"Tabletop D&D Has Lost Its Way" Says Pathfinder Video Game Exec

Feargus Urquhart, one of the execs from Obsidian Entertainment, which is behind an upcoming Pathfinder-themed video game, told Polygon why the company chose to go with Paizo rather than WotC for tabletop fantasy inspired games. "One of the reasons we actually went with Pathfinder was ... how do you say it? I'll just say it: We were having a hard time figuring out how to move forward with Dungeons and Dragons." The issue, he says, is that "D&D is a part of Wizards of the Coast and WotC is a part of Hasbro" and that he would "love to see D&D be bought by someone and become what it was before... Become TSR again."

Of course, TSR went bankrupt, so I'm not sure wishing that on somebody is a kindness.

Urquhart is a long-time D&D video game exec, having worked on games like Neverwinter Nights 2; he points out that "I'm probably one of the people who has one of the most electronic D&D games that they've worked on". Now, of course, his company has moved on to Paizo's Pathfinder.

The upcoming Obsidian video games will be based on the Pathfinder games - specifically a tablet game based on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, due in the next few months. The studio is, of course, known to tabletop RPG fans for D&D games like Neverwinter Nights 2. Urquhart did hint at non-card-game based projects, saying that "We're thinking about how can we take traditional RPG stuff and put it on the tablet. No one has solved it really."

You can read the short interview here.

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[Ranes]

...the likely source of hit points is naval wargames where it makes a lot of sense for ships not to be destroyed by single hits and for repairs to restore the damage they've taken. Which specific one it might hve been is hard to say…

Here's Arneson's recollection of events.

...but systems which operate that way predate D&D by a generation or more...

That's true.

 

[pemerton]

if copyright is allowed to cover the things a limited-time patent should be covering, innovation is pretty much destroyed, if not put in a chokehold.

I'm certainly not here to pass judgment on the merits (or otherwise) of US IP laws!

However, i could swear i remember some mini wargames that had "partial damage" to units, and recovery of those units in later turns(spring, summer, fall, etc), but since i never had as much of an interest in wargames as rpgs, my knowledge is limited in rules history there - especially since Gary was involved in quite a few wargames too!

Campaign systems in wargames usually have some sort of mechanism to replace losses in units of troops, but the likely source of hit points is naval wargames where it makes a lot of sense for ships not to be destroyed by single hits and for repairs to restore the damage they've taken. Which specific one it might hve been is hard to say, but systems which operate that way predate D&D by a generation or more - Fletcher Pratt's wargame predates WW2, for example.

These examples aren't the same as hit points, though.

Like the campaign systems in wargames, recovery is via passage of ingame time, but recovery is of an individual's personal injury, not of a unit.

Like the naval systems, recovery is in respect of harm to an individual entity, but it is personal injury, not repairs to a machine.

Were there hit point mechanics in the distinctive RPG style - "hit points" or "life points" as a measure of individual well being which are restored by the passage of ingame time - before D&D? I don't know the pre-D&D boardgame scene anywhere near well enough to answer. Non-RPGs that do use hit points (like, say, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, which call them "Stamina"), post-date D&D.

 

[Bluenose]

I don't know of anything that works exactly like D&D-style hit points. I've seen discussion from wargaming journals of the 1960s and early 1970s where figure casualties would be rolled for to see what actually removed them from the field, with various options including wounds that would take (1d6 months) to recover from. Some talk about "hero" units/individuals and how to make them survive better on the battlefield and what the consequences should be if they are put out of the fight. A lot of things were being tried out, so it's hardly a surprise that some of them are echoed in a game written by people familiar with the wargaming scene of the time. A lot of other things - personality traits that influence behaviour - don't appear.

 

[TheSwartz]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/conten...Allows-a-DM-To-Run-The-Adventure#.VPOiX_nF83I

Looks dang good to me. Will have to see how it turns out, but apparently it's possible for other studios can also create cool D&D video games.

Now, that being said, there have also been a LOT of bad D&D games made... I hope this is more like Neverwinter Nights then something like TOEE