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Kai Tave posted:Actually CoC is a mediocre to okay system that skates by heavily on nostalgia. well that's just like your opinion, man
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Mar 9, 2016 23:48
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yegods posted:well that's just like your opinion, man I mean, if your point was that CoC's system is great for portraying the Cthulhu mythos because they're both tedious and dull and vastly overrated by nerds then we're in complete agreement there.
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Mar 10, 2016 00:07
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Kai Tave posted:D&D and Pathfinder have been using tentacled whatevers from the realms of madness for literal decades now, Cthulhu was in an old TSR supplement that ran afoul of copyright issues, there was Cthulhu d20 back in the 3E days, I'm absolutely positive there must be plenty of not-Cthulhu stuff in Pathfinder already, I can't even begin to understand how Pathfinder Cthulhu is some weird controversial thing to some people in the year 2016. Newsflash, Sandy Peterson likes money. The Mythos was enthusiastically embraced by Pathfinder's founders. The very first adventure path statted a gug and featured Men from Leng as endgame antagonists. Supplements after that integrated Mythos gods as part of the "Dark Tapestry", Cthulhu affects Pathfinder npcs in their dreams from Earth and I think they put Bokgrung (sp) as physically hanging out somewhere on the continent.
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Mar 10, 2016 00:14
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:They're not diversifying, it's literally just a monster manual for Pathfinder with mythos monsters and some tacked on sanity rules. They even admit that less than half of the monsters are new and the rest are just compiled from other pathfinder books. The miniatures are just game pieces from Cthulu Wars. It's a way for RPG players to get the minis without shelling out for the board game. Oh. I misunderstood what was being sold here. From a business perspective if nobody at Paizo is considering what the company would do if the popularity of Pathfinder declined... well, that would be very foolish but also extremely typical and normal.
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Mar 10, 2016 01:02
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Leperflesh posted:Oh. I misunderstood what was being sold here. They have a moderately successful limited card game and a few board games, and that's about it for diversification.
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Mar 10, 2016 01:07
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Leperflesh posted:From a business perspective if nobody at Paizo is considering what the company would do if the popularity of Pathfinder declined... well, that would be very foolish but also extremely typical and normal. Oh, they're considering it. What do you think Pathfinder Online was about? 
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Mar 10, 2016 01:13
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Oh, they're considering it. What do you think Pathfinder Online was about? Lisa Stevens throwing her pal Ryan Dancey a bone and letting him milk her idiot fanbase for a sweet payday while he cooks up his next Great Idea would be my guess.
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Mar 10, 2016 01:20
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Also the Adventure Path after Hells Vengeance is a mythos themed one so getting some minis out there for it seems smart.
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Mar 10, 2016 08:29
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Considering how Paizo has been dribbling out the variant rules for 3.5e Unearthed Arcana over the course of multiple books for years, I wouldn't be surprised if the sanity rules here are just the sanity rules from that, which are themselves derived from CoC d20. I mean, D&D Next did it that way too.
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Mar 10, 2016 08:36
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Leperflesh posted:From a business perspective if nobody at Paizo is considering what the company would do if the popularity of Pathfinder declined... well, that would be very foolish but also extremely typical and normal. Is this happening? I know anecdotally that Pathfinder is still pretty popular, but I also get the sneaking suspicion from other boards that 5E is eating Pathfinder's lunch.
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Mar 10, 2016 09:15
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I've only got anecdotal poo poo as well, but I feel like I'm seeing a lot of the "only ever played D&D and Pathfinder" crowd declaring 5e to be the new big thing.
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Mar 10, 2016 13:21
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Well, barring sunk costs and whatnot, I would pick 5E over Pathfinder every time, but that's because it's still working out of the one book, while pathfinder has everything online contrasting and conflicting with itself, until a fifth level character sheets resembles a writhing tub of nightcrawlers.
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Mar 10, 2016 14:12
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Shout out to gnome7 for sending the Fellowship final draft to backers. Can't wait to play.
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Mar 10, 2016 15:06
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Man, I'd forgotten how much I loved that lava orc picture. Very much reminds me of Steven Universe.
