As I always say. Put the (mechanical) strengths of WotC and the (storytelling) strengths of Paizo together, and you have a relentless war machine with only one purpose - bringing the best possible game experience you can have.
Actually? No. It doesn't work in the medium to long term. The problem is that the "sell lots of Rules" approach to RPG sales ends up breaking your ability to sell compatible adventures. The problem with this approach is demonstrated with what happened to the compatibility of 3.5 and
Dungeon Magazine.
When you are Wizards of the Coast, your view your sales to be driven by the release of more and more rules hardcovers. For the most part, these books are directed at the broad mass of players.
When you are Paizo and selling adventures, you are already targeting your products at a smaller slice of the market (DMs). In order to maximize your ability to sell to that smaller slice, you need to maximize your compatibility of assumed Rules - which means you target the Core Rules only. And that's the problem in all of this.
So, what you had was
Dungeon Magazine writing adventures based upon the Core Rules only, while at the same time, you had WotC beavering away, MONTHLY, in an attempt to break the game with more and more rules with more and more power creep.
Now, I question whether it is possible for ANY DM to keep up with the release of such new rules on an even footing with the players, who necessarily must only confine their reading and character build exploration to one or two new books...
But whatever the case, once you allow these new Rules hardcovers into the game, you increasingly lessen the utility of using published adventures. And there came a point in time (in my estimation late 2005/ early 2006), where the 3.5 game simply BROKE with the power creep presented in WotC's accessory line.
That's what happened in the final two years of
Dungeon Magazine under Paizo. They put out awesome adventure Path products that were enthusiastically received by gamers. And all the while, monthly, WotC was destroying the compatibility of those adventures by releasing books which shifted the power balance in the game radically from that presented in the Core Rules. Paizo's adventure products became broken under this stress.
In the end, DMs were left with a choice: Ban the 3.5 expansion books from use at the table, or rewrite the adventures, sometimes radically, to up the power level of the foes to match the increased power brought to the table by the players.
Either way, you destroy the value in use of either the accessory Rules products or the published adventures.
You cannot have it both ways -- not with the ridiculous product release schedule that WotC had in the 3.5 era -- and while it is somewhat lessened in the 4E era, I would argue that the same problem is still present in 4E.
The only way this works is if you SLOOOOOOOOOW down the release of rules, and then deem it an assumed requirement that everybody will buy and use the expansion material.
Interestingly, I asked James Jacobs specifically about this issue last week and he advised me that forthcoming Paizo Adventure Path products and their module lines for Pathfinder WILL make use of the Advanced Player's Guide within the adventure text. Paizo is making the choice to build the APG into their product lines.
Paizo is very sensitive to this issue as they know what happened to their products' compatibility during the 3.5 era. To deal with this issue, it appears that Paizo will build in the "power upgrade" that happens with release of new player material. Paizo can get away with this because they aren't releasing a new rules hardcover for players every month; instead, they are doing so only once a year.
And Paizo, this time, is the beneficiary of sales of the APG, whereas before, they couldn't make up that revenue by excluding some DMs from their market by requiring those products. (How "required" this APG material will be in terms of being able to use Paizo's APs and Modules remains to be seen, of course.)
So that's pretty much the middle ground you have to aim for. You either slow down the introduction of new player focussed rules to the pace we experienced in the 1st edition era so that you don't break your published adventures...
OR
You go
Wango Zee Tango like WotC has done with 3.x and (to a somewhat lesser degree) 4.x in terms of your release schedule and say "to hell with compatibility with published adventures".
But you can't do both -- they are mutually exclusive approaches to publishing RPG products.
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Derulbaskul:
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firesnakearies:
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Mustrum_Ridcully:
