Imaro I'm not on this site for pidgin chess. Enjoy you're squabbling but you are attacking a strawman here. No pathfinder isn't popular just for the D&D brand recognition, but it is a major factor. Advertising is another major reason for Paizos success, and luck played a role, but from my first post on the subject my main thesis was that it's not as claimed due to pathfinders amazing narrative qualities. I've played adventure paths, Age of Worms comes to mind, and read others. The material is passable but I would hardly call it quality.
Pathfinder 1E This is why pathfinder has been successful.
- Thread starter Evenglare
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DaveMage
Slumbering in Tsar
What would you call "quality"?
Are you asking for games or what aspects creates quality. If the former I could list off my favorite RPG systems, if the latter that's a harder question. A quality setting IMO however is one that translates the feel of the game directly to play. A good example is horror. If you can be sitting in a brightly lit room just reading the material and you still are creeped out then that's stressful horror.
PF suffers the same problem as D&D and most D20 here, populating the world with stuff and telling people what to feel about it. This shotgun approach is just bad literature. But it goes farther then that. D20 is called a universal system, yet it has a narrow range were it works well. Material I've read from paizo don't just push the boundaries of D20's comfort zone they just ignore them, so you end up with material that is ruined by the fact that you drop a D20 and hey nat 20, great.
I didn't have any particular image in mind, although you've handily provided some.
I was more meaning that (as far as I know) D&D is the only fantasy RPG, and indeed the only fantasy fiction, that used the notion of chromatic dragons. Even to someone who didn't know about 3.5, a poster in a store showing some adventurers fighting a red dragon might scream "D&D".
Yes, because it involves a chromatic dragon. The resemblance to the old basic boxes, which I hadn't had in mind, only reinforces that.
I don't know how many 3.5 players brought OGL licensed materials. I would guess less than half the market, but I could be wrong. But 3.5 was definitely the name for a gaming system - WotC, the publisher of that system, released a series of corebooks with "v 3.5" fairly prominently on the cover.
From a marketing point of view, 3.5 refers to that game and those books, not the Revised (3.5) System Reference Document. In fact, in my experience, about 98% of the market does not understand the legal relationship between WotC's published books, the SRD released by WotC, the OGL under which the SRD was released, the d20 system license, and the materials released by 3PP under the OGL which either incorporate elements of, or a derivative of, the SRD and therefore (under the terms of the OGL) must themselves be licensed under the OGL. (I'm reaching that 98% figure by treating ENworld as including the most informed 10% of the market, and then adjusting for the confusion I see on this forum. It's an approximate figure only.) When a mug punter walks into a gamestore and see "3.5 Thrives" their mind does not turn to the SRD. It turns to WotC's game.
If this is your view, I don't think I want to hire you as my marketer! The Paizo poster, in its marketing function, barely resembles a website. It is a poster which is intended to be displayed at points of sale where consumers might be attracted to purchasing something that they otherwise don't know about - and it does that by speaking to a need that Paizo believes the consumer is likely to feel - namely, the need to keep playing 3.5! (As Paizo says on its website, "Folded copies of this poster were sent to game stores everywhere".)
Given the wonderful ways of the interwebs, I'm sure the occasional stranger has found him- or herself on the OSRIC website without knowing what s/he was looking for - perhaps some downloads even took place (given that it's free - another huge difference from Paizo, who are marketing something - ie seeking to sell it in a marketplace).
Paizo is not some hokey backwoods operation that thought it might be fun to keep 3.5 alive as a lark, and then suddenly had commercial success thrust upon them. Paizo is a deliberate, and as it turns out wildly successful, entrepreneurial venture. It didn't post PF on a website and see if anyone wanted to buy it. It sent copies of its poster to game stores everywhere - gamestores with which I assume it already had links via its stewardship of the licensed WotC magazine - and - via that poster - pitched its game to the peope wandering into those gamestores thinking "I still like 3.5".
I'm not sure if your apparent naivety about Paizo's marketing - evident in a comparison of PF to a retroclone like OSRIC or Labyrinth Lords - is genuine or disingenuous. But I think it is a huge selling short of Paizo's guts and achievement. I'm personally not a big fan of 3E as a system, and therefore not a big fan of PF, so the fact that "3.5 Thrives" is of little personal importance to me. And although I am not familiar with more recent PF books like Ultimate Magic and so on, I personally don't see Paizo's achievements in retweaking 3E as any greater than those of (say) Monte Cook in designing AE/U. 3E, as a system, is ripe for tweaking in order to improve certain aspects of its play whilst preserving the overall chassis more or less intact.
But the way Paizo seized an entrepreneurial opportunity and then pushed it for all it's worth is pretty impressive. They were probably the only ones able to do so, both for technical reasons - their access to subscription lists, and what I assume would be their knowledge of the distribution and retail aspects of the market based on their publishing of the magazines - and for "brand loyalty"/"consumer perception" reasons, because they had been widely seen as terrific stewards of the magazines.
But being the only ones who could do so doesn't mean that success was guaranteed. WotC also has a lot of technical capacity as well as market penetration and goodwill, and so is a hard firm to go head-to-head with. Paizo took a chance - a calculated one, but still a chance - and it worked out for them. That's the essence of entrepreneruship. I personally think it is not really comparable to the retro-clones like OSRIC, etc. Those are sophisticiated hobby endeavours, not entrepreneurial ones.
