Pathfinder 1E The good man WotC and the scoundrel Paizo

[BryonD]

Typically business decisions for large corporations are made by groups of people, and the majority of said group is who I was referring to.

Well if by "the majority" you meant "the majority of a small group of insiders" then you did not express that concept clearly. But, taking it now to mean that, the majority *should* have been able to reach that conclusion.

Your second sentence is the claim I'm arguing against. It's easy to say now that they should have seen it. Whether or not that's true is more complicated that saying but they should have seen it.

Well clearly they did not, so you have a point. But just because they failed to does not excuse it.

And heck, maybe they did see it, but they also predicted that DDI would be so profitable by itself that they didn't need to worry about a fragmented market?

That is illogical. DDI and market integrity are independent pieces. DDI + strong market presence >> DDI and split market regardless of how strong or weak DDI does.

There are so many variables involved in these types of decisions that I find messageboard claims of "but it's so obvious" to be unconvncing.

Fair enough. But when you've been arguing that exact same points for three years and suddenly people claim you just started saying it, I find that more than a little convenient. Yes, there are vast variables. But really this is about a few simple fundamentals.

 

[Fifth Element]

Fair enough. But when you've been arguing that exact same points for three years and suddenly people claim you just started saying it, I find that more than a little convenient. Yes, there are vast variables. But really this is about a few simple fundamentals.

Again, it's not the timing. I've never claimed you're only just now saying it. Any hindsight comments don't apply to you. I believe you 100% when you say you said the same thing in 2008. That's not an issue to me. It's why you were saying it, and whether you had anything solid to base it on.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Many people here indeed think and refer to Paizo as a good-hearted company that wants to keep on sharing with the OGL, distributing and updating the 3.5e ruleset, give candy to everyone. The same people ofter refer to WotC as a candy-stealing, evil monster who wants to kill D&D and kick its corpse until it is barely recognisable; a company who failingly wanted to appeal to videogame players, who releases books, supplements, and new editions only for money grabbing purposes. I know that I'm overstating, but you know it to be true at the core.

As a supporter of both WotC and their 4e and Paizo's Pathfinder, I find your overstating completely false. They are both businesses taking care of their interests. Before we advance too much further, let's have a look at what that means.

Wizards of the Coast have the following people to please:
- Hasbro and thus in turn Hasbro's shareholders
- Their employees
- Their customers

Paizo have the following people to please:
- Paizo's Owner (Lisa Stevens who by the way in 1991 left White Wolf and helped Peter Adkison form Wizards of the Coast, leaving in 2002 to form Paizo Publishing)
- Their employees
- Their customers

For what it's worth, my impression is that Hasbro is fairly hands off and that the "directive from suits on high" mentality is virtually non-existent. WotC is a big enough company to manage themselves and does not need to be held by the hand by Hasbro. I think the Gleemax failure is perhaps the biggest ripple WotC have caused at a Hasbro quarterly meeting (outweighed significantly by their trading card successes).

As such in terms of discussion, I think the two companies can be reasonably judged by how they please their employees and customers without needing to reference the demands of their owners.

Unfortunately, WotC have a poor track record in terms of their routine annual retrenchments (thankfully avoided last Christmas). While everything else about working there seems to be fantastic, this aspect is unsettling when it happens and something the closeknit gamer community views poorly. Paizo on the other hand seems to enjoy an excellent relationship with their staff (many of whom were formerly employed by WotC and many of whom were "just" gamers given the opportunity to live the dream). I think this is the primary point of difference between the two companies at this level.

In terms of Customer relations, Paizo are regarded as having excellent personalised customer service. No issue seems too small for them to deal with. I have been a customer of Paizo since 2005 and have not had a single issue arise. Any time I have asked for product to be specially delivered or made a particular request, their customer service team have been on the ball and delivered with a smile. In terms of the development of Pathfinder, the RPG Superstar competitions and the general availability of all employees for comment and advice, their relationship with their customers and delivering to the customers what they want is exemplary, and hard won over a long period of time.

In terms of Customer relations, WotC have had several slip ups or blunders depending upon who you talk to. On the whole, they have been OK but I can certainly understand why some customers do not rate WotC's treatment of their customers at the same high standard of Paizo. Personally I enjoy my DDI membership (which I have had sonce the beginning and will continue to hold onto) although I have not bought a physical Wizards book in a while - the last item I purchased was the new red box from Paizo funnily enough. I am concerned that content quality has trended down but I am hopeful with recent announcements that quality will improve over time. In the days of 3rd edition, I purchased just about everything they produced and supported their dragon and dungeon magazines (published by Paizo).

I think a reasonable analysis of this is that neither company is evil but that Paizo has earned a higher degree of good will over the past few years. As a smaller company with a closer relationship with their customer base, this focus of their business is both obvious and necessary.

Now, only at an hypothetical level, what if it was the opposite?

I mean, Paizo didn't really invent something.

