Is there any need for a pathfinder next? RPG systems have an infinite shelf life, wheeling out edition after edition is just fragmenting your market and creating those delightful edition wars we all know and love. And for what? The old system was probably just as good as your new one, maybe even better in ways.

It's applying the software life cycle to pen and paper books, pretty stupid.

I'm not overly familiar with Pathfinder but as far as I can see they're cranking out interesting settings and modules in lieu of new versions of their core system, which is exactly what they should be doing. Plus someone in Paizo really knows their way around the marketing circuit, a few of their moves have been quite clever.

Put those two together and I can see Pathfinder outliving and indeed outgrowing D&D, if they don't succumb to any 'new editions arms race' foolishness.

Quote from: RPGPundit;687398Sooner or later they have to change

No, they really don't.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb;687406P.S. And for the record, I also think that the OSR and "old school" games have more of a future than 5e ever will.

Can you elaborate on this?

Quote from: ggroy;687416Can you elaborate on this?

Yeah, I'm curious too. The OSR is NOT a market competitor for D&D or Pathfinder. I'm not even sure it's an untapped market. The best selling OSR books sell a tiny percentage of what The Complete Book of Dangling Schlongs made.

Sac Lamb sounds like a complete full-on Paizo fan-boi WOTC hater.  Good to know.

What would be amusing is if there will exist a few retirement/nursing homes in the late 2020's (or 2030's), which are dedicated to a clientele of old hardcore grognard type gamers.  :rant:

Quote from: RPGPundit;687398Anyone who thinks Paizo's just going to go on as-is indefinitely in an endless golden age is just fooling themselves.  Sooner or later they have to change, and that's a stickier wicket for them than most because their whole marketing strategy with Pathfinder was based on NOT changing.

A funny thought occurred to me - what if they pull a Steve Jackson Games and shift from RPGs to card games?

Every GURPS fan I know bemoans the rise of Munchkin and longs for the ancient days when your typical game store had a huge shelf of GURPS sourcebooks. Nowadays, everyone knows SJG as the company that does Munchkin.

At GenCon, Paizo was flogging the hell out of their card game. It looks like it's doing pretty well.

Meanwhile, their Mythic book for Pathfinder is... Kind of doing nothing. I checked Amazon for the card game, and noticed that the Mythic book is like #11 in gaming, and around 3000 overall. I buy a lot if gaming stuff on Amazon, and that's far lower than any new Paizo book I've seen. They're usually at or near the top and ranked around 1000.

I wonder if their plan is to simply sidestep D&D. I would be a really smart, long term move. They wouldn't compete directly with D&D, and if Munchkin is any example it's a better business to be in.

Quote from: JonWake;687434Yeah, I'm curious too. The OSR is NOT a market competitor for D&D or Pathfinder. I'm not even sure it's an untapped market. The best selling OSR books sell a tiny percentage of what The Complete Book of Dangling Schlongs made.

I think the OSR is its own thing that's basically web-centric, with blogs and G+ and so on. This cottage industry is not and never will be a threat to Paizo and WotC. I do believe there is an untapped market for old school games and play styles in general, and I do think it has good days ahead. It's not specifically dependant on what we think of as "the OSR" today, though.

I think there will be people playing old school vintage games long after 5th edition has come and gone. Whether the latter is going to be played after as well will depend on its own inherent quality, whether it attracts new gamers of its own whom, like those gamers introduced to RPGs with 3rd ed, will play other games for a while to ultimately play it again after going full circle, whether it is OGL-compatible and/or can easily be cloned under the OGL (not for its own sake, because retroclones are worth jack and shit in and of themselves, but are means to produce new stuff, modules etc for those games instead), and so on.

Quote from: Mistwell;687437Sac Lamb sounds like a complete full-on Paizo fan-boi WOTC hater.  Good to know.

What would have been to D&D if there were not Paizo as of now?

Quote from: Benoist;687478I think the OSR is its own thing that's basically web-centric, with blogs and G+ and so on. This cottage industry is not and never will be a threat to Paizo and WotC. I do believe there is an untapped market for old school games and play styles in general, and I do think it has good days ahead. It's not specifically dependant on what we think of as "the OSR" today, though.

