transmission89
Hero
You offer a very well articulated position, though I respectfully disagree with your conclusion regarding competition.No, that's not a mistake. Sometimes you don't choose whether to go head to head or not; it's a choice that's made for you. From a historical perspective, its very clear that the segment that pursued Paizo were those who wanted only iterative updates to 3e, and not the revolutionary premise of 4e. 4e caused them to balk, and they were happy that someone like Paizo stepped in to fill the gap. But if 5e offers a (debatable premise, but I think one that many will shrug and accept because relative to 4e, it's mostly true) an iterative fix to 3e, while kinda sorta saying, "yeah, sorry about 4e; I can see that that wasn't really what you were interested in" then WotC was clearly choosing to compete head to head with Paizo for a segment that Paizo had captured from WotC some years earlier. What Paizo is interested in doing has no relevance to that situation, because their hand was forced by WotC, and they needed to address that in some fashion.
In any case, let me put my cards on the table. I don't care what system Paizo releases their adventure paths under; l can read and utilize them in my game, if I were to, whether they're 5e or Pathfinder 2e or 1e, or D&D or 3e or 4e or AD&D, or anything else. I'm just using them as a buffet, and taking concepts and ideas and maybe maps and scenario ideas from them and using them in my own preferred system anyway. So whether or not Pathfinder 2e finds a segment or not is of no concern to me personally other than that for various reasons I'd like to see Paizo stick around and continue to publish adventure paths that I can choose to go pick up if the concept appeals to me.
And this is where I go out on a limb a bit though; I personally suspect that it is very debatable that Paizo will be able to create a new segment of former 3e-style fans who want a different approach to fixing the 3e-Pathfinder 1e system than what 5e has done. It becomes the classic definition of a fantasy heartbreaker at this point. This is especially ironic if the comment somewhere way up above has any merit; that the direction Pathfinder 2e went relative to 1e is similar "in feel" to that taken by 4e (personally, I think the radical changes to the implied setting turned off more people about 4e than the mechanics, to be honest. Although both were factors. Only one is a factor with Pathfinder, of course.)
I also, and this is the google search that brought me to this thread in the first place, am intrigued by Paizo kinda adopting a soft approach to metastory again, which has obviously fallen considerably out of favor with the RPG market in general. It's a softer approach than that taken by the big metastory games of the past, like Old World of Darkness or whatever, but if you have a campaign set in Lastwall or Absalom, or was built around a concept utilizing the Worldwound, you may or may not appreciate that the 2e material says that your setting element no longer exists, or otherwise had a radical change done to it.
And finally, it's my opinion that Paizo were probably mistaken to pursue an alternative system in the first place, when their entire business model was based on catering to the segment that didn't want to migrate from 3e to 4e. I think that their strategy would have been better served by offering their Ultimate Campaign and Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Horror and Occult Adventures, etc. rules systems as Unearthed Arcana templates or options on top of the d20 SRD, and the "Pathfinder game" should have been a retroclone-like version of the SRD. I think that they had a hard decision to make about what to do there, and in retrospect, split their own segment into those who were OK advancing from 3.5 to Pathfinder and those who were more interested in sticking with 3.5. I'm not sure if that's "fixable" now, but had they done that, they could easily have pivoted to supporting the 5e SRD, and rather than competing with WotC for that segment, they could have just sold to that same segment.
Of course, there's also micro-segmentation going on here too. Is the hardback setting/module approach of 5e a model that's gradually replacing the adventure path model? That's a discussion that's a different tangent altogether.
You’re right in that they didn’t necessarily chose competition but I’d say from a different perspective. They just wanted to use a souped up 3.x as their vehicle for their APs.
When 4e proved controversial, the sales success of pf catapulted them into direct competition but I don’t think anyone (including paizo) expected this or even necessarily desired this. I also don’t think they expected this for pf2.
They were forced by 5e in as much as the design space of 3e was already stretched and the larger market was perhaps finding it too cumbersome. So they wanted to improve pf their way, regardless of what 5e did.
I just find it odd many are placing it in the same sphere as 5e and not any other rpgs, labelling it a failure for not doing what no one else is doing anyway.