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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7549227" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've said this before, but the world needs another gaming system "like I need another hole in my head" (to paraphrase the song).There is I think at this point excessive interest in writing a rules set or wholesale revising a rules set to the degree that your product is now incompatible with prior rules sets.  I think the 5e designers were correct to try to set the expectation that this would be the 'last' version of D&D - D&D Eternal as well as D&D Next.  There are at this point a ton of reasonably well designed rules engines on the market.  They each have their advantages and drawbacks.  Some subsystems might need to be added or subtracted and some minor revision might need to be made as a result of experience that might constitute a sort of errata.  But there is no need to reinvent the wheel because whether its BRP derived, D20 derived, FATE derived, PBtA derived, SAGA derived, or Cortex derived, etc. something ought to be out there that works for your vision.  To much of what goes on in production of PnP RPG systems feels to me less like creating a work of art, than it feels like lonely fun that is engaged in without it ever leading to actual games.  I feel like these days rule books are produced mainly for the consumption of people who read rulebooks, and rarely do they ever lead to a lot of satisfying games much less art.  Rather, the leisure they consume is the act of reading rulebooks themselves, and the author made the rulebook mainly because he is the sort of geek for whom thinking up rules is fun.I'm OK with that, but I think we ought to be 40 years on aspiring to so much more.What really shocks me gaming here in 2019 is how little great content is produced for games.  There are a lot of arguments that occur over why D&D succeeded where other early games didn't, and I think that the reason is that D&D more than any other game system emphasized the prepared adventure as the core of its system.  D&D had a rule book, but the real game was 'the module' and D&D more than any other system offered up examples of the process of play in its modules and provided actually usable templates to the would be GM as to how to turn the rules into a game.  I've written a ton of my own content over the years, but the games I've gotten into and played a lot - D&D, Gamma World, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu - they always hooked me with their accessible adventures and not with their rules.I was trying to run 'Mouse Guard' for my kids over the Winter break, and I was struck by how poorly the text prepared you to run the game (and how fiddly it was, and how bad the math was, and how hard it made going from rules to story...) compared to how efficiently running D&D for them had gone.   As something to consume as a leisure activity, 'Mouse Guard' is a great rulebook and interesting to read.  But in terms of getting a game with a story and character out of its examples of play, there is a much higher hurdle to jump despite the book at least superficially spending more time telling you to do those very things.  I was also struck by how barebones the presentation of the example of play really was, compared to either the famous example of play in the 1e AD&D DMG, or most of all compared to published adventures of the same era.  There is an expectation in them that most of the story is not recorded, but will be improvised in play.  And while that is true, the amount and what you are expected to improvise in the two systems differs.   If you were to just read the rulebook, you'd say of Mouse Guard that it gives you the rules and tools to run any possible challenge, while a game like D&D gives you none.  But it turns out, that's not so much true, as for example thinking that 4e's skill challenge system gave you the tools to run any possible challenge turns out to be a naïve view of the problem.  If anything, Mouse Guard's rules less prepare you to narrate the fortune than D&D does.As it pertains to the particular post, I guess what I'm saying is that Paizo is getting it wrong (and I said the same thing to WotC before the 4e launch).  What made them successful is they focused on what was important about the game - the example of play, the intellectual property, the prepared adventure - and not really on the rules set.   Heck, they got famous for really well done 'Adventure Paths' which were some of the best D&D style adventures that had been published since the Golden Age.  Now that they've saturated their market with rules extensions, they want to reboot the market by publishing a new rules set, but I really doubt that will work no matter how elegant Pathfinder II turns out to be.  I suspect in fact that Starfinder will turn out to be more successful than Pathfinder II, and I'd strongly encourage any publisher out there that wants to launch a new game to focus very much on the fluff over the crunch if they want to be successful.   Or in other words, I don't think the rules they are harnessed to is the problem and I don't think it handicaps them.  I think with the right imaginative intellectual property and examples of play, you could come out with a D20 OGL game today, and it would be the hottest thing on the market.  And I think you could write one of the best game systems ever, and no one would play it.  I think people write rules systems though, because its a lot easier to write a rules system than create a property that goes through the culture like a welcome breeze and becomes the thing everyone is talking about (VtM when it first hit in PnP gaming, Skyrim or Minecraft in video gaming, MtG and the notion of the collectible card game, Star Wars in the movies, Game of Thrones or Stranger things in TV, etc.).</blockquote>

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