BryonD
Hero
No more than Greyhawk is baked into D&D.I'd be willing to bet that number is lower for Pathfinder players. Golarion is baked into Pathfinder.
And they tend to have a direct connection to Paizo. It is funny how you hand wave actual research on players at large in one sentence and then appeal to the unestablished authority commercial broadcast microcosm in the next.Almost every Pathfinder actual play podcast or stream is an adventure path.
And, of course, Critical Role was a Pathfinder 1E campaign that quite absolutely was not set in Golarion. They changed it to 5E because the system mattered.
And also, it is worth noting that the bestseller PF2E AP title on Amazon is currently at #46 in Pathfinder Game. I suppose you could make up an arguement that everybody is buying those exclusively from Paizo. But it would be hard to understand why the Bestiary is so far ahead. You would think anyone buying APs directly from Paizo would buy the bestiary there as well. (Heck, the PF1E bestiary, along with numerous other titles are outselling the AP). Hanging your hat on the AP is a really weak position.
You're gonna need that link. I've heard them praise their overall subscription service. But if you look at the range of crunch focused series they produce then you claim seems quite absurd. They don't produce scores of books a year (including multiple major hardbacks) just to solely support their 12 AP annual titles.And again, I don't have a link, but I'm certain I've read Paizo higher-ups remark that their AP subscription is their main revenue stream, and they publish core books to support that stream. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the foundation of Paizo's business was subscriptions to Dungeon magazine.
Sort of. But the core of what you are saying here works. They had a system that alienated players and that hurt sales. So they created a system that did a much better job of appealing to players.As for how much system matters, WotC themselves, during the buildup to the release of 5E, commented that their surveys and playtests showed them most players don't care much about the numbers on the character sheets. What they care about is the stories generated at the table. The implication was WotC got sucked into the char op element of the hobby too much, and alienated fans. With 5E, they were going to correct that by easing off on the crunch, and release a simpler, looser rules set to appeal to the broad base of the pyramid, rather than the hardcore crunch lovers at the top.
You combined an unsubstantiated claim that "complexity" is key with an unsubstantiated short selling of why some people don't like PF2E.So I think system matters in the sense that players have preferences for how much complexity they want in their game, and to what extent rules mastery is rewarded. But the kinds of arguments going on between advocates of PF1 vs PF2 are really about pretty arcane differences in two very similar, very crunchy systems. I don't think most players out in the wild care strongly about that stuff.
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