Would Paizo Make a Better Steward for Our Hobby?

[gamerprinter]

I think the point is that for the community it's better to have one overarching game that's "good enough" for most people to play, rather than 10 games that are each perfect for 10% of the community. That is, of course, a value statement based on whether you value the overall health of the RPG community (and if you have 5 gamer friends that you like playing with, you might very well not care), and that you feel a community organized around one communally shared game is a healthier one. A contentious view, but I can see the logic both for and against it.

It might be good for the proverbial "RPG community" for a single over-arching system to prevent fragmentation, I don't think that it is either realistic nor healthy for there to be one-way regarding anything for anyone. It may be true that fragmenting the player base hurts the RPG community overall and may lead to the end of RPGs in the long run - I don't ever want to participate in one way of thinking for anything: politics, religion, gaming, any subject. One game system sounds like monopoly to me, and would rather the community disappear altogether than to cleave to a single system just to prevent the game from becoming extinct.

 

[Cybit]

Anyone noticed we're pretty much stumbling along the same lines of reasoning that probably prompted the creation of the OGL?

 

[Jester David]

See, the problem is that Sour Grapes is precisely what created Pathfinder in the first place. I was there in the lobby of the hotel at D&D Experience when Jason was on the phone with people back at Paizo after having tried 4e D&D for the first time. I was just going to grab some food but I recognized him due to my experience with Living Greyhawk and stopped for a second to see what he was up to. I didn't mean to overhear, but the conversation was pretty much about how he didn't like 4e at all. I was extremely disappointed as I was a beta tester of 4e, already recruited to be an admin for Living Forgotten Realms, was at the convention running 4e before it even came out for people. I was really hoping that Jason might be getting back in to help us steward in a new campaign and edition. I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard and was curious about his whole opinion.

He proceeded to basically say that after one session of 4e, he hated everything about it and had no idea what they should do about that. I walked away disappointed that the game I was looking forward to was being trashed by someone I looked up to....especially after apparently so little experience with it. The books weren't even out and he was writing it off.

A couple of days later when Paizo announced that they were creating a whole new game that was based off the rules to 3.5e but with some houserules to fix the problems they had with it...I realized that I might have overheard what was basically the moment that Paizo decided to go ahead with their plans.

It seems to me that the entire impetus for Pathfinder was a snap decision over one bad play experience.

I don't disagree with this. It is true, from a certain point of view.

I wouldn't say "snap decision" so much as "forced to make a last minute decision". WotC didn't really leave Paizo much choice, not having the licence ready and not letting them test the game. So instead Paizo had to spend company funds to send someone across the country to play at a convention, all because WotC didn't want to send someone across town with the rules and an NDA to get Paizo on board.
Things might have gone very different had Paizo sent a different staff member, someone whose play style was more in line with 4e.

Still, it wasn't a decision made in a vacuum. Many of their fans were uncertain of 4e and wanted Paizo to stick with 3e. Again, had WotC done a better job of winning people over there might have been fewer people pushing Paizo to stick with 3e.

I personally believe that Pathfinder has caused way more damage to the hobby than anything else. In the past, when a new edition came out there were basically 4 choices: Continue playing with outdated rules out of principle, switch to a new game system, ride the wave of people switching to the new edition while ignoring the stuff about it you didn't like, or stop playing altogether. Paizo added a 5th option: Continue playing the same edition but with a different name and company with new books coming out.

In the past every option except riding the wave forward was a bad one. Stick with the same edition and wind up with no one to play with, switch to a lesser popular system and have the same problem, stop playing and you don't get to play at all.

I can't say I agree with this. Many, many gamers didn't upgrade from 1e to 2e. While it became harder to find groups it was not impossible. Especially with the internet. And, really, many gamers already had groups so it wasn't a matter of finding players so much as maintaining players.

It's the publisher's job to make people WANT to play their game. They can't just count on people playing because there's no other option. If a game publisher cannot convince people to play than another game publisher will win people over, like White Wolf was doing while TSR was imploding. That's capitalism at work. Bigby's invisible hand. Even without another option I think 4e would not have done well. It might have taken longer to collapse but it would have still ended.

Most people who didn't like 3e still switched to it...because there were no other good options. And eventually they grew to like it.

The problem with the switch to 4e is that no one had time to get used to it. Even before the game came out there was the option to bypass it entirely created by a well known company who pretty much said "We hate 4e so much that we can't support it in good conscience." Which, I believe, led to the situation we have now.

Stockholm Syndrom isn't a great way to keep people buying your product.

