". While if you put them side by side, people will say "over a million" is larger, people don't actually do very well with large numbers. People have some vague concept of what a hundred thousand dollars is; a house costs that. A million dollars, however, is a far more vague notion. So when people say "hundreds of thousands", it sounds bigger to them because they have some sense of scale; "That's lots of houses", they think, whereas a million is more difficult to grasp.

While obviously not dollars, it translates better.

[GâtFromKI]

There's a preview about the alchemist.

So he has the feat to craft alchemical items, and at level 19 he multiplies the damages of bombs by 6.

Therefore, either he deal 6 times more damages than anyone else and he's completely unbalanced, either the bombs' damages are 6 times too low (and the alchemist deals level-appropriate damages). I guess it's the second option. Or the third option: bombs are useless piece of shit and the alchemist is a useless piece of shit.

Therefore, why would anyone take the Alchemical Crafter feat and get a legendary rank, since his "legendary" bombs' damages are 6 times too low? Seeing this simple fact takes 30 seconds...


There's also stuff about resonance. The alchemist may spend his resonance to craft alchemical material, even though the resonance handle magical stuff and the alchemy is totally non-magical. I don't think the authors know what they want the resonance or the alchemy to be.

[Shrieking Banshee]

Therefore, either he deal 6 times more damages than anyone else and he's completely unbalanced, either the bombs' damages are 6 times too low (and the alchemist deals level-appropriate damages). I guess it's the second option. Or the third option: bombs are useless piece of shit and the alchemist is a useless piece of shit.

They probably gated off bombs to be only useful to the alchemist.

I'm much more concerned how wildly the feats vary in use. From vital to progress, to worthless garbage and sectioned off at arbitrary levels.

Getting a bite attack and claws at level 8?

[MGuy]

For some reason in this hobby getting the ability to attack at least somewhat competently is seen as a really... significant feature... Still, even with that level 8 is pretty damn steep.

[WiserOdin032402]

I'm pretty sure it's because of people falling for the stormwind fallacy so hard they forget what it's like to play an RPG where being competent is the norm.

[Shrieking Banshee]

And everybody is still waiting for the shoe of spellcasting to drop.

You could at least say they are streamlining options and of these power, downs are across the board then that can be alright, but of course, the spellcasting shoe is gonna drop with its massive fiddliness and cumbersome nature like a bad joke.