Summary
: I want to do an update on why the OGL was important, and why 5E is a dying game. To do this, we’re going to go through my old Pathfinder GM bag.
: First up is my old folder for character sheets. That sheet on top is from the last time I ever played, a game I stormed out of and never looked back. Ghosted all the fuckers I played with.
: If you want to know why, it was a high-level oneshot. I spent three hours making a wizard, only to have the GM look at me and go “No.” every time I tried to do anything. I was basically a dedicated GM at that point, this was the first time I had tried to play in over a year, and at that point I had enough.
: Next to it is a bunch of markers. Pathfinder Society used to have a bunch of "stock " maps that you could buy and not have to draw them, but I always drew them.
: Like so. This one won’t even lie flat anymore, and it’s the smaller of the two maps I had - I tossed the bigger one because it was getting kinda fucked up.
: Next to that is my bag of miniatures. Most of these I bought because it was generally frowned upon to go to a game store without buying anything. They’re all broken from being at the bottom of my closet for the past decade, so I pitched them all.
: The condition cards were a thing you could hand to somebody who got hit with a status effect. They were a neat little reference thing.
: The charger is from an old tablet-laptop hybrid thing I had years ago and has long since been tossed in the trash.
: Finally, my giant bags of dice. Gencon had a stand where you could take a huge fuckoff scoop and fill a bag with cheap dice, so I did that. This was one scoop’s worth.
: Now, what I want you to notice is what’s not there - namely books. That’s because all Pathfinder books are available as PDFs from the publisher’s website. That’s what the tablet was for.
: The reason this is important is because of a little thing called errata. Every tabletop RPG has it. What happens is that they print the books, and then after printing the publisher realizes they screwed something up, so they release an errata list that “patches” the book. Pathfinder 1E’s errata is all locked behind a login, but I can tell you there were hundreds of pages of it.
: If you had the PDFs though, it was no problem - they’d update the PDFs with the newer printings that had the errata built in.
: The other reason it’s important is that it made it really easy to play online using a VTT. See, at a physical table, it’s assumed that you can share books to an extent: that way, the GM doesn’t need to have every splatbook on hand. With PDFs, if the GM had a question I could just… send them the PDF.
: Or not, because there’s an easier way. Because the vast majority of Pathfinder 1E content is under OGL, there are entire sites (which are entirely legal) that will let you look up whatever you’re trying to find and tell you exactly where to find it.
: Snowball was a really overpowered spell, but it has nothing on Guiding Bolt.
: Now, let’s say for sake of argument I want to GM 5E. First, I’m going to need the Player’s Handbook (PHB).
: This is a big, thick hardcover that weighs somewhere between 4 and 5 pounds. We’ll say 4.5 for sake of argument.
: Unlike 3.5E, the SRD for 5E is completely locked the fuck down and doesn’t contain all the information in the PHB, so you need a physical PHB. No way around it.
WEIGHT COUNTER: 4.5 POUNDS
: Then I need the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG). This weighs another 4.5 pounds.
WEIGHT COUNTER: 9 POUNDS
: I also need the Monster Manual for 5E. This is another 4.5 pounds.
WEIGHT COUNTER: 13.5 POUNDS
: Now, the thing is, there are splatbooks for DMs just like there are for players. Let’s say I want a couple of those.
: 2 pounds.
WEIGHT COUNTER: 15.5 POUNDS
WEIGHT COUNTER: 17 POUNDS
: Now I’m carrying around 17 pounds of paper (probably more with errata) in addition to basically all of the stuff that was in my old bag, plus my laptop.
: Oh, and I can’t use any of this online easily. WoTC does offer an online system for books as well as their own VTT, but it’s DRMed to hell and sucks.
: In practice, this means I’m going to just carry my laptop with the pirate scans on it. Or I wouldn’t, because there’s no local scene for 5E where I live, so I’m probably just not going to play at all.
: This is the core of why 5E sucks. If I want to play Pathfinder online, there are a myriad of options I can use to accomplish that. If I want to play 5E.. not so much. That’s because it’s really hard to run a VTT without re-printing the rules, which isn’t allowed under the new license.
: I mean, you could always run a “rules-lite” 5E game without combat, but combat’s all 5E has going for it and if you’re running rules-lite you don’t actually want to play 5E.
