Quote from: Haffrung;682463as the hobby ages the hobbyists tend to have less time. If you're 42, with a serious career, a spouse who works, two kids, and some kind of social life outside of gaming, it's pretty hard to find the time to simply play once or twice a month, let alone create your own world setting and write up a level 1-20 campaign.

Exactly.

What you're paying industry professionals for is time. The time to develop a setting well, the time to playtest the system, the time to develop their skills beyond the level of "Well, any asshole could do this. And you have."

Hobbyist DIY time investment is best served by long running campaigns — prep once, run forever. Players who like to change up settings and systems tend to either have rotating GM's, much lower quality (which doesn't really matter — your game, your fun), or insane geniuses at the helm.

But the industry needs quality, and that takes time and hence money.

When I did my 2 year delve into running D&D 3e, I ran it with the 3 core books and we had plenty of fun. I didn't want nor need any other books at the table.

But that takes a strong GM!

Quote from: tzunder;682473When I did my 2 year delve into running D&D 3e, I ran it with the 3 core books and we had plenty of fun. I didn't want nor need any other books at the table.

But that takes a strong GM!

In my case, my players neither buy nor read RPG books. So the pressure to add new crunch is nil. However, I understand that's not common in this day and age.

They certainly learned a few lessons from WoTC and have been smarter and more careful about trying to slow down the pace of the bloat and inevitable decline.  But when the whole model has that design flaw, all you can really do is slow things down.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;682781They certainly learned a few lessons from WoTC and have been smarter and more careful about trying to slow down the pace of the bloat and inevitable decline.  But when the whole model has that design flaw, all you can really do is slow things down.

RPGPundit

Unless of course you see that 'bloat' not as bloat at all but as variety and options. 3.5 ended far too soon for my taste. I imagine so will Pathfinder. I just doubt anyone else will pick up the banner and carry it forward. And our hobby will be the worse off for it.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;681125Paizo actively supports 3rd party products and lists them on their site for sale.

Yes sir, sorry if I wasn't clear.  I meant to say, searches on sites other than paizo.com turn up zero Paizo products.  Except for language translations, I don't think I have seen anything from them on, say Drive Thru.

Point being, 'where you search' has a big impact on the ratio.

Quote from: Ravenswing;682234But Pazio's setting material is well executed, and it doesn't take very much work to strip out the game mechanics and insert the system of your choice.

Some of this is just good mojo, though.  For example, RotRL has some pretty sever problems for something that's been played so much and saw an Anniversary Edition.  Their treatment of Magnimar, too is far more lean than it appears.  Imagine you had the three or four products that mention that city, including the novel. Now take their city guide, and use a red pen to strike through everything that you already know about.  You're left with maybe ten pages of material. Maybe.

I still recommend them, but some of their excellence is skin deep.

Quote from: Tetsubo;682922Unless of course you see that 'bloat' not as bloat at all but as variety and options. 3.5 ended far too soon for my taste. I imagine so will Pathfinder. I just doubt anyone else will pick up the banner and carry it forward. And our hobby will be the worse off for it.

Bloat isn't bloat when there's a mechanism to void the excess and keep only the valuable bits. CCGs do this arbitrarily.  With 3e the players are supposed to do it via "rules mastery".  With that conceit, you can't remove the junk/trap options.  Bloat becomes inevitable.

"Bloat" is when conflicting rules that overlap and give bad consistency. That was/is a major problem with 3.x/PF.

"Feats" are just a mechanical jargon for abilities that a character accrues - tacked onto the larger core system. Ultimately it's no different than by building them into a class. Of course the issue is that most of these abilities are balanced by level, cost, or ability vs. other such things within the mechanics of the system that fulfill the same roll. In this case (of 3.x/PF) - spells.

You can almost see the silly logic that eventually spawned the 4e abomination. Rather than admit the balance is all kinds of fucked up, WotC went more meta-mechanical and abstracted all these abilities as "class powers" and built a skirmish boardgame around it.

I have no problem with the concept of Feats etc. The problem I have is that Paizo's implementation of them as well as other parts of their system are mechanically shitty. Great on appearance. Dogshit in actual play in my long-term campaigns.

Bloat is when you need more and more books to play published adventures.

Quote from: Haffrung;683109Bloat is when you need more and more books to play published adventures.

Bloat is when you have to carry more and more books to the game, or when you have to wade through more and more pages to find that one rule that applies to a given situation.

I'm sure that if ten of us replied to the question, "What is bloat?" there'd be twelve different answers.

Quote from: mcbobbo;682938Yes sir, sorry if I wasn't clear.  I meant to say, searches on sites other than paizo.com turn up zero Paizo products.  Except for language translations, I don't think I have seen anything from them on, say Drive Thru.

Ah, I see. Yes, I read your post completely backwards. Apologies!

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;683186Bloat is when you have to carry more and more books to the game, or when you have to wade through more and more pages to find that one rule that applies to a given situation.

Keeping in mind that nobody is making players buy anything beyond the core books. It's not a publisher's fault that some fans are OCD completionists or obsessive char op freaks. For those who aren't helpless addicts, bloat is only a problem when more and more discretionary products require other discretionary products to use. To use an example from Paizo, the existence of the Advanced Players Guide is not in itself bloat. The dependency of an adventure path on that book is.

Quote from: mcbobbo;682941Bloat isn't bloat when there's a mechanism to void the excess and keep only the valuable bits. CCGs do this arbitrarily.  With 3e the players are supposed to do it via "rules mastery".  With that conceit, you can't remove the junk/trap options.  Bloat becomes inevitable.

It never had bloat problems with 3rd edition, then of course, I applied the common sense theory of gaming.  Don't allow something into the game that ruins the game.  If someone comes up to you and wants to play an undead red dragon death knight, just say no, then show them what will be allowed in the campaign. "Rules mastery" is a must for a game master (it's even in the title).  So it makes no sense for someone who wants to run a game to snub their nose at "game mastery."  It's your job.  It's like someone wanting to be a pilot and not wanting to bother with learning to fly.