What caused Pathfinder’s decline in popularity? The end of COVID? While 2e had many problems, it was also when Pathfinder peaked in playerbase, and while adventure paths quality went down, we still got some absolute bangers like Gatewalkers. But in recent years, after they got butthurt about WotC licenses, I feel like they haven’t produced anything of value (even Spore War, which had a good first book, went to shit right after), and in general pathfinder tables popularity went down really hard.
>>98920919Dialing the woke shit to 11. More or less.......
>>98920919Pathfinder never had a real life of its own
>>98920919>bangers like Gatewalkersit's the most hated campaign by communityhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1gs0azw/adventure_path_survey_initial_results/#2
money woes are a factor -- $10 million worth of Paizo's printed books got stranded at Diamond Comic Distributor's warehouse, who went bankrupt in early 2025, and got sold without paying Paizo to pay Diamond Comic Distributor's debtors. They've had no cash, lost at least $2mil, and had to lay off a dozen people.
>>98920919To decline you need to be good in the first place.
>>98920919It was mostly these three major factors.1. Going Woke, rather than stay the same and collect the fleeing D&D fans like they did with 4e. They went just as bad if not worse and basically made anyone who would think about them flee elsewhere over bother seeing what they might offer.2. 2e was a flop. Let's be honest they only got big as they were a refined 3.5 clone when D&D went MMO like with 4e causing people to stay 3.5, do Pathfinder, or go back to older TSR books. If they didn't find other systems to play.3. Diamond fucked them over and basically cost them 2 million and it doesn't help 2e wasn't really sell well so it's not like they can simply recoup that lost easily.Basically they lost the point of them by going 2e. Then going as woke as WOTC losing the paying fans for the tourists who at best pirates their PDFs, and doesn't help they don't have the clout to be trendy to be swag for when doesn't really pay much as WOTC also found out. Then losing 2 million due to Diamond going bankrupt and getting sold leaving them hanging.Though going to be fair most TTRPGs have being declining. Only the small groups are getting anything. (I think in 10 years they be sold or left bankrupt.)
>>98921083>2e was a flopIt wasn't>1. Going Woke, rather than stay the same and collect the fleeing D&D fans like they did with 4eWas impossible after 5e massive success
>>98920919Pathfinder was created so people who liked 3.5 could have more of it, then they ditched that audience to make their own soulless garbage. Also going woke didn't help especially since 5e had already cornered the faggot market.
>>98920929Pretty much this./ thread
>>98920929>>98921252And yet DnD is more popular than ever, how curious.Have you ever considered that people who play tabletops don't fucking care about your feelings?
>>98921121Didn't they fuck up the 2e book so badly they had to remake the book to fix the problems with it?Yeah, 5e brought them back into the top fantasy TTRPG however, they still were big till they started changing things and went 2e. Which most new editions rarely get people to switch easily to it. 5e was a expection due to how bad 4e was. Look at 5.5/one/24 did. 2e suffered due to people staying with BX/AD&D over switching. Often it take a while for them to have enough to make it worthwhile especially if they pull enough money in the last edition.
>>98921083You are retarded. 2E was blowing out 1E in sales numbers, badly. This still didn't mean Paizo could weather 10m of stock being held up, that would have instantly killed Paizo dead at any time before 2E.
>>98920919Don't make retarded cumrags into gods by virtue of being someone else's cumrag
>>98920919I literally have no reason to learn Pathfinder 2e. As far as I can tell it's D&D 5e but more complicated and if I'm playing D&D at all, I'm not playing for complexity.
>>98921827>Didn't they fuck up the 2e book so badly they had to remake the book to fix the problems with it?No. That was because the OGL shitshow and WotC being retards gave them a perfect opportunity to collect all the errata they had in one place and sever their connection to the OGL permanently.
>>98922105>new thing outsells old thing everybody already owns
>>98922700Ultra retarded post, ultra retarded poster. What the fuck did you think you were accomplishing by this? I did not mean 'PF2 was outselling PF1's sales while PF2 was out' you dumbfuck. It outsold PF1 at its peak, by a lot.
>>98920929FpbpPathfinder has lost its edge.
>>98921287>DnDtourist
>>98920919>decline in popularityIt should be noted that almost nothing in the entire hobby has really "declined" in popularity, so much as D&D has metastasised, grown huge and swollen, and dwarfed everything else.The same number of people who were ever playing Pathfinder still are, it's just the number of newfag 5e players that changed.
>>98920929The election yesterday showed that woke is thriving, so I think its probably the fact that most of the adventure paths are kind of ass.
>>98922780Strixhaven exists, so that clearly doesn't matter.
