Pathfinder “Core Campaign” Shows Paizo is Worried About D&D Competition

PathfinderSocietyLogo_360

One of the axiomatic truths of the Dungeons & Dragons “edition wars” is that  3.5/Pathfinder is the “system mastery” edition. Between the Open Gaming License opening the system to third party content and Wizards of the Coast’s business strategy around monthly releases of splatbooks, the 3rd and 3.5 Editions of the game quickly bloated with options for classes, prestige classes, feats, and spells. Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder rebooted D&D 3.5 and fixed a number of issues with the system, particularly the resulting class imbalance, but it still embraced the variety of character options.

Yesterday, Paizo announced its new organized play campaign, Pathfinder Society Core Campaign. Amongst other differences from the existing Pathfinder Society campaign, this campaign will limit the character options to the Pathfinder Core Book and two small, free supplements. Paizo cites that one of the shortcomings of its existing Pathfinder Society campaign is “new players being overwhelmed or overshadowed by over-optimized characters.”

Catering to new players? Over-optimized? Don’t look now, but there’s a battle a-brewin’ between Wizards and Paizo.

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I Read Some Things: January 19th, 2015

I read some things this week. After the jump, you can read them, too.

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“Elemental Evil” Could Be a Huge Leap Forward for Dungeons & Dragons

Princes of the Apocalypse

As the flagship brand in the  hobby, Dungeons & Dragons (and its publisher, Wizards of the Coast) sets the pace for the industry. The business model really hasn’t changed much in the past 40 years: sell the core books to everyone, sell the splatbooks to players, sell the adventure modules to dungeon masters. Sure, each edition has changed the product mix a bit, but the only major departure was 4th Edition’s introduction of the D&D Insider online tools, which gave online access to all of the published splatbook content for a monthly subscription. 5th Edition looked poised to be the first edition of D&D to offer true “digital copies” of the books through the DungeonScape app (née Codename: Morningstar), but that plan ended after a rocky beta test.

Then, Wizards of the Coast surprised us all by giving away the “Basic Rules” for free online in PDF form in advance of the Player’s Handbook release. Granted, the Basic Rules are extremely basic, but it seemed a step in the right direction for Wizards to lower the barrier to entry into the game and generate interest with a new, younger audience.

With today’s announcement on the product line for the Elemental Evil campaign, though, Wizards has taken the D&D business model in another new direction, scrapping the previously planned Elemental Evil-branded Adventurer’s Guide splatbook, merging it into the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure module, and releasing the player content for free.

Princes of the Apocalypse is available on April 7, 2015 and includes an epic adventure for characters levels 1–15 as well as new elemental spells and the element-touched genasi as a new playable race. In addition, a free download will be available in mid-March that includes more new races plus the player content available in Princes of the Apocalypse

I’ve reached out to Mike Mearls on Twitter to clarify if this approach is unique to the Elemental Evil products, or if it represents their plan going forward. I haven’t heard back I’ve appended the post with his response below, but that won’t stop me from making some assumptions and reckless predictions going forward.

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Confessional: I Hate Reading RPG Stories

Is there a good story for this?

Is there a good story for this?

Let me start this by saying that I love thinking about games, writing about games, playing games, and experiencing the memorable stories that we create through games. I am an active participant on RPG-related online forums. I created this blog to help people play games, have more fun, and push the limits of the hobby. I believe roleplaying is an artform, and like any art, worthy of study and critique. I play, I write, I read, and I analyze.

All of this is to say: I have read an awful lot of RPG stories. From fa/tg/uys posting greentext on 4chan to desperate cries for help on Reddit, I have read everything from classics like the Dread Gazebo and Tucker’s Kobolds to modern serializations like the All Guardsman Party. I consume podcasts voraciously, listening to actual play sessions, where RPG stories are created, and discussion formats, where they are discussed.

I have come to the conclusion that I hate reading RPG stories.

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I Read Some Things: Week of January 12, 2015

I read some things this week. After the jump, you can read them, too.

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Everyone is Writing About the Orr Group Industry Report and I Am Too

A lot of people have written about the Orr Group Industry Report by now. They’ve all written basically the same thing, so take your pick of The Iron Tavern, Examiner, TGN, and Geek Native.  They follow the same basic observations, regurgitated from Orr Group’s press release: Dungeons and Dragons is popular, 5th Edition is growing, and now that players know their profile choices matter, more players are making sure their profile is accurate. In fact, I made the same observations on Saturday, and I didn’t even get a copy of the press release (Orr Group, you know where to find me.)

This report is interesting for the things that it is and the things that it is not, so we’re going to discuss it. To start, here it is:

Orr Group 2014 Q4 Industry Report Summary

Orr Group 2014 Q4 Industry Report Summary

Orr Group also published the detailed version of the report with Other Listed Games expanded, but that full infographic is quite large, so I’ll link to it here.

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