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JohnnyCanuck posted:Just as an FYI folks: because Zak is bringing suit against Mandy in Ontario, there is an Ontario-based anti-SLAPP law that's been in place since 2015. So thankfully, she has that going for her - it's not anywhere near as bad as it used to be. Good news! Also makes me want to repost her GoFundMe so I will: https://www.gofundme.com/f/gxywr5-legal-funds
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Apr 30, 2020 19:42
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Terrible Opinions posted:Well gently caress I forgot Bermuda. I'm not sure that's meaningfully distinct; surely we're talking about the harm of the concept of unspoiled, unclaimed land that's actually very much inhabited, rather than successfully inhabiting deserts?
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Apr 30, 2020 20:06
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 20:08
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Sometimes "desert" is just "this area that's a seasonal grazing area for this tribe" and then they come one season and it's fenced in and they're being scared off with shotguns. Well, yes, but that seems very unlikely to be the case for the Falkland islands we were discussing, whose primary value as land is "Arctic territorial claims invented by modern society" and "Penguins".
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Apr 30, 2020 20:16
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spectralent posted:I'm not sure that's meaningfully distinct; surely we're talking about the harm of the concept of unspoiled, unclaimed land that's actually very much inhabited, rather than successfully inhabiting deserts?
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Apr 30, 2020 21:30
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spectralent posted:Well, yes, but that seems very unlikely to be the case for the Falkland islands we were discussing, whose primary value as land is "Arctic territorial claims invented by modern society" and "Penguins". There is some linguistic double duty being pulled here between "colonization" in the sense of taking over a place with your gunboats and putting your boot on the native residents in order to extract value and profit, and "colonization" in the sense of "nobody has ever lived here, or sure the gently caress haven't lived here any time lately: let's expand into it and live here our selves." e: Historically most cases of the latter were actually cases of the former, even if in some specific situations it wasn't. Nessus fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 21:32
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Does Catan have a date attached? It's pretty abstract. The card art in my version has soldiers that look definitely from the colonial period, but then the expansion has knights, which could put it back in the middle ages when places like Iceland were first being settled by humans. And the resources involved match far better with that medieval period than they do with the colonial period. I guess people want to pick on Catan because it's a big name, but I think if you're being honest you have to admit it's a stretch. If you were to rank games by how problematic they are, Catan would fall very low on that list. Like, if you just take it at face value there's little to be upset by. If you try to read into it with the least-favorable interpretations (like saying the robber is indigenous), then you could do the same for literally any other game with equal or more success. Like, I could come up with something about how blokus promotes unsustainable capitalism, but who does that actually help? What are we trying to do with these critiques? It's important to critique games for their problematic elements because of actual harm they can cause. Someone earlier posted that they see killing Nazis as less problematic than killing demons. Okay, sure, let's examine that. If we accept a fantasy setting with literal gods and souls, then demons are creatures who want to bring the souls of all living beings into eternal damnation. And surely that makes them as legitimate a target for violence as any group, even Nazis. So the problem must be with those religious assumptions. Settings with those religious assumptions are problematic. So where do we go from there? Do we say that we only will play games and consume media with materialist fantasy settings and any setting with actual literal gods and demons is just right out? Is there a way to have a setting with gods and demons that is not problematic? Would it be okay to kill or banish demons in such a setting? If not, do they really deserve to be called demons?
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Apr 30, 2020 21:53
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Terrible Opinions posted:I think it is also a useful thing to consider formerly inhabited lands and formerly inhabited even if only in a remote period of time. Especially given that most of the time the reason for depopulation was colonialism spreading diseases that wiped people out like say in the Amazon rainforest. Though with the Falklands I was more trying to say that it just isn't suitable for long term human habitation without importing on a scale was was infeesible in pre-modern times. That's entirely fair; I guess I'm now more surprised Rapa Nui was self-sustainably inhabitable given how tiny it is. Nessus posted:There are a number of subarctic islands which have only been able to see long-term settlement due to semi-modern technology and, possibly, economic supply from another nation, this doesn't make the general point vanish. Catan presents itself as you settling and developing a relatively temperate island. You seem to be trying to make me say "Actually colonialism is cool and good" when what I said was "I think the Falklands was the most recent case of settling uninhabited land". I'm not entirely sure why.