And 4e had a full year to win people over before Pathfinder was really in stores. The Alpha playtest saw very limited release. And, really, for many 3e players at the time the reaction to Pathfinder could have been summarized as "I already bought the 3e rules twice, why do I want them a third time?"
And back in 2007, Paizo was not nearly as well known. I was vaguely aware of them as the Dragon and Dungeon company, but mostly after the news of the licence being lost.
And I don't recall them saying anything like "We hate 4e so much that we can't support it in good conscience." I suppose I could check the archive of their website.

WotC had every opportunity to win people over to 4e. Instead, people stuck with 3e until they slowly heard about this company that was producing updated 3e products. And they slowly started switching.
At the end of the day, WotC dropped the ball and was unable to win people over. People like me tried 4e and played for a year but eventually decided I liked 3e more and swapped back.

 

[Kinak]

See, the problem is that Sour Grapes is precisely what created Pathfinder in the first place.

Seriously, the person you were eavesdropping on has posted in this thread. You could ask him what was going on or, if that's awkward, perform some basic googling.

You could find, for instance, his version of the conversation you eavesdropped on:

I also went to D&D Experience during this time to check out 4th Edition; after playing the game, and talking to many of the fans at the show, it became clear to me that we were doing the right thing for our fans, our world, and the company.

Or the reason he had to go to the D&D Experience to find out about the game:

Early in 2008, it was becoming apparent that Paizo was in a bind. We still had not seen 4th Edition (or what would become the GSL) and we were starting to run into the part of the year where we were supposed to be working on products for Gen Con. Realizing that we were running out of time, Lisa called a summit at her house to discuss our options.

Even if there was nothing else wrong with your statements, the Pathfinder RPG was already under development at the time he played 4e for the first time.

To phrase that a different way: They had to choose whether to support 4th or launch their own RPG without ever having played 4th. No one was even sure there would be a GSL, let alone seen it.

But if you want to blame their decision on something that hadn't happened yet, based on a conversation you heard half of, I obviously can't stop you. I'd really rather you didn't, though.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So not supporting an edition you don't like damages the hobby? WotC is now synonymous with the hobby? Consumers shouldn't get to pick which game they prefer?

The gall of Paizo to have the temerity to publish a game other than Dungeons and Dragons (and the gall to be successful with it)!

I'm sorry, but I don't think that not liking the sensibilities of 4e makes one an antigamer. I get that some people don't like 3e and its offspring, but I would never accuse them of doing the hobby harm by preferring a game other than the one I prefer.

No, disliking 4e doesn't make someone an antigamer. There were people who hated D&D all along. They played other games.

My problem wasn't that Paizo published a game. It's that they published 3.5e D&D...again. And they published it based on a knee jerk reaction to 4e and an aversion to change. Aversion to change is a really common human trait. It rarely does us any good. However, it's really easy to predict that given the choice to change or stay the same most people will stay the same unless there is a REALLY good reason to change.

So, when 4e came out...the easiest thing for people to do was to stick with what they knew: 3.5e. But there was a really good reason to switch: No more 3.5e books and the majority of their friends hopping on the 4e bandwagon. Paizo gave everyone an easy out by making it easy to avoid change: Play their game that was almost identical to 3.5e D&D.

Sure, it was a great strategy for making money. But it made the community fall apart. It caused the edition wars to be louder and more angry than they ever would have been without it.

A number of my friends were RIGHT on the edge of playing 4e with us, they had huge doubts about the game because of how different it was but they were willing to give it a try until they heard about Pathfinder. Then almost all of them decided that it was better to stick with a game system that was more like what they were used to. A game system that promised it was completely compatible with 3.5e so they didn't even have to buy new books, they could just play characters directly out of the 3.5e PHB(this was later changed, but it was one of the first advertised traits of Pathfinder). Most of them didn't even try 4e because of that. They had just "heard bad things" and therefore wouldn't even keep an open mind. I don't even see half of them anymore because most of the time we spent together was gaming and we no longer play the same games.

 

[Wicht]

So, when 4e came out...the easiest thing for people to do was to stick with what they knew: 3.5e. But there was a really good reason to switch: No more 3.5e books and the majority of their friends hopping on the 4e bandwagon. Paizo gave everyone an easy out by making it easy to avoid change: Play their game that was almost identical to 3.5e D&D.

That's a nice story, but its not actually what happened. Paizo produced Pathfinder and, sure, a percentage of gamers stuck with it, maybe 10-15% of the base at first. But then as time progressed, 4e continued to lose support. We aren't talking people that refused to switch, we are talking about people who switched, didn't like it and then switched over to Pathfinder. The 10-15% grew to about 25-30% and then over about 2 years to 50%. In the meantime Paizo began to attract new players and grow their brand. People,many people did give 4e a try and decided they simply did not like it enough.

