Fanbase

>4e we all know has long slow combat

The thing that was fixed during the lifespan of the game? That even the devs acknowledged was a problem and then, y'know, made it work right?

Also, too tactical for roleplayers? What?

I've been, and for every depressed PF player you find at least another shill that will defend the system to the last men. I didn't say D&D/PF fanbase is formed entirely by shills, I just said it has a crazy amount of them.

>go to a D&D/PF thread and ask for a solution for a problem and their fans will immediately shut you down and dismiss your question aluding to those problems not existing. Why?

Why do you keep trying to invent this strawman?

Fuck off, you retard.
You're probably the same idiot who thinks that your personal tastes are objective facts.

>OP wants to talk about the fanbase
>Brings the system to the conversation while dismissing OP's post as bait
The bait is strong in this one, and I have bit

I did. He implied that other editionfags don't know or try to fix the problems inherent to the edition. We do. I've been spending the better part of a month working on making Crafting plausible in 5e so I can run a proper Eberron campaign.

>I am a faggot troll

Quit it. I already said it's outdated, but I at least understand that there's plenty of good reasons as to why it became popular and remains popular.

So quit trying to spin your whole "There's no reason people should like this game stop liking it please please please" bullshit every day. It's pathetic.

Read it again, because he just said that many (not all, learn the difference) are shills, you just went full defensive.

Really?

Try again, and actually tally the results in this thread. Being a /pfg/ regular, I find it hard to believe that more than 1 or 2 people defend the system compared to the multitudes that don't.

Perhaps you're running into confirmation bias?

>the most popular game needs shills

That's why you and OP are retards.

>Anyone who disagrees with me is a troll!
>No one could possibly hate my perfect pet system!

Settle down.

>The only reason why it upsets people is because they don't understand what makes it great
So enlighten us.

They don't defend the system because they recognize only trolls attack it.

There's plenty to complain about, but having things to complain about doesn't make it a bad system. It's certainly got bad parts, but the good outweighs the bad, hence why they still play it.

Veeky Forums samefags a lot, I wouldn't take any experience in here as an actual fact of anything. Though yeah, I've been in the official forums of Anima and in the official forums of PF and at least in those 2 cases the fanbase of PF is fucking cancer while the Anima one is well aware of their system having problems and trying to find solutions.

I think the latest wave of the 3.PF defence force arriving has very much proved OPs point. These people are like a cult.

*This person is like a cultist

Gods, but Path of War makes the shit go down smooth.

Reminder that the D&D 3.5 core books are some of the worst RPG books ever written.

Ludicrous imbalance (with some classes at the top of the power curve and others at the bottom, even accounting for all the rest of the OGL content), literal fucking lies told to the players about what the system allows you to do and what you can expect from each class, advice to GMs which actively does more harm than good including an utterly broken CR system which you are better off ignoring when it comes to effective encounter design.

The whole thing is a fucking joke.

It took 2e D&D, an already great system, and streamlined its mechanics around a simple and easy core mechanic. The d20 mechanic is easy to use, adapt, and design for, hence why it spread prolifically. It also streamlined things like unifying the class levels and making creatures more organic in their construction.

It also took some archaic game ideas and removed them or revised them (like the saves groups), and also adapted a fair amount of 2e lore while expanding upon it.

It may not be the best system of all time, but it's absolutely ridiculous to act like there's nothing good about it like you just did. You literally need to be retarded to pretend there's nothing about the game worth praising.

Well, can you list some of these good reasons then? I remember being very disappointed reading 3.0 when it came out, and kept playing AD&D 2nd ed. What the game did right, in your opinion?

>never looked at GURPS

Reminder that the GURPS books are some of the worst RPG books ever written.

Ludicrous imbalance (forcing GMs to perform extensive research just to avoid common pitfalls), literal fucking lies told to the players about what the system allows you to do and what you can expect from each option, advice to GMs which actively does more harm than good including an utterly ineffective challenge system which you are better off ignoring when it comes to effective encounter design.

Nope. GURPS is a toolbox, and it sells itself as one. 3.PF sells you a load of bullshit about party cohesion and how things are 'meant' to work while the mechanics directly undermine that.

Although honestly I do wonder if that's why most 3.PF fans defend the system. They don't pay attention to the mechanics, just how the system tells you things Should work.

GURPS sourcebooks are actually some of the best rpg manuals ever written. They're well researched and offer a ton of material on the particular subject they happen to cover. You could easily use them as high school textbooks, for example.

