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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannager" data-source="post: 5477093" data-attributes="member: 73683">From James Jacobs, in an interview with RPG Blog II (in answer to the question "For the uninitiated, can you briefly state an overview of the main design goals for Pathfinder?"): "When Wizards of the Coast switched to 4th edition, the previous edition  of the game went out of print. The core rulebooks would still be  available in stores, but not forever; they would eventually sell out and  be gone. And at that point, even though the rules were still totally  viable (and indeed, readily available online for free as the SRD), you  can't maintain a line of RPGs without having a core rulebook in print."Emphasis mine. Their "line of RPGs" is their Pathfinder campaign setting. I have seen the Paizo guys explain, explicitly, on more than one occasion, that one of the primary reasons they published the Pathfinder RPG was because they felt they needed to keep a version of the rules in print so that they could keep selling their adventures. They certainly used it as an opportunity to tweak parts of the game they felt could be improved, but I very much doubt they would have felt the need to do so were they not the publishers of a line of compatible adventures that they were doing quite well selling.I'm not sure why you're presenting this as a novel or even an unwelcome idea. It's intelligent, and it makes perfect business sense, unless you're of the hardened opinion that support isn't a significant deciding factor in what people play.I'm not painting Paizo as a blade-and-razor operation in the sense that they are selling razors for cheap and charging oodles for the blades. Their prices are all pretty reasonable. But they do maintain the model and concept of "Our Adventure Paths are what keep people coming back for more, and we need to provide those Adventure Paths with a level of support adequate enough to ensure that people will continue to play them."I'd love to have one of the Paizo guys chime in on this, because I'm almost positive I have seen James Jacobs or Erik Mona say, almost verbatim, "We created the Pathfinder RPG so we could keep selling our adventures."</blockquote>

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