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

[transmission89]

While not knowing the specifics, I expect they had reach the diminishing returns part of the product line cycle. This is not exactly an uncommon event in the industry, which is why you get what is sometimes dismissively referred to as "edition churn".

Yes, this is what I was alluding to. Effectively, just maintaining pf1 was unviable.

 

[S'mon]

Funny to hear 4E mentioned as a beast to run. To me it's the only edition of D&D I am comfortable running out of the box. I suppose it comes down to perspective on prepping, vs. actual game-time as well as personal preference on how much interaction you have to do with the mathematical system vs. the narrative.

4E prep-work is extremely easy. Setting up encounters is a piece of cake, and it's much easier to plan narratives because player capabilities are much more defined.

I agree about the prep-work. 4e D&D is the only edition with an actual functional encounter-building system, so good I actually used it (sometimes)!
'Planning Narratives' - hm, this is the kind of pre-plotting I don't generally like doing, I find it draining and uninspiring. I'm very much a 'play to see what happens' GM, and 4e is not friendly to sandboxing. But it does do cinematic, dramatic story arcs well. I certainly loved at least the first 20 levels of my 1-29 level, 5.5 year 4e Loudwater campaign.

 

[S'mon]

This still makes an assumption that its "niche" that only makes sense if everything but D&D 5e is niche.

Well everything but D&D and Call of Cthulu, judging by the sales and Roll20 play figures. In the past Vampire: The Masquerade, D6 Star Wars, maybe WH40K Dark Heresy, had their moments in the sun too.

But Paizo had the top selling RPG, albeit a D&D clone, from mid 2010 through to mid 2014. That's quite a comedown.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, this is what I was alluding to. Effectively, just maintaining pf1 was unviable.

Honestly, they'd managed to successfully stretch it out long past what most companies can.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well everything but D&D and Call of Cthulu, judging by the sales and Roll20 play figures. In the past Vampire: The Masquerade, D6 Star Wars, maybe WH40K Dark Heresy, had their moments in the sun too.

But Paizo had the top selling RPG, albeit a D&D clone, from mid 2010 through to mid 2014. That's quite a comedown.

I just think a definition of "niche" that largely excludes most of the companies in the RPG market, including ones that have existed for years and are well known is kind of self-serving. It makes assumptions of what "success" is that, is, effectively, impossible for most.

(As I noted earlier in the thread, the advantages Paizo had in the 4e days are not duplicable as they were based on particular events and dynamics in the market that they did not actually produce, though they took at advantage of them).

 

[S'mon]

I just think a definition of "niche" that largely excludes most of the companies in the RPG market, including ones that have existed for years and are well known is kind of self-serving.

I assure you I have no selfish or strategic interest in what's niche and what isn't.

But RPGs are a pretty niche market. I think it's reasonable to suggest most RPGs are niche games, from self-published OSR to the glossy coffee table stuff from Modiphius. A non-niche game is one played by a significant proportion of the gaming public. There only seems to be room for a few of those at most - currently I'd say there were two, going by the numbers (haven't played CoC since the '80s, bit surprised it's still so popular).

 

[fearsomepirate]

Is D&D 3.x still D&D when it's so different from OD&D, B/X, and AD&D? What about the difference between 4E and 5E?
To me, I see a more fundamental shift in playstyle, expectations of play, and rules between old school TSR era D&D and 3.x than I do with PF1 vs PF2.

Ultimately, it's comes down to consumer behavior. In the case of 4e, by and large, many people flatly rejected it as the successor to 3rd edition. Doesn't matter what the label said on the tin. What matters is consumer behavior. 4e was such a disaster that another company, despite not being allowed to use the phrase "Dungeons & Dragons" anywhere, literally marketed their product as "3.5 Lives Thrives!" and had a legitimate claim, in the eyes of much of the marketplace, to be the true carriers of the D&D torch.

But the problem with Pathfinder is that you can't sustain a product identity on somebody else's IP. As long as the IP owner is around and kicking, the successor product is theirs to make. That's exactly what happened with 5e. Since it launched, the dominance of 3.x-based gaming has collapsed, and I'm not just talking about Pathfinder. 3.5 itself was, by the few metrics I can find, still quite popular around the 5e launch, and interest in it has completely collapsed since then.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I assure you I have no selfish or strategic interest in what's niche and what isn't.

That was poorly phrased on my part; it wasn't directed at you per se so much as meaning "Yes, D&D is the big dog, but that doesn't make other game systems niche, it just means D&D is an aberration in the hobby."