Because most players of 3.PF don't take part of RPGs as a whole, they only play 3.PF. For most of them, D&Derivates have been their only exposure to RPGs or fantasy traditional gaming as a whole and they have no interest whatsoever in branching out. Since it's their chosen game, they are incredibly defensive about it and very lenient when it comes to its flaws, simply because they don't know any alternatives.

And before somebody gets triggered, there are people that play D&D and have tried or are playing other games. But look at gamefinders, look at the LGSes, most importantly look at the people shilling D&D in blogs, podcasts and Youtube. Most of them have never even heard of any other game. That best they've heard about Pathfinder, some shitty heartbreaker and maybe Vampire the Masquerade.

>gurps is a toolbox
>you need to reforge each tool to make it work

Wow, what a great purchase.
You GURPS apologists really are the worst, because as bad as you pretend 3.5 is, GURPS is borderline unplayable.

Nope. I don't even like GURPS, it's very much not my kind of system, but I respect it for what it does. For people and groups who are really into it, going into that toolbox and rebuilding the system to suit the next game they want to run is part of the fun. I don't really get it, but more power to them if it's what they enjoy, and as far as I'm aware the system fully supports that style of play.

3.PF, meanwhile, gets no respect, because it is a system which lies to you.

>GURPS
>Well researched

I guess if you only read GURPS rulebooks, it would seem that way.

>but I respect it for what it does.

Except it sucks at what it tries to do.
You probably just respect it because it's not as popular so you have no reason to even care about it.

What gets me about 3.5 is that Fantasy Craft exists and 3.5 is still popular.

It's like a gourmet restaurant opened up right next to a McDonald's that sold the same menu for the same prices but way healthier, better cooked and using actual animal parts, and everyone just kept going to the McDonald's anyway.

Nobody has ever shown me a key systematic failure in GURPS that undermines the whole system. While this thread has already pointed out several that are fundamental to 3.PF. If you have an example, go on, share it.

Different guy here, not a GURPS fan either.

Calling GURPS bad does not mean 3.5 is good. The fact that Linkin Park is bad due to being overly angsty and edgy does not mean One Direction is good because it's bland and sickly.

Humans are creatures of habit, and marketing is everything.

Plus, y'know, there are dozens of fantasy heartbreakers out there, and Fantasycraft is just one of them. There are loads of good, interesting and innovative d20 derivative fantasy systems that will always be in D&D's shadow because most people will just stick with what they know.

You keep reiterating what MADE it great way back when.
You have yet to explain why it still has any reason to be played.

>While this thread has already pointed out several that are fundamental to 3.PF.

Really? You mean a few butthurt opinions from people who don't understand the system?
It's the same thing in every one of these threads, with people dumber than 13 year olds pretending small oversights are system destroying.

I think I can lump you into that group.

Why?

>Ludicrous imbalance between player classes

>Broken CR system

>Ivory Tower game design which punishes people new to the system and those not making optimal choices

Those are the most bland and obvious ones that most people can rattle off, all of which are present in 3.5 core and undermine the rest of the system from there.

I'm going to need some examples of factual errors in the books, or I'm going to file that as trash talking.

Personally, I think 3.x was a neat little system for its time that fixed a lot of previous problems, introduced a lot of neat ideas for its time, and helped consolidate a bunch of disparate mechanics pretty well. Over time, the cracks and faults in the system- as well as those that it, specifically, introduced- became a lot more obvious, but owe it to the sort of hindsight and testing that years of play brought about. There's no reason one can't enjoy the system nontheless, though they'd have to be particularly stupid to not at least be -aware- of its faults.

Pathfinder, on the other hand, HAD the advantage of all those years of hindsight when they had the chance to address the system's issues but turned a blind eye to it, instead touting the system's most glaring faults and as integral, inexorable, and SACRED parts of the D&D experience, all the while parading themselves under the banner of The One True successor. So instead of selling Pathfinder as a retroclone with meaningful improvement, they sold it more as an IDENTITY. And the aftershocks and fallout of that stems into what the OP is talking about.

Okay so about those key systemic failures of GURPS, have any examples?

Don't forget that PF actively, deliberately, and maliciously filled in a RAW/RAI loophole that gave fighters +20 to hit with a ring of continuous true strike.

But infinite spells per day? Just fiiiiiiiiiine

"Ivory Tower" is not what you think it is. It's commonly used by the butthurt, but that's because they, like Monte Cook, think it sounds cool, and they like to extrapolate the most negative implications.

Ivory Tower simply means providing players with the rules without going in depth to explain the best uses for those options. This only applies to the Player's Handbook, and was largely done for the sake of keeping it as a streamlined reference book. The DM's Guide, alongside the class specific books like the X and Y series and later the Complete series, did provide not only explanation and assistance in building characters from the presented options, but a look behind the curtains for doing things like creating custom spells.

