War and Remembrance

On this day, 11 years ago, the 2008 Fantasy RPG Wars began. And we won.

By “we” of course I mean everyone who plays RPGs. Paizo shocked WotC into going back to basic principles and discovering that their fans don’t want 80 lbs of rules, nor is a new giant stack of character classes, etc. every few months or even every year a good way to support an RPG.

And now D&D has shocked Paizo into improving their games further, seeking to be the more mechanically complex game, but streamlining it to make it accessible to new players. At the Paizo booth at the GAMA Trade Show, one of the Paizo folks said, “We want Pathfinder to be the game you graduate to.” That sounds like a good place for them to be.

I used to think that WotC would eventually sell the license to D&D in order to keep the IP alive and save themselves the expense of making the game. I no longer feel that way. D&D is healthier than ever, and this rising tide appears to be lifting most, if not all, the boats.

Make the most of it, folks.

Art by Wayne Reynolds.  The genesis of Pathfinders goblins can be read here.

The No-news on the 5e OGL

Mr. Mearls' Legends & Lore blog continues to be the place for breaking news about 5e. Only, in this case, the news is nothing will break before autumn, and nothing will actually be happening until 2015 sometime.

The official reason given is quality control; they want folks to have the DMG in hand and time “to absorb the rules and how they all interact.” That seems a bit odd to me, considering the open beta testing period and online discussions about the rules organized by Mearls & Co.

So, being the suspicious git that I am, I suspect that WotC really doesn't know what they want from an OGL at this point. On the one hand, everyone expects them to have something, and they may actually feel they could benefit from one. On the other hand, they want to take the time to do it right because doing it wrong last time allowed the worst thing possible to happen: Paizo's Pathfinder RPG.

Make no mistake, WotC's fumbling about with an OGL for 4th edition is entirely responsible for the creation of the Pathfinder game. They should have been bending over backwards to get Paizo on-board with 4e. Instead, WotC left them dangling in the wind and forced them to remain with the 3.x OGL. It could have been, and should have been, handled differently.

So the big question is, does WotC understand this? It'd be easy enough to blame the whole situation on the mere existence of the 3.x OGL. After all, without that, Paizo wouldn't have been able to scoop up all those players who didn't want to migrate to 4e.

I think that's missing the point, however. After all, nobody's talking about True20, or Hackmaster, or Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Castles & Crusades, or even all of them combined threatening D&D's dominance of the market. The real threat is Paizo. And that's because Paizo has something that WotC lacks: an effective marketing juggernaut.

People know about Pathfinder, people are excited about Pathfinder, people love showing off their Pathfinder stuff. Pathfinder is bright and shiny. Paizo is seen as friendly and excited about gaming and eager to promote new talent and neat ideas. Paizo oozes cool; people may doubt whether or not they'll like Paizo's next adventure path, or think that Golarion is too generic or mish-mashy, or worry they're putting out too many hardcover rulebooks, but nobody doubts that the next things coming from Paizo will resonate. They will look cool, they will feel cool, and lots of people will be interested in reading them.

Paizo's tapped the same lightning that Games Workshop has held bottled for so long now. Sure, there are other games out there, but Warhammer and Warhammer 40k are the ones that fire imaginations and induce passionate obsessions (both pro and anti, as we also see with Pathfinder). In both cases, the rules barely factor into things. In both cases, the aesthetics created by the companies are gripping and inspiring and enticing.

And that's what WotC needs to worry about. They should fear looking like also-rans, which is why the discussion of their covers does matter. They wallowed for six years in the New Coke debacle that was 4e marketing and trade dress.

5e is a chance for WotC to start over with D&D and it certainly looks like they're taking. A strong and focused OGL would be another potent arrow in their quiver, so I can absolutely understand them taking their time in crafting one.

You Say "Industry," I Say "Potato!"

Recent discussion about Monte Cook bowing out of the development of 5e has lead a certain someone to declare that her initial decision to not care about 5e has been validated. This (all happening on G+ where the cool kids hang out and your humble troll occasionally lurks) lead to the requisite argument about the importance of the industry to RPGs.

