pteryx

Have to agree about six. The classic D&D videogames didn't choose a party size of 6 by accident in their designs.

That being said, the push towards four instead definitely started in 3.0's playtesting, on the assumption that parties would have one of each basic archetype (warrior, rogue, arcane caster, divine caster) for some reason. It probably also had a lot to do with how scheduling a dedicated table becomes exponentially more difficult with each added player.

Essentially, yes.

PCs having grievances can happen too, but it tends to be more of an intermediate technique than a basic one for players, and dependent on them already having a solid understanding of the setting.

The first thing to understand about how to have NPCs with legitimate grievances be a thing in a TTRPG is to imagine the world as a real one and the NPCs as people within that world. If you're just thinking of the setting as a flat backdrop for gameplay and the NPCs as colorful questgivers whose protection is a thin excuse for the plot to happen, then you're not going to be thinking in terms of things like what needs various NPCs might have and why they're unfulfilled or violated.

Thing is, your typical clear-out-the-humanoid-tribe dungeon crawl could be considered pretty evil in its own right by modern standards. Just putting an emphasis on how much that old trope would actually involve disrupting lives and destroying families could be enough, depending on what she's going for.

@ICCrawler @Zagorath
You can still buy materials from their store. I think they're counting on that alone to prop it up.

@PugJesus
Proper alt text: A large terracotta jar sits outdoorsm next to a wall and the window the camera is looking through. From within its darkness peers a pair of feline eyes, framed by a barely-visible black cat's face.

@caseyweederman @Aielman15
Keep in mind that a lot of people outside the hobby have never even heard of Pathfinder. Even knowing that there's such a thing as *editions* of D&D is unusual outside the hobby.

I'm not saying that lore is unnecessary or undesirable. I'm saying that historically, it was never included as part of what counted as "crunch", and at the time was even taken to be its opposite.

Back in the '90s, when the term "crunch" arose, "fluff" arose alongside it to describe things like background detail and other things that would be called "lore" in a post-WoW world. So it's a little weird to see background detail held up alongside the other kinds in this article.

Only self-professed haters? Tell that to the corporations firing people to replace them with "AI" that can't actually do their jobs correctly.

The kinds of people who find replacing artists a "desirable purpose" do not belong in a creative community.