The writer I’m discussing is Jason
Bulmahn, creator of Pathfinder and its current Director of Game Design for
Paizo. Bulmahn writes parts of instruction manuals and adventure paths for tabletop
RPGs. Jason acquired a ton of experience before he began designing Pathfinder,
playing TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons throughout his life. His experience
eventually got him a job writing scenarios for the Living Greyhawk Campaign run
by Wizards of the Coast, where players across the nation meet in small groups
to play Dungeons & Dragons in one vastly interconnected fantasy world. He
later moved to Paizo Inc. and worked on Dragon Magazine until the end of its
print run, after which he and the rest of Paizo focused on creating their line
of game mastery products and Adventure Paths for D&D 3.5 Edition. Two problems
arose as Wizards of the Coast prepared to launch D&D 4th Edition:
1) Paizo was unable to obtain the 4th edition rules early, meaning
they couldn’t design Adventure Paths until after the game had been released,
and 2) Paizo wasn’t sure how the new content license would work, meaning they
might have to shift their approach if they wanted to continue profiting off of
D&D-based books and materials.
During this time of uncertainty for
Paizo, Bulmahn had been independently working on his own edition of D&D. Instead
of designing a major overhaul like Wizards of the Coast had done with D&D 4th
Edition, his initial idea was a “D&D 3.75.” His idea was to take the core
ideas of D&D 3.5 and make various adjustments and improvements, presumably
based on both his own opinions and common community feedback. In his initial
writing, Bulmahn was mostly analyzing the existing D&D 3.5 rules, identifying
their strengths and flaws, and using his own experience in the game industry to
make them better (more entertaining, more steamlined, etc.). It’s also likely
that he took a lot of inspiration from his experience playing other games: In his
YouTube video on how to get into the games industry, he stresses the importance
of playing a variety of games (games you love, games you hate, video games,
board games, games in different genres, etc.) and analyzing those games – their
strengths, their weaknesses, and why certain decisions were made by the
designers. It seems that both this research and Bulmahn’s vast experience with
D&D granted him the expertise to design a great new edition.
As Paizo was brainstorming what to
do about D&D 4th Edition, Bulmahn pitched his D&D 3.75 as a standalone
set of rules that Paizo could publish. Paizo loved it and within a week,
Bulmahn was the lead designer for the newly coined Pathfinder RPG. Pathfinder
has been Paizo’s focus for the past decade, even releasing a sci-fi variant
(Starfinder) and currently gearing up to release Pathfinder 2nd
edition.
Bulmahn is now the Director of Game
Design at Paizo and Team Leader for Pathfinder 2E. Though he presumably still
does plenty of work establishing the design direction for the game, plenty of
his writing nowadays involves addressing questions and feedback from the
community. Looking through his posts on the Paizo
forum, there’s various posts introducing new content, explaining the thought
process behind certain changes, and otherwise moderating discussion about the
game. It’s unclear exactly how much of his writing is published in new
Pathfinder books, but he does mention editing the Chapter 1 text for a
Pathfinder 2E book in this
post.
Note from this post that Bulmahn
directly incorporates feedback from the community into his writing. Although Bulmahn,
being the head of game design, has a lot of freedom with incorporating his
ideas into the game, he’s still ultimately held accountable by the community.
For example, Paizo released a Pathfinder 2E playtest a while ago (basically an
open beta) and a lot of the community was unhappy with the Resonance system
included in the rules. (If I remember correctly, Resonance made Charisma and Use
Magic Device less weak but placed too many restrictions on magic item usage). Paizo
recently ended up scrapping the entire Resonance system due to its unpopularity.
I’m sure Bulmahn gets feedback from other writers on his idea, but it seems
like the main barrier between getting his ideas published is community
feedback.
It’s not entirely clear exactly how Bulmahn gets paid, but, given his roles in management and communication with the community at Paizo, he probably gets paid a regular salary for all his various work. Likewise, it’s unclear exactly how his writing process goes, but it seems to be a mix of analyzing existing rules, editing issues, and making improvements.
Works Cited:
youtube.com/watch?v=Zm-387BHc5g
polygon.com/2016/8/1/12317888/the-story-of-pathfinder-dungeons-and-dragons-most-popular-offspring
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bulmahn
paizo.com/people/JasonBulmahn/posts
paizo.com/people/JasonBulmahn/threads
paizo.com/threads/rzs42ec8&page=3?I-finally-understand-the-design-goals-of-PF2#102
twitter.com/JasonBulmahn
wizards.com/default.asp?x=lg/welcome