Was he right back then?

For fucks sake

>Sounds like an excuse for lazy design
Such statement would imply that there is a design choice to begin with.

Paizo just taked 3.5e and preserved it. D&D 3e itself didn't have a design goal other then evolving from a point (ad&d 2e) to a convergence of a different model (monte cook past i.c.e. rolemaster knowhow of a rule-heavy system) with the new owner pov (wotc MtG ivory tower design).

So there we are: defaulting to a degree of "realism" was never the case for 3.5 nor for Pathfinder, it's accidental in the way two different person work together designing a rulesystem while not adressing the "realism" to each other: we end up with a system in where casters bend the game and martials are bend by the game.

Which further shits on many traditional concepts, tropes and abilities. To make HP a good abstraction they needed to take it much further and tie to many systems much better.

On the other hand, you have the problem the less systems you have, the better.
The more systems you put into your ruleset, the worse it gets. See Shadowrun.

As always every approach has its problems.

Having more subsystems isn't inherently bad. It's just that the more subsystems you have, the harder it is to make them all balanced and work together in a way that's intuitive and easy to understand.

But that "normal" doesn't necessarily need to emulate reality. It just needs to be a baseline that the audience can associate with.

And even if you do want a realistic level to exist within the system, that doesn't mean player characters should be tied to it, or tied to it so unevenly.

It comes down to the same fundamental problem a lot of people hate admitting. D&D tries to have high fantasy magic users and low fantasy martials coexist, which doesn't work. You either need to bring down the casters to hedge mages with cantrips, or boost up the martials to legendary heroes who can cleave mountaintops, wade into the river of death and achieve other impossible things through their sheer strength of will, perfected skill and physical power.

>High fantasy
>Low fantasy
Stop using words that you don't actually understand.

I'll keep using words according to their meaningful contemporary definition, thanks.

You have to merge high and low magic together
nobody likes systems that only has one of them

IT DOES NOT MATTER IF A RULESET IS FLAWED, AS LONG AS PEOPLE LIKE IT

Oh god not this discussion again. Fuck off with your semantic bullshit m80

I disagree with all of those points.

Kludging them together just satisfies nobody, but having the ability to scale things from low to high can work. However, there are plenty of systems which just focus on doing one well that are very popular and successful.

A ruleset being liked doesn't mean it's flaws don't matter. A lot of people have a lot of complaints about the systems they love, precisely because being invested in something can often mean being more aware of its flaws than anyone else and wanting it to improve. Saying flaws don't matter is just foolishness that excuses lazy and bad game design and is a philosophy that would lead to stagnation in the industry.

In reality all specialized rulesets are less popular and sell less than all DnD and DnD derivatives

D&D is a specialised ruleset.

d20 is the opposite of specialised

False.

The d20 system was an attempt at a generic version of the D&D ruleset during the 3.5 era which didn't actually work very well.

D&D, as it exists, is a specialised system. It runs fantasy, and only excels at a specific flavour of fantasy that its rules are tuned to supporting, although what exactly that is depends on the edition. It's widely used for other things because it's the largest game in the world and RPG's are inherently adaptable, not because the system has any inherent advantages in terms of adaptation. Save, perhaps, the advantage of being the biggest game in the world, which means there's a lot of precedent of people adapting it, which does give you a place to start. Even if most D&D based games outside the fantasy genre are fucking terrible.

It's a lazy half-truth worded to support the same idea it could be used to deconstruct.

>A ruleset being liked doesn't mean it's flaws don't matter.
True, but isn't it wrong to claim that "Kludging them together just satisfies nobody" when we're talking about a family of games that must make up at least 75% of the global RPG market?
It's very specialized in some respects, but it's also meant to cater to a wide variety of tastes and experience levels. It doesn't cater to most of them very well, mind you, but since it can kinda-sorta satisfy most players it succeeds over more focused and coherent games. You can run a campaign that *pretends* to be gritty low fantasy for example, whereas Exalted can't even really pretend.

