Quote from: Shasarak on December 16, 2020, 08:19:39 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 16, 2020, 04:45:47 PM
What goalposts? You act as if I started this discussion.

Well, Pathfinder and OSR are literally DnD rules and Palladium Fantasy is literally not-DnD rules.

So yeah Palladium is different.

The DNA is there. 3-18 base stats is a dead giveaway. D20 rolls for combat and saves. Hit Points.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out Palladium started out as a set of houserules for D&D 1st edition.
There's plenty of differences, but a lot of similairies. It's much closer to D&D than the D6 system, or Shadowrun, or Interlock.

To use a rather vulgar metaphor, Baizuo are being spit-roasted by 5e from one side and the OSR from another.

Really Pathfinder exists only because of the 4th Edition launch fiasco.  People forget, but 4th Edition's launch was handled very poorly.  There was a similar disdain for the core group of consumers and chasing of a phantom audience as today.  WotC were convinced they were going to get a great, new audience of MMORPG gamers and weren't afraid of telling their core audience they were obsolete.

I am reminded of one particular promotional flash animation for 4th edition where people unhappy with the game were quite literally portrayed as trolls and then had a dragon shit half-digested adventurers all over them.

The weird, board-gamey mechanics and abandonment of formula by 4th ed created combined with the aforementioned hostility towards their core audience led to a mass player exodus.  The problem with Pathfinder is that it didn't do anything to fix the biggest issues with 3.5.  Instead it just leaned into them and declared them features.  Pathfinder was marketed as "3.75" and that much is true, Pathfinder is 3.5 on steroids.  Where 3.5 was a top-heavy, bloated mess of poorly designed systems, Pathfinder is worse.   Paizo were great at management and marketing, but they really weren't very good game designers and that's coming back to bite them.

Once 5e came out, it really showed the inadequacies of Baizou's design strategy.  5e manages to accomplish everything Pathfinder set out to do and does it better.

Also the "Old School" crowd are increasingly abandoning Pathfinder as they seek to go back to the very basics of DnD meaning the Basic/Expert set or Advanced DnD or find better ways to build on the 3.0 formula.

Paizo have really painted themselves into a corner.  PF 2e was their hail mary pass to get out and it's failed.

Baizuo is not long for this world.   They're likely going to coast for a while on their in-house IPs and licensing but we'll see how much longer that lasts.

Quote from: Jaeger on December 16, 2020, 08:00:18 PM

Quote from: Mistwell on December 16, 2020, 04:43:45 PM
...I don't really have goal posts. ... Not really a dictionary definition of evidence, just more in line with whatever standard I'd be satisfied with,...

Moveable goalposts, and words meaning whatever you want them to mean to fit your narrative...

At least you're upfront about framing your questions in bad faith. I'll give you that.

Dude, I was given two options, and I repeated back one of the choices. You presented "Are you X or Y" and I said "I am Y" and you're upset I chose one of the two options you gave me? You seem to think this is some heated debate where someone is trying to "win" a point or something. I really don't have a goal. There is no narrative (and if you think I have some bias or narrative or place I am coming from on this, I'd love to hear what you think it is).

I am asking if someone has something more which would satisfy my curiosity, but we already all agree on the premise. We both agree PF2 isn't doing as well as they expected, and I am just curious if there is something more to back that up. If the answers are "no we have nothing more" I am satisfied with that answer and it doesn't mean I "won" some argument because I am not having an argument and I have no position if there is some debate about it.

I think you took this whole thing wrong. Or I presented it wrong? I sure tried to make it clear I was not coming at it from a position or argument.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 17, 2020, 12:33:57 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on December 16, 2020, 08:19:39 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 16, 2020, 04:45:47 PM
What goalposts? You act as if I started this discussion.

Well, Pathfinder and OSR are literally DnD rules and Palladium Fantasy is literally not-DnD rules.

So yeah Palladium is different.

The DNA is there. 3-18 base stats is a dead giveaway. D20 rolls for combat and saves. Hit Points.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out Palladium started out as a set of houserules for D&D 1st edition.
There's plenty of differences, but a lot of similairies. It's much closer to D&D than the D6 system, or Shadowrun, or Interlock.

