Venture-Captain, Missouri—Cape Girardeau
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I find it great that Paizo is using the Flip-Mats and Map-Packs in PFS scenarios. What I would like to see is other Paizo products embraced in a similar way. Things like the variant monster versions from Classic ______ or NPCs from the NPC Guide. Anyone else like this idea?
If you check chapter 13 of the Guide, we list a host of Paizo products that are legal for play in Pathfinder Society. :-)
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Cape Girardeau
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And I appreciate the PLAYER Source material... I'm just hoping that more DESIGNERS utilize other Paizo products. At most, we have seen use of the Advanced Bestiary and Tome of Horrors, both written for 3.5 and out of print.
I also appreciate the changes that have been made by some designers recently in Pathfinder scenarios, like listing starting positions for opposing forces on encounter maps. This helps insure that a scenario is run the same every time, just like listing tactics.
Creative Director
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And I appreciate the PLAYER Source material... I'm just hoping that more DESIGNERS utilize other Paizo products. At most, we have seen use of the Advanced Bestiary and Tome of Horrors, both written for 3.5 and out of print.
I also appreciate the changes that have been made by some designers recently in Pathfinder scenarios, like listing starting positions for opposing forces on encounter maps. This helps insure that a scenario is run the same every time, just like listing tactics.
Actually, we use other Paizo products quite often in Pathfinder Adventure Paths. Especially in cases where Chronicle or Companion books are specifically intended to support an AP. But since we don't assume everyone buys every one of our books, we have to reprint all the crunch as necessary. That takes up room, and when it comes to making adventures fit, these elements are often what we chose to cut rather than to cut actual adventure content.
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Actually, we use other Paizo products quite often in Pathfinder Adventure Paths. Especially in cases where Chronicle or Companion books are specifically intended to support an AP. But since we don't assume everyone buys every one of our books, we have to reprint all the crunch as necessary. That takes up room, and when it comes to making adventures fit, these elements are often what we chose to cut rather than to cut actual adventure content.
Have you guys thought of adding web content for this type of support? For instance, if you have a society mod and you'd like to incorporate more Paizo stuff in it you could just have a web enhancement to include it that shouldn't take too much work. That way some people could get the benefit of the extra while not hindering those who can't or don't want to afford said extras.
It's a longshot that's too much work for not enough payoff I'm sure. I just wanted to throw the idea out there.
Not too put too fine a point on it, our organized play system exists to get people playing our game and buying our stuff. If we just gave away all of that content ... where would be the incentive to buy it?
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Creative Director
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Have you guys thought of adding web content for this type of support? For instance, if you have a society mod and you'd like to incorporate more Paizo stuff in it you could just have a web enhancement to include it that shouldn't take too much work. That way some people could get the benefit of the extra while not hindering those who can't or don't want to afford said extras.
It's a longshot that's too much work for not enough payoff I'm sure. I just wanted to throw the idea out there.
Folks ask for web content or web enhancements a lot. The problem there is the fact that web enhancements add a lot of work to our schedules. As it stands, keeping our various RPG lines on schedule is a really REALLY difficult task. Adding additional work in the form of web enhancements does not make this any easier, since from our production side of things (since printing and shipping happen outside of the editorial department anyway), there's no difference at all between the work that goes into a print product and work that goes into a PDF product.
MAYBE when we get to a point where we're actually ahead of schedule, frequent web enhancements and products could become more feasible. It's certainly not something that we're ready to think about right now, though.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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When writing The Pallid Plague, I specifically tried to use magic items and spells from Gods & Magic for the cultists to use. In the end, reproducing the rules for these elements ate up a lot of the already limited wordcount for a tier 1-7 adventure. I certainly understand the desire to see non-core rules appear in secondary sources to add verisimilitude and cohesion to the world, but they do pretty much require reprinting of rules, and that redundancy takes up space for new stuff. I used a non-standard monster in another upcoming adventure, but I don't know if it lasted through development.
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Venture-Captain, Missouri—Cape Girardeau
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I'm almost sorry I opened up this particular can of worms.
