RE: Pathfinder Online

** In response to a post at levelsave.com: http://levelsave.com/2011/12/pathfinder-online-announced/ **

The complaint with my early experience in 4th Ed D&D isn't necessarily with the system itself, but with the way the particular games at the Living Forgotten Realms nights in which I played were handled. The management team in Toronto for the LFR campaign is great, but some of the DMs are not. There is a policy that encourages players to rotate through DM duties every certain number of games. This leads to very player-driven sessions, a lot of looking up rules, and a ~lot~ of new DMs. This is a failing when trying to run story-driven modules, but not as much when running battle-driven modules.

This isn't an isolated problem, as I've seen the same kind of thing happen in other publisher-produced living campaigns outside of Toronto. I'm getting the impression that it's a living campaign problem more than anything. This may be why all of the modules in Forgotten Realms are so battle-heavy, with a story that ushers the next encounter, rather than explores the universe in which it is set.

That being said, the 4th Ed. D&D ruleset is definitely battle-oriented. The non-combat skills have been simplified so that rolling to tie a knot and rolling to hunt are based on the same skill. Whereas each segment of combat is accounted for, detail is high, there is "flavour text" for abilities that last less that two seconds. DMs and players can change that about their game, by adding complexity or by building highly detailed backgrounds with the DM. Roleplay doesn't need a bunch of attributes attached to it, ideally players should be able to choose to play out the role of their character verbally without any use of statistics whatsoever. Personally, I love that. Having a bare-bones character like you might in the 1st edition: Six statistics, a name, and a class. That's the ideal game for me. Combat in these games is driven in the same way, there is a stat that you are rolling against to "attack" and that's it. It's up to you to say if you are swinging from the chandelier and trying to upset the table that the Bullywug is standing on by throwing daggers at his feet and making him dance. (A lot of DEX tests on that one, yes?) There isn't any "Chandelier Barrage" ability which requires a unique formula to figure out damage for and might stun on a critical hit.

The 3rd edition, which is a medium complexity system, is also not for me. When I say I returned to "older systems," I didn't mean the third, I meant the first. I've been playing Labyrinth Lord for a while now, and I'm really enjoying the open-endedness of it. This game is perfect for me, and it's so simple to play and run that you can group more and more people together at the table. Taking on some of the older modules that required 8-12 characters to complete is an amazing experience. The table-talk around the game with that many players tends to be a lot of fun as well. This can't really happen with the 4th edition since battle tends to take so long that table-talk is discouraged. Making the game less and less social with each passing session.

This returns to the root of the discussion, MMO socialization. It is very true that MMOs don't tend to produce social buterflies, but there is a lot of socialization that happens in EVE Online. Joining a leading faction was actually a little much as far as my social threshold is concerned. I ended up just grouping with small squads to take down some other enemy-faction small squads. It was a lot of fun and a ~lot~ of socializing. This is why I have such high hopes for Pathfinder Online. There is a game developer who is interested in creating a sandbox, open-world MMO coupled with people who have been directly involved in an MMO which succeeded in doing just that.

Pathfinder Online Announced

** Originally posted on levelsave.com **

I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a long time, longer than I have actually been playing the video game variety. I was involved in a game of Vampire: The Maquerade when I was a mid-teen, and played in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign made up of almost all the same people. This was back in the mid-90s before I had experienced the crushing reality of life and I entered a sort of personal Dark Age of tabletop gaming. I wouldn’t play another game of D&D for over a decade, totally missing out on the entire third edition of the game. I began again in 2008 when the fourth edition was released, coming back to the table with fresh eyes and a willingness to adapt to all of the changes that had occurred over the course of the last 12 years. I created an elven archer and brought the character to my local Living Forgotten Realms nights, which are held across North America. I met new people and had some good fun, until I realized that I wasn’t playing Dungeons & Dragons. The system that I was playing was nothing like the D&D I knew. The battles were slow tactical affairs with grid-maps to represent the environment and markers or minis for your characters. The story was weak at the best of times, and at the worst of times would be completely skipped to fast-forward to the engagement of steel and mana. I felt like I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics. (Don’t get me wrong, FFT is a great game, it’s just not what I was there for.) So I made the jump back to older editions of the game, bringing a couple of my new-found friends along with me.

Many share my view about the fourth edition of D&D as opposed to older versions, but some maintain that it is the failing of the users to take the reigns and really drive 4E as it should be. I understand that view but would rather play a different game, thank you.

Pathfinder is a kind of spiritual younger sister to D&D. It grew out of the desire for more third edition content after the fourth was released. Since the latest system was changed beyond recognition, it made sense. Also called the “d20 system,” it too has undergone many changes in it’s rules. The errata to the core books that everyone needed to play was so large at one point that they rebooted the entire series and called it the 3.5 edition. There was a lot of grumbling and moaning about having to buy all new books amongst the fans of the game, but it wasn’t necessary. After all, there was the Official Errata, which was free but fairly confusing to use unless you already knew it inside and out. More and more errata was piled onto the system until Paizo, the company who handled publication of the Dragon and Dungeon lines of magazines. Announced that they would be releasing an RPG called Pathfinder. Obviously taken straight from the pages of the 3.5E and errata, they also made it their own. With new monsters, a slew of wonderful adventure modules, and new rules of their own, they released the hefty core rulebook under their own banner.

Now, Paizo has gathered certain figures from Wizards of the Coast (D&D Publisher) and CCP (EVE Online) to create a company called Goblinworks that will handle all aspects of what they promise is going to be a “sandbox/theme park” style MMO. I am assuming they don’t mean that all player characters will have mascot-heads and ride roller coasters for experience points. They are proposing a model of gameplay that revolves around player interaction, rather than collection and mail-runner quests. Paizo has stated that they would like to see players building glittering castles, garner support from neighboring townships to take down larger military powers, and yes, maybe even have a quest or two to kill a bothersome dragon.

This is exiting news for me, and I believe it can be done well. The way Paizo and Goblinworks are talking about this new project feels reminiscent, to me, of the power-struggle and economy inherent within EVE Online. Let’s just hope the project gets off the ground!

For more information about Pathfinder Online, visit http://goblinworks.com. If you’d like to know more about tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, visit www.wizards.com/dnd/.