Organized Play – Pathfinder Society for Pathfinder and the RPGA for Dungeons & Dragons – is very popular nowadays, and they’ve all gone to what was originally called the “Living” format, where you have characters that progress as you move from table to table, group to group, GM to GM, made possible by strong standardization.
The benefits of Organized Play include spreading the game through play opportunities at conventions, increased regular play options for those without regular gaming groups, and provides adventure content quickly consumable by GMs. It also provides a sense of community among the participants that make them stickier to Pathfinder and other Paizo products.
There are downsides to Organized Play too however. Let me preface this by saying “yay, Organized Play is good, its adherents should not be drowned in drainage ditches or anything.” This isn’t an argument against it. I’m sure people will trip out, but just because you like something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be advised of its side effects, just like any other medication 🙂
However, I’ve been involved in organized play for a long time (RPGA, including Living Greyhawk Triad duty), and here’s some issues I see coming from it. It’s mostly an extention of “Walmart/McDonald’s syndrome” (Or now “Netflix syndrome”) – the kind of specific decisions you have to make to create something that works impersonally at scale become predominant and affect even smaller venues because they set specific expectations.
1. Strongly sets a playstyle that disallows GM flexibility/fiat in favor of rules adherence; this is pretty much unavoidable due to the format. This allows a strong focus on character optimization to flourish and become a default way of looking at the game. This isn’t all PFS, but I believe a lot of the rise of RAW/CharOp playstyle from fringe to majority in the last decade has been as a result of the strong 3e/3.5e/PF Organized Play movement. When 3e came out, no one dreamed of using the CR system, or wealth by level, or any of those things as a straitjacket, but now that’s common. Optimization was mentioned only in terms like “min-maxing” or “munchkin” beforehand, now it’s a major part of almost all rules discussion. Of course, if you love RAW rules theory and CharOp this isn’t a downside. But it’s clearly a side effect.
2. Normalization of rules. Authors are loath to put non-legalese rules into products because it’ll be unsuitable for OP use; this means fewer cool experimental rules, fewer rules that depend on GM adjudication, and more fuel on the fire of the expectation that RPG rules should be a legally complete document. Whatever books are allowed by PFS, players feel entitled to use and feel ripped off if a home game doesn’t allow them. Third party publishers, since not allowed in PFS, are marginalized in home games too. Long term, this normalizing pressure ends up leaving us with more Quarter Pounders than home-cooked meals. I’m happy that things like Mythic are still being put out but just not allowed for PFS; it would be easy to be pressured into decisions that don’t let that happen. The more that PFS is tapped for playtests, etc. the more that can happen.
3. Promotes cookie-cutter adventures. To be fair, PFS innovates within the strict time/XP/treasure format a lot more than RPGA Living adventures did, but even so, there is a strong driver towards a very common “4 scenes 2 combats 1 RP 1 puzzle” or similar formula. When I lament the death of Dungeon Mag, James Jacobs says “well use some PFS adventures!” With respect, the PFS modules don’t compare favorably with Dungeon adventures in terms of raw diversity. And they’re not supposed to; like everything else for Organized Play they have to be crafted for large scale, transactional use, with little prep required and change allowed from page to play. And that’s good for PFS but tends to drown out deviations.
Now, I’m not saying OP has killed all third parties or interesting adventures or people that make RP decisions over rules ones. But it has clearly influenced the hobby in specific directions. There’s restaurants other than McDonald’s still, and stores other than Walmart, and movies you can’t see on Netflix. But the existence of a somewhat homogeneous monolith does create downward pressure on other types of gameplay. In our FLGS there’s seriously maybe 40 people a weekend playing PFS that “can’t find a home game.” There’s 40 of you there, sure you can – it’s just not as repeatable as that Quarter Pounder, so we go for the QP.
