It certainly isn't for the dark storytelling because the setting has gotten noticeably lighter in tone.
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.
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
Adventure Paths are outdated:
What was once the core product of Paizo is now an outdated relic.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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 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?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.
... which makes it a poor choice for discussion when all nuance gets stripped away from conversations by rabid internet tribes.
A huge percentage of people RPGs big weren't even alive then.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.