Would Paizo Make a Better Steward for Our Hobby?

[dd.stevenson]

When discussing the industry, it's fun to think about things that will never happen, like "What if Paizo owned D&D"?

EDIT: ...

EDIT the Second: ...

I think, though I'm not certain, that what you're really driving at is: "Given that D&D is the face of our hobby to the rest of the world, and the tone setter within our hobby, do you think we would be better off if someone else other than WotC were managing that brand?"

To which I would have to answer: I'm not certain, because my understanding is that the entire WotC management team responsible for D&D's performance over the last ten or so years has been fired in a career-ending way. And I'm completely uncertain as to the capabilities of the current D&D management team.

Ask me again in two years.

 

[Kinak]

Though "Pathfinder" was in development for a while before 4e came out, I'm led to believe by a bunch of comments made at the time that "Pathfinder" as it stood at that time was mostly a set of House Rules that Jason had written up for 3.5e and was using in his home games. I certainly got the impression that the company was leaning toward supporting 4e when they sent him there. After all, it was likely that most people would switch to a new edition and developing products to go with the new edition would make money.

Your timeline's a little off there.

He'd been working on "3.75" for a while. But, by the time you saw him, had already been tapped to work on "Mon Mothma," the production name for the Pathfinder RPG.

This article covers that year. Jason's section is "The Birth of a Roleplaying Game."

However, since they didn't like 4e when they tried it, they simply thought "Great, I'm not going to be playing this new D&D...what am I going to do now? Well, there's that set of house rules I've been working on to fix 3.5e. I guess we could publish those and just keep releasing adventures for 3.5e. Wait, maybe if I spend some extra time thinking about it, we could come up with even more house rules and just release a new PHB with all the bugs fixed. Let's do that." Which became Pathfinder.

You've got it right here, except for the order. They were already developing Pathfinder as a company by the time he went out there, then he played it and was glad that it looked like Pathfinder was the right call.

I certainly don't envy the position they were in and they certainly made the right decision for themselves. It just had a side effect of causing a larger rift in the community than there would have been without them.

That's a hard thing to say for sure. If we assume that most of the people playing Pathfinder now would have played 4e instead, you're probably right.

But it's really hard to say. Those people could be spread across half a dozen retroclones, arguably even worse, or they could still all be playing 3rd, which balances out, or anything in between.

For my part, I'd probably be playing Iron Heroes or nothing resembling D&D at all, so there certainly are people that would have moved further to the fringes if Pathfinder hadn't been created.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[gamerprinter]

I got into the hobby because there was already a community. I played my first game of Red Box D&D when I was 12 or somewhere around there. I liked it, but I only knew one person who played: my next door neighbor. I didn't like him very much so I never played again....until I was 15 and I found out people were playing D&D on BBSes. I found a BBS where there were 20 different games of D&D and other RPGs running in message boards. There were discussion groups for people who liked D&D. When I realized that this was something that people actually liked and played it felt like there were other people out there who liked the same things as I did.

I met my first real DM on my BBS. He paged me to ask if he could start a Robotech RPG on my message boards. We got to talking and he invited me to his weekly RPG group that has 12 people in it and played nearly every RPG. However, 80% of the time we played D&D as it was everyone's favorite. Some of the people in that group are still my friends to this day, 20 years later.

I've stayed friends with them mainly by playing D&D. It's what we have to talk about. To me, the D&D community is the exact same thing as my friend circle. We are held together by D&D and a schism in the D&D community means I lose friends.

I have a group of friends that I met through Living Greyhawk. We all used to travel to conventions and see each other a couple of times a year. We could talk for hours about our experiences with the adventures that were released and our opinions of certain feats or spells. Now, we see each other ONLY at GenCon. When we meet, we go out for dinner and have nothing in common to talk about. They play Pathfinder, I play D&D Next playtests. They haven't bothered to try D&D Next and they have no real desire to learn about it.

Without a community, I have very little desire to play D&D at all. I mean, I enjoy it but it lacks that extra joy that goes along with having people who like the same thing as you do. I kind of hate WoW, but all my friends play it. Most of them are the former D&D friends that I don't see anymore because they've abandoned D&D for WoW. A day doesn't go by that I don't think "Maybe I should just buy WoW because then I'd be part of the community again."

