Diminishing Returns 2: Shootin' Dudes in the Face

That's right, we've been shooting guys in first person since the very earliest days! First-person shooters still have more obvious increases than racing games, but what's notable is it took me a while to find an Xb1/PS4 game that I felt really showed off the hardware. If the game is mostly confined to buildings and alleys, the improvements over the 360/PS3 era are much less striking.

Atari 2600 (1977):

Okay, you're not shooting bad guys...but still...close enough!

NES (1983):

 
TurboGrafx-16 (1987):

Super Nintendo (1991):

 Nintendo 64 (1996):

Gamecube (2001):

PS3 (2006):

Xbox One (2013):

Diminishing Returns.

Diminishing returns: each additional investment produces a smaller and smaller proportional increase in quality. That is, if you were to ask consumers to rate quality on a scale from 1 to 10, what you would find is that eventually, a linear increase in investment does not have a corresponding increase in quality. This happens even when you re-rate older products.

What follows are a number of racing games on console hardware spread roughly 5 years apart. What you will notice is that sometime in the early 2000s, arguably beginning with the programmable shader era, the graphics seem more like a commodity than an obvious necessity.

Suppose we sorted these and other video game images in random order and threw in actual photographs and movie stills. Then we asked people to rate the images from 1 to 10, 1 being "I can barely tell what this is" and 10 being "this is a photograph." Then, we plot people's ratings vs the date of the software's publication. Would you expect a linear graph? I wouldn't.

Note that the gap between the Xbox One and the Xbox is 12 years, which is roughly the same as between the Nintendo 64 and the NES.

Atari 2600 (1977):

NES (1983):

 
TurboGrafx-16 (1987):

Super Nintendo (1991):

Nintendo 64 (1996):

Xbox (2001):

PS3 (2006):

Xbox One (2013):

Pathfinder 2: Incoherent Design

Pathfinder 2 isn't going to do well regardless of how good a game it is, but it's shaping up to be a pretty awful.  There is no one especially horrible design choice, but rather a whole pile of small, bad choices that indicate poor management and a lack of direction.

How can I tell? The key is that creators, which includes everyone from artists to engineers, require the firm hand of management to stay on task and put together a coherent product. If you do not do this, your creatives will destroy you. They will continue adding ornaments, frills, doo-dads, and gee-gaws to your product until it is a total mess.

PF2 contrasts with 5e, which has been a tremendous design success because Mearls' team worked from a "less is more" philosophy. When they ran into a problem, they solved it by removing or simplifying features, or rebuilt underlying structures. This is much more difficult than adding complexity and features. The final game was much simpler than the initial test packets (with their "martial dice" and other dropped features), and has benefited for it.

The Paizo team never really talks about any coherent vision or goal. Instead, the language that comes up the most seems to be opening or increasing "the design space" and giving the creatives more ways to play around. This should set off a ton of alarm bells...designers do not need fewer constraints compared to 3.5, they need more!

An example of where PF2 design is falling apart is spell heightening (just look at what a mess the new Heal spell is). In 5e, many spells may be "upcast" by using a higher slot. Each additional level typically adds another damage die or two, adds another target, increases the duration, or the like. In PF2, there are different kinds of heightening. Perhaps you gain something per slot, or per two slots, or the gain depends on both how many slots you increase and how many actions you spend, or perhaps there's a single large gain only at a specific higher level.

Another example is the "3 action economy." This initially sounded promising---getting rid of Swift, Standard, Move, and Full actions in exchange for just "actions" made it sound like they were  adopting the KISS principle. But as we learned more, it turned out that they were actually adopting an action point system. AP systems are fine, but they're significantly more complex that simple action systems. So while Mike Mearls over at WotC regards bonus actions as a design failure, since they added what he considers unnecessary complexity, the Paizo team is gleefully cranking out all kinds of ways to modify things by spending 1, 2, or 3 action points. Not only that, but they're writing feats and features to introduce exceptions to the AP system! So a wizard will get four action points, one of which can only be spent to concentrate on a spell. A fighter can take a feat so that moving twice and attacking costs only two actions.

