Jester David
Hero
That AP felt like they were afraid to push the envelop and do something very different.
Okay, it shouldn't be Call of Cthulhu but Paizo's adventures are curiously predictable with their mandatory dungeon crawls in every part. Really, I imagine the default playstyle has as much to do with their inability to vary the game that much.
That's how it started. That's what the people buying the original print run (and the rapid second print run) wanted. But what about the people who bought the third print run, a year or so after? Or the fourth? Or the fifth? Each print run getting larger and larger.
When the game started it was a bunch of people who didn't want to upgrade to 4e. But now it has an audience of its own. Arguably a larger audience.
Even if it's not and the vast majority of Pathfinder fans are former 3e fans... that's not a sustainable audience. It's not like they're making more 3e fans. Invariably some will die or leave gaming or switch to other games. That's not a long term audience. It has to strike a balance between appealing to that original core audience and the (probably larger) percentage of newcomers.
Minor tweaks aren't a whole edition. They're a fanbrew PDF of house rules and revisions.
If Pathfinder Revised is just going to be minor tweaks... then, yeah, why bother?
After all, this ignores a lot of the underlying flaws of the system. Like how high level monsters have ridiculous numbers of feats and their saves are ridiculous. Or how play just breaks down for a full third of the levels. Or how characters get five attacks, one of which can only miss on a 1 and the last can only hit on a "20".
There's a lot of just plain bad math in the game. Almost as if it's based on rulebooks being written by different people at the same time who were only half-coordinating.
The designers of Pathfinder have talked about legacy mechanics they wish they hadn't included. Jason Bulhman discussed how swift action just slowed down the game and probably weren't necessary. There was a lot of stuff that was included just because they promised Pathfinder would be largely backwards compatible. Ditto Starfinder, which is ridiculously conservative in its design. I've seen numerous 3PP that went farther with the system (such as Star Wars Saga, which predates Pathfinder by a couple years).
That sounds like one of the dozens of "D&D with a twist" campaign setting/ RPG hybrids that was released during the 2000s. (My favourite was Midnight. Great setting.)
Have you ever made a CR 8 monster following all the rules? It's a pain in the ass. And there's inevitably a mistake in the math. Have you ever looked at the errata documents Paizo APs? Pretty much every other statblock has a major math error in it. And those are done by professionals and heavily edited.
There benefits are outweighed by the costs.
Even Paizo seems to think so, since they went with the Unchained simple monsters for Starfinder. Pretty much the only rule from that book to make it into SF...
So... you're saying there's a market for such a product? A niche to be filled?
It kinda is. To a lot of people it is. Other than the gods, find one bit of Golarion lore in, oh, say the first six hardcover books.
Which begs the question: should it drop the pretence of being generic and double down on being the Golarion RPG?
So don't use them.
It's always easier to ignore a secondary mechanic than it is for a non-designer to create one and work it into the game. Those mechanics should be there for people who like them but not so baked in (i.e. included in feats and class features) that it's tricky to play without.
There's a lot of great ideas in modern games. Like the non-binary success of Genysis/ FFG Star Wars. Or that same game system's back-and-forth Force Point system that allows you to boost a dice and/or manipulate the story. Or Star Trek Adventures' Momentum system, where you pool points from extraordinary successes that can be used to boost future rolls or, again, alter the narrative.
