| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Pathfinder is not a refined, carefully mastered work of art. It's a polished up version of 3.5 that Paizo were forced to release so as to avoid going out of business as Wizards ripped the carpet out from under their feet.
I couldn't agree with this more.
Though personally, I'd go farther, and say Pathfinder simply fails to solve any of the fundamental problems it inherited from 3.5. Paizo was incredibly savvy to recognize and exploit the niche created by WotC. At that time, it was largely a question of survival, and they've done much better than I ever believed possible. But I think they've ridden the "disgruntled 3..5 fan" wave just about as far as it is going to carry them.
Thankfully, Paizo has built up enough of a customer base and market presence that they can afford to do their own thing. I'm not saying they should turn Pathfinder into Fate (or D&D 5E), but Pathfinder has some real problems that need solving. I frankly don't see how anyone who has run a few high level combats could possibly be unaware of some of them.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Paizo need to sell things. It's not just about the game, it's about publishing and selling additional material to keep the power on and the printers running, and eventually Pathfinder is going to start feeling old and outdated - to many I know, that's already happened. For those who don't want a new edition... you don't actually need to throw away your bookshelf of hardcovers. I know people who still play 3.5. I know people who still play 2nd edition AD&D. I know people who still play 1st edition AD&D. The books don't vanish just because new ones aren't produced in that system.
How many do you know? How easy is it to get a new group started? The network effect is a powerful drive to the current system and powerful deterrent to old systems.
The network effect is a powerful drive to the current system and powerful deterrent to old systems.
Correct. But eventually, when releasing new material one reaches the point of diminishing returns. I'd argue that Pathfinder is well past that point. In fact, what I've read of Ultimate intrigue, much of it actually makes the game worse (that is, provides negative marginal utility). YMMV, of course.
Of course when -- and I do think it's "when," rather than "if" -- Paizo releases a new edition, the trick will be to get the majority of the player-base to follow (which WotC catastrophically failed to do with 4E...hence the runaway success of Pathfinder).
|
Unfortunately that's a bit kiboshed considering it got confirmed Return is between Rise and I think Jade Regent chronology wise. Be awkward to reset stuff at that point.
Really? Interesting. I haven't heard much more than that announcement, and as I just came from a discussion similar to that here, I thought immediately that this might be another hint pointing at an eventual 2nd edition. Here in this thread, I was merely joking around.
But I think they've ridden the "disgruntled 3..5 fan" wave just about as far as it is going to carry them.
Dunno. I mean I stopped being disgruntled quite some time ago, but I'm still a very big fan of 3.X/PF, even with all the problems that includes. Meaning that if Paizo makes a complete system overhaul that somehow leads to the system not feeling as this kind of system anymore, it might mean that I don't like it too much. Maybe I even dislike it enough that I wouldn't want to use it.
And I say that as someone who actually advocates for them to make a new edition.
|
The issue here is that I don't think Pathfinder's problems are at high level play, they are at low level play. Play before level 7 or 8 isn't much fun, because spellcasters don't have enough spells to be able to use at least a minor spell every round of combat, and the martials don't have their iterative attacks yet. And Starfinder just made at least the second part of this so that you can never get into the sweet spot, because they eliminated iteratives.
Another perspective I want to share is that I appreciate that Pathfinder isn't some polished work of art that was made all at one time. The best stories aren't just written by one person, they took centuries of each generation tweaking and refining what the previous generations had passed on to them. The same with the best games, such as chess, where the rules were slowly refined over centuries. I prefer the feel of an RPG which has grown and developed over time; it feels much more organic. A few rule contradictions is a tiny price to pay for the richness that can only come from a game that has slowly developed and changed in this way.
Also, people can't agree on what the problems with Pathfinder are, so how could they agree on a solution? As an example, some people think Vancian casting is a problem. I think spontaneous casting is the problem. There's no way to make both sides happy.
Also, people can't agree on what the problems with Pathfinder are, so how could they agree on a solution? As an example, some people think Vancian casting is a problem. I think spontaneous casting is the problem. There's no way to make both sides happy.
My bet would be that a good majority of people agree that, say, high level combat in Pathfinder is problematic, and would prefer that it be improved. Of course I have no way of proving that specific point, but if we take a lack of perfect consensus to mean we should throw up our hands and say "welp, best to do nothing!", then very few things would ever change.
