When discussing the industry, it's fun to think about things that will never happen, like "What if Paizo owned D&D"?
Assuming that Paizo wrote a ruleset that you personally loved (or stuck with PF if you love it)...
...It's an appealing thought. Paizo seems to be a much better company than WotC, in every way I can think of. It doesn't have annual Xmas layoffs, it doesn't suck at PR, and I even heard that they keep boxes of kittens in the office for anyone who's having a bad day. ;) If Paizo was in charge of D&D (or PF, whatever), maybe we'd have another edition that broke the decade mark. Maybe we'd have less unwanted rules bloat, and more adventure and setting support instead. (Let's also assume that Paizo is supporting your favorite setting.)
But then again, who's to say that Paizo wouldn't become the next WotC after increasing its revenue stream and seeing the future generation of management? Like how VH1 became the next MTV, after going from MVs to reality garbage just like MTV did. When I see things like that happen, I have to suspect that there's an insidious underlying cause for the pattern. Who's to say that as a big company, there aren't underlying reasons for WotC's behavior other than bad decision-making and callousness?
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Who knows. Paizo maybe be better than wotc or worse. Hard to say. Then again unlike some in the hobby I dont have a strong emotional attachment to the companies I buy rpgs from. At the very least not unless I personally know the people running the company. Since I know no one from Paizo I respect all the thay have done. but that it.
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How is Paizo any more or less of a "steward of our hobby" than Wizards of the Coast at present? Sure, there can be one one (save it, I've heard it) most successful RPG company in the world, but how is any company that produces RPG material not a steward of our hobby? It seems to me that the whole point behind the OGL was to crowd-source stewardship of our hobby.
At least some of the great things about Paizo are because it is a much smaller company than WOTC. So I feel it is really hard to tell, if they got as big as WOTC, what they would be like.
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I couldn't care less about "stewards," "flagship brands," or whatever. Make a good product that my group and I enjoy, and we'll play, have fun, and recommend it to others.
I use to be on "team X" or "group Y," but it's all BS brand loyalty. I was loyal to WotC until my edition got dumped, and I didn't personally care for the replacement. I was loyal to Paizo until I ran into 1,000 rules changes I personally felt unnecessary and needlessly complicating.
To heck with it all. I'll play what's fun and and leave it at that. I don't care what company sells it.
-grizzled edition-war vet, with allegiance to no one.
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I'm split between this
How is Paizo any more or less of a "steward of our hobby" than Wizards of the Coast at present? Sure, there can be one one (save it, I've heard it) most successful RPG company in the world, but how is any company that produces RPG material not a steward of our hobby? It seems to me that the whole point behind the OGL was to crowd-source stewardship of our hobby.
And this
We - the gamers - are the stewards of the hobby.It is by our will that the hobby live and grow, and by our dollar that a particular company is shown our approval.
It is not WotC, Paizo, or any other company leading us - it's the other way around.
Ever since the day the first player picked up a rulebook, read through it, and said "huh, looks mostly okay but I don't like that bit, we'll just change that to say..." then the players have been the only real stewards of the hobby. Pretty much everyone involved on the design side of RPGs was at some point a player, too. There's very little difference at the end of the day other than designers do it for a living, and tend to be less protective of having their work edited ;)
I don't really see any one company leading the way, blazing trails through areas of roleplaying never before explored. I don't even see one company looking after and maintaining the hobby. They're all doing their own take on things, borrowing ideas from one another, and generally evolving the hobby between them. The most innovative idea to come out in RPGs this century was the OGL - and no, I don't mean the d20 rules, I mean the OGL license itself, which allows a system to be developed far beyond the means of a single company. There's really been no huge world-shattering developments, nothing to really need the guidance of a steward. The hobby doesn't really have one, it certainly doesn't need one, and it's absolutely better off without one.
A few people have mentioned loyalty. So, cards on the table - I'll be loyal to Paizo and Pathfinder for as long as it's the game I want to play, unless they want to start paying me ;) At this point in time, I don't see any alarm bells telling me my opinion of the game might change, but I'm also not under any illusions that it can't change if there was a business need to change it. If worst comes to the worst, I'll grumble and seek out whatever else looks likely to survive a good 10 years or so, and if that doesn't have an OGL I guess it'll finally be time to sit down and write my own system.
We - the gamers - are the stewards of the hobby.
It is by our will that the hobby live and grow, and by our dollar that a particular company is shown our approval.
It is not WotC, Paizo, or any other company leading us - it's the other way around.
I think this goes a little too far in discounting the influence that companies have in this dynamic. Communication between customers (gamers) and industry companies is far from perfect, and those companies are, as a result, forced to make decisions based on limited information. Those decisions are important.
But... guys... Gary Gygax, may he rest in peace, wrote quite clearly in an editorial in one of the early Dragon magazines (paraphrased, of course): The only way you can be certain that the adventure you play conforms completely to the rules, and maintains a sufficiently high quality, is by running only official TSR adventures.
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For example, look to Paizo and the Pathfinder RPG - Paizo did not create a game to which gamers then became aware they wanted, gamers wanted a particular game and so Paizo, having heard those wants, made the game.
Paizo didn't really create a game (at least, not from the ground up). They made some revisions to an existing, already popular game - revisions that were, I'd guess, just as much a response to their own desire to keep the system that their adventure paths use in print as it was a desire to meet the needs of the 3.5 playerbase for a more polished version of the edition.
This is the way it has always been; Even when it came to the original table-top RPG, the fans started to want a certain kind of game and so that game came to be (and yes, in this case the fans where also the creators and developers).
Again, this is simplistic thinking that really has no place here. The relationship between consumer, company, and product is much, much more complex than you want to portray it.
Sure, a company can decide how to make their game without any input from "the fans" and hope for the best - but in the end, if they don't "get it right" they won't sell enough product to stick around.
That's not the point. Game designers do not operate with perfect knowledge of gamers are looking for - usually they have rough ideas and some feedback (marketing or otherwise), but certainly nothing foolproof. They make decisions, and the games they produce are the results of those decisions.
For example, look at Pathfinder and D&D 4e: two significantly different games created by two different companies to try and address the same market. Both utilized tremendous amounts of feedback from gamers, both companies had their "ear to the ground", but the end results were not the same game. Why? Because each company had different designers with different philosophies and different design goals.
You should not be in the habit of kidding yourself into believing that the consumer has all the influence. That's not realistic, and it's certainly not productive.
