TL;DR version: Skip down to "Now let's compare to PfO" section and then to "Final Word," below:
DISCLAIMER: This thread is not intended for flames, or ranting, or rude/attacking comments of any kind. This thread is only for the open and thoughtful discussion of the reasons WHY making PfO "could be" a poor idea.
Why? By examining the case AGAINST creating this game, the developers and community alike can ensure that a core set of principles are forged. Despite any scope creep or change in operating structure, these basic tenets can always be represented, all for the purpose of ensuring a fun and rewarding,SUSTAINABLE game experience.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have been playing fantasy RP games since I was introduced to the "red box" basic D&D game on my 8th birthday. I started off playing halflings (that repeatedly died) in my uncle's campaign and after some time started DMing my own campaigns. I DMed basic D&D through Immortals set, played AD&D sparingly, played and DMed 2nd edition throughout its natural life, moved to 3rd edition, DMed 3rd edition through all iterations and books, moved to 4th edition, DMed through that for a year and abandoned it, and moved on to Pathfinder.
I am a Pathfinder Society member and GM, own most of the books and campaign sets, and venture to GenCon every other year. I have GMed many other campaigns in other game system such as Star Wars: Saga Edition.
In the computing world, I have been a tester for many MMOs. I was in beta 4 for EQ, played DAoC, beta-tested WoW and LoTRO, played Rift and a handful of other MMOs such as AC, DDO and Eve. I was an early tester for Star Wars the Old Republic (since July 2011), and I am the guildmaster of a powerful Sith guild on an RP server for SWTOR today. All in all, I was there for beta or at launch for nearly all the major MMOs to release since 1999, although I did miss AC2, EQ2, and Eve (which I joined 2 years ago for a while).
THE ANTI-CASE for PfO:
Initially I was excited at the prospect of Pathfinder Online. The concept of a Pathfinder MMO was shocking to me mostly because of an inherent bias I once had. When my players were talking about Pathfinder's origin, I was the only one that was not sold. As I had followed the various paths of Dungeons and Dragons throughout the years, I had firmly established TSR (and later, WoTC) as the holders of all intellectual property for "true" fantasy RP, or at least a game I would want to play. Sure, I had experimented in other systems, all the way back to the original Marvel Superheroes game to White Wolf and other systems, but at its core, I believed, and expected those systems to be derivatives at best and glorified board games at worst.
Thus, when Paizo really started making a hard run at launching its own game with the release of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, I had to examine my own set of ideals regarding fantasy roleplaying. At this critical point in Fantasy RP history, the giant that was D&D was essentially becoming fragmented, and very few could remain in the middle and stay neutral or favorable to both sides.
I knew some of these people involved in the crossfire. I had the honor one time of playing as a player with Ed Greenwood (creator of the Forgotten Realms). I had many discussions with the creative teams of D&D over the years, and Sean Reynolds had become an iconic hero of sorts, to the point I had him autograph splatbooks in which he was the majority author. These guys were on my facebook, and the marriage was coming to an end.
The point of this section is not to pontificate on my own life but to illustrate an example of what some hardcore fans were going through. This wasn't merely a new edition of the game they loved, such as when 3rd edition was released and people had to ask themselves whether they liked the changes or not. In some ways, this was taking a years' long journey through life merely to end at a doorstep: do I choose door 1 or door 2, and will I be able to come back to this point if I choose either?
We are not making this journey alone. We have friends. They have their likes and dislikes and rare is the group that can shift and just start playing other games if certain players do not like it.
I pushed them to 4th edition and we played for a year. I think the last half was merely to humor me. Although I really liked the changes, and some of my players did, the majority of them did not like the power band, the lack of magic item power, and how "easy" the game was compared to what they had played before. Regardless on anyone else's feelings on the matter, that is what THEY felt.
Thus, we moved to Pathfinder, and we were awash in creative juices. These guys know what they are doing. We loved it, and with good reason: many of the creative people we had come to like with D&D were working with Pathfinder now. Obviously there was synergy here.
