Good points. I feel like Fate does a better job staying in the interesting in-between for longer, and also supports “epic” stories a bit better (than other systems I have played).
But I haven’t tried to force Fate to support the newbie to epic growth, because the rulebook calls out that the Fate rules intentionally ignore supporting the ability to play as a helpless nobody.
Yes. That’s one reason that the Fate system basically disallows characters ever being low level. Low level starts aren’t actually particularly fun, and they can prevent characters from having diverse epic shared backstory.
“A wizards staff has a knob at the end.”
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
Yes. Starfinder has planets, and some planets have caves.
Find out in the next season of our campaign: “Survival in the Lands of Lava”. DM weeps quietly.
Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?
While technically the answer is “no”, people who emphasize the difference don’t apply the “Rule of Cool” as liberally as I did.
I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.
Sure, we absolutely shouldn’t just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.
But I didn’t find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.
Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn’t tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages “for good role playing” can scale an encounter’s challenge down.
If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw “Rule of Cool” at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.
I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.
I don’t mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don’t like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.
All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I’m not sure any of my players have ever noticed.
I played in that party in second edition!
We did not survive.
I imagine that Brennan Lee Mulligan walks a fine line as a public figure.
He still plays D&D often enough to (seemingly) not alienate people at Wizards whose work helped launch his career.
But he also plays significant amounts of other games, including some that I think are Indie developers, like Kids on Bikes.
I’m sure he’s aware of the issues and concerns in the community around D&D under Wizards - and probably shares many of those same concerns, as a fellow player and DM.
But, yes, the idea that Brennan secretly hates anything sounds pretty silly. Brennan has been pretty direct with his epic rants about things he really hates.
The rule of cool helps with honesty too.
My team knew well in advance that we would be short-staffed on the day the Switch 2 released.
Thank you! You’re doing Lliira’s work!
Nothing anotger fireball won’t solve…
the low rollers having been filtered out by dart traps, lucky kobolds, etc.
True. That’s mage survivor bias, right there.
Not really, I suppose. But having it explicit can help players realize they have the option.
“Concede” is also handy for situations where a player feels that their character winning this particular battle would be out of character.
It’s a particularly helpful rule for cases where the player wants their character to do something particularly foolish, maybe to reach a specific story outcome, but still wants some influence on the final outcome.
It can go along the lines of:
Player: My character doesn’t have the brains to not start this fight, but even if we roll lucky and win this, it would feel broken. Can I roll an attack and then immediately concede?
GM: Sure. What would that look like?
Player: What if my character is disarmed somehow?
Etc.
I’ve seen where a few outcomes get discussed, and if the group doesn’t have a strong favorite, we just ranked them in order of luck, and then determined the full encounter with a quick single roll.