Pathfinder 2E The Pathfinder Subform Is Definitely Dead - So What?

[Ixal]

No surprise that there are not many PF discussions here.
In the edition war era Enworld did a pretty good job driving everyone who was not a fan of 4E away and those became the core audience of Pathfinder.

 

[Galandris]

It certainly isn't for the dark storytelling because the setting has gotten noticeably lighter in tone.

Isn't that linked to the "canonicity" of AP? I am by no mean a Golarion expert, but I feel the setting was fraught with problems for the adventurers to resolve and as the AP solved those, the resulting world is better to live in... but maybe not as appealing to adventure in. Eberron (which can also be dark) has been stuck in 998 for decades and I think it's a good thing.

If Paizo wants their game to take off they need to pivot their marketing to something that highlights the games' actual strengths. They should also consider more modern approaches to marketing, such as utilizing influencers like independent content creators more fully.

They should also rethink their website. I have a very hard time to buy their PDFs due to links to paper versions of the products being very present, and if someone has a buying impulse, finding how to get the PDF immediately should help. I know, it's very minor and not on the level of what you mention, but despite having bought PDFs from them previously, my decision to buy the of the latest AP was followed by 30 minutes (no kidding) on finding the correct link to buy PDF-only.

Controversy cows creativity:

To be blunt, there are an increasingly large number of topics I don't feel comfortable engaging with fully anymore on lots of boards, including this one. As an example, I had an idea for a Gray Corsair campaign that would revolve around disrupting the slave trade of the Inner Sea

Yes, I can see how it could turn out if discussed on Internet boards...

Adventure Paths are outdated:

What was once the core product of Paizo is now an outdated relic. The pandemic has proven that more and more players are moving to virtual tabletops. Pathfinder 2e is very lucky to have a fantastic fan implementation of it's ruleset into Foundry, but that isn't for effort on Paizos part. Paizo is still interested in being a traditional publishing company, as if any of their customers are buying their products from local game stores. The player base is almost entirely online, and Paizo should be pivoting toward catering to where their audience actually plays. Instead they release what should be single-purchase adventures as multiple installment adventure paths. Adventure Paths were great when the main movers of your product were game stores with highly active tabletop scenes that served as hubs of discussion for newest stuff. Now the internet is your main customer, and your players are all going to discord and reddit and playing on Foundry VTT. Make the adventure content in a way that enables discussion better across the internet and caters to your existing customer base, which frankly you could do by just combining adventure paths into larger campaigns.

Sure the pandemic is starting to get old, but it will end at some point. I can understand a company would be reluctant to alter its business model, based partly on subscription, which requires regular products to be published, in favor of, say, twice yearly Internet-supported campaign, only for the pandemic to stop and people getting back to a regular activity.

 

[Ixal]

Isn't that linked to the "canonicity" of AP? I am by no mean a Golarion expert, but I feel the setting was fraught with problems for the adventurers to resolve and as the AP solved those, the resulting world is better to live in... but maybe not as appealing to adventure in. Eberron (which can also be dark) has been stuck in 998 for decades and I think it's a good thing.

Partially, but Paizo also actively removed many darker or controversial subjects apart from AP solutions. Goblins are probably the most obvious example. In PF1 they were described as evil and murderous and suddenly in PF2 they were just misunderstood and are valuable members of society which can be found everywhere in cities and are equal to everyone else.
Many other monster races like kobolds, lizardmen, etc. too became "normal citizens".

 

[Staffan]

Adventure Paths are outdated:

What was once the core product of Paizo is now an outdated relic. The pandemic has proven that more and more players are moving to virtual tabletops. Pathfinder 2e is very lucky to have a fantastic fan implementation of it's ruleset into Foundry, but that isn't for effort on Paizos part. Paizo is still interested in being a traditional publishing company, as if any of their customers are buying their products from local game stores. The player base is almost entirely online, and Paizo should be pivoting toward catering to where their audience actually plays. Instead they release what should be single-purchase adventures as multiple installment adventure paths. Adventure Paths were great when the main movers of your product were game stores with highly active tabletop scenes that served as hubs of discussion for newest stuff. Now the internet is your main customer, and your players are all going to discord and reddit and playing on Foundry VTT. Make the adventure content in a way that enables discussion better across the internet and caters to your existing customer base, which frankly you could do by just combining adventure paths into larger campaigns.

