Would Paizo Make a Better Steward for Our Hobby?

[Bluenose]

Because "gamist" is not binary with games either being all gamist or all simulationist.

Not every version of D&D has had the same level of gamist design. Often the gamist design was a simplification of something complex where simulation would break down or be too slow.

A game does not have two agendas. And I entirely disagree that there's any particular edition of D&D which is more gamist than any other. Some fake simulationist ideas, but faking it and being it are very different things.

 

[Jester David]

I'm certainly not disagreeing that WOTC made a bunch of mistakes that hurt them. I just think those mistakes wouldn't have cost them as much as they did had it not been for Pathfinder. People are willing to tolerate some missteps when they are really invested in something. People didn't invest in 4e because they had another option.

I still maintain that other editions of D&D didn't have REAL competition. When I played 2e D&D, we knew of the existence of Rolemaster, Palladium Fantasy, and the like. No one seriously considered switching to any of them. They weren't D&D. D&D was the first and best game. The rest, according to most people I knew were simply pale copies that got things wrong.

The rise of the Internet is another huge factor. I'd barely heard of other RPGs let alone wanted to try them out before the Internet allowed me to preview games.

Had there been the Internet earlier and people could recommend a Rune Quest or Rolemaster more loudly then earlier editions.
Which doesn't matter if people are happy or satisfied. If they're not looking for a game recommendations aren't paid attention to.

However, I think LG pretty much only attracts those who like gamist rules. After all, we've agreed to a bunch of rules simply to play LG. You get 52 Time Units and once they are gone your character can no longer adventure(and adventures took a minimum of 1 TU even if they lasted an hour of game time). If you find a magic item in an adventure, everyone in the group can buy a copy of it...so that it's fair for everyone. There is a GP limit on each adventure to make sure everyone advances at the same rate. Gold over the limit simply vanishes. No spell continues beyond the end of an adventure.

I think this is a chicken/egg situation.
LG had firm rules for a crunchy game so it certainly attracted people who liked that and the adventures had to have those elements. But LG players are a very mixed group. Like every other group. They were people who wanted to play more and lack groups or enough groups.
But to do well and advance they really need to become rule masters or they die. The adventures were too hard not to maximize. The design of 3e an difficulty of adventures pushed people to optimize. Not every adventure required optimization but since the penalty for failure was death and permanent change in your wealth-by-level you were encouraged to power game for those scenarios.
Then there was the famed arm race.

I'm not a gamist player. I'm a storyteller with a slight simulation slant. But during my time in LG I learned the rules sideways and managed to turn a bard into a potent character.

 

[gamerprinter]

I wasn't twisting anything. You claimed that it's a bad thing for any single game system to dominate the hobby. But, this is precisely what the d20 OGL was meant to do. Gamers might stray from D&D, but, they'd stay within the d20 family and hopefully drift back after some time. They wouldn't need to learn new systems.

No, I made no such claim. Everything I'm saying is in regards to stewardship by a single company. If you got that I'm saying only a single game system for all RPGs, you are not getting my meaning. I am only referring to game systems owned by game publishers. You've completely misunderstood my posts.

There's a reason that RPG.Net was so vehemently opposed to D20, and it's exactly for the reason you gave - a single, dominant system that absorbed most of the hobby for quite a while. It took the bubble bursting and the d20 glut to go away before you started seeing any significant innovation in games outside of d20. Savage Worlds doesn't make an appearance until 2003, Burning Wheel is 2002. And, really, it's not until about 2004 or 2005 before you start seeing indie games really start to make an impact.

So, I'll ask again, do you see the OGL as a bad thing for the hobby?

I didn't realize you were asking me that. But I see OGL is great for the hobby in itself, what it caused during d20 glut was how many publishers treated it wasn't necessarily good, but it was the actions by these publishers that wasn't good, not the license itself. Now the days long after the d20 bubble burst, OGL is still around and through other systems like Pathfinder it's proving it's worth. The publishers today are using OGL like it should have always been used.

But the OGL is a side issue, in that it doesn't resolve the question (nor really have anything to do with) of who should be steward of the hobby? All my posts in this thread, except for this last post regarding the OGL, refer only to stewardship - so let's return to the question at hand, and drop the OGL red herring.

 

[Jester David]

A game does not have two agendas. And I entirely disagree that there's any particular edition of D&D which is more gamist than any other. Some fake simulationist ideas, but faking it and being it are very different things.

