Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Ghostse]

I don't think the Paizo guys will be able to do PF3 as 5.5/5.75 like they did with Pathfinder 1. It'd be somebody who is already big in 5E and can step in if 6E is too big of a divergence and people don't like it. Paizo had the credibility to do Pathfinder 1 from Dragon and Dungeon material for 3rd and 3.5 so it'd have to be people and groups considered to put out good stuff for 5E doing that.

Paizo are already pivoting to releasing 5e material, my assumption would be to start building their creds.
I think PF2e would have been better received if they hadn't tried to make their 4e recruitment material 8 years too late. (I also don't think they released any 4e content)

I do know its not Apples-to-Apples, but I know that 6e will be different, being different will make 5e grogs angry, and if they can have something warm and familiar to step into, they will.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

I like Paizo 1e, but I think 5e does much better than Pathfinder 2e in terms of playability, balance, and even presentation of their books and other materials. There are also some good ideas in 5e stuff underneath all the forced woke stuff. This may be blasphemy, for example, but I find the 5e Ravenloft improved on old Ravenloft in quite a number of ways, and some of the new versions of old domains are much better (I'Cath, Kalakeri, etc).

On the other hand, the 2e materials from Paizo that I examined were just forced retcons of the setting to put more women in charge, double the number of non-binaries and trans people, and make 2 out of 3 people black or asian-looking. If anything, they took core ideas from 1e and actually dumbed a lot of them down to make them as least offensive as possible.

5e is going that same route too, but the people behind 5e still display come creative sparks now and then. I still check out their newer stuff, while I gave up on 2e after they did that Mwangi Expanse book that spent more time lecturing people abt how to put brown-skinned people on a pedestal but not too much to the point of exotifying or fetishizing them... what. As if the whole point of wokeness wasn't already infantilizing/fetishing people of color to cater to their savior complex.

 

[Ghostse]

I like Paizo 1e, but I think 5e does much better than Pathfinder 2e in terms of playability, balance, and even presentation of their books and other materials. There are also some good ideas in 5e stuff underneath all the forced woke stuff. This may be blasphemy, for example, but I find the 5e Ravenloft improved on old Ravenloft in quite a number of ways, and some of the new versions of old domains are much better (I'Cath, Kalakeri, etc).

On the other hand, the 2e materials from Paizo that I examined were just forced retcons of the setting to put more women in charge, double the number of non-binaries and trans people, and make 2 out of 3 people black or asian-looking. If anything, they took core ideas from 1e and actually dumbed a lot of them down to make them as least offensive as possible.

5e is going that same route too, but the people behind 5e still display come creative sparks now and then. I still check out their newer stuff, while I gave up on 2e after they did that Mwangi Expanse book that spent more time lecturing people abt how to put brown-skinned people on a pedestal but not too much to the point of exotifying or fetishizing them... what. As if the whole point of wokeness wasn't already infantilizing/fetishing people of color to cater to their savior complex.

DND5e has some fun thing you can steal for most any system, like Advantage/Disadvantage, hit-dice based recovery/healing, even the way they handle Fear by making it suck but without removing player agency. You can practically drag-and-drop these into any D20, and nearly ANY (non-pool) dice RPG. You can also adjust and tweak them fairly easy without worrying too much about run away math.

PF2e has some good concepts - racial feat progression, action economy balancing - but its stuff you'd have to build to fit, not things that you can just grab-and-go.

DND5e clearly had a lot of time, effort, and money poured into it. But the end result still just don't work for me, and that's before you add in the woke. PF2e just seemed like they were tired of 3.5's mechanics not conforming to their lore, and that they wanted to give munchkins a new toybox to min-max.

I was never a huge fan of PF1e, though I'll admit a good chunk of that might have been influenced by the groggy munchkin player base I've encountered. Which admittedly might not be all of them, but I've encountered multiple, distinct PF1e groups with the exact same sort of grogs using very similar munchkin builds, which leads me to believe its not random.

 

[AGreatDipAtAFairPrice]

PF2's playtest turned me off it. It was a confusing mess. The idea of taking all these racial feats for racial material that you get for free with a few easy decisions on Alternate Racial Traits turned me off and it just kept getting fiddlier and fiddlier and fiddlier. Everything was feat this, choice that, background this, ancestry that, small decision here, small decision there. I wondered if there was going to be a mechanical choice made about how well a PC could scratch its ass. Ancestral Ability: Superior Ass Scratching. I do hear there's people who enjoy it but it was too much for me. Also, the resonance thing which they ditched and magic item usage, availability, economy and crafting looked worse than PF1, too.