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Apr 30, 2020 22:20
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This is a question I had in reply to a post in the World/Chronicles of Darkness thread, but since this question has less to do with White Wolf specifically than with the industry as a whole, I thought I might as well post it here and see what others' thoughts were:GimpInBlack posted:EDIT: Also, the "supplement treadmill" you remember from the 90s is no longer a sustainable business model. It's not the fault of crowdfunding, it's the fault of "dozens of books in each edition and for each line" simply being a) not profitable and b) no longer necessary, since online sales and distribution means there's less need for constant new product churn to keep your physical shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores like there was back then. That seems plausible, except there's one company that does seem to still be keeping the supplement treadmill going: Paizo. Of course they recently launched Pathfinder 2nd edition, but even before that they were keeping to a regular churn. Their current product schedule shows a Starfinder book last month; a Pathfinder book next month; and two Pathfinder books, a Starfinder book, and a standalone Pathfinder adventure in June; plus they're putting out an Adventure Path installment each month for both Pathfinder and Starfinder (and the Adventure Path installments aren't just adventures; they have supplementary material included as well and are respectably sized hundred-page publications), and that's not counting their Pathfinder/Starfinder Society Scenarios and their miscellaneous products like their Flip-Mats and Pawn Collections and whatnot... all in all, they're releasing an average of about a dozen products a month, not counting those products that are just variant releases or special editions of previous products (though admittedly that is counting things like Flip-Mats and Pathfinder Society Scenarios that presumably take a lot less work to make). I'm not saying that to praise or criticize Paizo or as a comment on the quality of Pathfinder one way or the other (I'm honestly... kinda indifferent to Pathfinder overall, and what I've read so far of their first Pathfinder 2E Adventure Path is surprisingly bad); I'm just wondering how Paizo's still managing to put out such a steady stream of products if the supplement treadmill is unsustainable now. I mean, granted, maybe that's still not as much as TSR was putting out at the height of the 2E era, but it seems like a lot more than Wizards of the Coast or any other company is currently producing. Is it just that Paizo has a dedicated customer base held over from the days of 3E that they've conditioned to buy into their release schedule?
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Apr 30, 2020 22:28
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spectralent posted:That's entirely fair; I guess I'm now more surprised Rapa Nui was self-sustainably inhabitable given how tiny it is. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 22:30
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Jerik posted:Is it just that Paizo has a dedicated customer base held over from the days of 3E that they've conditioned to buy into their release schedule?
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Apr 30, 2020 22:38
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spectralent posted:You seem to be trying to make me say "Actually colonialism is cool and good" when what I said was "I think the Falklands was the most recent case of settling uninhabited land". I'm not entirely sure why.
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Apr 30, 2020 22:41
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Jerik posted:I'm not saying that to praise or criticize Paizo or as a comment on the quality of Pathfinder one way or the other (I'm honestly... kinda indifferent to Pathfinder overall, and what I've read so far of their first Pathfinder 2E Adventure Path is surprisingly bad); I'm just wondering how Paizo's still managing to put out such a steady stream of products if the supplement treadmill is unsustainable now. I mean, granted, maybe that's still not as much as TSR was putting out at the height of the 2E era, but it seems like a lot more than Wizards of the Coast or any other company is currently producing. Is it just that Paizo has a dedicated customer base held over from the days of 3E that they've conditioned to buy into their release schedule? I'm not a deep consumer of their products, but my understanding is that a lot of their publications are adventure paths or scenarios. Taking a look at the pathfinder books for example, you've got roughly 1/3rd being adventure paths, and 2/3rds other types of supplements. So a big chunk of that is basically consumable content. Pathfinder also has 3rd parties writing compatible content, so the product stream for the line as a whole is much bigger than just Paizo, with the consequent risk of low sales on a book being spread out a little more. WoD in the 90s was part of a different stream in the book treadmill trend, in that very few of it's publications were "adventures" as such. There were a few connected chronicle books, and a few early dungeon-crawls (essentially), but the core of what drove the treadmill was setting and metaplot books moreso than rules expansions or premade games to run. They weren't the only ones doing this, though probably they're the best remembered and many of the others were imitators. That probably made it more vulnerable than someone like Paizo or DnD. Theoretically, most people playing DnD or Pathfinder might be interested in premade adventures or rules expansions, as both could be directly used in their games. Even there though, you have to have had a big enough player base to keep sales in the black.
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Apr 30, 2020 22:54
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Maybe this is enough of a release cadence to count as a supplement treadmill? https://www.modiphius.net/collections/conan There's been a supplement every three or four months since release. Not quite the Paizo volume, but it's enough that if you play Conan, you have a new splatbook to buy very regularly.
