Quote from: Nexus;955727Probably going to regret this but: Freeform nature?

Yeah RPG are inherently freeform. They are about experiencing a campaign where you play a character interacting with a setting where the action is adjudicated by a human referee. The rules are tool for helping the referee adjudicate the action. They are not why you play a campaign in the first place.

Because you are a character within a setting, you can do ANYTHING that character can do as if he really existed within the setting. No set of rules can encompass the possibilities hence the need for human judgment to make the whole thing work.

Because the character can be doing whatever in the setting there is rarely a optimal "build". The only way optimal builds work is for narrow situations. If having a optimal build is a essential for a campaign then that means the referee has a narrow focus in what he details for the players.

D&D 4e is a good example of this. The vast majority of the published adventures amounted to a linked set of wargame scenarios where the focus was defeating the enemy through the clever use of tactics. They were not devoid of roleplaying but it was definitely filler material much in the same way the whole Inner Sphere setting works for BattleTech or the setting of Warhammer 40k works for that game.

In the published D&D 4e adventures I ran if the players doesn't optimize his build that means he is not fighting at his levels which makes him underpowered compared to his teammate. On the flip side when I used the D&D 4e rules for my Majestic Wilderlands how I used AD&D, GURPS, Fantasy Hero, etc then under-powered character ceased to be an issue. The variety of situation the player encountered increased and what became important was understanding the circumstances and planning accordingly.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;955657Unless the referee uses the "adventure paths" as mentioned above.  Will used to complain about this, and in that sense he was right.  In the current "pirate" adventure path you have to "do sailor shit," and unless you have a DEX or INT at least 14 you aren't going to get your mandatory "sailor shit" done.

Yes, this is bad adventure design, but it goes hand in hand with PATHFINDER's bad game design.

Also, teach your grandmother to suck eggses.  Neener.

WOw this thread has actually reduced my interest in Pathfinder even further below zero. Impressive.

However, I do find myself strangely drawn to a (non-Pathfinder) game where the players employ a battalion of mooks with 10-foot poles, rope, spikes, etc.

Oh, and as for disadvantages, I too find most of the common anti-disad arguments not a big problem in actual practice, but again it's a learned thing and a skilled GM (or player) makes all the difference. Experienced players tend to design their point-buy characters to be interesting people that they want to play. Of course it is possible to choose weird and/or annoying characters, or to munchkin out, but if you've tried (or just thought about) such designs in play, you tend to not choose that sort of thing again. And once a GM knows the system well enough, he'll also nix problematic characters, and help players make interesting appropriate ones.

Quote from: Skarg;955745WOw this thread has actually reduced my interest in Pathfinder even further below zero. Impressive.

People first, snacks second, place third, system fourth.

But yeah, I'd never ever EVER actually RUN Pathfinder; the local guys I've hooked up with, the one ref does Pathfinder adventure paths.  I'll play almost anything, and the ref is willing to do the old "Just tell me what you want to do."

Quote from: Baeraad;955737Actually... You know what the only problem I've ever had with Disadvantage systems is? Getting the players to actually sully their pristine characters with any ugly Disadvantages.

Likewise, I've found it an eternal struggle to get players to actually specialise in something, as opposed to spreading their points thin in a frantic effort to not be bad at anything ever. After all, what if they didn't put any points into Dance, and then there was a dance competition? Why, they'd be mortified! Better shave some points off of the fighting skills to put there, just in case!

And then there was that one time when a player struck me mute on the spot by asking: "do I really have to spend all my points?" Screw the sound of one hand clapping, that is a question to induce a zen state!

What I'm saying is, these discussions where min-maxing twinkery is assumed to be the norm and something a system is broken if it doesn't guard against always catch me wrong-footed. I can recall, hmm... all of twice over the course of the last fifteen years that someone has actually shown up with a character built for maximum utility at the expense of prettiness. The rest of the time, I keep having to try to convince players that a few actual strengths and weaknesses will bring more prettiness, not less, by making the character less bland and generic. To me, twinks are some kind of weird edge case that's unfortunate but can be safely ignored most of the time.

So how come everyone but me apparently runs into them everywhere? Do I just hang out in extremely strange places? :confused:

The only thing that surprises me is that these people are the majority. Yes, I've seen them, too, including the ones that didn't want such a powerful character:).
They just haven't been the majority, ever.
Do you hang out a lot with freeform players, or something:p?

Quote from: estar;955744Yeah RPG are inherently freeform. They are about experiencing a campaign where you play a character interacting with a setting where the action is adjudicated by a human referee. The rules are tool for helping the referee adjudicate the action. They are not why you play a campaign in the first place.

If only all players believed that...

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;955756People first, snacks second, place third, system fourth.

But yeah, I'd never ever EVER actually RUN Pathfinder; the local guys I've hooked up with, the one ref does Pathfinder adventure paths.  I'll play almost anything, and the ref is willing to do the old "Just tell me what you want to do."

Out of curiosity, what is your class, Gronan;)?

Quote from: Tetsubo;955703*Real* ROLE-players play one legged, blind, amnesiacs.

Gamma World!

Quote from: Nexus;955710Oh oh, cam we have the Disadvantage systems are of the Devil "discussion" now?

Or Social Mechanics vs Real Role playing?