Hopefully never, or not 'til after Eclipse Phase games are easier to find.
Starfinder is terrible.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If I had to guess paizo strategy it is thus:
1. Experiment with your sci-fi RPG with new game rules and business strategy. Your hardcore PF fan base guarantee solvent initial sales. Make this a wild success.
2. Business as normal for the PF gravy train until it stops making a profit. Stay at this stage for as long as possible to maintain good will.
3. Released a CRB unchained that collates and streamlines rules while maintaining crunch. Continue new material based on the unchained assumptions. PF.5
4. If still not profitable and SF is a success. Shutdown PF production in it's entirety and level with the fans that it just draining money.
5. When SF starts getting crusty, start developing PF 2.0. A complete re-imagining of a rules heavy RPG. Release PF2.0 as per step 1.
|
|
I don't agree with Throne; so far, Starfinder looks quite interesting, as long as it's seen as its own game, not a replacement for Pathfinder. Just like reading Tolkien and Jane Austin are very different, meeting different needs, Starfinder and Pathfinder are very different games, meeting very different needs for the same players. It's just when you start talking about wanting to replace the gorgeous complexity of Pathfinder with the austere simplicity of Starfinder that I start to get worried.
Jane Austin is also terrible ;)
Hopefully never, or not 'til after Eclipse Phase games are easier to find.
Starfinder is terrible.
"Starfinder is terrible" is a pretty sweeping statement.
There are definitely aspects of it that I'm not sold on (splitting AC, stamina points, etc.), but some (killing iterative attacks...dead) which I am. I would definitely like to see the latter make it to Pathfinder.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I don't agree with Throne; so far, Starfinder looks quite interesting, as long as it's seen as its own game, not a replacement for Pathfinder. Just like reading Tolkien and Jane Austin are very different, meeting different needs, Starfinder and Pathfinder are very different games, meeting very different needs for the same players. It's just when you start talking about wanting to replace the gorgeous complexity of Pathfinder with the austere simplicity of Starfinder that I start to get worried.
Not really arguing with you here, just more than a little boggled by someone characterizing a 500+ page RPG as "austerely simple."
Austerely simple until a few years from now as the source books pile up and it becomes an overly bloated dinosaur. :)
Yup. Give them a few years. Which makes it seem particularly odd to present Starfinder as a stark contrast to Pathfinder. They're both pretty rules-heavy as RPGs go.
I don't agree with Throne; so far, Starfinder looks quite interesting, as long as it's seen as its own game, not a replacement for Pathfinder. Just like reading Tolkien and Jane Austin are very different, meeting different needs, Starfinder and Pathfinder are very different games, meeting very different needs for the same players. It's just when you start talking about wanting to replace the gorgeous complexity of Pathfinder with the austere simplicity of Starfinder that I start to get worried.Not really arguing with you here, just more than a little boggled by someone characterizing a 500+ page RPG as "austerely simple."
It's a much lower number if you just count the good pages......
By that measure: FATAL: shortest RPG ever!Not really arguing with you here, just more than a little boggled by someone characterizing a 500+ page RPG as "austerely simple."It's a much lower number if you just count the good pages......
What, when Racial Holy War is on the table?
But do you need a flow chart to grapple someone?Austerely simple until a few years from now as the source books pile up and it becomes an overly bloated dinosaur. :)Yup. Give them a few years. Which makes it seem particularly odd to present Starfinder as a stark contrast to Pathfinder. They're pretty rules-heavy as RPGs go.
Or more importantly: Do you need a spreadsheet to handle mid-level characters in combat?
Most of my gaming groups transitioned from paper to laptops for character sheets fairly quickly during 3.5, as the combination of buffs that amassed in a large and caster heavy party were bogging down play to try and handle manually.
I like the non-stacking nature of Starfinder, though I feel they took it a little too far. A feat should stack with a magic item at least.
Hmmm..... Considering the changes to the RPG-line lately and the in-built setting in Starfinder, PF 2.0 would probably have Golarion built into it. Yet another reason why I probably wouldn't purchase such a product.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The issue here is that I don't think Pathfinder's problems are at high level play, they are at low level play. Play before level 7 or 8 isn't much fun, because spellcasters don't have enough spells to be able to use at least a minor spell every round of combat, and the martials don't have their iterative attacks yet. And Starfinder just made at least the second part of this so that you can never get into the sweet spot, because they eliminated iteratives.
