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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Which is the better fantasy rpg and why: D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e?
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<blockquote data-quote="Haffrung" data-source="post: 7877331" data-attributes="member: 6776259"><p>RPG publishers are trying to server two masters:</p><p></p><p>1) Readers (often not participating in games) who peruse the books at their leisure for entertainment.</p><p></p><p>2) Players who need the books as rules references and play aids for tremendously complicated games (by tabletop game standards even 5E is a 10/10 in complexity).</p><p></p><p>There are real tradeoffs here. The design decisions that make RPGs books attractive to read as entertainment - walls of text, wordy and bloated language, reluctance to use bulletted lists and numbered instructions, old fashioned and outdated layout choices (because nostalgia), did I mention walls of text? - make them harder, often <em>much</em> harder to use as rules references. I've been playing 5E since the Next playtest, I've run several Wizards, and I <em>still</em> have to pore over paragraphs of text in the PHB to find how many spells a level 1 Wizard starts with.</p><p></p><p>Adventures are the same. The extremely conservative approach to presenting them used by most publishers (some indie publishers have made tremendous strides in adventure presentation) means I no longer buy hardcopies if I can help it. I buy PDFs, so I can cut and paste and hack and summarize in order to turn the adventure into a reference I can use at the table. </p><p></p><p>The fact publishers who have a lot of market information continue to design and publish books much better suited to readers than players suggest that most of the people who buy RPG books don't use them at the table. IMHO, catering to those buyers contributes to making RPGs difficult to learn, difficult to GM, and often frustrating and awkward to play at the table. It basically relies on one or two alpha gamers in a group memorizing dozens of pages of rules in order for the game to run smoothly at the table.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Haffrung, post: 7877331, member: 6776259"] RPG publishers are trying to server two masters: 1) Readers (often not participating in games) who peruse the books at their leisure for entertainment. 2) Players who need the books as rules references and play aids for tremendously complicated games (by tabletop game standards even 5E is a 10/10 in complexity). There are real tradeoffs here. The design decisions that make RPGs books attractive to read as entertainment - walls of text, wordy and bloated language, reluctance to use bulletted lists and numbered instructions, old fashioned and outdated layout choices (because nostalgia), did I mention walls of text? - make them harder, often [I]much[/I] harder to use as rules references. I've been playing 5E since the Next playtest, I've run several Wizards, and I [I]still[/I] have to pore over paragraphs of text in the PHB to find how many spells a level 1 Wizard starts with. Adventures are the same. The extremely conservative approach to presenting them used by most publishers (some indie publishers have made tremendous strides in adventure presentation) means I no longer buy hardcopies if I can help it. I buy PDFs, so I can cut and paste and hack and summarize in order to turn the adventure into a reference I can use at the table. The fact publishers who have a lot of market information continue to design and publish books much better suited to readers than players suggest that most of the people who buy RPG books don't use them at the table. IMHO, catering to those buyers contributes to making RPGs difficult to learn, difficult to GM, and often frustrating and awkward to play at the table. It basically relies on one or two alpha gamers in a group memorizing dozens of pages of rules in order for the game to run smoothly at the table. [/QUOTE]
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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Which is the better fantasy rpg and why: D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e?
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