Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8305668" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Okay, here's my view on what went down there (and note there's some evidence that Pathfinder was briefly number one):Paizo was a well respected producer of adventures for D&D3 and 3.5.  They also, if I'm not conflating them with someone else, produced both Dungeon and Dragon for a while.Along comes D&D 4e.  I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of whether that edition was a fundamental mistake, if there were presentation problems, if there was enemy action in the form of people on the Net actively trying to sabotage it, or any of that; I don't have enough of a dog in that fight (I respect 4e's design, but don't particularly like it), and it doesn't particularly matter.  What matters is that there were a pretty impressive number of 3e players who, for whatever reason, did not want to make the jump to 4e.  They wanted to stick with 3e.So Paizo, essentially, gave them what they wanted: a somewhat cleaned up 3.5 that Paizo was going to continue supplying support for (all as a consequence of the OGL).  Its success was a mix of having a more than competent company (not only familiar with the system and capable of doing what was, effectively, a thought through set of house rules for 3.5, but capable of making it look good and get into distribution, coming from a company a lot of 3e fans already respect), the option the OGL presented, and the particular zeitgeist of the moment in the D&D community.(This comes up a lot when discussion of the sales of PF 2e are brought up.  Even though the latter seems to be doing perfectly respectable sales, a lot of people seem to want to think its a failure because its not doing PF 1e numbers, even though those numbers were almost certainly only possible because of the perfect storm of the 3e-4e D&D transition and likely will not be duplicated  ever.)</blockquote>

Verification