One of the design goals shared by both Pathfinder and D&D4e was to give players more options for their characters, giving them neat tricks and abilities at each level.
As a potential conversation topic, do you think this is a shift in player goals as far as RPGs go?
My old 2e gaming memories are kind of faded, but I don't remember being as oriented toward gaining new abilities as I was interested in engaging in new encounters. In effect, the adventure itself was the purpose behind gaming. Now it seems like the purpose is to level up your character. The reward is the new power, not the gaming experience.
At the end of a game session, are you more likely to fondly remember an awesome encounter (those orcs swinging across the lava pit on pendulums were insane!) OR how awesome your character was (my vault feet combined with my new springing sandals had me bouncing all over the place!)?
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I've thought about this, too. Not from the sales/ production side but from the what games are like nowadays side.
In the 80s and 90s you made a PC and took it to an adventure -- you wanted a cool adventure.
Now it seems this is only half of the equation. 50% of a Player wants a good adventure and 50% of that Player wants to develop his PC.
I think it's a side effect of a game system that, for the first time ever, is really good a developing PCs.
for me it has always been both. Going back to playing Ad&d in junior high, what my character could do was important to me. Because of the adventure is awesome, but my character sucks, them i am participating in it less. That is true now as it was then for me.
And i can assure you, gaining experience and treasure has always been a motivator in the game. That pull has always been part of it. It just wasnt the whole pull, as for most now, it isnt the whole pull. The idea then and now is to have a balance between the two.
I don't think the games changed all the much in terms of leveling up. Just in the older edition you had fewer options if you weren't a caster. Caster got spells where non caster just got better at what they did but little changed.
Of course back in the AD&D days getting 1 better THAC0 and more hit points was the goal but by the time you got to 7th level the leveling slowed so much that all you had was the adventures. I remember playing 3-4 modules before leveling up once with a Ranger at 10th level. So with 3E and PF the scale for leveling up is pretty even. You level up after X encounters roughly. Just in on AP you might level up 2-3 times.
How can you have an awesome encounter without awesome characters?
"That encounter we had the other day was awesome! They had orcs swinging across lawa on pendulums! They were awesome orcs! So awesome?"
"Cool! And then what did you do?"
"We screamed like little girls, wet ourselves, and ran away. We're only commoners, you know!"
Or, an only slightly less craptacular answer:
"We hit them with our longswords till they died."
Now, awesome characters doesn't necessarily mean 1000 new abilities, but Pathfinder is level-based. Its predecessor game, D&D, has always been level-based. If you have levels you have the goal to obtain them, in order to become more powerful and be able to conquer more difficult challenges.
Things might have been more boring on the character sheets back in 1e, where the fighting man only got better chances to hit, but it was about the leveling even then.
Plus, for me, RPGs have always been about what I can do in that fantasy world first and foremost. What the rest of the world can do is not irrelevant, but the most important thing is to be able to perform feats of heroism.
I think the 50% character and 50% adventure is a good equation though. Pre 3e games had so many "dead" levels where all you would gain would be hp or maybe some spells or even a new ability if you were of a specific class, but it always felt pretty pointless. I still had a blast playing in those games, but once 3e came along and had more things to "look forward" to as you level, I fell in love with that. Like W E Ray said, its finally good at developing PCs, and with feats and nonobscure skills you can really tailor your character to how you like them. All I see are improvements with how its going, and I feel that there is nothing wrong with either point of view, in regards to looking forward to leveling or the adventure. I don't feel that the sole purpose is to level your character; for me that feels somewhat empty and I recall many sessions where I looked forward to both adventure and leveling/planning my leveling path.
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How can you have an awesome encounter without awesome characters?
"That encounter we had the other day was awesome! They had orcs swinging across lawa on pendulums! They were awesome orcs! So awesome?"
"Cool! And then what did you do?"
"We screamed like little girls, wet ourselves, and ran away. We're only commoners, you know!"Or, an only slightly less craptacular answer:
"We hit them with our longswords till they died."Now, awesome characters doesn't necessarily mean 1000 new abilities, but Pathfinder is level-based. Its predecessor game, D&D, has always been level-based. If you have levels you have the goal to obtain them, in order to become more powerful and be able to conquer more difficult challenges.
