Pathfinder 2E Is It Time for PF2 "Essentials"?

[kenada]

Those conditions were handled by a general mechanic in PF1. Every ability score required its own explanation for what to do when a penalty/drain/damage was applied to it. If you have to do that, then you might as well give it an evocative name instead of something generic. Additionally, it was easy to mix up how things worked (only ability drain actually reduced the score, but the other two were written as if they did in places).

 

[Greg Benage]

Responding to the OP, it will never be time for PF2 "Essentials."

Paizo was a third-party D&D publisher that scooped up a significant portion of the D&D player base when Wizards published a version of D&D that a lot of people didn't like. That share has obviously been trimmed with the release of 5E, but if that's a problem for the company, they're not going to solve it by iteratively slicing their own customer base into smaller shares.

Honestly, they're not going to solve it at all, because "a relatively small share of the D&D player base" is always going to be a niche market outside of special circumstances.

That doesn't mean the problem (if it is one, based on their business goals) can't be solved--it just can't be solved by Paizo. Someone should be positioning themselves to pick up the torch if/when* Wizards drops it (again). Paizo could definitely be that someone (again), but they'd have to start publishing 5E content. I'll be more than a little surprised if they don't.

* Let's be real: It's almost inevitable. Wizards may not drop the torch, but people at Hasbro who don't understand hobby games will knock it out of their hands.

 

[willrali]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much damned hand wringing over something so inconsequential. But I must say the line of ‘why can’t Paizo just abandon its own silly game and produce some stuff for the system I like’ is kind of irrelevant.

In my experience, unless I’m playing in hardass iron-lung mode, Pf2 is, in actual play, very fun and zippy, and makes players feel powerful. The critical success and fail mechanics make things very interesting and varied. There’s a bit of a hill for beginners but there’s a lot more there when that learning curve is crested.

I’ve reached the stage that I thank the stars for Pf2; since it’s the Pepsi of the D&D world, it’s given me the ability to recruit players who otherwise would just be 5e. Getting people for my actual favorite games (Exalted 3rd and Mage Awakening 2nd) is more or less impossible.

So Paizo: thanks for the good work. Your monsters are fun and top notch, your power fantasy wish fulfilment is awesome, you’re not afraid of adult themes, and your actual game mechanics are more than smooth enough for me and my players. Keep producing material and I’ll keep buying it. No need for an ‘essentials’ just yet, IMO. Maybe an ‘unearthed arcana’.

 

[Desdichado]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much damned hand wringing over something so inconsequential. But I must say the line of ‘why can’t Paizo just abandon its own silly game and produce some stuff for the system I like’ is kind of irrelevant.

While that does seem to have been the converstaion I think it's kind of missing the point. It's not about "what do I like or don't like". It's not about you. It's not about me. It's not about the original poster. It's about the original poster noticing that Paizo's market share and engagement in RPG related discussions, and engagement with 3PP have all flagged very noticeably so that even someone who isn't really paying all that much attention anymore (like me) can notice it. That has nothing whatsoever to do with any individual's taste in gaming and what kind of mechanics they like. Given that observation, it was a request to discuss what, if anything, could be done to address that situation, along with one proferred proposal for discussion.

The real on-topic responses would have addressed one of the two proposed topics, or spinoffs on them:

1) is the original premise flawed?—and admittedly, there's a little bit of discussion about that. But the "rebuttals" to the premise don't really address the obvious elephant in the room that Pathfinder's market share, as reported with what data we can gather, limited though it may be, is way down. And the engagement in forums (including here) and engagement with 3PPs is way down. Those are all clearly visible to anyone regardless of whatever nitpicky details about the rollplay VTT are going on, or whether or not Paizo is still hiring. (My sister once got hired at Circuit City literally three days before the entire corporation declared bankruptcy and closed all of their stores. Needless to say, she never actually started, and her getting a job offer wasn't indicative of financial health.) Is there an interesting discussion to be had around that premise that the OP proposed? I think so, but I can't see that this thread actually addressed it. In fact, ironically, it corroborates it in at least one small anecdotal way. I was googling differences in setting between Golarion 1e and 2e, and I thought for sure that that would have been a significant topic of discussion at ENworld. Instead, I got routed... to this thread.