It DID actually start out as Kevin's House Rules (Palladium Fantasy 1e even had AD&D's one minute combat rounds), but that was back in the early 1e days where hacking a system in rather major ways was just part of the hobby and by 1981 his house-rules had evolved well past the point that they could be marketed and sold as their own thing.

Another important point to remember about that time was there was no OGL license back then. If you wanted to sell your own game you HAD to actually make it distinctly enough its own IP to not have TSR lawyers coming after you for it.

Which is why, in addition to the mechanical differences, Palladium also includes some rather specific changes to terminology for things that were shared; ex. Attributes instead of Ability Scores, Strike roll instead of 'to-hit roll' or 'attack roll', Hit Points and H.P. instead of hit points, A.R. (which ascended) instead of AC, using 1D6 instead of 1d6, and of course the names of the attributes (which otherwise mapped right to D&D's base six, plus comeliness and a speed attribute).

If Kevin had been just starting out c. 2000 with the OGL available, Palladium Fantasy might have looked more like Spycraft 1e or Mutants & Masterminds 1/2e... a system with a lot of changes, but still mostly using shared nomenclature from D&D instead of having all the names of things changed for the sake of increasing the perceived differences.

I say "MIGHT" though because at the time Kevin also made a big point of NOT jumping on the d20 System bandwagon and even included "the first multi-genre d20 system" as part of his marketing c. 2000 as the notion of using the same system for games across genres (which Ryan Dancy was pushing for the d20 System) was done by Palladium twenty years earlier with Mechanoids (1981), Palladium Fantasy (1983), Heroes Unlimited (1984), TMNT (1985), Robotech (1986), Beyond the Supernatural (1987), Ninjas & Superspies (1988) and culminating with Rifts (1990) all using the same engine with just minor modifications.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on December 17, 2020, 09:01:50 AM

Quote from: TJS on December 16, 2020, 11:47:12 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 16, 2020, 11:09:01 PM
I would like to note that several game devs, both WotC and Paizo, have admitted there were feats in the books that had minimal to no purpose and were deliberately left in to screw with people.

If you're referring to the Monte Cook essay what he actually said was that many feats were circumstantially useful and that they didn't tell the players what the circumstances were but left them to figure them out.

The example he gave was Toughness which a good feat to have if you were playing a one shot as a 1st level wizard but a bad choice for a long term campaign.  The example was probably not the best one, since a good case could be made that Toughness was flat out badly designed, but that was not the point he was making.  The reading of that article was extremely uncharitable.

Mastery as a motivation is not on its face entirely a bad thing.  As Cook said this was one thing people enjoyed about playing Magic, and the pleasure of mastery is one of the big things that motivates people - especially when playing games - but when you couple this with a complex system it can have unfortunate repercussions for the more casual player.

It's also amusing that this fed into so much 3e/4E edition war as this kind of design is at the heart of 4e as well.  4e was more forgiving of different levels of mastery but it was still very much there.

I think you are missing the point of the objections to this design principle.  People weren't angry because 3e included feats and options that only had niche applications.  They were upset because the designers purposely include options that had few, if any, applications for the express purpose of rewarding careful planning (in the building of your character) and punishing players who did not build with such optimization in mind.  Because of the mechanics of 3e, you quickly became either excellent or incompetent in any skill/test/challenge as the bonuses to skills skyrocketed.  By mid-tier, you could have specialists with +10 to +20 on specific skills.  This meant that anyone who did not narrow their focus to target what they wanted to be really good at would quickly find they couldn't do anything of note in the party, just because of the math.  Jack-of-all-trades was really hard to do in 3e, and required just as much system mastery as specialist.

So people were angry because they could pick a feat that seemed to do something, find out it was so niche as to be worthless, and then find their character lost their utility in the group.  Remember, this is a group game.  Very few people have the makeup to be happy when everyone around them can do what they want to do better than they can.  The combination of bonus inflation and feat trees made such an outcome very likely, unless you spent a lot of time planning your character's build.  And then your options were to beg the DM for a respec, trash the character, or play eternal catchup, sometimes with a character that had taken months to get where it was.  The problem wasn't that some feats were "circumstantially useful"; the problem was that too many were like Toughness and not well designed at all.  And Monte seemed to be justifying that through a particularly snide caveat emptor.