I'd argue that's only really a design trait of 5e, and they achieved it by making the system as basic and open to interpretation as possible. None of the prior iterations of the system are particularly good at it, although I guess 4e stands out as actually being a focused, coherent game very good at doing one thing, while 3.PF was so obfuscated and vague you could do almost anything with it and it wouldn't work that much worse than usual.

Doesn't that sort of demonstrate my point, though? 4e tried to be a more focused system, and in the process alienated people who weren't interested in what it was focusing on. They tried to make 5e all things to all people because they realized that's what D&D was in the first place, arguably going back to AD&D. 3e was a mess to be sure, but it was a mess with enough material to run any pseudo-medieval game you could possibly want, which always felt "like itself" no matter what ill-advised thing you tried to do with it.

Speaking of people who were "right back then."

In that single post? Perhaps.
Now post the rest of his temper tantrums where he actively mocks the fans who want real discussion and compares wanting an exceptional hero who is good at using a crossbow to wanting a superpowered waterballoon thrower.

Problem with 4e was not the 'focused' part but the fact that they made it too 'gameist'. For all of its flaws and problems 3.PF takes a pretty simulationist approach to the gameplay, even though it doesn't simulate our world.

>implying that's not what people says every time a new edition is released

>elegant
>versatile
>3e

One of these things doesn't belong.

>...trying my best to max-out the system, but the damn thing won't break
>Multi-class Monk/Fighter/Sorcerer

This is fucking comedy gold.

What is sad is as a response to the waterballoon quip a guy made a waterballoon thrower that was better than a crossbowman.

I do wonder if that's just something D&D has that's unique to it, though, as no other roleplaying game that isn't a generic system really works like that, and games trying to do the same thing almost always fall into its shadow. I don't feel like you can make a general argument that specific systems are less successful by pointing out D&D, because D&D is a singular unique game that kind of stands at odds with the rest of the hobby, while also being larger than all of it put together. The RPG space is in a weird position of just being totally dominated by a single product and fans of that product.

>SKR
>right about anything
40 keks

Not when Holmes Basic was released, or AD&D 1e, or Moldvay, or Mentzer, or Rule Cyclopedia, or AD&D 2e.

I know, right? How much did they pay for your soul, mister editor?

>They tried to make 5e all things to all people because they realized that's what D&D was in the first place, arguably going back to AD&D.

Incidentally, 2e was the first edition that tried to be "all things to all people." It didn't work all that well for that purpose because despite a rules shift away from dungeon crawling, it was still a super lethal system best suited for tomb robbers that was being misapplied to run all sorts of heroic fantasy stuff.

this is the fucking moron who thought that a 12 int wizard who refuses to cast spells and instead fires & reloads a crossbow would be a useful 3e playtest character, i.e. a character anyone would play ever. The only reason he keeps getting design jobs is because the RPG industry is more incestuous than a Targaryen family reunion.

Bill tried to warn us.

We didn't listen.
WE DIDN'T LISTEN.

1. GNS theory is bullshit
2. How is 3e simulationist? What is it simulating?
3. D&D is gamist. It's literally the definition of what gamism means. The "narrativists" and "simulationists" who devised GNS theory invented the term specifically as a place to shunt off D&D and any other system that wasn't cool enough for either tribe to claim
I think my point still stands because to me, D&D is popular because it's the first one most people play (and would probably stay that way even if WotC didn't spend a dime on marketing) and most people can't find a good enough reason to play anything else. If the system wasn't covering their needs, they'd try out different systems.
>Not when Holmes Basic was released, or AD&D 1e, or Moldvay, or Mentzer, or Rule Cyclopedia, or AD&D 2e.
Because all those were basically riffs or continuations on the same system, and so didn't provoke the "they change it and now it sucks because they changed it" nerd rage that happened when each edition became essentially a whole new game

No. No one plays DnD for a realistic medieval experience. Being "realistic" isn't a core part of any version of DnD, and making the game balanced shouldn't be sacrificed to that altar.