WotC dropped the ball. They were the market leader. It was their ball to drop. Its a bit misguided, imo, to blame anyone else for their poor performance.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Even if there was nothing else wrong with your statements, the Pathfinder RPG was already under development at the time he played 4e for the first time.

To phrase that a different way: They had to choose whether to support 4th or launch their own RPG without ever having played 4th. No one was even sure there would be a GSL, let alone seen it.

But if you want to blame their decision on something that hadn't happened yet, based on a conversation you heard half of, I obviously can't stop you. I'd really rather you didn't, though.

I'm aware of the situation at the time. There was really no good options for Paizo, I admit. And WOTC really dropped the ball in letting 3rd party companies in on their plans. I think they at least partially did this to themselves. Paizo was one of the most trusted 3rd party companies making D&D products at the time. If they had given then advanced copies of the rules and maybe even wrote up a preliminary license just for them, I think most of this mess could have been avoided. They didn't leave Paizo much choice.

Though "Pathfinder" was in development for a while before 4e came out, I'm led to believe by a bunch of comments made at the time that "Pathfinder" as it stood at that time was mostly a set of House Rules that Jason had written up for 3.5e and was using in his home games. I certainly got the impression that the company was leaning toward supporting 4e when they sent him there. After all, it was likely that most people would switch to a new edition and developing products to go with the new edition would make money.

However, since they didn't like 4e when they tried it, they simply thought "Great, I'm not going to be playing this new D&D...what am I going to do now? Well, there's that set of house rules I've been working on to fix 3.5e. I guess we could publish those and just keep releasing adventures for 3.5e. Wait, maybe if I spend some extra time thinking about it, we could come up with even more house rules and just release a new PHB with all the bugs fixed. Let's do that." Which became Pathfinder.

I certainly don't envy the position they were in and they certainly made the right decision for themselves. It just had a side effect of causing a larger rift in the community than there would have been without them.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

That's a nice story, but its not actually what happened. Paizo produced Pathfinder and, sure, a percentage of gamers stuck with it, maybe 10-15% of the base at first. But then as time progressed, 4e continued to lose support. We aren't talking people that refused to switch, we are talking about people who switched, didn't like it and then switched over to Pathfinder. The 10-15% grew to about 25-30% and then over about 2 years to 50%. In the meantime Paizo began to attract new players and grow their brand. People,many people did give 4e a try and decided they simply did not like it enough.

WotC dropped the ball. They were the market leader. It was their ball to drop. Its a bit misguided, imo, to blame anyone else for their poor performance.

I think both sides are to blame. A number of my friends didn't try 4e at all. A bunch of them claimed they were tired of buying books and would never buy another one again because WOTC had screwed them over by selling them a book a month for so many years straight then suddenly coming out with a new edition that made all those books useless. They didn't care what 4e looked like. They told me so each and every time I tried to convince them to come out and try it. They didn't want to try it in case they liked it. They were just going to keep playing 3.5e forever. Most of them bought Pathfinder books 2 or 3 years later when the Pathfinder community became big enough that half their group wanted to switch.

Out of the rest of my friends who did switch to 4e, most of them continued playing it until about 2011. Fatigue set in to a lot of them and they stopped playing altogether and we lost a couple of people to Pathfinder. The rest of them stopped playing shortly after 5e was announced. At that point a bunch of people I know felt abandoned again by WOTC. They still liked 4e, but felt like WOTC wasn't going to support the game anymore so they might as well move on. They eagerly awaited the next edition coming out right away. Then when most of them were told it was going to be 2 or 3 years before 5e would come out, they completely lost faith in them. Almost all of them switched to Pathfinder because that's where all the people are. Pathfinder Society now runs twice a week at stores in the city and they have a huge population of players.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It might be good for the proverbial "RPG community" for a single over-arching system to prevent fragmentation, I don't think that it is either realistic nor healthy for there to be one-way regarding anything for anyone. It may be true that fragmenting the player base hurts the RPG community overall and may lead to the end of RPGs in the long run - I don't ever want to participate in one way of thinking for anything: politics, religion, gaming, any subject. One game system sounds like monopoly to me, and would rather the community disappear altogether than to cleave to a single system just to prevent the game from becoming extinct.

I got into the hobby because there was already a community. I played my first game of Red Box D&D when I was 12 or somewhere around there. I liked it, but I only knew one person who played: my next door neighbor. I didn't like him very much so I never played again....until I was 15 and I found out people were playing D&D on BBSes. I found a BBS where there were 20 different games of D&D and other RPGs running in message boards. There were discussion groups for people who liked D&D. When I realized that this was something that people actually liked and played it felt like there were other people out there who liked the same things as I did.

