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

[payn]

It also makes a difference as to who the product is aimed at. Reviews of the BB suggest strongly its differences from PF2e are very modest, and it can function as a transition product. Its hard to see something that would satisfy people overall unhappy with PF2e while doing that.

Seems like that is what the OP is after. How to engage with PF2 without drinking from the fire hose. Modular systems have sort of been the white whale for almost a decade now. I'm betting the next edition of whatever is going to try and actually deliver it.

 

[fearsomepirate]

New adventures with new rules supplements are key to my enjoyment of the Paizo Adventure Paths and PF1. Bolting on new options is fun, exciting, and convenient for me. Rolling out a new edition is inconvenient because I need to learn a new system and possibly invest in something I wont like. Its quite easy to understand why why 3.5/PF1 lasted so long. Basically, I'm the opposite of all your findings here.

This is exactly what I am talking about, not the opposite. What I mean by the splat-driven concept is this idea that the true cycle of an RPG is driven by the publisher eventually ruining it by choking the rules to death, then rebooting it, forcing customers to update to the new thing.

The history of the industry does not seem to support your premise.

The history of the industry is largely one of failed products, failed business models, and pissed-off users.

Granted; I'm not saying that I regret buying this stuff, because I don't. But it argues against the idea that people aren't willing to jog in place on the treadmill. I think clearly a lot of people are willing to do that, as long as the basic system approach is one that they're happy with. They like seeing tweaks and add-ons and options, even if they never use them. Not saying that I wouldn't have preferred Pathfinder to have literally continued with 3.5, and written their bolt-on rules supplements specifically to work with that, because I would have. But... well, there you have it, I guess.

Who said anything about willing? The problem with the planned obsolescence model isn't that customers aren't willing to buy your update after your current product's breakdown, whether it was carefully engineered or not. The problem is that you're trying to drive revenue by deliberately annoying your users, then exploiting this annoyance to sell them an upgrade. This creates an opening for somebody who designs around longevity and prolonged customer satisfaction to eat your lunch; see General Motors vs Toyota for an example of how this can work out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Seems like that is what the OP is after. How to engage with PF2 without drinking from the fire hose. Modular systems have sort of been the white whale for almost a decade now. I'm betting the next edition of whatever is going to try and actually deliver it.

There are absolutely ways to do modular systems, but asking that to work well with exception based design (which the D&D sphere is absolutely filled with from top to bottom) is asking a bit much.

 

[Desdichado]

Who said anything about willing? The problem with the planned obsolescence model isn't that customers aren't willing to buy your update after your current product's breakdown, whether it was carefully engineered or not. The problem is that you're trying to drive revenue by deliberately annoying your users, then exploiting this annoyance to sell them an upgrade. This creates an opening for somebody who designs around longevity and prolonged customer satisfaction to eat your lunch; see General Motors vs Toyota for an example of how this can work out.

I don't disagree at all. Which is part of the reason that I personally believe that Paizo would have been better served by sticking with the SRDs and adding bolt-on options for the SRDs rather than having their own system. It looks like—right now, anyway—that 5e is the Toyota model, so to speak. Maybe I'm wrong and they're not planning on longevity and 6e pre-production planning is in full swing at WotC, but it appears for now that if "Pathfinder 1e" had been bolt-on options to what was essentially little more than a d20 SRD "retroclone" rather than a somewhat significantly different iteration of it, and if they'd migrated to a 5e SRD when it was clear that 5e was going to dominate the market in a way that 4e never did. That would have sidestepped all of the problems that you correctly highlight with there being their own system, with its own versions.

Water under the bridge at this point, but that's what I would have liked to have seen them do in an ideal world. Ideal for me, at least.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The history of the industry is largely one of failed products, failed business models, and pissed-off users.

This requires a rather specific definition of "failed products" at the very least, and said "failed business models" have in many cases managed to continue for years if not decades.

And I'm not convinced that anything that allowed the companies involved to continue would routinely satisfy said "pissed off users". They're often the classic example of a customer who wants "better stuff, for free".