As I've said I don't know PF stuff, but I like your characterisation of what is frustrating about a lot of RPG material - and not just D&D's.
Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap.
gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
That's not true. Not saying your LGS might not have had 3.5 books, but they weren't supposed to. WotC ordered all 3.5 books removed from the distribution channel, including books in existing LGSs, a year before Pathfinder was released. My LGS was long out of 3.5 books when I was still looking for some, about the time Pathfinder was still in Beta.
Paizo decided to create Pathfinder, as a result of not being able to supply a basic rules set to cover their AP productline. They would not be able to place adventures into distribution channels with a defunct game system, which is what 3.5 was at the time. Had 3.5 not been officially removed from the system, Paizo would not have needed to create Pathfinder.
Pathfinder was created to serve their main productline as a basic rules system. Since all their Dragon/Dungeon magazine support was based on WotC's 3.5 rules, they were already familiar with that, and thought it unnecessary to create a non-3.5 based game. So they created Pathfinder instead.
Imaro
Legend
Please stop misrepresenting my position when it comes to this... I addressed the retro-clones marketing in comparison to PF only in so far as each leveraging the D&D name for sales (which I had to clarify for you earlier). I even posted as much, which you conveniently ignored... or overlooked.
So if anyone is being disingenious it's you in choosing to continuously misrepresent my stance (which has been from the beginning that Pathfinder's success had little to do with their usage of the D&D name and much more to do with other factors.) and ignore many of the points I have brought up.
Imaro, you said this:
And that is primarily what I was replying to. You said that PF differs from OSRIC only in "larger audience", not in marketing speak. For the reasons I stated in my reply, I don't think that's remotely true - apart from anything else, OSRIC is not being sold into a market and so has no marketing speak.
But the bigger difference is this - Paizo sent a poster saying "3.5 Thrives" to "game stores everywhere". That is, they actively solicited purhcases from strangers by appealing to "v 3.5" - the version of D&D those potential customers has until recently been purchasing, and in most cases probably still were playing. This is radically different "marketing speak" and marketing activity from anything OSRIC has done - it has no reference to any version of D&D on any of its promotional verbiage (and, indeed, it is crucial to its tenuous legality that it not do so) whereas PF has such a reference front-and-centre on its widely distributed promotional poster.
As for disingenuity, I don't think I'm being disingenous at all. I'm saying what I think - PF is about entrepreneruship, and marketing, and using every possible technique to take ownership of a market that someone else created (namely, the market of people who will spend money on D&D 3.5 materials). The OSR retroclones are about hobby gaming. PF is a commercial product. The OSR retroclones are not (Castles and Crusades apart, but for that very reason - plus others - I woudn't categorise it as a retroclone). How much blunter do you want me to be?
EDIT: I may be in a minority by classifying RPG products by reference to their commercial characteristics rather than either (i) their legal characteristics (what trademarks they bear, what licences they are subject to, etc) or (ii) their textual characteristics (what rules, guidelines and fiction do they contain). But particularly when one is talking about the marketing of RPG products, and the creation of new markets for them or disputes between commercial competitors over existing markets, I think the classification that I am deploying is the overwhelmingly salient one.
And that is primarily what I was replying to. You said that PF differs from OSRIC only in "larger audience", not in marketing speak. For the reasons I stated in my reply, I don't think that's remotely true - apart from anything else, OSRIC is not being sold into a market and so has no marketing speak.
But the bigger difference is this - Paizo sent a poster saying "3.5 Thrives" to "game stores everywhere". That is, they actively solicited purhcases from strangers by appealing to "v 3.5" - the version of D&D those potential customers has until recently been purchasing, and in most cases probably still were playing. This is radically different "marketing speak" and marketing activity from anything OSRIC has done - it has no reference to any version of D&D on any of its promotional verbiage (and, indeed, it is crucial to its tenuous legality that it not do so) whereas PF has such a reference front-and-centre on its widely distributed promotional poster.
As for disingenuity, I don't think I'm being disingenous at all. I'm saying what I think - PF is about entrepreneruship, and marketing, and using every possible technique to take ownership of a market that someone else created (namely, the market of people who will spend money on D&D 3.5 materials). The OSR retroclones are about hobby gaming. PF is a commercial product. The OSR retroclones are not (Castles and Crusades apart, but for that very reason - plus others - I woudn't categorise it as a retroclone). How much blunter do you want me to be?
EDIT: I may be in a minority by classifying RPG products by reference to their commercial characteristics rather than either (i) their legal characteristics (what trademarks they bear, what licences they are subject to, etc) or (ii) their textual characteristics (what rules, guidelines and fiction do they contain). But particularly when one is talking about the marketing of RPG products, and the creation of new markets for them or disputes between commercial competitors over existing markets, I think the classification that I am deploying is the overwhelmingly salient one.
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Imaro
Legend
After this reply I'm through discussing this with you because you are, IMO, purposefully being disingenuous. You've taken a piece of a much larger discussion, quoted it out of the context of the entire discussion and then made the false claim that I've stated the "only" difference between OSRIC and Pathfinder are in their audience size when in fact that isn't the context in which retro-clones were brought up, and as I showed with the post you again choose to ignore, is not the entirety of what I said on the issue. Be as "blunt" as you want but you're arguing against goalposts you've constructed for yourself and attributed to me, so have fun.
