The Gaming Den

deaddmwalking wrote:Despite expecting 5th edition to fail, that's not something I anticipate with glee.

It is for me. I salivate at the thought.

Personally, an edition of D&D that is hands-down better than 3.x is what I want.

Sure. We all want an edition of D&D that's better than all of the others combined (instead of simply being a few pieces of all of the others combined). We also want flying ponies with death rays*.

The actual thing we are criticising here, and of which we are predicting the failure (D&D 5E), is none of those things. What anybody wants has very little to do with 5Ed unless what they want happens to be "5th Ed as it is" (unlikely, because it's largely incomplete and where it IS complete, it's complete balls) or "the failure of 5th Ed".

*I assume this is a universal desire.

Am I the only one that wants to see Pathfinder fail, more so than anything else right now?

icyshadowlord wrote:Am I the only one that wants to see Pathfinder fail, more so than anything else right now?

As much we hate on PF it may very well be the best designed RPG currently in print. If that statement fills you with crushing despair at the state of the industry that consider that confirmation that you belong here. The sad reality is that the industry is in the dark ages where there are aqueducts still standing but no one remembers what they're for or how the build them.

I agree Pathfinder is one of the best rpgs designed right now ( if no oyher reason its basically D&D 3.75 ), but saying the industry is in its dark ages is nuts. No other "age" had produced so much varied, successful and well designed content as the last 10 or 15 years. No matter your personal gaming style, I bet there there is more quality options available right now than 20 or 30 years ago.

We may well be living in the golden age of gaming.

silva wrote:I agree Pathfinder is one of the best rpgs designed right now ( if no oyher reason its basically D&D 3.75 )

and that's a fucking travesty, because it's been 14 years since 3.0 was released. You could argue that 3.5 was if not an improvement at least fairly neutral, but you can't say that about Pathfinder without being full of shit. The fact the a system developed more than a decade ago is able to dominated the market even when manged by hacks is not indicative of a healthy industry.

Now sure because of the internet more games in the absolute sense are being published, but those games are shit. As it stands now anyone can put some shit up on kickstarter and chuweros like you who eat and fuck shit will open their wallets as long as the right tribal buzzwords are provided. That's not fucking sustainable and it certainly isn't going to stop the hobby from dying a slow death.

Lord Mistborn wrote:

silva wrote:I agree Pathfinder is one of the best rpgs designed right now ( if no oyher reason its basically D&D 3.75 )

and that's a fucking travesty, because it's been 14 years since 3.0 was released. You could argue that 3.5 was if not an improvement at least fairly neutral, but you can't say that about Pathfinder without being full of shit. The fact the a system developed more than a decade ago is able to dominated the market even when manged by hacks is not indicative of a healthy industry.

Now sure because of the internet more games in the absolute sense are being published, but those games are shit. As it stands now anyone can put some shit up on kickstarter and chuweros like you who eat and fuck shit will open their wallets as long as the right tribal buzzwords are provided. That's not fucking sustainable and it certainly isn't going to stop the hobby from dying a slow death.

Is there anything that CAN topple 3E/Pathfinder from the #1 spot? Sure, people can conceptualize a better mechanical approach to a D&D style game, but anything that's lighter and more streamlined than 3E gets shit on here and other online communities.

5E seems to be doing well where I live, but that's completely anecdotal. As far as I know it could be tanking in every other part of the country. I probably won't know for sure until they announce 6E, or the D&D roleplaying game's discontinuation. I thought 4E was doing fine up until Essentials came out.

What if D&D5 doesn't fail, though? What if it's as big of a success as 3E, and has a 10 year long publishing cycle? This wouldn't fit WotC's planned obsolescence model, which makes a 10 year shelf life pretty much impossible, but I wonder what would happen on the off chance the game reached 3E's level of market saturation.

Lord Mistborn wrote:and that's a fucking travesty, because it's been 14 years since 3.0 was released... The fact that a system developed more than a decade ago is able to dominate the market even when manged by hacks is not indicative of a healthy industry.

One thing has no relation to the other. The oldness of a dominating product doesnt necessarily relate to the quality of design of its competitors. In fact, market domination has more to do with brand recognition and expertly funded publicity campaigns than to quality of design.

Or are you trying to say Call of Duty Modern Warfare is the cream-de-la-cream of videogames while Dark Souls, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Skyrim, Stalker Misery, Faster Than Light, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, are all pieces of bad design and evidence that the industry face a dark age ?

