Pathfinder 1E Elephant in the room/thread Forked Thread: Pathfinder - sell me

[rounser]

In Irish myth bards supposedly had the power to make people sick just by saying negative things about them.

In combat, and with instant effect? Like the guy dying on the spot? Details like that kind of matter to suspension of disbelief (for some of us at least).

 

[Jack99]

The "warlord". Doesn't fit an adventuring party where there are no soldiers to order around, name not appropriate to level or definition of term "warlord", no D&D archetype except if we redefine D&D conceptually as no more than a skirmish wargame, undermines the independence of other PCs and the nature of the D&D hero and adventuring party by giving orders like they were underlings rather than peers, is magically wiser at the specialists role than the specialists, and is just plain a bad idea.

I was wondering how long it would take you to bring up the warlord.

 

[Dannager]

Why not? It doesn't let me tell the stories I want; the implied setting's all wrong, for starters, with an all-core grab bag that includes some seriously goofy PC races and at least one contrived class that doesn't fit the core. Then there's the implausible mundane abilities and the unmagical magic, clerics who hit to heal, one HP demons, guys who can kill you by insulting you, and "healing surges", all design conveniences that don't necessarily make sense in a story context.

I'm going to make a truly radical claim right now.

Not one of these things you mention above in any way would prevent you from telling the story you want to tell in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, if that same story could be told in any previous edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Not one.

 

[smug]

I assume you mean the Bard's "Vicious Mockery". I thought that was weird, too, until I learned that there's a mythological basis for it. In Irish myth bards supposedly had the power to make people sick just by saying negative things about them.

I don't think that finding mythological roots is going to make it taste right to people that don't otherwise like the taste of it.

 

[Dannager]

In combat, and with instant effect? Like the guy dying on the spot? Details like that kind of matter to suspension of disbelief (for some of us at least).

This betrays a very incomplete understanding of how powers in 4th Edition, hit points in 4th Edition, and the narrative in 4th Edition are intended to work.

From my post on the Paizo boards, imagine this as how Vicious Mockery might finish an enemy off:

The bard delivers a scathing insult, cutting to the very soul of his target. Already dealt a mortal injury from a previous attack, and clinging to battle only with what remains of his resolve, the target finally loses his will to fight on, succumbing to the bleeding wound he was dealt by the fighter only seconds earlier.

For an even better example, see Matthew Koebl's fiction later on in that thread.

 

[Dannager]

I don't think that finding mythological roots is going to make it taste right to people that don't otherwise like the taste of it.

No, but it ought to give them some pause to think about why they would choose to single out something like that which "doesn't make sense", when it has strong mythological roots, and is found in a game where people get back up from the dead, teleport across planes of existence, and vampires, mummies, dragons, goblins and giants all exist.

 

[smug]

This betrays a very incomplete understanding of how powers in 4th Edition, hit points in 4th Edition, and the narrative in 4th Edition are intended to work.

From my post on the Paizo boards, imagine this as how Vicious Mockery might finish an enemy off:

The bard delivers a scathing insult, cutting to the very soul of his target. Already dealt a mortal injury from a previous attack, and clinging to battle only with what remains of his resolve, the target finally loses his will to fight on, succumbing to the bleeding wound he was dealt by the fighter only seconds earlier.

Needing that lot to make the thing seem less daft isn't my cup of tea. But that's fair enough; it's just taste. For my taste, that's not how the elements you mention 'work' because that doesn't work for me; hit points, in particular, are bad enough in pre-4e D&D and I don't think that particular band-aid does any good. Again, fair enough, because it's just a matter of taste.

Entirely aside from the point of the thread, but I've never been as aware of the gulfs in the hobby as when talking about 4e v pre-4e, even going back to the old White Dwarf AD&D vs Runequest war on the letters page. Back then, I sort of felt that both sides had a point but now I find myself on one side.

NB: In your explanation, is the mortality of the fighter's blow not somehow dependent on the bard executing their own mockery, even though the fighter's blow happened before? Another example of why it's not my cup of tea, maybe, if I understood you right.

 

[RefinedBean]

The "warlord". Doesn't fit an adventuring party where there are no soldiers to order around, name not appropriate to level or definition of term "warlord", no D&D archetype except if we redefine D&D conceptually as no more than a skirmish wargame, undermines the independence of other PCs and the nature of the D&D hero and adventuring party by giving orders like they were underlings rather than peers, is magically wiser at the specialists role than the specialists, and is just plain a bad idea.

Yeah, them Warlords are just ruining the game.

Name not appropriate...maybe you haven't looked at the name Fighter? Every class in the game FIGHTS. They're being undermined by the Fighter's mere existence!

Any character played to be a complete jerk will negatively impact the game. This is not a function of the class chosen, this is a function of what the player does with the class. If the other characters don't want to take "orders" from the grizzled, battle-hardened war veteran, than either the group has problems or they'll have to figure out another way to make things work.

 

[Dannager]

NB: In your explanation, is the mortality of the fighter's blow not somehow dependent on the bard executing their own mockery, even though the fighter's blow happened before? Another example of why it's not my cup of tea, maybe, if I understood you right.

No, it's not. Because of the structure of narrative gameplay, a wound that you might otherwise have not considered lethal to the monster (in the storytelling sense) becomes lethal when it's clear that it would make a good story if it were - the idea of the fighter's wound being responsible for the monster's death, but the bard's mockery actually finishing him off is a compelling one to weave into your game's narrative.

Of course, you can always play up the magical angle of the bard's vicious mockery. It is, after all, dealing psychic damage using a magical implement. Though words are the vehicle to deliver the attack, it's just as harmful in an arcane way as if the warlock had tried to rip the target's mind asunder with visions of the Far Realm.

 

[James Jacobs]

So just to be perfectly clear, it's not the fact that the rules in 4th edition are different or that there's a "decency clause" in the GSL that won't let us "tell our stories the way we want to" that, honestly, was the main element that convinced us at Paizo that we were better off with 3.5/Pathfinder RPG. Rules are in large part irrelevant to story, and the fact that many are playing Pathifnder adventures with 4th edition rules is proof of that. Likewise, while we DO skew toward more mature content, we don't have to—we operated under the same "decency clause" with Dragon and Dungeon, after all, and were able to do pretty much everything we wanted to do there.

No, the real problem is the fact that the GSL prohibits you from redefining things. As I read the GSL, if you do a GSL product, you have to present goblins, succubi, eladrin, the Abyss, and everything else in the game in the way (both rules and flavor) that D&D presents it. We wouldn't have been able to redesign goblins the way we did in Pathfinder #1, nor would we have been able to make the changes to drow that we did in Second Darknss had we been using the GSL. THAT'S what we meant, really, when we said that it won't let us tell the stories the way we want.

Another part of the problem is that if we went with the GSL, we'd be handing a big chunk of our destiny back to WotC, since they can change or revoke or adjust the GSL whenever they want. That includes 4 to 10 or more years from now... the folk who control the GSL today will not remain the same folk (with the same desires and opinions) forever. It's not good business to base your entire publishing concern on a foundation that someone else controls and can change (or remove) at any time.

Furthermore, I can certainly say this: not being beholden to another master is incredibly liberating. The loss of the magazine licenses and then the loss of a supported and in-print rules set have caused an incredible amount of stress and worry here at Paizo. Both were things we had no control over, and when you have key underlying elements of a business that you have no control over, that's a recipe for doom. With the switch to Pathfinder RPG, Pazio is, for pretty much the first time, flying under its own control; we're free to succeed or fail on our own, without worry of having the rug yanked out from under us just as we're getting our footing. I'm pretty excited by that.