If you're really so butthurt about non-magical characters doing epic things, have like one sentence of lore about how people who train their bodies enough unconsciously tap into the Swole Force or whatever which causes them to be magically enhanced. Or start having magical swords that only fighters can use rain from the sky at level five. There's a million ways to handwave the "realism" problem away, and that's assuming you just don't ignore it and declare that people above level 5 are all superheroes.

>Because all those were basically riffs or continuations on the same system, and so didn't provoke the "they change it and now it sucks because they changed it" nerd rage that happened when each edition became essentially a whole new game

Pretty much, yeah. When Wizards took over, D&D died, only to be replaced by new games wearing its name.

>Martials and martial options should suck because realism
>Casters use magic so you don't have to explain shit
Then why is there something like levels in this shitty system? why it takes the same amount of xp to level a martial who has to suffer and endure shit upon shit while for a caster is a cakewalk? Makes no fucking sense, and you still see tons of defenders of this approach

I guess I feel like, because D&D's position is so unique, it isn't really a useful point in the broader context? D&D remains successful because it's the largest RPG ever and it tries to cater to everyone, as well as keeping people within its ecosystem. But that's not something another game can really accomplish outside of extreme circumstances like the rise of Pathfinder, and even then D&D 4e still outsold it while they were still printing books.

I do think we're seeing a slow change though. I don't think D&D will ever go away, but the indie RPG space is larger than ever before, and is appealing to audiences who might not otherwise enjoy the D&D formula.

He's conveniently forgetting that in real life getting shot with a single fucking crossbow bolt (or an arrow for that matter) would leave you lying on the ground screaming and probably kill you unless you could find immediate medical attention. Pathfinder has HP bloat out the ass so that doesn't apply.

HP is not Meat Points

They shouldn't be. As noted in , they fuck it up a lot.

Where's that screen cap talking about how Beowulf fought Grendel underneath a lake for a week or Roland cutting a mountain in half or Arthur killing a 1000 dudes with a single sword swing?

He probably uses this same philosophy when designing new classes and archetypes.
>"You chose to play a cavalier? Don't you know that cavaliers are literally useless without a horse. It's just reality, because if you train to fight on horseback that must mean you're completely useless if you're not on a horse. What should we do? Design the cavalier to have useful abilities when not on a horse? That defeats the purpose of playing one, it's just realistic guys"

...

Those are not really relevant
DnD is for playing fancy Hero Quest

Stories of mythic heroes going on quests isn't relevant to that?

>How is 3e simulationist? What is it simulating?
Mostly itself and its own world. I don't care much about GNS but 4e did take steps to further disentangle gameplay and in-world entities. Where in 3.PF things are built more or less on the same ruleset in 4e PCs and their enemies don't have much in common except using d20 to decide the effectiveness of their actions.

3.PF pays at least some lipservice to how things work from in-world perspective and 4e tried to fully move it into the "up to GM" realm.

I honestly prefer the latter in almost all cases. I've never understood the obsession with rules-as-physics or PC/NPC mechanical symmetry. It just seems to make things so much more awkward and fiddly and causes so many problems.

So what is it then? According to the rulebook rolling a successful attack roll means the attack connected, and if I was using a crossbow that means the bolt hit the target, right?

IIRC there was an optional HP system for D20 called vitality points, they used that in the D20 Star Wars and it was also in one of the Unearthed Arcana. It basically split HP into vitality points and wound points. Vitality points would be like your normal HP, with dice and constitution modifiers, while you had as much wound points as your constitution. VP would reflect your ability to avoid getting hit, a mix of fatigue and luck. Attacks that only damaged your VP would be described as narrowly avoided glancing blows or as dodged/parried. VP would also recover faster than wounds.

I liked the system, had a bit of "character shields"/"hero's luck" touch to it, which was fitting to the Star Wars game that introduced me to the system. However, there was one weird aspect to it. While normally you would only start taking wound damage once your VP ran out, crits would circumvent VP and deal wound damage directly. This gave a huge advantage to crit focused builds, since while VP were steadily getting higher, wounds would not. Dunno if they fixed that in later editions, but was easy enough to house rule.

