Is Dreamscarred Press dead?


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Ed Reppert wrote:
Maybe the Illuminati got to them.

Why would Steve Jackson Games go after Dreamscarred Press?


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber

Jeremy posted an update to the Kickstarter with the first couple pages of one of the four classes the book is expected to include. So not dead, but as earlier posts shared, pretty wounded.

The Exchange

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As a retailer/distributor of DSP products, unfortunately, I can agree that for some reason Dreamscarred Press seems dead. I rarely get any response from any communications to them, or if I do, it takes weeks to get a response, and even then it's a challenge. At one time DSP was the top seller at opengamingstore.com. Now they barely register a tick-mark in sales. I also am not sure why this is the case :(

Silver Crusade

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Probably cause the system those products were built for have moved into the second edition, and they haven’t released anything for P2 yet due to the real life issues they’re experiencing currently.


d20pfsrd.com wrote:
As a retailer/distributor of DSP products ... at one time DSP was the top seller at opengamingstore.com. Now they barely register a tick-mark in sales. I also am not sure why this is the case :(

Is it time to update the top publishers list? I would assume being on that list meant lots of people would be buying the books recently, and it would be easy to find a group using them?


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They undertook too many projects. I wish they just stuck with Psionics. They branched off into PoW, Vampires, Akashics, etc.etc. and to me that wasn't why I signed on with DSP.

I'm a huge psionics fan, WotC doesn't care about Psionics, Paizo abandoned Psionics and went with Occult magic with rips from Psionics, which left DSP as my only real source for new Psionic material.

And now that's gone too.

Starting to hate the TTRPG industry, it's not catering the bases that are left behind from edition changes and system abandonments like it used to. It's become an "assembly line" of consumers, out with the old and in with the new.

MMOs don't do this crap. Final Fantasy XI was still release expansions even far after the success of FFXIV. And they still continue to support and update the game.

While MMOs have been inspired by and borrowed from TTRPGs, it's time the TTRPG businesses take a thing or two from MMOs.


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Barachiel Shina wrote:

MMOs don't do this crap. Final Fantasy XI was still release expansions even far after the success of FFXIV. And they still continue to support and update the game.

While MMOs have been inspired by and borrowed from TTRPGs, it's time the TTRPG businesses take a thing or two from MMOs.

Erm, what? Live service video games stop support and make the game inaccessible all the time for a number of different reasons. FF XI's continued existence is pretty abnormal, given that XIV and WOW both had "blow up the world and start a new one" storylines in which the old content became inaccessible.

Shadow Lodge

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Don't expect coherence from edition warriors.

Silver Crusade

Also Paizo never had any Psionic products.

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Rysky wrote:
Also Paizo never had any Psionic products.

The old Pathfinder Chronicles: Campaign Setting had a two-page section specifically on psionics, not just psychic or occult magic. No rules material, just fluff on its presence in Castrovel, Vudra, and the Darklands.

As far as I am aware, though, that's the only time psionics has been specifically referenced.

Edit: No, I was wrong. It's mentioned once in Gods and Magic, and then there are even alternative stats for psionic Seugathi in Into the Darklands.

Sovereign Court

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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Those are products from the 3.5 era of Pathfinder. With the Pathfinder RPG the connection to Psionics was severed.
Dreamscarred Press is essentially a one or two man show now and struggling with the Covid situation. They have a product in developement (Psionics for Starfinder) that takes them ages to finish, but the company is still alive (but not kicking very hard atm).

Grand Lodge

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Barachiel Shina wrote:

They undertook too many projects. I wish they just stuck with Psionics. They branched off into PoW, Vampires, Akashics, etc.etc. and to me that wasn't why I signed on with DSP.

I'm a huge psionics fan, WotC doesn't care about Psionics, Paizo abandoned Psionics and went with Occult magic with rips from Psionics, which left DSP as my only real source for new Psionic material.

I was fine with them doing a few projects. Going psionics, PoW, and Savage Species was fine for me because they were usually separate people doing the designing, but the same group doing the editing. Doing the other projects was what really kind of killed things. Not to mention edition changes and other systems coming in that they wanted to be a part of.