>>98921287Have you considered that faggots already play DnD? If your product isn't woke compared to DnD, you are appealing to the people who are off-put by the gayness of modern DnD. If your product is woke on the other hand, you are appealing to the very same people who like how gay modern DnD is, and those people aren't going to buy your product because they are already satisfied by DnD. Being dissimilar to modern DnD is a competitive advantage, which they abandoned.
>>98920919I think its because PF1E had a niche as the most homebrewable dndlike. It was basically 3.5++ and had a ton of insanely good modules plus it was easy to convert modules from other systems in to it.PF2E had some very novel and cool ideas, but ultimately it just WASNT FUN TO PLAY. Like, it really was just a slog. Character creation looks so open at first glance, but when you get into the nitty gritty and start trying to make more creative ideas you realize how heavily restrictive it really is. So you might thing "Oh I can fix this with homebrew", but the problem is that every class in PF2E has like 4x the rules and text of a class/subclass in 3.5 or 5th edition because you need to make a bunch of action moves that cost turn juice in addition to all the normal passives and those moves need to synergize in some way with the class's mechanics. So yes, PF2E had a HUGE boom in popularity because so many playergroups had that one guy who really loves 3.5/PF1E sell it well... but when the groups actually tried to play it they found the world and systems were just less good than PF1E so it didn't stick. The PF1E nerds trying to sell their 5th edition friends on pathfinder as the system of infinite homebrew and creativity only for those same friends to find a system that was like "oh you can't do that, and you can't do this, and no you can't do that... and yea half the class abilities are just insanely underpowered for genuinely no reason and almost all of them have no in built scaling so they start being mathematically detrimental to use after level 2.OH!!!! BUT THERE ARE LIKE 3 WAYS TO MULTICLASS!!! Yea, what you mean is you can multiclass, just like every other version of DND, but with more hoops to jump through.It just wasn't that good, really that's it. You can convert modules to PF2E, the lack of good modules is not why it died. The game just isn't that fun.
>>98922731>immediate incoherent meltdown
>>98922868>illiteracy
>>98920929Two sides of the same coin.
>>98922780Blue states rejected transgenderism, so not really kek
>>98922780The election yesterday was a repudiation of ZOGnald and his war with Iran for Israel.
>>98923352It is pretty funny that they also voted for law makers whose stated opinions were that they'd cut apart any of these statutory changes in court to make them basically nonfunctional. The median American voter is a strange beast.
>>98922780Americans are rejecting Israel (the country that makes your HRT), woke is still over freak.
>>98920919Pathfinder's core audience was people who wanted to play 3.5 forever. Making a 2nd edition that was somewhat similar to 4e is the worst possible thing they could have done.
I just keep introducing new players in my group to PF1e and ignore PF2e's existence.
>>98923485Calm down, I understand yesterday was traumatic for you, but I just looked up "where is HRT made" and its mostly all in socialist China.
>>98923492ngl this is a more concise, coherent and tldr version of what I said in >>98922853 lmao
>>989209192e just fucking sucks to actually play. It has none of the charming quirks that allow power fantasy the way 1e did.1e is still there and is still the best d20 system.But it has a huge problem, and it's entirely a marketing problem. It's considered... "old". Old as in crusty and not as good as "modern" games. It's perceived as janky and clunky instead of as providing robust options and broad content.On Paizo's end, they can't continue supporting PF1e because WotC killed the OGL.Technically, PF1e is still covered by the OGL, and WotC's legal attack on it did fail and they cannot stop Paizo continuing to publish content under the OGL....But there's a huge problem with that and it's almost entirely a market demographics problem. Paizo believes that "modern gamers" want simpler, smaller ruleset... like D&D's 5e. Instead of establishing their products as something that isn't D&D, they've repeated what worked for them with the launch of PF1e: by making "D&D but plus-plus". This is not working because D&D 5e is just a fucking awful shitpile of a system. D&D does not even work to play D&D.It very fundamentally does not matter if players claim they want something simple if they don't actually *enjoy* that simplicity. This is a profoundly lethal situation for Paizo to be in: because you can't fix players. Players are the problem in this situation, and there isn't anything Paizo can do about that because they don't have the market share to re-educate / train players to fix that problem.So WotC continues to dominate marketshare through a combination of toxic game design (which establishes dysfunctional habits in players) and overwhelming dominance in funding to monopolize marketing.
>>98923492>>989240523.5 lovers moved to 5e the second it was released....
