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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OpsKT" data-source="post: 7647797" data-attributes="member: 70780">Thanks for this. I was not calling you or Lisa lairs (as implied by another earlier) but as a general academic rule, you mistrust numbers you don't see yourself unless you at least know how they were gathered. Thank you. That makes sense as a way to have gathered those numbers that would be accurate. It sounds like this is a terminology difference based on matters of scale. In my business classes (currently in senior year finishing a second Bachelor's degree in Business Information Systems) we discussed flight to quality as what happens when large mass manufactures contract around the goods/lines that both sell well and have a high margin. For example, GM cutting the popular lines of Pontiac and Saturn, even thought the consumers were buying them and they were popular because the margins were still too low even with people buying them as very popular brands. I could see in a smaller market where that contraction would be more of a response to consumer actions than margins, but only to a point. Star Wars Saga Edition was very popular, but WotC decided to end it because in part it had too low a margin with the licensing fees. That said, how much of this flight to quality is due to the game being good, as opposed to the perception that the game is good? While Pathfinder is a decent system, it was built on the bones of D&D v3.5, and as a result has most of the problems that v3.5 had intact. 4e has it's own set of problems (while I think that both games problems stem form being level based over 'organic' that is a topic for another time and thread), but at least it is more consistent among levels with those problems. Pathfinder still has 'liner fighter, quadratic wizard' issues even with the new gifts to the martial style classes. Or, and this is impossible to easily measure I'd admit, but should be considered, how much of this perceived flight to quality is due to the edition wars and the perception that one game is winning over the other? While the edition wars have pretty much drove me away from running both, how many feel like they have to be forced into one or the other to find people to play with? Which is a shame, because I do believe there is room for both, as each does the 'Generic Fantasy' genre with a different feel. Part of this, I think, is that in the industry, the GMs have an unusual amount of clout. In video games, anyone can buy and play. In TRPGs, it is often the DM who buys, runs, plans, and chooses the game for the entire group (in part, often because they have the money to buy this stuff). I give you full credit and award for being a good enough man to admit that was a mistake and not try and gloss over it. I don't care what the people on the Eve Online forums might say about you, you just earned big points in my book. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Do I really think the companies as a whole are encouraging the edition wars? No, of course not. That's bad business form to attack your competitors directly. But do I believe that marketing people might be taking advantage of that? Sure, to a point. We're all human. We want to feel like we've made the right product choice and that we 'won.' But the industry as a whole would be well served by doing what they can to get everyone back in the Big Tent®, and then working with the consumers to figure out how to get more people to come in the front flap and see what we have to offer. In this we fully agree, and before I finally deleted my account and quit their forums because I was sick of the edition wars, I said very similar things often on the boards at WotC. Let me ask you if this makes sense -- I have been saying since the first Character Builder was released that the CB should be a free product to use (online or offline, doesn't matter). It would let you pick your powers, do the math, and so on. And it would make you a character sheet. But only the sheet. No power and item cards. Powers and feats just listed by name. To know what all that stuff you added to it DOES (read: your powers and magic items, rituals for certain caster classes), you'd need to own the books that stuff was in. Therefore, WotC would give away convenience with the CB, but actually encourage people to buy the books.  Does that make sense based on your experience? And, if it does, would Paizo consider doing that for Pathfinder?And as an end note, to someone else --Well, it does actually. They are called Amazon (where I get most of my physical game books because my UFLGS never has stock) and DriveThruRPG. If the companies started doing Kindle editions, I'd get those via Amazon (for supplements, I still like physical core books to reference at a table).</blockquote>

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