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Mar 10, 2016 15:49
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Kai Tave posted:Lisa Stevens throwing her pal Ryan Dancey a bone and letting him milk her idiot fanbase for a sweet payday while he cooks up his next Great Idea would be my guess. Well, what's interesting about Paizo is that they've always tried to branch out - into fiction (Amazing Stories) or into other fandoms (Star Wars Insider, Undefeated). Though they've never had a world of luck with it, I get the impression that Lisa Stevens has always been keenly aware of the risks of having their business revolve largely around Dungeons & Dragons.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:31
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, if your point was that CoC's system is great for portraying the Cthulhu mythos because they're both tedious and dull and vastly overrated by nerds then we're in complete agreement there. I'm guessing that you haven't been in a good CoC campaign. Some of my best RP experiences have been with that system. The slow inexorable slide toward insanity as evidenced in HPLs stories is quite evident in the CoC system. Eh, to each their own.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:34
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Given that Pathfinder's core audience is people who refused to move on from 3.X D&D come what may, I doubt they're going to be losing audience anytime soon.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:35
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Drone posted:Is this happening? I know anecdotally that Pathfinder is still pretty popular, but I also get the sneaking suspicion from other boards that 5E is eating Pathfinder's lunch. Anyone who makes solid claims is full of poo poo. Games Workshop is the only trad game company that is both a public corporation, and not a subsidiary of some other company, so it's the only company that regularly releases hard sales figures to the public. There's anecdotal evidence, but a lot of it is based on what is going on at some person's FLGS, which varies wildly from one spot to the next, so it's next to useless. You also can't go by poo poo like amazon best seller lists, because those are always going to favor the newest release of anything, and also don't take into account the other avenues of sales. We won't know if Pathfinder is in real trouble until/unless Paizo says it is, or it becomes massively noticeable across the full spectrum of sales outlets.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:36
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Yes, to be fair: I think Paizo's gotten to the point where if for some reason all d20 books would catch fire, they could make a new game and have enough goodwill to survive, however diminished.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:37
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Leperflesh posted:Anyone who makes solid claims is full of poo poo. Games Workshop is the only trad game company that is both a public corporation, and not a subsidiary of some other company, so it's the only company that regularly releases hard sales figures to the public. There's anecdotal evidence, but a lot of it is based on what is going on at some person's FLGS, which varies wildly from one spot to the next, so it's next to useless. You also can't go by poo poo like amazon best seller lists, because those are always going to favor the newest release of anything, and also don't take into account the other avenues of sales. That said, I can't see Paizo admitting they're going under until about five seconds before Lisa Stevens turns off the lights on the empty building.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:46
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yes, to be fair: I think Paizo's gotten to the point where if for some reason all d20 books would catch fire, they could make a new game and have enough goodwill to survive, however diminished. It would be a massive risk. What if their new game is poorly received? I assume any given new game project would take like at least a year of leadtime between conception and release, and if their D20 product is burning down during that period, there might be significant company resources being dedicated to trying to resuscitate it, too. I think the most likely scenario isn't Pathfinder suddenly selling zero products overnight; it's someone releasing a product that lures away the most valuable customers faster than Paizo can easily react, but still slow enough that the company pours resources into trying to stem the tide rather than quickly admit defeat and start working on a brand new thing to sell. Or maybe it would follow a similar path as TSR did.  This is all just random speculation. My point is only that product diversification is worthwhile as a hedge, even if your side products aren't profitable. (This is why Games Workshop was incredibly foolish to burn down first its bitz business, then specialist games, and now warhammer fantasy, while also basically ending new releases for lord of the rings; we've discussed this in the GW death thread. Those lines were much less profitable, sure, but they didn't actually lose money, and they represented hedges against the potential for warhammer 40k popularity declining at some point.)