How can you fake simulation?
Again, it's not a binary situation. A game is not either all simulation or not simulation. There can be places the game leans to simulation or has nods to reality or designs a rule to complement realism.
It's never been perfectly simulationist but the number of instance of mechanics breaking suspension of disbelief might be fewer.

 

[Umbran]

A game does not have two agendas.

Whatever the Forge people might say, Gamers have agendas. Games are tools we can use to fulfill agendas.

I know some folks say that a given gamer only ever has one agenda. I think that's silly. Gamers have a variety of desires, some of them mutually exclusive.

Some games, therefore, are designed to fulfill multiple agendas.

 

[marroon69]

I think the issue really is based around the ownership...small focused company that dedicates all its time and resources to one thing Vs. huge multi-national company that views it as a money making brand. Not saying Paizo does not want to make money it just seems to me that they understand there customer base better and they can focus on the product. With Hasbro holding the strings of D&D and you can see that it was slowing being changed in hopes of open it to a bigger market and making more profitable. My two cents....

 

[kitsune9]

I'm a little late to this party, but it's hard to say that Paizo would end up making a better steward. They aren't the 800 lb gorilla in the room. I think if they did, even if they did a lot of things right, the dork rage would start popping up.

I could complain about WotC's errors, but I think that dog has been kicked before. I'm a big PF fan (so that's my "perfect" ruleset) and currently I love the direction that Paizo is going and I think their success says much of their strategy and PR outreach.

 

[Emerikol]

Whatever the Forge people might say, Gamers have agendas. Games are tools we can use to fulfill agendas.

I know some folks say that a given gamer only ever has one agenda. I think that's silly. Gamers have a variety of desires, some of them mutually exclusive.

Some games, therefore, are designed to fulfill multiple agendas.

I believe that a game's rules tend to prioritize design so that G > S > N or whatever. The actual campaign ran by a particular DM though will take it much farther. So I do think campaigns have a primary GNS agenda but I also realize that some players will settle for second best because of their limited options. Typically the DM will set the agenda but I've see other things.

 

[pemerton]

Whatever the Forge people might say, Gamers have agendas. Games are tools we can use to fulfill agendas.

I know some folks say that a given gamer only ever has one agenda. I think that's silly.

The Forge people don't dispute that a single person can enjoy different things. And they certainly don't dispute that a given game can serve different agendas (Champions and Tunnels & Trolls are two mainstream games often mentioned in this context).

They tend to favour "tight" design that focuses a game in on one particular agenda, but that's a design norm, not a prediction about extent rulebooks and the uses to which they are being put.

Some games, therefore, are designed to fulfill multiple agendas.

I think the main question is, can you fulfill multiple agendas all at once? The Forge says "no". The argument, at least as I understand it, goes roughly like this:

* An agenda is about the point of play, as manifested through the sort of behaviour at a given table that is encouraged or discouraged.

* During a given episode of play, it can't be that - at one and the same time - participants are (say) encouraged to subordinate "gutsiness" to fidelity to character and setting concepts, and acclaimed by their felllows for gutsy play.

* Therefore (generailsing the above premise to other differences of agenda), during a given episode of play only one agenda can be pursued.​

I think that there are at least a couple of points where the argument is vulnerable.

One is this: while it is plausible as an argument that simulationinst and non-simulationinst agendas aren't compatible (and I regard this as borne out by practically every thread I've participated on these boards where the contrast between "mainstream D&D" and "indie" play agendas has been discussed!), I'm less sure it is plausible for multiple non-simulatoninst agendas. For instance, it seems to me that, during a given episode of play, it perhaps can be that - at one and the same time - participants are encouraged to play their PCs to the hilt so as to drive conflict to its resolution, and are acclaimed by their fellows for gutsy play. Particularly if the system is designed to require gutsy play as a necessary mechanical condition of driving conflict to its resolution. (Burning Wheel might be an example of this.)

A second point of vulnerability, and I think one that a lot of people (perhaps including Umbran?) have in mind, is to question the monolithic nature of the group.

I think the idea is that you have one participant who derives pleasure from subordinating "gutsiness" to fidelity to character and setting, and another participant who derives pleasure from playing in a gutsy style. WotC seems to favour this sort of idea, with its discussion of "player types" in its DMGs (derived, at least loosely, from Robin Laws' similar ideas, I think). In D&D, in particular, this tends to be achieved by making one aspect of the fiction - combat - the site for gutsy play, and another aspect of the fiction - social encounters and urban exploration more generally - the site for subordinating gutsiness to fidelity to character and setting. (Mearls certainly echoed these divisions in contrasting combat with "roleplaying". You also see it in the frequently-expressed idea that combat is an alternative to, rather than a site of, characterisation and roleplaying.)