Adventure paths, to me, are still one of the selling points for Pathfinder. However, it seems to have taken them a little while to figure out how to make them for PF2. I have run the first two parts of Extinction Curse, and I wasn't very happy with those because they were pretty much all dungeon crawl (and also because while the AP was framed as "the Circus AP", it's been more "the Aroden/xulgath AP with a little circusing in it"). But Strength of Thousands seems to be a lot better in that regard.

I'm also not sure all that much has moved to VTTs, particularly not long term. Our gaming group played on Roll20 for about a year and a half, but are now back at the table. I have a feeling that physical gaming tables are going to overshadow VTTs for a long, long time.

And I don't think they'd work well as single-purchase adventures, at least not without massively reducing their scope. The whole point of an adventure path is "Here's a whole campaign from level 1 to 20 in six installments*, ready to play." If you want smaller adventures, they make those too, but APs are their bread and butter. I'm not saying APs are perfect – for example, I think the "20 levels in 6 x 64 pages**" format is a bit too tight, and they'd be better off either making AP installments bigger (and of course adjusting their workflow to accomodate this), covering fewer levels, or releasing APs in more than 6 parts (which messes with their schedules). But I'm not running Paizo, so it's not my call to make.

* Recently they've been experimenting with 1-10 or 11-20 in three installments as well.
** Each AP installment is 96 pages, but only about 2/3 is actual adventure material, and the rest are things like new creatures, new magic items, or supplementary rules which is usually adventure-related but not always directly adventure-relevant.

 

[DaveMage]

The system is great, the world is awesome, the marketing is terrible:

Paizo's designers have made a truly great product in the TTRPG space, I fully believe that. Paizo has unfortunately done an awful job marketing their stellar product to the public. Pathfinder 1e directly compared itself to D&D 3.5 as it's functional replacement as well as supporting a more dark and subversive tone in the published story material. Now it's been over a decade since 3.5, D&D is well into the second replacement to that edition. Paizo hasn't adequately answered the question of what audience is in the position to benefit from PF2e the most.

I think this is a good point. As a Pathfinder 1E fan, I don't remember ever being given a compelling reason to move to 2E. In fact, all I saw through the 2E development process was how the system changes were reflecting a D&D 4e look more than anything else. (My disgust with 4e was, of course, why I went to Pathfinder in the first place.)

I'm still playing Pathfinder 1E, so I still visit the Paizo forums (occasionally) when I'm looking for info in the 1E product threads when I'm running those adventures, but I'm not making many new posts, only seeing what is already there. (No need to post Pathfinder 1E stuff at EN World either.) I will also drop by the Paizo boards when there is union talk, since I find that interesting. And I can't help but read James Jacobs AMA thread. That guy is a gaming treasure. Whatever they are paying him, it's too low.

 

[payn]

Adventure Paths are outdated:

What was once the core product of Paizo is now an outdated relic. The pandemic has proven that more and more players are moving to virtual tabletops. Pathfinder 2e is very lucky to have a fantastic fan implementation of it's ruleset into Foundry, but that isn't for effort on Paizos part. Paizo is still interested in being a traditional publishing company, as if any of their customers are buying their products from local game stores. The player base is almost entirely online, and Paizo should be pivoting toward catering to where their audience actually plays. Instead they release what should be single-purchase adventures as multiple installment adventure paths. Adventure Paths were great when the main movers of your product were game stores with highly active tabletop scenes that served as hubs of discussion for newest stuff. Now the internet is your main customer, and your players are all going to discord and reddit and playing on Foundry VTT. Make the adventure content in a way that enables discussion better across the internet and caters to your existing customer base, which frankly you could do by just combining adventure paths into larger campaigns.

