I’ve had Pandora for several years. I’ll have days at works where I have Pandora on pretty much straight through. It’s single-handedly responsible for most of my metal playlist, and thus for my collection of Iron Savior songs, and thus for the longest-running plot in my longest-running campaign. I’m a fan.*
But I’ve noticed a curious tendency I have when I’m using it. Consider my a cappella playlist, where I gave Pandora a series of all-vocal songs to use as seeds. I’ve made sure to only thumbs-up similar vocals-only songs (okay, and one or two by Van Canto), and for the most part I’ve gotten what I wanted. The biggest outliers are comedy tracks. A few of my initial seeds were comedy songs, so Pandora assumed I wanted comedy songs as much as I wanted a capella. Especially comedy songs in a country music style. Especially political comedy songs in a country music style. This was wrong.
Faced with this attack on my intentions, I rejected every song that didn’t meet my criteria hoping to goad Pandora more into the style I wanted. Eventually it worked, and I now have a mostly valid playlist…except for the longest time there were a few a cappella songs I didn’t really like that nonetheless appeared in heavy rotation. This is because I didn’t dare thumb them down. I consider my playlist a delicate house of cards where removing any a capella song, no matter how little I liked it, could convince Pandora to return to the post-apocalyptic days of guitars, drawls, and words that only rhyme with “Obama” is you squint really hard.
I don’t know if Pandora started figuring things out or just expanded their songlist, because in the last nine months a glut of new, good songs have appeared, and approving them finally gave me enough purchase to feel comfortable kicking out the worst offenders. But the point isn’t how amazing my mixtape is and how you totally have to listen to it. It’s that I engineered, in my own mind, a situation where the fear of change paralyzed me into sticking with something I didn’t actually like in case its presence was saving me from a worse fate.
Speaking of which, my current gaming groups.
I’m currently involved in three campaigns, one of which is with a group that has been meeting more or less consistently for ten years. We’ve had people duck in for a campaign here and there, but they’re more like guest stars. Our five man band has a lot of shared history that I imagine is intimidating to anybody trying to elbow their way into one of our games. More than that, we’re fairly comfortable with each other and more than a little reluctant to allow somebody new. This is despite the fact that every new person we’ve had, barring one, has been a joy to have at the table and worked their way in almost seamlessly, inside jokes notwithstanding.
But still, even after far more good than bad when it comes to new players, we’re still a little gun-shy about fresh blood. Almost as gun-shy as we are about new games, which if you think about it is even more ridiculous. If somebody joins a campaign and we don’t work out, we have to go through the “it’s not you, it’s all of us, independently, somehow” conversation. If we don’t like a game, we just have to say “it occurs to me that none of us like GURPS and we should try something else next week”. The barriers to entry for trying a new gaming system are ridiculously low, but we still never do it.
Part of that is a comfort level thing. We like knowing how common rules work without looking them up, we like knowing our macros more or less function as intended, we like knowing that if we have a really sticky question we have three DMs in the room who can piece it together, etc. But I think more of it is the nagging question, “what if we don’t like it?” Which, all told, is a pretty trash argument. We’re talking about giving a roleplaying system a spin. It’s not a skydiving course.
There’s so much out there I want to do that I haven’t. I want to get back into Fate. I liked ICONS. I’ve dipped my toes into a Powered by the Apocalypse game. I’ve been wanting to try Savage Worlds and Big Eyes, Small Mouth for years. But whenever we bring it up, we agree that it’s a neat idea and then don’t do anything about it, because we’re already playing D&D or Pathfinder, and why would we do something different if what we’re doing works?
It’s not like I’m suddenly going to drop everything to go on an RPG system world tour. In one group we’re running a Pathfinder campaign during the break of a different Pathfinder campaign. In the other we’re coming to the end of a 4E campaign, and it will be followed by a Pathfinder campaign because I’ve had a key player threaten to quit if I try running it in a different system. I’m also not going to abandon either group if they’re not interested in trying something new. But the next time the opportunity arises I’m going to push it pretty hard, and this post serves as my declaration of intent.
…I’ll probably keep the same blog name, though.
* — I am aware of Google Play, and I have thought about it. But when I looked at it today the first thing it recommended to me was Green Day, then Red Hot Chili Peppers. I don’t think Google Play and I will be friends.
On Pathfinder
I told you that story to tell you this one: I’m starting to wonder if I’m done with Pathfinder.