As far as iteratives are concerned, I feel the opposite. In high level Pathfinder, most melee characters are near-worthless unless they're standing still - they're heavily dependent on enemies choosing to stand next to them. At level 4 you can still move and attack without penalty, which makes combat more interesting. And it flows a lot quicker because you don't have to roll so many dice to resolve an attack round.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The network effect is a powerful drive to the current system and powerful deterrent to old systems.
I don't know how relevant this is as a data point, but I recently failed to get a Pathfinder game going because almost everyone I spoke to was more interested in playing 5E. The "all my existing books are worthless" problem can happen even without a Pathfinder 2.0.
I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do it reminds me of 1st edition without being a mess. Its over simplified for me but it works well for new players.
I refuse to even make a character for D&D.
I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.
As Vidmaster said, it is simple and very easy to pick up and play - far more so than Pathfinder.
Is it oversimplified? Well... yes and no.
In terms of player material, the 5th Edition PHB is a good starting point, but nowhere near a complete system. It is in dire need of more archetypes first and foremost, a little bit of breadth to its magic, some additional background options and more magic items.
In terms of GM material... I was extremely disappointed. Considering they delayed the release of the DMG and MM specifically to try and ensure they were all top quality, the fact that there is an immense lack of cohesion between the three, and a severe shortfall in tools for the GM to use (except for "just make stuff up as you go") pretty much turned me off the system. At least while GMing.
I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.Because people have different tastes and interests in RPGs?
So it's not to your liking, so what?
No need to dog pile.
I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.
Dunno where you find a ste up... the mechanics of 4e work smoothly enough, even if HeroLab is an invaluable help, and it lets you build characters to specs, like you want them, I have much more difficulties creating characters I feel like playing in 5e, the cookie cutter effect is even worse... and I fail to find any charm to the advantage/disadvantage mechanics.
I refuse to even make a character for D&D.
a specific edition in mind or is your dislike brand wide?
I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.Dunno where you find a ste up... the mechanics of 4e work smoothly enough, even if HeroLab is an invaluable help, and it lets you build characters to specs, like you want them, I have much more difficulties creating characters I feel like playing in 5e, the cookie cutter effect is even worse... and I fail to find any charm to the advantage/disadvantage mechanics.
See I don't feel that way at all. Its got to be a preference plus whatever you started with kind of situation.
5 edition, that's the technical name for it, supposedly to combat the edition wars, or cover up the fact they'll just release a new edition every five years.
Take your pick.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Starfinder is a nice rules set but I don't want Pathfinder to go the same way.
Given that the other responses were different and still generally pretty dismissive of 5E (it's crap, simple...turned me off, over simplified...for new players), I don't think it was dog piling at all.No need to dog pile.I don't understand why 5E is so popular, when it came out I looked at it and wasn't impressed at all. I mean obviously it is a step up from 4E but that is not saying much.Because people have different tastes and interests in RPGs?
So it's not to your liking, so what?
"So it's not to your liking, so what?" You don't find that a bit over the top? You didn't give a reason to like it you instead made a comment to infer his opinion was meaningless. This doesn't help you convince others it just appears as rude. Maybe you didn't mean it to be I don't know context is easily lost in text. That is how I read it anyways.
I find 5e too easy to break. It makes for a decent RPG, but the game side is heavily flawed and depends far too much on the GM writing whole segments of the rules. For example, the skill rules basically do not exist.
Starfinder actually took some of this. For example imprecise perception still has the +1/10ft DC rule (see environments), but the visual perception rules do not have that. It's up to the GM to impose distance penalty as appropriate (which basically means never). But you can see the sun in SF, while such a feat is impossible in PF.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
5E is a fantastic game. It drops a lot of the clunkiness of 3.5/PF and does away with many annoying elements of the ruleset AND preserves the good old D&D feel at the same time.
My only two problems with it is that the amount of setting/adventure material is nowhere close to what Paizo puts out AND there are far fewer options for customizing your character.
A game that has the 5E elegance of core mechanics while having at the same time the 3.5/PF amount of classes/archetypes/domains/elements/orders/mysteries etc. (but not necessarily feats and spells) will be a winner for me.
