Mind = Flayed: 2019

Friday, November 8, 2019

So How's Pathfinder 2 Doing?

In 2016, I predicted that Pathfinder would not survive 5e. In 2018, I predicted PF2 would briefly seem to sell very well, but not ever capture the heights of PF1.

Well, it seems my predictions are being born out. The original Pathfinder eventually went on to sell competitively with 4e, some even saying it outsold 4e in the last couple years of its life. Pathfinder 2, well...outside of its launch month, when it briefly cracked the top 200 on Amazon, it's fallen to a distant 2nd place on Amazon. Let's compare to this snapshot from August 2018:

November 2019 Fantasy Gaming Snapshot (non-RPGs represented with ellipses):

...
D&D Player's Handbook
...
D&D Xanathar's Guide to Everything
D&D Monster Manual
D&D Dungeon Master's Guide
D&D Eberron Preorder
D&D Core Rulebooks Gift Set
D&D Starter Set
...
...
D&D Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes
...
D&D Descent Into Avernus
D&D Volo's Guide to Monsters
...
...
...
D&D Curse of Strahd
D&D Dungeon Master's Screen Reincarnated
D&D Ghosts of Saltmarsh
...
...
...
...
...
D&D Waterdeep Dragon Heist
...
... (lmao, the Elder Scrolls cookbook)
...
...
D&D Arcane Spellbook cards
D&D Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
D&D Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
D&D Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
...
...
D&D Baldur's Gate: DIA Dice & Miscellany
Pathfinder Core Rulebook (P2)

Yikes. #39 is not where I expect a new product to be, certainly not one that is supposed to be competitive with D&D. As we continue looking down the list, all things RPG-related are D&D, including 3rd-party products, with only two Paizo books in the top 100, the P2 Bestiary and a P2 character guide. Starfinder's now at #107.

The RPG industry has returned to D&D + outliers. Sure, we'll see P2 as the #2 RPG for the quarter, and Starfinder at #3, but these numbers show just how distant those are behind #1. It doesn't look like P2 is going to renew sagging interest in Paizo's take on D&D.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Guns are Loud, Not Low

I've played a fair amount of video games, and by far, Battlefield 3 and 4 have the best gun sounds of any game I've played. Distant second is COD: Black Ops, which is roughly on par with World at War. Everything else is trash.

Why?

Guns are really, really, really loud, typically well over 150 dB. But they also have nearly all of their power at the high frequency range, about 1-1.5 kHz. Listen to this to get an idea of how high that is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o_fZX_voFo

The problem entertainment has is that really loud, high pitches are extremely unpleasant to the listener. This because sound intensity, which which is how much power is delivered by an acoustic wave to a unit of area, is proportional to the square of the frequency. Movies tend to peak around 90 dB, but if all that were in the 1-1.5 kHz range, it could really damage your eardrums. Consequently, that kind of loudness is reserved for low-frequency bass tones.

In order to make guns sound loud, movies and video games tend to rely on a few tricks. Some are quite clever, like reducing the volume of other sounds to make the guns sound louder by comparison. But nearly all of them just lower the sound of the gun so they can amplify its loudness. If you watch enough action movies or play enough video games, you probably think handguns and rifles make loud, booming noises. But even the biggest machine guns don't boom, they bang.

The funny thing is World at War and Black Ops used a lot of authentic gun sounds...and were widely panned by game critics and gamers alike for their "thin, unrealistic" gun sounds. By contrast, the Modern Warfare series, which sounds like it uses a lot of synthetic audio, was praised for its sound, and every game in the series won awards from the game industry for its sound design. Because people think guns have bass-heavy booming sounds, this is what an AK-47 sounds like in MW3, as compared to real life:

But if you ask me, the first of these sounds a lot more like the real thing:

Sunday, February 24, 2019

Diminishing Returns

They remade a couple Black Ops 1&2 maps for Black Ops IV. The machine on the left has 512 MB of RAM and came out in 2005. The machine on the right has 8 GB of RAM and came out in 2014.

This is why graphics do not matter any more.

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

5e's HP Inflation

5e is pretty well-known to have an HP inflation problem. It's not as bad as 4e (which gave high-level dragons over a thousand hp), but it's worse than 3.5(!!!). An AD&D ogre has 19 hp, a 3.5 ogre has 29 hp, and a 5e ogre is a bloated monstrosity with 59 hp. There's a lot of initial bloat, but it does sort of calm down by high levels, at least compared to 3.5. An AD&D 2e Ancient Red Wyrm had about 104 hp. 3.5's Very Old Red Dragon has 487 hp, and 5e's Ancient Red Dragon has 546 hp.

So what the heck happened? If you look at the raw damage of a fighter, it doesn't look that far off. A 5e fighter is attacking twice for 1d8+6 when an AD&D fighter is probably doing 3/2 attacks for 1d8+4. Eventually, AD&D fighters have a much higher chance to hit as well, so damage stats are surprisingly close.

One of Mike Mearls' guiding philosophies in 5e design is that not hitting anything for several rounds in a row is boring. At early levels in AD&D, your chance to hit was often around 25%. In 5e, your base chance to hit is typically no lower than 40%, and often much higher. In the case of the ogre, everybody's got about a 60% chance to hit.

So at low levels, the biggest difference is that the other classes do a lot more damage than they used to. An AD&D Magic-User often twiddled his thumbs until combat was over, and a Thief's big effort was to try and not die. But in 5e, every caster has cantrips that do about 1/3 to half the damage of a Fighter's attack. The Thief (now the Rogue) gets his Sneak Attack any time he attacks the Fighter's target. So when you add everything together, the party as a whole is easily doing triple or more an AD&D party's damage. So when in addition to your fighter's 1d8+5 damage, the rogue hits for 2d6+3, the cleric hits for 1d8+2, and the wizard hits for 1d10, with a 60% chance to hit for each, that 59 hp gets whittled down pretty quick.

At the high end, there is a different dynamic in play. The fact is that both AD&D and 3.5 were notoriously broken at high levels. Your wizards & clerics would pile on a few effects to turn the party into an unstoppable killing machine, your warriors looked like Christmas trees of powerful magical gear, and they would tear through the most dangerous monsters and even gods as though they were made of tissue paper. So at high levels, 5e characters have actually been nerfed quite a bit, while the monsters have been significantly beefed up. An ancient dragon is no cakewalk, even for 19th-level characters. 5e's Ancient Red Dragon has 546 hp, but he's a reasonable threat for that 19th-level party, while AD&D had virtually nothing that would challenge players of that level.

What I don't like about this system is there's a tremendous amount of bookkeeping to do in a battle. If you look at my notebook after a fight, you'll often see a dozen or more hits recorded on a monster before it goes down. It can be mentally exhausting, especially since I don't like to use digital tools in a social setting. The characters in my party are only around 6th level, and virtually every fight they have now has over 200 hp to whittle down. The warriors have two or more attacks, mage spells have a lot of dice, and the druid might summon eight animals to help him, each with its own attack. The math works out, but sometimes it all seems to get out of hand.