2) The OP's secondary premise is that Pathfinder 2e's rather tepid apparent reception may be based on its mechanics, therefore he proposes some changes that he thinks would improve it. He made some specific references to WotC learning from 4e not to keep doubling down for too long on a system that's losing market share. Nobody's really addressed this; they've just kind of said, "don't split the player base." This seems a little bit of a facile piece of advice to me; Paizo's entire reason for being and the lever that they used to catapult to a position of major player in the market was based on the splintering of the player base that was already happening. Late era 3e was bleeding players left and right to the OSR and other games that weren't quite so cumbersome to run, and word of mouth online as it aged was certainly tipping towards a significant plurality of negative—even acknowledging that plenty of people were still playing it, and not complaining. But when 4e was announced, and then launched, and it wasn't what a significant portion of the player base wanted, the market was splintered, and it allowed for an opportunity for Paizo to jump in. If it wasn't for splintering the player base, there never could have been any Paizo.

But the other lesson to be learned here, was that WotC cleaned up their act and released a game that was much more big-tentish than 4e ever was, and seems to have brought a very large chunk of the prodigal sons back into the fold. And anecdotally, at least, it seems to have contributed to growing the tent, which back in the 2e, 3e and 4e era most gamers assumed was pretty much impossible. When that happened, it kinda seems like the whole reason for the Pathfinder system was taken away from them, but they haven't seemed to have noticed yet. To be honest, I was never sure why they didn't just keep going with the 3e/d20 OGL as it is. Based on book prices online and engagement with folks here and there, it certainly seemed that during the 4e era, a very significant plurality kept on playing 3e and buying used 3e books, so Pathfinder making what was essentially a "3.75" was needlessly splitting their potential player base. I know, I know—I remember the interviews, discussions, posts, whatever where they explained why they did that, but it did split their potential base, and it also opened them up to exactly the situation that they're in now. Had they remained a company that supported the 3e SRD, they could have easily pivoted to supporting the 5e SRD once 4e withered and died. Instead, they created their own alternate SRD, and now that they're so invested in it, they seem unable to divorce themselves from thinking that they need their own SRD. Instead of Pathfinder 2e, I think it would have made more sense to say, essentially, "WotC got their act together and 5e was what 4e should have been, so now we can go back to supporting that the way that we supported 3e back in the day." I think their inability to step away from this system that they created that clearly doesn't have the pull that it really kind of needs to is a long-term losing strategy for Paizo. Had they simply published the SRD with less investment in modifying it, it would have been much easier for them to have walked away from it again, instead of feeling so emotionally and financially invested in a new kinda sorta 3e-ish system.

And to head off the inevitable emotional projecting from the peanut gallery before it shows up, no, I don't have any particular horse in this race. I don't play 5e, I don't play 4e, I don't play 3e, and I don't play PF 1e or PF 2e either. I play a customized version of Microlite, and I have no need for any other system ever again in my life. So I make these comments as someone watching what appears to be happening from a business perspective, without any particular ulterior motive to get some kind of product that I want out of it. (Although admittedly, our data is pretty scanty, and we may well be misreading what it seems to be saying.) I've said goodbye to both WotC and Paizo, at least in terms of system, long ago, and I'll probably gradually lose any interest in their other stuff soon too, although the premise of the book Corporate Cancer is more likely to be the cause of that than the system. I've already kissed both systems, or anything even all that closely related to either of them, goodbye long ago and made my peace with the split. And I even got to keep the house and the kids, and am making no alimony payments!

Anyhoo; I think that would have been an interesting discussion, and that's clearly what the OP was trying to spark. Kinda disappointing that we didn't get it.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Not much of an observation really, I think it was more wishful thinking that the viewpoint of it being a failure had already been validated.

 

[Desdichado]

Are you suggesting that falling market share on VTTs is some kind of artifact of observation bias? Or the lack of 2e 3PP support?

