One of the main things that attracted me to Pathfinder and Paizo in general (and I can't be alone on this), is the incredible level of customer support and interaction you folks have with us, your loyal customers. It's quite a heady experience to have Sean K Reynolds and Neil Spicer threatening to rough you up in a dark alleyway and take your wallet!
My question is, given how often you folks are on these messageboards, do you ever find yourselves scrolling down to the near bottom of the screen and check out what some of us are doing with Paizo Adventure Paths or homebrew Golarion games in the play-by-post section?
I honestly don't have time to read PBP games. I've run a few back in the day (before I started at TSR), but most of my board-reading goes to answering questions about books and miniatures, and I have to cram that in between frantic bouts of working on the latest Paizo books. :p
I think it's a time management thing. The Paizo crew doesn't have as much opportunity to look into PbP gaming (even for just following along). In those moments when they do have opportunities to game, it's usually with a staff run game there in Seattle...which is live and in-person as opposed to online.
Back when Realm of the Fellnight Queen was in development, I suggested to some folks at Paizo that maybe I could run it as a PbP game on the messageboards as a way to further advertise and drum up interest in the adventure. But I really couldn't do that until it hit the street, because I'd otherwise be giving away elements of the design (which may or may not make it into the final product). In addition, the next assignment came (Kingmaker's Blood for Blood), which was an even bigger commitment. So, I shelved the Fellnight PbP idea and didn't really trot out anything further on that adventure until I ran the Shadow of the Fellnight Queen prequel at PaizoCon last year.
Also, I already do a lot of PbP gaming. So much, in fact, that I had to trim back on some of it. I barely have time to play in one, much less run one now. And running a PbP game is a much bigger time investment. So, as a contributor to Paizo, I have limited time to look in on PbP games. And I can only imagine how little time the actual Paizo crew would have given how crazy busy they are these days.
My two cents,
--Neil
P.S. Here's your wallet back. ;-)
These are all the answers I was expecting. Mostly, I was just curious if, for example, people at Paizo were checking into any of the Carrion Crown PbP games to see how players were running with the latest product. I get, however, that PbP games are very slow and by the time the developers got any useful feedback from them, there would be four more completed adventure paths to consider.
Rob McCreary also ran a PbP game set in his nation creation of Iskandria from RPG Superstar 2008. That was before Paizo hired him. But, he too has PbP experience.