I think that's going to be a tough sell. Right now PF complexity and clunkiness are a feature to a lot of people and what exactly differentiates PF from 5E. Paizo goes chasing the simple system route and they would have to make the better system.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
OK, the reason 5e is popular will not register to most Forum-Folk. You see, for a lot of people, apparently a growing percentage of them, Pathfinder's ever expanding war-gamey crunchiness gets in the way of "fun" for them. This is exacerbated by wargame style-zealots and rules lawyers who happily trash sessions because of their Drive to be Right. When people reasonably propose that Pathfinder can be played in a less "crunchy" manner, they are often told that they should be playing another system.
Guess what? This advice is being taken, to the Pathfinder™ producers' and players' detriments.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I disagree that crunch is the problem. It's when the crunch is too complicated for the average player to process while drinking that it becomes a problem.
Not all players may prefer rules heavy RPGs but a heavy rules set is a safety net for GMs. If the session goes poorly, blaming the rules or a lack of following the rules sits better with many GMs. A GM can always house rule, but in a rules heavy system, it is optional. You don't have to make up as many rules and then be called a bad GM because the rules you were forced to make up ended up being bad.
5e is well marketed and easier to get into with an updated rules set. SF is a bit harder to get a player to understand, but the GM isn't going to have to make up as many rules as they would in 5e.
PF does not have the gameflow enhancements of SF nor the more tightly controlled accuracy progression that will allow less optimized players sit at the same table as full optimizers without feeling like trash. (It took me 5 full days to read the SF crb in it's entirety with comprehension and I did it like a second job. I really doubt that many/any here have given SF enough time to back their judgments. I still see another week of work before I'm comfortable in making a proper theory craft judgment)
I understand the crunch problem, I have what I regard as a serious PF Library (CRB, APG, UC, UM, ACG, ARG, UE, plus dreamscarred's Psionics unleached just cause I like psionics, and a couple short things like Dwarves of Golarion)... yet, whenever I read stuff about builds, I have a 98% likelihood of stumbling on some feat or class that's in a book I don't have, a large part of it Golarion specific,... I mean, I don't even have fair knowledge of all the classes, archetypes and feats in the books I have, how the eff do you keep up with all the additional material?
I understand the crunch problem, I have what I regard as a serious PF Library (CRB, APG, UC, UM, ACG, ARG, UE, plus dreamscarred's Psionics unleached just cause I like psionics, and a couple short things like Dwarves of Golarion)... yet, whenever I read stuff about builds, I have a 98% likelihood of stumbling on some feat or class that's in a book I don't have, a large part of it Golarion specific,... I mean, I don't even have fair knowledge of all the classes, archetypes and feats in the books I have, how the eff do you keep up with all the additional material?
I'm not sure it is a matter of keeping up with the additional material and more that someone hears about a class/archetype/feat/etc from a review or forum post and researches that alone, combining it with a build that they came up with or tripped over on the internet. I've seen a number of these build threads where people aren't quite sure where the item in their build came from exactly, but they found it on their build program or one of the online sites and so on.
As far as drinking and rules go, Rhedyn, I offer that players should pick one or the other to focus on. I've often found that players that are drinking find a lot of things too difficult: the right dice, how to move their miniatures, role playing coherently and so on. Rules are about 8th on the list. :)
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
OK, the reason 5e is popular will not register to most Forum-Folk. You see, for a lot of people, apparently a growing percentage of them, Pathfinder's ever expanding war-gamey crunchiness gets in the way of "fun" for them. This is exacerbated by wargame style-zealots and rules lawyers who happily trash sessions because of their Drive to be Right. When people reasonably propose that Pathfinder can be played in a less "crunchy" manner, they are often told that they should be playing another system.
Guess what? This advice is being taken, to the Pathfinder™ producers' and players' detriments.
Exactly. Pathfinder did have its moment, because that advice took you pretty much nowhere before 5E came along.
But now you can play a leaner, lighter Real Deal complete with beholders, Mordenkainen and Blibdoolpoolp. You can't run an expanding business based on people who have emotional problem with WotC, people who enjoy 3-hour long encounters, people who play with their four pals from high school since 1978 and don't see the "we really need new people in this tiny hobby" issue and people who keep talking about linear Fighters but what they truly, really enjoy about the game is playing 15 minute adventure day Wizards because they know every spell in the game and that makes them feel like WINNING.
If you do that, you'll just slowly watch the freight train of newbie-friendly D&D run you over. The best thing you can do is first, start another train on a track where WotC has nothing on you (done) and two, make Pathfinder more approachable.