Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-27221056-20180504125708/@comment-454133-20180504171900

I enjoyed Pathfinder, though the level of options makes it hard to GM a game effectively, in addition to overwhelming players. Best to tell your players they can select from a subset of all the sources (chosen by you, for your sanity). I also didn't like the feat tax, where special feats had massive requirements -- if you wanted to do something interesting, you had to play a fighter and devote all your feat slots toward someday acquiring that special feat around level 16 or 20 or so. Also a lot of abilities were useless half the time, e.g. disarming or grappling. If the enemy had lots of special abilities, grappling them was trivially easy; few special abilities meant they were just a giant sack of meat with extremely high stats, and grappling etc was entirely useless.

I like 5th Edition's focus on less... everything, so that your creativity, roleplay, and storytelling determine your character more than do the mechanics. More and more I'm moving in that direction -- I don't want the mechanics getting in the way of good roleplay, either by restricting it or by simply overwhelming the player so they struggle to focus on the roleplay. However, I haven't played 5th edition much, and what I did play did feel a bit... random, which I don't like. It should not be a 30%-50% chance of failing at something I'm an expert at doing. And I like combat to be uncommon and interesting, not common and boring. Though the combat I played in this short campaign was pretty fun.

A couple of lesser-known recommendations:

I really like a game called Mayhem RPG, a dinky little RPG created by someone in my home state. I put a lot of time into building a campaign and the associated world-building, history, etc, and my players apparently had a really fun time with it. The game requires some love and some agreement to not abuse it, as it's a work in progress and made by a small team, but I found it to be tactically interesting, great for roleplay, and easy to pick up and learn. If you're interested in the game world I created for it, let me know and I'll post a link.

There's also an unauthorized Pokemon RPG that I sampled at the Salt Con board games convention that has me very interested. Your pokemon handle all the combat, so your own character (the trainer) is more focused on roleplay skills. I had a fun time, and I like the setup of their game system! The pokemon version isn't officially the purpose for the system so they don't get in trouble, and it can be used for all kinds of minion-based games, but the pokemon part was so much fun. ^_^  I only played one game though so I can't say how well it works longer-term.

When I played, we were new recruits for Team Rocket. I lit a large forest fire to funnel the pokemon to me so I could catch them; instead I attracted an Arcanine to the flames (uh oh!). I used my Coolness and Leadership skills to impress it and convince it I would be a great master; together we would burn the world! I then used my endurance to pet it and endure the flames without flinching. That (and some good rolls) is how I got that high-level pokemon to join our team. There's so many different skills, and they encourage that sort of freestyle use of them, that it was a really fun system for me. And it's all free online, so I'm really happy pointing people to their system. What I'd really like to do is start a game, but no one in the world has time these days.

I can tell you a lot about 4th Edition, as I invested into it in a big way before having to bail out because my friends refused to play it. I liked a lot of what it did, and disliked things too. Some of my friends disliked it greatly.

The good: It streamlined a lot of concepts like powers, and introduced abilities each class could use every encounter (can be reused after only a 5-minute rest), or at-will (no limit per day), in addition to the per-day abilities. Now your wizard didn't blow his two spells in one encounter, then throw up his hands and say "Welp, I'm done!  Guess I'll miss with my crossbow for the rest of the encounter!". Every character stayed consistently viable, which went a long ways toward eliminating the "5-minute workday", where players would get into a fight, expend all their daily resources, and then try to retreat and rest to get their dailies back. They were given the resources to keep going, and encounters/quests were thus structured so that they *needed* to keep going -- the world wouldn't wait for them to rest 8 hours per encounter.

The bad: It didn't focus as much on roleplay, becoming so numeric and class-focused that the features of your class could easily displace the freeform player decisions that make P&P rpgs so fun. Bad if your players don't realize they should still be free-styling it, but worse if your GM doesn't. One youtuber was talking about this -- he jumped up on a construct and tried to pry the gem out of its forehead to shut it down, and the GM said "but which power are you using?". "I'm not using a power, I'm going to pry out the gem!". "You have to tell me which power you're using.". These sorts of misunderstandings are devastating to roleplay, and it's clearly the GM's fault in this case, but 4th Edition seemed almost to funnel everyone down that path and that's not a great idea. All the data tracking also became burdensome too, particularly for the GM; but that applies to Pathfinder to some degree too.

I spent a lot of time on the forums discussing builds around a single feat, which would allow you to knock foes prone in certain circumstances (and I came up with a crazy number of builds that could do it). I loved the clever methods available, all the crazy combinatorics. But there were also perma-stunlock builds etc that would render the game unplayable because they were so obscenely OP! Like Pathfinder and others, it's a game where you have to have an understanding with your GM that you'll focus on fun, not on breaking the game until it's not fun.

The big problem I have with the forums in Pathfinder, D&D 4th Edition, etc is always the same: Dominated, absolutely DOMINATED, by munchkin power-gamers who have no patience for players who don't want to abuse the system and stretch the rules to reach the absolute peak of power. It became a very depressing place to visit to get advice and ideas.

And I'm a power-gamer myself. I just believe in, ya know, rules and fun. Pen & Paper is not a video game to exploit and claim victory... it's a much more complicated experience and it involves other people -- friends -- who you should be taking into account. P&P is too tedious to play as a video game too... the whole point is roleplay and it's a weak experience if you're just munchkining your way to ultimate power. It's really tough dealing with people who don't understand or don't respect that. And again, this is coming from a powergamer with a tendency toward fun roleplay. ;)  I'm also a GM (in fact, I've GM'd much more than I've played), and that's a whole different experience.