I just read that playtest and thought it was so baroque compared even to majority backwards compatibility with 3.0 and 3.5 material Pathfinder1 and its only going to get crazier. I had no idea what benefit it provided over older editions/OSR, 3rd/Pathfinder1/4E/5E. I don't really know why I would want this for a dungeons and dragons style game. What's the hook, what's the point, other than PF1 being old as dirt and Paizo wants money? What would I even get out of this and who is even going to want to play this or get the phD required to run this?

I have no idea how it runs in practice, on paper it looked like a nightmare. It made me kind of think, "I think 5E doesn't have enough player-side crunch and choices to make after existing for so long, but their calls that I've been bashing as so lazy makes more sense than this."

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

I wondered if there was going to be a mechanical choice made about how well a PC could scratch its ass. Ancestral Ability: Superior Ass Scratching.

Mock it if you want, but this is a very important skill to master when establishing dominance over an ogre or troll, not to mention the circumstance bonus it gives to digging rot grubs out of your buttcheeks.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I do know its not Apples-to-Apples, but I know that 6e will be different, being different will make 5e grogs angry, and if they can have something warm and familiar to step into, they will.

I take the complete opposite view. WotC is following trends 5-10 years too late. With that in mind, I'm guessing they're going to jump on the minor incremental improvements train. Some numbers will be moved around, some abilities will be tweaked, but overall it'll be the same game with a patchwork of fixes.

On the other hand, the 2e materials from Paizo that I examined were just forced retcons of the setting to put more women in charge, double the number of non-binaries and trans people, and make 2 out of 3 people black or asian-looking. If anything, they took core ideas from 1e and actually dumbed a lot of them down to make them as least offensive as possible.

The biggest problem Paizo's setting has is that every official adventure is canon. This creates a huge problem where every major region has already had it's problems solved, so they have to retcon like a super hero comic to keep things interesting.

I read on Discord that Starfinder has an adventure that blows up The Drift. From what I read, the book has several unofficial endings that flip the setting on its head, and a canon ending that slams the reset button so hard as to make the adventure pointless.

PathFinder 2e has a similar problem with it's Egypt setting. I've wanted to run such a setting for a long time but can never find players. The PF1 has a cool campaign that ends with you fighting the evil Pharaoh in his flying pyramid battleship. In PF2 the options are either playing cleanup in the aftermath, or retconning a bigger, badder threat.

PF2e has some good concepts - racial feat progression, action economy balancing - but its stuff you'd have to build to fit, not things that you can just grab-and-go.

This is what killed the game for at least one group I know. You can't add extra races without a lot of work.

I had no idea what benefit it provided over older editions/OSR, 3rd/Pathfinder1/4E/5E. I don't really know why I would want this for a dungeons and dragons style game. What's the hook, what's the point

DnD is an old game and almost every new edition has been bodged onto the old. PF2 is the first attempt I've seen to take serious strides away from that model. For example, the whole move action, action, full action, bonus action, free action, swift action, farting action, reaction nonsense of DnD was getting too much. Even DnD knew this which is why 5e made an attempt to reduce them to a manageable amount.

You already mentioned the lack of real choice in 5e character creation, but PF2 has some really cool stuff, like intimidation allowing you to scare people to death. It also leans into the unstated secret of DnD, that being that the game is a tactical skirmish game with a plot. Shields are part of the game instead of a flat AC bonus. Things like that.

I've not played enough to comment on the economy, but with DnD and PF1, it was not usual for players to have more gold than they could spend.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

The biggest problem Paizo's setting has is that every official adventure is canon. This creates a huge problem where every major region has already had it's problems solved, so they have to retcon like a super hero comic to keep things interesting..

Yes, I never understand this approach. Games are only as organic as they are in individual sessions. If I'm not mistaken, it's been a while, the last few Adventure Paths offer some agency in terms of the key decisions can choose to make, but the subsequent modules go for a decision determined by the authors, thus requiring any DM to do a lot of homebrewing if they wanted to keep playing the next AP.

They even do this within an AP.

