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Paizo is pretty much going with Starfinder because if they make Pathfinder 2.0, it'll be edition wars all over again. The revolution devours its own 2d8 children per round.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:24
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Mors Rattus posted:Won't happen. They had their chance with Unchained and deliberately didn't take it. Can you elaborate on this? I thought Unchained was just super-buff characters.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:26
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Mors Rattus posted:Won't happen. They had their chance with Unchained and deliberately didn't take it. Not really. They've said, privately, that they'll be doing one at some point. It's just a matter of time. They know as well as anyone they can't keep this up forever.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:35
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Zurui posted:Can you elaborate on this? I thought Unchained was just super-buff characters. Fairly reliable rumor held that Unchained was designed as 2e-but-backwards-compatible.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:36
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:As crazy as that seems, that's a good way to run a store. You don't want to be the store that still has the remnants of D20 shovelware books and 90's treadmill supplements from publishers like White Wolf still on the shelves.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:43
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It's not really that surprising for someone to proclaim that Pathfinder is done. It would be like being shocked when a 90 year old person dies and in the case of Pathfinder, one who drinks a bottle of Jack Daniels a day and smokes a pack and a half a day. Pathfinder lived a lot longer than it had any right to with the amount of books they put out. Yep. I don't think 5e is really the problem. The problem is that Pathfinder is, what, 7 years old? And it's built off of 3.5 which is by now 12 years old. Which was built off of 3.0 which is 16 years old. Pathfinder isn't getting new players because, to be honest, there probably aren't any new players left. People are heading to 5e because it's the new game in town (new-ish, I guess), but I don't know how many of them are actually new to the hobby as a whole.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:08
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I can really only speak for myself but I've had a whole lot of new / returning from 15-20 years ago people getting into 5e.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:11
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Pathfinder has been in need of a 2nd edition to avoid dying out for a while. This is just a reminder. They're still super afraid of doing it and rightfully so: their fanbase is terrified of change and their only claim to fame is being a dinosaur. A Pathfinder 2e also runs into a "should we rip off 5e? " problem. Considering 5e is still running, that would be unwise and they know it.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:20
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Clearly they should rip off 4e
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Aug 12, 2016 21:42
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Kurieg posted:Clearly they should rip off 4e
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Aug 12, 2016 21:44
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Sadly, Pathfinder will never be Dungeons & Dragons, and just will never have the name recognition of the latter. It's sad, because Dungeons & Dragons is half-assed in just about every way a game can be half-assed save art assets. I think for all of its clunkiness, Paizo is doing much more interesting things, while 5e is largely coasting by on its name.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:44
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Kurieg posted:Clearly they should rip off 4e That's been a joke for a while, but they'd never do it. 4e saw little 3rd party products because it was simply too much work to make new classes/abilities for it. Making a 4e class is an undertaking, even if you just do essentials. They could do a weird mix of 3e and 4e to resell books but then they run into the "literally everyone has been doing that for the last six years" problem.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:44
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Yeah, I love 4e but I'm not really sure what else you could do with it now. Basically every possible class role has been done, often multiple times, all the classic races and a bunch of others are playable, the major campaign settings already got their books, and so on. It's basically a fully complete game line.  And that's not even getting into the fact that, yeah, it's loving hard to make good and balanced 4e classes. Paizo will never do a 4e ripoff just because I don't think the developers there have the inclination to build and playtest a game like that.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:47
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4E needs a new edition that streamlines, condenses and simplifies things, and removes the horrid amount of bloat more than anything else. Paizo are 100% absolutely not the people to do that, even if they were going to do a 4E retroclone.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:57
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I think if you were going to do a new version of 4e you'd probably just be doing rebalancing, fixing some of the math, plugging some of the worst exploits, and trying to find solutions to make high-level play more palatable. I think it definitely has its own flaws, they're just not as huge and glaring as those of other Dungeons & Dragons editions.