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Apr 30, 2020 22:59
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 23:16
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No idea really, I don't pay attention to D&D 5e.
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Apr 30, 2020 23:18
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Desiden posted:I'm not a deep consumer of their products, but my understanding is that a lot of their publications are adventure paths or scenarios. Taking a look at the pathfinder books for example, you've got roughly 1/3rd being adventure paths, and 2/3rds other types of supplements. So a big chunk of that is basically consumable content. Pathfinder also has 3rd parties writing compatible content, so the product stream for the line as a whole is much bigger than just Paizo, with the consequent risk of low sales on a book being spread out a little more. Take another look at the product schedule. Between March and July, they've released or are releasing Starfinder Near Space, Pathfinder Bestiary 2, Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide, Starfinder Starship Operations Manual, and Pathfinder Lost Omens Legends—all of those actual, honest-to-goodness, hardcover books. Five books in five months. That's in addition to the Adventure Path installments, two of which they're releasing every month (one for Pathfinder and one for Starfinder), and those aren't insignificant either; they may not be as big as one of their hardcovers, but they're still a good hundred pages each (and they also include rules expansions; a little over half of each volume is taken up by the adventure, and the rest by new rules, new monsters, setting expansions, etc.). As for adventures, they actually seem to have cut down on standalone adventures that aren't part of an adventure path or Pathfinder/Starfinder Society; I only see one ("The Slithering") scheduled during that period. Now, yes, many of the products on their schedule are Flip-Mats and Pathfinder/Starfinder Society adventures, but even if you ignore those and just look at the hardcover books and the Adventure Paths... that's still a lot of products, certainly far more than Wizards of the Coast or Onyx Path is putting out. As for the third-party products... I'm not sure I see the relevance? Yes, Pathfinder is published under the OGL, and so third party companies can also publish Pathfinder products, but Paizo doesn't get any cut of the profits from those—it's not like the DM's Guild. So having the risk "spread out" because people might be buying third-party products instead of Paizo's doesn't help Paizo at all; that would actually cost Paizo money. (Of course, in practice, it's likely the case that rather than people buying third-party products instead of Paizo's, they're buying them in addition to Paizo's, so Paizo is indirectly making money because of the increased market and exposure... but in that case, if you include the third-party content, it just means there are more products in the treadmill that people are buying, and that just exacerbates the question!) EDIT: Gobbeldygook posted:Shadow of the Demon Lord also maintains a breakneck publishing pace. Hm... I'm not as familiar with Shadow of the Demon Lord, but glancing at the company's Latest Releases page, it doesn't really seem comparable... it seems they've been releasing a product or two per month, but most of those have been very short adventures or supplements of less than ten pages each. The last big thing they've released was Punkapocalyptic: the RPG in February. I'm just really wondering whether the whole thing about the supplement treadmill being unsustainable in today's market is a myth, or whether Paizo just has some kind of special circumstances that let them get away with it... Jerik fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 23:19
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 23:22
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Well, if we compare to Paizo, then Modiphius' release cadence includes several other product lines, but I was just thinking of Conan. It helps that (in theory) all these supplements are 100% funded, since they were laid out and promised in the Conan kicstarter years ago.