Things might have been more boring on the character sheets back in 1e, where the fighting man only got better chances to hit, but it was about the leveling even then.
Plus, for me, RPGs have always been about what I can do in that fantasy world first and foremost. What the rest of the world can do is not irrelevant, but the most important thing is to be able to perform feats of heroism.
Kaeoss, you always keep the conversation simple and to the point. However, I must disagree with the original poster on the versatility of 4e and the character options 4e gives. A mage is a mage is a mage and they all are almost exactly alike in almost every way. It is what rought me to pathfinder, and to think the 4e offers options to perform such great feats of heroism is inconcievable to me.
Your right in the leveling aspect. 2e was the last version that made you feel that you earned a level, and the xp required to go up to the next level is simulated by the medium and long xp track offered by pathfinder. However, even with taking that into acount, I find the player base for the long xp track to be few and far between. The 50%/50% rp/leveling aspect of character development is rare at best, atleast in the dallas fortworth area, which sports 1.5 million people and has lots of gamers.
CC
A mage is a mage is a mage and they all are almost exactly alike in almost every way. It is what rought me to pathfinder, and to think the 4e offers options to perform such great feats of heroism is inconcievable to me.
I would definitely disagree with that statement, having played both games.
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How can you have an awesome encounter without awesome characters?
"That encounter we had the other day was awesome! They had orcs swinging across lawa on pendulums! They were awesome orcs! So awesome?"
"Cool! And then what did you do?"
"We screamed like little girls, wet ourselves, and ran away. We're only commoners, you know!"Or, an only slightly less craptacular answer:
"We hit them with our longswords till they died."Now, awesome characters doesn't necessarily mean 1000 new abilities, but Pathfinder is level-based. Its predecessor game, D&D, has always been level-based. If you have levels you have the goal to obtain them, in order to become more powerful and be able to conquer more difficult challenges.
Things might have been more boring on the character sheets back in 1e, where the fighting man only got better chances to hit, but it was about the leveling even then.
Plus, for me, RPGs have always been about what I can do in that fantasy world first and foremost. What the rest of the world can do is not irrelevant, but the most important thing is to be able to perform feats of heroism.
I personally believe that one makes the other better.
Having great characters lead to great adventures, and great adventures lead to great characters. I don't think it matters if there are 10 options or a million, the person will get out of the game what they want and enjoy it none the less.
Kaeoss,
I must have the most difficult name on the boards :)
you always keep the conversation simple and to the point. However, I must disagree with the original poster on the versatility of 4e and the character options 4e gives.
First, I like how you get from lauding my conversation technique to disagreeing with the claim that 4e has great versatility.
Second, I don't disagree with you there. Versatility did not seem to be a "design goal" there.
Your right in the leveling aspect. 2e was the last version that made you feel that you earned a level, and the xp required to go up to the next level is simulated by the medium and long xp track offered by pathfinder. However, even with taking that into acount, I find the player base for the long xp track to be few and far between.
It might be that people have become less patient and more eager to get to the next level.
I do think that part of the issue is the change in the gaming circumstances: I often hear about people who used to play "in the good old days" when they were going to school/university, weren't married, didn't have children, didn't have 40+hours/week jobs, and so on. Back in that Golden Age of roleplaying, they had all the time in the world, could play several times a week, sometimes all day long.
But these days, those same people do have wives/husbands, and children, and jobs, and other responsibilities, and may have moved away from the old homestead, and only find time to play once a week, for a couple of hours (maybe not even that often).
So back in the good old days, they didn't care that they had to put hours and hours of game time into it before they reached the next level - they would put those hours and hours of game time into the game each week (and some people had veritable gaming marathons in the summer, where they played for hours each day every day), so they levelled up fairly often. If you played that way with something akin to the fast advancement track, you could probably get one AP done every week.
But today, with the little time life leaves people to play the game, many only get one level-up a month, maybe two. Change that to a slower XP track and you can write down your character and then sell the books, since you won't need it again for a couple of years. (slight exaggeration).
Beyond that, I get to play about 1.5 times a week, and I love the fast track. I'd take a faster one if there was one. I don't mind going through campaigns quickly (not that this happens), as I have so many ideas and character concepts floating in my head that I could play for years at my current pace without a single new sourcebook to tickle my old creative bone.