I much prefer the disassociated mechanics of TSR D&D, which makes it easier to slot in subsystems to taste. This breaks the core of the D20-system mechanic, but the problem is that the associated D20 subsystems, like skills, often don't work. RAW, Diplomacy breaks the game

Nope. Direct statements from Cook contradict what you're saying, and he designed the fucking thing.

minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=13812.0

>Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.

>Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.)

>There's a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

The system was intentionally made to be unbalanced, to have some options be explicitly better than others. Which is bullshit, awful game design that your apologism cannot counter or ignore.

1. "ludicrous" is an exaggeration, and class imbalance only really becomes an issue at the higher levels.
2. It's hardly broken. There's a little roughness at lower levels (CR 2 and below) because the game is a little more swingy there, but overall it's a useful "single glance" approximation. The DM's guide does provide the common sense advice that creatures may be stronger or weaker depending on the party composition (flying creatures will be more challenging for parties without flying/good ranged abilities), alongside other considerations that you seem to never bothered to have looked at.
3. That's not what Ivory Tower is.

>"an issue at the higher levels"
>6+ is higher levels
We usually call them mid-low (below 10th level) but whatever

Ludicrous is exactly what it is. Classes like Fighters and Monks are utterly irrelevant compared to casters like Wizards and Druids. They lack anything in the way of out of combat utility, making them worthless there (especially given their shitty amounts of skill points), while in combat it is trivial for a caster to do more damage, take less damage or just ignore damage altogether and win entirely through the application of save or suck effects.

CR? CR is bullshit. There are low CR encounters with immunities to non-magical weapons (below the level you'd expect people to have them) and those fucking cr 1/2 flies with a save or die. You can follow every guideline it gives you and still create a TPK completely by accident. You're better off ignoring CR altogether and eyballing it, and if a system is better ignored than used then it's fucking broken.

As for number three,

Also worth noting is that he doesn't really know what a "Timmy card" is. They're big cards with big effects, as opposed to cards less interesting but very economical. Cruel Ultimatum and Akroma are good examples.

Furthermore, the actual point Wizards makes by introducing that archetype is that Timmy cards represent the sort of appeal that some players get from the game- big, dramatic, fun moments- and that the game should have content that can support that appeal instead of punishing it.

Cook was talking out of his ass.

Cook rarely talks out of anything else. I'm still astonished by the huge pile of pretentious wankery that is Invisible Sun. I can't wait to see the box get torn apart and all those intricate secrets people paid hundreds of dollars for being shared online faster than they can discover them themselves.

You know I'm still waiting to hear those examples how GURPS systemically fails to do what it sets out to do. I'm all ears!

You utter moron.
That was written six years in retrospect, and doesn't take into account anything beyond the Player's Handbook. It's a silly article that people like you like to twist around to suit your purposes.

More importantly, there's more than a single reason why options are better than others, including encouraging a particular style (swords for the classic adventure feel) or idealogy ("active" feats being better than "passive" feats). At the end of the day, even these options are not necessarily stronger, because there are multiple layers of the game that make interactions between choices more complex than "a sword is better than an axe".

And, you need to remember that it wasn't "intentionally made to be unbalanced", but that it was built from an even more unbalanced system, with 2e coming from a time where balance between characters was hardly a priority. 3rd edition took countless important steps to make the game more balanced, including unifying the class levels, but legacy ideas were retained as part of the brand image that lead to certain things being unbalanced.

At the end of the day, the balance issues of the system really aren't that dramatic, especially since they're very well understood at this point. Even just a casual search online or reading through any of the guide books can make questions of balance an effective non-issue.

But, back to the main topic, your "Ivory Tower is the death of the system" idea is a bad joke.

I give him credit where he's due, he DID help introduce a lot of novel and interesting material and improvements in 3.x; unfortunately, as those aforementioned cracks started to show, he traded in his self-assessment for self-importance.

>really aren't that dramatic,

Compared to stupid shit like having Werewolves fight Vampires in oWoD, sure. In comparison to even previous iterations of D&D, they are very dramatic

Unifying class levels made the game more imbalanced. In AD&D wizard was better than fighter at high levels, and thus needed way more experience to level up. 3.5 removed that while forgetting make the fighter levels equal in power to wizard levels (see linear fighter vs quadrilateral wizard)

Hint: it doesn't.

Oh, sorry.
I thought you were implying there was still some merit to 3.5

>It's a silly article that people like you like to twist around to suit your purposes.

Finding direct quotes from the guy who wrote the system and coined the term that prove you wrong is twisting it?