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Aug 12, 2016 21:57
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Also, no one at Paizo is a big 4e fan. This is a company of people built of ignoring 4e by sticking to a revived 3.5 (a 3.75). They were able to push out so much content because they actually liked 3e and 3.5e. They couldn't do 4e from lack of passion.
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Aug 12, 2016 23:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Sadly, Pathfinder will never be Dungeons & Dragons, and just will never have the name recognition of the latter. It's sad, because Dungeons & Dragons is half-assed in just about every way a game can be half-assed save art assets. I think for all of its clunkiness, Paizo is doing much more interesting things, while 5e is largely coasting by on its name. This is pretty true. Even if it's an uninspired game set in an uninspired setting, they're at at least working on stuff for that system and introducing new things. 5e is mostly outsourcing and shrugging their shoulders.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:16
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Perchance starfinder is pathfinder 2e? But, ya know, an experiment so, if people don't like it, they can disavow it.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:22
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It would make sense if Starfinder is the test bed. Star Wars was used as a test bed by WotC when they had the license, especially Saga Edition.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:26
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yep.
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Aug 13, 2016 01:16
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It would make sense if Starfinder is the test bed. Star Wars was used as a test bed by WotC when they had the license, especially Saga Edition. Man was it ever. Saga edition had a lot of weird mechanics in it. Some of them made it into 4e, the rest just fell by the wayside. It's too bad Saga didn't use the 4e power system, I would have loved to see a Force Powers system with at-wills and encounters. Also with non-Jedi characters that don't suck.
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Aug 13, 2016 01:55
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Covok posted:Perchance starfinder is pathfinder 2e? But, ya know, an experiment so, if people don't like it, they can disavow it. At Gen Con when the devs were asked the compatibility question they said you'd have to do some conversion so I wouldn't be shocked if it was a way to float potential changes past the player base.
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Aug 13, 2016 02:13
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I always get irrationally frustrated with my old group who loved Saga edition but hated 4e. Saga had a lot of the exact same rules they "hated," but when written out in its verbose 3x style they were innovative and clear. Like "bloodied" was an abstraction they couldn't bear, but "a character who is at or below 50% of their starting HP" was fine. loving nerds.
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Aug 13, 2016 02:16
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Covok posted:Perchance starfinder is pathfinder 2e? But, ya know, an experiment so, if people don't like it, they can disavow it. Starfinder is supposed to be backwards-compatible with Pathfinder, so I'm not holding out much hope that it's supposed to be some big innovation. Kwyndig posted:Man was it ever. Saga edition had a lot of weird mechanics in it. Some of them made it into 4e, the rest just fell by the wayside. I found this page where someone made a basic reskin of 4th Edition to Star Wars:       Ki-Adi-Mundi is really just a Knight Fighter, but it's something.
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Aug 13, 2016 02:55
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Droids are vampires? Amazing.
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Aug 13, 2016 03:09
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Threepio as a lazylord is utterly brilliant.
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Aug 13, 2016 03:18
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dwarf74 posted:"Based on the patterns, the problem is clearly about getting new players, which Pathfinder gets few of with 5E available. It's a hard sell at this late stage for a staff member to suggest Pathfinder when 5E is right there." This is hard for me to understand. Pathfinder and 5e seem about as mechanically distinct as two 3e clones could be. All I can imagine is that customers are coming into the store and literally asking "Do you have that D&D game?"
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Aug 14, 2016 23:04
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DalaranJ posted:This is hard for me to understand. Pathfinder and 5e seem about as mechanically distinct as two 3e clones could be. All I can imagine is that customers are coming into the store and literally asking "Do you have that D&D game?" Yeah, but one is a few years newer and got "Dungeons and Dragons" slapped on it.
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Aug 14, 2016 23:21
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This is sort of paizo's own doing, they made it so that 3.5 was the "True" D&D, so 5e is now more like 3.5 AND it's got the logo to boot, and no one wants pathfinder anymore.
