Tuesday 22 December 2020

Pathfinder and the Appeal of Crunch

In the comments on this post, Patrick Stuart asks:

Do you think Pathfinder is finally uncool enough that we can adopt it and do the pretentious version?
This was in a response to the suggestion that Pathfinder is struggling, 5th edition D&D having basically eaten its breakfast. 

I have no idea whether this is true or not. What I do know is that Pathfinder's 2nd edition, despite billing itself as being "easier to learn and faster to play", comes in a core rule book 640 pages long, so it really wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't exactly selling like hot cakes. Was this game ever going to appeal beyond the niche of disgruntled players of 3rd edition D&D still upset about 4th edition? It was, in essence, their OSR, so would one really expect it to be much more than a tiny corner of the market once Wizards of the Coast got its act together?

With all of that said, I do occasionally find myself vulnerable to the siren song of playing complicated and crunchy games. I think this is the wargamer in me. A detailed combat system like Cyberpunk 2020's makes tactics really matter in a way that in a faster and looser game they simply can't, and there is a lot of enjoyment to be squeezed out of even very simple fights when what happens is messy and difficult to resolve. You don't get many of those combat encounters you get in D&D (which are a feature of every campaign I've ever been involved in, as a player or DM) when it's late in the session or everybody is keen to move on from the fight and everything just descends into "Ok, I roll to hit...and miss...the orc rolls to hit...he hits...take 2hp damage...now I roll to hit..." When combat rules are gritty and complicated, that often serves in itself to make combat feel like it has high stakes. 

At the same time, though, the beauty of crunch is that it provides mechanical variety. In the end, there isn't really a great deal of difference between creatures in an OSR variant of D&D except at the aesthetic level. An orc is basically the same as a hobgoblin, an elf, a dwarf, a bandit, etc. There are, of course, ways to make them interesting, and we've been talking about that for well over a decade now in this neck of the woods. But the fact of the matter is, when monsters have lots of stats and abilities - when, in short, a game is crunchy - then the differences between them are readily apparent, and matter. This has its advantages. It elevates the stakes again; these hobgoblins may look like orcs, but they are not the same, and the differences might surprise you. 

I don't have the time or inclination to sit down and read a 640 page long RPG rule book and properly digest it. But if I did, I have a feeling I might in the end enjoy it. 

21 comments:

  1. I think PF2E is suffering from a perception that it is something, as you point out, which disgruntled 3rd edition players might prefer to play. In reality the content 3E/PF1E players never left their systems and have no interest in adopting PF2E. The new edition could benefit from a smaller introduction (the beginner box does that well) but it's really just a "medium crunch" option designed for D&D 5E players who would like a little more "oomf" in their rules and choices but not too much extra math, or at least that's my take (as someone who loves PF2E but burned out badly on PF1E and finds 5E sorta vague and simple).

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    1. It does seem a very narrow niche, though. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but I think its audience is necessarily going to be "boutique".

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  2. I think that as a player (and in a different way, as a DM), I enjoy obsessing over things. When playing pathfinder/mainstream d&d, this obsession is about crunch because this is what the game and community allows you to do. When I played ars magica, which was VERY crunchy but also didn't expect you to make optimal choices (or maybe I just didn't care as much as a player), I obsessed over minute details of medieval Ireland. From my point of view, the enjoyment was similar - I got to engage with the game outside of sessions, and share it with fellow players during sessions (in d&d during combat, in ars magica by arguing about religion). For that matter, games with "lore" (star wars, anything by white wolf) leans on the same obsession in my opinion, and I even find that usually the same people who enjoy reading d&d crunch are the same people who enjoy reading lore for the game.

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    1. Yes, that makes sense. And it makes me think that maybe the OSR is really just about downplaying the obsessional elements of gaming? (Which is a value neutral statement. I think obsessing over the details of medieval Ireland for an Ars Magica campaign sounds marvellous.)

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    2. I agree, somewhat. I think a lot of what OSR strive for is fast and loose, even when well designed (the glog is a good example IMO). On the other hand, Patrick's veins are very obsessable while definitely OSR.

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    3. Good point on the enjoyment of reading both crunch & lore by some people. IMO a lot of big page count RPG stuff is at least partly created as reading material, and this applies to both the fiction and the rules (which can reinforce the fiction by grounding it in solid mechanics).

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    4. > And it makes me think that maybe the OSR is really just about downplaying the obsessional elements of gaming?

      Hm, this seems consistent with Necropraxis' No Homework manifesto ( https://www.necropraxis.com/2019/01/22/no-homework/ ); a different way of looking at a similar principle, maybe.

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  3. Another portion of it is that, in general, most people play in relatively railroaded, low-freedom games where the average GM hasnt done all that much prep and might not be the best at improvisation (read: the average person playing a game is an average person); what crunch does is it allows the GM to offload some system-mastery work to the players and give them a say in what kind of game they want to play.

    On top of that, spending some time coming up with a concept and then spending (sometimes copious amounts of) time to scaffold a character to fit your design lends a bit of ownership to the game itself, sorta in a positive-flavored sunk-cost way.