"Quadratic," just as an fyi.

>previous iterations of D&D
You mean where magic users were just about useless at low levels, before dominating the game at high levels?

And classes were made distinctly unbalanced with prerequisites that rewarded players who rolled strong characters by letting them play even stronger classes?

Those previous iterations?

There's plenty of merit. It's a great system. There being other great systems doesn't make playing a great system bad.

The only reason it's not the most popular system at the moment is because 5e is the one system that is generally superior in every category.

Can we talk about different fanbases? This 3.PF shit is played out. Is it just that no other game has a fanbase large enough to be obnoxious?

Nice bait post, I'll bite.

The problem is that you are not going to get people to agree on what is 'wrong' with a given D&D system. For example, for me the 3.pf is overly complex and unbalanced. But, for Bob over there that is exactly what he loves about the system.

The people in the 3.pf general? They are the ones that agree with Bob and will defend their point of view. Me? I'm over in the 5e general and wondering why Bob doesn't just buz back to 3.pf and leave me alone.

Other systems? I can't answer that. Maybe because in their case when there is a problem is it is so bad/obvious that nearly nobody sees it as a strength. Which would probably also answer the question of why they never became as popular as D&D I suppose.

You want consensus on what is wrong with a version of D&D? Go to the general of another edition and ask them. Or I guess you could go to this sort of thread where the answer will be 'everything'.

Nobody played with Unearthed Arcana, so the only obnoxious prerequisites were Paladin's 17 charisma.

From one of the guys who helped write the system, and misinterpreting it to help serve yourself?

The guy even says D&D doesn't exactly do what Magic does, and more importantly he even explains that there are times when the toughness feat has its uses. More importantly still, other authors of the game distinctly destroy the concept of Ivory Tower, because they went deep into explaining the particular strengths and weaknesses of different options in a "Behind the Curtain" approach outside of the Player's Handbook.

WoD had the gothic melodrama stereotype but that feels a bit dated now. Most of those sorts have likely drifted on to ultralight stuff like Monster Hearts.

You've still yet to provide any actual counterargument.

The proof of core imbalance is still there- If a system rewards mastery (with more power), then it implicitly punishes novices who choose 'bad 'options. That is a known core principle of 3.5's design.

Do other books do it better? Sure! But I'm talking about core. The foundation of the system, the thing it's all built upon. I think that banning core is generally one of the best things you can do for 3.PF, at least decent chunks of it, but if you're assessing a system it seems silly not to start from the core content and work from there.

It's also worth noting that Cook himself acknowledges it was a bad idea. Something many fans still seem to struggle with.

>You mean where magic users were just about useless at low levels, before dominating the game at high levels?

Wrong. And the imbalance is not as pronounced from my experience as in 3.PF

Anecdotal evidence is worthless. That you can make the system work and not run into the problems does not mean they do not exist.

A system being bad or mechanics being broken does not mean the game is unplayable. Groups can have great games in bad systems, but it means that it will likely be more work on the GM or groups part to deal with issues when they occur, or the GM will just ignore the mechanics when they go wrong and be forced to make it up as they go along, which is also a failure on the systems front.

What do you want to hear?
WoD's is 30+ years fedoratippers and landwhales wearing corsets and lace.
Savage Worlds' is like the retarded little brother of Pathfinder's community.
Shadowrun's community has been taking a giant spiked dildo up its ass for years and everyone knows the game is barely more functional than Simbabwe's economy, but don't you fucking dare to point it out.
GURPS is practically a cult.
STRIKE! has that one retard.
Call of Cthulhu is a bunch of fucking well adjusted gentlemen of refined taste.
FATE's fanbase has about as much to it as the """game""" itself.

3.PF is just an easy target because of its size, people are just more familiar with it, but most of the bigger games have obnoxious fanbases.

You must have played a different game then, because the entire point of magic users back in the day was having a weak, pathetic, sack of vulnerable potatoes for the rest of the party to carry around for several levels, so that that player would essentially "earn" the right to playing a reality warping near-god at the higher levels.

They tried to fix this in 3rd edition by making them stronger at lower levels and weaker at higher levels, so that people could actually have fun playing low level casters, but this ultimately backfired because they wound up being a little too strong at low levels, and much to strong at higher ones without editing their spell lists.

Why is it D&D attracts such a ridiculous amount of hate? Veeky Forums acts like 3.5 fags are some massive horde when 9/10 any time an user mentions the system outside of a general it's to talk about it like it's the second coming of Satan. They act like autists who refuse to play anything but Pathfinder is somehow Pathfinder's fault, while happily ignoring GURPSfags who shill GUROS at every opportunity are some kind of enlightened master race despite GURPS being even easier to break mechanically and having even more shitty, wacky rules.

