Pathfinder 1E Is Pathfinder going to slow down?

[Umbran]

Then again, the only reason Pathfinder was ever successful is because of people who love the D20 system more than is probably healthy.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Edition warring insults are not welcome. Take them to some other board next time. Thank you.

 

[n00bdragon]

Woot. Rep, infraction, mention, and three post quotes for just two sentences.

 

[Campbell]

At its heart Pathfinder is a game that knows what it wants to be. It's a purist for system, deep setting immersion with a high level of crunch delivered in discrete pieces that interact with each other in a number of permutations. In short, it's more like 3e than 3e ever was. It delivers something a good deal of the community wants. It's a hardcore game built by hardcore players for hardcore players. It's a game that I think will be around for a long time. It's also a game I have little to no interest in playing or GMing.

Do I think there's a portion of current Pathfinder players who will find something in other games to grasp on to? Absolutely. The entire community is well served by diversity of play. If Pathfinder fits what someone is looking for in a game less well than other games than they should play those other games. Still, I don't see it going anywhere. It might have to share the spotlight with games that emphasize other parts of D&D's heritage, but as long as the game stays as focused as it already is I believe it will always have a sizable audience. In fact I feel like Paizo is much better suited to catering to its core audience than Wizards will ever be.

 

[Weather Report]

It's 3rd Ed to me, I do not see the difference.

 

[silverblade56]

I agree with that. It is really irksome for PFS, epecially since they often reference Bestiaries 2 and 3 which I don't have.

 

[Henry]

I agree with that. It is really irksome for PFS, epecially since they often reference Bestiaries 2 and 3 which I don't have.

At least the good news for this is that all their references are available through
http://www.d20pfsrd.com
And
http://paizo.com/prd/

Though yes, it is a minor annoyance to me to see the "monster X ,book Y, page Z" references. I probably need to work ahead of time to put the shortcut links in my pdfs.

 

[S'mon]

They can't keep adding player-side stuff forever onto the same edition, but AFAICT they can keep publishing Adventure Paths forever since they cleverly use a magazine-based subscription model. As long as their APs are good, people will keep subscribing.
They can also publish adventures and GM-side campaign material forever, and that can come with particular area-specific player-side stuff like eg rules for PCs from planet X.

I expect eventually they'll do a 2e Pathfinder core rulebook, but it will have minimal changes and aim for very high backwards compatibility with non-core materials. Likewise some of the most popular non-core books are likely to be republished. I think they'll avoid the WotC model of scrapping everything and starting afresh, since their customer base was founded on people who disliked that model.

Edit: Oh, eventually Paizo's founders will retire/depart and at some point the company will lose its way and go belly up or be taken over. That could be decades away though.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

There seems to be a recent trend in RPGs for a return to rules lighter games. We've seem the rise in popularity of FATE, Cortex +, Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Numernera, IKRPG, and others. Other games in development are turning from complexity to easier to digest rules. Companies like Crafty Games who traditionally have made quite dense games rules wise is apparently dialing down the crunch quite a bit for Spycraft 3rd, and of course WotC is making D&D next a lighter set of rules first with complexity to be added later.

Heck, my friend who LOVES crunch in rpgs is now looking for lighter games and got fatigued by Shadowrun 5th very quickly

One wonders if this trend will affect Pathfinder

Early post, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion of this.

I think it will help Pathfinder. A lot of people and companies are going lighter. And for those of us that prefer crunch (Pathfinder and HERO are my two go to systems) will find less options "in the wild" for high crunch games and drift towards the crunchier games. I find Dresden Files RPG (FATE) to be almost unplayable because of how light it is - doesn't mean I don't like the game, just that system is not to my taste (I GM it though ) As a player I spend a lot of time in the rules outside of actual table time - sometimes much more time. I enjoy that - reading rules, seeing how this fits with that, how these to things lead to an interesting really flavorful outcome. Any game that isn't complex enough for me to enjoy that way I will not play for very long as it can't hold my interest.

And while lighter games are the going trend, not everyone wants that. Pathfinder will be there for those that prefer a heavier game.

 

[darjr]

Interesting point. Now that I think about it I've seen a lot of that locally. Around here I see a lot more games being played than I think I've seen in a while. But the complex games have seem to focused around just a couple, Pathfinder being a big winner.

 

[Wicht]

Hmm, I don't know what it says about me that I think Pathfinder to be only a moderate-rules-heavy game. I have never thought of Pathfinder as being overly complex but actually middle of the road in complexity. While there are multiple moving parts, so to speak, they are each of a rather simple nature and normally seem fairly intuitive in application. I find it interesting to note that it is now considered to have a "high level of crunch" for a certain percentage of the community.