Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder sales

[prosfilaes]

I'm calling some of the things certain members say trash.

"Not until people from the Pathfinder community step up to the plate and decide to start cleaning out their own trash." There is no grammatical way that can refer to what certain members say.

But sure, continue interpreting my words in the least charitable light possible. That's how civil discussion is conducted. I'm having some serious issues with the way you choose to carry yourself in debates, prosfilaes. I make a concerted effort to remain civil, and to give others the benefit of the doubt. I ask that others do the same.

Am I annoying you? Because just below this, you say that you don't care if you're annoying me.

It's not civil discussion if you keep grouping a bunch of people together and abusing them based on the actions of one. If you have problems with something that cyderak does, take it up with him, don't blame it on Pathfinder fans. It's not civil discussion when you're asked for evidence to back up your claim, and you just "yes, I have some".

Which, frankly, isn't a problem for me. If they're annoyed by having their poor behavior pointed out (or having the poor behavior of their tolerated peers pointed out) I can't help but see that as a good thing.

 

[MerricB]

Hmmm, even without the Dungeon information that is a lot closer than I expected. DDi is doing well, but not as much better than I thought that it was.

The problem is we don't know how many of the DDi subscribers are hidden from us by not signing up for a forum account.

Cheers!

 

[Pentius]

It's not civil discussion if you keep grouping a bunch of people together and abusing them based on the actions of one.

He isn't blaming PF fans for Cyd said, he's blaming them for not reprimanding him. I think he can go ahead and do that, too. Dannager has defended PF from over-eager 4e fans before, and I know if I were to insult it, he'd be right in my face about it. Like he's saying, Dannager or I could reprimand Cyd for saying something not polite, but it washes off, because we're 4e fans, of course we don't want people saying bad things about our game. By contrast, when Dannager tells a 4e fan to back off, they listen, because they know he's on their "side".

 

[Dannager]

"Not until people from the Pathfinder community step up to the plate and decide to start cleaning out their own trash." There is no grammatical way that can refer to what certain members say.

I'm sorry that you see it that way.

Am I annoying you?

No. You are, however, not proving enjoyable to talk with.

Because just below this, you say that you don't care if you're annoying me.

If you're annoyed by someone calling out someone else's poor behavior and asking you to help them correct the issue, then no, I really don't care if you get annoyed by it.

It's not civil discussion if you keep grouping a bunch of people together and abusing them based on the actions of one.

I'm "abusing" no one. I'm asking you to join me in making sure that fanboys with wildly inflamed opinions of games they don't like are aware that it is not okay to celebrate the imagined demise of a game others enjoy here on the EN World forums.

If you consider that abuse, then I consider you part of the problem.

If you have problems with something that cyderak does, take it up with him, don't blame it on Pathfinder fans.

I am not blaming his actions on Pathfinder fans except to the extent that they fail to address this behavior. I'm sure that you wouldn't appreciate Pathfinder receiving the same treatment from a rabid-4e-fan version of cyderak.

It's not civil discussion when you're asked for evidence to back up your claim, and you just "yes, I have some".

There's nothing uncivil about saying "Look, I'm convinced of what I'm saying and I don't really feel the need to convince you to change your viewpoint, so I'm not going to spend my time hunting down evidence that almost certainly will not matter one bit."

 

[prosfilaes]

He isn't blaming PF fans for Cyd said, he's blaming them for not reprimanding him.

No.

Huh, it had been a few days since I'd heard a Pathfinder fan celebrating the imagined failure of a game they don't play.

I'd been starting to think that maybe they'd cleaned up their act.

 

[Dannager]

He isn't blaming PF fans for Cyd said, he's blaming them for not reprimanding him. I think he can go ahead and do that, too. Dannager has defended PF from over-eager 4e fans before, and I know if I were to insult it, he'd be right in my face about it. Like he's saying, Dannager or I could reprimand Cyd for saying something not polite, but it washes off, because we're 4e fans, of course we don't want people saying bad things about our game. By contrast, when Dannager tells a 4e fan to back off, they listen, because they know he's on their "side".

This.

prosfilaes, please consider that you may be hearing what you want to hear when you read my posts, and not hearing what I'm actually saying to you.

No.

Yes.

 

[prosfilaes]

I'm sorry that you see it that way.

That's the classic form of a non-apology apology. Some people consider that ruder then saying nothing at all.

I am not blaming his actions on Pathfinder fans except to the extent that they fail to address this behavior.

"Huh, it had been a few days since I'd heard a Pathfinder fan celebrating the imagined failure of a game they don't play."

There's nothing uncivil about saying "Look, I'm convinced of what I'm saying and I don't really feel the need to convince you to change your viewpoint, so I'm not going to spend my time hunting down evidence that almost certainly will not matter one bit."

No, provided you say it once and step out. But sitting there nitpicking the other people's evidence and repeatedly asserting your own position evidenceless is uncivil.

prosfilaes, please consider that you may be hearing what you want to hear when you read my posts, and not hearing what I'm actually saying to you.

Dannager, please consider that your words may not come across to others as you want to them to, but ultimately you're responsible for the words you wrote. One of the things I'm getting annoyed at is your way of never taking responsibility for what you wrote.