Really? I notice a quote further on mentioning reprinting three-quarters of the SRD which I suppose is your angle here. Were you a part of the alpha/beta testing? Do you understand how almost every element of the game was scrutinized by Paizo and their customers? Do you understand that this is not the primary aspect of what Paizo provides for their customers - that being the adventure subscriptions. To do this, they needed an in print version of the rules satisfactory to their customers and I think the facts are that they succeeded in doing this. I think you show a measure of ignorance here - please correct me if I am wrong.

I think they don't even have the resources nor the experience to develop a full-featured game like D&D 3.5e all by themselves. All they did before PF (correct me if i'm wrong, because i had never heard of them before) was to publish supplements and adventures.

As to the talent of many of their employees (many of whom wrote for WotC) that you seem to be happily ignoring, I think you do them a deep disservice. More to the point, you are not in a position to be making this judgment - effectively your opinion here is meaningless.

All Paizo did was take an existing system released with an open license, add some changes and update what was strictly necessary (grapple rules, some underperforming classes), then resell it with a new brand. Heck, they didn't even solve one of the biggest problems of 3.5e, the all-powerfulness of wizards at higher levels, i.e. the exponential growing of spellcasters compared to the linear growing of other classes.

The difficulty of the power of high level magic is hard-coded into the system. To maintain backward compatibility (one of their primary goals of the Pathfinder Core Rules), they could not extract this from the system without destroying this goal. However, the changes they did make to the wizard are noticable (the increased difficult of successfully casting spells, the changing of save or die spells) and if you do not include many of the "broken" spells from WotC's "Complete" series, but restrict yourself to the Pathfinder Core, You will find that Paizo did an excellent job of balancing the classes and making them enthusiastically playable.

You can speculate that they hadn't got a clue on how the system worked in the inside, otherwise they could have gone further and fix the huge problems of balance.

Speculation is useless and in this case misleading at best, devisive and disingenuous at worst. They acheived their aim of satisfying the majority of their customers. As for personal experience of high level Pathfinder play, I have quite a bit where as I am "assuming" (again correct me if I am wrong), that all you have is... speculation.

You could also say that they did this only to keep publishing adventures and modules the same way they did before, so they didn't need to change system or to reinvent theirselves. Some could say that they exploited 4e's situation (bad reception) by reprinting 3.5e at little cost compared to its production value.

Again misleading at best, disingenuous at worst. Lisa Stevens was not going to close up shop and leave her employees and customers out to dry. They had enough time when their contract was not renewed by WotC to scrape together the Pathfinder Adventure Path but this very easily could have fallen flat if it did not gel with their customer base. It was successful. WotC then announce 4e. Paizo are left figuring out whether to support and be at the mercy of an unclear GSL or going it on their own. Not wanting to have the rug taken out from under them again by WotC , the obvious business decision was to choose the latter. At this stage, the possible success or otherwise of 4e was unknown.

And now they are getting near (some say they even outdid) WotC in terms of selling revenue.

Paizo sold a heap of the Advanced Player's Guide in a quarter where WotC had nothing of note. Comparing one of Paizo's strongest quarters to one of WotC's weakest is just that, although the fact that a small company such as Paizo could achieve such success is significant for both companies going forward.

Well, I would call this a huge money-grab. You do relatively nothing compared to the huge work required to develop a big RPG, and become a selling competitor to the market leader. If there weren't the OGL, this could have been brought in court and Paizo would have lost. In fact, even though the laws on IP don't cover rules, Paizo basically reprinted whole sections of the 3.5e Player's Handbook with minimal changes.

Businesses to be successful need to make money. I think the success of Paizo in this regard is based more on very hard work from their employees, their careful attention to their customers and an element of serendipity. If they were just trying to gouge money out of their customers, then they would have failed and rightly so. Paizo cared for all of their stakeholders and were successful in doing so.

In fact, the OGL, which was initially seen as a godsend by the RPG community, was a huge -up for WotC. It permitted all sorts of alternative RPGs based on its excellent (at the time) ruleset, that one by one stole some market share to D&D. Paizo exploited this weakness without shame.

As S'mon mentioned, the cat was already out of the bag so to speak. I think many d20 supporters would heavily disagree with you. And again, if all Paizo was doing was exploiting a weakness rather than supporting their staff and customers, they would have failed. Paizo did a lot more than what you are saying.

On the other hand, WotC worked their asses off to make 4th Edition, and they didn't do as well as they expected.

Effort and reward are not correlative. Regardless, I hope you are not trying to insinuate that 4e has not been successful. That would be a pretty dumb thing to say.

The most insulting thing is that some people have been referring to them as the money grabbers, and then switched to Pathfinder declaring their love for Paizo. Now, you can say many bad things about the marketing, PR and administration teams at WotC, but that doesn't mean that the developers worked really hard on the system and made the changes that they thought to be best for the game. And now they lost half their userbase.

