1. like finding smaller companies who are struggling and giving them a hand. either by supporting their products or outright buying the ip to produce them.
2. keeping an eye on the consumer market. via reading blogs, tweets, and message boards or watching podcasts. actively answering those requests to chat up your new lines coming out or in the works.
3. hiring the best talent available for the price you can afford to pay. freelancers and staff.
4. gaming. yes. actually playing the games you are designing instead of just doing strategy thinks. this includes demos at cons or stores. so the product gets a full vetting.
5. being willing to make changes when changes are necessary instead of just at a whim or b/c you need to find a cash revenue. this is a hard one. things plateau. but killing a product line that others are happy with is never a good thing.
6. staying hungry. if you aren't hungry, you aren't looking. sated companies soon become dead wood.
7. not being afraid to voice an opinion. yes. you will piss off customers. but being honest and true to your product is better.
There are a number of suggestions already made that I agree with so here's something on the simpler side:
Improve the quality of the Map Packs. Make them from thicker material. Try to keep the price reasonable and competitive.
And since I know your eyes are on this thread ...
Please pass along a huge thanks to your Customer Service team. Cosmo specifically recently helped me with a minor issue, and the team as a whole has always been the best. They are truely a model for how all customer service should be handled.
2. Make sure PF fiction does not establish "setting canon" or adopt the RSE mode of the FRs. An official statement along the lines of "Pathfinder fiction are stories set within the Golarion setting. The author's are afforded a certain amount of creative license in detailing the setting beyond what appears in Pathfinder products (APs, modules, RPG, etc.). The stories presented are no more or less canonical than an idividual GM's campaign set in Golarion is." or something along those lines.
3. Encourage other 3rd-party publishers to adapt other settings to the PFRPG (ala Freeport). You folks are kicking mucho hind-end with adventures set in Golarion. Let other companies focus on adventures for other settings or generic settings. Continue to expand the PFRPG influence through complimentary 3rd-party products (see #1 above).
4. Test the waters first. While I, desiring to be a Golarion completist, might jump at the chance to see Golarion's other continents in their own sourcebooks, don't commit the resources unless sufficient interest (i.e. $$) is shown through the purchase of a 32-page gazetteer or a module or 3. Also, don't abandon the core region (i.e. the region/continent we have today).
Pretty please, that is.
5. Tell Erik Mona to quit daydreaming and get back to work!
With respect to El Mahdi and Rechan (and I truly do not wish to start an edition flamewar)... please, no.
Don't try to out-WotC WotC. Your business model is working for you. If theirs is working for them, great.
Stay as far away from 4e and the GSL as possible in terms of Paizo-developed product. You've already bucked the conventional wisdom, beyond anyone's expectations. Don't look backwards.
I would order lots of coffee and slack off on Friday!
I would invest in some humor articles.
I would push pcgen devs and get out the new patch with some help from PAIZO. Sourceforge is an awesome platform for exploiting downloads of developing software.
I would stay on the ball and keep doing a good job knowing that my job exists solely for the reason of making sure that people do not have to WAIT for their PF book to arrive in the mail!
*might task a person to pick up a third party virtual table top platform and establish a free client with an 'ingame' store for various items - blatantly stealing the idea from Korean games and pairing it with GNU distribution tricks.*
Or better yet, don't sign the GSL and still produce stuff 4E'ers wish to buy. Like Kingmaker!
Go even further and split the Pathfinder (30-pages) module line from the rest of the Golarion/PFRPG stuff ... or at least loosen the ties. Make these into modules which are light on the rules (sc. stat blocks), but can be used by anyone running any edition of D&D. Like James Raggi did with Death Frost Doom.
Less utopian: draw in new players to PFRPG. Develop a slightly lighter version which takes people step by step through character creation. Produce modules for that version which make DM'ing them as easy as possible. Bulmahn's Crypt of the Everflame was a very good way forward in this area.
Start to focus on younger players as well, but take them as serious as if they were adults. Don't ever feel you have to simplify the language to enable them to keep up with your prose.
Final point: extend the space on a page you print text on and enlarge the font size.
