Is Pathfinder 2 Paizo's 4E?

[Tony Vargas]

You act as if being popular and providing what one thinks the best play experience would be are mutually exclusive... they aren't.

They needn't be. Depends on how close "what one thinks the best play experience" potentially might be is to what the market turns out to demand, at the moment.
If the market demands banging your head against a brick wall, and that's not your idea of a fine play experience, they're mutually exclusive. There's no accounting for taste.

...but...

As long as it doesn't tank the company, I'm glad they didn't. We already have one company producing a game to be popular; I'd rather they take their best shot at what they think the best play experience would be, even if it doesn't quite get there.

Jumping on the 5e bandwagon wouldn't be producing a game to be popular, it'd be producing supplements for a game that's already popular - and could even be producing said supplements /with the hope of providing the best play experience/ possible under that game.

 

[Campbell]

Here's the thing - I do not think Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford designed a game to be popular. Fifth Edition is not a direct distillation of feedback and focus groups because that's a horrible way to design a game or do anything creative. I think like all creative professionals they designed something they wanted to play that they believed would be acceptable. Based on a lot of commentary I have seen from Mike Mearls I firmly believe this was always the game he wanted to play and hoped others would too. There's a fairly direct line between Essentials and Fifth Edition.

 

[Eric V]

Here's the thing - I do not think Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford designed a game to be popular. Fifth Edition is not a direct distillation of feedback and focus groups because that's a horrible way to design a game or do anything creative. I think like all creative professionals they designed something they wanted to play that they believed would be acceptable. Based on a lot of commentary I have seen from Mike Mearls I firmly believe this was always the game he wanted to play and hoped others would too. There's a fairly direct line between Essentials and Fifth Edition.

You're reading it differently from me, I guess. From the ideas in the test packets to what we have now, a lot of sway was given to feedback; they've said so themselves. There are even times where they have said they thought an idea was good but the feedback was negative so they nixed it.

Because they have a new business goal with D&D (to be evergreen like Monopoly, Risk, etc.) they approached it differently...and they succeeded, without a doubt. The success is because they paid attention to what was popular and what wasn't. I don't see how that's a particularly controversial statement, tbh.

 

[Eric V]

Jumping on the 5e bandwagon wouldn't be producing a game to be popular, it'd be producing supplements for a game that's already popular - and could even be producing said supplements /with the hope of providing the best play experience/ possible under that game.

Yeah, I guess...but the designers may not have wanted to handcuff themselves that way if they felt the actual product of 5e wasn't as good as their own stuff.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, I guess...but the designers may not have wanted to handcuff themselves that way if they felt the actual product of 5e wasn't as good as their own stuff.

As good (or better) doesn't necessarily sell like as popular.

PF2 is very likely, by some valid criteria or for some set of preferences, a better game than 5e. Possibly much better. Heck, I might end up playing PF2 in preference to 5e, if given the chance (of course, I've felt that way about Savage Worlds before I finally tried it, and about 13A though the chance rarely presents itself).
But the 5e bandwagon is getting a lot more money thrown at it. Jumping on wouldn't've been a bad business idea for Paizo, given that their rep would have given them a strong position producing adventures & supplements.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Here's the thing - I do not think Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford designed a game to be popular. Fifth Edition is not a direct distillation of feedback and focus groups because that's a horrible way to design a game or do anything creative.

They sure painted it as a direct distillation of feedback. I agree it's not, or not just that. But popular, at least in the sense of broadly acceptable, was clearly a prime goal.

And it's not like anyone wants to produce a product that no one buys. Well, anyone actually running a company for profit.

I think like all creative professionals they designed something they wanted to play that they believed would be acceptable. Based on a lot of commentary I have seen from Mike Mearls I firmly believe this was always the game he wanted to play and hoped others would too. There's a fairly direct line between Essentials and Fifth Edition.

Essentials was also very much a response to 'feedback.' (If more of the ear-splitting screech sort.)

 

[Eric V]

As good (or better) doesn't necessarily sell like as popular.

No, it certainly doesn't.

As I wrote, I wouldn't want the company to go down, but barring that, I am glad they gave it their best creative shot.

 

[Garthanos]

You're reading it differently from me, I guess. From the ideas in the test packets to what we have now, a lot of sway was given to feedback; they've said so themselves.

The questions always seemed targetted to get the results they were after to me. At least in the first few till I got tired of it pretty fast being obvious that 4e fans were not actually welcome or their target audience. This is indeed pretty subjective we can suppose but I see it more like Campbell

 

[Campbell]

I think the idea that an independent publishing house could survive or even thrive off of becoming a third party publisher for another company's game is not necessarily a valid assumption to make. Fifth Edition makes Wizard of the Coast a lot of money. However, unless Matt Mercer or Matthew Colville are attached it has not proven to make anyone else a lot of money. Being #2 in the market, even if it remains a distant #2 provides Paizo with a good chunk of revenue.

Would they really be selling more books or get more prominent shelving space if they were selling source books and adventures for Fifth Edition?

Would they have to plan their release cycle around Fifth Edition? Paizo is already planning well into 2021.

If they start selling really well what does Wizards do to respond? What happens if there is an edition change?

I think the only way this would ever work is some sort of exclusive deal to make D&D branded products and given their history Paizo is loathe to attach themselves to anyone else's ship. They had to scramble and drastically change their business model because of decisions made by Wizards of the Coast before. Being independent to formulate business plans and steer their own ship might be worth it even if revenue is not as strong as it could be (I do not think that is the case anyway).

 

[Parmandur]

Here's the thing - I do not think Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford designed a game to be popular. Fifth Edition is not a direct distillation of feedback and focus groups because that's a horrible way to design a game or do anything creative. I think like all creative professionals they designed something they wanted to play that they believed would be acceptable. Based on a lot of commentary I have seen from Mike Mearls I firmly believe this was always the game he wanted to play and hoped others would too. There's a fairly direct line between Essentials and Fifth Edition.

Thing is, Mearls has detailed what he would do differently if he had his way rather than following through with making what people wanted (making the game a dice-pooling system, for instance). They really did go out of their way to figure out what the public wanted, and designed for it. To this day, surveys have veto power over new material, which is why there was no mass combat system published until Ghosts of Saltmarsh.