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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 5182738" data-attributes="member: 60075">Someone brought up that post on another forum, and I decided to cross-post my response there on here. ----It's an interesting post, if old old news, as Jacobs has said this time and again. See, what he glosses over is the context in which his "adventures are also there to be just read, not played" posts usually arise on the Paizo boards, and that is when customers point out how Paizo's simultaneously catering to the audiences Jacobs mentions, to wit(1) GM running module as written(2) GM stealing an NPC here, a location there(3) GM without a group, just likes to read,is not without problems. Just look at the first 20 pages of Burnt Offerings, Jacobs' own flagship instalment in the Pathfinder adventure path series, and you'll see what it means when an author entirely compromises the needs of audience (1) to cater to the needs of audience (3). WotC does it the other way round, all their modules are solidly geared towards audience (1) and don't give a flying <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> about audience (3); which is, incidentally, why they sell so poorly: I really can't imagine that anyone casually browsing 4e modules in a bookstore on a rainy Saturday afternoon at Barnes & Modules gets his imagination fired away. By contrast, every Paizo module to date has had the instant effect of visually and verbally scoring a bull's eye on the casual reader. That's the legacy of Paizo running Dragon magazine, which they had to design in such a way that casual readers on news stands or Barnes & Nobles bookshelves would feel prompted to pick them up and quickly peruse them... that being the point at which Paizo (as Erik Mona once said) already considered their product a success. Needless to say, this type of customer context is utterly alien to audience (1). When I GM a module, most of the visual and verbal effort in Paizo products often comes as a hindrance, as it's not even geared towards the players at my table; 95% of the text doesn't concern the actual adventure at the table, very little is cast so as to make it easy to convert it into read-alout text (or into something I can paraphrase as such without 'reading it alout from the book'), very few pictures work as table devices since they don't just show the baddies but also some other heroes fighting them, and so on and so on. Paizo has very clearly dedicated its efforts to writing modules for group-less GMs, which also includes GMs who have a group but not the time to run another Pathfinder campaign for them (either because they're running a campaign of their own - which is where (2) above comes in - or because they're already running an earlier Pathfinder campaign). Which, come to think of it, is 95% of all their customers. Heck, I myself got probably 3000 pages of Paizo content on my shelves with only a thin chance of using 10% of that material at my gametable in the foreseeable future.</blockquote>

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