D&D Next really scares me. I like it a lot. However, if it doesn't manage to convince some of my friends to return to playing with me...I might have to give it up and just play WoW instead. Which is disappointing.

Our starts in gaming sound almost identical - even the ages, but I started playing in the late 70's, BBS's didn't exist yet. Except, only knew handfuls of people that played (from a small town), but it was enough to start playing. I've never needed a community, as long as there was enough people to fill one game table, I don't ever need more than that. Now I work in the RPG industry, so things are different for me, but for different reasons.

As I previously stated in this thread, if it weren't for a new player with a ton of 3x books, I'd probably still be playing 2e - I've never needed to jump to the next edition of any game (or anything really). So even if DDN is the best thing since apple pie, there is no attraction for me to even look at it. And regarding my very, very low opinion regarding all digital games, there's no possible chance WoW would ever be on my horizon - ick...

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

As I previously stated in this thread, if it weren't for a new player with a ton of 3x books, I'd probably still be playing 2e - I've never needed to jump to the next edition of any game (or anything really). So even if DDN is the best thing since apple pie, there is no attraction for me to even look at it. And regarding my very, very low opinion regarding all digital games, there's no possible chance WoW would ever be on my horizon - ick...

I think for me, I love change. I see the problems in things very quickly. Even if something is working perfectly fine, I'm always looking to the future to see what might be better. Then again, I work in the IT industry and I have a love of technology that was born from a desire to see everything improve over time. When I was 15 along with playing D&D I'd sit in my room and dream of what computers might be like in 20 years. At the rate they were advancing, computers would have processors with 3 GHZ! Imagine what you could do with all that processing power! After all, DOOM had such amazing graphics now, imagine what kind of games would exist in 20 years. Imagine what technology would allow us to do. My 15 year old self would still be amazed at how things turned out. I can just imagine seeing an iPad Air 20 years ago...I'd be flabbergasted.

Yet, still today, I'm always looking for the thing that's just slightly better than the year before hand. I check 15 different news sites a day to find out what is the next big thing. This applies to everything I like. I buy a game and no sooner do I get it than I'm looking at what the thing that comes out next will be that fixes the problems with the current game.

For me, it almost goes without saying that I'll play D&D Next. If only because I have to at least try the next big thing. I'm predisposed to look at whatever comes next in the best possible light. I hate to look backwards. Once something has run its course, it gets left behind. Best to try the new thing. Even if it isn't wholeheartedly better, it's at least different and interesting.

When 3e came out, I'd already been checking Erich Noah's 3e News every day for over a year before hand trying to learn everything there was to know about it.

 

[gamerprinter]

I'm in the graphics industry, and I do freelance cartography and some publishing work in the RPG industry, so I rely on computers to help me create and do my job, but when I play games, it's live in front of people at a table - we don't even allow PCs, IPADs, tablets, nor phones in our game room. I prefer to separate the two activities. I do use PC/internet for game prep, but not for actual play.

My players are prone to come up with creative, out of the box solutions to problems and encounters in game. All digital games are limited to what has been coded into the system - you can't play out of the box if the code doesn't let you. Playing live games with live people that adjudicate rules on the fly to allow out of the box thinking makes tabletop games infinitely allow for any possibility. Until a computer can match the capability to the human brain in lateral thinking digital cannot accomodate my needs, so I don't look there.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You've got it right here, except for the order. They were already developing Pathfinder as a company by the time he went out there, then he played it and was glad that it looked like Pathfinder was the right call.

I was unaware of this. Though, I suspect that had he liked 4e a lot, Mon Motha would have eventually been scrapped as not needed. It's not a huge surprise that Jason was already working on updates. He is a guy who was very invested in the D&D rules. There's a reason that most of Living Greyhawk lived in feat of adventures written by Iuz(Jason)...they were likely to be extremely deadly and bend the rules fairly dramatically to be so deadly. He knew the rules very well and liked to abuse that knowledge to kill PCs.

I am reminded of Spring Revery Down Under in Australia. Guest of Honor was Jason. He was running a Special adventure written by him and they were keeping track of how many PCs he had killed compared to other DMs. I believe at the end of the weekend it was something like 22 PCs killed by Jason and 6 was the most for any other DM. Even with the same adventure.

That's a hard thing to say for sure. If we assume that most of the people playing Pathfinder now would have played 4e instead, you're probably right.