>>98922853Paizo should have iterated on PF1e with a substantial balance pass on character mechanics (like specific class features, feats and spells that either underperform or overperform) and the economic assumptions of itemizations. And a standardization of the combat and downtime action economy.Because those are the areas where munchkins run into issues that can break the game.The actual engine of the game is still the best. And 90% of the system is still the best. It's only that last 10% where quality assurance / designer balance oversight lapsed which is what causes so much grief among munchkins.>>98923492Correct.But happily, 1e still exists and is still free and you can still play it forever.>>98924052We will either have to wait for a post-D&D edition of dungeonpunk adventure RPG or someone will have to pick PF1e back up, brush the dust off, update it for balance (which mostly just means a few dozens of specific spells and feats) while keeping the modability and protecting it from WotC's legal aggression, and then marketing it as a more flexible, meatier way to support power fantasy and character customization compared to D&D.And that won't be Paizo because Paizo thinks they can only make Walmart-branded D&D 5e. Whoever wants to pick this up will have to be a studio that isn't driven by the legal and market pressures that have enslaved Paizo.
>>98924070>It's only that last 10% where quality assurance / designer balance oversight lapsed which is what causes so much grief among munchkins.I hate to say "the GM can fix this by being competent" again because thats how people defend the desert of no rules that is 5th edition... but the Gm can fix this by being competent. PF1E biggest strength is how easily modable it is, precisely because the foundation is so solid. As you said, 90% of the system is still best in class.
>>98924056We absolutely fucking did not. No one in my rather large network of gamers did, at least. We all hate D&D 5e with an unabiding passion.I ask all applicants trying to join my table what they think about 5e and it's the most successful filter I've ever applied. I've never enjoyed tabletop RPGs more. My player groups are so much more stable, so much more productive and so much more immersed just because of that one single question on my applications - it's the only question I added or changed in the last twenty years and yet the change has been so drastic.
>>98924073I mean, I agree. A competent GM has no problems running PF1e, especially if the players are engaging in good faith.What we're talking about though is the margin of vocal minority. It's that vocal minority which creates and propagates the marketing that reaches outsiders for the same reason that negative reviews of restaurants are so impactful: if you have a lovely time and enjoyed your lunch... you are so much less likely to leave a review saying so than the outrageous Karen who blows up and leaves a ranting one-star rating.This might seem unfair and illogical, but it's just how such things work.
>>98924076I mean you are just filtering for older gamers desu. A lot of people who have only played 5th edition are just in their early 20s because for their entire adult life 5th has been the current system.And lets face it, for almost the entirety of RPGs as a hobby DND has been the gateway that people enter to get into the hobby. Almost certainly your first RP session was some version of DND. I think there might be something to be said for the fact that we are balding men in our 30s who just want more emotional maturity in general and you might be selecting for that more than taste.
>>98924080Ok?My point stands stronger.
>>98924076>We absolutely fucking did not. No one in my rather large network of gamers did, at least. We all hate D&D 5e with an unabiding passion.You don't even play tabletops
>>98924084The only weekend sessions I've missed since 1992 have been for shit like the holidays or deaths in the family.Shut the fuck up, little boy.
>>98924079But among hobbyists, even 5th ed peasents, PF1E still has a sterling reputation. If I talk to normie early 20s people at the LGS they always see 3.5/PF1E as the ultimate version of dnd but their thoughts are basically that its intimidating to get into on their own because there are more rules and the community is smaller and its old. The reputation among dnd fans of PF1E is very very high. Its just not monetizable at all because its basically finished and crystalized and covered by the OGL like >>98924052 says. PF2E biggest problem isn't marketing or anything, its that the core rule set isn't very fun because its very hard to design for. It's genuinely hard to design a class 1 to 20 in PF2E and I know because I've sat down to do it. Compared to making a subclass in PF1E which can take 20 minutes and be perfectly balanced and functional. So a lot of the classes feel unnecessarily restrictive in their design, which goes against the freedom people expect for pnp rpgs.My ultimate condemnation of PF2E is that its too much like a video game rpg but without a computer doing the work to run the crunch for you.
>>98924092>But among hobbyists, even 5th ed peasents, PF1E still has a sterling reputation. If I talk to normie early 20s people at the LGS they always see 3.5/PF1E as the ultimate version of dndIs that true, though?>but their thoughts are basically that its intimidating to get into on their own because there are more rules and the community is smaller and its old.But why would that prevent them from moving to PF1e though? It makes no sense. They think it's so superior but they don't want to use it??? That's just nonsense. I think you haven't examined the narrative you've constructed and / or it's unsupported by actual survey / data (not that such data actually exists or is accessible to people outside the industry).>My ultimate condemnation of PF2E is that its too much like a video game rpg but without a computer doing the work to run the crunch for you."Classic western RPGs" have seen a significant pop of popularity recently with Owlcat's two Pathfinder 1e games after Obsidian's Pillars Of Eternity Deadfire and now Larian's BG3 having been suuuuuper popular for the horny tumblr crowd. Owlcat's Rogue Trader and soon Dark Heresy are also quite popular and for good reason. People LIKE playing video game RPGs in this tradition. They're fucking fun.And not to put too fine a point on it, but the math involved in these games is pretty trivial. It's literally just adding and subtracting single digit numbers...