Fast forward to modern day, and we are still playing Pathfinder, albeit we have run across the same adages that plagued 3.5e after significant gameplay time:
*Published campaigns end at too low level for our taste. Why build *Rules to 20+ and not publish modules to 20+?
*Gameplay at the high end is very slow.
*Even highly experienced players get bogged down in very obtuse rule lookups.
*Certain character become really broken as they increase in level.
*Monsters and NPCs are difficult to run when they have so many obscure abilities and feats from rarely-accessed books.
*Character development/building is an art form that requires a tremendous amount of research to optimize.
Now, let's compare this to what has been discussed for PfO:
*Persistent, sandbox-style gameworld.
*Real-time character progression in the Eve style.
*3 main vectors of gameplay. PVE, PVP, and Resource Management in an ecosystem: https://goblinworks.com/images/SandboxEcosystem.jpg
*PVE
- Wandering monsters: Random spawns with security sectors like Eve Online. The further away from civilization you get, the more dangerous.
- Harvesting hazards: Located around mining nodes. The further away from civilization you get, the more dangerous.
- Ruins, lairs and caverns: These are the classic adventuring experiences, essentially dungeons.
- Encampments: Encampments are spawned groups of enemies, that when left unchecked, can grow to dominate an area. When defeated, they are removed from the game world permanently.
*PVP
- Battlefield content: inhibit growth of competing settlements
- PvE encounters that turn into PvP.
- Assaults to gather construction materials for your allied settlements.
*Resource Management
- Resource node exploration: find valuable resource nodes.
- Resource node exploitation: mine resources while fending off PvE and PvP attacks.
- Resource construction: build hideouts, inns, watchtowers, forts, and eventually, settlements.
- Guild account management: sophisticated controls around accounting, manufacturing goals and assigned tasks, and profit distribution to guild shareholders.
- En masse crafting management: construction materials, cooking materials, enchantment components, magical reagents, metals, cloth & leather.
I may be missing a few here or there, but for now let us establish these facets as 12 operating principles of the game. It can be collapsed even further to say that as envisioned, PfO is a fantasy roleplaying game set in Golarion with all of the wonders of the Eve Online economic engine mapped directly to fantasy RP counterparts.
Further collapsed, the game boils down to PvE, PvP, and mining.
What does Pathfinder, the role-playing game, represent?
In the classic "4x" strategy games, you have the following classic gaming vectors: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.
In Pathfinder, three of these are fairly strongly represented, but each has an asterisk:
*Explore: Pathfinder takes the classic fantasy RP genre and overlays it with a popular Pathfinder Society entity, whose mission is to uncover new secrets and delve into lost knowledge. Many games tie into these themes of exploration for fun and profit.
However, this "x" has an asterisk in that although the game world is presented with maps and culture to provide a layer of verisimilitude, actual games represent only a tiny portion of the game world in a more-or-less railroaded plot style: A happened to B. Visit B to learn about C, and kill or talk to everything in your path. Some of these adventurers are more railroad style, such as the Council of Thieves campaign, and other campaigns are more sandbox-style, such as Kingmaker.
In PfO: This "x" is further expanded to include exploration for resource nodes to manage, a concept foreign to Pathfinder gamers and fantasy RP in general.
*Exterminate: Defeating monsters and humanoid enemies is part-and-parcel to the fundamentals of the game. A significant portion of the game (75%??) revolves around the combat engine and combat experience in general, and role playing opportunities are overlaid to provide a theme and enjoyable background for the experience. Character building and design, "return to the home town" role playing experiences and other minor events round out the game experience.
*Exploit: The only real exploitation that occurs in Pathfinder is the accumulation of wealth and magical resources for distribution in the immediate adventuring group. Recovered items are sold, rewards are given by quest "givers" and money is consumed as a resource to procure more powerful mundane and/or magical items to make the party stronger, such that they may begin the exploration/exterminate event again. Countries, economies, mines, and other resources in the game world are rarely, if ever, tampered with except in rare, usually one-time-only situations.
