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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8506298" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Given the enormous and enduring popularity of 3e and its descendants (e.g. PF1e), juxtaposed against the frank and open admission from the designers that the system is really really broken to a degree that cannot be fixed in place and must be replaced, I think it is quite fair to say that whether a system is well-designed (as in, the rules avoid causing problems during use) and whether it is popular are two completely unrelated questions. (I can no longer find the blogpost where they said it, but one of the PF2e designers--IIRC Jason Bulmahn or Mark Seifter--effectively said &quot;we had to design new rules because we couldn't fix PF1e without making it incompatible, and we couldn't put off fixing it any longer.&quot;)You can have a really popular thing that is also really not very well-made. In fact, I would say gaming in specific has been quite prone to that. EverQuest was THE mega-popular MMO before WoW. Yet it was actively player-hostile in many ways and a number of its design decisions are baffling today (like having the possibility of completely losing all your equipment due to a random in-game event, such as an avalanche, that puts your body in an inaccessible location. My dad had to deal with that and eventually managed to persuade a GM that this was stupid and shouldn't cost him equipment he spent literal months crafting.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8506298, member: 6790260"] Given the enormous and enduring popularity of 3e and its descendants (e.g. PF1e), juxtaposed against the frank and open admission from the designers that the system is really really broken to a degree that cannot be fixed in place and must be replaced, I think it is quite fair to say that whether a system is [I]well-designed [/I](as in, the rules avoid causing problems during use) and whether it is [I]popular[/I] are two completely unrelated questions. (I can no longer find the blogpost where they said it, but one of the PF2e designers--IIRC Jason Bulmahn or Mark Seifter--effectively said "we had to design new rules because we couldn't fix PF1e without making it incompatible, and we couldn't put off fixing it any longer.") You can have a really popular thing that is also really not very well-made. In fact, I would say gaming in specific has been quite prone to that. EverQuest was THE mega-popular MMO before WoW. Yet it was actively player-hostile in many ways and a number of its design decisions are baffling today (like having the possibility of completely losing all your equipment due to a random in-game event, such as an avalanche, that puts your body in an inaccessible location. My dad had to deal with that and eventually managed to persuade a GM that this was stupid and shouldn't cost him equipment he spent literal months crafting.) [/QUOTE]

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