Codexes

I wonder if Pathfinder is gleaning benefits from the OGL debacle last month.  Certainly the content creators surrounding TTRPGs have flocked to the Pathfinder standard.  Videos have proliferated this past month, competing with one another to explain what Pathfinder is, how to get started in it, how it works, why such-and-such is leaving D&D for Pathfinder and so on.  Hardly an essay about D&D ends without the writer wrapping up their point by admitting that they're thinking maybe it's time to leave D&D and try another game, "maybe Pathfinder."

I know very little about Pathfinder except that it sounds awful:

... Next is Lorian the ranger ... and the ranger has a feat called 'hunted shot,' which lets Lorien spend her first action to hunt prey, which will be this wight here; her second action to use hunted shot to make two attacks, and her third action to make a third attack.  And hunted shot can only be used once per turn, because it has the 'flourish' trait.  The player prepares to do this and expresses that they've been frustrated because they are doing this every turn, and because it's the most optimal thing they can do.  It does the most damage compared to their other options ... and thinks that the hunted shot feat, since they took it, is incentivising them to do this every turn.

The GM says, "Well, you can still walk up to the enemy and make a melee attack — why don't you?" ... and the player says that they've done some math and found out that they do a certain amount of damage while standing in place, hunting prey and using hunted shot, compared to if they were to walk up to the enemy and make strikes with their short sword.  The GM says, "Well first of all why would you use your short sword?  Your rapier does damage, but besides that, this is not necessarily because of hunted shot — the wight is standing outside your melee range.  If it were standing next to you, then you wouldn't be needing to spend an action to walk up to it, and you could go straight to hunt prey, which increases your damage, and then make those two strikes ... and there's other reasons you might want to be in melee; maybe you want to draw fire away from an ally who's in trouble, like right now; or maybe if you had a very high strength you might be doing even more damage, than your current strength bonus is currently giving you ..."

I'm not going to unpack this.  I did listen to all of it.  I find the rules comprehensible, and not that removed on their surface from similar examples I've watched with 3e, or even that I've had with my own AD&D Frankenstein campaign.  The creator's argument is worth making; I can't say for certain that he made it, because I don't know enough about Pathfinder to say.

The larger issue for me is the service the rules are performing here, as opposed to how they were intended to perform with earlier games, or indeed other, non-RPGs.  Take this from the Game of Life:

Play moves to red who will choose to start college.  A player receives $40,000 loans from the bank when choosing the college path.  Red spins the wheel and will move five spaces.  Red lands on a square that states, "Study for exams, miss next turn."  Red will miss her next turn.

Good game vocabulary is rendered to be (a) as self-explanatory as possible; and (b) to suggest context that fits the game's theme.  In the second case, the theme is "life," as the title states.  In life, skipping over childhood, the proposed first important decision people make is to choose whether or not to get a higher education (well, the modern game was released in 1960 with an intended white, middle class audience).  Game elements like the wheel, moving spaces, missing turns, etc., are elements we learn at a very young age, if we get a chance to play any game, from checkers to cards.  As a game, Life is boring, but it's clear.

Because D&D is vastly more complex, from the beginning it's been difficult for the game's vocabulary to be self-explanatory.  And as the game has gone through editions, the desire to add feats, spells, races and classes has saddled ordinary game play with spectacular levels of descriptively erroneous game elements that cannot be reconciled except when the words themselves are treated as an alternative-language codex and not as the words they are.

For example, linguistically, it isn't possible to "hunt" and "battle" at the same time.  The two verbs have vastly different meanings that cannot be reconciled.   This means when using the phrase "hunted shot," the player has to subordinate the meaning of the word hunt to the official codex of what it means in the game.  This isn't especially problematic with one word ... but there are literally thousands of these circumstances which have become canon over time, crippling the game's language and making it increasingly difficult to master the rules.  It's not so much that the rules themselves are all that complicated; it's that the need to provide rules that make everyone's actions individualistic, while also providing a choice of individualistic actions, heaps language on language until those without excellent knowledge have to have the game pedantically explained to them again and again.

This bogs down game time.  I've experienced this as well with my own rules, especially in the various tiers of sage elements I've advanced.  Players first get confused trying to keep "field" straight from "study," and study straight from "ability."  Then it's a matter of reconciling their understanding that of the knowledge they have, there's a difference between what's "in field" or "out of field."  And finally, there's the list of abilities being divided progressively into "amateur," "authority," "expert" and "sage."  Despite my efforts to be clear about these aspects, I find myself regularly having to remind the players what's what.  Which I do patiently, knowing these things will become second nature.

The arrangement had to exist in this fashion to keep players from acquiring all, or too many, sage abilities early in the game ... and to ensure that there could never be an instance when every player would gain all the abilities from any particular class.  The way it's set up, this just isn't possible.  A character, to have a perfectly average chance of getting every sage ability in studies outside their fields would need to reach 67th level.  This would take a lifetime of play, and in any case I use an arbitrary limit of 23 to 29 levels, depending on the character class.

