Thread by @djrhutton

This is the most tacit admission I've seen from an RPG designer of how elitist gatekeeping and grognardism was killing their game.

And I think it's good it was said. 🧵

#dnd #pathfinder2e #TTRPGs

Years ago I made a Reddit post about how I hated the Ivory Tower Design of older systems like 3.5/1e because it was just kind of smug and gatekeeper-y, and it attracted douchebags who's narrative fantasies were inherently tied to the mechanical superiority those games offered.

I got a swathe of people responding saying that was their experience too, and that a big reason they prefer modern games is because it doesn't attract as many assholes. They don't need to gatekeep those games because they inherently deter elitist showboaters.

The whole 'git gud' mentality is passable in single player video games because you have no-one to impress but yourself. But in a group scenario, social dynamics matter, and if your dynamic is 'I need to better than my team mates', you're probably going to be grating.

I'm just thinking about that line in the Social Network where Zuckerberg's soon to be ex says 'you'll think everyone hates you because you're smart. But you're wrong. Everyone hates you because you're an asshole.'

This is why I hate generalised friendly platitudes in the TTRPG sphere like 'system doesn't matter' and 'let people play how they want.' Systems can never appeal to everyone, they will always attract a certain kind of player. And sometimes those players are undesirable.

Games like 3.5/1e are dying for a reason. People who are upset they are and blaming vague issues like players wanting less crunch or complexity need to take a good hard look at what makes their preferred a systems appealing and why they're not profitable anymore.

One final positive aside, the PF2e sub is pretty great and a big part of that is down to the moderation fostering a good community and stamping out toxicity. Shout out to @Rulelord2E and his team for the good work.

Just a follow up: a few people in this thread pointed out how the commenter was a prominent 3rd party author before joining Paizo himself, and took offense to his dismissal of 3pps alongside trolls and grognards.

He's responded directly to a similar criticism on the sub since.

In lieu of this blowing up, I want to tail-end with a few addendums.

First, I cannot emphasise this enough: this is about the PF 1st Edition community, not the 2nd Edition one. I'm very involved with the latter and it is a much more intuitive game with a very engaging community.

If you want to try 2nd Edition out, please check out the subreddit, it's welcoming to all new players and we're happy to help provide advice to get you started.

reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e

Second, a lot of people are saying that 3.5/1e was not designed to be obtuse, but was a result of content bloat. This is just not true. 3.5 - which was the chassis for 1e - was purposely designed with Ivory Tower Design in mind.

This great thread by @TheChindividual sums up the principles and how it worked in 3.5 very well.

https://twitter.com/TheChindividual/status/1532286364338868225?t=L938gs5pf4h_-dqaapZ3gw&s=19

The funny thing is, as someone who loved 1e and avidly followed its development, I could see Paizo struggling against that inherent design for all its stewardship of the 3.5 OGL. They were trying to apply more stable game design principles to a chassis that inherently rejected it

PF2e is a much cleaner game that aligns with the vision they were clearly going for, and you can see that in its design principles if you followed that through line.

Finally, there's a lot of people saying they've had mostly good experiences playing PF1e even to this day. Obviously, hashtag not all PF1e players, and I would not deign to take away those experiences from them.

I need to make it clear, I loved 1e. I was onboarded to TTRPGs with 3.5, and 1e was my favourite version of that game. I loved the wealth of character options, and I have fond memories of the campaigns I ran using it.

But I can never go back. The system is too clunky and unintuitive mechanically, and it definitely attracted...a type. I think the fact this post has been resonating with so many people, shows both that people know what I'm talking about, and it wasn't an isolated experience.

In hindsight, we didn't realise how much better it could be. This was before the 5e boom, and the pool of players was much smaller. 3.5/1e was dominant till 5e came out, and it attracted a lot of smug powergamers and elitists by virtue of its design.

We didn't really have the choice to be picky. Now with the wider playerbase, we have more people to pull from. Much like comic book movies going mainstream, the antisocial geeks in the LGS are no longer the only people invested in TTRPGs, so we can choose to just not engage.

Much as I have criticisms of 5e mechanically and the monoculture around it, the indisputable net win it gave was expanding the base and forcing companies to engage with a market outside of the tiny group of hardcore grogs and pedants.

Paizo did this and saved themselves from commercial doom. They may have drunk from the poison challace initially to make buck, but in creating a game that was much more about that intersection of mechanics and fantasy, they earned themselves a much better audience.