*Expand: Expansion is not represented in the core Pathfinder game, and only through the use of optional books such as Kingmaker is the concept even touched upon.
SUMMARY:
Of the 12 facets I presented for PfO, only 2 of those facets are presented in the standard Pathfinder roleplaying game. One of those facets, wandering monsters, is nearly absent in many games, almost to the level of becoming an optional rule. Wandering monsters are rarely presented in Pathfinder Society sanctioned play, and I venture that these encounters may only represent 5% of all encounters ever presented to any player worldwide. More or less, wandering monsters is a semi-rare event and not core to the game.
Even with expanded rules in the Kingmaker campaign, the most "audacious" attempt thus far to introduce Kingdom management, only 6 other facets are introduced to the game world, and most of them only in very high-level, barely noticeable level of detail. There are rarely mines or other nodes that, once absorbed into the kingdom, provide a barely noticeable bump in overall resources. Even in Kingmaker, resources are only somewhat "gathered" (more like "conquered") and only barely "managed." The levers or controls offered to the group is essentially through the construction of buildings. It is a spend-points, drop-in-instant-building type of fashion. It is more Warcraft (the very first game) than Age of Empires.
So, even by adding the Kingmaker aspect to Pathfinder, only 6 of the 12 facets are strongly represented in the game:
- Dungeons (standard fare of adventures)
- Encampments ("outside" dungeons that once defeated gives resources or joins your kingdom.
- Battlefield content: war with competing baronies/kingdoms through the campaign in simple army unit system.
- Resource node exploration: in Kingmaker, you do explore hexes, so I can see this one. Although once a hex is explored, it is rarely revisited.
- Resource construction: in this mini-game, you construct buildings to offer additional resources to the overall kingdom at-large.
- Account management: simple controls are offered to the party to show monthly gains in resources that may be spent to construct buildings and/or form standing armies.
Two other facets, wandering monsters and resource node exploitation, are barely noticeable, if at all.
Thus, at its best, it could be said that even emulating the Kingmaker campaign series (a series of 6 adventure modules), Pathfinder Online is decidedly a different game, encompassing not only a significant expansion on what building construction is, but it also escalates the node management from a mini-game to a level equal in significance to PvE content. PvP is almost entirely a new invention on these tenets, and harkens more to other MMOs than has basis in Golarion, or even any Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper game.
FINAL WORD:
In short, the PfO design documents are incredibly ambitious but seem to steer away from the core of what encompasses Pathfinder RPG as a game. Pathfinder RPG is primarily a character-based RPG focusing on small parties of adventurers undertaking very risky missions for profit and/or intrinsic rewards. They are heroes, anti-heroes, or rarely villains, and they build a career on risky ventures as they gain power and magical items.
Only by adding the elements of an optional campaign (Kingmaker) does one even come into the ballpark of what PfO claims: a sandbox-style MMO focused on PvE, resource management, and PvP. The core Pathfinder RPG, at best, only captures one of those elements (PvE), and only via addition of the Kingmaker campaign does it even venture into resource management. PvP is entirely alien to the Pathfinder genre.
Thus, PfO as written becomes an incredibly risky venture. If the focus is placed too highly on resource management, node exploitation, guild/corporation accounting, and PvP, the game that has been released would be fantasy RP Eve Online instead of a Pathfinder MMO. The concepts are neat and refreshing while applied to the Fantasy RP genre, but entirely disassociates and separates itself from what Pathfinder actually represents.
RECOMMENDATION:
Despite all of this, I think that PfO is a terrific idea and should be created. However, instead of focusing so much on delivering the Eve experience to fantasy RP, the focus should instead be on the Pathfinder Society and the exploration/extermination avenue. If PfO had half of the economic engine that Eve had, it would be a terrific game. Pathfinder characters are generally not involved in the fluctuating prices of manufactured suits of chain mail armor, much less the value of trade goods, such that it begs the question of "why?"