    Whether or not this is the best way to do that is (and has been) up for debate

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  4. I disagree that every monster in the OSR is the same on a mechanical level, you rightly said that there are ways of making them interesting. An Old-School monster still has abilities that differentiates them from other monsters, the environment where you find them in and their behavior is also a huge factor. Old-School games more have just a different way of thinking about things. You more have to interact in the tabletop game like you actually would in real life, rather than in a video game where you've memorized the mechanics and the statistics of the game. It is the difference between acting in a play for acting and
    merely knowing mechanically the layout of a theater.
    I haven't played a war-game so perhaps I am a bit ignorant when it comes to this, I still think that games need crunch, a tabletop game without crunch is just improvisational story-telling. The best games are where you let picaros run around in a sandbox and see what happens.

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    1. Well, I definitely don't disagree with your last point!

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  5. Good post. Now, this is asked in complete ignorance because I've never played any edition of D&D later than Basic or first-edition AD&D, but is there an element of 'you can't get there from here' in attempting to turn D&D into a successful, tactical, crunchy combat game?

    It strikes me that the games that are great at promoting tactical play tend to be sleek and streamlined: Runequest, say, or The Fantasy Trip. They're 'crunchy' in that they're far less abstracted than D&D and have lots of options for the characters in combat, but they don't get there by layering lots and lots of special rules on top of D&D's abstract attrition engine. So they tend to be fast - and to centre on *decisive* combats, where one blow might prove disabling if not deadly. And that in itself makes tactics - both before and during melee - absolutely crucial.

    I'm not sure if D&D can ever quite provide that - but the abstract and attritional module has attractions of its own, including long, engrossing and (let's face it) utterly unrealistic dungeon-crawls.

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    1. I think you are probably right in the end.

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  6. I ran a yearlong Pathfinder campaign and told the players, “You can use anything for Pathfinder that’s published by Paizo to develop your characters.” There’s something to be said for granting the party such a vastness to draw on; they were certainly more engaged in research and discussion of their characters between games than I’ve ever seen before or since. It was maximalism. As a result certain PCs became stupidly powerful, one guy just googled “most OP Pathfinder build” and ended up playing an idiotic barbarian who charged people with headbutts and could break down dragons at close quarters, but it actually wasn’t a huge problem because everyone was driving an extremely fine-tuned customized rig in his own character and I could tell they took pleasure in the extremely specific things they could each do.

    Regarding the dragon thing they regularly flipped over battles that I estimated would have an 80% chance of breaking them because I was trying to create a sense of danger in-universe; instead they turned into these all-conquering Julius Caesars who just won upset after upset and were literally having other planes colonized on their behalf after dragging down the meanest sons of bitches they encountered short of lesser gods. My vision was usually that they would be sneaking around or doing diplomacy but you know how players are and everything’s got a statblock in Pathfinder. I know I could have just killed them but it seemed like the honorable way to simulate a hostile universe was to throw encounters at them that were fat above them in CR, but when you have access to to whole panoply of Pathfinder splatbooks there’s evidently not a lot you can’t overcome. Many PCs have died in my other campaigns but there weren’t a lot of fatalities in that one; usually to get one (the possibility of which I felt was necessary to keep things from veering into the absolutely cartoonish) I’d have to set up blood-curdling ambushes and many-on-one assassinations, which the party often broke anyways despite their casualties; I think they were only ever captured once or twice.

    That’s that superhero zero-g rocket tag level of play people talk about and try and get away from; but it was FUN and the only reason I wouldn’t run it again is because that combat is s.l.o.w. and all the moments of high drama in and out of combat could have happened in any system detailed enough for a GM to place a battle on the edge of victory and defeat. Normally I prefer to run games where you can only play a baseline human and any player magic is self-sacrificial and you can die to a single bad attack, but if you have time, there’s something to be said for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink gaming and some of the drama *was* by necessity built upon the detail of the combat and the necessity that I throw hell at them to even give them a challenge

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    1. At that level it begins to sound a lot like Exalted? Not that I have ever actually played that.

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  7. In practice I find detailed & slow combat rules only work if you actually play them out like a wargame, with maps or miniatures.

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  8. My feeling about crunchiness in general is that it's more suited to the "game before & after the game", when prepping stuff or working out after-effects. Or just to enjoy reading & imagining how incredibly sophisticated it all is. In actual play it only works if people have really mastered the rules, which is rare enough. More likely lots of complicated bits quickly get thrown out and you end up with something fairly minimalist inspired by the original rules.

    It's also more of a DM thing, except perhaps in the intricate time-consuming character generation systems some of these games have.

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  9. As a boardgamer, wargamer and an accountant, I like crunch and fiddlybits. I do however like some of the less crunchy games/rulesets, but I find that depending on who you are playing with really determines how much crunch is going to be used. Trying to get people to play Pendragon with me is hard. They usually don't like the crunch (and many don't like the focus on knighthood) and I end up doing all the off-adventure crunch which they end up ignoring anyway.

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  10. I think there's a distinction between crunch and maths-heavy. I watched a few minutes of a Stream of Pathfinder 2 and each turn of combat took about a real-time minute of adding various circumstantial bonuses. The stat blocks for monsters are sometimes a whole page.

    5e has a large amount of character options and - if I'm allowed to use the word - 'builds', but the maths remains pretty flat.

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    1. Yeah, I get exactly the point you are making. What I like is CP:2020 style tactical crunch - not just the totting up of bonuses.

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