Now sure because of the internet more games in the absolute sense are being published, but those games are shit.

How old are you ? Eleven ? No, really. Because - SURPRISE! - your personal taste is not the objective truth by which all things are measured. Right now there are more quality games in all styles - from simulationism to narrativism to tactical gameyness to LARPING to whatever - than the industry ever saw. Even your favorite game (which I suspect is D&D 3e) continue being available on stores and online resources until today.

I would like to hear a good, valid, adult, argument about the industry being in some kind of dark age. Because right now the only thing I see is a baby crying because his mommy took his pacifier.

You may have wanted to use slightly fewer examples of titanically successful sales juggernauts in that list of video games, silva.

Hiram McDaniels wrote:Is there anything that CAN topple 3E/Pathfinder from the #1 spot? Sure, people can conceptualize a better mechanical approach to a D&D style game, but anything that's lighter and more streamlined than 3E gets shit on here and other online communities.

There is a big shift right now towards 'lite' 'shared storytelling' games. That is not what 3.x and Pathfinder are. In fact it is because they are rules heavy games that they're catering to a section of the market that wants that when everything else isn't.

Perhaps surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, that is apparently a large portion of the market. Until someone is willing to put the work into making a better 'rules heavy' game, nothing will topple the entrenched 3.Pathfinder throne.

5E seems to be doing well where I live, but that's completely anecdotal. As far as I know it could be tanking in every other part of the country. I probably won't know for sure until they announce 6E, or the D&D roleplaying game's discontinuation. I thought 4E was doing fine up until Essentials came out.

Of the 9 people in my gaming group, all know of 5e, but have no interest, haven't looked at the rules, and aren't planning to. I'm the only one that has looked at them in depth, and that's more because I like dissecting design.

What if D&D5 doesn't fail, though? What if it's as big of a success as 3E, and has a 10 year long publishing cycle? This wouldn't fit WotC's planned obsolescence model, which makes a 10 year shelf life pretty much impossible, but I wonder what would happen on the off chance the game reached 3E's level of market saturation.

I don't think 5e has a 10 year life cycle in it (1000 true fans aside). It has mechanical and production issues, and it doesn't have much room to grow in the current market.

3.0 was actually an amazing piece of work. It was basically compatible with 2e stuff allowing it to move the entire player base of basically was the RPG community over to it, actually made the mechanics of play better, had pretty high production values, and was put out at just the right time to take advantage of the waning of 2e and the coming of the internet. It would have been a good solid D&D game just on that, but it brought something else to the table that catapulted it to the most popular ttRPG of all time... the OGL. You cannot imagine how powerful the OGL was for 3.x.

The chances of any game getting the same market share that 3.x had is essentially non-existent.

Lord Mistborn wrote:Is there some instance where we predicted a product would fail and it succeded that I'm forgetting? When we say that the industry is composed of failing smarmgarglers that's not because we'er overly negative. It's actually because the industry actually is composed of failing smarmgarglers.

Well, a lot of people, including me, predicted that Pathfinder wouldn't amount to anything more than another interminable d20 clone that doesn't go far enough like Legend or Final Fantasy d20. And I don't think anyone would've predicted that it would've been the industry leader.

After New World of Darkness went down in flames and White Wolf ceased to exist as anything more than an IP-in-exile with no real staff or assets, I would've bet real money that Exalted wasn't getting a new edition anytime soon.

If you want to catch Pappy Lago with his pants down again, I'm very confidently predicting that 3D-printing will allow another wargaming team to karate kick GW in the nuts and give them the first real competition they've had in decades.

Just clarifying my previous point: I don't know about the RPG industry (it could well be facing a decline or something, I don't follow sales numbers or whatever) but the RPG hobby is stronger than ever.

silva wrote:your personal taste is not the objective truth by which all things are measured. Right now there are more quality games in all styles - from simulationism to narrativism to tactical gameyness to LARPING to whatever - than the industry ever saw.

This really isn't the venue you want to make this argument. Also you're using GNS terms in 2014 sweet Madokami what is wrong with you. There are more games but once again that doesn't matter. We have metrics for what makes a good RPG and as far as I can tell compliance peaked last decade and then when downhill from there.

Fuck in the early 2000's the Old Shit Reactionaries were being laughed out of the room. Now they're getting their names on the newest edition of D&D.