I think this is one of those areas where people are talking past each other. Watching Zak of all people poo-poo the industry is a bit twitch-provoking. Sure, he doesn’t need the industry, but I don’t exactly see him sending the money WotC’s paying him to advise on 5e back to them.

The DIY community can absolutely point to things like Fight On! and the gorgeous books shipping from Raggi’s living room and proudly proclaim that they can produce high-quality products just like (and often better than) the industry. But that only begs the question of where, exactly, is the line between the industry and the DIY folks.

The line has gotten really blurry with 5e. So far, 5e marketing has largely been about getting the blogging world yammering about it. In just under a month, WotC is promising to unleash a playtesting blitz similar to what the Paizo crew did for Pathfinder. Are all those playtesters part of the industry? What about people who drop some cash into a kickstarter project and get their names in a book? I think they are, and I’m fairly certain Paizo and WotC want them to feel like they are. The products Paizo sells are not nearly as important as the culture they foster, with their wide-open playtests, their organized play, and their RPG Superstar contest all working to blur the line between industry and hobby. Spend some time on the Paizo boards and you’ll discover that Pathfinder isn’t so much an RPG as a friendly, geeky cult. The fans send the corporate headquarters pizza for crying out loud! Even Apple fanatics don’t got that far.

It was recently announced that Tor is going to drop DRM on their ebooks. They can do this because the relationships authors have with their readers is becoming warmer and closer. Readers want to pay for books because they know that’s how writers keep the lights on and afford time to sit down and write. They want to say “thank you” to the authors for what the authors have given them. Paizo’s fans want to do the same thing, as do the fans of Steve Jackson Games. WotC is trying to build the same sort of rapport with their audience.

It’s coming slowly, but the relationship between consumers and producers is transforming. It used to be we just bought what we were offered. More and more, however, we’re developing relationships with the folks who make our stuff. I think RPGs are ahead of the curve here because the line between producer and consumer has always been rather hazy, and is only getting fuzzier with time.

Pathfinder Does a Beginner Box

Urgh...

Ok, so a project that was supposed to be due sometime in mid-November is now due by November 1st, which means blogging will be spotty until next month. Even my regular gaming has been thrown off schedule. This is what I get for boasting about how we play nearly every week. For those of you to whom I owe writing, yeah, might be a little late because of this. Basically, work is sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Paizo's decided they wanted to get in on the box action, and they're launching their beginner box this month. It includes a 64 page player's book (nice traditional page-count there) that will get you all the way through 5th level. The pre-gen character sheets are done up to explain how to use the stuff on the sheet to minimize running back to the book. There's also a DM's book that's twice as long that includes an intro adventure that introduces different aspects one-per-room (the first room involves a skill check, the next room has a combat, etc.). It also includes 100+ monsters with a much more strealined statblock (still not old-school simple, but surprisingly sleek for 3.x game) and advice on building your own adventures. Plus other goodies:



Frankly, the neatest parts to me are the character sheets for the pre-gens that give you the basics right on the sheet. For a game as complex as 3.x, that seems pretty vital to me. I'm also intrigued by the implication made towards solo play out of the box (though no details, so possibly I misunderstood that part).

The box comes out in late October and retails for $35. That's probably still in the impulse-buy range for people with jobs and comfortably below the price of a new computer or console game. The challenge for Paizo will be getting it in front of potential new players; their strength has always been in catering to the existing 3.x community, and I doubt they're going to have penetration into WalMart or Target.

What You May Have Missed: Romancing the Clone

Yes, I'm still alive! Just busy as all get-out. New text-mapping posts should be showing up next week.

In the meantime, unless you are a fan of 3.x gaming you may have missed what Paizo's been up to lately. Of particular interest to me have been attempts to add rules for romance into the game. As you'd likely expect, they seem heavily influenced by computer RPG tropes. We don't see the actual rules here, but we do see that there is a romance score, preferred gifts, and hated insults. At a guess, you ply your character's object of affection with gifts and services to, in effect, "buy" their romantic interest.

An interesting twist on this idea is the inclusion of a devotion boon. This is the mechanical bonus your character gets when they have earned enough of the NPC's affection. There's also an enmity boon that I assume you acquire if the score goes too far in the opposite direction. It's a neat idea, and I would be shocked if the notion isn't picked up by outfits like BioWare.