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Mar 10, 2016 18:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:Evil Hat does publicly release its quarterly figures, too. Not to undercut your core point, but GW isn't the only game company that does that. Huh. That's cool that Evil Hat does that, but they're not a public company, so their statements don't have to conform to SEC standards of accounting practices and investor disclosure. At a quick glance, I see sales numbers but not profit/loss, cash flow, or equity statements. But still, really cool, thanks for pointing me to that. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 18:49
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yegods posted:I'm guessing that you haven't been in a good CoC campaign. Some of my best RP experiences have been with that system. The slow inexorable slide toward insanity as evidenced in HPLs stories is quite evident in the CoC system. Eh, to each their own. Some of my best RP experiences have been with Pathfinder and 3.5. That doesn't make those systems not poo poo.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:51
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Is there somewhere I could read up on this 20d glut stuff? I got out of gaming around 99-01 and never really saw any of it. The idea of a ton of loosely compatible stuff seems appealing, but no one on SA seems to have anything good to say about it.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:54
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bongwizzard posted:Is there somewhere I could read up on this 20d glut stuff? I got out of gaming around 99-01 and never really saw any of it. The idea of a ton of loosely compatible stuff seems appealing, but no one on SA seems to have anything good to say about it. The problem was the sheer volume and lack of quality control. The OGL basically let anyone make their own D&D supplements. Finally, every gamer's dream could be realized! You, yes you, could make a module or class or monster or whatever that you could sell for actual profit as a D&D product! You could be a game designer! Which, on the face of it, is fine. But the problem was that everyone was making d20 products because the fans wanted to be "game designers" and the other companies were trying to get some of the D&D pie. So there were hundreds and hundreds of D&D-compatible products coming out every month, and there was no way the audience could keep up, and even if they could there was no way anyone could use all of it. Just looking on DriveThru for stuff in the "D&D > Unofficial D&D > 3.X/d20/OGL" category gives almost 5000 results. And that's just digital. A lot of people self-published their modules and monster books and original campaign setting DO NOT STEALs, and to this day there are game stores that still have shelves and shelves of this poo poo they're never going to move. This was also the era before print-on-demand and crowdfunding, so it wasn't like you could run a KS as sort of interest/demand gauge and have hardcopies printed and shipped by a third party as needed. If you wanted to get into brick-and-mortar stores you needed to pay out-of-pocket for a print run of a couple hundred copies. The other problem was that 90% of the stuff coming out for third party D&D content was garbage. There wasn't a lot of playtesting on a lot of stuff, or it was so niche nobody but the writer and his personal group could care. You didn't need to design anything, because the system was already designed. Never mind that there were never any guidelines on how to design a good feat or spell, people were writing them anyway and pushing them out onto DriveThru and RPGNow. It took a long time for people to realize that a lot of the 3PP were bad, but by that point we were buried in it. I think it was Justin Achilli who said "the problem with d20 isn't that it's a bad system, it's that now everyone with a hacked copy of Acrobat and half a page of hobbit stats thinks he's a game designer." And that's what the bust was. People stopped buying 3PP stuff, but you still had small self-publishers stuck with hundreds of copies of a book nobody wanted anymore, and even the major publishers were stuck with d20 versions of their main game lines and suddenly found that nobody gave a poo poo. A lot of publishers took huge hits or went under. This is a better-written description: http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/34868/what-is-the-d20-bust-and-what-does-post-d20-game-mean
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Mar 10, 2016 19:17
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In all fairness quite a lot of the official D20 stuff being released towards the end of its run was garbage, too. Wizards never spent much time trying to balance its own feats, spells, monsters, items, etc. Why should third parties do what the core doesn't bother to do? The original 3.5 players handbook has the Toughness feat. The game had problems from day 1, and the official publisher didn't seem especially interested in addressing them.
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Mar 10, 2016 19:46
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Leperflesh posted:It would be a massive risk. What if their new game is poorly received? I assume any given new game project would take like at least a year of leadtime between conception and release, and if their D20 product is burning down during that period, there might be significant company resources being dedicated to trying to resuscitate it, too. I think the most likely scenario isn't Pathfinder suddenly selling zero products overnight; it's someone releasing a product that lures away the most valuable customers faster than Paizo can easily react, but still slow enough that the company pours resources into trying to stem the tide rather than quickly admit defeat and start working on a brand new thing to sell. Well. Look at how much money Paizo made doing a Kickstarter for a thing that was not even a game. Hell, it wasn't even a product! As long as they could have a pitch together in short order, there are enough Paizo devotees who would likely throw money at it sight unseen. They couldn't rely on that long-term, but the Paizo name now has enough value that they'd really have to gently caress poo poo up to sink overnight, since they've proven they can make some pretty big boners (see the link above) and keep on going heedless.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:22
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It's also worth noting that with the recent humble book bundle Paizo got a default share of $16 out of $25 for the all inclusive package and raised over $1 million there, so it isn't unreasonable to conclude they walked away with at least $600k for PDFs. That's also not counting whatever they raised on the comic bundle simultaneously.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well. Look at how much money Paizo made doing a Kickstarter for a thing that was not even a game. Hell, it wasn't even a product! As long as they could have a pitch together in short order, there are enough Paizo devotees who would likely throw money at it sight unseen. They couldn't rely on that long-term, but the Paizo name now has enough value that they'd really have to gently caress poo poo up to sink overnight, since they've proven they can make some pretty big boners (see the link above) and keep on going heedless. Honestly a lot of that money was because of the new Pathfinder megadungeon attached to it, with people who couldn't give a poo poo about an MMO pledging to get it early/cheaper/signed (the same thing happened with their later Kickstarter for the actual game). I doubt it would have done nearly as well if they hadn't had that as a reward.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:32
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senrath posted:Honestly a lot of that money was because of the new Pathfinder megadungeon attached to it, with people who couldn't give a poo poo about an MMO pledging to get it early/cheaper/signed (the same thing happened with their later Kickstarter for the actual game). I doubt it would have done nearly as well if they hadn't had that as a reward. Well, they got people to pay an average of $73. Even if it was just for the book (which is probably an oversimplification), getting people to pay a minimum of $50 for a 96-page softcover (actual value: $25) and getting them to pay nearly 50% on top of that says a lot about how much people are willing to just throw money at the brand. The average pledge value is so high that the $15 dollar PDF level barely even seems to figure in as a major factor.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:53
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I remember seeing in the PFO thread that apparently when people learned the game was dying and that Goblinworks was hemorrhaging money, were willing to throw more money at it. Also something something Star Citizen.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:59
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Huh, I hadn't realized the average pledge was that high. Nevermind then! And yeah, PFO did manage to attract a bunch of the same type that Star Citizen did. Just not enough to do the same poo poo Star Citizen is doing (that is to say not publicly and obviously failing).