But RPGs are a pretty niche market. I think it's reasonable to suggest most RPGs are niche games, from self-published OSR to the glossy coffee table stuff from Modiphius. A non-niche game is one played by a significant proportion of the gaming public. There only seems to be room for a few of those at most - currently I'd say there were two, going by the numbers (haven't played CoC since the '80s, bit surprised it's still so popular).

The problem is, there's actually no data that's particularly useful on how many people play a given game; at best you get things like certain kinds of sales or online platform usage, but that doesn't actually tell you what the numbers in the field are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ultimately, it's comes down to consumer behavior. In the case of 4e, by and large, many people flatly rejected it as the successor to 3rd edition. Doesn't matter what the label said on the tin. What matters is consumer behavior. 4e was such a disaster that another company, despite not being allowed to use the phrase "Dungeons & Dragons" anywhere, literally marketed their product as "3.5 Lives Thrives!" and had a legitimate claim, in the eyes of much of the marketplace, to be the true carriers of the D&D torch.

But the problem with Pathfinder is that you can't sustain a product identity on somebody else's IP. As long as the IP owner is around and kicking, the successor product is theirs to make. That's exactly what happened with 5e. Since it launched, the dominance of 3.x-based gaming has collapsed, and I'm not just talking about Pathfinder. 3.5 itself was, by the few metrics I can find, still quite popular around the 5e launch, and interest in it has completely collapsed since then.

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.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Fantasy heartbreakers are, as far as the market is concerned, D&D clones. That's why they're heartbreakers. Whoever makes them is always passionate about this totally new, compelling take on exploring dungeons and slaying dragons. Even if Magic Missile isn't on the spell list...welp, people don't care. Nobody wants to play this game, which lacks gnolls or remorhazes, and it's not because of GURPS:

Everything about this screams, "Grandma Fooler." Now, PF2 is more than a few steps above a Grandma Fooler, but ultimately, it's still off-brand D&D, along with 13th Age and countless others, and that hurts its ability to stand out. I could be wrong, but I bet Starfinder would have done better if they'd fully embraced the space opera/sci-fi theme instead of trying to connect it back to D&D tropes and World of Golarion.

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

But it didn't make an impact on the market. It's a fantastic setting, but it's not what people wanted: what people wanted is the book you have a picture of.

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.

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?

I agree about not trying to revise PF 2e. Better to either abandon it, or to continue supporting it but accept it will always be a niche game.

I mean, anything that isn't D&D at this point is going to be niche. Pathfinder got the way it was not because it was an independent game, but because it attached itself to the previous D&D edition.

Regarding investing in a PF3e, I think their best option would still be to support 5e D&D - they have a ton of valuable IP they can pick from to convert over. IMO they screwed up hugely by not doing this 2015-16 when it was clear 5e was a huge success. Kobold Press currently occupies the ecological niche that Paizo could have claimed as the premier third-party supporter, often producing material superior to WoTC's own IMO, and with some products even competing with WoTC on sales (I find my Pocket Creature Codex is vastly superior to Volo's or Mordenkainen's for GM utility). But Paizo unlike KP has that huge backlog of Adventure Paths, quite a few of which I'd say are better than the WoTC campaign hardbacks, that could be converted into fat 5e hardbacks with a very good potential investment/reward ratio. If they don't do that, well my feeling from the sales & play stats I've seen is that they are going to be surviving more off long tail sales on their PF 1e material, and from licensing, than from anything PF 2e is likely to generate.

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.

Regarding PF2e rules - well yeah, the 3-action economy is good. The Feat bloat and trivial bonuses are bad, like someone took the worst bits of 4e D&D and thought "How can we ramp this up to 11?" For me the PC-build structure of PF2e is just not fun, and I suspect that's true for the majority of potential players in the D&D-genre market. I'm not keen on the way higher level PF2e monsters swiftly become unhittable, either - again, a weak bit of 4e D&D design that 5e I think correctly discarded.

That's great, I suppose? I mean, as a dude who has gotten tired of the simplistic yet convoluted (especially when you need to do multi-classing) nature of 5E builds, the modularity of PF2 is just so damn nice. Same with monsters, where barely anything misses and it's just a hard DPS race to the end. I haven't found monsters to be completely unhittable in PF2 yet, but that's just my experience. YMMV.

But at the end, I think all these "PF2 should become more like 5E" calls always miss that we already have a 5E, and trying to become closer to that is just going to get you eaten up by 5E: the fewer differences, the fewer reasons to convert over from the biggest thing out there, while people who want differences go to something else.