In other news, Paizo has also optimized their online rules resource document for viewing via phones and tablets. I imagine this will be a huge boon for their players of their game in the coming years.

Unleashing the Lawyers of Yuletide Cheer!

Dan over at "Sword and Board" reports that WotC has sent a cease-and-desist order to Crystal Keep. For years that site had blatantly copyrighted material posted for download, being a sort of mostly-up-front version of those sketchy Russian torrent sites so famous in gaming circles.

Most see this as WotC getting tough about defending their IP. I’m not so sure that’s necessarily what’s going on. As Ghostofmarx pointed out, WotC’s virtual table appears to be system-agnostic. Yes, I know WotC has been strongly anti-pdfs in the past. And yes, I know this flies in the face of all that the intranetz holds to be true about business (in spite of evidence that 3e with OGL has sold much better than 4e without it), but I think this may be the opening moves in attempts by WotC to get a piece of Paizo’s action.

The Pathfinder RPG did commit some pretty serious tweaking on 3.5, but they claim it’s still backwards compatible with at least that version of 3e, and I haven’t seen a lot that leads me to think otherwise. Which means all the customers WotC “lost” when they didn’t migrate up to 4e are playing a game that’s compatible with large numbers of books WotC could still sell them. No, reprints are almost certainly not going to happen, but pdfs could.

That could be a win-win for both WotC and Paizo. The truth is, it’s not really competition; by this point, the 3e/Pathfinder folks aren’t likely to migrate back to WotC for anything less than 5e (and probably not even then) and the 4e folks most likely to go back to 3e probably already have done so. And, quite frankly, there’s no reason someone couldn’t play both. :p

So, WotC releases a their virtual tabletop as the flagship of a revamped D&D Insider, and to sweeten the pot even more for those holdouts firmly in the Pathfinder camp, they’ll offer pdf versions of 3.5 material to subscribers. Now WotC has folks who never bought the 4e books paying monthly subscription fees for their digital initiative.

And now Paizo is getting support from the biggest gorilla in the jungle. People have a new way to play Pathfinder even when they can’t get face-to-face, there’s old-but-cool exciting material to incorporate into their games, and more excitement and buzz about their work.

Keep in mind that just about everyone at Paizo got their start working at WotC. The people involved here are not bitter rivals, but old friends, colleagues, and creative partners. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they game together on their off hours, hang out at the same bars and clubs, even attend the same Christmas parties. The assumption of bitter rivalry just doesn’t appear to hold up to the reality of how this industry works. DDI goodies for Pathfinder can bring new subscribers, and Pathfinder goodies (tile sets, monster tokens, etc) for the virtual tabletop will make that product more fun for everybody. If this is, in fact, where things are heading, it could be a big coup for both sides.

Sandbox-finder?

There are so many good blogs out there! I might almost say too many; I'm having a devil of a time keeping up with all the good stuff going right now. Case in point: nearly a month ago, Navdi posted about his desire to use Pathfinder materials to run a more sandboxy, Old School game. I just discovered this last night. It struck a chord with me because 3e in all its incarnations leaves me cold, but I love Paizo's design style, artwork, and just the look-and-feel they give their stuff. So, how to infuse a more Old School feel into a game that is based on Paizo's rules and Pathfinder adventures?

I offered some suggestions in his comments, and this is expanding on what I wrote there. Generally, what the players want from 3e and its ilk is a sense of story and verisimilitude to their adventures; they don't want to just whack random monsters for random amounts of treasure. What DMs pining for a more Old School game often want is a more open-ended story and a more proactive approach from players towards tackling challenges; they don't want the players twiddling their fingers while they wait for the DM to deliver the adventure on a silver platter. With a creative and flexible DM, those goals are absolutely compatible. (Where you'll run into trouble is the conflict between the players' desire for mechanical customization of their characters and the DM's desire for simplicity. If you find a good way to harmonize those discordant themes, please let me know.)

