The Most Dangerous Site in Gaming

Monday, September 19, 2011

About a decade ago, the unwritten rules for success in the tabletop roleplaying game industry were rewritten by the most dangerous man in gaming. Ryan Dancey, then a vice president at Wizards of the Coast, championed the idea of "open gaming." This idea was clearly crazy. Take the crown jewels of the most popular roleplaying game in history and give them away to your competition, for free? Madness!

In retrospect, it was not so crazy after all. That decision changed the entire industry. Hundreds of publishers, including Paizo, have since taken advantage of Ryan's foresight. The core innovation was the OGL, the Open Gaming License, but the real meat was in the SRD: the System Reference Document, the rules you actually needed to play the game.

The original SRD was a collection of exported Microsoft Word documents. The rules you needed were in there, but it wasn't very user friendly. Over the years, fans have taken it upon themselves to organize and hyperlink that content, earning the enduring gratitude of countless gamers.

When Paizo launched the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, we stood on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Open gaming is at the heart of everything we do. What better way to help the fans play their favorite game than to publish the rules, for free, in an accessible and hyperlinked format? And so, the PRD was born: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document.

We take our commitment to open gaming seriously, so we update the PRD with the open content from each of our new rulebooks. For the release of Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Combat, we decided to put a little extra into our revision. Take a look at the new Pathfinder Reference Document. Now look at it using your phone, or your iPad. Notice anything different? That's right, it doesn't suck anymore! We've put a lot of effort into making it as useable as possible.

I hope this latest presentation of the rules to the world's best roleplaying game makes lots of people happy. Happy people have a way of becoming happy customers, and that's the key to our ability to keep on producing great content for your game.

P.S. The current PRD consists of over 2,000 files and more than 50,000 hyperlinks and is produced by tiny robots from our original InDesign documents, so there are bound to be some problems. Please post here if you find any.

Gary Teter
Software Developer