WotC is doing psionics again with the release of Tasha's, but they're a "fixed" version. The psi-warrior and soulknife are pale abstract comparisons to the original. Thankfully they had the intelligence to listen to us complaining that the psi-warrior shouldn't be the psychic warrior. Even then, you give the character a sun blade, and it's straight up a Jedi. Literally no difference.


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I don't think the breadth of products was a problem for DSP. There were different authors interested in different projects, working under the DSP umbrella name. The two owners supported, encouraged, and provided coordination of things like art orders and layout, but otherwise the actual heavy writing were freelancers. If anything, the variety gave DSP more to do, which created enthusiasm and pride. If it was just psionics books, there would have only been a handful.

Really, it comes down to real life having repeatedly kicked the two real humans at the top of the imprint.


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I signed on to DSP for Path of War, Monster Classes, Psionics, Akashic Mysteries, and the vampire stuff!

You're speaking on your own and not for this Edition Warrior, Barachiel Shina.

PFRPG + Mythic Adventures to rule them all!


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Arachnofiend wrote:
Barachiel Shina wrote:

MMOs don't do this crap. Final Fantasy XI was still release expansions even far after the success of FFXIV. And they still continue to support and update the game.

While MMOs have been inspired by and borrowed from TTRPGs, it's time the TTRPG businesses take a thing or two from MMOs.

Erm, what? Live service video games stop support and make the game inaccessible all the time for a number of different reasons. FF XI's continued existence is pretty abnormal, given that XIV and WOW both had "blow up the world and start a new one" storylines in which the old content became inaccessible.

MMO's dont really do that , EQ after 20 years just had an expansion, even though eq 2 exists.

it's like that for most MMO's so the poster is not incorrect about, it's pretty much standard.

however the economics involved don't make it in my opinion a fair comparison.

Silver Crusade

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Also MMOs, even outdated or "free" ones, make a F%!@TON more revenue than the TTRPG industry.

Paizo Employee

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Rysky wrote:
Also MMOs, even outdated or "free" ones, make a F*%#TON more revenue than the TTRPG industry.

Historically, FTP MMOs are actually more lucrative than subscription-based ones. When Turbine moved a failing Dungeons & Dragons MMO to free-to-play, the massive increase in profits they saw led them to turn around and make Lord of the Rings Online, which was currently very successful under the subscription model, free-to-play as a way to boost their earnings. That doesn't work nearly as well with a TTRPG, particularly one which is already free to play, however.

The consumer scale is also very different. A successful MMO like say, World of Warcraft, has about 5 times as many active players as D&D 5E has. D&D in turn claims to have a consumer base somewhere in the realm of about 4,000 times the size of the average sales of a given Dreamscarred Press product.

So, DSP's customer base is about .00005% the size of a successful MMO's consumer base, and that's a difference in scale so significant that things that are true about one just cannot be true about the other. Even an extremely dated MMO like Final Fantasy XI still has around 400 times the number of consumers that a company like DSP has. Now, add to that the fact that much of the costs involved in running an MMO are sunk; you don't need to release new product every month in order to keep your fanbase hooked, you can just program a calendar year's worth of recurring events into things and spend a whole year making money while you work on the next patch, update, or expansion. The window of meaningful profitability for a TTRPG product is much smaller; you might have residual sales for years if you're lucky and made a good product, but the bulk of your profit is going to happen in the first three months of the product being out, and after that all of your stuff is free on the internet anyways, so there's no way to timegate or otherwise manage your profitability.

On top of that, TTRPG products have razor thin margins and many products simply fail to recoup their costs during their most profitable window, which then makes it hard for the next book to get off the ground. If TTRPG products were sold at a cost that's actually commensurate with what they cost to produce and set at a pricepoint that guaranteed all the contributors who put in the equivalent of a full time job's worth of work could make a living wage, a book like the PF2 CRB would cost $100 and the average price of a 3pp PDF would be $19.99. Since no one will pay that, most companies need to try and make a profit on volume. Since the audience size for 3pp TTRPG companies is so incredibly small, they have to achieve volume by creating as many products as possible, hoping that the successful ones outnumber the unsuccessful and that the totality of sales across the year are enough to turn a meaningful profit and finance the next year's endeavors.

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