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[Flying Dice]

I mean, I'm assuming that nobody else is taking this particularly seriously beyond mild curiosity to see how far you're willing to go in your quest to ensure that everyone plays your sooper speshul set of houserules and nothing else.

The impression I get from this discussion is quite the opposite - that there's one guy arguing for his favourite ruleset (which in itself is pretty "no duh" behaviour) and several people arguing against him because it's super important to them that some guy knows when he is wrong on the internet. So don't try that "I'm so cool and don't really care about this argument like whatever also by the way here is another of the many paragraphs I've written on the subject but whatever I don't care" act. It's pretty cheap.

Nah. I mean, I sort of care because I dislike blind loyalty, and I've made that pretty clear; to reiterate: 3.5e has a lot of shitty things in it, and PF has a lot of shitty things in it.

You also apparently weren't paying attention. Unless you honestly think that posting this with no other context in a 3.5e thread isn't bait:

People still play 3.5?

I was interested to see how far he'd go to push a game which is pretty fundamentally similar to 3.5e, even to the point of keeping the massive imbalance between class tiers that is widely agreed to be one of the biggest 'needs fixing' aspects of 3.5e, despite purporting to be a 'better' version of 3.5e.

But yeah, I was also sort of bored in between matches and apart from LordBucket's new morality problem thread this was the only thing that... well actually I can't really say that it wasn't rehashing old ideas, considering that "no for srs PF is totally different from 3.5e and is so much better" is one of the staples of edition wars. I'd honestly suggest that anyone arguing that PF is substantially different from houseruled 3.5e is deluding themselves.

And perhaps it was too subtle, but when I was poking at his data and bringing in other data that is just as borderline-meaningless, I was making a point: it's vague as hell and hard to determine which is actually more played and more popular. Roll20 is a very small subset of the D&D community no matter how much anyone might wish otherwise (Oh, you have several tens of thousands out of a playerbase of millions? Congrats.), and trying to determine popularity based on that, on search terms, on sales in a given quarter, or anything else is difficult and prone to manipulation (as all games of statistics are), which isn't helped by the relative dearth of information on the matter. But I suppose that went over your head.

It looks like this did as well: D&D editionwars are an exercise in futility, because it's ultimately a matter of personal preference. Each of the editions has issues (some more than most, but which those are depends on who you ask), but each also has people that love it. I'd hoped that the subtext would have been obvious, but evidently it wasn't. I'm not dismissing his preference or backing out with "lol i never cared" because this argument is and always has been circular and pointless; I was trying to push it into that realization, but I suppose I should have just ignored the guy who came in here to stir shit up, since in retrospect he probably didn't care about anything except poking buttons and getting people to feed into it because they didn't bother reading the context behind it.

I also note that you aren't giving him shit over "lol but PF is not my favorite system, I'm just wanking it because... something". So are you hypocritical, or did you just want to drop in to fire shots once without actually following the argument?

Roll20 is literally the biggest online roleplaying site. It's pretty damn huge.

Do you not understand how random selection works? I can get numbers that show that Obama is the least or most favored president in the history of the U.S. just by selecting a specific location (or web site userbase) to poll. It's self-selection; if a community tends to favor a given thing, it gathers more people who favor that same thing. Thus, when you poll the members of that community, they (gasp) favor that thing. This is part of the point I was trying to push people towards realizing: you're not going to get a representative sample for this by polling one site (any more than cherrypicked search trends from Google are meaningful for anything other than what they specifically demonstrate), and it's probably too much of a pain in the ass for anyone to bother getting a proper cross-section even of D&D players who play exclusively using the internet. Even if you had 50,000 people on Roll20, that's less than a tenth of a percent of the projected worldwide D&D playerbase, and is self-selected for the preferences of the community. At best that data shows that the Roll20 community is mostly ambivalent, but that its DMs tend to prefer PF.

[scriver]

I also note that you aren't giving him shit over "lol but PF is not my favorite system, I'm just wanking it because... something". So are you hypocritical, or did you just want to drop in to fire shots once without actually following the argument?

I thought it (or to be precise I thought "well you sure manage to come off like it is your favourite"), I just didn't bother to reply.

[Rex Invictus]

<snip>

Again, I'm glad you've given up on the whole "3.5 is more popular than Pathfinder" thing.

Do you not understand how random selection works? I can get numbers that show that Obama is the least or most favored president in the history of the U.S. just by selecting a specific location (or web site userbase) to poll. It's self-selection; if a community tends to favor a given thing, it gathers more people who favor that same thing. Thus, when you poll the members of that community, they (gasp) favor that thing. This is part of the point I was trying to push people towards realizing: you're not going to get a representative sample for this by polling one site (any more than cherrypicked search trends from Google are meaningful for anything other than what they specifically demonstrate), and it's probably too much of a pain in the ass for anyone to bother getting a proper cross-section even of D&D players who play exclusively using the internet. Even if you had 50,000 people on Roll20, that's less than a tenth of a percent of the projected worldwide D&D playerbase, and is self-selected for the preferences of the community. At best that data shows that the Roll20 community is mostly ambivalent, but that its DMs tend to prefer PF.

So you're saying that Roll20 was founded for the sake of playing Pathfinder? I'm genuinely at a loss. You're arguing that using Roll20's statistics is equivalent to using the statistics of a forum solely dedicated to Pathfinder?

You're saying a tenth of an entire group is too little to make a meaningful study of? Even if the group is self-selecting (which it is not in this case), that's still unbelievably wrong.