I think "most" is the key. If the people who switched to Pathfinder were split between 60% 4e and 40% other, it still would have meant that 4e would have had the staying power to go another couple of years. I think that 4e with all of these extra people would have SEEMED a lot more dominant to people. Perception is a big deal. When people consulted message boards to talk about D&D, instead of 4 people saying "4e is great!", 4 people saying "I think I'm just going to switch to Pathfinder instead" and 2 people saying "I hate 4e and Pathfinder, I'm going somewhere else", it would instead be 7 for 4e and 3 going somewhere else. New people coming in would have looked and said "Ok, so basically everyone is playing 4e. I'll buy those books." instead of "I don't know, I'm confused, there's a bunch of people at my store who play this game called Pathfinder, should I buy that instead of 4e?"

I think the perception that 4e had already lost...long before it actually had was part of its downfall. Which, for a lot of people, started with the announcement that Paizo had tried out the new edition and decided to make an entirely new game rather than write adventures for 4e. After all, if a company that ran Dungeon and Dragon Magazine for years hated the new edition so much that they felt they needed to make their own game...well, that surely meant the new game was bad.

Having run 4e at that same convention, I can tell you that the response was overwhelmingly positive. I had one player at one table who insisted on nitpicking the rules and complaining they didn't make any sense and I had one argument with a player at the end of the convention about the fact that square fireballs didn't make any sense and moving on angles being the same speed as straight meant that 4e broke the laws of physics. However, other than those 2 incidents, I ran probably 50 people through the Dungeon Delve or through the intro adventure and most people ended up really liking the game. People were lining up over and over again and standing in line for nearly an hour to play the Delve. I got roped into running it because they needed extra DMs.

It was only the truly diehard people who were opposed to it. Most of them were people who were mod authors for Living Greyhawk who were annoyed that they couldn't make things like Gelatinous Cube Monks and Animated Object Floors with 1 level of Warrior. Though, most of these people were good friends with Jason since he was a member of the Circle and dealt with them on a regular basis.

These people are fairly influential in the Organized Play/RPGA community however. I know most of them and a number of them ran conventions in their home cities with 300 attendees doing nothing but playing Living Greyhawk. When they came back from D&D Experience talking about how they hated 4e and their friend Jason had their back by keeping 3.5e going, it definitely affected things. How much? Who knows.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'm in the graphics industry, and I do freelance cartography and some publishing work in the RPG industry, so I rely on computers to help me create and do my job, but when I play games, it's live in front of people at a table - we don't even allow PCs, IPADs, tablets, nor phones in our game room. I prefer to separate the two activities. I do use PC/internet for game prep, but not for actual play.

Fair enough. To me, technology has always been a part of enhancing everything about my game. I bought a touchscreen tablet with a stylus as soon as I could afford one because I thought what was the point of wasting paper if I didn't have to? That was I also didn't have to carry my heavy character book filled with 50 different characters with me. Plus all my books. I haven't actually opened a D&D book now in over a year. I just read PDFs on my screen instead.

Obviously, the game itself is still about the face to face interaction. But anything that helps is encouraged. Though we do have one DM who insists on no technology at all. It has made him very unpopular and people complain about it nearly every week.

My players are prone to come up with creative, out of the box solutions to problems and encounters in game. All digital games are limited to what has been coded into the system - you can't play out of the box if the code doesn't let you. Playing live games with live people that adjudicate rules on the fly to allow out of the box thinking makes tabletop games infinitely allow for any possibility. Until a computer can match the capability to the human brain in lateral thinking digital cannot accomodate my needs, so I don't look there.

I don't play the game just for out of the box thinking. I remember the first time I truly felt marveled by D&D. It was because my DM described things in so much detail I felt like I was there. It felt like I could see, hear, taste, touch everything. To me, the wonder of the game was that it was so immersive. I felt like I actually was a Drow Ranger who lived in this world. Even from the first time I played D&D I was consider how it might be improved with super realistic graphics and virtual reality.

It's worth noting that by the time I started playing D&D I already enjoyed multiplayer DOOM for PC, I had played adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest. I had already played Final Fantasy 1. Gaming to me already was digital before I ever picked up dice. I learned to use computers because I couldn't get games to load on my Commodore 64 without learning enough BASIC to make them work.

