Pathfinder 2E Is It Time for PF2 "Essentials"?

[teitan]

1. continuing to support the most popular edition of D&D <=== PF2e lost this

this is not the same issue as it was when 4e came out. Back then 3.5 still dominated the market and people & companies were blindsided by the 4e announcement. I mean sure, speculation was always rampant but that happens all the time anyway. There is even a prominent D&D YouTuber who is posting spec videos on that and everything is evidence. Now? Or even 2019 when 2e came out? Not so much. While it appears the RPG market has grown its really D&D 5e has grown and the tide slightly rose for everyone else. 3.5 is also no longer the most popular version of the game and PF1 was extremely long in the tooth.

1. High-quality adventure paths <=== Not great now, but can be fixed

lots of buzz on Abomination Vaults.

1. Sunk cost (i.e. "I already have all these books, I want to use them!") <=== PF2e lost this

every rpg ever. A second edition always fractures a market for a period of time and some will never come back.

1. Far better 3rd-party support than WotC <=== PF2e lost this

Continuing to support 3.5 or similar games is not the concern, most of the D20 publishers have moved on to their own systems or publish materials to support 5e and the fact is 3rd Party support isn’t all that important, even for 5e. It makes minimal impact on sales and doesn’t benefit Paizo (in the case of PF) or WOTC with 5e. Not anywhere near the levels it did in the D20 era. It’s more of a nice thing that fans like.

1. Organized play <=== PFS is fine!

 

[teitan]

I suspect, and this is, at best, informed speculation on my part, that the people who found the 4e experience really didn't suit them found the 5e one tolerable even if it wasn't entirely what they wanted, and the network factor did the rest.

I dunno. While WOTC marketed 4e very poorly they weren’t wrong on the issues with 3.5. Pathfinder seemed to address a lot of them. 5e wasn’t just tolerable, it is well done and pretty universal in that conversion of Basic and 1-3.5 era adventures can even be done on the fly opening up the nostalgia market as well. That was a huge deal in 2015 especially with the biggest criticism of 4e was that it didn’t feel like D&D. 5e feels like D&D, has all the best bits & bobbles of each edition (a lot from 4e even with different names) and by emphasizing ease of play, especially for the DM, back to OSR levels, they made the game easy for anyone to learn again.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

It really doesn't help that all the insinuations that Pathfinder 2e are niche or doing badly, are based on data that's... controversial at best, due to mitigating factors in the reliability of the sources employed. As far as Paizo's words, and actions, we have every reason to believe they're doing well-- we have statements from Lisa Stevens that Pathfinder 2e is doing well, Paizo has been consistently expanding their team and promoting within, and the product lines haven't experienced any meaningful slowdown beyond what the designers discussed as finishing up the crunch to get what they saw as essential out. There's demonstrable growth in the community, much of which is driven by players who were previously playing 5e and will happily describe the benefits of their own decisions to switch.

Most of the posters who are attempting to autopsy the still-thriving game seem to consistently demonstrate an irritation that it wasn't their own idea of a fantasy heartbreaker, or sanctimoniously denouncing its lack of submission to 5e's design choices. Now I think 5e is a fine game for fine people, I played it myself for years, but it always felt like it compromised too much. It's like it purchased its benefits at too high a cost, and that the main reason I was playing it, was a mix of a few next gen feeling rules that made me not want to go back, and the fact that everyone else was playing it too (as well as unfulfilled promises of modular complexity, looking at you legends and lore.)

Pathfinder 2e is the right game for me and my friends, its the right game for a growing number of people who were dissatisfied with 5e. It doesn't have to overtake 5e to be successful, and I don't even think Paizo ever treated that as a desirable goal. Which was the right move, they can sell to a growing base of users who want what 5e gave up, with all the innovations 2e does bring to streamline, simplify, and balance the games that came before. For some of us, 5e made a deal with proverbial devil in the way it goes about its design, which was absolutely the right move for many gamers and for WOTC itself. But no decision is the right decision for every gamer, and Pathfinder 2e do what Dungeons and Dragons 5e don't.

Pathfinder 2e supports system mastery and character choice, because well optimized characters are definitely stronger than non optimized ones, but not to the degree that it presents a problem. The game can offer nail biting challenges, but it certainly doesn't have to, provided the GM actually cares to read the game's own guidelines. The game provides deeper support for exploration and downtime, though obviously these rules take up space.

Its a great game, and lots of people like it, at a certain point, you're stripping out desirable function in streamlining, so its nice that there's a game that offers that 5e doesn't, I expect it to go on succeeding and snowballing as it spreads.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I feel like this is just such a bad read of things. You're talking about art style, not substance,

I'm talking about how you communicate your product to potential customers. The first thing most people interact with is your visual presentation. If your game is about a Madmaxian post-apocalyptic wasteland or spacefaring fighter jocks blasting frog-people back to the black hole they came from, presumably, your box art will not feature a bearded dwarf wielding an axe against dragon.