No.
3rd edition lied to itself when it presented that it had moved away from just going into dungeons and killing stuff
It is still only about dungeon crawling

it's relevant when both 3.PF devs and their defenders use the "martials in mythology suck and casters in mythology are superpowerful" as an excuse for why martials suck in 3.PF.

They use these two arguments:
1. Because realism!
But when you point out that dragons and magic aren't realistic they use this instead:
2. Because verosimilitud with mythology!
But when you point out that martials in mythology are more badasser and powerful they go to the first argument, rinse and repeat.

Reality would seem to disagree with you

Those are just names of mechanics
Damage does not mean literal damage
Hitting does not mean literal hitting

...So what, the bolt just whizzes past the enemy's head and lowers his self-esteem?

But you can't blame people, given how obfuscated everything is it's very easy to get confused.

Maybe it reflects off armour and bruises him, or nicks his cheek, or forces him to twist an ankle getting out of the way, or he's just out of breath from diving out the way. How you fluff it is up to you, the abstraction is pretty flexible.

3e is actually a pretty fucking terrible system for classic dungeon crawling play, due to the overt focus in combat, bloated skill list, and general crunchiness all but enforcing that killing a character should be a major event. Also, the in-game time is too fast

No, the enemy barely dodges and loses stamina over that tight movement.

>I guess I feel like, because D&D's position is so unique, it isn't really a useful point in the broader context? D&D remains successful because it's the largest RPG ever and it tries to cater to everyone, as well as keeping people within its ecosystem. But that's not something another game can really accomplish outside of extreme circumstances like the rise of Pathfinder, and even then D&D 4e still outsold it while they were still printing books.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that if something were to somehow replace D&D, it would have to have the broad appeal that D&D does. You can see this in at least some countries where D&D isn't #1. Last I heard, Shadowrun is the most popular system in Germany. Like D&D, it's a very mechanically specialized system, but also one that suits a massive range of tastes and preferences
>I do think we're seeing a slow change though. I don't think D&D will ever go away, but the indie RPG space is larger than ever before, and is appealing to audiences who might not otherwise enjoy the D&D formula.
Around the edges, I suppose. It's a lot easier to publish RPG books and a lot easier to get them seen. I don't think that has any relation to D&D, either a shift in spite of its dominance or a reaction to something it's doing wrong, and I don't see any proof it's going to meaningfully threaten D&D's market share, even in the long run. 5e was a massive hit, after all.
>You're absolutely right, but I'm still going to use this as an excuse to whine about post-TSR D&D

Yes, it can mean fucking anything
This is why AC is both armor + dodge + deflection + everyone
I once agreed with my GM that the bard character never got touched by attacks and instead always got some lucky way to avoid getting split in two by a huge axe or anything else

And I prefer symmetrical rules for games on 3.PF levels of complexity.

Though I don't mind asymmetry in less complex and more narrative based games.

...Shadowrun is not a broad system at all. It does a single kind of game, magic-cyberpunk heists. It goes between pink mohawk and black trenchcoat, but that's just different tones, it doesn't actually change the meat of the game or what you can do with it.

>I've never understood the obsession with rules-as-physics or PC/NPC mechanical symmetry

Yeah, it's a very 90s obsession. Nobody cared about that shit before, but suddenly in the 90s it was all the rage, even though it tends to make systems a downright unplayable trainwreck if you push it hard enough.

I tried it. It's pretty shitty.

I like the one in SW Saga Edition with its Wound Threshold much more.

I also used a variant of VP/HP system where only crits did permanent damage (but no additional damage) and non-crit damage was restored within minutes. It worked pretty good, but it was in a low-magic E6 game so the healing wasn't wide-spread.

An then comes the poison...

Fumes

Fumes on contact or poison that needs to get into your bloodstream really stretch my descriptive skills. I can describe only so many "small nicks" and "grazes".

This just opens up the question for spells that are "DC save for half damage"
Lets say the spell Storm of Daggers is one of these, so if rolling to dodge the spell means you got out of the way and sprained your ankle or something, that must mean that failing the saving throw means you must have gotten hit by the daggers. Right?