I've played a one-shot of 5e, and while it's a playable game unlike 4e, it does have issues. The biggest problem for me is that the modifiers are so small that you'll be failing regularly, even at things you're supposed to be good at. The people I've seen who like it are old grognards who pine for the days when players had minimal choices and had to fellate the DM if they wanted magic items. This may appeal to DMs with a "fuck the players" mentality, but that isn't enough - you've got to get the players on board too. And without an SRD or even official PDFs, 5e is at an even greater disadvantage against Pathfinder.

If WotC were smart, they'd realize that people really liked 3e and the current team of hacks can't make something better. I like the idea of a 3e "special edition". 3e had a lot of splatbooks, and for every race, class, monster, spell or magic item that would ever see play, there were ten that just took up page space. If I were them I'd re-release the three core books, then put out a book of races and classes, a book of monsters, and a book of spells and magic items, consisting of the ones that people actually used.

Hiram McDaniels wrote:Is there anything that CAN topple 3E/Pathfinder from the #1 spot?

I think there's something, and it will more than likely be called Pathfinder 2.

4e-5e really reminds me of the late-AD&D2/Alternity era. It's the same unfocused/let's-throw-shit-at-the-wall attempts at design that don't pan out, the same bullshit weird-ass house rules "fixes" to treat symptoms so as to avoid facing the structural problems, and the same obstinate refusal to actually write the game that people want to play.

At some point, one of WotC or Paizo will realize that what the market actually wants is 3.x, only with major fixes and upgrades, and hire someone to do the job Monte Cook did to the AD&D ruleset. And since by now it's obvious that WotC sees the D&D department as a way to get Hasbro to pay for full-time DMs to entertain their M:tG employees, I figure it's more likely that Paizo will be the ones to act.

I would like to hear a good, valid, adult, argument about the industry being in some kind of dark age.

Yes, because for all your spam-worthy of the word "Evocative" and impressionability, I would've thought you a child yourself (finding wonder in everything, but then pointed out having kids & junk). For dishonest ways have gone about, one would say ye deserve little of such an explanation, but it would be against tennets of conversation, and such discussion would be good for the thread as well.

Looks like a Dark Age as the giants are the same crap from over a decade ago because RPG culture is decades behind (albeit social conventions update). There's a larger desire for "rules-lite" I believe because of people want a fresher start, & designers are lazy. It could be a Rules-Heavy game, and if it meant a new start, majority would likely flock to it. There's definitely a desire for a "new" game, which is why Edge of the Empire, or 5th edition SR are getting played.

silva wrote:Just clarifying my previous point: I don't know about the RPG industry (it could well be facing a decline or something, I don't follow sales numbers or whatever) but the RPG hobby is stronger than ever.

Tee-hee

The part you guys are (inexplicably) missing is that silva is an idiot.

He is claiming that the industry/hobby is better now when fewer people are playing because more games exist and also all the past games still exist.

Just like if you locked Silva in a tiny room with only a single copy of "Everybody Poops" and then killed everyone else on the planet including yourself, he would still claim that being a reader is better after all that then 7 minutes before the Apocalypse because a bunch of books he can't read exist.

MisterDee wrote:

Hiram McDaniels wrote:Is there anything that CAN topple 3E/Pathfinder from the #1 spot?

I think there's something, and it will more than likely be called Pathfinder 2.

I'd really like for SOMEBODY to improve 3rd edition but I'm skeptical of PF doing it. I base that almost entirely on PF fans. In the FB groups and people I meet in meat space, every time I mention PF making some sweeping changes or even needing to greatly improve there are either a flood of arguments about how it shouldn't because reasons* or that it is already the perfect RPG ever ever.

*Reasons including: It is perfect with its imperfections, there is no perfect RPG so fuck trying, anything you don't like you can not use or add, role playing not roll playing, 4e shows no improvements can be made, go play a different rpg, you're not old enough to know what you're talking about (Must be 30+ or some such), etc etc.

Kaelik wrote:Just like if you locked Silva in a tiny room with only a single copy of "Everybody Poops"

I know it's a hypothetical situation, but I'm okay with just that part of it. Especially if there's no means of posting to the Den.