I met my first real DM on my BBS. He paged me to ask if he could start a Robotech RPG on my message boards. We got to talking and he invited me to his weekly RPG group that has 12 people in it and played nearly every RPG. However, 80% of the time we played D&D as it was everyone's favorite. Some of the people in that group are still my friends to this day, 20 years later.

I've stayed friends with them mainly by playing D&D. It's what we have to talk about. To me, the D&D community is the exact same thing as my friend circle. We are held together by D&D and a schism in the D&D community means I lose friends.

I have a group of friends that I met through Living Greyhawk. We all used to travel to conventions and see each other a couple of times a year. We could talk for hours about our experiences with the adventures that were released and our opinions of certain feats or spells. Now, we see each other ONLY at GenCon. When we meet, we go out for dinner and have nothing in common to talk about. They play Pathfinder, I play D&D Next playtests. They haven't bothered to try D&D Next and they have no real desire to learn about it.

Without a community, I have very little desire to play D&D at all. I mean, I enjoy it but it lacks that extra joy that goes along with having people who like the same thing as you do. I kind of hate WoW, but all my friends play it. Most of them are the former D&D friends that I don't see anymore because they've abandoned D&D for WoW. A day doesn't go by that I don't think "Maybe I should just buy WoW because then I'd be part of the community again."

D&D Next really scares me. I like it a lot. However, if it doesn't manage to convince some of my friends to return to playing with me...I might have to give it up and just play WoW instead. Which is disappointing.

 

[Jester David]

My problem wasn't that Paizo published a game. It's that they published 3.5e D&D...again. And they published it based on a knee jerk reaction to 4e and an aversion to change. Aversion to change is a really common human trait. It rarely does us any good. However, it's really easy to predict that given the choice to change or stay the same most people will stay the same unless there is a REALLY good reason to change.

If you try something new and don't like it it's not an aversion to change, it' sand aversion to that change. Change is neither good nor bad, it's just... change. Neutral. There can be great changes and terrible changes and changes that are personally good to you while being personally bad to someone else.

So, when 4e came out...the easiest thing for people to do was to stick with what they knew: 3.5e. But there was a really good reason to switch: No more 3.5e books and the majority of their friends hopping on the 4e bandwagon. Paizo gave everyone an easy out by making it easy to avoid change: Play their game that was almost identical to 3.5e D&D.

The easiest thing is to stick yes, to keep playing and not buy any new books. An medium change is swapping to a very different system. A hard change is swapping to a *slightly* different system where you kinda know the rules but not always so you have to check and can never be sure if you're remembering the old rule or the new or a house rule.

Pathfinder is very tricky to swap from 3e from for that reason. And it's hard to convince people to buy the same books yet again.

Sure, it was a great strategy for making money.

It's also a great strategy for losing money if your competitor turns out to have a great game. Or people stick with what they have.

But it made the community fall apart. It caused the edition wars to be louder and more angry than they ever would have been without it.

The community was already falling apart. The edition war and split would have happened anyway. It was happening anyway back when Pathfinder was new and few people gave it a second thought.
If you want someone to blame for the edition war, it's everyone else. Paizo and WotC get alone fine and buy each other's content. The original employees of Paizo were the WotC periodical department, there are 3-4 other WotC refugees hired after layoffs and the CEO of Paizo was the first employee at WotC.
Really, Paizo is what you get when you apply the Ship of Theseus paradox to WotC...

A number of my friends were RIGHT on the edge of playing 4e with us, they had huge doubts about the game because of how different it was but they were willing to give it a try until they heard about Pathfinder. Then almost all of them decided that it was better to stick with a game system that was more like what they were used to. A game system that promised it was completely compatible with 3.5e so they didn't even have to buy new books, they could just play characters directly out of the 3.5e PHB(this was later changed, but it was one of the first advertised traits of Pathfinder). Most of them didn't even try 4e because of that. They had just "heard bad things" and therefore wouldn't even keep an open mind. I don't even see half of them anymore because most of the time we spent together was gaming and we no longer play the same games.

Bolded the relevant section. Had they heard "4e is amazing" or "it's the best edition of D&D ever." They might have been more willing to switch.
Had the presentation and marketing and build up to 4e been better things might have been different. Had 4e been what people wanted Pathfinder wouldn't have sold out its first printing at launch a year after 4e was released.

WotC didn't give them a reason to switch, didn't encourage and motivate people enough to try their game. They just assume everyone would play and switch because it was D&D. They've said as much in interviews the last few years.
That's on them and no one else.

So, really, the best lesson is that WotC might not have been the best stewards of the hobby...