I was excited to read this since I think the APs have lost a step. Then, realized its an odd complaint about APs online presence? Paizo has been an internet based store for over a decade. I have only used PDFs in F2F and now VTTs since 2009. The dedicated AP specific forums were/are invaluable to running the APs. I'm not sure exactly what Paizo is supposed to do to make APs more online?

 

[Kaodi]

I can confirm that the PF2 General subforum of the Pathfinder Discord is very lively. That is where I engage in almost all of my PF discussions even though I can probably be described as an EN World lifer. Also, while it might not seem like there is much active moderation, discussion can be heated due to strong opinions but does not really get nasty. There are regulars, just like here, and they anchor the tone.

 

[Umbran]

... which makes it a poor choice for discussion when all nuance gets stripped away from conversations by rabid internet tribes.

Mod Note:
Calling them "rabid internet tribes" is stripping away nuance, as well. And use of "tribe" for this is... interesting, to say the least.

Our inclusion policy doesn't hold with lumping disagreement into an ill-defined group name, and then dismissing it. Please don't do that again.

 

[darjr]

If anything this thread proves that people are paying attention.

 

[Parmandur]

No surprise that there are not many PF discussions here.
In the edition war era Enworld did a pretty good job driving everyone who was not a fan of 4E away and those became the core audience of Pathfinder.

A huge percentage of people RPGs big weren't even alive then.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was excited to read this since I think the APs have lost a step. Then, realized its an odd complaint about APs online presence? Paizo has been an internet based store for over a decade. I have only used PDFs in F2F and now VTTs since 2009. The dedicated AP specific forums were/are invaluable to running the APs. I'm not sure exactly what Paizo is supposed to do to make APs more online?

Yeah, I'm a little puzzled about that too, unless the premise is that online play is more likely to be episodic. Which hasn't been my personal experience, but that experience may not be reflective of most other people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In some respects, I'm not sure what "better marketing" for PF2e would look like; as it is, talking about it with people outside the PF2e community often turns into edition wars with PF1e fans or system wars with D&D5e fans, neither of which seem too useful.

 

[JThursby]

They should also rethink their website. I have a very hard time to buy their PDFs due to links to paper versions of the products being very present, and if someone has a buying impulse, finding how to get the PDF immediately should help.

Oh yeah, the website could use a redo (again).

I was excited to read this since I think the APs have lost a step. Then, realized its an odd complaint about APs online presence? Paizo has been an internet based store for over a decade. I have only used PDFs in F2F and now VTTs since 2009. The dedicated AP specific forums were/are invaluable to running the APs. I'm not sure exactly what Paizo is supposed to do to make APs more online?

I explained my point poorly, so let me try again. Imagine you're a GM looking through the Pathfinder 2e reddit. You read about Strength of Thousands and think an African-inspired magical school campaign would be great for your players. You go to the Paizo store and find to get Strength of Thousands you need to buy all six parts as separate payments of $17.99, over $100 dollars total. They won't even be in the same document, you'll have six different pdfs to flip through to get the whole picture of the campaign. There's no bundle to entice buying the whole thing. The only VTT options are Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which all cost the full $25 dollars per module instead of the PDF price, and are platforms that have notoriously bad implementations of the PF2e rules, plus have their own outrageous expenses to begin with. You may be willing to pay those prices for a game you know your group will stick with, like 5e, but are you willing to pay the same prices on a game you're not sure they'll stick with? Within the span of a few minutes of thought Strength of Thousands has gone from an enticing idea of a campaign to a procession of unnecessary inconveniences, risks and expenses to the prospective buyer. People don't pick up first modules of APs on impulse in a digital storefront the same way they would in a traditional storefront, other strategies need to be brought to bear to build an audience. Would this be less of a barrier if there was a lot more buzz behind the campaign, like with the popularity of Abomination Vaults? Maybe. But so far we haven't seen an ability for Paizo to regularly produce hype behind their 2e APs. Until Paizo finds their step and gets to generating hype the best thing they can do is re-organize their existing content into a form factor that presents itself as more affordable and more convenient to digital buyers.

