Pathfinder 1E Paizo Annoucement!

[Jeff Wilder]

All per encounter abilities refresh after a 'short rest' of five minutes. If you don't have time for a 'short rest', you don't get them back.

Yes, those are "per encounter" abilities. The poster listed "per rest" abilities as something different.

Maybe my math is off here, but isn't that 50 rounds?

In 3.5 it is, yes. I dunno if that will hold true in 4E. In any events, "five minutes" isn't my number, it's the designers'. The extra time is hand-waved.

The examples you've given would be, in 4E terms, all the same encounter. Personally, for me they're still the same encounter in 3.5 terms. If you're still counting in rounds, it's the same encounter. But in 4E, those examples will definitely be one encounter.

Did you have any examples of "per rest" abilities, BTW?

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Yes, those are "per encounter" abilities. The poster listed "per rest" abilities as something different. Did you have any examples of "per rest" abilities, BTW?

At will, per encounter, per day (WOTC terminology) = Per encounter, per rest, per day (my terminology).

The per encounter abilities are not actually "per encounter," unless you refresh them with a 5 minute rest.

You can also use multiple healing surges during that rest, so you could add "non-combat healing surge" to the list.

Sorry about the confusing terminology.

 

[Firevalkyrie]

Leaving aside who "we" might be, what reason is that?

A "Fantasy" or "OGL" heartbreaker is a game that somebody obviously put a lot of effort into, that is doomed to marketplace failure (or at least to low sales) because of insufficient differentiation from D&D, insufficient cash for marketing and so forth. Somebody (that being Paizo) is obviously putting a lot of effort into Pathfinder, but its chances of finding significant success in a market already saturated with high-fantasy RPGs (and a clear market leader in that segment which is also the market leader in the RPG segment overall) are pretty limited. At the Source - which is the biggest game store in Minnesota and one of the biggest in the country - I see lots of very pretty, very well-produced fantasy RPGs on the shelves; none of them save D&D sells well if at all. Stranger things have happened, but I wouldn't put my money on PRPG finding more than a tiny niche in the market.

There's a huge difference, also, in the challenges faced by Pathfinder and D&D. Pathfinder merely has to cannibalize enough business from the curious and the interested to turn a profit for Paizo. D&D is the gateway game to the entire hobby. Except for a tiny percentage of outliers like me (started on Star Wars D6, maybe a month or two after it came out in 1987), almost everybody in this hobby started through D&D.

I have 6 Pathfinder issues on my shelf (dratted overseas post holding up number 7), and from what I can see of the Paizo boards there are plenty of people who have subscribed to Pathfinder. This is not "from the ground up".

I have 7 Pathfinder issues on my shelf, and from what I can see that's not on an Internet message board (which are by definition filled by the small proportion of people who are passionate enough about something to post about it on the internet), Pathfinder has NO real-world visibility at this moment. There are no copies in mainstream book or toy stores. Only some game stores carry the Pathfinder line - every game store and virtually every general-purpose bookstore at least carry SOME D&D product.

Let's not fool ourselves, Pathfinder is only likely to draw attention from deep hobbyists unless Paizo has a LOT more backing than we think they do. Television, radio and print ads cost a LOT of money, money I doubt - but would be happy to be proven wrong - that Paizo has available.

Paizo are attempting to improve 3.5, a game whose flaws its creators are trumpeting at every opportunity. They are not hoping to knock 4th edition off the number 1 spot, or even make a significant dent in its sales. They are trying to make a game which will sell enough copies to keep the company going, in the hope that in fact it will be successful (in Paizo terms, not WotC / Hasbro terms).

I'm not worried about Paizo's idea of their product's chances. But that post was written in response to somebody who was imagining for himself that Pathfinder has a nonzero chance of knocking off 4th Edition as the dominant game in the market.

If 1 or 2 companies with the necessary funds use the OGL at this point they may anchor the standard system for D&D-like worlds to 3.5 (and the 4.0 will be just another RPG system).

I have a dimmer view of what "the necessary funds" means than Dimitris. I'm sure he means enough to produce a pretty and slick hardcover RPG that will look nice sitting on the shelf at an FLGS. I mean enough to do what Wizards can do through Hasbro - get it into game, book and toy distribution channels and get print and possibly radio and television advertising out there so that people are made aware of the product without specifically seeking it out.