Who said anything about willing? The problem with the planned obsolescence model isn't that customers aren't willing to buy your update after your current product's breakdown, whether it was carefully engineered or not. The problem is that you're trying to drive revenue by deliberately annoying your users, then exploiting this annoyance to sell them an upgrade. This creates an opening for somebody who designs around longevity and prolonged customer satisfaction to eat your lunch; see General Motors vs Toyota for an example of how this can work out.

I'm not convinced that RPGs are planned obsolescence; its a simple case that in a product like an RPG, at some points a company is going to get diminishing, in fact sharply diminishing, returns out of its product line and there's not an unlimited amount of new extensions of the line that will solve that.

 

[wakedown]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much damned hand wringing over something so inconsequential. But I must say the line of ‘why can’t Paizo just abandon its own silly game and produce some stuff for the system I like’ is kind of irrelevant...

To further put this into context, Paizo is just a teeny tiny company in the world.

Remember they were just printing magazines and running an online game store like MiniatureMarket or TrollandToad - you can still buy things like Ticket to Ride or minis from Paizo, it's just they quote 38 days to get it to you so I imagine that part of their business has fallen materially as their CEO stepped down and the pandemic hit.

As a teeny tiny company, it's about the human beings - the creative people who worked there. Without those people, those individuals, Paizo is just a word, a limited liability corporation, and a fairly laggy website.

So when asking, why isn't Paizo making great new creative content like you were used to them making (Rise of Runelords, Crimson Throne, Kingmaker, Carrion Crown, etc) and making it for 5E?

The answer is... "they" (the Paizo you used to know) are absolutely doing that.

When you get an RPG product you love, open the cover to see who you can thank for bringing that to light. It's not about Paizo LLC, but about the creative individuals whose brains were available during the brief schism of the 3E->4E transition and willing to write content for a 3E-compatible ruleset.

The Golden Era of Paizo, if you look at the authors, was built on the creative efforts of - Pett, Bauer, Logue, Greer, Vaughan, Schneider, Kortes, Leati, Hitchcock, Spicer, Hodge, Reynolds, Sutter, Frasier and even Radney-MacFarland (who was there briefly for the launch of PF2E). Nearly everyone from that era has left "Paizo LLC" and if they are still writing, they are, at large, producing their work for 5E and elsewhere. It's really just Jacobs and Bulmahn left from the magazine days trying to hold the ship together.

So, you've got this online store where not only has the CEO left as of 2018, but all these creative people who were great at their jobs. They have this legacy product line in Pathfinder (and Starfinder to a certain extent) where they have just enough demand to justify a nominal expense to develop content. With that small budget, we see books printed in China, and organized play fans who are largely inexperienced taking their first crack at authoring content alongside ever-rising price increases on the products.

If your real desire is to see Paizo LLC produce 5e adventures, ask yourself who you want writing and illustrating those. Chances are they are already doing so, or would be receptive if you approached them to encourage them to do so.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well, I've maintained since 2015 that Paizo had no good options, since it staked its product identity on somebody else's brand.

This requires a rather specific definition of "failed products" at the very least, and said "failed business models" have in many cases managed to continue for years if not decades.

Any product that fails to meet revenue expectations and has to be pulled from the market well before its planned EOL is a failure. For example, as much as D&D 3 can be called a design success, from the simple fact that people continued to play variants for 15 years, it resulted in people getting fired and Hasbro rebooting not just the game, but the entire business model, in a shockingly short time.

A failed business model is one that, if pursued to its end, bankrupts your company, forces you to shut down a division, kills the entire brand, etc. A famous example is AD&D 2e's publishing model. Another is 3.5's model of crapping out full-sized hardback rules expansions (>= 150 pages) every couple months. Of course, that business model collapsed in a short time as well. Resulting in Hasbro shoveling the entire thing into a landfill, pretending it never happened, and rebooting again.

And I'm not convinced that anything that allowed the companies involved to continue would routinely satisfy said "pissed off users". They're often the classic example of a customer who wants "better stuff, for free".

What people want is to not have their current product become a piece of crap due to mismanagement.

I'm not convinced that RPGs are planned obsolescence; its a simple case that in a product like an RPG, at some points a company is going to get diminishing, in fact sharply diminishing, returns out of its product line and there's not an unlimited amount of new extensions of the line that will solve that.