What they're producing is chaos. The less consistent the patterns are, the more time players will have to spend parsing rules text to make sure they get it right. The more complexity and exceptions there are in the rules, the more places overlooked interactions will cause the system to break down (this is why 3.x was an unfixable mess). "Opening up the design space" to give your creatives more space to play around and fewer constraints or patterns to cleave to produces design messes.

At this point, I'm expecting PF2 to be a disaster for Paizo. It won't even make Pathfinder fans happy, let alone attract anyone from 5e or draw in new players to the hobby.

The Impending Doom of Paizo

Two years ago, I made some predictions about Paizo's ability to survive 5e. I said they had 3 bad options:

1. Keep running with the 3E model forever.
2. Update to the 5e SRD.
3. Do something new. 

They are going with the option I expected they would, the third. The Pathfinder 2 RPG is obviously going to be a failure, and let's get into why (it actually has little to do with the revealed mechanics, which admittedly look pretty bad). The key is to understand what the Pathfinder brand's identity. Pathfinder is embraced by the market as a well-supported, generic knock-off of D&D 3.5. The fundamental problem is that it's a backward-facing brand. The way brands work, the heir to a beloved brand can never come from another company. Pathfinder isn't the successor to 3.5; it's just a repristination. The successor to D&D 3.5 is D&D 5e.

Furthermore, 5e has changed what makes Pathfinder unique. While 4e was WotC's flagship product, Pathfinder's identity was "pretty much everything you liked about 3.5 that 4e dumped." Since 4e dumped nearly every classic D&D-ism that didn't work with 3.5's feat-bloat, that meant a Pathfinder game felt more like "real" D&D than 4e. But the 5e design team not only kept what worked about 3.5,  but went back to the sources (a kind of "Protestant Reformation" of D&D, if you will) and restored a number of AD&D-isms and even OD&D-isms that had been discarded over the years. This means that what makes Pathfinder unique in 2018 is "mostly failed design ideas from 3.5."


Because Pathfinder's brand identity is defined entirely in terms of somebody else's product, Paizo has nowhere to go with Pathfinder 2. The revealed design of PF2 has so far been pretty incoherent. Paizo's doubling down on bloated feats, large numbers, fiddly modifiers, and mechanical complexity for its own sake. But that isn't fundamentally why Pathfinder  2 is going to fail. Even if PF2 is a great RPG, it's going to fail because the D&D brand is owned by Wizards of the Coast, and 5e has been a smash success. There is little to no market demand for a game that is "like D&D, but different." Pathfinder only succeeded because it was perceived by the market as being more true to D&D than the official version.

Pathfinder 2 will initially sell seemingly well, but its peak will almost certainly be below PF1's. There will be significant attrition of existing Pathfinder players, as it is so different as to be incompatible with old material, it will lure almost nobody over from other games, and it will not grow the RPG market at all. Within 18 months, even if initial sales numbers seem impressive, there will be significantly fewer people playing PF2 than PF1, and growth will be practically nonexistent.

It's much harder to shrink a company than to grow it, so it's anyone's guess as to whether Paizo will stay solvent.

Dungeon Fantasy: Powered by Nobody Cares

I picked up a Dungeon Fantasy boxed set at a low price. It was steeply discounted, and I was curious about GURPS. The game was, predictably, a commercial failure. Steve Jackson Games said as at their Stakeholders Meeting that the game was:

...so very late, costing more to produce than is healthy, and requiring so much of our upper management team's time and sleep. As it is, the game will likely be sold out at our primary warehouse before the end of the first quarter and will not be reprinted. The current market doesn't leave room for a game like this to succeed, and it's a great thing that we cut our planned print run by 30% or we would be stuck with copies for years to come.