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Apr 30, 2020 23:28
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Jerik posted:Hm... I'm not as familiar with Shadow of the Demon Lord, but glancing at the company's Latest Releases page, it doesn't really seem comparable... it seems they've been releasing a product or two per month, but most of those have been very short adventures or supplements of less than ten pages each. The last big thing they've released was Punkapocalyptic: the RPG in February. sotdl is nearing the end of its run from what i understand. occult philosophy was the last big title, but before that rob was releasing a book a week. called it demonday. they were usually small, 10 page world supplements, 14 page bestiaries or adventures that could range from 8 to 40 pages in size. he'd take a week off here and there but for a one-man (paying freelancers ofc) outfit he was putting out a ton of cheap content on a regular schedule
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Apr 30, 2020 23:35
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Leperflesh posted:Well, if we compare to Paizo, then Modiphius' release cadence includes several other product lines, but I was just thinking of Conan. It helps that (in theory) all these supplements are 100% funded, since they were laid out and promised in the Conan kicstarter years ago. Hm... on the one hand, yes, Paizo has more than one product, but on the other hand, only two, really: Pathfinder and Starfinder. And even if you ignore Starfinder and just look at Pathfinder, sure, that cuts Paizo's release schedule roughly in half, but still leaves it releasing a lot more than Wizards of the Coast or Onyx Path. I found Modiphius's release schedule online for July through September 2019, though (at least of "Major Releases", though I'm not sure what qualifies as a "Major Release"), and ignoring restocks it only shows fourteen products total over that period, which I guess does beat Wizards of the Coast for release frequency but still isn't up there with Paizo. (Of course, I don't know how representative these specific months were for Modiphius overall; they just happened to be the months I could easily find the information for.) Serf posted:sotdl is nearing the end of its run from what i understand. occult philosophy was the last big title, but before that rob was releasing a book a week. called it demonday. they were usually small, 10 page world supplements, 14 page bestiaries or adventures that could range from 8 to 40 pages in size. he'd take a week off here and there but for a one-man (paying freelancers ofc) outfit he was putting out a ton of cheap content on a regular schedule Okay, but if we say one supplement a week, an average of 20 pages, that's about 80 pages a month, which is... actually pretty comparable to 5E's output, of a 300-or-so-page book every 3 or 4 months. That's certainly very respectable for a one-man operation, but I don't know if it qualifies as the kind of supplement treadmill I'm talking about. I don't know. Maybe the supplement treadmill still can be a thing, but most companies aren't doing it for some reason? I don't know what would make Paizo special and allow it to produce more products than anyone else can, except maybe that Paizo got lucky bleeding off a big chunk of the 3E market when it first started and has more money than most other companies so it can pay enough writers to keep such a glut of products going, while most other RPG companies just can't afford it. (I guess presumably Wizards of the Coast could, if Hasbro cared enough about D&D to want it to, but, well...) Still, I assume the supplement treadmill must still be profitable for Paizo, or it wouldn't still be doing it...
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Apr 30, 2020 23:44
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Jerik posted:This is a question I had in reply to a post in the World/Chronicles of Darkness thread, but since this question has less to do with White Wolf specifically than with the industry as a whole, I thought I might as well post it here and see what others' thoughts were: There's a very important difference for Paizo: most of their lines are actually run as subscriptions, with the individual unit sales as a secondary product stream. Lisa Stevens and Erik Mona have said that it's the subscription sales that really matter to the company; they have shut down lines in the past when the subscriptions weren't profitable (notably, Pathfinder 1e had no non-Adventure Path adventures for years). This means that they have really, really good product and profitability data the rest of the industry doesn't, and that they know they'll get guaranteed returns on various products. e: they're also really good at cross-promotion and addons. Want to run an AP? Okay, here's the six volumes - and you can buy maps, miniatures, cards and so on to go with it. Subscribe? Great, here's a PDF to go with your physical copy - and a discount if you buy the content again on roll20. Lisa Stevens is one of the few actual businesspeople in the industry, and has been around the supplement treadmill model for a very long time. You can argue that that applies to Paizo; the important thing is that they make it WORK. Arivia fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 23:49
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Arivia posted:There's a very important difference for Paizo: most of their lines are actually run as subscriptions, with the individual unit sales as a secondary product stream. Lisa Stevens and Erik Mona have said that it's the subscription sales that really matter to the company; they have shut down lines in the past when the subscriptions weren't profitable (notably, Pathfinder 1e had no non-Adventure Path adventures for years). Ah! That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the subscription model. The actual hardcovers aren't part of the subscriptions, though, are they? Although even if they aren't, I guess Paizo could be pretty confident subscribers would buy them (especially as in the past I think they've had a tendency to theme Adventure Paths around recent hardcover releases), so that still gives them an idea of a guaranteed audience. EDIT: Whoops! Never mind! The hardcovers are included in subscriptions! Pathfinder Bestiary 2 product page posted:Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Rulebook Subscription. Hm. I wonder why other companies haven't moved to a similar model, then? I guess maybe because you'd need to hit a certain threshold of loyal customers before the subscription model becomes viable, and that threshold's hard to reach...? Jerik fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 23:54
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Jerik posted:Ah! That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the subscription model. The actual hardcovers aren't part of the subscriptions, though, are they? Although even if they aren't, I guess Paizo could be pretty confident subscribers would buy them (especially as in the past I think they've had a tendency to theme Adventure Paths around recent hardcover releases), so that still gives them an idea of a guaranteed audience. Yes, there are subscriptions for hardcovers. Those five hardcover books you note in the next few months are three separate subscriptions: the Pathfinder 2e rules subscription, the Pathfinder Lost Omens (setting books) subscription, and the Starfinder Rules subscription. Whatever kinds of products you want to buy, Paizo will subscribe you for them. Even their extra products often come as optional parts of subscriptions; you can add on say an Adventure Path release hardcover as part of your regular subscriptions when they would release it.
