Goblin Squad Member
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As a possible aid to any budding evangelists out there:
Here's my attempt at a pitch letter I sent out to my D&D group tonight. If it in anyway saves you some time and effort to copy/modify this for your group/guild/gaming buds, have at it.
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There's a new sandbox game coming out, Pathfinder Online, that I think would be a lot of fun for us, and it would be prudent now to think through how we want to position ourselves for the game, and early access to the game. Quick summary for anyone I haven't talked to at length about this:
-It's a D&D game, using the Pathfinder D20 OGL system. That means a lot of familiar stuff (barbarians, rogues, sorcerers, turn undead, smite evil, backstab, etc). Alignment is a metaphysical property, not a moral one. That is, your motivations are irrelevant. Evil=murder, assassination, that unholy sword consecrated to Azmodeus, the spell create undead, etc.
-It's a sandbox, not a theme park. Instead of farming mobs, finding quests, and beating dungeons/raids, the players make the content. They harvest resources, fight back competing monsters, craft, explore, build settlements, nations...and compete with other player communities.
-Open world PvP. Essentially high security safe areas near the three starting areas, a narrow middle range of limited protection/danger, and the wide world where anything can happen. If someone murders you you can kill them back with no consequences, and you can hire bounty hunters to get them back infinite times.
-Everything is player crafted. Harvesting is more like setting up a camp and then keeping the workers safe while they mine/harvest, NOT like your toon whacking a rock.
-Skill based, not class based. If you want to fill the role of a cleric, you train in cleric skills (divine spellcasting, heavy armor, turn undead, etc). If you want to mix and match skills you can, but if you mix roles (multi-class) you are locked out of the singleclass capstone ability (for example, for druids Wildshape at will).
-THERE IS NO GRIND. You gain skill in whatever you choose to train at a set rate whether you play or not. It will take each of us exactly 2.5 years to get to the capstone of a role (e.g. 20th level) no matter how much we play. Joe may have more money, may get more stuff, because he plays 25 hours a week and I play 10, but when we are one, we are both the exact same level of base character power.
-Mass combat and warfare are going to be designed features. So instead of a bunch of people in a melee, you might have a squad of people who train together, and thus have huge combat bonuses because they act cohesively. Also, there will be battle leadership skills--my paladin will likely be a battle leader, much less powerful in single combat, but a bad-ass leading a squad or platoon.
Here's the full blog for more detail:
https://goblinworks.com/blog/
They have had a Kickstarter, raised $300k, and used that money to make a tech demo of the game in three months using middle-ware they lisenced rather than developed (saving tons of time). The demo showed investors that they could put in 3d art, have high quality visual rendering effects in the client, have an AI for mobs, have client machines connect to a server host, have character models, and a few other things. It was enough to secure funding for a 2016 release.
They want to make that faster, and have started a new kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-a-fantasy- sandbox-mmo/posts/358338?ref=activity
If they raise $1M in 48 days they'll have early access in 2014 summer. It's a beta, except no wipes--we'd be playing our permanent characters, and helping build the game from the ground up in 500 person a month waves. I bought in at the Crowdforger Buddy level--I get two copies of the game, two 4month subscriptions, and early access in the order signed up (I signed up among the first 30 or so). So basically I have Brittney and I in the game. If you guys look this over and decide it is worth getting in on, and wanted to kick in $82 each, we could get a guild membership: six games, six 4mo subscriptions, and six early access slots.
Let me know what you guys think.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wait. Some of this info appears to be unconfirmed. I've never heard this game will be running the d20 system???
Indeed, that part there is an extreme misrepresentation, a more accurate statement would be something like
It is heavily based off of the pathfinder campaign setting, Goblinworks has said exactly the opposite when it comes to the OGL D20 mechanics. The game will not be using them, though some of the mechanics it is using will be based on them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-It's a D&D game, set in the Pathfinder World. That means a lot of familiar stuff (barbarians, rogues, sorcerers, turn undead, smite evil, backstab, etc). Alignment is a metaphysical property, not a moral one. That is, your motivations are irrelevant. Evil=murder, assassination, that unholy sword consecrated to Azmodeus, the spell create undead, etc.
Using D20 will only lead to more confusion, I understood what you meant, but not everyone will.
-THERE IS NO HEAVY GRIND. You gain skill in whatever you choose to train at a set rate whether you play or not. The goal is to create a 2.5 year minimum time before people start reaching the top of the archetype skills. Joe may have more money, may get more stuff, because he plays 25 hours a week and I play 10, but when we are one, we are both the exact same level of base character power. And the game doesn't stop when you reach the end of your archetype, you are still able to train in anything you want.
No one ever said no grinding, you may very well have to go kill a hundred enemies of some type.
2.5 years is not when everyone will 'capstone' or get the 20th badge, it could vary well be 4 years for the majority of players.Not sure how to reword it, but we haven't been told that a 10hr/week and a 25hr/week person will be equals, every time we talk about balance like this Ryan never confirms it, and usually hints to EvE where new players can serve a purpose, but are not as powerful as the older players. The player who plays more will probably be more wealthy, and wealth has been used by Ryan as one of the factors that determine how powerful a character is.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Valkenr,
On the first item you have have the gist of it--this was a shorthand way to get across that there are going to be concepts in the game familiar to my D&D group--it would be dense to misinterpret that as "this will have the same mechanics as TT."
On the "grind" issue, based on what's in the blog and Ryan's comments here, there won't be a grind in the sense I understand the word as used in MMOs. We may have to do certain tasks as part of our path, but we won't have to grind through rats/skeletons/NPC quests in a race/slog to the level cap. My D&D group has tried and failed several times to play MMOs, and always failed because of the grind differential. Essentially two of the guys find grinding very rewarding, so they log 30 hours a week. Me and another bud can put up with it kinda, and we can grind like 15-20 hours a week. And one of the wives and my gf, who are only interested in doing something with us socially/get zero satisfaction from "ding," will log like 5-10 hours a week. And no matter what rules we make about alts, when you can play your main etc., after a while we end up with a level spread from 20-50 and we can't play as a group anymore. That's what I mean when I talk about grinding, and the problem of grind differential.
I do very much appreciate your last two revision sentences--I wish I could edit my little template.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Valkenr,
On the first item you have have the gist of it--this was a shorthand way to get across that there are going to be concepts in the game familiar to my D&D group--it would be dense to misinterpret that as "this will have the same mechanics as TT."
I wouldn't say it is dense to misinterpret it as that, considering that is what it means. The "D20 OGL System" specifically pertains to the mechanics, yes the classes are covered under OGL, as are the mechanics for them etc... While paizo is far more free with the OGL, in the case of WOTC's implimentation of it, the portions WOTC released under OGL are the exact oposite of what goblinworks is going to use, (IE WOTC released the rules, mechanics, abilities, combat system etc... and did not release the setting and lore.)
The very phrase "D20 System" makes one think to the dice roll hit/miss mechanics, of which they also wouldn't be the first game to use if they were using it (DDO actually shows a dice roll when you attack)