There're studies that can take 100 people and can make assumptions of a million and be relatively accurate (as long as you account for standard deviation and confidence issues).

Have you ever taken a class in statistics?

[My Name is Immaterial]

What FD seems to be saying is that you can't prove PF's dominance with enough satisfaction based on this sample. He's not saying Roll20 was made for PF, he's suggesting that Roll20 is a place where people go to play PF, because there are PF games there, or at least, that's what I'm suggesting. I'm also suggesting that you can't use anyone group to extrapolate for the rest of the population. .5% of Americans may go to Comic Con, but you'd be laughed out of the room if you tried to say that .5%'s hobbies reflect the rest of America. Less extreme example: Fox News viewers don't represent the rest of the country. They go to Fox News because they like the content, and so, Fox News provides more appealing content.

I believe this part of the edition wars is completely futile. You can't demonstrate this either way with enough certainty to make sweeping statements about this. Certain data supports you, while others do not. You'd have to perform a massive census of RPG players to prove this one way or the other.

[Fniff]

Here's one question about D&D I always had: how do you guys keep track of all the numbers when GMing?
The one time I played New World of Darkness, the most complex game I've ever played, I was overwhelmed with the amount of stats and numbers and rules you had to keep track of. And from what I can see D&D is more complicated then nWoD. This may be because I'm bad with mathematics, but I just don't see how you could be a dungeon master without going mad.

So, would people agree that D&D is harder then average to GM, or is it just me?

[Bauglir]

Largely through practice. As a player, you only need to worry about one character's numbers, and at low levels in D&D characters have largely the same numbers to worry about regardless of their role. Those numbers tend to remain consistently the core of the rules for everything throughout the game, so once you get that down it's easier to handle the one-off bits that get tacked on with monsters and/or high levels, and the larger number of them you have to deal with as a DM through multiple sheets.

[Rex Invictus]

Here's one question about D&D I always had: how do you guys keep track of all the numbers when GMing?
The one time I played New World of Darkness, the most complex game I've ever played, I was overwhelmed with the amount of stats and numbers and rules you had to keep track of. And from what I can see D&D is more complicated then nWoD. This may be because I'm bad with mathematics, but I just don't see how you could be a dungeon master without going mad.

So, would people agree that D&D is harder then average to GM, or is it just me?

D&D is middleground to me. There're several tiers, going from pure narrative (FATE etc) to slightly narrative (WoD) to crunchy-ish (D&D) to very crunch (RuneQuest) to I have no idea (GURPS).

[Criptfeind]

Here's one question about D&D I always had: how do you guys keep track of all the numbers when GMing?

Two things: One is just, writing them down in a easy to access fashion. Like, both in real life and on the computer I keep my GM notes in a folder and try to keep it organized so that I can quickly access the information that is most likely to be relevant. Second thing is cheating. You don't need to memorize the all the enemies stats, or even any of them. In general all you will need a lot of the time is their defenses, their attack, and their hp. You can just forget the rest of it. Or take it a step further and make it up on the spot if you want, once you get to know your players and what they can and will do in a situation you can make up the important statistics on the spot to give them the correct level of challenge (like you want this foe to be able to hit ac 17 25% of the time? Give him a +2 attack. Your big guy swings for a average of 25 damage? Now you can set their hp to a level where he will kill them in the right number of attacks.) I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, but especially if your players do something unexpected and you need to think on your feet this is probably a better option then trying to keep in mind absolutely everything you need to make up encounters. (Although if you do do this, it helps to know a bit how things interact. Like, if you have a bunch of 4 hp goblins with +3 to their attack have their damage rolls have +2 is probably a good idea, since that +3 is ether coming from Hit Dice or Strength, and super strong goblin warriors are easier to sell then 2+ HD goblins having only 4 hp.)

So, would people agree that D&D is harder then average to GM, or is it just me?

I think D&D is a game where you can sorta put in a lot of different amounts of effort to run it. Although a lot of games are sorta like that. But, basically, I don't think it's that hard to run a game. Running a good game can be hard (although that depends on what you and your players are looking for.)

[Bohandas]

So to answer the original question.
Paladins suck. You cant do anything fun.

They can carry a sidearm.

(Check out Dragon Magazine #306 page 97-98 (Murlynd) .)

If you do go with Murlynd as your patron deity, you should name your warhorse "Technetium"

[mainiac]

snip

Or as someone put it along ago, Gandalf was a level 6 wizard.  Although that was before Peter Jackson sunk his claws in.

[Sergarr]

snip

Or as someone put it along ago, Gandalf was a level 6 wizard.  Although that was before Peter Jackson sunk his claws in.

I didn't know level 6 wizards were proficient with swords...

[mainiac]

I didn't know level 6 wizards were proficient with swords...

Does he display any proficiency in the books?  All I can remember is him murdering the goblin king in the dark.  -4 unproficient, +3 BAB against a target of 10, so a decently lucky roll.

[Bauglir]

I'm actually pretty confident that Gandalf, in 3.5 at least, was Paladin 3/Bard 1, and he gained 2 more Paladin levels after the whole Balrog incident.

[Sergarr]

I didn't know level 6 wizards were proficient with swords...

Does he display any proficiency in the books?  All I can remember is him murdering the goblin king in the dark.  -4 unproficient, +3 BAB against a target of 10, so a decently lucky roll.

He used the sword in pretty much most of his engagements with enemy, including a cavalry charge. I doubt a wizard would do that.

A paladin, on the other hand...

[mainiac]

He uses sword in cavalry charges in the books?  It's been like 10 years so excuse my poor memory.