| Joe Angiolillo |
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
WHY KILL THE GOLDEN GOOSE?
As a retired professional game designer and game historian of some note, I find the Pathfinder Playtest has a fatal game design flaw. My background is: starting designing games in 1959, designing games at Coleco for Colecovision and the Adam and Atari and other computers, designing WarGames which was awarded the #1 game cartridge in 1984, developing the first edition of Axis and Allies, since 1968 being mentored by Gary Gygax, owning and designing games for Nova Games and Game Theory and Design, Simulations Publications (SPI), scenarios for Avalon Hill, etc.
There are many new ideas in the Pathfinder Playtest that are good ideas and have great potential so I will not comment on these ideas. Playtesting will make those good ideas great and streamline the system, removing others.
The fatal flaw is explained as digging a hole in the design to fill it with a plug. This same problem occurred with updates to GPS systems. When GPS for cars first came out you were asked to input address number, street name, city or town name, and state. That system worked great. Then some idiot designer decided you should only input address number and street name. The system would take up to 5 minutes to search every town and city in America and list a number of places based on distance to choose as your destination. The search result was tedious and time consuming, sometimes never listing the destination searched for. That GPS system was worse than a map! The next generation design was even more ridiculous. The idiot designer decided to do the same thing but show a map with circles of locations. You had to guess which circle was your destination. Then you had to press that circle and the GPS system would update your driving directions, almost always giving the wrong destination. You would have to do the same thing all over again until you found the correct driving directions. Terrible! Terrible! Terrible! Siri and the I phone have replaced GPS systems and eliminated an entire industry.
So what is the flaw in Pathfinder Playtest? In order to implement the idea of critical failures, the play test invented hero points. So dig a hole in the system and create an artificial plug.
Why is this system so bad. To understand its flaw requires a study of RPG history. Gary designed D&D. I consider hime to be one of the best game designers in history. He is on par with George Fox from England in 1801, Ann Wales Abbot in 1843, etc.
Originally D&D put the focus on the Dungeon Master (GM for Pathfinder) and the Dungeon Master needed to at least create the scenario. D&D evolved from miniatures and war games from Avalon Hill. As such there needed to be a winner. Often, if not always, the designer of the scenario wanted to not only challenge the players but to kill them off. Because D&D was such a blockbuster, eliminating some new players was no big deal. There were always other gamers new to D&D to replace them. It took years to realize that putting all the focus on the Dungeon Master (GM in Pathfinder) eventually slowed down sales and put RPG games lower in rank on game play when it could have been more popular than Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers games. This flaw emboldened the Dungeon Master to the point that he thought he was a great designer and even a God. Players fled!
I have encountered at least one of these GMs in Pathfinder edition 1. He has written numerous scenarios and plays the role of the "forgiving God." He chooses the toughest scenarios so that he can kill player characters. After he has about half of the player characters below 0 in an encounter, he allows the rest of the player characters to flee and regroup. The remaining player characters regroup after healing and attempt to free the below 0 characters that have stopped bleeding out. This encounter comes before the final encounter. Even though the the encounter includes evil intelligent or hungry monsters, they do not kill the downed characters. The remaining player characters either leave or mount a new attack against the damaged enemy to save the player characters that are tied up. In the two scenarios run by him that I played (at low level), I obtained 2 experience points and 1 prestige point. I will never run with him as GM again.
So Pathfinder Playtest moves more power to the GM and away from the players. The way society has changed, I cannot see any other result than the GMs using that power to kill even more player characters than Pathfinder 1. The number of players are dwindling as it is. Why kill the Golden Goose?
Joe Angiolillo