P.S. And Pathfinder doubled down on this approach.  The several years I spent playing PFS, I probably spent more time planning characters than I did playing them.  There's something wrong with rolling a skill check that is effectively your bonus, plus a d20, rather than a d20 plus your bonus...

I wasn't saying anything about why people disliked it.  I was correcting a false representation of the article.

And you're making another one.  "Justifying it"?  The whole point of the article was reflecting on how he felt that whole approach had been a mistake!

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 17, 2020, 09:19:44 AM
Yes, there is a difference in kind here, not just degree.  Specifically, these things are different in kind:

A. We, the authors, had certain themes in mind or a feel or a certain aspect of the game itself wasn't important to us.  So we didn't spend a lot of time on the other stuff, neither design time nor checking the math nor even much play testing.  We expected GMs to adapt that stuff themselves or ignore it.

B. We, the authors, knew that we had screwed up certain elements that we were working on but we needed a widget to check off a box.  So rather than fix it or exercise some editorial judgment we made up reasons after the fact for why a key aspect of the design that we screwed up was actually a feature not a bug.

The first one may make you not care much for the game if you want the things the authors didn't want to spend time on, but you can still respect whatever they did do on its own merits and according to how well it meets the design goals the authors did care about.  I don't know about anyone else, but the second causes this reaction from me:  "Very well.  If it is all that much trouble to try to do a good job with whatever you goals are, I'll take you at your word that you don't know how to produce anything useful to me."

Again this makes no sense as a reading of the ivory tower article. The whole point of the article was not to justify what they did then but to justify why they were going to do things differently in 'Next'.

It's just that nerds typically can't follow a basic argument and then everyone just believes the bullshit summaries they read on forums and so don't read the original article with any care.

People fixate to much on the fact that he used 'Toughness' as an example.  He was trying to say that 'look even this has situational usage'.  I suspect, however, that overall, it was weaker then they meant it to be generally.  The idea that they deliberately made it weak was nowhere stated and is an extremely uncharitable inference.

Probably a more typical example of ivory tower design were the frost cheese feats in 4E.

This was a trick that consisted of taking two feats:

QuoteWintertouched
EDIT

SHARE
Wintertouched is a heroic tier feat available to all player characters.

When a character with the Wintertouched feat uses a cold keyword power, that character gains combat advantage for that attack against creatures vulnerable to cold.[PH:201]

Wintertouched is an essential part of the frostcheese strategy. Creatures hit by a cold keyword power from a character with the Lasting Frost feat become vulnerable to cold, setting them up for Wintertouched's combat advantage.

QuoteLasting Frost is a paragon tier feat available to characters level 11 or above.

Once per turn, when a character with the Lasting Frost feat hits a target with a cold power, the first target hit gains vulnerable cold 5 after the power resolves. The vulnerability lasts until the end of the character's next turn.[PH:203][U :3/2010]

The March 2010 update limited Lasting Frost to applying to only the first target hit by a cold power per turn, and clarified its timing.

Lasting Frost is an essential part of the frostcheese strategy. Creatures made vulnerable to cold by Lasting Frost grant combat advantage to characters with the Wintertouched feat using cold keyword powers.

The first feat Wintertouched is pretty weak all up if you don't also take Lasting Frost.  It's almost certainly a sub-optimal choice.  This is not pointed out to you however.  You need the system mastery to see that these two feats are best used together.  Another element of system mastery is knowing that this combination is far superior on a character like a ranger that has multi-attacks, and probably not the best choice for a character with one big massive attack such as a Barbarian.  And of course you also need to find some way of reliably doing cold damage (not too hard with 4E's wishlists of magical items).

This was the basic design principle Cook was reflecting upon (and criticising!) - not that they deliberately put in trap options to screw over players.

Quote from: Torque2100 on December 17, 2020, 01:20:08 PM
To use a rather vulgar metaphor, Baizuo are being spit-roasted by 5e from one side and the OSR from another.

Really Pathfinder exists only because of the 4th Edition launch fiasco.  People forget, but 4th Edition's launch was handled very poorly.  There was a similar disdain for the core group of consumers and chasing of a phantom audience as today.  WotC were convinced they were going to get a great, new audience of MMORPG gamers and weren't afraid of telling their core audience they were obsolete.