The more I read about Pathfinder and the more I understand the designers’ intentions and the way players use it, the more I see how at odds I am with it. I started with Pathfinder expecting it to be like a fixed D&D 3E, and as I understand it that was the explicit intention and marketing pitch. For me this meant a simulationist game where everything worked using a similar set of rules and thus everything was comparable, but where magic was no longer the be-all and end-all skill that invalidated any other option. It meant removing or repairing the most frustrating parts of the rules and leaving the core intact. It meant getting back to the idea of “storytelling with conflict resolution, which we admit is primarily but not exclusively through combat” and away from the “make numbers go up so you can feel good about yourself” style. I get the latter enough in my online games, thank you very much.
But from what I see in releases, the community, official forums, etc., that’s not what Pathfinder actually is. Instead it’s all about optimized, magic-heavy, power-and-control play. It’s exactly what I’ve been telling people D&D is not for the better part of ten years. It’s not unlike finding out a poem doesn’t mean what you thought it meant, in that there’s a whole body based on the alternative interpretation while you’re a quiet little voice offering an alternative to which nobody feels the need to listen.
I’ve gone back and forth for a while on whether this is something that’s actually happening or it’s just a story I’ve made up based on limited exposure. But I see it in the official designs, too. For example, consider healing. In D&D it’s a benchmark skill, required at all levels of play. But in Pathfinder, healing isn’t even a thing. The only point of a healer is to provide emergency supplication so the players can survive long enough to repair themselves between battles with wands of cure light wounds. Instead, a healer is best played as a striker, because it’s more mathematically viable to kill a monster and thus prevent it from dealing damage than it is to heal a character a half-hit from death. Because in a world where characters are expected to either win the battle in the first two turns, deal (level * 10) damage per round every round, or rebuild the character until they do, mathematical viability is all that matters.
It’s this world into which Paizo has released its last few books. Consider Pathfinder Unchained, the Advanced Class Guide, and Occult Adventures. Among them they introduced twenty classes. Of those, only one is capable of being a full healer. A second can spoof it with archetypes at the expense of most of its other class features. But almost all of them are designed to do absurd amounts of damage. This is our meta.
The community even has its own language for how the system now works. “Traps” are feats, class features, and other options that seem neat but aren’t optimized enough to keep up with the most powerful choices in each category; Vital Strike is a trap because you can do more damage attacking twice than attacking once with a damage bonus, and non-spellcaster characters are expected to use full attack actions every round to maximize damage. “Rocket tag” is the style of play where high-level characters hurl catastrophically powerful abilities, usually spells, at each other, and the first to make one connect essentially wins the fight; this is ostensibly a gaming style to be avoided but it’s also the only way anybody seems to know how to play above L10. “MAD” is “multiple ability dependent”, a class or feature based on more than one ability score; this is a detriment because SAD (“single ability dependent”) classes can boost one ability score, like Intelligence, to the stratosphere and build their entire character around it by ignoring everything else that goes into a person.
It’s the same language I hear when people discuss competitive games like Magic: the Gathering. But Pathfinder isn’t supposed to be competitive. Players aren’t supposed to be doing everything they can to break the game wide open and assert dominance over an opponent. It’s supposed to be cooperative, where you work with people to achieve a goal. It’s literally in the first paragraph of the first chapter of the Core Rulebook:
Competitive, high-powered play only works if everybody is equally in on it. If this isn’t what you want, the community’s message is clear: you’re either playing the game wrong or you’re playing the wrong game. And hearing that message, time and time again, from every direction including the designers, is exhausting. I don’t need my pastimes to exhaust me.
This isn’t to say I want to abandon Pathfinder completely. I still like the core ruleset, and it still gives me that dungeonpunk feel I want out of a game. But it means I’ll spend my time on other systems, and when I do run Pathfinder it won’t be as she is intended. I need a game where instant-death spells are discouraged, where clever tactics are rewarded more than the best builds Reddit can come up with, where there’s more focus on character stories and growth and a logical world than on gathering a handful of dice and eying the DM threateningly. Mechanically I’ll use our alternate system for save-or-dies, using them more as dramatic finishing moves than turn-one dominance tactics, and I’ll keep working on themes, intended to bring “character” back into “character design”. The lyrics stay the same, but the rhythm changes.
But this means I’m essentially leaving the Pathfinder community, because they want something I don’t and vice versa. I’m not sure how big a loss this is; certainly Pathfinder won’t notice my absence, and I’ve been so put off by the Pathfinder community from the moment I encountered it that I’m not losing any significant emotional investment. It still hurts, though, to work in something for so long only to find out it was never for you in the first place.