I can confirm that the PF2 General subforum of the Pathfinder Discord is very lively.

I'm there too, there's just not a lot of discussion about stuff I find interesting. A lot of it is hot takes on mechanics and relative class strength, general white room stuff. I'm more interested in the potential for telling stories using the systems and lore of Pathfinder, not so much lamenting about some classes dealing slightly less damage on a hypothetically average turn than some other classes.

Mod Note:
And use of "tribe" for this is... interesting, to say the least.

This is clearly used in the context of tribalism, the tendency for "my side vs your side" mentality that turns discussions toxic.
Come on, this is exactly what I'm talking about. I don't appreciate the implied accusation of racism, and it coming from staff only makes it worse. It's unreasonable. It also illustrates my point: how eager are people going to be to post their genuine and benign thoughts if they think it might be perceived as deviation?

---

This is unrelated to any of the above, but I would like more active discussion about PF2e stuff. I was waiting to see if there was going to be a review of the Lost Omens: Absalom book, but since one hasn't manifested I am considering writing my own. I've been enjoying the book immensely, it not only contains tons of interesting lore but is structured in a way that makes the process of reading it and imagining how to run it an absolute joy. I'm in the process of setting up the content it has into Foundry and might also do a companion write up for my thoughts of running such a huge city location in a virtual table top setting.

 

[payn]

I explained my point poorly, so let me try again. Imagine you're a GM looking through the Pathfinder 2e reddit. You read about Strength of Thousands and think an African-inspired magical school campaign would be great for your players. You go to the Paizo store and find to get Strength of Thousands you need to buy all six parts as separate payments of $17.99, over $100 dollars total. They won't even be in the same document, you'll have six different pdfs to flip through to get the whole picture of the campaign. There's no bundle to entice buying the whole thing. The only VTT options are Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which all cost the full $25 dollars per module instead of the PDF price, and are platforms that have notoriously bad implementations of the PF2e rules, plus have their own outrageous expenses to begin with. You may be willing to pay those prices for a game you know your group will stick with, like 5e, but are you willing to pay the same prices on a game you're not sure they'll stick with? Within the span of a few minutes of thought Strength of Thousands has gone from an enticing idea of a campaign to a procession of unnecessary inconveniences, risks and expenses to the prospective buyer. People don't pick up first modules of APs on impulse in a digital storefront the same way they would in a traditional storefront, other strategies need to be brought to bear to build an audience. Would this be less of a barrier if there was a lot more buzz behind the campaign, like with the popularity of Abomination Vaults? Maybe. But so far we haven't seen an ability for Paizo to regularly produce hype behind their 2e APs. Until Paizo finds their step and gets to generating hype the best thing they can do is re-organize their existing content into a form factor that presents itself as more affordable and more convenient to digital buyers.

That makes much more sense. Doing as much as possible to make VTT work effortlessly with PFRPG products would be a good move for Paizo. Maybe even an absolutely necessary move since folks who subbed up may have to purchase another product to run VTT. Pre-pandemic this wasnt an issue since many subbers didn't use VTT, but now...

However, I do think you get a lot for those 17.99 modules. In my experience, the beefy paragraphs explaining each module in the path is pretty adequate to making a decision to jump in. This is also where the invaluable part comes in for the sub-forums (at least in the past with PF1). Perhaps reddit and discord have taken over this heavy lifting? I dont think a complete package deal is out of the question, but I doubt a hefty discount is in order. After reading about wages and difficulties in the industry, I find these prices completely fair based on amount of game time I get out of them. Clearly, YMMV. There is, of course, the stand alone module line, albeit, with fewer options than the decade + AP line.