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Apr 30, 2020 23:57
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Yeah, I realized after I posted that the hardcovers were included in subscriptions and edited my post accordingly, but I guess you were already replying while I was editing it. I hadn't realized Paizo's subscriptions were quite so all-encompassing. Hm. So I guess maybe the main takeaway from this is that it's not that the product treadmill is inherently unprofitable in today's market... it's that you can't just throw products out haphazardly and hope to make a profit, but need to have some business savvy in how to go about it.
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May 1, 2020 00:00
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Jerik posted:Yeah, I realized after I posted that the hardcovers were included in subscriptions and edited my post accordingly, but I guess you were already replying while I was editing it. I hadn't realized Paizo's subscriptions were quite so all-encompassing. Yep. And I think your guess that it's a hard model for other companies to pick up is correct. Remember, Pathfinder was a hail mary for Paizo - it was fumbling around trying to find some way to keep the company going after WotC took back the publishing rights to Dragon and Dungeon, so they already had subscription and periodical experience, and a lot of it. If it had failed, they'd have just released six middling d20 shovelware adventures, no big deal. But they had built up a dedicated audience specifically for their adventure series in Dungeon, and tried to keep that going. It worked. And then they slowly, slowly built upon it - it's only after they have adventures, and a setting, and are producing player content too, that they go ahead and decide to do the Pathfinder RPG. And that RPG was specifically an opportunistic play for the audience that didn't like 4e. Paizo is very business savvy. They've made mistakes (oh god Pathfinder Online) but they are very good at what they do in general.
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May 1, 2020 00:06
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Jerik posted:Take another look at the product schedule. Between March and July, they've released or are releasing Starfinder Near Space, Pathfinder Bestiary 2, Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide, Starfinder Starship Operations Manual, and Pathfinder Lost Omens Legends—all of those actual, honest-to-goodness, hardcover books. Five books in five months. That's in addition to the Adventure Path installments, two of which they're releasing every month (one for Pathfinder and one for Starfinder), and those aren't insignificant either; they may not be as big as one of their hardcovers, but they're still a good hundred pages each (and they also include rules expansions; a little over half of each volume is taken up by the adventure, and the rest by new rules, new monsters, setting expansions, etc.). As for adventures, they actually seem to have cut down on standalone adventures that aren't part of an adventure path or Pathfinder/Starfinder Society; I only see one ("The Slithering") scheduled during that period. Now, yes, many of the products on their schedule are Flip-Mats and Pathfinder/Starfinder Society adventures, but even if you ignore those and just look at the hardcover books and the Adventure Paths... that's still a lot of products, certainly far more than Wizards of the Coast or Onyx Path is putting out. I probably overemphasized the importance of the APs/Scenarios, but my intended point was more than the supplement treadmills for WoD and Paizo were different sorts of beasts. Of those books you listed I see two that might be considered mostly "setting" (near space and omens), and 3 that are more rules expansions, adding new monsters, new starship rules, and new character options. Looking at Pathfinder 1st edition as a whole (which I would argue is relevant as "the modern industry" since it's only 11 years old), you have 13 APs, 3 dedicated setting books, and 28 books wikipedia groups as "game books", of which I'd probably count ~20 as rules books and ~8 as more "setting", though there's a lot of overlap there. Altogether you've got 44 books for the flagship line, though that's leaving out other publications like GM screens or box sets or stuff, spread out over 9 years. Now let's compare that to vampire 2nd edition, which like pathfinder was the flagship line for the company. It's not as easy to break up the books into discrete categories, because WW liked to throw a smattering of rules and character options into almost every book, but we can make some general groupings. Excluding novels and a few other GM screens/pins/whatever, we're talking about ~50 books published in 6 years. Of those, I'd only really count around 8 as being books primarily about expanding character mechanical options or new ways to play (Core book, player's guide, ST guide, 2 sabbat guides, inquisition book, ghoul book, and the black hand book). The clan books and the like have some character options, but the majority of page count is setting lore and NPCs, with usually a few pregens and a small set of powers, merits, flaws, etc. There are by my count 6 adventure books. The rest are primarily either setting info on particular parts of the world, the clan books, or other types of lore books. So in around 2/3rds the time, vampire put out around the same number of books, and many of those tied to specific places that