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Aug 14, 2016 23:35
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DalaranJ posted:This is hard for me to understand. Pathfinder and 5e seem about as mechanically distinct as two 3e clones could be. All I can imagine is that customers are coming into the store and literally asking "Do you have that D&D game?" I find it hard to recommend to old players, for that matter. Really, anyone at all.
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Aug 14, 2016 23:39
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Fantasy Craft already showed me you can make a 3.5-derivative that's actually interesting and innovative, after which Pathfinder didn't have much in the way of appeal for me.
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Aug 15, 2016 00:31
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dwarf74 posted:I'd find it hard to recommend PF to a new player no matter the situation. As someone who plays Pathfinder as their main game, I wouldn't recommend it to new people at all. Unless you're already in, there's not much to recommend it, really. It's still better than 5e, though. If you're playing 3e or a derivative it's an easy worthwhile upgrade, though. Couple odds and ends: -Pathfinder Unchained was never meant to be Pathfinder 2e, a lot of people went on the record as hoping it would be but it definitely wasn't designed as one. The point was what they said it was - to update and revise some parts of Pathfinder in ways that broke compatibility, especially with the larger d20 ecosystem. Notably, Paizo has been doing a fair amount of work breaking out of the whole d20 everything runs on the exact same systems under the exact same rules no matter what part of the game it's under. There's class templates, which just apply a class to a monster without actually giving it levels in that class. Pathfinder Unchained had an entire different monster creation system that's top down (pick a challenge rating, note a good attack bonus/hp/whatever for that, then just build a monster and don't worry about the hit dice or specific modifiers quite adding up). Stuff like that. -Starfinder definitely breaks compatibility and is going to be Pathfinder Saga Edition like people say. Paizo's admitted as much, it'll be broadly comparable but with some differences. (Which it kind of has to have, since you could use the Pathfinder rules to make Starfinder as is anyway right now.) -I think Paizo still has a good amount of ideas and space for Pathfinder. They've got adventure paths until 2018 announced, plenty of options in a bunch of different ways. One nice thing about how Paizo does stuff is that they're willing to sell smaller books than WotC was - something like Black Markets wouldn't have made it to print for 3.5, because there's not necessarily enough there for the 160 page hardcovers WotC did. But it's perfect for their 32 page softcovers. So forth and so on. Pathfinder is hitting the long tail, but it still has some time in it, basically.
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Aug 15, 2016 01:06
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Kurieg posted:This is sort of paizo's own doing, they made it so that 3.5 was the "True" D&D, so 5e is now more like 3.5 AND it's got the logo to boot, and no one wants pathfinder anymore. Yeah they kinda painted themselves into a corner where everyone has drunk the kool-aid that 5e is simpler/more streamlined/less complex/plays faster (yes) and more balanced (haha no) and "encourages more roleplaying unlike 4th edition" (a fallacy), while also having the actual Dungeons & Dragons brand name. Without 4e to juxtapose itself against, there's a lot less to recommend PF for (although I'd still pick PF over 5e, if I absolutely had to choose between the two).
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Aug 15, 2016 01:54
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Arivia posted:As someone who plays Pathfinder as their main game, I wouldn't recommend it to new people at all. Unless you're already in, there's not much to recommend it, really. It's still better than 5e, though. If you're playing 3e or a derivative it's an easy worthwhile upgrade, though. I think 5e is definitely a better game for a new player - and frankly a better game overall. It's not the pinnacle of design or anything, but it's a definite improvement on the d20 chassis.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:01
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DalaranJ posted:This is hard for me to understand. Pathfinder and 5e seem about as mechanically distinct as two 3e clones could be. All I can imagine is that customers are coming into the store and literally asking "Do you have that D&D game?" This is silly. Most people don't care about mechanics at all. They make their buying decisions based on marketing and reputation and recommendations from friends. And the marketing and reputation for both PF and 5e is "the true D&D descended from 3.5," so they are not very distinct at all from a selling perspective. The proportion of people who care explicitly about mechanics in games is probably similar to the proportion of people who care explicitly about technical aspects of film composition. Having better composition will make a better film, which is likely to lead to better reviews and reputation, but there are other, easier ways to get the reputation you want: marketing (not to say that marketing is infallible either!).