For example, Return of the Runelords, there is an option to keep Xanderghul alive, by accepting his surrender. Personally, I'd take that route, because one of the most powerful ancient runelords, one that manages to become a demigod, alive to meddle in the present day seems far more interesting than that fat jealous hag Belimarius. The very next chapter, however, assumes outright you kill Xanderghul and you somehow will never, ever kill Belimarius. So in the end, the two Runelords that survive are the two surviving women. One is a tyrannical seductress-sorceress with insanely high CHA score, and yet adventurers are assumed to instantly trust her instead of asking whether she is doing some charm-thing on them. The other one... ah who knows.

The Lost Omens 2e lore all follow this. Whatever decisions you made in a certain AP that don't agree with what these people want to be canon - who cares, negated by lore.

These people should go write a novel if they want to railroad players like this. Oh right, the Pathfinder novel line folded. My bad.

Edited to add: I forgot the worst. Their last 1e AP line required players to sacrifice their characters FOREVER, unless they do some contrived stuff first, to supposedly destroy the big bad Tar-Barphon. Oh, you killed him? Open the Lost Omens campaign setting and weep, losers, because he didn't get killed, just... went on a holiday. Ha, ha!

Compare this to the 3.5e D&D splatbook Elder Evils that allows players to sacrifice their characters to save the world from Atropus the Undead Planet of Doom. That is a much better sendoff one can give the players to celebrate the end of an edition!

 

[Adamska]

As @Corn Flakes said, yes. Gygax had also gotten TSR into a bit of trouble with some of his outsized ideas, needed to be bailed out, and the bailout came with a frothing Fundie Christian Karen atttached, as @BlankSpaceBaby pointed out.
Its a bit hard to unpacked because everyone with first-hand knowledge of what went down during the period hated everyone on the other side, but either she was trying to expand the market and regain control of the D&D IP (i.e. you can't copyright Devils or Demons) or she was purposely trying to tank the company to sell it off.

It's more retarded than that actually. He legitimately got fucked out of his own company by his two other co-owners associates while he was busy doing some form of big merchandizing deal that'd eventually lead to the DnD cartoon and taking time off to write books. The Blume brothers fucked up their assets and threw the company into debt. Gygax then fucked up himself because his writing buddy he was collabing with at the time suggested his sister to manage the finances.

Then the Blumes, knowing that Gary was starting to try and remove them from company operations, decided to fuck him one last time and give their assets to said writer's sister, a Lorraine Williams. Gary couldn't void the sale, and got wrekt.

She genuinely had contempt for the gamers she now had to deal with, and fuck that devilry and all. But she did at the end of the day actually WANT to make money. She made a strong effort to force her designers to design a fuckload of settings, tried to force Flash Gordon down their throats to make a sci-fi game (and this effort created Spelljammer), and forced them to crank out books.

Problem was, she's penny-wise, pound-foolish alongside having contempt for he loser employees. She didn't want them to test shit, since she saw it as skiving off of work to play games. She also treated them like trash, and also did not understand the limited size of the market fully due to said contempt.

She did not tank it on purpose; she'd have sold it earlier if she did.

 

[FatalTater]

It's GenCon time again!

But wait!

If you were hoping to get an abortion while attending, you may be disappointed.

https://www.ibj.com/articles/gen-con-leaders-hurt-angry-amid-states-proposed-abortion-ban

https://archive.ph/4frQf

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Crosspost from the Transformers General thread

The Transformers RPG has been released. I'll be going through it in a bit but it should be on par with the GI Joe and Power Rangers RPG books just with rules on transforming. So a decent 6/10 book.
Pros
There's rules in the book to have Powermasters, Headmasters, Minibots like in Armada, and bots like Soundwave/ Blaster as well as triple changers.
Rules on Mass shifting
Do you like pantsformers? You can do that!. With some tweaking of those rules you could in theory use that for some combiners.
Nice Artwork
Vehicle attack rules.
Threat (bestiary) has a good selection from all over the place in terms of series. Including drones and miscellaneous non-named threats.

Cons
Missing rules. There's nothing on being a Dinobot or any animal bot (though Kickback has a write up as does Tantrum) or a combiner (like actual rules they do show Combiner Wars Onslaught, some parts of Ruination like Armourhide, and some terrorcons though).
Artwork will be dated within a few months as it's using IDW artwork (it should just stick to the toy artwork)
Artwork is combination of G1, Combiner Wars, IDW and Cybertron (both the cartoon and the game). Pick a lane!
Human Companion is a perk. You should feel bad for taking this perk. You're better off getting a MIni-con and having it pick a perk.
Your limited on your gear due to hardpoint system. Circumvent this by making a mini-con a weapon with the size perk so it's one size larger in alt-mode.
Weapon range is retarded. For instance, you're a 30ft+ robot but your shotgun has a 20ft./ 60ft. range. Or you can throw a grenade 20ft. Your reach should be around 15ft. what the fuck were the developers thinking,? Double or triple weapon range if you decide to play this.
No write ups for allies like Optimus Prime.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Yes, I never understand this approach.