As best I can, I struggle against codex-phrasing in game design.  A "field" corresponds to a "field of study," which any person in real life understands without explanation.  A "study," likewise corresponds to studying a given subject.  The two words may be used interchangeably in English, but the heirarchy is quite natural once explained.

Most of the time we understand what an amateur is, and I have very little trouble with players remembering this description for the lowest level of sage ability.  Trouble arises in placing "authority" vs. "expert" in the hierarchy.  My dictionary defines an authority as, a person with extensive or specialised knowledge about a subject: an expert.  It defines expert as, a person with comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of, or skill in a particular area.

So, interchangable.  I didn't want to use "specialist" because, in fact, the expert in the system has a wider range of knowledge as the player accumulates levels, not more specific knowledge.  I did not wish to use "pundit" for obvious political reasons, nor "oracle" because it has a religious aspect that did not fit, nor "maestro" nor "virtuouso" for their musical connotations.  "Master" is sexist, "professional" is anachronistic, "wizard" is a flat-no fail, "genius" can in fact apply to any level of knowledge, since knowledge is collected and a genius can start off ignorant and become knowledgeable.  Thereafter the remaining terms for expert become increasingly slang-oriented or utterly out of the player's ken regarding recognisable English words.  Which would just make the problem worse.

The result is a patient effort to stipulate that "authority" and "expert," both very familiar words, have in fact two weights for synonyms about knowing things.  At least that's what both words actually mean.  If I'd used maestro, I'd have an endless fight on my hands in arguing that no, it does not mean the geologist can play music.

A connection the reader should have made by now is that the decision to revert to Basic versions or AD&D seems right, initially, because the game's language becomes instantly more comprehensible.  An "attack," which is self explanatory, is done by every character in the same way.  The weapon can be changed, and that provides some choice, but the player cannot change the amount of damage done simply by changing the imaginative way in which the player chooses to attack.  Multiple attacks to occur, but never as many as three and never on account of skills, or feats, whatever we choose to call them.  There are adjustments to hit and damage, but these are limited to a relatively few number of possible game elements, most of which provide plain relevance in the game.  That relevance can be argued, and has been, for many decades ... but strength does suggest hitting harder and dexterity does suggest hitting faster.

The argument that dexterity ought to mean, "hitting more precisely," and therefore causing more damage, emerges from cinematic representations of combat.  It serves a plot to show a smart character who outmanuevers a bigger, stronger opponent by cleverly hitting in just the right place, like tapping a button that circumvents the enemy's advantages.  It is, in fact, the story of David from the Bible ... though if that story is true, the relative weakness of David has been debunked.

The "dexterity = higher damage" argument was underway when I started playing D&D.  I'd argue that it, and other arguments like it, were central to the many enhancement rules that emerged within the first two or three years of D&D.  The invention of the barbarian, for instance, which argues that a barbarian's strength ought to be greater than a civilised fighter's strength ... which, in fact, makes no sense at all, except "Conan."

An "acrobat" is a circus performer.  "Performance" and "skill" are distinct from one another; the acrobat character was given no rules of any kind to contribute to the character's public performance abilities, only aspects of the profession that could be applied to adventuring.  We could simply have given the skill to one of the existing classes, but that wasn't sufficient for the game designer or publisher.  "Acrobat" sounded cool.  Thus we progressed down a path towards the accumulation of codex-driven words whose definitions became absurd in game context.

The comprehensibility of early D&D was a plus ... but it wasn't comprehensible enough to sustain itself.  At too many points in the original versions were game elements perceived as either limiting or illogical ... within the scope of logic from people who felt the game needed to reflect their personal will rather than their personal will adapting to the game.  Thus, we are here.

I'm rather encouraged by the so-called rush of D&D players to other game forms.  Not because it means more non-D&D games will be played, or even that these people will get out of my game, so they can go whine and pout about some other game I'll never play.  But because it portents the collapse of corporate gaming.  As various game companies fight each other for participants, struggling to outdo one another with more and more choices, while "simplifying" actual game play so as to appeal to the widest possible audience, we should expect a boom period where dozens of games suddenly experience an exceptionally widespread popularity.  Journalists will rush in to cover the excitement of it all, while program-directors will push to have more and more video content made that sells to the desired viewer.

Then, bust.  The shallowness of what gaming becomes during the boom period will fail to sustain itself; something else is sure to wander along for the next generation and that'll be it.  Hasbro's film this month may or may not fail, but Hasbro surely will; that's another post for another day.  I'd rather just watch that one happen, to be honest.  But over all, rushed, cheap films produced by non-players, as they must be, since that's how corporations function, will crash and burn the hobby.

Whereupon they'll be a last spate of articles about how D&D is "dead," while I go on publishing books.  I'll go to cons and talk to the disillusioned, as I have in the past, blowing their minds with things they've never heard, showing them things they've never seen.  My wiki will get bigger.  I might even make a lot of money someday ... as I encourage those who really do love D&D.  And who will never leave it.  Not for all the Pathfinders in the world.