As doomed as it turned out to be... I would have *really* liked to gotten on board with Pat Kapera and Alex Flagg on Fantasy Craft. I didn't even know about it until way after the fact.

What killed that was the fact it was only two of them working on it and Fantasy Craft dropped literally the same time as Pathfinder. It got smothered in the crib.

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 10:41:21 AM
As doomed as it turned out to be... I would have *really* liked to gotten on board with Pat Kapera and Alex Flagg on Fantasy Craft. I didn't even know about it until way after the fact.

What killed that was the fact it was only two of them working on it and Fantasy Craft dropped literally the same time as Pathfinder. It got smothered in the crib.

I like to call that 'UHF Syndrome' when something of quality releases only to get run over by one or more bigger names.

('UHF' opened in theaters against Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters 2, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society, License to Kill, and Lethal Weapon 2. I'm amazed it made any money at all.)

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 10:41:21 AM
As doomed as it turned out to be... I would have *really* liked to gotten on board with Pat Kapera and Alex Flagg on Fantasy Craft. I didn't even know about it until way after the fact.

What killed that was the fact it was only two of them working on it and Fantasy Craft dropped literally the same time as Pathfinder. It got smothered in the crib.

  They claim Spellbound is almost ready to see the light of day. Maybe that will allow it to fill the niche of 'what 3.X wanted to be,' as opposed to 'what 3.X became,' which PF has sewn up. Of course, I'm also the eccentric who thinks that Savage Worlds is the closest thing to what 2nd Edition wanted to be, so take my assessments of the hobby with a cubic foot of salt.

Quote from: wmarshal on October 01, 2021, 09:42:28 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 01, 2021, 08:51:10 AM
But in terms of "unlikely to be repeated conditions" I think this is spot on. 5e returned to the OGL, fixing the mistake made by creating their own biggest competitor.

It seems to me that a graduate level thesis could be done covering the grade A strategic mistake WOTC made by trying to fire their biggest third party content provider, and inevitably created their biggest competitor just as they tried to convince their customers to switch to a new product. (4E was the New Coke of D&D. Imagine what could have happened to the Coca-Cola company if they had a supplier that could have immediately rolled out an classic Coke replacement l.) One can only hope that those at WOTC involved in such a poor business decision to fire Paizo from D&D have been banished from the business world, and are now working as tradesmen somewhere in the Yukon.

Something very similar happened with Nintendo and Sony, which led to the Playstation.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on October 01, 2021, 10:58:21 AM

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 10:41:21 AM
As doomed as it turned out to be... I would have *really* liked to gotten on board with Pat Kapera and Alex Flagg on Fantasy Craft. I didn't even know about it until way after the fact.

What killed that was the fact it was only two of them working on it and Fantasy Craft dropped literally the same time as Pathfinder. It got smothered in the crib.

  They claim Spellbound is almost ready to see the light of day. Maybe that will allow it to fill the niche of 'what 3.X wanted to be,' as opposed to 'what 3.X became,' which PF has sewn up. Of course, I'm also the eccentric who thinks that Savage Worlds is the closest thing to what 2nd Edition wanted to be, so take my assessments of the hobby with a cubic foot of salt.

I know most people's heads will explode at the idea of you saying that...

But having delved so deeply into both lines of design... I totally see what you're getting at.

Fantasy Craft took the 3.x d20 design to the craziest heights of trying to balance all of it's subsystems against one another. The problem with d20 becomes manifest. So many subsystems and granular progression reveals the issue with the *assumed* progression which has been massively distorted by decades of power-creep beyond the original assumptions of Gygax himself.

This has led to gigantic numbers bloat, as well as revealing just how far removed the abstractions of their subsystems are mechanically from the realities they're supposed to portray. The bloat feeds the bloat. Because 5e never even tried to resolve these fundamental design issues with the rigor that Fantasy Craft did, it either retains them, or shifts them under the rug.

Fantasy Craft spreads the power more evenly across the 20-level spread which is what 3e presumed to do. It leverages the abstractions of Feats far better than any other edition since 3e, and directly tackles the worst offenders of the 3e mechanical design - LFQM, Stat Dumping, Scaling and recodifies the 20-level spread.

Savage Worlds accomplishes this further by boiling away the needless numbers-bloat, and leverages the reality that Classes are just packages of Abilities. It breaks those abilities out to add directly to a simple Core Task Resolution Mechanic - roll 4 or higher. Everything else is plugged into that.