Also, ive done some of the 5E WOTC AP stuff... It just doesn't compare.

 

[Umbran]

This is clearly used in the context of tribalism, the tendency for "my side vs your side" mentality that turns discussions toxic.

Mod Note:
Per the Terms and rules of the site (linked on the bottom of every page), if you feel a need to comment on moderation, we ask and require you to take that to private message with a member of the staff. Please do not clutter the thread with arguing with moderators.

 

[Retreater]

The only VTT options are Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which all cost the full $25 dollars per module instead of the PDF price, and are platforms that have notoriously bad implementations of the PF2e rules, plus have their own outrageous expenses to begin with.

I don't want to be that "Foundry VTT guy" but a one time purchase of $50 gets you that VTT. There's a brilliant PDF importer that works for legally purchased PDFs that loads them into Foundry, with monsters, maps (with dynamic lighting), tokens, etc. I didn't believe it myself, coming from Roll20 (where I loaded in Age of Ashes and Abomination Vaults over many hours). Here it was done for me in minutes for no extra cost.
If you're thinking about PF2 online, it's a great option. It's not my system, but I'd be happy to give you more information if you'd like.

 

[JThursby]

However, I do think you get a lot for those 17.99 modules. In my experience, the beefy paragraphs explaining each module in the path is pretty adequate to making a decision to jump in. This is also where the invaluable part comes in for the sub-forums (at least in the past with PF1). Perhaps reddit and discord have taken over this heavy lifting? I dont think a complete package deal is out of the question, but I doubt a hefty discount is in order.

If all that was newly offered was a single, combined PDF at the combined cost of the adventure path, that in and of itself represents a significant increase in convenience and enticement. Clicking on "buy now" once to get a single document with everything you need is much less of a barrier than having to do the same thing six times and having six opportunities to rethink your purchase. I know this sounds like nit-picking, but Paizo really should be doing low-effort things like this when possible.

Also, ive done some of the 5E WOTC AP stuff... It just doesn't compare.

I like both Chris Perkins and James Jacobs work quite a lot, whenever I see either of them head a project in either company I'm there day one. There's quality to be had in both games, I'm not willing to throw either product totally under the bus just because of some botched projects like Tyranny of Dragons or Age of Ashes.

I don't want to be that "Foundry VTT guy"

Don't worry, I'm one of those guys too. That module is great, and it has saved me literal days of prep work. Still, Paizo should either be doing more to sell stuff to us or broadcast that such great fan support exists, and will persist, on their website or social media platforms. It would be good for community engagement and also let more people know how cheap and easy it is to get into their game.

 

[Kaodi]

I'm there too, there's just not a lot of discussion about stuff I find interesting. A lot of it is hot takes on mechanics and relative class strength, general white room stuff. I'm more interested in the potential for telling stories using the systems and lore of Pathfinder, not so much lamenting about some classes dealing slightly less damage on a hypothetically average turn than some other classes.

I suppose that it is fair. I am not exocist by any means but I love that whiteboard stuff and making character builds (which perhaps makes it ironic that I never talk in the actual builds subforum). I do not think those sort of crunch discussions are entirely divorced from storytelling though - at least for some players. Having fun is, I think, probably a prerequisite for telling good stories. And fun can be harder to come by if your character build does not achieve the level of effectiveness you require.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I see I'm again the guy who sees "VTT" and does not assume automation past the ability to make die rolls, port maps and move tokens when everyone else apparently does.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I suppose that it is fair. I am not exocist by any means but I love that whiteboard stuff and making character builds (which perhaps makes it ironic that I never talk in the actual builds subforum). I do not think those sort of crunch discussions are entirely divorced from storytelling though - at least for some players. Having fun is, I think, probably a prerequisite for telling good stories. And fun can be harder to come by if your character build does not achieve the level of effectiveness you require.

Being able to get a good result for what I was aiming for in a character absolutely effected how well my wife and I engaged with our characters in our current campaign.