The Forge response to this rebuttal of the "single agenda" argument, and one for which I personally have some sympathy, is that a game in which you have participants looking for different things in this way, is in some sense unstable or "second best". It relies on a high degree of GM control over the game in order for it to work, and is vulnerable to player disruption at many points (most notoriously, the "power gamers" or "munchkins" who try and turn social encounters into combat encounters, or who build PCs that run roughshod over the "roleplayers'" PCs in circumstances where resolution via mechanics, rather than via free roleplaying and GM fiat, is involved).

I think this, as much as the jargon, is why The Forge is regarded as elitist: because the core implication of The Forge's analysis, as I've just sketched it, is that mainstream roleplaying - in which the GM exercises a high degree of control to make sure everyone gets a little bit of what they like, and which is vulnerable to disruption by "power gamers" and "munchkins" - is inherently unsatisfactory. (Or, at least, less than fully satisfactory.)

A second implciation, somewhat relevant to the idea of "stewardship", is that roleplaying would be more appealing to more people if it didn't, at least in its mainstream form, take for granted this rather specific social contract in which people agree to subordinate their own aesthetic preferences for those of others in this systematic yet somewhat arbitrarily adjudicated way.

I entirely disagree that there's any particular edition of D&D which is more gamist than any other. Some fake simulationist ideas, but faking it and being it are very different things.

How can you fake simulation?

An example from 3E/PF - introduce the notion of "natural armour" bonus.

Ancient and older dragons have natural armour bonuses somewhere between +29 and +40. A Pit Fiend has a natural armour bonus of +23. This is in circumstances where the most magical of all suits of plate armour grants a bonus to AC of +13. What do those "natural armour" bonuses represent, in the fiction? No one knows, or bothers trying to find out. There are simply mechanical contrivances to ensure CR-appropriate ACs, with a veneer of simulation applied via the "natural armour" label.

Another goes back much further in the game: label a spell that heals a lot of hit points "Cure Critical Wounds" even though there are plenty of critical wounds that can be healed by much weaker spells (eg "Cure Light Wounds" will probably heal any critical wound suffered by a 0-level NPC), and there are plenty of non-critical wounds (like a dragon bite suffered by an otherwise-uninjured high level fighter) which cannot be healed by a single application of any lesser spell.

Once again, what we have here is a mechanical contrivance for the rationing of hit point recovery, with a veneer of simulation applied via the "Cure Critical Wounds" label.

In the context of D&D, I think the most obvious examples tend to come from the combat mechanics, but they can be found elsewhere as well - for instance, the various bonus types in 3E like "sacred bonus", "insight bonus", "luck bonus", "circumstance bonus", "competence bonus", etc - it's quite unclear to me what these all correspond to in the game. How is a sacred bonus - which sounds to me like a blessing from the gods - different from a luck bonus - which sounds like it might be the result of a blessing from the gods? Or how is a luck bonus - which sounds like it might be about fortuitous circumstances - different from a circumstance bonus - which presumably reflects fortuitous circumstances? How does "insight" differ from either "luck" or "competence"? Etc. Once again, no real effort is made to give these notions an ingame meaning. They're mechanical contrivances with labels slapped onto them to create the veneer of simulation.

This is the sort of thing that a lot of people have in mind, I think, when they describe 3E as an "illusionist" game, or describe 4e as - by way of contrast - having "drawn back the curtain". (The Forge also uses the term "illusionism", but to describe something quite different from this fake simulation.)

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

To answer the thread title, Paizo may already be the steward of our hobby, and it got there by being better at it.

They have growth and stability on their side, a popular product that may well be the most popular RPG at the moment (it's hard to know with confidence).

Moreover, they employ many talented game designers, provide tons of material, are careful stewards of their own ruleset, and have found numerous successful ways to expand the Pathfinder brand.

Maybe it's because they've learned from experience. Maybe it's because they don't serve any masters but themselves and their fans. I could speculate all day.

The only thing they don't have is the D&D name. But, that may not be as big a detriment as you'd think. Pathfinder, the brand, may not be as well known, but it also doesn't have any cultural stigma attached.

Don't get me wrong. I love D&D, and I have very high hopes for 5E and WotC moving forward. But they have their work cut out for them if they want the kind of success, appreciation, and loyalty that Paizo has developed these past several years.