I think there will be people playing old school vintage games long after 5th edition has come and gone. Whether the latter is going to be played after as well will depend on its own inherent quality, whether it attracts new gamers of its own whom, like those gamers introduced to RPGs with 3rd ed, will play other games for a while to ultimately play it again after going full circle, whether it is OGL-compatible and/or can easily be cloned under the OGL (not for its own sake, because retroclones are worth jack and shit in and of themselves, but are means to produce new stuff, modules etc for those games instead), and so on.

Now, what could be interesting for the OSR is if 5e becomes a kind of lingua franca for groups like FLAILSNAILS. They don't need to use it in particular, but if a GM can take a look at a 3e character and mentally port them into the same system as a BECMI character, that might make the system have some viability with the OSR.

On the other hand, most everyone in the OSR has been playing their game of choice for years and years, and can do all the porting and conversions in their heads.

Interesting times-- there are a lot of unknown unknowns, as Dick Cheney would say shortly after shooting a motherfucker in the face.

I believe it was Rumsfeld who talked about "unknown unknowns and known unknowns", but yeah, these are definitely interesting times for the D&D game at large, for sure.

Quote from: Benoist;687512I believe it was Rumsfeld who talked about "unknown unknowns and known unknowns", but yeah, these are definitely interesting times for the D&D game at large, for sure.

Flubbed my History check.

Quote from: JonWake;687434Yeah, I'm curious too. The OSR is NOT a market competitor for D&D or Pathfinder. I'm not even sure it's an untapped market. The best selling OSR books sell a tiny percentage of what The Complete Book of Dangling Schlongs made.

Do we have figures for that? What does an average Paizo or D&D splatbook sell in comparison to what, say, Lamentations of the Flame Princess has sold?

Vincent Baker's games, as of March 2013, had sold about 8000 copies combined (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/707). Those are the only RPG sales figures I can remember seeing anywhere.

I haven't been over to the Paizo boards in a long time, but it used to be that it would list your subscriber status when you posted.  If you look around at the registered users and review that, it'll give you a sense of the minimum orders for each product - and since they sell a lot of product direct through subscriptions, it seems a more reliable gauge than Amazon sales figures.

Quote from: Benoist;687512I believe it was Rumsfeld who talked about "unknown unknowns and known unknowns", but yeah, these are definitely interesting times for the D&D game at large, for sure.

You go to market with the game you have, not the game you wished you had.

JG

Quote from: Sacrificial LambP.S. And for the record, I also think that the OSR and "old school" games have more of a future than 5e ever will.

Quote from: ggroy;687416Can you elaborate on this?

I'll try. For nearly 40 years, "old school" or "vintage" games have been created and played. They're still going strong. Obviously, not as strong as 3.x or 4.x, but the potential market was and is still there. Granted, there may have been a major lull in their superficial popularity during the "d20 Boom", but people were still playing Basic D&D, 1e, and other such games all along.

Unlike the potential 5e market (or future 6e market for that matter), the "vintage" gamers simply do not have to worry about the "planned obsolescence model" due to not being beholden to any one company. Wanna write something for OSRIC, or Labyrinth Lord, or Swords & Wizardry? Go for it.

Many gamers like constancy, and the convenience of an open gaming license that lets them publish material for the types of games that they're actually interested in. I don't think 5e will be as open as 3.x (if at all), and if it isn't, then practically speaking, it's like having a poison pill in your gaming license. The genie is out of the bottle, and WoTC would be foolish to try to stuff it back in at this point. Of course, WoTC will probably try to indirectly eradicate the OGL (by not supporting it)....because they have people with a different type of corporate philosophy running the show right now.

Quote from: BenoistI think the OSR is its own thing that's basically web-centric, with blogs and G+ and so on. This cottage industry is not and never will be a threat to Paizo and WotC. I do believe there is an untapped market for old school games and play styles in general, and I do think it has good days ahead. It's not specifically dependant on what we think of as "the OSR" today, though.

I don't know, Ben. While there is no single company that acts as a threat to WoTC or Paizo....collectively, all these "vintage games" and retro-clones add up in diluting the D&D brand, and diverting many potential customers away from the "Big Two" gaming companies. However, WoTC will probably be damaged by this far worse than Paizo ever will, if only because Paizo seems to more greatly value and understand customer service and public relations than WoTC does. I would also say that Paizo is far less likely to completely embrace the "planned obsolescence model" [POM], than WoTC ever will.