 

[Pentius]

That's the classic form of a non-apology apology. Some people consider that ruder then saying nothing at all.

That may be, but I don't think he needs to apologize for you taking it wrong.

"Huh, it had been a few days since I'd heard a Pathfinder fan celebrating the imagined failure of a game they don't play."

Also means, "Lately, the conduct of the Pathfinder fans has been more conductive of civil discussion. Sadly, none has stepped up to this."

Dannager, please consider that your words may not come across to others as you want to them to, but ultimately you're responsible for the words you wrote. One of the things I'm getting annoyed at is your way of never taking responsibility for what you wrote.

That doesn't mean a person should take responsibility for any possible interpretation, especially if they're willing to clarify on what they meant.

 

[Wayside]

If all the D&D players in the world vanished, D&D wouldn't be all that valuable at all. The ancillary material grows off the trunk; no matter how little of the tree is trunk, you can't cut off the trunk.

Since nobody liked the idea of "Fallacy!"-free Friday I'll go ahead and point out that a) you're begging the question here, and b) the assumption that tabletop D&D is the trunk of the D&D tree is a genetic fallacy.

I don't know about Warhammer. If the MMORPG disappeared, Warcraft's name would drop massively. If all the tabletop RPG players disappeared, World of Darkness would be known only by the LARPers.

Well, first, no, Warcraft was a hugely successful brand long before World of Warcraft came along. There's no World of StarCraft or World of Diablo, yet those are phenomenally successful brands as well.

Second, World of Darkness has spawned several successful video games -- particularly Bloodlines, but the Hunter games were well-received too -- with a pretty highly anticipated MMO currently in the pipe. There was also the Kindred TV show, which Showtime was in negotiations to acquire when the lead actor died, effectively ending the series. Tough break, that.

Not yet; they are producing their own line of novels.

And I wish them well. In ten or twenty years we could be having a very different conversation, although from where I sit we've passed the high-water mark for fantasy fiction. There's still plenty of it and it still does well, but not like it did from the 70s to the early 90s.

The movies? The three movies, only one that went to the theaters, and all of which bombed?

Yup, those movies. The ones that got made because D&D is actually a valuable enough brand that folks thought they could make some serious coin with it. And they would've been right, if only the movies themselves hadn't sucked.

Moreover, the movie whose description on IMDB starts "Based on the phenomenally successful role-playing game,"? And that's why the RPG is so important.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Let's turn this around: Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time; Avatar does not have an RPG; and that's why the RPG is so unimportant.

The day D&D stops being an RPG is the day video game companies start asking themselves the same thing Fallout did with GURPS; why are we licensing this instead of making a cheap ripoff?

And here's why that analogy is flat out wrong:

1. Interplay never asked themselves that question. The deal fell through because Steve Jackson wasn't okay with all the gore and violence in the game.

2. Interplay wanted to license the GURPS rules. They weren't interested in a setting.

3. Nobody licenses D&D for its rules. What they're after are the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Planescape, et al. Worlds and characters: these are where the value of D&D lies. And none of them is dependent on the tabletop RPG.

Now, video game developers have left and will continue to leave D&D behind once they've built a reputation for themselves, like BioWare did. That's just good business. It's also why WotC should really have its own studio and bring video game development in-house.

I don't believe that, for comics either. Comic movies stay alive because they have a hardcore base behind them. Some of that is TV, but most of that is comics. You kill off the X-Men comics, you'll discover that the people like my father--who spent the entire First Class movie not realizing that Charles Xavier was that bald guy in the wheelchair--are not enough to carry the brand.

Yeah, I don't think so. I've never read an X-Men or a Spider-Man or a Batman comic in my life. You have to realize that hundreds of millions of people watch these movies, yet a really popular comic won't even move 100,000 units.

Were comics once the core? Absolutely. They created the initial awareness on which later products have capitalized. Will that awareness magically disappear if the comics cease to exist? Nope. It's there, and as long as it continues to be cultivated in some form, it's not going anywhere.

World of Darkness is a game. No one besides the gamers still remember it or buy the products... no doubt in large part due to the RPG no longer being there to support the auxiliary products. Pathfinder is starting to sell novels, but it'll still only work as long as Golarion exists in the minds of its hard-core fans.

Again, not so much. I've no idea what White Wolf's release schedule looks like these days, but RPG books aren't a necessary condition for growing the World of Darkness brand. Doing something, on the other hand, is. As long as they've got games or novels or something good coming out, it's fine. If they aren't doing anything, then that's a separate issue.

 

[Echohawk]

I am not of a business mind but these numbers seem pretty dire. It didnt really hit me until I read another post, but really, 60K subscribers is very low. The amount of non subscribing players I beleive would be 5x that number at most. Anyway, that is a really low number of Pen and paper rpgs players.

I would really expect the DDI subscriptions to be in the 6 digits at least.

Once again: Those numbers are not the numbers of DDI subscribers. Those are the numbers of DDI subscribers who have also registered on the WotC forums.

[size=+2]We do not have any information on the total number of DDI subscribers.[/size]

For all we know there could be a million DDI subscribers, but only 6% of them have also registered on the WotC forums. It is not a good idea to reach any conclusions about the success of DDI based only on the information available to us.