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Mar 10, 2016 22:03
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Leperflesh posted:In all fairness quite a lot of the official D20 stuff being released towards the end of its run was garbage, too. Wizards never spent much time trying to balance its own feats, spells, monsters, items, etc. Why should third parties do what the core doesn't bother to do? Actually I'm gonna disagre with you and say the 3.X stuff released near the end of its life was actually on the whole better than the stuff that had come before it. That was when you started to see them experimenting with things that would wind up inspiring 4E like the Tome of Battle. Some of the most broken untested stuff in 3.X was right out of the good ol' PHB (Clerics, Druids, and Wizards mainly, plus Monks and Fighters on the opposite end of the spectrum). Otherwise yes, WotC didn't exactly set a sterling example for would-be game designers to emulate. Plus it's also important to note that even before Pathfinder was a thing you had companies like Mongoose publishing "pocket D&D handbooks" which were ten dollar paperbacks containing all the reprint able SRD stuff, so even then the whole OGL thing wasn't working the way Dancey had pitched it to them. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 22:11
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And now 7th Sea broke a million.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:04
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WaywardWoodwose posted:Well, barring sunk costs and whatnot, I would pick 5E over Pathfinder every time, but that's because it's still working out of the one book, while pathfinder has everything online contrasting and conflicting with itself, until a fifth level character sheets resembles a writhing tub of nightcrawlers. The problem with 5e only having the one corebook is the same as trying to play 3e with just the PHB - it's the fact that you're putting a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party that's making the game so much more uneven, compared to a late 3rd-Ed Warmage or Warlock in the same party as a Swordsage or Psychic Warrior.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:The problem with 5e only having the one corebook is the same as trying to play 3e with just the PHB - it's the fact that you're putting a Fighter and a Wizard in the same party that's making the game so much more uneven, compared to a late 3rd-Ed Warmage or Warlock in the same party as a Swordsage or Psychic Warrior. Yeah, I mean, you could always tell your Pathfinder group "okay, core book only guys," but that's not really going to improve things unless your sole criteria for quality is number of books involved.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:07
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Has anyone seen Privateer Press's low-energy Widower's Wood campaign? They did it with modest pledging tiers and no add-ons to avoid the fulfillment issues that tend to plague miniatures-driven projects (Conan, Bones, anything Mantic)--which is not a bad plan, but the stretch goals are set at 25000 increments and were lackluster to start. It's been funny seeing the pledges per day asymptotically reach zero. They've had the same goals unmet for about a week now, and it's pretty clear that there's no chance they make the $100000+ worth of goals they revealed. The comments section is starting to eat itself, with accusations of people who aren't backing being lazy. Like, it's not a failure, it's just 
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Mar 11, 2016 01:18
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Eclipse Phase Fate is out to backers now. According to the latest update it will be up for sale next Friday.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:29
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Kai Tave posted:Actually I'm gonna disagre with you and say the 3.X stuff released near the end of its life was actually on the whole better than the stuff that had come before it. That was when you started to see them experimenting with things that would wind up inspiring 4E like the Tome of Battle. Some of the most broken untested stuff in 3.X was right out of the good ol' PHB (Clerics, Druids, and Wizards mainly, plus Monks and Fighters on the opposite end of the spectrum).
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Mar 11, 2016 04:01
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As I recall, they're pretty solidly tier four. Their main issue is that they run out of power pretty quickly even at mid-to-high levels, meaning they become mediocre archers partway through the adventuring day.
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Mar 11, 2016 04:14
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