Before people get to caught up in a 5E has failed feeling lets remember a bunch of things:

1) Most markets, even speciality ones, are large enough for two large market dominating players to act. When you look back at 4E it sure as fuck split the fanbase, and Frank loves to trot out the "hundreds of thousands" comment, but lets not fucking kid ourselves. 4E outsold everything not named pathfinder by leaps and fucking bounds. 4E was not killed because it wasn't making money, it was making fucking great money compared to everything not named pathfinder. If Mearls promised suits that 5E would outsell pathfinder every month of its entire run then he is a fucking moron who will get canned at the end of the year when it turns out that magic doesn't really fucking exist. However, the sales targets for 5E are probably more modest. As long as the game turns a profit that meets or exceeds what they have promised shareholders Mearls can personally smear each book with horseshit and nobody who could stop him will care. 5E will then be a "success" as long as wizards maintains or builds marketshare, even if it does not unseat its competitor for the top spot.

2) The real reason that there even was a split in the fanbase was because of a revolt by WOTC 3rd party partners. It was not the scream of 1000's of internet fanboys, not the "inherent superiority" of the 3.x ruleset. What really happened (as confirmed by Lisa Stevens) is that WOTC suits decided that the 3.x OGL had screwed them out of money by making it to easy for 3rd parties to support the game. WOTC wanted all the 3rd party publishers to produce all the small profit necessities while they produced the stuff that made real money. They probably could have even made this part work if they hadn't also decided not to provide the system or other materials needed to write content for 4E to those other publishers until it was to late for them to have products ready for gencon 08. You can't tell businesses that you are working with that they have to miss the biggest trade show of the year to remain on the good side of your business and not expect a lot of them to tell you to go fuck yourself. 5E does not have the same wide open OGL as 3.x but it is better. Not only that but the first adventure is a collaberation with a third party. Even Piazo has mentioned that they might start selling content that is stated up for both pathfinder and 5E. Even having shitmuffin on board is a help in this regard. 5E is not a great game, its not even a game thats trying to sell innovation, but it is trying to be an industry darling. Every website, podcast, or nerd culture venu that can be reached has given 5E at least a thumbs up, and most of them have given it really glowing reviews that basically say "this is great, its just like D&D when I was 12!" So while the forums are filled with 3etards and 4urries that know that the game is bullshit, the editors who control the frompages of the internet have praised it from on high in a way that just didn't happen for 4E.

3) We have not even seen the real things that will determine if 5E is a success or failure yet. The most profitable aspect of 4E was the fucking character builder. It never showed up in Icv2 numbers, but WOTC people basically let slip that the god damned character builder alone justified the entire print run of 4E. WOTC already knows that the real money is in subscription services. The only way to get good computer support for 5E is through the software they are promoting. I will shit a brick if that software is not designed on a subscription model. Again, Mearls can write truely astoundingly shitty rules, the hardbacks can gather dust at the FLGSes, but if a million people agree to pay 5 dollars a month for a piece of crappy software then it justifies the same 5 year run that Hasbro seems to plan around. The real thing that 4E took from MMOs was the monthly fee and that "feature" is certain to stick around.

I thought most of the core rules of 4e were a good improvement over 3.5

-Skill proficiency replaced fiddly skill points
-Skill list consolidated, though maybe they could have had a few more skills
-AC/Fort/Ref/Will follow the same mechanics

The problem I had was the classes (same power schedule, no real power progression) and wonky math among other things.

MGuy wrote:

MisterDee wrote:

Hiram McDaniels wrote:Is there anything that CAN topple 3E/Pathfinder from the #1 spot?

I think there's something, and it will more than likely be called Pathfinder 2.

I'd really like for SOMEBODY to improve 3rd edition but I'm skeptical of PF doing it. I base that almost entirely on PF fans. In the FB groups and people I meet in meat space, every time I mention PF making some sweeping changes or even needing to greatly improve there are either a flood of arguments about how it shouldn't because reasons* or that it is already the perfect RPG ever ever.

*Reasons including: It is perfect with its imperfections, there is no perfect RPG so fuck trying, anything you don't like you can not use or add, role playing not roll playing, 4e shows no improvements can be made, go play a different rpg, you're not old enough to know what you're talking about (Must be 30+ or some such), etc etc.

What would constitute an "improvement" to 3.x?

All of the changes that I want to see are ones that would make the system lighter, streamlined and more balanced, but apparently that's not what the market wants. The market wants a dense, bureaucratic deck-building game built on a solid foundation of: "You must have THIS much Asperger's to play".

Full disclosure: I hate 3E with a passion.

Getting all the classes on more or less the same page, so they -all- play in the same world as monsters.

Removing trap options and expanding the amount of viable weapons/builds/tactics.

Monster PC rules which don't punish players for daring to want to play a gnoll or giant or whatever.