Heck with this Im hiding in the LARP bunker till the radiation levels clear.

Quote from: estar;955711Advice not a rule.

I've vociferously argued that 3rd Edition encounter design was blighted by people (a) taking advice and interpreting it as rules and (b) misreading the advice on top of that. But among the people who did the misreading were, in fact, the Pathfinder designers, and that's reflected in the design of their game. Their rules for building encounters in the core rulebook tell you to pick a difficulty off a table which consists entirely of APL-adjusted encounters in a tight cluster around the party's current level.

Obviously, yes, you can just ignore that. But Pathfinder's design is heavily influenced by Adventure Path railroads that make the GM solely responsible for everyone's enjoyment.

With that being said, Gronan's experience with Pathfinder (where apparently a 5% or 10% shift in successful skill checks renders the adventure unplayable) matches neither my experience nor mathematical commonsense.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;955756People first, snacks second, place third, system fourth.

But yeah, I'd never ever EVER actually RUN Pathfinder; the local guys I've hooked up with, the one ref does Pathfinder adventure paths.  I'll play almost anything, and the ref is willing to do the old "Just tell me what you want to do."

Pathfinder is 3/3.5e D&D so many of the problems inherent in it are WOTCs fault. The adventure paths? Dont know... probably Pazio's fault? But its ok to blame WOTC for that too.

The impression I got though from 3e was that stats werent as important as squeezing every ounce of BAB out of a build?

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955620I am in utter awe of that kind of skill at anything.

Me too.  Now, I do want to scratchbuild an HO scale model of a Chicago, Minneapolis and Omaha class "D" Atlantic, but I'd use commercial drive wheels.  Since the piston rods connect to the drivers, the drive wheel hubs are not circular but rather cams to give the necessary "crank" throw.  To be able to craft four, or six, or even eight driver hubs by hand when they are less than half an inch long, and to do it PRECISELY, is astonishing.  Because all the hubs have to be identical to within a ten thousandth or so, or the whole mechanism locks up tight.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955620Note to self: do not piss off model machinists. Ever.

*pulls hat brim down low over eyes*

I cannot tell a lie, I stole that from Pratchett's "Hogfather."

And when I say "I cannot tell a lie," I mean, "I really suck at it," not "I have some special moral virtue."

Quote from: estar;955720

Quote from: AsenRG;955715I am not totally clear on the circumstance of the campaign where Gronan experienced an Adventure Path. I could assume that the referee was running it 'as-is' and the whole thing was an experiment to see what it was about.

It's a group of about five folks in rural South Dakota.  The only guy who is even willing to try to ref besides me is, like the rest of us, married with a career and kids.  He says plainly "I can either run an Adventure Path straight out of the can, or not run at all."

It's okay fun, and I like hanging around with them and drinking.  While it's true that "not gaming is better than bad gaming," it is also true that "slightly suboptimal gaming is not bad gaming."

The first one was some dragon thing with the Dragon Swamp and the Dragon Hills and the Dragon Woods and the Dragon River and the Dragon This and the Dragon That, and I took one look at the map and said "Gee, I wonder what the final villian is?"  I played a Hobbit Paladin and it was okay fun.

This one is about being pirates, just for a change of pace.  So I rolled me a straight fighter and put my one 8 in Charisma, just to make sure I wasn't duplicating my last character.  But at a Cha 8 I can hardly buy a flask of ale without getting guff.

The character sure does hit things good, though.  His name is Hassan.

Quote from: Omega;955770Pathfinder is 3/3.5e D&D so many of the problems inherent in it are WOTCs fault. The adventure paths? Dont know... probably Pazio's fault? But its ok to blame WOTC for that too.

Once you get into trying to divvy up faulty, any of this is going to get very murky. Obviously Paizo needed to stay close to 'like 3.5' to capture the market segment they were looking for. However they redesigned the monsters, assigned their own challenge ratings, and wrote their own treatises on how to build an encounter  

QuoteThe impression I got though from 3e was that stats werent as important as squeezing every ounce of BAB out of a build?

It depends on what level of optimization you are talking about (and whether PF eliminated some of those levels, I confess I looked at their book when it first came out, but never played. We'd already house-ruled 3e into a different beast by then, and the changes that Piazo made looked analogous, but not complementary to ours). However, from what I gather from 3e forums, characters that care about BAB (martials) end up being interchangeable mop-up crew and the real goal is to get spellcasters who can change the course of the battle with well placed spells, access to and resistance to (through saves) which are dependent on the spellcaster's main stat (Int for wizard, etc.).

Of course, those are 1) 3e, not PF, and 2) what people discuss on forums, not necessarily what people actually play. High-level optimizing 3e sounds incredibly tiring. I can't imagine there aren't large swaths of people playing interesting characters and ideas regardless of whether it is 'best.'

Quote from: gronan of simmerya;955783the character sure does hit things good, though.  His name is hassan.

Hassan Chop!

Weird, won't let me do all caps.

Quote from: CRKrueger;955789Hassan Chop!

Weird, won't let me do all caps.

Ah, you are educated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kico0_ENOXo

Quote from: Tetsubo;955703*Real* ROLE-players play one legged, blind, amnesiacs.

Mom?!

...and sometimes the shark jumps the thread...