probably wouldn't be of much interest to the general player base if they weren't from there or weren't avid consumers of the lore in general. Also keep in mind vampire was only one of 5 major and a whole bunch of minor interlinked series all churning out books simultaneously. I don't have the energy to try to count them all for that same period, but it was a lot, especially for werewolf and mage. So it's a really huge number of books, while simultaneously having a lot of them focused on exploring fairly specific setting info, much of it not very player facing unless your campaign happened to be in that area. To me at least, when people talk about the supplement treadmill being dead, that's more of what they're talking about. Paizo is prolific, sure, but a lot more of those books were likely to have something of an interest to most of their player base, at least in theory. Whereas in 1994 alone, vampire had 3 clan books that maybe had general appeal, 2 setting books that most people wouldn't care about unless they were setting their game in LA or New Orleans, 2 books mainly of interest to a GM (and pretty specific there I don't know how many STs really wanted a book of criminal vampires and one about elysium), and a novel. That's the kind of model that I think just won't fly these days for most companies, where even your core books are going to have a much smaller fanbase if you're not DnD or Paizo. Could someone else match Paizo today? I think it'd be possible, if you had a game with enough of a built up following. To Leperflesh's point, it seems like Modiphius is probably one of the few to have that kind of fanbase. I'm not sure if at this point you could grow something like shadowrun that much or not. But I think the volume of books TSR and WW were churning out in the 90s? In both number and focus, those were different than how Paizo is set up. (My main point with the 3rd party stuff for Paizo was that a lot of the more niche or obscure stuff that maybe appeals to a smaller audience are things Paizo can let other companies try to produce, if they don't see a sure way to get a return on their money. If someone else can adapt book of 9 swords to pathfinder, great, it gives players who want it something else to buy to keep them interested in the line, and if it doesn't sell profitably, it's not really Paizo's problem. WW by contrast was putting out some pretty niche works themselves, and thus had to eat any underperformers out of their own budget).
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May 1, 2020 00:20
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Jerik posted:Hm. I wonder why other companies haven't moved to a similar model, then? I guess maybe because you'd need to hit a certain threshold of loyal customers before the subscription model becomes viable, and that threshold's hard to reach...? The way I see it, there are two main things a company would need to set up a subscription model now: 1) They need a system crunchy enough to support this many supplements. You need to make things meaty enough to justify spending that much money a month, and the supplements you make need to be meaty enough that you don't burn through all your content in a few months, and making a system with that much crunch to it is hard. 2) You need to have enough resources to make enough stuff to set up the first few months of your subscription model to make sure it's a good investment for customers, and you need to be able to do that without having your company fold entirely if your subscription doesn't find an audience. This is the hard part, because the RPG market doesn't exactly have great profit margins. This was a safer bet in 2009 when Paizo started their subscriptions, but times have changed. (And, as others said, this wasn't even that safe a bet at the time.) Of course, you could go for something smaller-scale than the full Paizo subscription model, but at that point you're just running a tabletop Patreon and you probably aren't going to fund a big, glossy RPG supplement just from Patreon money.
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May 1, 2020 00:24
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Jerik posted:Yeah, I realized after I posted that the hardcovers were included in subscriptions and edited my post accordingly, but I guess you were already replying while I was editing it. I hadn't realized Paizo's subscriptions were quite so all-encompassing. I think that's spot on. TSR was the even bigger example here, which was spewing out an absurd number of products, particularly fiction novels where they were on the hook for returns, which basically broke the company (there's more twists and turns there, but that was a big chunk of it). White Wolf threw a ton of stuff at the wall and saw what stuck, which was great for their first 3 big lines of vampire, werewolf, and mage, but got a lot more hit or miss in terms of sales with the other lines. Whatever any of us think of Paizo, by contrast, they've always seemed to me to have a good handle on what their customers want. They spotted a niche with the rancor over 3rd to 4th edition dnd and catered to it. I'm not as deep into their products as to say how well all their books have been received, but they do generally seemed more focused on their core line(s) than just putting out every idea they have in hardback form. Edit: and sorry for the rambling giant posts, we have legal weed here in Detroit and not a lot to do right now. I'll engage when I can be pithier later on.