Wrong. It means you sprained BOTH ankles of yours.

You can tell a very wide variety of stories in the Shadowrun universe, as long as they involved guns, and it suits a very wide variety of player preferences. It destroyed every other cyberpunk system by appealing to be scifi and fantasy fans, instead of just fans of cyberpunk. When you can have a wuxia hero, a sneeki breeki oper8or, a hacker, and wizard powered by Christ in the same party, that's actually a pretty fucking diverse game

It all makes sense now.

No, damage does not have to mean wounds
HP is merely "countdown of fate"
If you go to zero, you get hit.
So this super dodge Bard can just avoid all hits until she meets a spell/attack that finally puts her HP to zero and then she gets hit for good.
Her luck finally ran out.

And people still defend this as a good system.

It is a ROBUST SYSTEM
IT JUST WORKS

Doesn't PF have Cavaliers that don't need horses, instead getting a Squire that works like a more sapient Animal Companion. Or am I thinking of 5e?

In a more simulationistic RPG, he would have been.

He's a blithering retard specifically because he's trying to apply that exact line of logic to a fucking high fantasy game that takes place in high fantasy settings.

What about that isn't good? At worst it's just unclear terminology, but it works well. Better use of language or explanation would improve it, but the core concept is solid.

PF devs are drooling fucking morons who deserve to be shot, their wives sold to Somalian pirates, and their children turned into hot-dogs and sold at the local county fair at discounted prices.

I don't think I'm even joking. If I knew I could get away with it, I would go after Paizo's developers with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. I am physically offended by the fact that they're allowed to breathe the same air I do.

I prefer to run HP as as meat points it could make games look a little ridiculous but it helps with internal consistency. And considering that I don't even try to pretend the game is anything but high fantasy it works pretty good.

Like that time bandits armed with bows laughed at the PC with over 30 ft. of deep snow between them. He took the hits and then just jumped over the snow without running start and cut one of them in half.

I don't think that option is in the Advanced Player's Guide. It might be an option in another expansion book, but that's a major problem if the better class option is in another book they want you to buy.

>I think this is a reasonable punishment for making a game I don't care for
>I don't think I'm even joking
Jesus Christ, get laid. How do you people manage to out-circlejerk the Pathfaggots?

>You can run a campaign that *pretends* to be gritty low fantasy for example, whereas Exalted can't even really pretend.
Have you tried playing TSR D&D?

I mean post-1e D&D. Even by AD&D, they'd strayed pretty far from gritty dungeon crawling

>4e tried to be a more focused system, and in the process alienated people who weren't interested in what it was focusing on.
The problem with 4e was that they listened to people that knew 3.5 very well. You can see that they had probably read the char op boards, and worked to mitigate the flaws of 3.5 based on the analysis of its most knowledgeable community members: namely the extreme disparity in the tier system.

Unfortunately, some people raised a stink about this, swearing these problems did not exist. And being brainless consumers, they wanted to buy books instead of just continuing playing 3e like the people happily playing OD&D or B/X, so WOTC created its own worst competitor in Paizo through the OGL.

I heard an interesting comment on it on Veeky Forums a while back.

4e took what 3.5 was, and made the best game it could out of it.

5e took what people thought 3.5 was, and made it a real game.

At heart it means you are running out of plot armor. This is more or less how Gygax himself ran it as you can see in the 1e DMG

>It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points?Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage — as indicated by constitution bonuses — and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the “sixth sense” which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection.

Brainless edition cultists are a small minority everywhere but online communities. If your smug, pretentious narrative were true they would have hated 5e nearly as much, instead of jumping ship en masse

AD&D 2e was the first edition that really started moving in that direction, and it was only a half-hearted attempt, from a mechanical standpoint. (The modules went all the way) OD&D, the Basics, and AD&D 1e are all pretty solidly built for the "gritty dungeon crawl" niche.

That... actually sounds about right.

Man, I'm sure glad that massive explosion from a maximized Fireball didn't actually HIT anyone that was directly under it and inside its blast radius!