Its been a long time since I looked at any 2e stuff, and I don't remember it very well. I seem to recall, however, that it blitzed you through the first couple levels at about the same rate you do now, and then it seemed ot slow down in the 4-10 range and kept you there for a while. The game seemed designed for those levels, since afterwards non-humans had issues leveling. Levels were bland for most people then, so it wasn't really a focus. Your increases in power came from the cool loot that you picked up, and so there was more of a focus on it and making sure the magic items were cool.
Now, I think magic items have gotten a lot blander but classes have gotten much more interesting. I love looking through the old Magic Item Encyclopedias for interesting items to include. They tend to inspire creative solutions to problems. Classes now provide a lot of the variation that GMs used to dole out with the magic items, and players can select them. This transfer of power resulted in increased emphisis on character building. I don't think it changed much of what you see when your at the table, but I think it changed attitudes between games.
Another thing was that classes leveled at different rates, so you would have had some people with the same experience, but different levels. Fighters were very good overall throughout their advancement, but spellcasters, wizards (or magic users) in particular were slower to gain power but once they reached a certain level, were paid back for their earlier difficulties by becoming the most versatile and possibly more powerful. It made sense, but I'm glad its not that extreme in Pathfinder or 3e anymore and non-existant in 4e.
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Amael makes a good point for Magic-Users; they leveled so slowly compared to everyone else that, even though they were the class that got something every level, they leveled less often.
Thus the argument that Magic-Users have always gotten something at levelling holds less water.
But for all other PCs it just seems like the best new boon would be hit points, a few % points for your Thief Skills or maybe an improvement to your ThAC0 (or you get to attack 3 times every 2 rounds instead of 1-1). Maybe every few years a Save would get better. Now there's SO much more.
I stick with my 50%-50% generalization earlier.
From my memories in the 80s with 1E and then my 90s 2E experiences, conversations were mostly about the adventures, the NPCs and the encounters that somehow we got through miraculously because so-and-so managed to do such-and-such and wasn't that crazy!?
For the last ten years it's nothing for some Players to spend much of a session considering what Feat they're gonna choose next level or that they're looking at the Complete Scoundrel, perusing a couple PrCs that they may take a level in soon; all they gotta do is put 2 more Skills in such-and-such.
In my first 20 years of gaming I never saw anything like that.
Now, well, I think it's 50/50.
. . . .
And you can't listen to what Chaos-Boy says, not only is he Chaotic (rolls eyes at the silliness), but you can count the times he's actually had something good to say and you'd still have a few hairs left on your head to count with.
Amael makes a good point for Magic-Users; they leveled so slowly compared to everyone else that, even though they were the class that got something every level, they leveled less often.
In earlier editions, I always played a cleric so I got the best of both worlds (new spells on a regular basis + fast level progression).
For the last ten years it's nothing for some Players to spend much of a session considering what Feat they're gonna choose next level or that they're looking at the Complete Scoundrel, perusing a couple PrCs that they may take a level in soon; all they gotta do is put 2 more Skills in such-and-such.
I see that sometimes. I also saw some characters being pre-planned from the very start (with a piece of paper that lists what spells, feats etc the character would get at X level). But I've also seen people who level up, look at what they can do, do it, and move on. Or a mix of all of the above.
And you can't listen to what Chaos-Boy says, not only is he Chaotic (rolls eyes at the silliness)
Which is my first advantage, because I think for myself.
It makes sense, though that you're not used to seeing people taking a lot of time considering their next feat - you're used to be told what feats, and spells, and skills, and everything to "choose".
but you can count the times he's actually had something good to say and you'd still have a few hairs left on your head to count with.
Considering that the average head has millions of individual hairs and I have just over 10.000 posts, that means I say hundreds of good things in every post. That is impressive even for me!
Didn't know you were such a fanboi!
I'm bald
Well, horny boy, your picture says otherwise. You know lying is unlawful.
Plus, saying that when you start bald (0 hairs) and then subtract some hairs, you suddenly have some left, is illogical. It's something I expect to hear from a Protean, not a little devil-worshipper.
I'm afraid I have to report you to the imp that is your superior.