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What about the 3.5 stuff after 4.0 launches (12 or before), a retroactive patch as it where? The page count is not an issue for that, the watsed man hours creating something that generates no revenue is. Then again some loony on the tinternet will do it for free anwyay :)
Or perhaps if they collect adventure paths into hardcovers they could update them then (like they did with SCAP)
Unfortunatly I dont think Pathfinder (or any published modual) can eisily do a conversion.
If you read the articles on how 4th Ed is shaping up they address how 4th edition will make it possible to fight hordes of monsters all at once.
I cant explain it to well..but a 3rd edition modual translated to 4th will have the PCs fight small groups of enemies that wont be balanced out to well without adding more monsters.
A 4th edition modual translated into 3rd will cause the PCs to fight a giant amount of weakings with no challenge involved or a giant amount of tough enemys that will cause a TPK.
Changing statblocks will not be good enough...Conversions will need to be re-writes.
I agree with you too. Substantial changes take a lot of work to weave into an ongoing story and my version of Greyhawk includes every game I've played and everything I've written since I got the boxed set in the mid-80s. Unless you engineer some catastrophic changes to the setting (anyone seen the future entries in the Grand History of the Realms yet?), massive changes to cosmology, racial characteristics and the like just don't gel.
I have a long standing tradition of working bits of previous campaigns into my current campaigns. My last Planescape campaign touched on an earlier Planescape campaign, a homebrewed D&D campaign (the players met their former characters, and the Eberron campaign I was running at the same time (the players traveled into Eberron's past and helped build the first ruins the Eberron players explored). I should point out that I had three players in both campaigns.
I don't mind the rule changes that help speed up play or give new options. My problems are changes like the succubus. If I were to run a planescape game under 4e, I would have to do massive amounts of changes. While I can draw from the Planescape fluff to recreate to planar cosmology (and the Blood War), explaining to players why succubus is now a devil breaks the illusion. It is like using made-up names for dinosaurs. There is a momentary disconnect when a player goes huh?
At least the left the bone devil as a devil, instead of making it the bone demon.
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End result is if 4.0 cans (scarifices cans of Red Bull to Zeus), Hasbro will drop Wizards, which will have devalued significantly, and hopefully someone that gives great customer service, attention to detail, and ultimately produce sbetter quality products, with a nice cash flow from good sales, will step in. Look I play fantasy games, I can dream can't I? :)
Just like they did with Transformers when sales tanked in the late 80s, right? Or GI Joe? Or more likely, they'll retire the D&D brand for some number of years and bring out a new thing branded Dungeons & Dragons much later that has only the slightest resemblance to D&D, that makes the most paranoically depressive fan imaginings of what 4th Edition clearly must be look like old-school 2nd Edition AD&D.
If you think that a big corporation is going to let a potentially valuable intellectual property slip through its fingers, you could not possibly be more wrong. There's dreaming, but dude, you're smoking something.
It's worth pointing out, too, that the world of the Pathfinder Chronicles is NOT Greyhawk, and the official "planes" of Pathfinder cannot be the Great Wheel as presented over 30 years of non-open D&D material.
So we've got to go down some new roads as it is.
--Erik
Hmm... if WotC isn't using the Great Wheel anymore, I wonder what a beat-up, used cosmology with a checkered past would go for nowadays? ;)
Incidentally I'll leave aside the straw man about innovation and stale conventions. The stuff we publish stands for itself
And stands exceptionary well.
RPG Superstar 2015
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When I heard all those months ago that Dungeon and Dragon were no longer going to be published, I was mildly concerned about the future of Paizo and what that decision by WotC would mean to a company I had come to trust with a dedication to excellence for my hobby.
Now that we are on the other side that and we'll all sit huddled around our screens waiting for the other shoe to drop, I can't help but think to myself what a comfort it is to have former nearly insiders to give me a look through the window of WotC. I'm not one to follow the industry with a magnifying glass and I find the information shared with us by Erik and the others very illuminating.
As someone who has dealt with customer satisfaction for over 10 years I have never heard of a company willingly producing a product that would "fire" it's entire target audience. That concept is so foreign to me that it makes me question those at the helm of that company. That may not be their attitude now, but any company who has that in their past is going to have to live with that knowledge being available.
