Dungeons and Dragons may not be a
videogame, but it is the ur-example of roleplaying games, without
which games like Skyrim or Final Fantasy would not exist and which,
I'd argue, is actually more influential for modern fantasy than even
Lord of the Rings due to compiling and collecting so many sources.
And while the main game has gone through four editions, with a hiatus
for a fifth one coming our way, that's not what I'm here to talk
about.
I'm here to talk about Pathfinder. It's
been called the true 4th edition by many players of the
game despite not being produced by Wizards of the Coast (the actual
owners of D&D). Its existence is owed to the fact that Wizards
allowed their third edition of the game to be open-sourced, allowing
any other publishers to use their rules along with a whole bunch of
their creatures and races in exchange for a bit of legalese at the
back of their books.
But, to put a long story short, they
abandoned the third edition for a fourth one after a good run of
eight years, due in no small part to an array of massive game balance
problems (As in, with the right books you could build a character who
was literally omnipotent from level 1), and that new edition was
vastly different than any before it, more akin to the less-detailed
but more balanced videogame rpgs, and massively divisive.
And, when they changed editions, they
also abandoned the company that used to produce their magazines
(Dungeon and Dragon) to produce them in-house. And the people behind
said magazines, Paizo, had to release something new soon or else go
out of business. And the system was still open source so...
Well, that's how we got Pathfinder. And
it's been proven to be far more popular than 4th edition,
or at least as it gained popularity it's seemed to eclipse it, to the
point where some have speculated that the recent announcement of
fifth edition is a reaction to this. But why? And what does this say
about the gaming community?
Well, the first thing one notices when looking at Pathfinder is that you can access a large chunk of it for free. Well, that's an understatement. You can access EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF CORE RULES MATERIAL EVER, LEGALLY! And this isn't a hidden fact, oh no, this is actually prominently featured on Paizo's site, the Pathfinder SRD. That's thanks to their use of the open source system to be sure, but to make so much of it available speaks to something.
And I think what that speaks to is the
spirit of open-source-ness amongst the gaming community. We've seen a
lot of memes and projects develop out of collaborative effort, such
as the internet boogeyman Slenderman or the fully-fleshed-out
tabletop RPG Adeptus Evangelion. And in the history of D&D I've
read, the open-sourcing of third edition was done in that same
spirit, to make D&D the fans' and nobody elses'. And while fourth
edition moved away from that, with its open-source agreement that was
unclear and most often unused, Pathfinder embraced it, and has been
rewarded by the market for it. We are nerds and we want to control
the things we love.
Also, another thing you'll notice is
the rules. D&D 4e gained most of its balance from restricting the
powers of each in-game “class” to a set patternof “powers”
that only really applied in battle and differed only in the ways they
applied themselves to battle tactics. It also gained most of its
infamy from this. Though they began breaking up this paradigm later
in the edition, Pathfinder did it differently right from the start.
Instead of making, say, the wizard weaker, they just made everything
else stronger. And those other classes they did weaken, they did so
in ways that were subtle and still fun to play (I.E., the cleric
could no longer use the best armors and the Druid had much more
limited, but still versatile, shapeshifting abilities). Compare the
original SRD to see the difference, and you'll see there's a pretty
big gap in there. In addition, they improved the classes thought to
be Weak, like the fighter and the paladin, and boosted their power.
The fighter now has far more things that are exclusive to him, and no
levels, and the Paladin's healing and class features have been
boosted way up!
This shows what I think is the great
triumph of Pathfinder over 4e, which is that it knew what to keep and
drop. While the upcoming D&D Next appears to be doing something
similar, Pathfinder knew that people liked the old system just fine.
Specifically, they liked the fact that classes felt different other
than by power source. The Wizard still casts a certain amount of
spells per day (Though with weak unlimited-use ones for backup), the
Fighter still smacks things straightforwardly (albeit with a lot of
extra feats). It's not that people were unsatisfied that they had
these nitches, but that they did not fill them well.
And the list of creatures adds to this
reverence for tradition. For, while there are quitea few typical
fantasy staples like orcs, trolls, dragons, and the typical D&D
staples like otyughs, umber hulks, gelatinous cubes, and so-on, the
fact of the matter is that they also do quite a bit new. There's a
lot of more obscure mythical creatures used, like the Akhlut or the
Pukwudgie or the Garuda, alongside some new ones like the Vemerak (A
horrible underground scorpion monster with fungus powers) and the
Slurk (A slipperey-slimy walrus-fanged frog domesticated by the
underground-dwelling Kobolds).
And not to mention, alongside the
fantasy staples like Elf, Dwarf, Human, Halfling, Gnome, ect, the
races include such things as half-vampires, half-genies, xenophobic
winged folk, shadow-puppet people, and so-on.
But nobody is as angry about the
inclusion of these weird races as they were about D&D 4e's
inclusion of the comparatively mundane Dragonborn (Dragon people) and
Tieflings (Demon people). Why? Because they kept them out of core.
The weirder didn't replace certain races, as they did with the
half-orc and gnome in the first days of 4e, but were instead given
their own book (the Advanced Race Guide) and they kept the . Likewise
with the monsters, 4e had some baffling omissions from the first
monster book, like the Iron Golem, the Rust Monster and all the
Metalic Dragons. All those unique monsters I mentioned? They were in
the later books, with the first monster book being occupied by the
classics (And also the Froghemoth).
So, over time we see a clear trend for
what they tend to keep: Keep the things that aren't broke, fix the
ones that are, and keep it diverse. While 4e made some drastic
changes to the system, some of which were great, some of which were
total failures, Pathfinder took a look at the previous edition, saw
what people didn't like, and fixed it. At the same time, given the
examples I mentioned, they also managed to add new and exciting ideas
to the game, but, at the core, the game was still 3e, minus the
glaring balance problems.
And so, the core lesson to this is just
that: When you are handling a licensed brand KNOW WHAT THE CORE IDEAS
ARE AND HOW THEY APPEAL TO THE FANS! Now if only Michael Bay could
learn this...
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