Not saying that it isn't; maybe it is. But either way, it is certainly an observation, and if it's actually true, then talking about what that means is potentially interesting.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Are you suggesting that falling market share on VTTs is some kind of artifact of observation bias? Or the lack of 2e 3PP support?

Not saying that it isn't; maybe it is. But either way, it is certainly an observation, and if it's actually true, then talking about what that means is potentially interesting.

We've had this discussion on here, 5e dominate to an extent where producing 3pp supplements for other systems is still a fairly counterintuitive business proposition.

The 2e community, exclusively points people toward Foundry to an extent where it's all that comes up when you do a Google search for pf2e vtt. But Foundry doesn't publish (or collect?) numbers. Either way roll 20 is an exceptionally unreliable source concerning the size of the playerbase.

I've been using the growth and activity level of the subreddit personally, which is still growing. It's not a perfect metric, but it's better than the alternatives.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Are you suggesting that falling market share on VTTs is some kind of artifact of observation bias?

I mean, it only fell for one quarter after multiple quarters of growth. It's not like it's been cratering or something. Plus the whole Foundry thing going on.

Or the lack of 2e 3PP support?

Is this indicative of sales, or is it a number of different things at play?

Not saying that it isn't; maybe it is. But either way, it is certainly an observation, and if it's actually true, then talking about what that means is potentially interesting.

I mean, it's been #2 on the ICv2 charts since it released. It's biggest RPG product on Amazon besides 5E stuff. There's just not really an indication that it's doing demonstrably bad or anything, just people acting like it not running neck-and-neck with 5E as some sort of failure.

 

[Desdichado]

I mean, it's been #2 on the ICv2 charts since it released. It's biggest RPG product on Amazon besides 5E stuff. There's just not really an indication that it's doing demonstrably bad or anything, just people acting like it not running neck-and-neck with 5E as some sort of failure.

Well, that's fair enough. I wonder if the strategy of being the alt.D&D when real D&D is blowing and going like gangbusters again is a viable long-term strategy, though. Even if they're not "failing", I wonder the degree to which former Pathfinder players have made their way back to D&D in the form of 5e and how much more of that there is likely to continue to be going forward. It's one thing to compete head to head with D&D when it's 4e, and there is a very contentious and bitter custody battle going on between the brand and the customers. It's another altogether to compete against a robust and popular 5e version of D&D. When even the most mainstream visibility of the game, assuming that Critical Role plays that ... er, role, have converted their campaign from Pathfinder to 5e, and 5e is literally for sale in the toy section of Walmart again, like it was back in the early 80s. But that's clearly just armchair strategizing by someone with no skin in the game, so take it for what it's worth.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There are almost certainly three main groups of PF1e players who exist at this point (I'm ignoring people who've bailed completely out of the D&D-sphere, since its going to be impossible to say what kinds of reasons there are for that, and whether anything would have changed it).
1. People who transitioned to 5e. There can certainly be argued some of these might have not done so if PF1e continued to be supported, but that's a counterfactual; even without any inside specifics I can pretty much assume that was not economically viable, or Paizo would not have gone to the work of doing 2e. So in practice, you have the people who were going to leave to 5e one way or another for the most part anyway.

2. People who stuck with 1e even though its no longer supported. That absolutely was going to happen with any significant edition transition. It always does.

3. People who transitioned to 2e.

So, in practice, what's required here is to proponents of a different version of PF2e need to demonstrate in some way other than declaration, that the groups in the first two categories would have been smaller and the third group larger with different choices. That is, and likely can't be, anything but speculative.

As to going head to head with 5e--that's not exactly what's happening any more, and I doubt Paizo had any delusions it would be. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, they could do that for a short while because of the historical accident of the large populace dissatisfied with 4e, many of whom were staying with 3e and thus were potentials for an alternate-3e. That hasn't happened before, and likely would never happen again.

But that doesn't mean there isn't room within the general D&D-sphere for people who want something D&D-like, but don't want what 5e is offering. It isn't going to be as big as it was at the peak of the PF1e period, but that's not the expectation I expect; it just has to be enough bigger than the presumably progressively flatter sales of 1e to justify the effort.