Pathfinder's chance of doing that is exactly zero. Newcomer products with very little brick-and-mortar presence don't knock off highly established products with a heavy presence. Despite the increased prominence of E-tailers in recent years, brick-and-mortar stores still make up the overwhelming bulk of retail sales; E-commerce has only barely managed to become profitable overall in the last year or two. I'm not knocking what Paizo has accomplished with their store and with Pathfinder in only a handful of years and seven months respectively, but you're looking at the progress of a startup. It LOOKS like a lot of progress, but it's still only a VERY small company and there's a limit to both what it and its distribution network can handle. It looks like a nice game - and I will probably buy a copy and run it from time to time - but it's not going to change the world.

Also, 2 companies would make a joint venture, and joint ventures in the consumer marketplace are inherently limited, that's the reason AT&T merged with BellSouth, to bring Cingular all under one roof so it could react more quickly and more decisively to conditions and changes in the wireless market.

 

[Quantarum]

Pathfinder has NO real-world visibility at this moment. There are no copies in mainstream book or toy stores. Only some game stores carry the Pathfinder line - every game store and virtually every general-purpose bookstore at least carry SOME D&D product.

Books-A-Million carries Pathfinder in my area, it's in the same section with the D&D books. Our Barnes & Noble is terrible in every catagory and carries no new WoTC products and just random bits and pieces that I suspect are cast offs from other stores. I haven't seen a D&D book in a toy store since Lionel Playworld went under, Toys-R-Us used to carry the Basic Game boxes in their board game section.

-Q.

 

[dm4hire]

When is the last time you saw a commercial for D&D? Outside of being related to a videogame or movie? Uh, it's been a very long time. D&D is still pretty much a world of mouth game depending upon existing market and periodical adds to generate the interest in it. The loss of Dragon and Dungeon magazines was a big loss of that advertisement. Several responsible for 3.x initial release have said that losing the magazines was probably a huge mistake in advertising considering its impact they played last time. As for word of mouth, everything my LFGS knows about 4e is due to a few players, such as myself, printing the news from here and making them available for people to read. To say that Paizo will fail because they don't have the finance to market the game via TV or media advertisement is ludicrous as they will have the same word of mouth as D&D. As for visibility I agree with Quantarum in tht my LFGS has a huge section of Pathfinder and Gamemastery camping right in the middle of their D&D wall surrounding the Core books. People know about the product or they wouldn't be getting that kind of response from LFGS.

 

[Firevalkyrie]

Books-A-Million carries Pathfinder in my area, it's in the same section with the D&D books. Our Barnes & Noble is terrible in every catagory and carries no new WoTC products and just random bits and pieces that I suspect are cast offs from other stores. I haven't seen a D&D book in a toy store since Lionel Playworld went under, Toys-R-Us used to carry the Basic Game boxes in their board game section.

-Q.

We don't have Books-A-Million, but neither Barnes & Noble nor Borders carries Pathfinder in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. My understanding is that WotC intends to get the 4E Basic Game into toy stores (like T-R-U) and big-box discounters (Target and Wal-Mart).

 

[JoeGKushner]

We don't have Books-A-Million, but neither Barnes & Noble nor Borders carries Pathfinder in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. My understanding is that WotC intends to get the 4E Basic Game into toy stores (like T-R-U) and big-box discounters (Target and Wal-Mart).

That's great for WoTC.

However, does that mean Paizo cannot survive?

No.

Take for example Gen Con 2009. If they sell out of their initial print run, what does it matter if it's not in places like Books A Million or Borders? Getting the product directly into the hands of consumers through physical contact points like conventions or through their own stores directily gives them more money in their pocket.

While greater access to material would be nice for walk by purposes, as many games aren't in Books A Million and many games still come out, like a new Rolemaster Classic book in the works for example, being in Barnes & Nobels isn't a requirment for a successful RPG. (Heck, the fact that Paizo's products are available at Amazon is probably more important than say Borders whose lost so much value in the last few weeks that it shows the weakness of brick and mortar against internet value.)