Though, even when I started playing D&D(I won't say switched to D&D because I still digital game constantly and I played Everquest for years because it was the closest I had seen anyone come to virtual reality D&D), the rules were the rules and were not to be broken. "Out of the box thinking" often had another word in our group: "cheating". If our DM allowed a plan to work that was completely crazy then people would call them soft and make fun of them for allowing players to walk all over them. The smart DM saw through the player's ploy to get way more power than they should have and simply said no...or made all plans turn out for the worst.

 

[gamerprinter]

"Out of the box thinking" often had another word in our group: "cheating". If our DM allowed a plan to work that was completely crazy then people would call them soft and make fun of them for allowing players to walk all over them. The smart DM saw through the player's ploy to get way more power than they should have and simply said no...or made all plans turn out for the worst.

I don't mean anything goes, everything is kept reasonable even when I'm winging the rules. I do some game development, creating rules PF supplements among other things, so being creative and reasonable is part of the job of DMing, in my experience.

 

[WayneLigon]

When discussing the industry, it's fun to think about things that will never happen, like "What if Paizo owned D&D"?

As far as I'm concerned, they do.

Maybe WOTC will pull something good out in 5E. To me, 4E was a poor decision more than likely forced on them by a corporation because some dude in a position of power became terrified at the idea of the OGL. At this point, though, I don't know. I haven't been able to participate in any playtesting for 5E and so haven't read much about it - I want to form opinions based on the finished product at this point.

 

[Jester David]

I think "most" is the key. If the people who switched to Pathfinder were split between 60% 4e and 40% other, it still would have meant that 4e would have had the staying power to go another couple of years. I think that 4e with all of these extra people would have SEEMED a lot more dominant to people. Perception is a big deal. When people consulted message boards to talk about D&D, instead of 4 people saying "4e is great!", 4 people saying "I think I'm just going to switch to Pathfinder instead" and 2 people saying "I hate 4e and Pathfinder, I'm going somewhere else", it would instead be 7 for 4e and 3 going somewhere else. New people coming in would have looked and said "Ok, so basically everyone is playing 4e. I'll buy those books." instead of "I don't know, I'm confused, there's a bunch of people at my store who play this game called Pathfinder, should I buy that instead of 4e?"

Maybe. Maybe not.

WotC stopped doing PDFs in early 2009 after PHB2, which might have been an early sign they were worried about sales. This was before the PF Core Rulebook.
Paizo also started outselling 4e in late 2010 when they had just started coming into their own. That couldn't just be Paizo gaining sales but WotC losing sales. It's doubtful that everyone who stopped praying 4e went straight to Pathfinder.

It's also unfair to put all the blame of 4e's failure on Paizo and competition. Every other edition of D&D had fantasy competition and survived.
WotC made a couple other errors that could have really hurt, such as making it easy to buy DDI and skip books, errata that devalued the books, the GSL, and accessories that made it easy to skip the core books, and the like.

Having run 4e at that same convention, I can tell you that the response was overwhelmingly positive. I had one player at one table who insisted on nitpicking the rules and complaining they didn't make any sense and I had one argument with a player at the end of the convention about the fact that square fireballs didn't make any sense and moving on angles being the same speed as straight meant that 4e broke the laws of physics. However, other than those 2 incidents, I ran probably 50 people through the Dungeon Delve or through the intro adventure and most people ended up really liking the game. People were lining up over and over again and standing in line for nearly an hour to play the Delve. I got roped into running it because they needed extra DMs.

It's too small of a sample to be representational of the audience, and I'm not people who were excited enough about 4e to travel to a convention are the average.

I remember looking at those files as well and not being wowed, but I wasn't entirely disappointed by the game until I saw the PHB.

It was only the truly diehard people who were opposed to it. Most of them were people who were mod authors for Living Greyhawk who were annoyed that they couldn't make things like Gelatinous Cube Monks and Animated Object Floors with 1 level of Warrior. Though, most of these people were good friends with Jason since he was a member of the Circle and dealt with them on a regular basis

Really?
Really???
There's no one else? How about: People who don't like gamist rules. People who like strategy over tactics. People in the middle of campaign. People who preferred gritty adventures to heroic adventures.

I played a lot of LG as well and certainly got tired of that game and 3e at the end. But the experience was really not representational of 3e as a whole. The token warrior level was a running joke in LG but was likely rare in the rest of the hobby.