What’s interesting, besides the arguing over “IT DOES NOT!!!”, is figuring out how to run OP in a way that mitigates these three effects. I think there have been some steps in this regard already; being able to sanction home play of APs and still putting out rules that aren’t PFS-safe are great. And I am sure this isn’t the intent of many of the venture-captains and all, who work hard to provide interesting and customized experiences especially at big cons with interactive events and such. What else can be done to have an OP that doesn’t go “full McDonald’s?”
Geek Related 
I have been thinking about organized play that allowed more GM adjudication, because I am looking at diceless organized play, that breaks some of these molds by its very nature.
Oh and there is always Adventure Quarterly if you miss Dungeon Magazine 🙂
I went and backed the AQ Kickstarter despite their cunning plan of not linking it off the Rite Publishing AQ Web page. Derp.
I hear you, man. I don’t consider PFS adventures very usable outside of the campaign environment, with a few exceptions. Unlike Living Greyhawk, my first love, they assume the PCs are members of Pathfinder Society and there are a lot of built-in assumptions about the role of the characters in the world, and especially the most recent material brings the overarching plot of the campaign front and centre.
And yeah, it does terrible things to player culture, even though there really aren’t that many scenarios you’d even need an optimized character to survive. I wouldn’t even mind so much if the characters had personalities, but for some reason, the guys with the biggest numbers on their character sheets rarely have any dimensions beyond those numbers.
I’m the Venture-Captain of Finland. I love the campaign and I think it’s a great way to get casual games without having to commit to a regular gaming schedule, but it’s kinda like chocolate chip cookies. Tasty, small and slightly addictive, but not something you can build your entire diet on. If it was the only game in town, I’d probably be stuffing twenty-siders up my nose and giggling hysterically before the month was out.
And it feeds on itself; from reading threads on the Paizo forums seasons 1-3 are easy and don’t require optimization, 4 gets harder, 5 gets even harder. On the one hand it’s good that they listen to the people playing, who now that they’re all optimized want more challenge, but it effectively shuts non-optimizers (and the iconics that are supposed to be playable) out of the game entirely. It’s hard to avoid the siren song of escalation.
They did recently redesign the iconics, though, and now even Valeros has reason to live.
Poor guy has gone through some pretty sad incarnations.
A very insightful post – I had noticed the rise of attitudes that were disinclined to look favorably on GM adjudication (or, really, any GM empowerment) in favor of hard adherence to the rules (which, in turn, necessitated a greater focus on legalese rules design), but I never would have thought to attribute it to organized play.
I, for one, welcome our new legalese overlords. As both a GM and a player I like rules that are clear and don’t require somebody to make decisions about how they work at the table. As a GM, I hate having pause the actual game in order to deal with the rules issues. When there’s a lot of rules, any choice you make will affect how it interacts with other rules. That should be figured out in the design phase and not in the middle of a combat.
As a player, I like my game to be internally consistent. A more interpretive ruleset means it’s more likely that something coming up will work differently than something in the past. Either that, or you need to write down evey ruling and make a new game out of house rules. It’s also good to be able to sit down with a new group and just play without learning a whole new game that you’ve played for years. And if you go back and forth between different groups it’s hell to remember which differences go with which group.
I think it’s the rise of videogames and CRPGs too that contribute to min-maxing and optimisation. That’s because in so many CRPGs you have to play a min-maxed combat oriented character to progress, especially early ones like Arena. In many CRPGs if you create a character you might like to roleplay but which isn’t optimised you make the game significantly harder for yourself, sometimes impossible to complete. So people who are coming to tabletop from CRPGs have already been punished for creating characters they might like to roleplay instead of min-maxed optimised characters, and so they assume they will be equally punished at the table unless they optimise.
I think 5e has done some work to address this, the way the game is balanced making sub-optimal choices doesn’t hurt you too much. For example, the lack of racial penalties means that all races are now roughly as good at all classes, some are slightly better but none are significantly worse. So you can make a half-Orc wizard if that’s what you want to RP and not worry that your character sucks and will die all the time. In your read-through of the 5e PHB you called this a “sop to the helicopter parented self-entitled kids of today” but it’s actually just good design, from the standpoint of encouraging RP over min-maxing and optimisation.