|
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Paizo Pathfinder® GameMastery® Planet Stories® Paizo Games | |||||||||||||||||||
| About Paizo Messageboards News Paizo Blog Help/FAQ | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 Recent Posts
Many, many thanks for the great review! We appreciate it.
Our print products are available to FLGSes through our fulfillment house Studio 2 Publishing and through Indie Press Revolution. IPR has a much more limited reach, but they were a great place to start for us. Any 3PP that has products in an FLGS, I recommend should check into joining Bits and Mortar, which makes it possible to provide free PDFs to FLGS customers at participating brick-and-mortar shops, effectively allowing you to sell print/PDF bundles at an FLGS.
In August we are releasing our first fully original game system - Exploding Aces. EA is a cinematic rpg designed to simulate action/adventure, horror and sci-fi films/TV shows. It uses standard playing cards to resolve actions instead of dice. Robert
You bet! I was glad to provide a quote!
The ones in the UA weren't very balanced either. It's important to remember that what we mean by our flaws not being balanced is that the flaws are not equal. They are balanced in the sense that the right feats, class or racial features and/or skill point placement balance them out - and we even include rules for buying off the flaw and overcoming it.
What about another +1 due to Rogue being that human's favored class? ;) And there's that as well. :) Even with "only" 3 bonus skill points, a 1st level character with high INT can still start off with a really large number of skill points. That's why we limited it to 3. Heck, Sean and I briefly considered only 2 skill points.
Interesting. The 3e version of the "Unearthed Arcana" had a section on flaws. It'd be interesting to compare the two. I agree with this version of only allowing one feat maximum for a flaw. UA could get a little broken. For example, I had a sun elf wizard start at 1st level with three feats by taking two flaws, slow (base speed cut in half) and absent minded (-4 spot and listen checks). I played him as the absent minded professor. As Sean said, there really is no connection with the flaws from UA - which even though I own I had completely forgotten about, and didn't even realize they'd managed to make it into the 3.5 SRD. These are completely unique, straight from Sean, with some minor tweaking by me.
Jeebus man, she's a succubus, not a Cylon!So say we all!So says one of my prophets.*nods*And yes, Dark Mistress, if you happen to read this, I also look at your reviews along with End's as an assist to my 3PP material selection about 80% of the time. He's got a point, Sean, and besides, you tell me that Six wasn't part succubus. Seriously. :P And, yeah, I do wish we could've seen more. Maybe if Caprica hadn't been canceled...
So says one of my prophets.*nods*And yes, Dark Mistress, if you happen to read this, I also look at your reviews along with End's as an assist to my 3PP material selection about 80% of the time. So say we all!
It is precisely that reason that I like using stuff that isn't in the Bestiary. "Oh! It's a Glabrezu! I know what to do to beat it guys!" became all too common in the 3.5 days and I made more liberal use of 3PP creatures, and my players found they liked it better because it was a true challenge when they weren't tempted to metagame the combat. And my players did hate it when I threw in creatures from our upcoming Tome of Monsters for playtesting purposes - but that was because they freaked them out. "What do you mean it's an undead kid?! Good god, you're twisted!" One of my players still has nightmares about the drekavac climbing up his character's body. Mwahahahaha!
As a point of reference, here's the Character Flaws from the SRD as ported from Unearthed Arcana. Huh. Never even thought to look for such a thing in the SRD. I like ours better anyway. :D
Sure, I just wanted to explain the thought process behind it. If you're dealing with new players, you might be better of saving things like traits and flaws, despite their attraction. You don't want to overcomplicate the game for them. Every GM has to know their group and provide something they can all enjoy, after all.Yet you hear the clarion cries of 'we want more of these feat thingies!'. XD The flaws are the sort of thing I as a GM would make a note of and keep beside me all the time. I do this sort of thing anyway, even before the flaws with mechanics came about. I don't worry about their spells, magic items, feats, because if the player forgets - well, that's their problem. The flaws on the other hand, I'd keep close track of, whether it was a Will save or a flat skill penalty.
+1! That is exactly it. Our Book of Arcane Magic has had a couple less than stellar reviews, and several good reviews. Some people don't want more spells - especially 3PP spells - in their game. That said, we've still sold nearly 600 combined print/PDF copies of that book. Certainly wasn't a waste of time for us.
You can check out a sample of the first 4 pages HERE.
It's not Paizo's place to tell the 3PP what not to "waste their time" on. That also assume's that even Paizo knows exactly what every single player of the game wants, and they don't. Heck, read through the playtest forums and you'll find a lot of people that aren't going to use the upcoming character archetypes from Ultimate Combat. Should Paizo have not "wasted their time" on those?
I don't remember that feat either. We did introduce a feat in Paths of Power called Jack of All Trades, which doubles skill points for 1 level, and I suppose someone playing a rogue could take a flaw, then use the bonus feat for that feat and end up with a lot of skill points at that one level. There's always the danger of a power gamer figuring out a way to take advantage of any rule or option, though.
got a ? about that... how long has that book/PDF been out?Gee would your highest selling one be Luven's? :)Luven's is actually #2 for us, at just under 300 PDFs sold. Arcane Magic - our very first print book - is #1 still, and is approaching 400 PDFs sold. The Book of Arcane Magic was released in August 2009. Luven Lightfinger's Gear & Treasure Shop was released in February 2010.