I am reminded of one particular promotional flash animation for 4th edition where people unhappy with the game were quite literally portrayed as trolls and then had a dragon shit half-digested adventurers all over them.

The weird, board-gamey mechanics and abandonment of formula by 4th ed created combined with the aforementioned hostility towards their core audience led to a mass player exodus.  The problem with Pathfinder is that it didn't do anything to fix the biggest issues with 3.5.  Instead it just leaned into them and declared them features.  Pathfinder was marketed as "3.75" and that much is true, Pathfinder is 3.5 on steroids.  Where 3.5 was a top-heavy, bloated mess of poorly designed systems, Pathfinder is worse.   Paizo were great at management and marketing, but they really weren't very good game designers and that's coming back to bite them.

Once 5e came out, it really showed the inadequacies of Baizou's design strategy.  5e manages to accomplish everything Pathfinder set out to do and does it better.

Also the "Old School" crowd are increasingly abandoning Pathfinder as they seek to go back to the very basics of DnD meaning the Basic/Expert set or Advanced DnD or find better ways to build on the 3.0 formula.

Paizo have really painted themselves into a corner.  PF 2e was their hail mary pass to get out and it's failed.

Baizuo is not long for this world.   They're likely going to coast for a while on their in-house IPs and licensing but we'll see how much longer that lasts.

One of the big problems I remember with 4E was that there were going to be all these digital tools, which... never materialized. Oops.

Combine that with 4E's jarring mechanical shift that made it look more like a tabletop version of WoW...

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 17, 2020, 09:39:39 PM

Quote from: Torque2100 on December 17, 2020, 01:20:08 PM
To use a rather vulgar metaphor, Baizuo are being spit-roasted by 5e from one side and the OSR from another.

Really Pathfinder exists only because of the 4th Edition launch fiasco.  People forget, but 4th Edition's launch was handled very poorly.  There was a similar disdain for the core group of consumers and chasing of a phantom audience as today.  WotC were convinced they were going to get a great, new audience of MMORPG gamers and weren't afraid of telling their core audience they were obsolete.

I am reminded of one particular promotional flash animation for 4th edition where people unhappy with the game were quite literally portrayed as trolls and then had a dragon shit half-digested adventurers all over them.

The weird, board-gamey mechanics and abandonment of formula by 4th ed created combined with the aforementioned hostility towards their core audience led to a mass player exodus.  The problem with Pathfinder is that it didn't do anything to fix the biggest issues with 3.5.  Instead it just leaned into them and declared them features.  Pathfinder was marketed as "3.75" and that much is true, Pathfinder is 3.5 on steroids.  Where 3.5 was a top-heavy, bloated mess of poorly designed systems, Pathfinder is worse.   Paizo were great at management and marketing, but they really weren't very good game designers and that's coming back to bite them.

Once 5e came out, it really showed the inadequacies of Baizou's design strategy.  5e manages to accomplish everything Pathfinder set out to do and does it better.

Also the "Old School" crowd are increasingly abandoning Pathfinder as they seek to go back to the very basics of DnD meaning the Basic/Expert set or Advanced DnD or find better ways to build on the 3.0 formula.

Paizo have really painted themselves into a corner.  PF 2e was their hail mary pass to get out and it's failed.

Baizuo is not long for this world.   They're likely going to coast for a while on their in-house IPs and licensing but we'll see how much longer that lasts.

One of the big problems I remember with 4E was that there were going to be all these digital tools, which... never materialized. Oops.

Because the lone developer thereof died suddenly - and all his work was encrypted and thus could not be carried forward by anyone else.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 17, 2020, 09:39:39 PM
Combine that with 4E's jarring mechanical shift that made it look more like a tabletop version of WoW...

Intentional outreach to the massive WoW fanbase on the part of WotC. Had the digital tools been completed and available at launch....

Quote from: RandyB on December 17, 2020, 09:50:41 PM

Because the lone developer thereof died suddenly - and all his work was encrypted and thus could not be carried forward by anyone else.


Intentional outreach to the massive WoW fanbase on the part of WotC. Had the digital tools been completed and available at launch....

