The Quitting Pathfinder Controversy

It started with this video. The title speaks for itself, but the reasoning, as you'll see below, is highly debatable.

It's hard to be honest with yourself sometimes when it comes to something you care about. But today, I am going to talk about my big issue with Pathfinder 2e...

This sparked somewhere between a butt load and a metric shit ton of response videos like this one:

Taking20's Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fyninGp92g&t=29sJoin the Community Discord: https://discord.gg/eBz6PANCheck out my Patreon for un...

I did not, by any stretch of the imagination, watch all of them, but my favorite response has to be the one that came from the ever-insightful Professor Dungeon Master (I highly recommend his channel):

Episode #168. Professor Dungeonmaster reacts to Taking 20's Quitting Pathfinder and the illusion of choice. Do Pathfinder and 5E really offer more choices, o...

As for me, all of this put me in mind of this video by Mark Brown at Game Maker’s Toolkit (also highly recommended):

A designer's job often involves making sure players are experiencing the game in the most fun or interesting way. In this video, I look at examples of games ...

Of the responses I viewed, only Professor Dungeon Master had the nerve to indict designers for boring gameplay. The problem with arguments that blame players for not making sub-optimal choices is that it runs counter to the nature of those players and what they find fun about the game. They want to play the system to its fullest and they want to be rewarded for exploiting their own mastery of the rules. That is 100% valid and no amount of telling them to ignore what they find fun about a combat system is going to change their minds. If playing a game true to its systems makes it less fun, there’s a design problem. Of course, Professor Dungeon Master offered some stellar suggestions for alternatives to D&D and Pathfinder that scratch that same tactical combat itch. So there is hope yet for systemic optimization players.

But what I wonder about is this: if you are a player who feels that you have to play sub-optimally to get what you want out of D&D/Pathfinder, why not play a game that’s more geared toward your style of play? Clearly, this type of player won’t be interested in 5 Torches Deep; but why not play Dungeon World or Fate where the creativity of your problem solving is as important as your dice rolls? With these games, your bonds and personality traits have real relevance on your character sheet and you’re actually rewarded for playing “sub-optimally”? Just a thought.

Anyway, I thought this little flare-up was interesting; I could circle for hours around what it says about game design or the gaming community at large. But we’ll leave it here for now. This is Professor Gamemaster (TM) signing off––may all your rolls be sub-optimal! (also, TM)