"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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[chriton227]

Citing it because its revenues went up would be how it would work if Hasbro were a relatively small company. Instead, Hasbro is the closest thing to a cyberpunk-style megacorporation that exists. If they're losing profits in a noticeable amount; it's because the entire industry is losing profits in a noticeable amount. Keep in mind this is a corporation that can toss a couple hundred million at a movie flop and not even find the loss of money worth mentioning in their quarterly reports. And the number of product lines and brands they have is so huge that it's very likely even they don't have a complete list.

So, when they mention a product, it's because that product not only saw a rise in profits, but saw a rise in profits that affected their bottom line. They have product lines that rise in a large percentage of profit every quarter that they don't mention. So to mention DnD at all means that it's doing extremely well, to the point it has risen above the hundreds of other product lines competing for attention.

Hasbro is far from a cyberpunk style megacorp, in the business world they are pretty small. They aren't even in the Fortune 500. If they lost $200mil, that would amount to almost 5% of their 2014 gross revenue and would be equivalent to 70% of their 2014 profits, and would definitely be mentioned in their quarterly statements. Hasbro as a whole is smaller than Activision Blizzard, Hanesbrand (makers of Hanes underwear), Coach (known for handbags), and Tractor Supply Company. If you want megacorp, try Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, or Nestlé. All of them own huge portfolios of brands covering a wide variety of industries and have tens of billions of dollars in revenue per year. Or Walmart with almost $500 billion in annual revenue (more than 100x what Hasbro has).

 

[Dausuul]

Just to clarify (not to Mark CMG, but to the wider audience), the Design Team basically sets strategy -- they say, "We want the game to do this." The nitty-gritty mechanical expression of that is then created by the Development Team. So Monte's role in the 5e process was not to create mechanics or write rules necessarily, but to provide goals and objectives for the development team, and then evaluate the results.

Was that distinction still in place for 5E development? I know that's how things work on the Magic side of the company, and it used to be how D&D did things too; but I'm wondering if that division was maintained as the D&D team shrank. Seems like when you only have a handful of people working on the mechanics in any capacity, it would be hard to keep them strictly separated.

I'm also not sure it makes as much sense for D&D as it does for Magic. As I understand it, the whole reason they evolved the two-tiered structure for Magic was because of the need to maintain tight balance in a competitive "rules-first" game. D&D is much less demanding in that regard.

 

[Zaruthustran]

I've enjoyed games that Feargus has worked on, and I'm glad he's excited about his Pathfinder games (I'm very much looking forward to that tablet PACG).

That said: it's poor form to publicly diss another company, particularly a former partner.

In my eyes, he's given up 5 reputation points, and taken 10 damage to "class."

 

[Shasarak]

That was one of the running jokes / concerns here on ENWorld at the time. Cook mentioned the idea of maybe making a "Passive Perception" kind of system in Next (I think in one of his Legends & Lore columns) as a possible direction they could go in, not realizing that it was already in the 4E game. So people were ripping on him for being so far out of the D&D loop that he didn't even know what the game currently was that he was working on.

I found the whole reaction kind of silly, since all of these web articles have always seemed like they were written last minute at the end of the day Friday when the person suddenly remembered "Oh crap, I have an article due!", which is why they've never been completely polished or free of bugaboos. But people here took them so goddamned seriously and you'd think the earth was falling into the sun and that Cook shot their dog based on the reactions people had to him writing as though he was inventing Passive Perception in his column.

It was almost as fun a reaction as the time when Mike realised that you can not shout an amputated hand back on.

 

[aramis erak]

I thought Gary had left TSR by then?

In any event, I'm not sure this is a good example - if not this particular suit, then there were others where TSR went after other RPGs designed by EGG after he had left the company - indeed, sometimes long after he had left the company. So I don't think it was so much an issue of 'creatives' working on other things, but rather EGG in particular.

Gary had worked on some items that made it into DJ and DJ:Mythus while at TSR. TSR had the files to prove it.

 

[Henry]

First, [MENTION=907]Staffan[/MENTION] , thanks for finding that. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Gary had worked on some items that made it into DJ and DJ:Mythus while at TSR. TSR had the files to prove it.

TSR's owners circa 1990 had about as much credibility as Pinocchio at Liar's Dice. It wouldn't have shocked me at the time if they had forged said files just to prove their point. They filled their legal complaint with outrageous claims, were openly hostile to fans, and ran the company into the ground with pet projects and blind alleys of marketing. (I still remember the "official derivative content" ftp server. Yeesh that was ludicrous.) It still amazes me how well they had people fooled into thinking they were doing a good job for so long.

Back to the court filing a second -- I just now realized that in (7) they claim ownership of "vocations" because God forbid no one had a vocation before D&D came along; in (32) they basically claim copyright on Rolling Dice to determine resolving things; in (33) they claim copyright on random damage; and in (35) as my personal favorite, they claim COPYRIGHT ON the concept of TIME HEALING INJURIES. Someone alert doctors and physical therapists everywhere!

Or wait, were doctors derivative of Clerics in the PHB?

 

[Staffan]

Gary had worked on some items that made it into DJ and DJ:Mythus while at TSR. TSR had the files to prove it.

Wasn't that Cyborg Commando? And the lawsuit against GDW for Dangerous Journeys was solely about copyright, not about any work-for-hire stuff.

 

[pemerton]

(35) as my personal favorite, they claim COPYRIGHT ON the concept of TIME HEALING INJURIES. Someone alert doctors and physical therapists everywhere!

Or wait, were doctors derivative of Clerics in the PHB?

It's fun to make fun, but your paraphrase of the claim isn't accurate.

They claim copyright in respect of "The method . . . in which rest is used to remove characters' points of physical damage". That may well be derived from D&D. What game measured physical damage in points, that recovered with the passage of ingame time, before D&D? (Doctors in the real world are irrelevant to this: they don't measure damage or recovery in hit points.)

I think the part of the claim that is more open to dispute than the claim of derivation is the claim that this game mechanic was one in respect of which copyright could arise.

 

[Henry]

It's fun to make fun, but your paraphrase of the claim isn't accurate.

They claim copyright in respect of "The method . . . in which rest is used to remove characters' points of physical damage". That may well be derived from D&D. What game measured physical damage in points, that recovered with the passage of ingame time, before D&D? (Doctors in the real world are irrelevant to this: they don't measure damage or recovery in hit points.)

I think the part of the claim that is more open to dispute than the claim of derivation is the claim that this game mechanic was one in respect of which copyright could arise.

I hyperbolized, but I do agree - 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. But that's been a consistent issue for a while now.

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!

 

[Bluenose]

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.