I have every faith that Paizo will continue their excellence and their recognition of who it is that they are in business for. Thank you guys for reaffirming (even in just little ways) that you are as passionate about my hobby as I am.
Just like they did with Transformers when sales tanked in the late 80s, right? Or GI Joe? Or more likely, they'll retire the D&D brand for some number of years and bring out a new thing branded Dungeons & Dragons much later that has only the slightest resemblance to D&D, that makes the most paranoically depressive fan imaginings of what 4th Edition clearly must be look like old-school 2nd Edition AD&D.If you think that a big corporation is going to let a potentially valuable intellectual property slip through its fingers, you could not possibly be more wrong. There's dreaming, but dude, you're smoking something.
I'm not going to say I know one way or the other, but the Dungeons and Dragons property is a whole different animal than G.I. Joe and Transformers.
Hasbro made insane amounts of money on both of those properties, and they originated both of them (yeah, you can argue that they bought the molds for the Transformers from Takara in Japan, but the name and back story were all theirs).
Further, Hasbro had an established history if seeing G.I. Joe rising in value and then needing to be relaunched to be profitable (and they really never "shelved" either property, but some of the other iterations of G.I. Joe and Transformers didn't go over as well as they would have hoped, and stayed under the radar).
Heck, it was cheaper for Hasbro to buy Kenner than it was to outbid Kenner for the Star Wars license.
Anyway, D&D is a big name, yes. In an article that ran in PC Gamer about three years ago, a Hasbro exec mentioned that they really saw D&D not as a game, but as a property with huge name recognition, but admitted that they had been having a hard time turning that name recognition into mainstream success.
My gut feeling is that 4th edition is the last offensive. I don't think that D&D is loosing money, per se, but it isn't making the kind of money that Hasbro's games and toys do, and corporations have a tendency to want all of their profit margins to be similar, even if their products aren't.
This is just a guess, and I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that WOTC has been told that you have to meet a benchmark of X with 4th edition, and if you don't, we sell you off. That's why the monthly fee for an online site, making every PH and MM a "core" book and the like. Its not so much greed (at least for WOTC) as it is justifying their existance.
As far as not selling of a valuable intellectual property . . . it happens all the time if you can't make the intellectual property as valuable as you want it to be. From Hasbro's point of view, they pay X in salaries and get XY in return. If they sell off Dungeons and Dragons, they get 5XY up front, and they can spend X in salaries developign something that has a return of 2XY.
As someone who has dealt with customer satisfaction for over 10 years I have never heard of a company willingly producing a product that would "fire" it's entire target audience. That concept is so foreign to me that it makes me question those at the helm of that company. That may not be their attitude now, but any company who has that in their past is going to have to live with that knowledge being available.
To tell you the truth, the more I have thought about this, I think they may be "firing the customer," but I think there is a target range of who gets fired. I think they may be counting on people that started up the game with 3rd edition as staying, for the most part, so they are only "firing" 1st and 2nd edition players.
3rd edition hasn't strongly reinforced a lot of "old" D&D conventions, and this has only increased since 3.5. Greyhawk is mentioned less and less, more and more classes that are "experimental" were introduced, the adventure path wasn't allowed to use the name Greyhawk or Tensor, the Player's Guide to Faerun reemphasized that FR has "always" had a separate cosmology, and FR shifted more from regional books and more toward "concept" books, Eberron was established with a non standard cosmology and a lower emphasis on alignment.
I think, especially since 3.5, that the emphasis has been on not getting new players too comfortable with old conventions.
Yes, in the last year we have had the Expedition books, and the Grand History, but I think these were almost a "parting gift" for the 1st/2nd edition fans that are probably leaving, so why not let them go out the door with a new product and light a few more dollars . . .
Again, I could be way off here, and have no particular inside knowledge at all.
you are singing my tune..... been a 1st ( i like original ad&d) player / dm since late 70's. i have heard some good, some bad about 4th ed.
I dunno. Seems like the ones most incensed about it are the 3e fans with their million dollars worth of books.
I'm not a 3e guy. I'm a 1st/2nd edition guy and I'm looking forward to 4e.
I'm not claiming any specific knowledge here, nor have I done or been privy to any market research, the reasons for my theory are listed in the original post. For what its worth though, several of the people that I have seen that have complained about the amount of money they have spent have been people that played earlier editions before this one.