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May 1, 2020 00:30
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It's worth realizing that the supplement treadmill was often smaller in the 2e/oWoD days too; there's a big difference between publishing a bunch of 96-page softcovers and a 200-page hardcover. It wasn't until 3e D&D that we actually got a ton of hardcover supplements every month. Also Paizo notably cut out their monthly 32 page player books in the transition to 2e, because they were poorly edited and not playtested. Even their model has a limit on how much they can produce.
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May 1, 2020 00:42
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Desiden posted:Looking at Pathfinder 1st edition as a whole (which I would argue is relevant as "the modern industry" since it's only 11 years old), you have 13 APs, 3 dedicated setting books, and 28 books wikipedia groups as "game books", of which I'd probably count ~20 as rules books and ~8 as more "setting", though there's a lot of overlap there. I don't know where you're getting those numbers... there were a lot more setting books than that in Pathfinder 1E. Look at this page: most of the products in that list are setting books. I wouldn't count the map folios, and there are a few other products like Misfit Monsters that don't really fit, but still, there are about sixty books in that list that are pretty undeniably setting books, and several more that are debatable or hard to classify. Heck, I'd say in 1E there were far more setting books than there were rules books—though there were also more than twenty rules books, and there were twenty-four Adventure Paths, not thirteen, so I don't know what list you're looking at, but it's seriously incomplete. Also, that thing about throwing rules and character options into the same book? Yeah, Pathfinder did that too. Here's an entire line of books that mixed character options and setting information—so, you know, all of these ninety-something books are also in part setting books (and in part rules books). And there are some books there that are at least as "niche" as any of the White Wolf books you're bringing up. Plus, like I mentioned before, only a little over half of each Adventure Path volume is devoted to the adventure; the rest is character options, new rules, and setting information. (And each adventure path installment was 100 pages, and there were six installments in each adventure path, so that's thousands of pages of character options and setting information in the Adventure Path volumes.) So, no, I'm sorry, but your analysis of White Wolf having had more specialized content just doesn't hold up. Paizo published a lot more books about specific locations in their setting or other specialized topics than you're making it out to be. Seriously, take a look at the lists of books I linked to above—there are plenty of niche works there. I think Arivia's probably got it right that Paizo's success with their supplement treadmill comes from their subscriptions and business practices (and the headstart they got with their built-in audience from their time with Dragon and Dungeon)—in fact, Paizo has had more of a supplement treadmill than White Wolf ever did, though, again, maybe not quite as much as TSR in the 2E days.
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May 1, 2020 00:52
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Absolutely nothing beats the 2e treadmill, which has something like over 600 products released during its time.
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May 1, 2020 01:01
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Slimnoid posted:Absolutely nothing beats the 2e treadmill, which has something like over 600 products released during its time. Every month there'd be far more stuff coming out than any teenager or college student could afford. And lots of the stuff was aimed at tiny sub-niches. Things like this, the second of a linked set of Maztica adventure modules, which was aimed at 1) DMs (not players) who 2) bought pre-made adventures and 3) played in the Forgotten Realms (specifically the 4) Maztica region) and who had 5) bought and played through the previous module in the series. If you didn't meet ALL FIVE of these criteria, then the product really had nothing to offer you (unless you also were a gotta-have-em-all collector - which, again, see note above about how hard it was to afford all these products month after month after month) No wonder TSR went broke. Ryan Dancey talked (and did) a lot of nonsense, but his impulse to relaunch D&D with an emphasis on evergreen core products that were broadly usable by every playgroup was a very sound one.
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May 1, 2020 01:10
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Jerik posted:Okay, but if we say one supplement a week, an average of 20 pages, that's about 80 pages a month, which is... actually pretty comparable to 5E's output, of a 300-or-so-page book every 3 or 4 months. That's certainly very respectable for a one-man operation, but I don't know if it qualifies as the kind of supplement treadmill I'm talking about. oh yeah i would just say that rob schwalb writes his rear end off and was able to use his kickstarter money to fund freelancers writing supplements for a long time. i don't know if i'd even call it a "supplement treadmill" because to me one of the defining aspects of the treadmill is that you have to keep buying. with sotdl you could just buy what you wanted, there wasn't a need to keep up with every release i do think, given how so few people are doing it anymore, that the supplement treadmill is probably a difficult thing to pull off. that much content at an acceptable level of quality with art and other stuff seems out of reach of everyone but paizo and wotc, but wotc hasn't really engaged in it like they did before. my books are littered with 3e and 4e books of extremely dubious use that only exist because of the treadmill. like who's out here trying to pull stuff from magic of incarnum or grave encounters
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May 1, 2020 01:46
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I think art is the biggest hurdle really, and honestly I'm not the type who feels like full color painting styled artwork is a requirement for everything. Really love the old-school aesthetic of a solid, black & white inked image. A recent book I got called The Tomb of Black Sand has some just fantastic artwork in it.
