Quote from: Caesar Slaad;489621I really have to wonder how much actual play your frothing hate comes from, or if you are yet another one of those hatahs out there always fault-finding and never really giving the games they hate a chance.

Given that your supposed "mathematially derived" flaws are so at odds with my actual play experience, I am given to suspect the latter.

Is this a parody or the real thing? I'm asking because this is the bland rhetoric we've seen at paizo.com over the years. Also, you might want to (re)read this ([edit] and this).

Quote from: Windjammer;489680Is this a parody or the real thing? I'm asking because this is the bland rhetoric we've seen at paizo.com over the years. Also, you might want to (re)read this ([edit] and this).

So that's it then? Conjured analyses with no correlation with actual play trump actual play and observations to the contrary are "rhetoric"? If you are looking for the source of rhetoric,  look in the mirror.

I invoke Gygax's First Law:

D&D building block are so robust, that tampering with the interaction scheme nearly never invalidates the D&D-style fun to be had.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;489685Conjured analyses with no correlation with actual play trump actual play and observations to the contrary are "rhetoric"?

"Laws of probability be damned, I have a system! This casino is gonna be mine!"

Quote from: Windjammer;489618The short answer to Akrasia: google Pathfinder, Trollman, kick a man when he's down, and some other threads on TheGaming Den. There's also the documentation when Trollman & Co. got removed from open playtesting because they were using mathematical modelling to show that the actual design didn't deliver the intended results. The reason given wasn't only or so much that he had used non-nice language (though he had) but that mathematical modelling wasn't what Paizo wanted from the public playtest. You read that right.

This doesn't surprise me. Large chunks of Trollman's mathematical analysis is spherical cow stuff. Paizo wasn't saying, "We don't think mathematical analysis is valuable." They were saying, "We've done mathematical analysis. We're interested in seeing what happens in actual play."

They might have been able to do this more diplomatically, but they were specifically trying to avoid the type of fatally-flawed "theory first" playtesting that plagued 4th Edition.

QuotePathfinder copied 4E's way of rolling Jump & co. into Athletics, and Listen & co. into Perception. That was a fix. Not a terribly original one, but (what little) honor where honor is due. Pathfinder of course also tries to be original, and that's where the hilarity starts. Like, to stay on topic, introducing a Fly skill. Yes, that's exactly what D&D needs.

Makes sense to me. Notice that once you've done PF's skill conflation, it becomes quite logical to have one skill associated with each movement type.

(I might be biased because I use a Fly skill in L&L to streamline the entire system of flying rules into a simple skill check.)

QuoteCaesarSlaad mentioned Combat Maneuvers. These'd be my main beef. I can't rule out that these things got fixed in errata v. 1.03416, so please forgive if I judge the game on its release state.

Here I completely agree. CMB sounds great, but there are some fundamental design flaws. I also think the desire to maintain reverse compatibility eradicates the utility of the system by keeping all kinds of fiddly exceptions in the different maneuver types.

One of the best things I ever did in my 3.5 games was to roll tripping and grappling into a single system. I think the CMB system should have been (a) properly balanced and (c) rolled up pretty much all the combat maneuvers into a single, unified system.

But there's definitely a reason why I've never bothered updating my campaign to PF. There's just nothing there that justifies doing the conversion.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;489531Call of Cthulhu.

Back off poindexter, it isn't per se a bad game, but...


"you have been summoned to the mansion of Great Uncle Fester to learn his dark secret..."

That would mainly concern too many of the published scenarios then?

I'm a fan of Call of Cthulhu, but I actually would agree that it seems overrated at times, though perhaps not criminally so. I personally find combat pretty clunky and the resistance table a rather pointless contraption. While it's true that there's usually an easy way to deal with any perceived handicaps of the rules, some of the praise it gets seems exaggerated.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;489728This doesn't surprise me. Large chunks of Trollman's mathematical analysis is spherical cow stuff. Paizo wasn't saying, "We don't think mathematical analysis is valuable." They were saying, "We've done mathematical analysis. We're interested in seeing what happens in actual play."

That's also how I understand the gist of the James Jacobs statements I referenced, statements which turn the feedback of some Denners round and say 'of course we want a low(er) probability for combat maneuvers to succeed'. It still leaves me scratching my head why that should have been a design goal in the first place, though.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;489728They might have been able to do this more diplomatically, but they were specifically trying to avoid the type of fatally-flawed "theory first" playtesting that plagued 4th Edition.

I was going to ask you to expand, but then realized that by 'theory first' you probably meant something akin to the linked reference to your spherical cow blogpost. (Correct me if this is wrong; and also, if it is wrong, kindly expand on what you meant by 'theory first'.)

Quote from: Justin Alexander;489728But there's definitely a reason why I've never bothered updating my campaign to PF. There's just nothing there that justifies doing the conversion.

This is something very worthwhile to raise in the context of this discussion.

Even people on Frank's forum will now, in 2011, on occasion recommend Pathfinder over 3.5 to new people, both for ease of market accessibility (head over to Amazon, buy your own copy), and also because they feel you get more meat on the bones than if you simply went by the 3.5 PHB. The usual proviso is 'if your group is not very attentive to rules details in the first place' (which they grant few groups are and I'm inclined to agree).

However, the 2009 issue of whether extant 3.5 groups should convert or not is a separate discussion, and here I believe raising issues like CMB success odds is a lot more pertinent.

Actually, beyond all the details, the thing Pathfinder RPG lacks most, in my opinion, is the publication of a separate softcover volume which contains the player-relevant material only. I've often wondered whether people feel happy to carry around this heavy tome when they are not game mastering. If you play a caster PC, you'll need it for the spells alone.

Oh, I love that Spherical Cow essay! It scratches so many nagging itches I've been trying to reach.

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;489777I'm a fan of Call of Cthulhu, but I actually would agree that it seems overrated at times, though perhaps not criminally so.

I think some historical context is probably required here. If CoC were published today, it would sink without a trace into the massive and overwhelming sea of games which look just like it.

This is because most of the industry has been massively influenced (either directly or indirectly) by CoC.

CoC is also one of the best-supported RPGs in the biz. (D&D, WoD, and Rifts are probably the only ones that give it any competition.) This is largely because it's endured for thirty years without any sort of major revision, a feat which it accomplishes because it largely does exactly what it says on the tin.

Any claim that CoC is widely overrated would just leave me completely befuddled.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;490017This is because most of the industry has been massively influenced (either directly or indirectly) by CoC.

Could you elaborate on that?  The RQ-derived games were never popular in my area at the time, so I'm not seeing it.

In My neck of the gamerverse I vote for Savage Worlds. Every game store save one had hordes of rabid fan folk jumping Me because I did not bow down to it upon hearing it spoke of. Now I don't hate savage worlds but come on people give the fanboi crap a rest they were worse than the D&D 4th edition fans.

In as much as something can be classified as overrated on the basis that "I don't understand why so many people like this so much", my one vote is for "Universalis".

I don't know what it is that I'm not getting, but upon reading the rules it looked like the most stark worst waste of time of any RPG I'd ever seen. Yet, it has a tremendous following.

Over-rated.

//Panjumanju

Quote from: daniel_ream;490019Could you elaborate on that?  The RQ-derived games were never popular in my area at the time, so I'm not seeing it.

The easiest demonstration is, of course, the Sanity mechanics. Whether you're looking at cyber rules in Cyberpunk 2020 or humanity in Vampire or avant garde mechanics from story games, mechanics derived from Sanity are everywhere in this industry today. CoC is the origin point for the entire development track that leads from ablative points to elaborate carrot-and-stick trait systems.

The even larger influence, though, is in scenario design and system focus.