As someone bitching about 3.PF, I'll reiterate the point I made in I don't entirely hate the system. A lot of the classes in other books, limited casters and initiator martials, are really fun and interesting to play.

But the mechanical framework is still shite, and the core is the best example of that. If you are going to call something 'core', and that has big fucking problems, then your system has big fucking problems.

When your experience is limited, your perspective is one-dimensional. Imagine if someone tried to convince you that grass was purple. You'd think they were here high, or fucking with you.

It's literally four super autists who hate the system, along with a few people who are tired of its popularity.

Most of Veeky Forums either doesn't really care, or likes the system.

Basically, you can just ignore these threads, because those four super autists are just trolls and it's not worth giving them the attention they so desperately crave.

I fucking love this argument, I really do.

It's an anonymous imageboard, so just label anyone who disagrees with you as one or a small group of people. It's an easy and thought free way of discarding any and all opposition. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

The issues of dragon right after 3.0 came out hosted a mighty flame war. Then wizards stopped printing anti-3 letters to the editor. Ron Edwards tier brain damage memes were from 2004.

No, it's less an argument, and more of just the unfortunate truth. These four super autists would have been banned ages ago, but they know anonymity protects them.

It's less about "opposition" and more of just identifying trolls and their habits. If you don't like 3.pf, that doesn't make you a troll, but if you make dumb threads like these, that places you firmly in that category.

I don't even really like 3.pf, but I can recognize a troll when I see one.

>OP asks why 3.PF fans seem to always irrationally attack people who criticize the system.

>Is irrationally attacked for criticizing the system.

It's the bizarre confidence that always gets me. The self assurance that lets you be so ridiculously precise.

Four people? Fuck it, sure. Amongst all the anonymous posters from all over the world posting at different times of day, you were able to discern and be absolutely confident that there are exactly four people who disagree with you.

It's an incredible degree of delusion, it really is.

Grognards are gonna grog. I'm actually quite sad that there's still grogs out there who are incredibly upset about 3e effectively replacing 2e.

Like, it's been sixteen years. Let it go. You might as well be upset about more people playing 5e, or even 4e.

Well, it did a very good job of proving his point.

Three then? I said four because there is a cycle of three "ISN'T D&D THE DEVIL?!?" troll threads and I was giving the benefit of the doubt that there might be a fourth in this little troll clique, but I guess three would be more accurate.

Remember, I'm not talking about the people who simply don't like 3.pf, but the people who feel compelled to troll about it.

>irrationally

OP invents a strawman and gets people to tell him to fuck off.

You can also fuck off.

>we wanted to reward mastery of the game

I don't know how anyone can read this as anything other than backpedaling.

>hey did you guys know this game has serious balance issues
>N-no it doesn't! Those trap options were put there to act as a mini-game within the game!

He didn't even criticize the system though

>serious balance issues
>1d8 19-20/x2 is better than 1d8 x3
>a boring feat is not very rewarding

Oh no.

Mutants and Masterminds, Champions, Anima, Rogue Trader, et cie. Besides, there's gotta be something worth saying about WoD's community besides "fedoras and whales." How about pontificating on Werewolf kiddies versus Vampire tryhards?

You are making wild, baseless assumptions based on circumstantial evidence and waving it around as a banner. It's just fucking stupid.

Assumptions like that don't belong on Veeky Forums. Anonymous communication removes the ability to be so sure about things like that, and IMO it's a good thing.

Don't discredit someone based on your assumptions about them, engage with them- Or don't, if it's a blatant troll- based on their own merits, there and then, because you have no information beyond that. Building up complex fantasies about exact numbers of identified trolls, cliques and agendas is just bizarre paranoia.

More like TWF being utter shit, monk being useless and outclassed by everybody, etc Those kind of issues.

TWF is a great example, given that it actually reduces your damage overall. You invest feats into the chain just to get worse and worse.

Stop trying to defend yourself and your two friends. You guys are dumb trolls, and trying to pretend you guys are anything else is a joke at this point.

You're here trying to take unfair advantage of being anonymous, by routinely spamming about how assblasted upset you are about people playing a game you don't like.

And, you're going to keep doing it for years, since it's unlikely that people are going to stop playing the edition you hate so much anytime soon.

This is why I fucking love this. The reactions of people having their paranoid delusions challenged are always so much fun.

Come on, I want to hear more. What's our agenda? How are we coordinating? Just how far has your twisted little mind extrapolated coincidences and connected false positives into a pattern?