Effectively "Edges" are just Feats with more mechanical power. Where it matters is directly tied to "How One Dies in Game" - since the Wound system of Savage Worlds is pretty simple, it bypasses the HP Pinata issue of d20. This allows for more mechanical and abstract leverage to the combat system of Savage Worlds where Parrying and Armor (Toughness) is tighter, and has more verisimilitude without have a shit-ton of sub-systems to figure out.

Fighters are *hard* to land a blow on because, shock, they're good at fighting. They can take massive beatings because they're Tough. They're harder to damage because they're strong enough to wear armor (making them Tougher). Conversely casters suck at all those because they're putting their advancement into other things - but can nuke like nobody's business.

Savage Worlds does with smaller numbers, less bloat, what 2e set out to do circa-Skills and Options. I think Fantasy Craft v. Savage Worlds is a better example. In fact if you look at Savage Worlds Pathfinder and Fantasy Craft, they're weird mirror opposites of one another. Exemplars of both their systems doing the same thing with different mechanics expressing them.

Edit: I should amend the Savage Worlds does have a lot of modifiers to combat, but they're all small numbers and common sense. You can fit your character on half an index card at Legendary level (which would be like 18th+ level in D&D) which in 3.x would be a 4-page dissertation trying to describe your character mechanically.

I admit, I was thinking less mechanically and more philosophically--the strong setting emphasis of both AD&D 2E and Savage Worlds, Edges and Flaws as a parallel to Kits for straightforward distinction of characters, and a general 'high adventure' feel with medium mechanics, moderately plotted games, and warlord/domain play as possible but not central.

It still stands.

The mechanics of the design emulate the same general things that define the systems. All the sinew in-between the sub-systems is where where they differ philosophically, aside from their task-resolution mechanics.

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 11:32:11 AM
Savage Worlds accomplishes this further by boiling away the needless numbers-bloat, and leverages the reality that Classes are just packages of Abilities. It breaks those abilities out to add directly to a simple Core Task Resolution Mechanic - roll 4 or higher. Everything else is plugged into that.

Effectively "Edges" are just Feats with more mechanical power. Where it matters is directly tied to "How One Dies in Game" - since the Wound system of Savage Worlds is pretty simple, it bypasses the HP Pinata issue of d20. This allows for more mechanical and abstract leverage to the combat system of Savage Worlds where Parrying and Armor (Toughness) is tighter, and has more verisimilitude without have a shit-ton of sub-systems to figure out.

Fighters are *hard* to land a blow on because, shock, they're good at fighting. They can take massive beatings because they're Tough. They're harder to damage because they're strong enough to wear armor (making them Tougher). Conversely casters suck at all those because they're putting their advancement into other things - but can nuke like nobody's business.

Savage Worlds does with smaller numbers, less bloat, what 2e set out to do circa-Skills and Options. I think Fantasy Craft v. Savage Worlds is a better example. In fact if you look at Savage Worlds Pathfinder and Fantasy Craft, they're weird mirror opposites of one another. Exemplars of both their systems doing the same thing with different mechanics expressing them.

Edit: I should amend the Savage Worlds does have a lot of modifiers to combat, but they're all small numbers and common sense. You can fit your character on half an index card at Legendary level (which would be like 18th+ level in D&D) which in 3.x would be a 4-page dissertation trying to describe your character mechanically.

In some ways, Savage Worlds reminds me of a far less imbecilic Skills and Powers.

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 11:45:03 AM
It still stands.

The mechanics of the design emulate the same general things that define the systems. All the sinew in-between the sub-systems is where where they differ philosophically, aside from their task-resolution mechanics.

   Not disputing; just pointing out my own line of thought on the subject.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on October 01, 2021, 11:52:07 AM
In some ways, Savage Worlds reminds me of a far less imbecilic Skills and Powers.

  Agreed--but one of my long-standing questions about S&P is how many of its problems were its own, and how many of them were inherent in trying to build the AD&D structure into a point-based system?

I find that SW fixed my problem with skillpoint based games: Balancing expensive abilities.
In Skillpoint based games (Shadowrun, Gurps, M&M) they try to balance abilities against each other with costs, but this causes a glut of numbers bloat and makes increasing in power dissapointing.

Savage Worlds levarages so many good systems together in harmony: Your skills are important, but your edges are what make a character REALLY stand out from one another. But at the same time your abilities aren't finnicky shit like '+0.5% hit chance on a tuesday per 3/4ths of a level'.
The amount of skillpoints/ level is low and actually managable, but is also significant.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on October 01, 2021, 12:07:22 PMAgreed--but one of my long-standing questions about S&P is how many of its problems were its own, and how many of them were inherent in trying to build the AD&D structure into a point-based system?

