Pathfinder Sells Out

Is it just me, or does that wizard look like the same one who's on the 4e PHB cover, aside from the hair color?

According to Paizo, as of Monday, their Pathfinder game’s core rulebook has sold out its first printing.  Now, this is mostly distributor orders — not actual sales — and there’s no indication of how large the first print run is.  Still, it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.  I suspected that the initial sales would be very strong, and I hope it’ll bring people to the hobby, and not be confined to the existing 3.5 audience.

I have my doubts, though.

I haven’t seen the final revision of the rules, obviously, but the beta was not promising.  While the stated intent of the developers was to address some of the problems of 3.5e, and in particular to make melee characters a more viable choice, I found that the beta did the exact opposite — spellcasters were given a variety of bonuses.  Some problem spells were addressed, like Glitterdust and death spells, but there remained a wide variety of “I remove the enemy from combat” spells — including some new ones added by Paizo.  Fighters, on the other hand, were given more bonus feats… but they also need to spend more feats in order to achieve the same effect they used to get from a single one.  For instance, the +4 from Improved Disarm?  That takes two feats in Pathfinder.

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Of Possible Interest… (PDFs)

…EN World is offering a whole bunch of assorted PDFs for $1 each.  The sale runs until Gencon.  I know, I’m a little late with this one, but it slipped my mind.  My free time has mostly been occupied with writing a piece for Nevermet Press.  They’re a bunch of cool fellows.  Have you checked them out yet?  No?  Click the link, then.  Click it!  I’m watching you!

…Ahem.  Anyway.  You’ll see that piece toward the end of August, if all goes well.  More about that later, though.

The sale’s on 3.5e-era stuff, so it’s likely primarily useful to those who are sticking with that edition or Pathfinder.  A quick look shows at least a couple of options that would have utility in almost any game, though.  Need some inspiration for a thieves’ guild or two?  A city council to drop into your new city?  Ideas for some tournament or festival games?  Want to add some steampunk flavor to your game?

Maybe even try a new game?

There’s a lot of material on offer.  It’s worth a look through.

If I were still playing 3.5, I’d go for Everyone Else: A Book of Innkeepers, Farmers & More.  Almost 70 pages of ready-made statblocks for villagers, mooks, and other random NPCs in case that tavern brawl breaks out?  I’d buy that for $1 and save myself a whole chunk of work.

The Rules Gap

In my experience, people who play D&D — and roleplaying games in general — have two ways of looking at the rules.

Some try to make their games fit the rules.

Others try to make the rules fit their games.

Tales of the Rambling Bumblers touched on this in an excellent post about two months ago, but it comes to mind now because of what I wrote about in my previous post, and because of several unrelated recent conversations I’ve had with other gamers and bloggers.  My take on it is slightly different from Joshua’s; for one thing, I’m coming at it from the player perspective instead of the system perspective.

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Defining Roles

(This is a reprint.  This post was originally published on July 30, 2008.  I’ll be touching on the subject again — and on how it’s changed thanks to the new books that have come out since I first wrote this — in the near future.)

Over at All Your Dungeons Are Belonging to Us!!, Donny raises an interesting point regarding the difference between third and fourth edition D&D.  In a nutshell, he feels that character roles, for the sake of game balance, are enforced more strictly in 4e than they were in 3e, and his opinion is that this is a bad thing.  It’s the following passage that inspired this post, though:

I do not like being TOLD how my character SHOULD be played. It’s just like that. The great peoples (no sarcasm) over at Wizards have taken this edition WAY too far down the path of one-size-fits-all. The “tyranny of fun” argument was misplaced with the stupid cave slime example, THIS is where it lives. It is right at the heart of the system, not in some silly little table, buried in the middle of a book. Want to play a ranger? Good, you’re the striker. Just. Like. That. Even worse, where’s the customization? Everything that has been set aside for you in terms of powers are designed specifically to reinforce that role. Even within it’s own framework this has problems. You cannot fill any other role.

This is not entirely true, in my limited experience with 4e.  But it is largely true, especially of the ranger.  Most classes can, with some work, fulfill a secondary role — the fighter can put out damage almost as well as a striker, the paladin has some healing and buffing abilities like a leader, the warlock and the cleric bring some control to the table, and even the rogue can do a lot of sliding and pushing and knocking the enemy prone if he builds for it.  The ranger, though, is largely damage.  Future books might change that, as Donny notes later, but the core ranger is a striker.

Is this a problem?

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War and How to Wage It

March’s RPG Blog Carnival on War, hosted by The Book of Rev, will soon be drawing to a close. Before it does, here’s that post I promised about war within a fantasy setting.  The typical D&D campaign is set in a fantastic version of late-medieval to early-Renaissance Europe, so that’s the setting I’m considering.  Gunpowder isn’t a factor, but magic and mythological creatures are.  This is bound to change the way a war is conducted.

For instance, let’s take castles and fortifications.  These are, essentially, walls.  Walls can prove very effective at protecting one army from another, helping to defend a strategic point even against larger forces.  They’re cover for allies and an obstacle to enemies.  Confronted with a strong castle full of defenders, many armies of the middle ages were forced to respond with besiegement — what could be a long process of waiting for the defenders’ supplies to run out, or for their commanders to make a mistake.  The other major option, if the enemy could not be drawn out, was the use of siege engines, devices intended to breach or circumvent the walls.

But in a game like Dungeons & Dragons, a siege might not make sense.  If the army has a complement of flying creatures, for instance, walls become much less of an obstacle.  Similarly, there are many creatures that can teleport or tunnel.  What impact would this have on the game world?

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