Pathfinder 1E WotC desperately needs to learn from Paizo and Privateer Press

[Philosopher]

I believe that writing for "use" involves concise verbage, compartmentalization of important information, and the ability to locate what is relevant at a glance.

I believe that writing for sitting down and reading involves flowing text, connected strings of though, and a series of hooks that prompt you to follow the text to its next topic.

I believe that these two sets of requirements are at odds with one another, and that in the universe of limited resources that is the book publishing world, one has to be able to hammer out priorities.

No. The concise game mechanics can be listed in stat blocks. Proper flavor text can come after that.

Well, we could have it, but it would seem to add a lot to the price and size of the book.

Maybe Small/cheap----crunch----fluff

Pick any two you like.

I don't recall the 2e books, for example, being any more prohibitive in cost than the 4e books.

 

[Rechan]

Tell that to Harry Potter.

Just because they read Harry Potter doesn't mean they're reading everything else.

But helll. They're just as likely to use anime and video games (The horror) as source material/inspiration than they are books.

 

[Garmorn]

Just because they read Harry Potter doesn't mean they're reading everything else.

But helll. They're just as likely to use anime and video games (The horror) as source material/inspiration than they are books.

Yeah, check out any Buffy or Stargate fanfic site and quite a few are anime, video or movie crossovers.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Tell that to Harry Potter.

The vast majority of Harry Potter readers are adults. (And even more that weren't adults when they started reading Harry Potter are adults now ... ) Nowadays the craptacular Twilight series would be a better example.

When folks go off about how kids just don't read today, to me it just sounds like the same old cliche, "Well, back in the old days, things were better! These gosh darn kids today, just don't understand 'em!"

Yeah, this is the problem with the laziness of attributing motives and then dismissing, rather than simply reading and reflecting. I was in no way making any sort of value judgment. (It would be especially hypocritical to do so, given that I read much less now, myself, than I did when I was a teenager in the 80s. And I read much less for the same reasons teens do ... many, many other distractions.)

My statement was based on evidence. I know quite a few geeky pre-teens and teenagers, and almost none of them read for pleasure. They code, they play video-games, they surf YouTube, and some of them play RPGs. But almost none of them read for pleasure.

When I was growing up in the 80s, I had video games to distract me just like I do today.

Oh, please. Just ... please.

If anything, the increased entertainment options with the internet and such don't so much distract from reading as they distract from physical activity, playing!

They distract from both.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I know a lot of kids who read Harry Potter...and for most of them, those books comprised 50% of their pleasure reading in a given year. The rest was videogame guides, fanzines about their favorite shows (like Buffy or DBZ or Inuyasha), or music...and a lot of THAT was online. It was the rare kid who went from Rowling's work to another novel or collection of short stories, etc.

As for videogames, etc.- I basically admitted that videogames and other forms of entertainment can be just as likely sources for inspiration for those who are of a creative bent.

Like others, I also had my share of videogames to play and burn away the hours. However, the videogames of my youth- Pong (yes, I'm that old), Atari 2600 and the like- were very much in the arcade style and had a tendency towards repetitiveness. It wasn't your mind being challenged so much as your endurance as you repeated certain maze patterns, firing solutions, etc.

The bulk of today's games are much more immersive because they engage both the mind and the body. Good games make you think.

 

[Mistwell]

Tell that to Harry Potter.

When folks go off about how kids just don't read today, to me it just sounds like the same old cliche, "Well, back in the old days, things were better! These gosh darn kids today, just don't understand 'em!"

When I was growing up in the 80s, I had video games to distract me just like I do today. And out of the kids I knew, I was one of the few avid readers.

I'm not worried about reading as an activity dying out anytime soon. If anything, the increased entertainment options with the internet and such don't so much distract from reading as they distract from physical activity, playing!

I have a friend who is a successful professional author. He gets reports from his agent, who is a fairly well known agent, on a frequent basis. He tells me science fiction and fantasy book sales are extremely down, and have been for quite some time, even before the recession. Except for a handful of very popular books, like Harry Potter, the Twilight novels, take-off vampire stuff, and a couple of "gimmicky" type books like Sense, Sensibility and Seamonsters, the entire market for fiction seems to have really fallen on hard times.

You can read more like that here:

"Crisis Time: Science fiction book sales are, except for established big-name authors, way down."

More here, on how bad sales are in 2009, and here showing that all reading is down across the board in the U.S..

"Fewer and fewer Americans are reading for pleasure. That's the conclusion of a study released today by the National Endowment for the Arts. It tracks a decline among Americans of all ages. Here are a couple of the most striking statistics. On average, Americans spend two hours a day watching television and seven minutes reading. And only one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Which explains why, when you go into a small bookstore, you find Harry Potter, Twilight and LoTR...and maybe a section of RPG or licensed property novels, and not much else.

Even genre-fiction periodicals are feeling the crunch. Fantasy & SF Magazine, a venerable publication, has gone from monthly to bimonthly. Some of the ones I used to read have been out of print for some time now.

 

[Hussar]

Add another divine apparently, between people who think that books can only be for reading or "using", and those of us who firmly believe we can have it both ways.

This has been addressed, but, I'd like to chuck in my 2 cents too.

For a book to be used and useful, requires the information to be immedietely accessible, easy to find, easy to read and consise. No excess verbiage, minimum of description and examples should be separated from the rules.

Now, that makes incredibly dry reading. Boring in fact.

So, exactly how do you get both? Unless you separate the elements out very strongly - similar to the White Wolf books where the flavour text and stories are usually at the beginning of the chapter and the crunch comes next.

The problem becomes when the flavor gets inexoribly tied to the crunch. People complained about ghouls and where ghoul paralysis comes from. Apparently we didn't actually know where it came from until 2e - a decade or more after the appearance of ghouls.

But, what happens when I decide that ghouls use poison to paralyze? I've had players in the past insist that flavor matters. That I cannot use monster X in this place because it's the wrong terrain (I had manticores in the mountains IIRC).

Placing lots and lots of flavour in the game raises expectations that that flavour will be used. Players make choices and assumptions based on the flavour. Heck, there's another thread floating around here complaining that creatures as PC's are not given "racial" abilities. That assumption only comes from flavour. There's nothing in the mechanics that state that all minotaurs use large weapons or all kobolds must have darkvision.

Yet people assume because that's the flavour, then it must be true in all cases.

-----------------

On reading. I read some time back that YA fiction is seeing a massive boom in sales right now. However, only a small number of people are actually reading all those books.

IMO, that's pretty much the way its always been.

Jeff Wilder - you pshaw the idea that video games in the 80's wasn't a huge time sink. Trust me, it was. That bajillion hours I spent playing games like Bards Tale or Temple of Apshai or M.U.L.E or many others wasn't my imagination.

People don't read for pleasure. People have not read for pleasure in decades, if they ever did at all. Look at your parents. How many books do you think they read in a year? Look at your parent's friends. How many books? Reading for pleasure is not as common as people think.

 

[Reigan]

I wonder how many people using this forum use time that used to be for reading fiction?

 

[Snoweel]

I wonder how many people using this forum use time that used to be for reading fiction?

I'm definitely one.