Three ancillary points:
1. My theory is just an educated guess based on some things that have caught my attention, and likely not 100% on the mark.
2. Just because they target a given demographic doesn't mean it will work.
3. Posts on message boards are essentially anecdotal and have little scientific bearing to the entirety of people that play D&D. We may know what most of the people that post on a given site think, but that leaves out lurkers, not to mention all the people that don't visit any site at all.
Anyway, D&D is a big name, yes. In an article that ran in PC Gamer about three years ago, a Hasbro exec mentioned that they really saw D&D not as a game, but as a property with huge name recognition, but admitted that they had been having a hard time turning that name recognition into mainstream success.My gut feeling is that 4th edition is the last offensive. I don't think that D&D is loosing money, per se, but it isn't making the kind of money that Hasbro's games and toys do, and corporations have a tendency to want all of their profit margins to...
So why aren't they making the most of it?
Back in the 70's or 80's wasn't there a release of toys based on the d&d line?
War duke, Strongheart, etc, heck they even did a d&d animated series and we all know what happened to that right?
All we've seen so far is a lacklustre first movie that was due apparently to them pushing the issue instead of developing it as it was being released in the same year as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings part 1.
The second was much better and had less of a budget but was more in line with WHAT it should have been.
Those other lines got their promotion from the numerious cartoons it was advertised in... the only thing they did to d&d was to try and draw as much blood from the stone without a care that there was other ways to get that money from it...
Sorry if you find this offensive but there is just so much they could do to recap their money and all I can say is that it looks as though this has developed into who cares...
And my reply is... WE DO.
They even still show adverts on the game itself (I can say you tube here right?), all we've had is those teaser videos... come on people wake up and smell the roses... you've got a huge market here and you're peddling flowers when you could be running the entire Market show!
Here is a funny realization I had the other day:
Sunday when I was on my way out the door my girlfriend asks if I'm going to be back home late. I tell her I probably will since I'll be playing Pathfinder with my friends. She reminds me to pickup some dinner since I haven't eaten yet.
Later when I arrived me and my friends were talking about some of the information we have gathered about 4th Edition, which we all thought of it as kinda 'meh'. And as we prepared to run the final stretch of Burnt Offerings, my train of thought stopped for a bit. I realized something as I watched my friends prepare. They were telling me about what they'd been doing in game and what their plans were after the threat to sandpoint was removed. They had all kinds of fun detailing their interactions with the town and npcs. It kinda hit me that yes, the D20 rules are D&D.
When we started playing and entered the dungeon the final fight took a bit because of some complications, ended up being bogged down in the combat. We worked through it for a bit and eventually it was over.
Afterwards my PCs had a ball going back to town as heroes.
I realized that game that regardless of the edition (3.5 or 4) that Paizo uses to base their Adventure Paths on it's still Pathfinder, and so long as the Paizo staff keeps putting this kind of quality work out I'll more then likely just keep running the Pathfinder APs.
My players and I have pretty much thrown ourselves into Rise of the Runelords and have gobbled up every bit of the fluff we have access too.
They love this new world Paizo has created, and I love running it for them. If Paizo changes to 4th Ed. Then I'll just consider it Pathfinder Rules and buy what I need to keep running my Pathfinder games.
You gentlemen and ladies have made one hell of a world.
I believe that 4e will be Final Fantasy tabletop. It will do well for about six months, then the video gamers will realize that they can get the same satisfaction from just playing video games and 4e will flop. But through the OLG's 3rd party companies like Paizo will catch WOtC if not pass it in success. This will wake up the folk at Hasbro/WOtC. The trend I see when joining new groups is most of the new gamers want options, options, options. That is because most of the new gamers haven't been in good games/campaigns. So we will lose them. But people who use modules or who are old school gamers will still play campaigns and not care so much for th next feat or the next class. This is what we'll be left with and the hobby will right itself. Just a theory. But one I hope stands true.
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I realized that game that regardless of the edition (3.5 or 4) that Paizo uses to base their Adventure Paths on it's still Pathfinder, and so long as the Paizo staff keeps putting this kind of quality work out I'll more then likely just keep running the Pathfinder APs.
