Pathfinder 1E You're the CEO of PAIZO. Now What?

[Mistwell]

Last I heard (from Orcus on these boards) no one at Wizards was returning his calls when he was trying to negotiate a separate license.

I believe he was looking to change the GSL, not a separate license.

Last I heard (from Scott Rouse on these boards), Wizard's attitude of the original GSL was that there was little need to make it more publisher friendly as there was a license out there that some publishers have signed and was working for them just fine.

I am not talking about a GSL change.

Getting them to negotiate an additional license might not be so easy to get them to the table. Esp considering that Scott Rouse and Linae are no longer there.

Has anyone at Paizo picked up the phone and tried?

 

[BryonD]

I am not asking for an excuse. I said I think it is perfectly fine that they don't WANT to support 4e. It does not need an excuse.

What I am saying is the "we won't do 4e because we don't like the GSL" is an excuse. If they wanted to do 4e stuff, they could pick up the phone, call people they know at WOTC, get the ball rolling on negotiating their own license, and make it happen. Much smaller gaming companies than Pazio are perfectly able to do just that, and I have full faith that Paizo could as well if they wanted to.

So yeah, what's with the excuse that the GSL is the reason. If the reason is they just don't want to do 4e, that's fine. But "GSL ties our hands" is an excuse.

Again, no it is not.
No one is saying the GSL ties their hands.
Their hands are tied by default.

They have mentioned their license for Dungeon and Dragon and how that went. The OGL/GSL issue has nothing to do with that. They don't want to repeat that experience.

It is far more accurate to say that 4E fans demanding support try to use the GSL as an excuse for why Paizo shouldn't get to make their own choices. Paizo explaining how the GSL doesn't untie their hands is far different than then saying it ties their hands.

It is still not an "excuse".

 

[Dannager]

"flawed" <> "worthless"

I'm quite confident that the assessment of a fan site based team building a product that is in no small part promoted as "support the site by buying this", would be far less representative than other putting-food-on-the-table companies.

Indulge me.

 

[Dannager]

It is far more accurate to say that 4E fans demanding support try to use the GSL as an excuse for why Paizo shouldn't get to make their own choices.

What?

Wow.

 

[BryonD]

Has anyone at Paizo picked up the phone and tried?

Have you?
Why does Paizo have the slightest obligation? (And why do they owe you an answer whether they have or have not?)

Again, are you telling them that repeating the Dungeon/Dragon license deal is a good business move for them? Forget the OGL/GSL. Why should they want a special license when they already had one and don't want to go that way again?

Your entire position is based on the default that they should be supporting 4E unless all options are exhausted.
The default position is to do your own thing.
The OGL was a massive special case. It was the existence of this special case changed the playing field in a way that no license agreement can or will.

 

[BryonD]

What?

Wow.

Truth hurts.
Paizo doesn't owe you anything. But they get hounded and hounded.

 

[BryonD]

Indulge me.

Sorry, no.

 

[coyote6]

So yeah, good idea, not bad idea. Assigning one employee to convert stuff already written, at significant profit, is a good idea. I'd bet a lot it would be a net positive.

It would take more than one; you'll need one person to write the conversion, another person to edit it, and a third to do the layout (which could be an extensive job, if you are reprinting entire adventures but with different stat blocks), at least.

Then you'll need to re-playtest the adventure, because my impression is that 3.5e/Pathfinder encounters aren't necessarily the same as 4e encounters. Just swapping 4e orcs for Pathfinder orcs might not work very well.

Plus, one game is 1-20, the other is 1-30, and characters of a particular level in one system will have radically different capabilities from same-level characters in the other system. How good of a 4e adventure will a simple encounter-by-encounter conversion produce? Will it be up to Paizo's standards?

I think it's a bit more work than just having one person do it.

From what I know, modules/APs do just fine.

If they do, why don't more people make them? As far as I can tell, the people currently publishing adventures regularly are WotC, Paizo, Goodman Games, and a few PDF-only publishers that probably sell a few hundred copies. I don't think Adamant has put out a 4e-compatible adventure in a while, though I haven't checked.

Outside of D&D & its heirs, who else sells adventures in print? Pinnacle & several Savage Worlds licensees do, but only Pinnacle & Triple Ace Games have adventures in print, AFAIK. There are much more in PDF (thankfully), but mostly, they don't seem to be worth the money to print 'em. TAG has said that sales of PDF adventures financed the later printing of said adventures in compendiums, implying to me that just printing the adventures was seen as unreasonably risky & expensive.

Hmm, maybe that's what I'd do if I was CEO of Paizo:. take my Ferrari, leave my sprawling seaside mansion, drive into town to the bank, get the magic wand out of storage, and wave it to make RPG publishing much more profitable, retroactive into the past (thus providing the Ferrari, seaside mansion, etc).

 

[Dannager]

Have you?
Why does Paizo have the slightest obligation? (And why do they owe you an answer whether they have or have not?)

They have no obligation. No one is saying they do. But there are a lot of people who think it would be really cool if it happened, no matter how unlikely that may be, and those people like to discuss the possibility.

You, on the other hand, are being incredibly dismissive, and are engaging in some pretty flagrant misrepresentation of others' positions.

Truth hurts.
Paizo doesn't owe you anything. But they get hounded and hounded.

You're right, in a very literal sense Paizo doesn't owe us anything. Nor do we owe Paizo anything. Paizo is a business, and we are customers. We, as customers, are discussing what we would like to see out of Paizo, a business. I very much doubt that hearing a bunch of people saying the equivalent of "Hey, we really want to give you our money if you do decide to make this product, and we're happy to offer suggestions for getting it off the ground!" is something that the Paizo folk consider "hounding".

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Paizo and WoTC

Why on earth would Paizo want to go down the road of producing content for WoTC again? They tried that with Dungeon and Dragon and Hasbro jerked the rug out from under them and darn near killed their company.

It isn't a simple matter to produce 4E adventures. You have to have a group of writers that are fully familiar with the 4E rules, who run 4E games, and who stay abreast of what is happening in the 4E world. There is a huge opportunity cost involved in doing that.

I can just imagine the consequences of Paizo making this decision. Everything is great for awhile, Pathfinder gets dropped or sidelined... then 5E comes out, and some suit at Hasbro decides that a 5E deal for Paizo isn't in Hasbros best interest and ...history repeats itself.


Paizo would be crazy to give Hasbro a second chance. I hope they never do.

Ken