There is more to producing an RPG than just what the developers do. In terms of your customers (not users or userbase), serving them actually means something. I'm truly seeing you are pretty ignorant on quite a few things. IF I have the wrong of this, please demonstrate.

In my opinion, WotC is just a normal company faced with the economic crisis and the difficulties of standing up in a market like this. Paizo, insted, are the real money grabbers, exploiting others' excellent work.

I think I adequately showed at the very beginning of the post that the two companies are very similar (if different in scale). They are a business. A healthy business is more able to support their shareholders/owners, employees and customers. Both WotC and Paizo can be described as healthy if somewhat different in the methods that they achieve this. You seem to ignore that Paizo had a good relationship with both their staff and customers and did not wish to abandon either of them. The line that you are trying to push is erroneous at best and plain dumb at worst.

Removed a particular comment that was beyond the bounds of polite discussion. I'd also note that there are other parts that are excessively rude, discoloring otherwise valid points. -Keterys

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[keterys]

Please ensure you can discuss the topics in this thread without any sort of name calling. This is a contentious topic, and one that can too easily garner inflamed responses. It thus behooves all posters to moderate their own replies, please.

Thanks!

 

[gamerprinter]

So you're suggesting that Paizo gave my information to WotC, who turned the data over to a market research company, who in turn sold the information to Bradford Exchange? This becomes ever more convoluted, and since the chess flyer was a different incident at a different time, there's nothing even linking WotC to the first chain of events. In fact, there's evidence that they were not linked.

What I mentioned before about the timeline not adding up is that according to Paizo, subscriber information was given to WotC before I moved. That means the data they gave to WotC was my old address. So one possibility is that subscriber information was passed to WotC on a regular, perhaps monthly basis, and Paizo was deceptive about when and how often that took place. The other is that WotC was not involved and Paizo shared my information with someone they oughtn't have.

Don't make me construct a flowchart to explain the intricacies of this incident. That's not going to qualify me as a mentally well person.

No, we're saying that your subscriber information was owned by WotC, and that Paizo gave them nothing. WotC took it, as was their legal right to do, and they turned around and sold this list, which was also their legal right to do so. So your angst should be pointed at WotC if anyone at all. Perhaps it should be pointed at yourself for not realizing that it was WotC's legal right do so.

By pointing at Paizo for your issue, you're greatly mistaken, as only WotC had the right to resell the list - its not a list owned by Paizo, rather owned by WotC. Remember that Dungeon and Dragon mags were owned by WotC, given license to Paizo to publish. Dungeon and Dragon were not owned by Paizo. Paizo cannot sell a list they do not own - only WotC can do it, as they are the owners of the list.

WotC sold the list, not Paizo - that's what is being said.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Hard-core 3.5 fans are going to like Paizo, hard-core 4e fans are going to like WotC.

Sorry, I'm a hard-core 4E fan and I like both WotC and Paizo.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I suspect what happened was that they thought the d20 trademark license would be viewed as an indespensible part of the licensing; and the d20 STL did not allow PHBs to be published since character creation rules were verboten by the license. But the d20 license itself was ultimately seen as secondary to the OGL by itself. I don't think they foresaw fully independent games being produced using the license; it's often difficult to foresee the full implications of your decisions.

This was where I was confused. So, Character Creation & Advancement are part of the OGL, just not the d20 STL?

 

[Umbran]

Only a handful of people really needed to, and those people *should* have been able to.

Hindsight is 20/20. It is very easy to have made a good guess, and look back and say that everyone should have agreed with you in the first place. We cannot lay out the reasoning of all parties, to compare and see which really made more sense at the time the decision was made, without the information of the intervening years.

I read about a study done of entrepreneurs recently, finding the most common traits of successful captains of small to medium businesses. Cleverness was not even in the top five - the top trait was perseverance. To quote Charlemagne in Pippin, "It is smarter to be lucky than it is lucky to be smart." The ability to predict was not as important as the ability to stick around and take advantage of developments.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Hindsight is 20/20. It is very easy to have made a good guess, and look back and say that everyone should have agreed with you in the first place.

In other words, nobody can possibly have been correct, only lucky.

And, of course, WotC couldn't possibly have been incorrect (even with their vastly superior access to information useful in making the decision), only unlucky.

Genius!

 

[Wicht]

This was where I was confused. So, Character Creation & Advancement are part of the OGL, just not the d20 STL?

The OGL only covers those elements of a game released under the OGL. A publisher is allowed to print part of their book under the OGL and keep other parts of it closed, as covered in section 8 of the OGL.

WotC never included their character creation or advancement rules in the SRD and these rules were alwasy "closed content."

This does not prevent a company from recreating character advancement rules of their own and adding it in on top of the Open Content of another company (in this case WotC), which is what Paizo and others have done. Moreover, any character creation and advancement rules declared open content by any other party (other than WotC) to the OGL is thereafter open.