Rightly or wrongly, gamers strongly prefer games that are provided with support. Since WoTC embraces "POM", 5e will likely be fully supported by WoTC (and in print) for only a few years....just like 4e.

Quote from: BenoistI think there will be people playing old school vintage games long after 5th edition has come and gone. Whether the latter is going to be played after as well will depend on its own inherent quality, whether it attracts new gamers of its own whom, like those gamers introduced to RPGs with 3rd ed, will play other games for a while to ultimately play it again after going full circle, whether it is OGL-compatible and/or can easily be cloned under the OGL (not for its own sake, because retroclones are worth jack and shit in and of themselves, but are means to produce new stuff, modules etc for those games instead), and so on.

I agree. People will be playing these "old school/vintage games" long after 5e is gone.

Back in 2008-2009, I discussed the "planned obsolescence model". I said that WoTC embraced this concept...and in 2009, I predicted 5e. Here are some threads and posts where this subject (and related material) is discussed:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=14595&page=2

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb (posted 07-02-2009)The 5e threads on ENWorld get heated because many of the posters over there don't want others acknowledging the "planned obsolescence model" adopted by WoTC. In the past, discussing a new edition shortly after one was just released sounded silly. Now, not so much. I think people suspect that any edition released by WoTC is just temporary now, which it is. The EN mods are trying to avoid an Internet flamefest (hence the closing of the 5e threads before they really even started), and can try to fight this rampant speculation for a little while, but not for too long. They'll just be unintentionally diverting the 5e speculation to other non-related threads, and if they were smart, they'd just let it run its course. The harder you try to slap something down, the harder it bounces back up. But you know what? It's their forum.

If you discuss 5e without any hint of humor or sarcasm, people will eventually get pissed off. Why? Because the discussion is an acknowledgement that 4e will eventually go out of print, and many gamers refuse to play games that they feel are going out of print soon, or aren't officially supported at all. For a long time, WoTC hid the fact they were releasing 4e, because they feared too early an announcement of 4e would have hurt their 3.5 sales. So if we have people saying:

"In 5e, I'd like WoTC to replace Hit Points with a condition track, and have a spell point system, and ditch Alignment, and reintroduce Tinker Gnomes, and blah, blah, blah..." :blahblah:

You'll have other people reacting like this:

"Shut the fuck up! If you talk about 5e, people will reject 4e because they'll be afraid of it being out of print soon." :rant:

It really is that simple. They're not exactly saying it in those words, but that's the gist of the conversation. Basically, many gamers stop playing an rpg if they think that it'll soon be dropped by the publisher, and people over there know it, so any 5e discussion will put some of the more zealous 4e fans on the attack. It might seem silly, but that's just the way of things.

Anyway....can we all admit there's been a negative change in the atmosphere of ENWorld? Something's up. The posters are more passive-aggressive, and the moderators are more tight-fisted than before. Basically, posters and mods alike are crankier now, and with the "Eric's Grandma" rule, there's no real way to vent. I still visit there, but ENWorld isn't quite the same...

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=14595&page=3

Quote from: ggroy (posted 07-02-2009)I wouldn't be surprised if WotC is already working on a 5E D&D.

Based on historical precedent, work on 4E was already underway in early 2005, which was a bit over a year after the 3.5E core books were released in July 2003.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb (posted 07-02-2009)I don't think they're actually working on 5e yet, but they probably will pretty soon. They've certainly got a plan for 5e already though. History supports this. I know talking about this on ENWorld gets people riled up, but we all have to face some facts.

Gamers want a roleplaying game that is supported. If an rpg is not supported, then by the "rules of gaming culture", gamers will often reject it. If people talk about 5e, then that's a statement that 4e won't be supported for very long. In eight years, we went from 2e, to 3e, to 3.5, and then to 4e. What makes 4e immune to the "planned obsolescence model"? Nothing. This is the way WoTC operates, like it or not. The fact there are so many fucking arguments on ENWorld about this tells me that the people there don't like this at all. So what do we do about it? Fuck if I know. When Pathfinder comes out, the arguments will probably double for the next year. The EN mods will have their hands full..

I could keep going on about this topic, but the whole "planned obsolescence" discussion merits a thread of its own....