While it's great to see all these different alternate rules and suggestions and stuff, and some of it IS really innovative and cool... that's not the goal of the beta...
I've really enjoyed reading and participating in the design discussions during the Alpha and Beta phases so far, but at times it is frustrating many of those innovative ideas won't be implemented. I'd like to see a RPG Superstar type talent search to find a game designer who could come up with the best ideas for alternative rules to the Pathfinder RPG once it comes out. I know great talent already surfaced during the first RPG Superstar, but I feel writing a great adventure and writting good game rules can be different skills - so targeting good game rule design would be the purpose.
Pathfinder Unleashed sounds like a good name for the final product.
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Totally. I don't know if I'm necessarily needing a whole contest or even another book full of alternate rules--but I do agree very much with the sense of frustration.
When the playtest first came out our group was so enthused to throw in our voices to see if we could put our mark on the game we love. We really thought that we could maybe drift the game a teensy bit away from all the years of battlemaps and tactical encounters that WotC had mired the game in over the years--maybe back toward something that valued a more story and drama focused kind of gaming. Certainly the high story value of the Pathfinder games has always seemed like it would benefit greatly from that sort of thing.
But as the playtest wore on, we've felt...marginalized. Somewhere between mobs of people scouring over the math looking for logic loops to turn into gold-making factories, to a lot of fear of making substantive changes to the rules, to issues about backward compatability, to a strong desire to enforce the use of all RAW or disregard the input, it's increasingly become the sort of thing where our group's input hasn't felt wanted. So we just stopped contributing.
For the first time a company we totally respect, whose products we love has offered to remake the game, to get rid of a lot of the problems and tool it so it works better with the kind of stories we want to tell--and it turns out the input we desperately want to give isn't at all what the guys making the game are interested in hearing.
Yeah. Frustrating.