0. I want to emphasize that I endorse your products here at the drop of a hat. This is written by an active supporter.
1. Design 1 high-level module for your system, internally play-test it, rewrite it, then release it. This is the area of PfRPG that got the least feedback and testing. And it's fairly clear that it is the area for which your editorial staff has the least interest. If you want to know how your system plays in the end game of campaigns, however, there's few better ways to find out.
2. I agree with Rechan. Something's going wrong in your AP design: routinely your fans are extremely excited about the first two-three adventures then go ballistic about your fourth and fifth adventures. Examples with spoilers :
Curse of the Crimson Throne features five awesome adventures undermined by: Skeletons of Scarwall (CotCT), great dungeon crawl but bad design--too little reward for too big a distraction from the AP's main appeal of an urban campaign. One module outside the city was fine; two meant that the PCs never got to run the resistance movement, which happened off-screen. The fact that you have three "invade the heavily guarded castle-like structures in a row over the last two installations doesn't help. The fact that the climactic battle is also not in the city that the PCs work so hard to defend is a problem as well.
Second Darkness: The problems show up early this time, after two good early adventures, with the giant choo-choo train of "Armageddon Echo" to the extremely underwritten Underdark city of "Endless Night" and ending with the mass battle of a bazillion high level casters and demons in "A Memory of Darkness". The fact that the fifth installment includes a number of different NPCs so depressed that they're written to discourage interaction with the PCs doesn't help.
Legacy of Fire: Absolutely stellar opening three modules followed by... consecutive modules in which the PCs are trapped on a plane and have to get out. Then everything's back on track for the last installment. Basically, it reads like the designers wanted a four installment path: 1-3, 6. Very little would be lost by saying "Time passes" and skipping two of those modules. That's a problem because you're losing the players just when the narrative climax should be approaching.
Council of Thieves: Awful first adventure with unpopular map design followed by very innovative theater module. Great work! But it takes three full adventures to solve the problem of wandering monsters in the city, a problem which the opening pages of the first module points the party. And you have an adventure in Cheliax in which the Hellknights and Church of Asmodeus are tertiary figures. And, for a resistance movement, there's an awful lot of reacting going on here.
Kingmaker: Everyone's very, very excited by this sandbox AP concept. We all want you to put out the 3P version of classic 1E adventures. It should be a hoot. But I worry. All I have to do is read the summaries of the last three installments to suspect that fans will go ballistic again. The fourth and fifth installment summaries seem to provide solid motivation for the PCs to travel to other lands, but when combined with the sixth module, it will become problematic. Why? Because the final adventure gives every indication of a climactic end in a different dimension. Instead of, you know, the kingdom the Kingmakers made. So, it's Curse of the Crimson Throne and Legacy of Fire all over again.
I can think of two solutions to the AP design problem. First, Paizo's design team has a long, long track record of promising one kind of AP experience, giving it, then delivering another one by installment 4 or 5. Embrace the fact that some APs are going to be have their fun based in providing breadth, travel and an epic scope, while other APs take one area and bring it alive. It doesn't seem like your editorial staff can quite commit to that concept that not every AP needs to shake things up. Not everything has to be Dr. Who, where every adventure's in a new land. Sometimes, Deep Space Nine or Angel is just fine.
Second, where is it written that every AP has to be 6 issues long? Why can't some of them be four issues long? Why can't the material determine how long the path will be? I understand that there's probably manufacturing and business model reasons for it, but I feel like you have to start being wary of watering down the quality of your core product.
3. When asked on this web site to provide recommendations to individual modules, I've not felt compelled to speak up for anything you published after the new edition was made. You need a signature module for your edition.
4. Take a sabbatical and study how successful companies adapt to rapid growth. You've added a lot on your plate, with stories, and game aids, and modules, and fan-authored short modules, and conventions, and writing an adaptation of a new edition, and managing all the hassles of a web community, and how all of that increases the complexity of management, accounting and manufacturing sides of your operation. It's no wonder that your APs are starting to miss some big picture issues: you're probably surfing from deadline to deadline, crisis to crisis. Fortunately, other companies have gone through these very same growing pains. Learn from their experiences.
