BTW, if any of you live in the SF Bay Area, I'll be running a terrain-rich version of Out of the Abyss:Rage of Demons Encounters season at Games of Berkeley. Wednesday Nights 6-9pm starting January 13 2016. Contact jose@gamesofberkeley.com.

[Photos of non WWG terrain omitted...]

Perhaps it might have - if Wizards actually put out a rules supplement somewhere along the way. As it is, it's a good introductory system - but it just needs a little bit more. One or two more base classes and a handful of options for each class, an expanded Feat list to mull over, and, more than anything, races of all stripes and colors. As much as I'm enjoying playing it right now, there's really not enough variety in the system to keep me playing 3-4 years down the road without retreading old ground - and the supplements they have put out have all been adventures, which historically don't sell as well (especially for a system that is as easy to port things over to as 5e).

Now, we definitely don't need the glut of years gone by - especially 4th Edition - but we also need something to keep the system evolving and changing. It's been a year without any solid crunch book (I know, Sword Coast Adventures just came out, but that is 80% fluff with very little actual crunch sprinkled throughout - though it does have a nice selection of Backgrounds, which is good), and the system really needs more than that to keep alive.

Megan gave me some fairly scary numbers the other night - Pathfinder actually comes out with more stuff in any given month than WotC did at the peak of the 4e glut.

But it also sells much better than the 4e stuff did - in part because of the pricing (a $20 Adventure Path book is a better impulse sale than a $50 adventure in hardcover), and in part because Paizo does not make it so that every book is essential - not being expected to buy every one of those $20 supplements means that you are more likely to buy the $0 supplements that you actually want.)

Another part of it seems to be folks judging books by their covers - and the covers on the Pathfinder books look better.

None of which explains why Pathfinder seems to have had a major upswing at so many BaM! stores.

The Auld Grump

Ya know, I would have said that Pathfinder must have plateaued (how is that word spelled correctly with 4 vowels in a row?) by now, but our local PFS group here in MN has continued to grow over the last year.

At the one big annual gaming convention, Con of the North, last Feb, PFS had about 12 tables running in every slot of the Con. This coming Feb, we have the Special planned for 20 tables and the convention organizers have moved us to the largest room in the hotel. I checked our membership on our Meetup page and in 2015, we went from 614 registered members to 844. That's a 37% increase this year alone.

The logic might go something like this: most people who liked 3E and the OGL switched to Pathfinder when 4E came out (at the latest.) When 4E sucked donkey balls, many more people switched to Pathfinder because it was the next biggest game and kinda sorta familiar even if they started with 4E. And now, with Pathfinder now being the actual most played game out there and D&D still having a bit of a bad rep in the gaming community from 4E, Pathfinder is the more obvious choice unless the buyer is simply unaware of the market and wants to buy/play D&D.

I could be wrong, of course.

I cannot believe I wrote that.

Brain damage, it's a terrible thing.

We are chugging right along enjoying our 5e game. I could see us maintaining for some time to come, but I would REALLY like to see an Eberron release, plus a healthy number of feats/spells/monsters. The rest of it is working fine for me, but options as both a DM and a Player could be expanded.

I cannot see our group ever switching to something as cumbersome as Pathfinder. A few play it on their own in other groups, but the majority want something with less crunch and easier to have fun with while not having to read tons of rule-books.

I would likely buy things in the $15-25 range as impulse buys. The massive adventure books have caused me to stick with core books only. They just seem too niche for my uses. I run my own adventures (or a mix of things).

I honestly don't even know what is currently offered, or what is on the release schedule.

While I don't know what's on the release schedule (as far as I know, it's mostly more of the $50 campaign books), I do know what they currently have to offer:

The Core Three (DMG, PHB, and Monster Manual)
4 Adventure/Campaign books (1 for 1-7, 1 for 8-15, and 2 for 1-15)
1 Setting book (Sword Coast Adventures) with a bunch of fluff and a bit of crunch (a smattering of race and class options and a decent number of backgrounds)
1 Players Companion PDF (free PDF or you can get it POD)
7 PDF adventures available for a range of prices.

And, that's it. A full year in, and basically just the options from the core rulebooks to work with. Personally, I would have liked to see at least one 'crunch' book filled with new ideas and expanding on old ones (more class archetypes, fighting styles, backgrounds, and feats for the players to ponder, and a few DM modules that can be ported into the game like Hero Points, Horror Checks, etc, as well as a sizable chunk talking about how to integrate them into your game).