Why was this failure so predictable? Simple, look at the box:

What does that box say to a customer in the store? It says, "Hi, I'm a generic knock-off of D&D!" And in this case, there's truth in advertising. Steve Jackson is one of those nerds who thinks the mathematical beauty of a system matters to people, when the fact that D&D was king through the 80s, complete with its messy saving throws, bonkers high-level spells, and weird combat resolution, should have told him otherwise. The real question should be, "Who's looking for a different way to play D&D?" The answer is, "Nobody."

 The reality is very few customers do much research. If you're looking for people who have researched your system and know what "Powered by GURPS" means," you're looking at a very, very tiny niche. If you want real success, you want to get the people who walk into the store, see your attractive product, pick it up, and buy it. People just don't do that with obvious knock-offs. They either already have the real thing, are there to buy the real thing, or already don't like the real thing. My guess is most DF purchases were by curious gamers with money to burn who read the rules once before permanently shelving the game (like me) or GURPS fans who are hoping against hopes that they can use a D&D clone to lure unsuspecting marks into a point-buy spergout.

Honestly, I think a box set isn't a bad idea. Only D&D has the brand heft to require the massive buy-in associated with the 3-volume format. If I'm going to try something other than D&D, I'd like one purchase to have the whole game covered so that I can run it and get people involved without having to have them buy anything (people will balk at even a $5 PDF, really). The problem is the box set is literally just generic D&D. Who cares? I'd be much more interested in something different. Sci-fi, post-nuclear wasteland, zombie apocalypse, steampunk...just not, you know, getting the Fighting Man, the Magic-User, the Cleric, and the Thief together to go into a cave, kill the goblins who live there, and grabbing their gold. I already have a shelf full of books for playing that game, and my players have a lot of fun at my table. D&D is good enough that I have zero desire to learn a complex new system to play the same game. It's why I haven't picked up 13th Age, despite the game being universally praised. It's just D&D with different numbers.

Content is king, not rules. Learning rules is a necessary chore people do in order to get to the content, not the main thing they want to do. Without compelling content, it doens't matter what your rules are, which is what SJ Games got backward and always has. DF has completely boring, derivative, generic content, so it gives you no good reason to learn the 3d6 system. And that's why it failed.

4e is Definitely Dead

I go to used book shops fairly frequently. They almost always have a healthy selection of 4e books, generally ranging well beyond the 3 core rule books. This doesn't prove much, but it does suggest that 5e really has successfully appealed to a broad range of players. I was a pretty big 4e fan, but since switching to 5e, I've had no desire to start a 4e game ever again. It's a combination of how much smoother 5e gameplay is and how 4e's monster manuals were unusable disasters,

Winging It for Two Players

What do you do when only two people show up for game night? A lot of DMs will cancel, but this is the wrong thing to do. People planned their evening expecting to do something fun, and they went home disappointed. Too much disappointment, and they'll stop coming.

My solution, which has been quite effective, is to run a "Monster of the Week" game.  It's pretty simple...if I've got 2 players, I pull a CR-appropriate monster out of the book, come up with a hook, and send them off to fight it. Generally speaking, if you've got 2 players, a monster whose CR is about 2 less than their level should be okay.

A good Monster of the Week adventure should go like this:
1. Learn there is a problem. (Something is killing the villagers' sheep.)
2. Discover the true nature of the problem. (There's an owlbear that's moved into a nearby cave.)
3. Develop a plan. (Use a sheep as bait, rogue throws a net down from the tree.)
4. Take care of the monster (kill or drive off).
5. Get reward.

Don't run it as a railroad. Maybe in tracking the owlbear, somebody fails a Survival check, so they end up getting lost in the forest and waylaid by goblins. Maybe they find the owlbear too fast, so in the owlbear cave, you stash a corpse with a map to a small, zombie-infested ruin deeper in the forest.

The key to the loot is it needs to be disproportionately large. Reward players who have the commitment to play even when they don't have a full Fighter/Cleric/Roge/Wizard group. Not only does this make people want to come back, it makes the players who skipped out feel like they're missing out.

Don't worry about not having a full adventure worked out right away. You'll figure out the details as you go...and you may want to remind your players that you're making it up tonight, not running from your prepared notes or module!