You're certainly within your rights to hate anything you want with as much passion or cold disdain as you can muster, and 3rd edition D&D has a lot of things about it that even the most flavoraid drinking fan will admit are problems, the fact is that 3e 'just works' in a way that few other games do. Take that recent whining by SKR about how D&D characters are unrealistically strong because of bench press records - he's fucking wrong. Not because it's a damn game and if you want to be playing a character played by Dwayne Johnson instead of Mads Mikkelson you should be allowed to do that, but because bench presses are an arbitrary demonstration of arm strength and real people can lift considerably more than that when they are allowed to use their legs. In short: someone put a lot of fucking effort into even trivial parts of the game like lifting tables and they already produce emergently realistic results to a degree that has not been matched before or since.

Further, the rules of reach, threatened squares, flanking, and attacks of opportunity create a tactical mini game where position matters and tactical advantage is apparent and emergent from the rules without particularly being dumb. The development of firing lines and choke points all comes naturally out of the rules, and you can easily show an ongoing battle to someone unfamiliar with the game and explain in non-game terms why everyone is where they are on the map and it will make sense to them. It's a stunning achievement.

That being said, we can certainly talk about some genuine problems:

• Wizards >> Fighters. Some people describe this as wizards being too strong and some people describe this as fighters being too weak. Probably both are true. It's not super apparent at low level when a longsword is an adequate expression of your hatred of goblins and many problems can be solved with thumbs and ropes, but the first time the adventure takes place in an environment literally inaccessible without magic, the disparity is undeniable.

• High end numbers get wonky. The higher level you get, the more places the numbers fall apart, mostly with skills and saves. Multi class save bonuses get terrible pretty fast, and of course a high level skill bonus item gives a bonus that is half again larger than the entire RNG.

• Multi class rules don't really work that well. At very low levels, it works OK, but multi-casters fall behind rapidly because being behind a static number of caster levels is a bigger penalty the farther up the power curve you go. And the aforementioned multi class saves problem, and the general useless nature of high level non-caster abilities all converge to make it fall apart around level 7.

• Monster character rules don't work at all. Basically they plug right into the multi class rules and monsters don't even have classes to set their abilities in the first place. You have the 3e version where monster PCs suck, and the Pathfinder version where monster PCs are way too strong and it all has to go to the drawing board.

• Wealth by level breaks down at mid level. The wealth rules in 3e are frankly amazing. The tables fit together in an interlocking fashion where someone math hammered out logs and quadratic progressions and the numbers all work out. You actually can derive objective statements of whether the DM is being stingy or generous and the tables do produce the results they say they do. But... the numbers just objectively aren't big enough and the rewards for getting large numbers of tiny items are large enough to support a 'Christmas tree' that most people subjectively don't like. Characters can't afford +3 gear when they are high enough level to need it, and most people think the thing of swapping out magical amulets, boots, and belts after every fight is 'kind of dumb.'

These are big problems, and it would take a new edition to tackle them. I'd also like to see a decent kingdom management minigame in the core rules. But just throwing up your hands and saying 'I'm gonna go design magical tea party instead' isn't a reasonable answer. And that's why that answer has not been well received by the public.

-Username17

Aryxbez wrote:There's a larger desire for "rules-lite" I believe because [ . . . ] designers are lazy.

That is one of the reasons why there are so many shitty rules-lite games. Creating a proper rules-lite game requires a lot of designer effort.

Aryxbez wrote:Looks like a Dark Age as the giants are the same crap from over a decade ago because RPG culture is decades behind

But the giants were always the same crap from a decade ago, because the giant is always D&D. By this logic the hobby was ALWAYS a dark age. (perhaps the only exception being the mid 90s with the White Wolf phenomena).

My point remains: never before we had so much games being released with so much variety in content and style, whatever the industry giant is or how long it has been dominating or whatever.

I would go further. Gaming industry in general - be it roleplaying, video gaming, boardgaming, etc - is having a creativity boom in the last 5 to 10 years. It's the near we got to a Golden Age in a looong time. I can name dozens of good games in all medias that stand on their own, financial and quality-wise, something one couldn't do 20 years ago. I'd it's caused by POD, crowdfunding or e-distribution I don't know (perhaps so), but the fact is its here, it's happening.


Crying like a baby because your favorite edition of Shadowrun or Gurps or D&D isn't improved is nuts - these games are still available, go play them and house rule as you wish. Damn even OD&D and Runequest are available. It's like the 70s again. You can have your old Mustang side by side with new Ferraris. How awesome is that ?