If Paizo make the shift to 4th Edition, even the most diehard Pathfinder fans will need to purchase the new PHB, MM, DMG just to continue play the game. But with many of us subscribed to Adventure Paths released every month, will any of us require anything more from WotC than the Core rulebooks?
Then the following year, PHB2, MM2, DMG2 are released as Core rulebooks. What are the chances that these rules will be added to the d20 SRD?
Currently, Paizo games assume characters are drawn from the 3.5 PHB standard races/classes. But say Monks and Gnomes don't appear until PHB2? Or Lizardmen and Shamen are added as player races/classes in PHB3? Or Ogres are delayed until MM2? If these become available in future d20 SRD updates (because I can't imagine the SRD without Monks or Gnomes), will companies such as Paizo include them in their products? Will we need to purchase PHB2, MM2, DMG2, PHB3, MM3, DMG3, etc just to keep up with Pathfinder in the future?
Expanding the SRD should be good for the industry, but it might also be a smart move on WotC's part, trying to get players or DMs who only purchase the PHB, MM, DMG and then move onto other companies for campaign support - competing for your dollar.
By the time I think my group will have reformed for us to run Rise of the Runelords I think that 4th edition will already be out. How hard do you think it will be to convert what I think is a great adventure path into the 4th edition rules? And are there plans to convert the 3.5 monsters from Pathfinders 1 and 2 into 4th edition? This is assuming, of course, that you are planning on converting.
If these become available in future d20 SRD updates (because I can't imagine the SRD without Monks or Gnomes), will companies such as Paizo include them in their products? Will we need to purchase PHB2, MM2, DMG2, PHB3, MM3, DMG3, etc just to keep up with Pathfinder in the future?
If they're in the SRD then you don't need to purchase them at all. By definition, they're available for free. Anything in the SRD (such as the Charm Domain, for example) is on-line for anyone who wants to look at it. No purchase necessary.
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If you think that a big corporation is going to let a potentially valuable intellectual property slip through its fingers, you could not possibly be more wrong. There's dreaming, but dude, you're smoking something.
Fascinating, someone states something you disagree with so you criminalise them :) I am assuming you are stating I smoke THC? In the UK it isn't criminalised by the way, it is merely a controlled.
Let 4th edition run for a while and not meet its corporately set targets and see how long Hasbro hugs the copyright which suddenly becomes valueless, or not profitable enough (like Chainmail, dropped but not sold and replaced with miniatures painted by someone who is blind alas).
Also your customer bases do not really stand up to comparison, and as such seperate business strategies should apply. Male children, also known as boys, play with Transformers and GI Joe. They tend to stop when their balls drop and they notice the jiggly bits on women. A very specilaised subset of men collect and keep toys and dolls, but not many (possibly more in Japan).
Girls and boys play D&D, and as it is a fairly cerebral activity may continue until the day they die. Many of us here have played all editions, or have played for longer than some of you have been alive. Very different customer bases, but you are right in one regard.
Corporations are stupid enough to think they are the same thing and compare them directly as if that gives their decisions relevance, because working for one I can say there is nothing as stupid, unaccountable, and socipathic as a corporation trying to give shareholders (a total misnomer as well) what they think they want i.e. dividends or a massive surge is share value. Also note the bigger the corporation is, the less in control it is of its own divisions and the more monstrously stupid it acts.
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The trend I see when joining new groups is most of the new gamers want options, options, options. That is because most of the new gamers haven't been in good games/campaigns. So we will lose them. But people who use modules or who are old school gamers will still play campaigns and not care so much for the next feat or the next class. This is what we'll be left with and the hobby will right itself. Just a theory. But one I hope stands true.
The feats/options/prestige classes trap is so easy to fall into. It is far, far more satisfying to play in a good campaign with just the the three core books (and far cheaper). I've kept my Runelords group with just the PHB and the few extra feats in the Runelords players guide and they've been having a blast.
The "options, options, options" route is not new. I got into Hero and GURPS due to fellow gamers being unhappy with the level based systems of 1e and 2e.
That did not stop them from playing in D&D games I ran though. All game systems have problems. I have played every version of Shaowrun. Each version has made HUGE improvements, but they all have problems.
I personally like the idea of options. I like the idea of a talent tree system to allow characters to flesh out some unique parts of their characters (like the way the basic classes in d20 Modern are done).