So (A) they tried to target a new demographic, without doing some extra work to maintain the old base and (B) were so inept that they set a critical component up with a single point of failure and compounded this by having their single point of failure (one programmer) create another single point of failure (the encryption) inside the first point 

Just between you and me that looks like a failed INT check by most of the marketing team (A) and a fumbled INT check by the development team (B)

...and I thought Paizo had bad project management.

Quote from: RandyB on December 17, 2020, 09:50:41 PM
Because the lone developer thereof died suddenly - and all his work was encrypted and thus could not be carried forward by anyone else.

If that's the case, then WotC is run by a pack of phenomenally stupid fucking morons.

On what planet do you put the software tool production, for your flagship product, in one guy's hands without someone else being able to get into it? Who does that? WotC wasn't a goddamn garage business; were they THAT shorthanded?

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 18, 2020, 12:03:13 AM

Quote from: RandyB on December 17, 2020, 09:50:41 PM
Because the lone developer thereof died suddenly - and all his work was encrypted and thus could not be carried forward by anyone else.

If that's the case, then WotC is run by a pack of phenomenally stupid fucking morons.

On what planet do you put the software tool production, for your flagship product, in one guy's hands without someone else being able to get into it? Who does that? WotC wasn't a goddamn garage business; were they THAT shorthanded?

I have some vague recollection that him encrypting it was related to the murder suicide. And then of course when your boss murders his wife and then kills himself on a small team like that, you tend to get the employees going "nope, we're done now."

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 18, 2020, 12:03:13 AM
If that's the case, then WotC is run by a pack of phenomenally stupid fucking morons.

On what planet do you put the software tool production, for your flagship product, in one guy's hands without someone else being able to get into it? Who does that? WotC wasn't a goddamn garage business; were they THAT shorthanded?

As Mistwell points out... it wasn't some accident, it was deliberate sabotage. The project was being handled by an entire software developm team. One night the head of the project went into the system, encrypted all the files with a personal passcode, murdered his wife and then killed himself.

This also didn't happen until the project was years into development, so not something WotC would have foreseen when the team was hired. It also happened just months before launch. Everything looked fine until it wasn't and they still managed to scramble out a last minute character builder from scratch and get the monster builder software within months of launch.

That's not someone you can blame WotC for. If the project hadn't been lost to sabotage, 4E would have launched with a character builder, monster builder, "character visualizer" and a 3d virtual tabletop (that used the visualized characters) on a subscription model which was their real plan for getting to the $50 million in sales target (and had a much better shot at... 500,000 people at $8/mo. gets you there).

I'm having a difficult time envisioning a development environment where the only copy of the source code is in the source code repository subject to such an encryption ploy.  Sure, it might be the most recent copy because all the other developers had (incorrectly) not pulled a copy in the last week or two, at the outside.  Or we are back to the idea that they hired a development "company" with one real developer? 

Sure, that's a nasty setback (on multiple levels, not all business).  However, WotC has a string of such "managed to pick the wrong company to help" setbacks in tech.  At some point, if you can't ever get it right, it calls into question your judgment on picking your help.

As for the relative incompetence of the PF folks and the D&D folks, it's kind of like arguing over the difference between getting yourself stomp by the bull or gored by the bull instead of talking about maybe not getting hurt by the bull.

I keep hearing that story about the collapse of DnD 4th edition.

I would love to watch a documentary about the disastrous launch of 4th edition and how it imploded including the murder suicide and the sabotage of the online tools.  Sounds like it was quite the clusterfuck backstage.

Quote from: moonsweeper on December 17, 2020, 11:55:20 PM

Quote from: RandyB on December 17, 2020, 09:50:41 PM

Because the lone developer thereof died suddenly - and all his work was encrypted and thus could not be carried forward by anyone else.


Intentional outreach to the massive WoW fanbase on the part of WotC. Had the digital tools been completed and available at launch....

So (A) they tried to target a new demographic, without doing some extra work to maintain the old base and (B) were so inept that they set a critical component up with a single point of failure and compounded this by having their single point of failure (one programmer) create another single point of failure (the encryption) inside the first point 

Just between you and me that looks like a failed INT check by most of the marketing team (A) and a fumbled INT check by the development team (B)

...and I thought Paizo had bad project management.

As I heard it, the encryption was the programmer's choice, not WotC's. But they allowed it, by ignorance or inaction. I'd guess ignorance.

Better info upthread.