I don't know any of Paizo's adventure paths well enough to say, but the ones I have read at least make nods towards player choice (and their latest, Kingmaker, promises to do more than that), and as Navdi points out in the comments of his blog, Paizo does a great job of establishing settings that are larger than the mere adventure path and its dungeons. With all that in mind, here are my suggestions to Old School-ify your existing collection of Pathfinder adventure paths:

1) start the players off with a clear, obvious, but open-ended problem. My favorite is a shipwreck (players need to gather supplies and find their way to civilization), but you can also use a natural disaster or alone in the wake of a military defeat for their side.

This works great because the players are presented with concrete, obvious problems to solve, but while there's no dungeon in sight, they're immediately put into the proper, creative, open-ended problem-solving mode that is the backbone of Old School play.

2) Once they've reached civilization, shift the focus to an urban environment. Everyone knows that Old School play and city adventures are incompatible, right? (We just won't mention Aerie of the Slave Lords and Vault of the Drow. Or the Random Harlot table. ;) ) Give them something concrete to do as soon as they get into the city, or better yet, have it be something they need to do that they discovered while solving the issues of the start of the campaign. During the course of this first urban adventure, start planting the seeds of conflict that will inspire the players to make choices: let them hear rumors, find treasure maps, or make enemies that will guide them to your adventure locations. Let them choose sides in local conflicts, and make those choices matter. Most importantly of all, make it clear to them as early as is reasonably possible that their choices have a direct and powerful impact on the setting. If they're not utterly bizarre, they'll love it. And again, that puts them in the proper headspace for Old School play.

3) Use more than one Pathfinder series. Since you're giving the players choices about what challenges to tackle, you'll likely need more adventures than one Pathfinder series can provide. So feel free to seed your CotCT adventures with some cherrypicked from Rise of the Runelords or Legacy of Fire. If they don't know much about the OSR, you might be able to squeeze in a Raggi adventure or something from Fight On!

4) By the time the PCs reach 4th or so level, most of the work should be done; they'll be interacting with the world as a place, rather than looking for the markers pointing them towards the next adventure. Don't be surprised if it takes that long, however. Even when the players are all on-board for that sort of thing, it can take some time before they know enough about the setting and the NPCs to really start being proactive and taking their destinies in their own hands.

Pathfinder Goes Old-school

In spite of embracing 3.x, there's always seemed to be a certain friendliness among the Paizo ranks towards the Old School way of doing things. I know Mr. Maliszewski has been very grateful, for instance, for their reprinting of many of the pulp classics that inspired the founding of D&D.

Pathfinder, however, has been fairly antithetical to the Old School way of doing things. While the adventures offered allow flexibility in how their challenges are tackled, the existence of an "adventure path" pretty much necessitates a railroad.

So I find this press release about their latest six-volume adventure path rather interesting:

We're very proud of Kingmaker, as it marks a new kind of Adventure Path for us. As always, there's an underlying story—this one involving a secret villain and a bandit lord and trolls and barbarians and missing villages and superstitious kobolds and drunk thugs and so much more—but how that story unfolds is going to be left in large part up to the players. In each of the six Kingmaker volumes, you'll find several quests for the PCs to complete. And don't be surprised if players make up their own quests as they explore the land!

Not only are we tackling a more nonlinear "sandbox" approach to adventure construction (which means that it's very likely your PCs will work through this adventure in a completely unique order), but as the Kingmaker Adventure Path unfolds, your PCs will settle towns, gather followers, raise nations, and fight wars. By the end of Kingmaker, chances are good that one of your PCs will, indeed, be king or queen of his or her own nation!

And just to drive home the Old School vibe, each volume will include an original monster from Ed Greenwood.

Now, if I thought people were actually sinking the money into market research, I would be crowing from the rooftops about how Old School is the new Cool School. Between this and WotC bringing back Gamma World and boxed sets, there certainly appears to be a real Renaissance underway.

I suspect, however, that what's really happening is a sort of Old School fever; our enthusiasm for our games and our styles of playing is infectious. And we keep doing the impossible. Fans are not supposed to be able to churn out regular, dead-tree periodicals full of volunteer articles and art that look worth a damn, but we do. Boxed sets were supposed to be dead, but we sell out print runs. "Unsupported" games are supposed to quietly die away, but things seem better than ever for TSR-era versions of the game.

These are amazing times we're living in, and it's us who are making them so. Fight on!