The Golem does not get it.

“The Golem doesn’t get it!”

This is the first sentence in a newletter/spam that came today from ‘Paizo’:

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game™ from Paizo Publishing is one of the world’s best-selling fantasy roleplaying games, in the true spirit of the classic dungeon crawl (more ad copy follows).

Whaaaaat?  “…the true spirit of the classic dungeon crawl“?  Since when? I mean, I’m hardly one of the “I learned to play D&D as a child sitting on Gary Gygax’s knee” people (I first played in 1978 in a location very far from Lake Geneva), but to claim “the true spirit of the classic dungeon crawl” for Pathfinder (a re-write of the 3.5e D&D rules, which were written to ‘fix’ everything that was supposedly ‘wrong’ with ‘old’ D&D) seems like a load of shit. D&D 3e and it’s iterantions couldn’t wait to tell people, “Hey, we fixed D&D!” and now that some people are saying that they liked the way it was, they are tring to climb aboard that bandwagon as well. It’s as bad as hearing Mitt say, “I know what the common man thinks and feels because Ann and I own a lot of common men, along with a stable full of dressage horses…”

The people who like Pathfinder probably don’t WANT a classic dungeon crawl (at least, none of the fans of Pathfinder that I know do).  And that’s fine.  But, please, lay off the ‘true spirit of the classic dungeon crawl’ shit, ok?


2 Comments on “The Golem does not get it.”

  1. Well, I play Pathfinder with an old school vibe, but it needed a little work. 3d6 in order etc.
    And there are a lot of dungeons in the adventure paths (good for looting and using, because the adventure paths per se are so not old school… “You have to go there now, or else everything's going downhill…” 😛 ).
    But yeah, that claim is a little pretentious.

  2. Stephan Poag says:

    I don't resent 'Pathfinder' But I suspect the ad copy is a bit of someone saying, “I read online that people are saying that old school dungeon crawls are back in… so let's put that copy in our press releases even though we have no idea what it means.”
    I used to work for a company where one of the ViPs used to like to use words that sounded cool even though he only had vague ideas about what they meant. So he was always saying stupid things like, “We need a new paradigm,” and then he would go on about working smarter not harder and all the usual 'Lets get our numbers up this quarter' crap. Tossing in fancy words like 'paradigm' just made him sound like a stupid asshole… which I suppose he was.


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