Stars Without Number revised does this pretty well all things considered. S&P is just a thing that happens when you are at the experimental phase.

Quote from: tenbones on October 01, 2021, 10:31:58 AM
As an odd obscure footnote to history, concerning the transition period from 3.x to 4e...

I was part of a small circle of feature writers at Dragon that Paizo's editorial pulled in to be notified that there was talk about a 4th edition of D&D was being mulled about at WotC. Paizo thought they were going to be part of whatever the 4e development was going to become. The feature writers had all our stuff sniffed over by WotC and Paizo, so it was assumed we, specifcally, would have at minimum some access to this process because we were the ones doing features on specific topics requested by Paizo editorial often to back up projects coming up from WotC sometimes with 6-months of lead time.

At the time, Mearls (one of the circle of feature writers) was talking to me and a few other writers about a side-project... a quasi-Open Source version of d20 where we would outline the core mechanics and each writer would own their respective subsystems, and we'd peer-review everything and decide what is Core and what is Optional. But the rules would have been made free to the public. We were talking about setting it all up - including our process for bringing in submissions etc (which was going to be easy since our goal was to be constant curating and peer-reviewing once the core rules were set).

Before we got it started Mearls went quiet... then I got disillusioned with 3.x/Pathfinder, tired of the editorial chains (heh I was always trying to subvert 3.x and push its boundaries - so was Mearls, which is what got us to work on Goodman games stuff)... then Paizo told us they lost Dragon and weren't going to be part of 4e. This is when the whole Pathfinder thing happened... and I jumped ship, because I came to hate what 3.x had become and when I found out that Pathfinder wasn't going to really push the envelope on the system, they played it safe with what became Pathfinder, the whole thing lost its appeal to me.

The kick in the nuts is when Mike told me and others that he'd gotten the offer to join the 4e team... Our conspiracy theory was that they got wind our little Open Source project and killed it by offering Mearls the Golden Handcuffs. In hindsight I'm less certain of this. We had a crew of *killers* that were down with this project - so it might still be true. I think in retrospect we were a nuisance that was easily dealt with. But I also think by serving up an Open Source system that was actively curated it would have leveraged the massive swell of third-party support already extant in 3.x suddenly with no place to go. Would it have been successful? We'll never know...

But now Estar has me thinking about it a LOT these days...

That is so freakin fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. It wouldn't surprise me if they got wind and shut it down by hiring Mearls. I mean I don't know the dude, like at all, but I'm sure he's a nice guy, but if I was all of a sudden offered a job with WotC I couldn't say shit for the likely NDA.

5.5e will be a gooey androgynous mess.

I do not agree with all of the 5e criticism. The core is solid. D20 + proficiency + ability is clean. A nice house with a nice fence around it. But before the paint was dry, they let cousin Eddie park out front. And now the yard is full of burning tires, combat wheelchairs, and furries swiping on their homemade deodorant as they get ready for the prom.

I don't know enough about the people involved, but I'd love to have a drink with Perkins and get his perspective. Anybody can see Crawford from 10,000 miles away, but I have always wondered where Chris falls out in all of this. For reasons I cannot quite articulate, I would not be surprised to see him quietly step away before 2024.

I do not enjoy Savage Worlds. I tried, but all PCs felt a bit samey to me and d4 to d12 didn't feel like enough granularity to me. A matter of taste, I guess.

However, Savage Worlds IS indeed nearly the PERFECT level of crunch for me. I hope I can make a similar job with my minimalist 5e - maybe about 50ish pages, four core classes with lots of customization (something like 2e in this regard), fewer spells, six or seven skills, and so on.

The crunch that is being added to 5e doesn't help me, quite the opposite.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on October 01, 2021, 01:04:03 PM
I do not enjoy Savage Worlds. I tried, but all PCs felt a bit samey to me and d6 to d12 didn't feel like enough granularity to me. A matter of taste, I guess.

The difference from d4->d12 is ~50%. Thats not accounting for things like frenzy, free-rerolls, static bonuses, aiming, ignoring penalties, circumstantial bonuses, equipment stuff. ETC.

D&D 5e has a variance of ~50% - Over 20 LEVELS.

I'll have to check out Dungeon World and Savage Pathfinder. I missed August's Dungeon World promo on Bundle of Holding. Argh