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May 1, 2020 02:01
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Arivia posted:Also Paizo notably cut out their monthly 32 page player books in the transition to 2e, because they were poorly edited and not playtested. Even their model has a limit on how much they can produce. I think they've effectively moved some of that content into the Adventure Paths, which have more player content (including new feats/weapons/ancestries/archetypes) and more in the way of generically usable setting info than the 1e APs.
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May 1, 2020 02:07
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Jerik posted:I don't know where you're getting those numbers... there were a lot more setting books than that in Pathfinder 1E. Look at this page: most of the products in that list are setting books. I wouldn't count the map folios, and there are a few other products like Misfit Monsters that don't really fit, but still, there are about sixty books in that list that are pretty undeniably setting books, and several more that are debatable or hard to classify. You're misrepresenting the various product lines that existed during Pathfinder 1e, although you've got a better idea about the numbers in each line. The Campaign Setting books were released every few months and specifically fleshed out a part of the setting, with a mixture of GM and player options. It's important to note those books were small softcovers (generally about 96 pages). The Player Companions were the monthly player releases I mentioned; they were niche because they could be, and because they were supposed to be impulse buys or nice subscription addons. They were done in setting but weren't really about the setting so much as just expanding a specific topic for players; note that because of the toolboxy nature of Pathfinder, what might seem like a niche title was often more accessible (for example, a book about arcane magic would also have options for say fighters). Plus when they did do a niche topic (say 32 pages on Underdark races), it didn't really matter, because next month was a more general topic for you to spend $15 USD on. 1e Adventure Paths as a general rule were not for players; they would only contain player options when it was specifically necessary and relevant to the adventure path, or part of one of the setting articles. I don't disagree that Paizo was and still is producing a lot of content, but they've always been pretty clear about who should be buying what, if that makes sense. If you were just a player or just a GM, you knew there were specific lines you wanted and could ignore the ones for the other role. Roadie posted:I think they've effectively moved some of that content into the Adventure Paths, which have more player content (including new feats/weapons/ancestries/archetypes) and more in the way of generically usable setting info than the 1e APs. Likely, yes. Stuff like the shoony show they're going harder on putting player content in those, which is fine. The important change is now they have time to edit them and wave them at least vaguely in the way of playtesting, which really didn't happen with some of the Player Companions. (Sometimes for great results, sometimes for ill as in "why has it taken us three books about and a round of errata to finally make swashbucklers as good with rapiers as with longswords".)
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May 1, 2020 03:38
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Fair enough; I was trying to respond to the contention that the Pathfinder 1E material concentrated on general-appeal rulebooks and didn't include a lot of books that detailed specific regions of the gameworld or were otherwise on specialized topics (as well as Desiden's drastic underestimate of the number of Pathfinder 1E books), but you're right; I did make some misstatements about exactly what kind of content was contained in which lines.
Jerik fucked around with this message at 04:20 on May 1, 2020 |
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May 1, 2020 04:15
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The important thing to take away is that the 2e AD&D and WoD supplement treadmills are divisive and push you into smaller and smaller groups, like was shown with the Maztica example. It wasn't just that there was a lot of content, but that it pushed you away from buying other content that wasn't for you (other splats in WoD, other settings in AD&D.) That's never something Paizo has fallen prey to. They can target books at specific parts of their audience, but they're never exclusionary: there's only one setting, and the rules components can be shared broadly across different characters, groups, and campaigns. Paizo is also really good at supporting rules and systems: the class or ancestry or whatever you like will continue to get support and updates when it's (thematically) appropriate, it's never one and done. Sometimes books or rules elements are updated and the previous ones are obsoleted, but it's never a case of "nah we just decided to never do any more inquisitor stuff ever again." Even running basically a homebrew setting for Pathfinder 2e (of course I'm actually converting FR stuff), I can still just grab the new book off the shelf and use stuff from it in my game tonight without any trouble.
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May 1, 2020 04:42
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Slimnoid posted:Absolutely nothing beats the 2e treadmill, which has something like over 600 products released during its time. The sheer size of it also meant that a lot of them got loving weird, which was great. Spelljammer and Dark Sun were really left-field settings.
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May 1, 2020 16:30
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