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And proving that anecdotal evidence is worthless, last year at two conventions I ran games at (one gaming, one general sci-fi/fantasy), a majority of my players (4/7 in one and 5/6 in the other) were 25 or under, with the youngest being an eight year old girl. None were accompanied by parents...

Quoted for emphasis. The internet works 24/7, but the Brand Team doesn't report to work until 8 AM Pacific (which is 11 AM Eastern) on Monday.

80 powers/30 levels = an average of 2 2/3 powers per level. Assuming that, as they've said, some levels don't have corresponding powers ("You can only slice the cake so thin"), say every third level, that's still 80 powers/20 levels for 4 powers per level (and probably still a higher number at...

When a company is purchased by another company, its records become the property of the purchasing company.

The guys at Wizards talk about - and have been talking about for several years - the methods they use for market research. They send out surveys. They use focus groups both in-house and off-site. They, yes, pay attention to message boards, not just theirs but others also. So yes, there's quite a...

Agreed. In the most active year (2006) of 3E, Wizards put out 3 sourcebooks or large adventures per month, for a total of 36 products in that year.

I'm listening to the Tome's interview with Erik Mona and the thing that I notice that he keeps talking about is "doing it the way we did it before." Nowhere do we hear "trying new things." And that's really in the end my biggest beef with Pathfinder: It's all about retreading the ground we've...

I've seen customer surveys (those little white cards you're supposed to fill out and send in) in the back of roughly 50% of all Wizards products I've ever bought. I've never seen any in Paizo's. Which is why it worries me that Paizo is using their message boards for feedback... message boards...

Because I've taken apart and put back together 3E in as many ways as I can think of, and none of the reconfigurations is particularly interesting to me. So a new version of the game that starts from "let's make sure the math works on all levels" appeals strongly to me.

The 6th is a Friday, the 9th is the following Monday. Speaking as somebody who works with a corporate ordering system for a living, unless you specifically ask for Saturday delivery, they don't deliver on Saturday. Because of the slight uncertainties of the shipping system, they can't send an...

We don't have Books-A-Million, but neither Barnes & Noble nor Borders carries Pathfinder in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. My understanding is that WotC intends to get the 4E Basic Game into toy stores (like T-R-U) and big-box discounters (Target and Wal-Mart).

It's not really all that widespread. There are about an estimated 5.5 million people playing D&D regularly (defined as once or more a month). That 5,000 downloads is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total number of active D&D players. I'd also be interested in knowing the churn rate of...

To be honest, Pathfinder doesn't make sense. It's gratuitously incompatible with 3.5 despite advertising compatibility with it. 3.5 adventures played with Pathfinder characters are going to need a lot of work to make sure that the adventurers don't walk through the module, while Pathfinder...

I read that in an editorial several years after the fact, so if it's bad information it's at least secondhand bad information. I yield to the greater knowledge on this.

That is a bad, bad example. Microsoft had more capital at that point than anybody else in the business bar IBM. They also had their OS and office software installed on 80% or more of every IBM/compatible installation, and a wide reputation for quality software (scoff if you like, it's true)...

A "Fantasy" or "OGL" heartbreaker is a game that somebody obviously put a lot of effort into, that is doomed to marketplace failure (or at least to low sales) because of insufficient differentiation from D&D, insufficient cash for marketing and so forth. Somebody (that being Paizo) is obviously...

Pathfinder is printed in China...

No (sorry, I should have used different terminology, but "playtest" was the first thing that came to mind). I downloaded the PDFs from here and ran a game last weekend. Granted things could run differently in the "real" game with more abilities available, but from what I saw, once you start...

In my first playtest session, my players blew through their dailies very early on and had to run on per-encounters and at-wills for about ~70% of the session (the party rested up just before they hit the BBEG). That was very tense - the PEs are good but not THAT good, and you always blow through...

If it were that simple, there would be at least two and probably many more commercially dominant RPGs. There aren't; there is only D&D and to a much lesser extent World of Darkness - according to CGM, an industry trade magazine, D&D has four times the sell-through of WoD, which itself has four...