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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5805360" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't have any particular image in mind, although you've handily provided some.I was more meaning that (as far as I know) D&D is the only fantasy RPG, and indeed the only fantasy fiction, that used the notion of chromatic dragons. Even to someone who didn't know about 3.5, a poster in a store showing some adventurers fighting a red dragon might scream "D&D".Yes, because it involves a chromatic dragon. The resemblance to the old basic boxes, which I hadn't had in mind, only reinforces that.I don't know how many 3.5 players brought OGL licensed materials. I would guess less than half the market, but I could be wrong. But 3.5 was definitely the name for a gaming system - WotC, the publisher of that system, released a series of corebooks with "v 3.5" fairly prominently on the cover.From a marketing point of view, 3.5 refers to that game and those books, not the <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35" target="_blank">Revised (3.5) System Reference Document</a>. In fact, in my experience, about 98% of the market does not understand the legal relationship between WotC's published books, the SRD released by WotC, the OGL under which the SRD was released, the d20 system license, and the materials released by 3PP under the OGL which either incorporate elements of, or a derivative of, the SRD and therefore (under the terms of the OGL) must themselves be licensed under the OGL. (I'm reaching that 98% figure by treating ENworld as including the most informed 10% of the market, and then adjusting for the confusion I see on this forum. It's an approximate figure only.) When a mug punter walks into a gamestore and see "3.5 Thrives" their mind does not turn to the SRD. It turns to WotC's game.If this is your view, I don't think I want to hire you as my marketer! The Paizo poster, in its marketing function, barely resembles a website. It is a poster which is intended to be displayed at points of sale where consumers might be attracted to purchasing something that they otherwise don't know about - and it does that by speaking to a need that Paizo believes the consumer is likely to feel - namely, the need to keep playing 3.5! (As Paizo says on its website, "Folded copies of this poster were sent to game stores everywhere".)Given the wonderful ways of the interwebs, I'm sure the occasional stranger has found him- or herself on the OSRIC website without knowing what s/he was looking for - perhaps some downloads even took place (given that it's free - another huge difference from Paizo, who are marketing something - ie seeking to sell it in a marketplace).Paizo is not some hokey backwoods operation that thought it might be fun to keep 3.5 alive as a lark, and then suddenly had commercial success thrust upon them. Paizo is a deliberate, and as it turns out wildly successful, entrepreneurial venture. It didn't post PF on a website and see if anyone wanted to buy it. It sent copies of its poster to game stores everywhere - gamestores with which I assume it already had links via its stewardship of the licensed WotC magazine -  and - via that poster - pitched its game to the peope wandering into those gamestores thinking "I still like 3.5".I'm not sure if your apparent naivety about Paizo's marketing - evident in a comparison of PF to a retroclone like OSRIC or Labyrinth Lords - is genuine or disingenuous. But I think it is a huge selling short of Paizo's guts and achievement. I'm personally not a big fan of 3E as a system, and therefore not a big fan of PF, so the fact that "3.5 Thrives" is of little personal importance to me. And although I am not familiar with more recent PF books like Ultimate Magic and so on, I personally don't see Paizo's achievements in retweaking 3E as any greater than those of (say) Monte Cook in designing AE/U. 3E, as a system, is ripe for tweaking in order to improve certain aspects of its play whilst preserving the overall chassis more or less intact. But the way Paizo seized an entrepreneurial opportunity and then pushed it for all it's worth is pretty impressive. They were probably the only ones able to do so, both for technical reasons - their access to subscription lists, and what I assume would be their knowledge of the distribution and retail aspects of the market based on their publishing of the magazines - and for "brand loyalty"/"consumer perception" reasons, because they had been widely seen as terrific stewards of the magazines.But being the only ones who could do so doesn't mean that success was guaranteed. WotC also has a lot of technical capacity as well as market penetration and goodwill, and so is a hard firm to go head-to-head with. Paizo took a chance - a calculated one, but still a chance - and it worked out for them. That's the essence of entrepreneruship. I personally think it is not really comparable to the retro-clones like OSRIC, etc. Those are sophisticiated hobby endeavours, not entrepreneurial ones.</blockquote>

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