I understand it to an extent. They want to add or change things in the setting without pissing off fans, and they want things players do to be "real" and "matter".

Changing the setting is an obvious one. Stagnation leads to creative and financial ruin. Just yesterday I was doing some campaign prep and saw some forum posts complaining about teifling, drow, and dragonborn in 2021.

Making every campaign canon is a lie the same way every MMO having every PC as "The chosen one" is a lie. It's an illusion that breaks the instant you think about it.

I get the problem they're trying to prevent, but they went about it the wrong way.

 

[Ghostse]

I understand it to an extent. They want to add or change things in the setting without pissing off fans, and they want things players do to be "real" and "matter".

Changing the setting is an obvious one. Stagnation leads to creative and financial ruin. Just yesterday I was doing some campaign prep and saw some forum posts complaining about teifling, drow, and dragonborn in 2021.

Making every campaign canon is a lie the same way every MMO having every PC as "The chosen one" is a lie. It's an illusion that breaks the instant you think about it.

I get the problem they're trying to prevent, but they went about it the wrong way.

There is some extremely german German RPG that does this by publishing lore updates for the global situation... every year IIRC. This lets different groups not only stay roughly synced on current events, but allows you have a campaign set in a previous time and everyone be on the same page with what has happened, and gives the GM a path for "if the players don't do anything, this happens"

 

[eternal dog mongler]

TSR. Yes. I miss those days. The QC was whack when it comes to balancing at times as well as the quality of the products, but there were so much variety and flavors to choose from. Planescape, Mystara, Spelljammer - those days were awesome and not homogenized high fantasy like things tend to be these days. Oh, and no proms and bartending.

The blended sci-fi/fantasy settings were everywhere back in the day and they really seem to have died off. Especially if you go a little bit older than even second edition. A bunch of dwarves and elves exploring a crashed spaceship? Yeah sure whatever have at it.

WOTC did update Expedition to Barrier Peaks though which is pretty cool.

 

[The Ugly One]

Something I've wondered about 2e is the high amount of settings and expansions it had. Along with fan favourites like Dark Sun, Planescape, and Ravenloft. You also have lots of smaller books and adventures for each of the settings and the core game.

Were whoever owned DnD back then was just spamming books like crazy?

Edit: Fixed typo.

WotC had a rather 1-sided, poorly-thought deal with Random House where they would cash advances on any material they sent. This deal was inked when TSR was small and selling through material far faster than they could print it. When Lorraine Williams took over, they started referring to RH as the "Bank of Random House," and would pay their bills by spamming crap at RH, with total disregard for whether it would sell. Williams was constantly trying to figure out how to rotate money out of TSR's bank account and into hers, so a lot of what happened at TSR in the 1990s was really just a front for her financial scams.

Williams was not trying to make profit, because she didn't care about TSR profits. She was running a bust-out operation where TSR was loaded up with debt in order to write her bigger and bigger checks.

 

[anti SJW]

WOTC did update Expedition to Barrier Peaks though which is pretty cool.

If you mean this, it was put out by Goodman Games, not WOTC. Very well done.
I wish they would do an update on the Slave Lords series.

 

[The Ugly One]

I think Dungeons and Dragons 6th edition is coming out. The new monster manual is a bunch of reprinted material that they fiddled with the math. It is not anywhere near to the extent of 4th edition to essentials, but just enough to be annoying and suspicious. I figure it'll be 2024 or 2025..

t really makes me laugh how 4e was bashed as the padded sumo, wet noodle fight, long, boring combat slog and you had to be a munchkin and go to CharOps boards to do anything edition and that is exactly what 5e became. At least WOTC gave out official errata to earlier monster manuals and tried to overtly rectify the situation with Monster Vault within 3 years.