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Aug 15, 2016 02:09
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Jimbozig posted:This is silly. Most people don't care about mechanics at all. They make their buying decisions based on marketing and reputation and recommendations from friends. And the marketing and reputation for both PF and 5e is "the true D&D descended from 3.5," so they are not very distinct at all from a selling perspective. This is very accurate.
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Aug 15, 2016 03:29
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Jimbozig posted:This is silly. Most people don't care about mechanics at all. Ah, let me rephrase that. This is hard for me to accept.
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Aug 15, 2016 04:02
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Now that Pathfinder has the softcover books out, that's a pretty big tipping point in its favor as far as recommending to new players. Here, you can get these two books for less than the cost of ONE of the three books you would otherwise have to get. Just, hopefully you don't have vision problems because it doesn't look like they adjusted the layout at all, just shrunk the pages down to teeny tiny text.
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Aug 15, 2016 05:27
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Kurieg posted:This is sort of paizo's own doing, they made it so that 3.5 was the "True" D&D, so 5e is now more like 3.5 AND it's got the logo to boot, and no one wants pathfinder anymore. Yeah, this too. Pathfinder staked everything on the idea that 3.x would be here to stay forever and that the key to success was scaring people away from 4e. And, once Mearls was done sabotaging 4e, it worked! Right up until WotC decided to take their playbook and do it right the gently caress back at them. Arivia posted:-I think Paizo still has a good amount of ideas and space for Pathfinder. They've got adventure paths until 2018 announced, plenty of options in a bunch of different ways. Horseshit. At least, mechanically. Sorry, Paizo not only does not have conceptual ideas or space for Pathfinder, they haven't for a long time now. They probably haven't ever. Like, consider 3.x. You had Tome of Magic, which, well, 1/3rd worked, and at least the other 2/3rds were ideas. You had Tome of Battle which we all know and love here. You had Incarnum, which...was certainly a thing, but hey, it was a thing that did it's own thing. You had the Factotum. Even in early 3.5 you had the psionics rules which were the best psionics had ever been at the time! Beyond classes, you had Complete Scoundrel and it's skill tricks. You had Weapons of Legacy which, sure, didn't work, but it was a new idea. A magic item that leveled WITH you, and became a core part of your character. That's something D&D had needed for ages, and they finally tried it out! You had warlocks and dragonfire adepts. When you look especially at late 3.x, they were throwing things at the wall to see what would stick - they were experimenting. Now look at Pathfinder, and point to me the times where they did something that wasn't "this is your class. It has a pool of abilities to choose from every x levels. You might have a daily set of points you spend on those abilities. You may have vancian spellcasting." Because that's loving it. That's all they've got. It's all they've EVER had. I dunno much about Golarion or whatever, but mechanically, Paizo hasn't had a single original idea since day one. They didn't even develop their own goddamn system! Every now and then they'll tweak it a bit. This vancian spellcaster also has a pet, and, what do you know, the PET gets the pool of abilities to choose from! This vancian spellcaster . Paizo has always been an exceedingly conservative design group, and that's putting it politely. Even their warlock rip off is a) way shittier, and b) less creative, because they were afraid it would be too weird and overpowered. Using an at-will blast? Holy poo poo! That's loving OUT THERE!
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Aug 15, 2016 09:44
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I think you're being uncharitable, Cirno, Paizo devs have at least three more feats they could churn out by tying a mouse cord around a limb and playing cup-and-ball with it.
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Aug 15, 2016 11:31
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