I've enjoyed ALL the Paizo product I've purchased... but the major decision maker for most of the product I have bought is its inclusion in a Pathfinder Society scenario. I have expanded my purchases to include Flip-Maps and Map-Packs recently, since some of them have appeared in scenarios recently. I have purchased the Companion line since its inception, as most of that has been allowed for play. On the other hand, I have, in the past, skipped a majority of the Chronicles line, since only some of that has been included in Pathfinder Society play.
I have noticed in the past, that Pathfinder Society play helps fuel Pathfinder sales in my FLGS. My original idea was to entice the designers into using other products (i.e Classic Horrors revisited, etc.) in the scenarios to help those product lines that seem to... linger on the shelves. More sales seems good, right?!
I failed to look past the basic idea the Paizo uses with the Pathfinder Society play... no to REQUIRE the players to buy more (as their competitors did with their organized play). I had forgotten that Paizo is our choice of game systems because they understand that forcing sales on their customers is bad for business. I apologize to both Joshua and James for taking time away from them to address this issue. Thanks for your answers.
Now back to work!
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People could always put a reference to the Archives of Nethys in an adventure that makes use of non-core resources. It has most everything on there, and the magic items/prestige classes are being worked on as I type this. :)
*stuff about web enhancements*
Real PDF web enhancements are a thing of the past. Occasionally they make sense for things like the Bonus Bestiary and Player Guides, but as a regular thing blog posts work much better and take less time/effort away from products being worked on.
I will reiterate my desire for more cut content to be posted on the boards or as blog posts, even if the canon doesn't quite match up all the time due to later editing. I'd rather have extra content that doesn't match and sort it out myself, than to have those extra words languish on a hard drive somewhere.
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Not too put too fine a point on it, our organized play system exists to get people playing our game and buying our stuff. If we just gave away all of that content ... where would be the incentive to buy it?Actually, what I might like to see in this department is to have the additional material the module uses put right in the module description. So, say if Module X uses a flip-map, you say that right on the page. Don't require the GM to have it, but it would be nice for me to know that that's an option before I buy.
Actually many of the mods do use flip mats and map cards and explain which one to aquire if you want them.
You could make the arguement that they should state on the cover what flip mats to take advantage of, but then again that might be considered a spoiler.
One example of flip mat use is Devil We Know: Shipyard Rats.
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I'm going to try using item cards for the first time this weekend. I've found that my players usually forget what items they have found along the way during a scenario. I'm hoping by giving them a physical card they will remember that they actually do have an antitoxin available when the wyvren poisons them. ;)
I also use flip-mats and Game Mastery map packs as often as possible. This keeps the map art to a maximum and shortens the time it takes to put the map together, thus maximizing the amount of playing time.
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Creative Director
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*stuff about web enhancements*Real PDF web enhancements are a thing of the past. Occasionally they make sense for things like the Bonus Bestiary and Player Guides, but as a regular thing blog posts work much better and take less time/effort away from products being worked on.
I will reiterate my desire for more cut content to be posted on the boards or as blog posts, even if the canon doesn't quite match up all the time due to later editing. I'd rather have extra content that doesn't match and sort it out myself, than to have those extra words languish on a hard drive somewhere.
More often than not, content that gets cut is cut because it's, frankly, not very good. When we have to cut content for space, it's usually something relatively minor like a line of extraneous description from some read-aloud text or some similar element. Most of our authors are quite good at gettiing us products close to the requested word count anyway, so the perception that we ALWAYS cut lots of content is pretty false.
And again, a large amount of what ends up on the cutting room floor is sub-par and shouldn't be shown off anyway.
What I certainly do NOT want to encourage is to set up a perception among our writers that it's okay to overwrite because we'll just put those extra words out as a web enhancement. When an author severely overwrites on a project, that creates a HELL of a lot of extra work for us, especially since we can't just cut stuff at random. We actually have to read and develop and deal with all of those extra words in order to figure out how to fit 20 pounds of words into a 10 pound bag, as it were. And often, by the end of the revision/editing process, the excess words that got cut are replaced or rendered illogical, redundant, or obsolete by the revisions, so simply putting them up on a blog post would actually cause a lot of confusion.
It's nowhere near as easy as just dropping the cut content (which, again, doesn't happen as often as folks might think) into a file and then just dropping that file into a blog post.
*stuff about web enhancements**More stuff*I never thought of it like that. I'll leave it up to you guys when stuff should be thrown up and stop asking.