5e has the opposite problem from 4e. Even with a well-optimized party, high-level battles were an absolute slog. I remember single battles taking hours due to all the interrupts, marks, and ongoing effects. In 5e, it doesn't take much effort for high level parties to go through what are supposed to be hard enemies like hot knives through butter. An ancient red dragon is supposed to be pretty tough for a 17th-level party; a competent party at that level will probably knock it out in 2-3 rounds.

IMO the problem really goes back to 3rd edition, which 5e is really descended from, with the ability score mod. This makes HP inflation a huge issue. This means piles of damage dice come into play so that combat doesn't take five days. This makes multiplier effects (e.g. Extra Attack, critical hits, dice rerolls, etc) that much more extreme. Since switching to OSR systems, I've really come to appreciate how the math of B/X scales more nicely.

 

[Big Nasty]

There is some extremely german German RPG that does this by publishing lore updates for the global situation...

Das Schwarze Auge?

 

[Zemporer]

It's more retarded than that actually. He legitimately got fucked out of his own company by his two other co-owners associates while he was busy doing some form of big merchandizing deal that'd eventually lead to the DnD cartoon and taking time off to write books. The Blume brothers fucked up their assets and threw the company into debt. Gygax then fucked up himself because his writing buddy he was collabing with at the time suggested his sister to manage the finances.

Then the Blumes, knowing that Gary was starting to try and remove them from company operations, decided to fuck him one last time and give their assets to said writer's sister, a Lorraine Williams. Gary couldn't void the sale, and got wrekt.

She genuinely had contempt for the gamers she now had to deal with, and fuck that devilry and all. But she did at the end of the day actually WANT to make money. She made a strong effort to force her designers to design a fuckload of settings, tried to force Flash Gordon down their throats to make a sci-fi game (and this effort created Spelljammer), and forced them to crank out books.

Problem was, she's penny-wise, pound-foolish alongside having contempt for he loser employees. She didn't want them to test shit, since she saw it as skiving off of work to play games. She also treated them like trash, and also did not understand the limited size of the market fully due to said contempt.

She did not tank it on purpose; she'd have sold it earlier if she did.

Just a minor correction to this. It was Buck Rogers William's brought/forced onto TSR since she owned the rights to the characters. I believe the right's filtered down from her grandfather (John Dille). who published the original story.

 

[Gingervitis]

Slave

Uh, sweatie? That’s problematic in current year. We have no room for bigots like you

 

[Ghostse]

5e has the opposite problem from 4e. Even with a well-optimized party, high-level battles were an absolute slog. I remember single battles taking hours due to all the interrupts, marks, and ongoing effects. In 5e, it doesn't take much effort for high level parties to go through what are supposed to be hard enemies like hot knives through butter. An ancient red dragon is supposed to be pretty tough for a 17th-level party; a competent party at that level will probably knock it out in 2-3 rounds.

Yup. I love me some 4e, but if the party enters combat, that is pretty much all you're doing that session. This is actually less of a problem if you run a campaign that plays to 4e's focus - namely set-piece tactical battles with a navigable meatgrinder where soft-skills come into play, leading to a big show down. EVERYONE, players and monsters, just had too much HP & healing available.

I have some... I can't remember the movement/philosophy's name now, but basically 4e megadungeons that were expected to be run in a single evening (all of the with a Real-world tuned kill timer) that you'd run in a rogue-a-like fashion: namely the players were all but expected to fail their first time through, but then play again next week. There were pretty fun, but re-running the same encounters got tedious.

5e, and granted I've done sub-10 games, is not quite to 3.5 mid-game rocket duels level of lopsided but its definitely rewarding hit-early and clearly unintended levels of damage scaling.

IMO the problem really goes back to 3rd edition, which 5e is really descended from, with the ability score mod. This makes HP inflation a huge issue. This means piles of damage dice come into play so that combat doesn't take five days. This makes multiplier effects (e.g. Extra Attack, critical hits, dice rerolls, etc) that much more extreme. Since switching to OSR systems, I've really come to appreciate how the math of B/X scales more nicely.

Again, I like 4e but ever since I got introduced to B/X (and tuned to the fact that to run an old school campaign you need to rethink/retool your narrative) but when you really want to open up a campaign, its nice to be able to up the player tension & provide negative consequences with violence and not have it halt campaign progress for a week or two.

3.5 was really good with the right group, but yeah, in B/X it is nice to not have to care about munchkins.

Das Schwarze Auge?

"Black" was in there somewhere so that's probably it.
Some neat concepts but simply far, far too German for me to get into.