To be honest, Pathfinder was even worse off for content in their first year after the Core Rulebook came out. I was complaining and complaining in that first year that they needed some options for players out there. It wasn't until the APG came out a year later that they had some more crunch added to the game. But at that time, Pathfinder hadn't yet gained a lot of traction, was building itself as a business so they could only publish so much, and everything was compatible with 3.5, so you could use all of those books for options if you wanted. And their APs were really the thing that drove their adoption and consistent sales early on.

5th edition is in a different situation where they should be trying to regain market share and improve their reputation with the fan base, but it seems they're playing it rather conservatively.

It's been interesting reading this thread after avoiding it for a while.

Gump, Your numbers on the D&D vs pathfinder adventures are interesting, considering that the stats on Amazon seem to show the exact opposite. The WotC adventures are all up near the top of the best selling lists, (and have been for a long time) while the pathfinder adventures are no where to be found. The pathfinder hardcovers show up, but pretty far down the list.

It matches much of what I see at my local gaming store. Some pathfinder adventures seem to come and go, while others (the AP books) seem to sit on the shelf for a long time. In fact that is still a part of the Wrath of the Righteous AP sitting there gathering dust two years on.

I wonder if this is because as you say the softcover modules are impulse buys, and you don't do much of that kind of shopping on amazon, as opposed to in a brick and mortar store...

That said I also find I buy almost all my books these day's via amazon or paizo subscription, as the nearest bookstore is now half an hour away, and a couple hours round trip (drive + browse time) is not something that I can afford. Between work, a house, wife and kids, I barely have time or money to do much of anything fun these days. So I have to be very careful with my gaming dollars. I at least find paying $30 for a WotC adventure vs. $120+ for an adventure path is way more affordable for me.

As a side note:
Having bought a number of both the pathfinder AP releases and the WotC modules over the last couple years, I actually find that I like the WotC modules quite a bit better. (Except for that first Tyranny of Dragons abomination which I try not to remember) The Pathfinder AP have the problem that the stories are still very inconsistent across volumes and the stat blocks constantly reference books that I often don't have.
That said, the big advantage that Paizo has is that they are still releasing electronic versions of their books, which means that I can read them while traveling. I just don't have room to pack those big WotC adventures when I go out of town for work.

Shame on you WotC for still not releasing PDF or some kind of license for your Game!!!!!

Though, now that I think about it, ugly covers could have something to do with why it is selling better at Amazon - people are a lot less likely to judge a book by the cover if they are already online, looking for it.

The Auld Grump

Agreed. I can see what they were going for with them - grand vistas, exciting enemies, and valiant heroes - but they really come off more 'meh' than anything else. The 3e covers were great because they gave you the feeling of holding an ancient tome of lore and legend, which gave you the feeling of delving into ancient and fantastic journeys before even cracking the book open. The 5e books... Not so much.

I talked to the manager, and found out what triggered getting rid of the 5e stuff - they had their first return deadline on the first hardcover adventure supplements - and returned six out of eight copies.

Returns are what killed 4e for the bookstores - and the middle management of the chain well remembered how badly 4e had hurt them.

Then they used a Baby with the Bathwater approach, and just returned everything, even what was actually selling.

This was followed by people that were looking for 5e as Christmas presents, and not finding it....

So, the best sellers came back, and the rest headed off to the state of Washington, and whatever fate WotC relegates the unsold product to. (Hardcovers are returned, paperbacks are stripped, the covers returned, and the remainder of the book destroyed. Chain bookstores greatly prefer the latter.)

The Auld Grump

I wonder if the reverse is true - that part of the reason why they are willing to risk so much space on Pathfinder is that they have never been burned in the same way by Pathfinder as they were with 4e?

They never brought in multiple entire cases of Pathfinder, so never had to return entire unsold cases of Pathfinder. (4e hurt... a majority of product was returned. BaM! is not remembering how many they sold, they are remembering how many they returned.)

The Auld Grump - a risk that they were unwilling to take with 5e.

*EDIT* I know somebody that is currently running Kingmaker with the 5e rules.

It's interesting to look at the pledge levels in the Ultimate NPC kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/no ... der-and-sa )

At each pledge level, they have separate pledges for 5th edition, Pathfinder, and Swords & Wizardry). The pledges are running roughly 2:1 on 5th edition vs. Pathfinder. I don't have insight whether this is a representative sample or not, but it is clear data on a buying population.

Steve

It´s an intertesting statistic, but we also have to remember that Paizo has already released a similar product. So maybe PF buyers are not so interested in the KS.

Plus, 5th edition still doesn't have that many books out there yet for general GM resources. So, folks might be taking advantage of this opportunity to fill out their reference material a bit more to assist in their campaigns. This is a little reminiscent of when 3.0 came out and a 3rd party had a Bestiary released before WotC even had their Monster Manual released.