Rolling for Initiative--'Pathfinder' and the 5th Coming of 'Dungeons & Dragons'

[fjw70]

I am very interested to see how things in the RPG industry play out over the next few years. Mona is right when he says the entire industry will benefit from a health D&D bringing in new players. I buy both D&D and PF products despite never playing PF (they make great adventures and supplements) so I hope both stay around for a long time.


Paizo has a great organized play program. It is probably true that you can find a PF game easier than a D&D game right now but that doesn't surprise me since D&D isn't actively supported right now. For many gamers a game that isn't actively and constantly supported isn't worth playing. I don't feel that way and have never had a problem finding people to play 4e.


Will D&D's organized play program increase significantly?


PF benefited from 4e only supporting one style of play (it didn't have to be that way - 4e is flexible enough to support multiple play styles- but that is the choice WotC made). 5e won't have that issue. I think will make 5e much harder to compete against for Paizo.


I wonder if 5e will have crunchier modules (such as skill points) to compete with Paizo for the crunch crowd or if they will be happy to concede that piece of D&D to PF.


I am pretty excited to see how this plays out.


Btw, I haven't been following PF products lately so didn't know about this mega-dungeon. I will have to get a copy of that, but I will probably run it with 5e.


The last paragraph made me realize something. I haven't been buying D&D or PF stuff lately (D&D hasn't had much to buy) but when I am buying D&D stuff I think I tend to buy more PF stuff as well. Hmmm . . .

 

[Ahnehnois]

If I was a betting man, expecting a business to be fueled by WotC screwing up and alienating its fans seems like a pretty good bet to me.

 

[Celebrim]

Adventures don't sell, they just sell your system, get your game played rather than just read, and grow the market for your material.

And if WotC's past is any indication, they'll continue to treat all of that as unimportant, rely on old IP, and put out minimal bad adventure content.

 

[DaveMage]

If I was a betting man, expecting a business to be fueled by WotC screwing up and alienating its fans seems like a pretty good bet to me.

I wonder if they will keep the D&D staff intact. That's the danger with WotC. The people making decisions today may not be there tomorrow, so any future "promises" may or may not happen.

 

[Nikosandros]

Adventures don't sell, they just sell your system, get your game played rather than just read, and grow the market for your material.

Looking at the success of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths, it looks like that adventure can have a good market.

 

[fantasmamore]

...went on and on about how DMs have less time in the modern world. Which is both true and untrue (if the game is important, you'll make time).

You can't make time every time you play. It's life that doesn't let you to. I am not going to buy a game that is not simple and easy to run or design my own adventures. That, doesn't necessarily means that the players or the DM won't have options (simple does not equal simplistic). It just means that everything has to be very well organised and playtested before it goes to print.

 

[TerraDave]

I also was struck by the 4-5 multiple for player oriented material.

I think the poster was a store owner, so I hope this is based on actual data, not just a theory (of the kind you might find in, say, an ENWorld post).

I guess we don't know exactly what is being compared. You can have many different adventures and just a few player splats...so its not a straight up comparison.

And of course GMs are often suckers for "player" material. I use to buy tons of it, though have gotten better about it.

But agree that things that make a GMs life easier means more gaming and sales overall.

 

[Campbell]

I still don't get the contention that Next appeals mainly to 4e fans. That's not what I see among those of us still on EN World, or more entrenched communities like Something Awful's TG forum and RPG.net's D&D forums. That's not saying I don't think it will do well - locally I'm seeing some guarded interest in our pretty strong 2e community and those burned out by both 4e and Pathfinder.

 

[Celebrim]

Looking at the success of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths, it looks like that adventure can have a good market.

The main success of the Adventure Paths is that they made a good market.

Basically, how successful your RPG is should be measured by how many GM's are playing your game. Adventure modules encourage GM's to play your game, and if those games are successful it creates fans of your game who now want to buy your product and keep playing your game. Paizo ended up popular and trusted because WotC outsourced all the 'low profit' modules to Paizo back when they had a relationship. When WotC ended that relationship, Paizo realized that by and large they - and not WotC - owned the market and they could take it with them. Where Paizo's modules before that had been driving sales of WotC's high profit splatbooks, they are now driving sales of Paizo splatbooks.

The profit on a module might not be very large - if all Paizo was doing was selling modules they'd probably still be a small company - but the residuals on a module are huge.

If your game system doesn't have ready to play adventures for it, your game system is doomed.

 

[Minigiant]

I dunno.
It's onething to capitalize on someone else's failure. It's a whole 'nother thing to hedge your bets on someone else to fail in the future based on the past. Even the village idiot can pull off a surprise.

I capitalize and benefit on failure to pay the bills. But I am not crazy enough to pick a target.