Is this similar to what was introduced in D&D during the 3.0 days in Unearthed Arcana where you take a flaw in order to pick up another feat? I actually do not recall the 3.0 flaws at all. I'll have to go back and check that out and see how similar we are. For our product, you take a flaw and you can either take a bonus feat or 3 bonus skill points. You can take up to 2 flaws, but you can only take a single bonus feat (so if you take two flaws and want a bonus feat, you have to take the skill points for the other flaw). We also included rules for buying off a flaw down the road, since many flawed heroes of fantasy learn to overcome their flaws, not just live with them.
Yeah, we'll never have the number of customers that purchase iPhone/iPad or Android or Blackberry apps, but we'll still always have customers. New gamers come into the fold every day, and long-time gamers look for something they've never tried every day. While most of our PDF-only products have sold around 100 each, a significant number of sold around 200, and a few have sold over 300. And every time I think it's time to retire one or two of our oldest PDFs (which sell the least), someone comes along and buys 2 or 3 of them, so I leave them up. And when it comes to the PDF version of our print books, all but one has sold over 200 and one is fast approaching twice that number. I don't expect to have the sales volume of an app - no matter what I put my pricing at - but I do expect that we'll always sell products unless RPGs suddenly and completely vanish.
Hm, only 3 skill points? There was a feat in the 3.5 Psionics Handbook that granted 5. What calculation prompted the choice of three? Because it is just under the average number of skill points for the Core Rulebook base classes. The average is actually 3.8, but we chose to round down because 3 points is a lot of bonus skill points for a 1st level character. For example, a human rogue with a 14 INT and taking one flaw would start with 8 (rogue) + 1 (Human) + 2 (INT) + 3 (flaw) = 14 skill points. If she takes a second flaw, that's 17 skill points at 1st level.
It is important to remember that the designers/writers and the publishers are also players, too. I don't know of any 3PP that just releases products because they are "kewl ideas". All of the publishers that post on these forums keep a close eye on what the players of the game want - but that also includes what the people they game with themselves want. I know that what the folks at my local game club say they would like to see weighs heavily in the types of things 4WFG produces.
LOLNow, mind you, products that come out for $1.99 are obviously brilliant masterworks that everyone should own.Noted. Ok, soI'm going to be making some changes to upcoming products... In all seriousness, a lot of it comes down to page count. 4WFG's 20 page and less PDFs are generally 2.99 or less. Once it starts pushing past 20 pages (and few of our PDF only titles do) our price goes up.
If I recall, there was a bit of speculation at the beginning that it wouldn't be sustainable for pretty much the very reasons it wasn't sustainable. I was certainly curious. While many of our PDF only products are 1.49/1.99/2.99, the PDF versions of our print products are never lower than 7.99 - and they sell just fine for us at that price. In fact, most of them sell far, far better than our PDF only products.
Player's Options: Flaws is now available at DriveThruRPG and Your Games Now. It should be available here at Paizo.com very, very soon!
I was happier when the discussion segued to ice cream. Can we get back to that? But seriously, while a number of 3PP are producing a lot of material right now, and there are only so many dollars to go around to everyone for Pathfinder Compatible products, the solution to staying in business is two-fold. 1) Consistently produce quality material that gets good reviews from known and trusted reviewers (I'm looking at you, succubus!). 2) Branch out from Pathfinder, or, as the saying goes, don't put all your eggs in one basket. For the most part, many 3PP are already doing that by supporting other RPGs. Later this months is our first product supporting M&M 3e and later this summer is our first original game system. Gamers want to game, and if we produce quality material - for any game system - they'll spend their money to buy it.
Damn you! Now I want ice cream...
Pretty much this. There's no "crowd" from a buyer's viewpoint when only focusing on very specific things. And that's very true. Even during the glut, I didn't feel there was a glut because I focused on a few 3PP (Malhovac, Green Ronin, Goodman Games and XRP mostly) and rarely bought anything outside of them. It wasn't until after 4e/Pathfinder came along and a lot of older OGL material went on sell for cheap that I began to pick up other stuff.
Part of that depends on what system you want to write for, as some magazines support only 1 or 2 systems. If you're talking Pathfinder, then I suggest Kobold Quarterly, Pathways or Wayfinder.
Agreed. The d20 glut didn't happen because there were too many publishers producing too many books, it happened because: 1) there were too many publishers producing too many poorly written/edited books; and, 2) book and game stores ordered anything and everything, thinking all gamers would want all books, period. Publishers, whether the ones that survived the d20 glut, or new ones that have entered in recent years, learned from those mistakes, for the most part. Sure, we occasionally produce something that isn't the same quality as the bulk of our material, but most of try our best to put out only the best product we can. And as Dark Mistress has pointed out more than a few times, writing/design quality is often subjective. If it's something you are particularly fond of, you might consider it better quality than what others do. Editing/layout quality is far less subjective, though.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