What's this say to somebody who doesn't know anything about Pathfinder? It says, "I'm a knock-off of Dungeons & Dragons." If I'm already happy with D&D, I'm uninterested. If I'm not interested in D&D, I'm definitely uninterested. If I'm unhappy with D&D, depending on why I'm unhappy, I might still be uninterested (I might be sick to death of gangs of medieval murderhobos killing ogres and dragons). The presentation screams that this is is a product designed to appeal to sophisticated RPG consumers who already know who Paizo is. This boils down to people who already love Paizo and will buy whatever they make if it's any good, and people who love D&D themes and want a new mechanical twist on them. It's extremely limited, because the market of "D&D fans who feel like the latest game from WotC completely lost the plot and fails at meeting basic expectations" ain't there no more.

and your point is just that much with GURPS because it has a mold-breaking setting: Infinite Worlds. That whole setting of multiversal intrigue and adventure where you can fight world-hopping mirror fascists, supertech Nazis, modern wizards, sentient dinosaurs, a Rome that never fell, superheros, and anything else you can think of. That's totally not regular dungeon fantasy and it's honestly awesome: I adore that book and everything in it.

This sounds like a commercially terrible idea that sold horribly. [Reading your next sentence, it was.]

Your mistake is saying that the market views "fantasy heartbreakers" as D&D clones when, really, every RPG is viewed as a D&D clone. To take a comparison from another thread, D&D is the Kleenex of the RPG industry and basically everything in the industry is defined by it. "D&D but space", "D&D but the 1980s", "D&D but cyberpunk", "D&D but _______" is how things are viewed regardless because for most people, D&D is RPGs.

I don't think VtM was viewed as a D&D clone in the 1990s. Granted, a lot of people saw it as "goobers reading poetry to each other between dice rolls," but it was definitely different than spelunking dungeons to get loot.

As to Starfinder, I dunno. It doesn't interest me, but I suppose it's gotta interest some people as it seems relatively popular. Beyond Star Wars, what other setting are out there that might be doing better? Traveler? Phase Eclipse?

Starfinder interested me right up until I found it was going to be, thematically speaking, Off-Brand Forgotten Realms in space. I'll allude to something else I said. Go back to when D&D got big, and you see it's riding a wave of sword & sorcery popularity that is as much fueled by everything from Conan the Barbarian to Masters of the Universe as anything TSR was doing. VtM was successful for the same reason; you had that kind of dark, gloomy ethos everywhere in the 1990s, whether we're talking about Trent Reznor tearing up the charts, or movies like The Crow. I think if you were going to try to build success off something truly different, you'd try to build off current pop culture trends.

 

[S'mon]

The problem with supporting 5E is that instantly makes having your own system worthless: why produce a system when you are supporting the most popular and profitable system out there? Why convert to your system when they can just get everything in the system they already have.

I get people wanting 5E Paizo support, but that doesn't really benefit Paizo at all if they intend to have their own system.

If they prioritise having their own system over making money, well that's up to them I guess, they're not a public company with shareholders to account to AFAIK. But in business terms forcing people to convert to your house system as a point of pride doesn't seem like the best approach, and is a bit odd considering they've always ridden D&D's coat tails - and done well doing so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I dunno. While WOTC marketed 4e very poorly they weren’t wrong on the issues with 3.5. Pathfinder seemed to address a lot of them. 5e wasn’t just tolerable, it is well done and pretty universal in that conversion of Basic and 1-3.5 era adventures can even be done on the fly opening up the nostalgia market as well. That was a huge deal in 2015 especially with the biggest criticism of 4e was that it didn’t feel like D&D. 5e feels like D&D, has all the best bits & bobbles of each edition (a lot from 4e even with different names) and by emphasizing ease of play, especially for the DM, back to OSR levels, they made the game easy for anyone to learn again.

I'm not convinced it was necessarily "well done" by the standards of people who really liked 3.5, however. My point was that it was closer to what they wanted than 4e was, though, and the network benefit made up the rest. The OSR crowd was a separate issue since we were talking about 3.5 diehards, and to at least a lot of the OSR crowd, 3.0 D&D was the debbil.

 

[S'mon]

It really doesn't help that all the insinuations that Pathfinder 2e are niche or doing badly, are based on data that's... controversial at best, due to mitigating factors in the reliability of the sources employed. As far as Paizo's words, and actions, we have every reason to believe they're doing well...

Surely Amazon sales or Roll20 % played, while far from being precise measures of success, are at least objective measures. Which you can hardly say about a company's own reports of how well it's doing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If they prioritise having their own system over making money, well that's up to them I guess, they're not a public company with shareholders to account to AFAIK. But in business terms forcing people to convert to your house system as a point of pride doesn't seem like the best approach, and is a bit odd considering they've always ridden D&D's coat tails - and done well doing so.

On the other hand, they aren't competing with Kobold Press and a lot of other people who are doing 5e support, and aren't in the situation of figuring out if WOTC is going to undercut some product they sell the next week by selling their own version of it. Adventures aren't the only thing Paizo does, and adventures and monster books are the primary third party support you can produce that isn't potentially asking the main company to cut your legs out from under you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Surely Amazon sales or Roll20 % played, while far from being precise measures of success, are at least objective measures. Which you can hardly say about a company's own reports of how well it's doing.

It doesn't matter how objective it is if its measuring the wrong things. As noted, Paizo is set up so a rather lot of their book sales are done in-house, so that's a whole swath of sales the Amazon numbers aren't showing.

 

[darjr]

@Thomas Shey That’s a huge maybe. And if you’re trying to tell me they are selling a significant amount of core books compared to Amazon you’re going to have to have something, anything, to back that up.