NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 4155180" data-attributes="member: 31454">The only reason I disagree with this point is the demographic that Paizo is selling to. In theory, the big selling point for Pathfinder is that it's going to keep 3.5 alive. One of the big reasons why many people want to stick to 3.5 is their sunk cost: they're well-invested in a healthy 3.5-compatible library. If Paizo wants to market to people interested in still heavily using this library, they need to strike a very difficult balance. Pathfinder needs to be unique and good enough that people want to replace their tried-and-true 3.5 PHBs with Pathfinder. The good I'm not worried about: whatever I think about the result in terms of being unique enough, Paizo will put out a good product. However, the uniqueness is the key. If it's not unique enough, then what's the point? It'll be more akin to Monte's Book of Experimental Magic: a nice little aid you might pull houserules from (and for 3.5, there are some nice ones in there). Alternatively, they make it unique enough to justify being an independent game. In that case, you start to run into problems with compatibility with a lot of the back-materials that 3.5-fans want to keep using. The class changes in particular alter the assumptions behind how a lot of supplements work in very fundamental ways.The people who are going to convert to Pathfinder from 3.5 are the hard-core Paizo fans (whose support Paizo has more than earned with their years of absolutely excellent products). But how many of those are just going to be "protest votes" against Wizards of the Coast and not true support for a new system? We just don't know. And I'm also a little worried about the 4e fans of Paizo who won't be getting any adventure paths drifting away from the company: tying one of their flagship products to a new system rather than D&D is a gamble. Further, as I mentioned above, the compatibility issues with adventure paths for people still playing 3.5 could be annoying, especially if the paths come to rely on Pathfinder-exclusive features.The real difficulty is going to be whether or not Paizo can find that magical balance where the game will be different enough to justify being a separate product (enough so that people will be playing Pathfinder and not 3.5 with Pathfinder house rules) and still manage to allow direct or near-direct portability of their 3.5 supplements. If Paizo can do both of these with Pathfinder, it will be extremely successful. If not, I worry that it'll be a passing fancy.How much of their resources are being devoted isn't something I'm familiar with. But considering that the project is being opened, I expect the process to be a little less resource-intensive than a closed-development might be. But this is just pure guess-work on my part. Paizo seems to be keeping their options open in terms of how they'll approach 4e, which at this point is good business sense.I'd honestly be very happy if you were right: I'm probably converting to 4e for my games, but having a strong team like the one at Paizo helping to establish the Open Gaming market as independent and sustainable even without the 800 lb. gorilla is a dream come true. I want them to succeed, and succeed wildly enough to prove that open gaming works. I'm just not sure if Pathfinder is the game to do it.</blockquote>

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