Pathfinder 2E What's the deal with 3rd party PF2E Adventure "support"??

[Staffan]

It was huge right away

Edit: I was not claiming one product (and to be picky I listed TWO), but was demonstrating the environment.
companies have changed names and it gets hard to keep track. But Sword and Sorcery Studios, Green Ronin, Necromancer games, and others hit the ground running. (There was freeport stuff at that Gencon)

Mongoose and Goodman were right in there, Fantasy flight did some quick stuff. And the desk shop 1-dude publishing companies went nuts.

Slayer's Guide to Hobgoblins was released in 2001 - I think it was the summer or late spring, but I can't easily find any info saying exactly when.

Goodman started with the stand-alone d20 RPG Broncosaurus Rex in 2001, and didn't really get into the sourcebook game until 2002 with the Complete Guide series, and the first DCC adventures were released in 2003.

Fantasy Flight Games were certainly early adopters, with a fair amount of product released in 2001. It's hard to tell if they were early or late 2001 though.

I certainly wasn't suggesting that it took a year or so before anything happened with the OGL/d20 system. I'm saying it took about a year for it to explode. To some degree, that's because it took some time to actually make the product after the rules were released.

Basically, the first year was a combination of people with an inside track (Green Ronin via Chris Pramas), enthusiasts who wanted to be RPG publishers with varying levels of quality (with Necromancer Games being on the top edge of that), and White Wolf and FFG dipping their toes. When people saw that things were working out for these, that's when the boom really started - but that took like a year from the release in 2000. And of course, RPGNow was a major boost as well, which lowered the bar to publishing by quite a bit.

 

[BryonD]

OK Seems to be nit picking quite a bit there. I don't think there is a standardized definition of "explosion" for this conversation.

I'm going to stick with the "explosion" started in well less than a year, effectively right away, by my standards.

 

[zztong]

True, it is doing my well for an RPG: but other than 3.x (and PF by extension) and 5E, has any RPG ever really supported a full-blown 3PP market?

Since you're naming specific versions of D&D, 1e and 2e.

Does anyone else remember Judges Guild? They supported lots of early game systems. I remember them supporting C&S, DragonQuest, and even Superhero 2044.

 

[Shroomy]

True, it is doing my well for an RPG: but other than 3.x (and PF by extension) and 5E, has any RPG ever really supported a full-blown 3PP market?

Call of Cthulhu has a relatively robust 3PP market.

 

[Zaukrie]

I think two things:

On drivethrurpg, there is more PF2 content than people realize.

Publishers are making more money per hours spent on 5e, therefore the big players aren't yet doing PF2 stuff.

I anticipate that more stuff will come out for PF2, but again, not from teh biggest producers out there.

 

[Parmandur]

Call of Cthulhu has a relatively robust 3PP market.

Relatively, I'm sure: but is it 3.x or 5E D&D scale?

 

[JeffB]

On drivethrurpg, there is more PF2 content than people realize.

You are correct- and thanks for the FYI. 154 items came up when I searched. Most of it is the SOS typical of PF/3.x (player facing crunch), but I did see quite a few adventures in a casual look-see. Several of the companies producing these are familiar to me/I've heard of (Rogue Genius, Sneak Attack press, etc) but I wonder why they are not putting items up on the Paizo store, and sticking to DTRPG? I would think that the Paizo PF2 adventure section would garner them more exposure and sales*



* or perhaps it's a $ thing- Drive-thru takes a smaller bite out of the pie than Paizo.

 

[Bravesteel25]

* or perhaps it's a $ thing- Drive-thru takes a smaller bite out of the pie than Paizo.

This is what I've heard it comes down to. A lot of 3PP are no longer putting their stuff up on Paizo due to the cut that Paizo takes. DriveThruRPG and Open Gaming Store seem to offer much better terms.

 

[Shroomy]

Relatively, I'm sure: but is it 3.x or 5E D&D scale?

No, but how many other games can boast multiple successful 3PP publishers and their own version of the DM's Guild? The folks running Chaosium now are closely modeling their marketing on WotC and it appears to be paying off.

 

[dmccoy1693]

3p production seems to have slowed overall. Many of the companies are producing 5e material or are producing things for other systems. (John Brazer and Traveler for instance)

Thank you for mentioning us. We have been focusing on Traveller over the past year, mostly because the year prior we focused on Pathfinder, trying to get projects finished up we had in the pipeline.

For this year, however, we have a number of projects we're working on for PF1, not PF2. We decided that PF2 is not the system for us. We just don't love it the way we love PF1. So we won't be supporting the new system.