[What if] Pathfinder suddenly disappeared?

[cranberry]

That's too close to reality right now. Id rather not think about it.

But I have all of the books, so I would just have to create my own adventures instead of relying on Paizo.

 

[Desdichado]

I mean, that's kind of what happened with PF1, which is my "forever game." Paizo stopped supporting it, and when they did a lot of the wider community did too; certainly the OGL debacle didn't help, and nothing has since ameliorated the harm caused by that (since you can't publish PF1 content under the CC, and that's 99% likely to remain true even if WotC ever releases the 3.5 SRD under it).

Yeah, that's pretty much what happened to me in 2008 with 3.5. There's no problem playing a "dead" game if there was a ton of material produced for it. In this case, 3.5 and PF1e are so close that a lot of the material from both can, with a little bit of fiddling here and there, be cross-compatible, effectively doubling the amount of material available. I mean, you can play that stuff forever.

2e obviously hasn't been around as long, and Remastered even less so, so if that's your system, you've got a lot less to work with.

Of course, I don't care as much about compatibility questions anyway; in spite of the fact that I like 3.5 and PF1e, I tend to run a pretty handwavey game anyway.

 

[Koloth]

For one of my groups, we all agreed to stick with PF1 after PF2 came out. Between the group, we probably have most everything Paizo published and a lot of 3rd party stuff on top of that. Bonus is it is supported by PCGen, my go to offline character generator.
A 2nd group has moved to PF2. But again, between the group, we have most stuff published to date. Plenty enough for years of play before we have to scavenge stuff from PF1 APs or other modules.

 

[Incenjucar]

Pull a Pathfinder and build new worlds with old rules and expand and adapt. Which plenty of GMs do anyways.

 

[Desdichado]

Pull a Pathfinder and build new worlds with old rules and expand and adapt. Which plenty of GMs do anyways.

Yeah, I admit that I don't completely understand the gist of this type of question and many related ones. What would I actually personally do if someone stopped publishing new material? Use the 50+ years of old material, or make up my own. There's so much material out there. I don't really understand the need to be playing whatever's brand new. I only adopted 5e—reluctantly—two years ago when I relocated and joined an existing group that was already playing it. I have little interest in Pathfinder 2e or Remastered except from an academic curiosity standpoint, and I'm mostly only interested in Pathfinder 1e because it's compatible with 3e and I'm willing to finally, grudgingly, admit that it's enough of an improvement to probably justify using it instead of 3.5 if I were to start a new campaign.

But, once again, I don't play with power gamers, I'm pretty handwavey about mechanics, so systems don't matter too much to me. I like Pathfinder 1e specifically because of the roleplaying options inherent in the mechanics, not because I want to create broken combos or builds, or whatever, and I can run a module from pretty much any system on the fly. Because I run that way, my flexibility to use any material published at pretty much any point during the history of D&D and D&D-like games means I have way too much material to ever really care about what's new or not.

In fact, given that a lot of the new material (at least for 5e; I know that this isn't the case for Pathfinder) is actually "remastered" old material, new material is especially meh.

 

[djotaku]

Lots of great replies here. I'm more familiar with this from the D&D world as my first TTRPG was D&D 5e and I've since mostly played Tales of the Valiant (which is maybe a less extreme equivalent of 3.5e->PF1e as an analogy). And, basically, there are still tons of folks playing D&D 3.5 and D&D 4 and who never went from 5 to 5.5e.

I'll say the same thing that always comes up in the D&D world around topics like this or what if WotC takes something away from you on dndbeyond - the awesome thing about an "imagination game" is that as long as someone has a copy of whatever rules you want to run, you can run it forever.

I think the same problem from the D&D world applies to Paizo world. You can keep playing the old thing IF you can still find other players. The internet makes this much, much easier. However, some portion of any fanbase is doing to want to play the newest thing. Online VTTs and so on will move support to the new thing. (Unless it allows fan systems like Foundry does) There won't be any more official published material. So it becomes harder as the GM has to do more work. This is truly the only limitation on keeping old games alive. (Which is a variant of the unintended consequence of all the things being available forever that is plaguing video games, music, and tv/movies. If you make a new thing you're not just competing against the new things, but also all the old things)

 

[djotaku]

In fact, given that a lot of the new material (at least for 5e; I know that this isn't the case for Pathfinder) is actually "remastered" old material, new material is especially meh.

You might enjoy this: - I'm only partway through it, so I'm not sure what the conclusion will be, but Bob is usually very, very reasonable with his conclusions. (Although he does like to rib his paizo audience a bit)

 

[Justice and Rule]

Honestly you could probably get by with all the stuff out there for either edition. I mean, I'd want the next magic book, definitely, but I think outside of really missing the fantastic gazetteers, Pathfinder is basically a "forever game" any way you look at it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

With apologies to Douglas Adams.

Wasn't he a GURPS man?

 

[Incenjucar]

The path forks quite a bit depending on whether there is ongoing IP protection. If Paizo's catalogue IP remains locked down by lawyers, there's a solid chance of a new IP using the ORC-available rules emerging from a Kickstarter. If the IP is functionally free to use, homebrewing Pathfinder itself becomes a free-for-all until the IP momentum dies down and the homebrew takes on its own life anyway.