I think most companies that have relied on rules expansions to drive revenue recognize this has a short life cycle. The first expansion sells like gangbusters, the second less so, and there is some Nth expansion which is not even worth the paper it is printed on, at which you reboot the core rules, not necessarily because the core rules themselves are bad, but because you figure you can sell a Monster Manual II more easily than a Monster Manual VIII, and you need new rules that are sufficiently incompatible with the old ones to justify telling people to buy new supplements.

 

[Desdichado]

If I can interject a potential tangent into the discussion here, is the era of the adventure path kinda over? I know that was a huge part of the way Paizo did stuff for a long time, but it seems like maybe they reached a saturation point. I do notice that nobody else is really attempting it either; WotC is putting out "campaigns" that are similar to how Call of Cthulhu traditionally used to do it, where there's one rather thick book that details a single adventure in multiple chapters.

And I know that the reality of those campaigns isn't necessarily all that different than an adventure path, other than the publishing schedule; i.e., one chapter per month with additional setting add-ons built in to the book vs. all at once in a single big book but with less mechanics and fluff about extraneous stuff altogether—the differences are somewhat more imagined than real. But it seems like the business model for one seems to be ascendant and the business model for the other isn't.

 

[Desdichado]

Any product that fails to meet revenue expectations and has to be pulled from the market well before its planned EOL is a failure. For example, as much as D&D 3 can be called a design success, from the simple fact that people continued to play variants for 15 years, it resulted in people getting fired and Hasbro rebooting not just the game, but the entire business model, in a shockingly short time.

A failed business model is one that, if pursued to its end, bankrupts your company, forces you to shut down a division, kills the entire brand, etc. A famous example is AD&D 2e's publishing model. Another is 3.5's model of crapping out full-sized hardback rules expansions (>= 150 pages) every couple months. Of course, that business model collapsed in a short time as well. Resulting in Hasbro shoveling the entire thing into a landfill, pretending it never happened, and rebooting again.

That's only true if we make the implicit background assumption that mismanagement and poor execution of an otherwise perfectly fine business model doesn't happen. Sadly, I think that is rather the norm these days instead of the exception in the corporate world. Was the 3e design team shuttered because of a poor business model? Or was it shuttered due to interference with a perfectly good business model by yahoos from Hasbro who didn't know the territory and therefore wanted to do a bunch of stupid stuff that the games professionals tried unsuccessfully to fight off?

 

[willrali]

Instead of Pathfinder 2e, I think it would have made more sense to say, essentially, "WotC got their act together and 5e was what 4e should have been, so now we can go back to supporting that the way that we supported 3e back in the day." I think their inability to step away from this system that they created that clearly doesn't have the pull that it really kind of needs to is a long-term losing strategy for Paizo.

I'm glad they didn't do this. I tried 5e for years and its problems are just too numerous. Blandness being chief. Pf2 means I can get a 'D&D-esque' experience and attract 'D&D' players without having to run 5e. Paizo has enough name recognition that many players will say 'oh yeah, Pathfinder's the D&D knockoff game right? I'll give it a try.' That's more than good enough.

As long as Paizo is in business and producing this stuff, which as far as I'm concerned is top notch and full of interesting options, what they're doing can easily be defined as successful. They're not a publicly traded company. They can do whatever they please, which in creative endeavors, is great for people with niche tastes. No need for an 'essentials', though as I said earlier, an 'unearthed arcana' -- in the old sense of the word, not bewildering web articles -- would be neat.

If they go out of business because of Pf2 then that would be sad, but from a selfish perspective, at least I got to stay in the hobby a few more years, since the number of Mage and Exalted players still around is more or less nill.

Anyhoo; I think that would have been an interesting discussion, and that's clearly what the OP was trying to spark. Kinda disappointing that we didn't get it.

Was it? If the thread had been titled 'let's spitball solutions to things I don't like about Pf2' that would have been much more fun and probably quite productive. Instead we got a question-begging 'is it time for essentials', which has more flamebait packed inside it than a carton of cordite.