>>98921287Even with the current state of D&D, Paizo and its products are far more woke in comparison.
>>98924111>But why would that prevent them from moving to PF1e though? It makes no sense. They think it's so superior but they don't want to use it??? That's just nonsense. I think you haven't examined the narrative you've constructed and / or it's unsupported by actual survey / data (not that such data actually exists or is accessible to people outside the industry).Imagine there is a really cool reliable car from the 90s that people still talk about as being really good and reliable. That doesn't mean everyone has access too it. Really dedicated folks might go out, find one used and fix it up and get it running and take their friends for a ride but most car shoppers will never see one even if the car has a good reputation.
>>98924111>Is that true, though?No, people were tired of 1e and new retarded rules it tried to introduce by the end of it's life cycle, and not just because 5e was better.
>>98923485I hate to break it to you, but the majority of AIPAC supported candidates (both red and blue), won on 4 Nov. Americans are not rejecting Israel (they dont care), they are rejecting inflation and high gas prices. Woke is still dead, though, thats true.
>>98922853Yeah, this.2e LOOKED like it would fix all the problems my table had, but it just wasn’t fun to play. Canceled the campaign after about a year.
>>98924123That's such a ridiculously stupid metaphor to reach for.PF1e is not an antique car. There isn't some kind of limited and dwindling supply of PF1e. It's literally just freely available. There are multiple SRD sites around the internet. You can just... go look at them and use them to play PF1e right now.https://www.d20pfsrd.com/https://www.aonprd.com/https://pathfinder.d20srd.org/It's not some kind of rare artifact that only aficionados can access. It just fucking isn't. It's still there in exactly the same form it's always been there. You can still get it and use it for absolutely fucking free.It doesn't require weird technology skills or unique replacement parts or years of work to refurbish or restore it to working condition.What the fuck. What the fuck are you even doing?? Like what the fuck do you think you'd doing here?
>>98924251calm down woman, you're being hysterical!
>>98924124Just like with any other game, you can just not use the parts you don't want to use. Paizo didn't even make the Occult Adventures books. Paizo licensed the development of that content to a guy who didn't even know much about PF1e, and he sold it to Paizo very late in the game's life cycle, and Paizo only bought it because he asked for so little and Dreamscarred Press was already basically defunct so the one guy remaining from that duo didn't have the legal rights to sell psionics to Paizo at the time.So just don't allow the weird Occult Adventures classes, anon. They're shit and no one uses them and you don't have to use them. You literally just don't even have to use them.
>>98924253You were being told to fuck off with your nonsense. That's not hysteria. You were just called out on your horse shit.Maybe that uno reverse switcheroo works on your playground, but some of us are adults here.You may leave, and if you do it quietly no one will pay much attention to your humiliation and since it's relatively semi-anonymous few will even know or care who you were.
>>98924056no, we still play 3.PF why would I play "mother may I" the game instead? 5e has no rules or they have "lol dunno ask your gm, is not like I'm supposed to be a fucking manual" rules. I want actual concrete rules not difuse shit
>>98924265Lady, please! You are embarrassing yourself! Go home to your husband, before you hurt yourself.
>>98924056I like 3.5 well enough, if the DM knows the pain points, and 4E too, and no the fuck I did not. 5E was an abysmal game.
>>98923492Given their numbers eclipsed PF1 by a longshot, and PF1 also had a problem in that it started fucking dying the moment 5E came out, no, it was a smart move. OP is full of shit.
>>98920929You type like you're 65
>>98920919Pathfinder's success was grabbing the market when D&D went with 4E and people didn't like it. With D&D reclaiming its place (even if it sucks ass) and the 3.5era grogs declining, Pathfinder had nothing. Whatever it did have it dialed down, watered down or changed and just became one of many in a soup of post-5e D&D wannabe.
>>98922836What drew me to Pathfinder originally was that it was a bit darker and edgier than 3.5; lots of horror elements. I liked the sexy art, I liked the cannibal ogres, I liked the Hellraiser ripoff god.Now all the gods have pronouns in their portfolios.You could tell a lot of the setting was made by people who were liberal AND historically literate; Darkmoon Vale has a local robber-baron as a villain who pays his loggers in company-fun-bucks and makes them buy their own axes (from him).
Is there an OSRish version of Pathfinder 2e? I like the three-action mechanic, I just find the character-build-wank to be cancerous at the table.Like how DnD5e has Shadowdark.
>>98924764>What drew me to Pathfinder originally was that it was a bit darker and edgier than 3.5; lots of horror elements. I liked the sexy art, I liked the cannibal ogres, I liked the Hellraiser ripoff god.>Now all the gods have pronouns in their portfolios.lol>You could tell a lot of the setting was made by people who were liberal AND historically literateare you sure about that?
>>98924092>>98924111My guess is that the Adventure Paths elevated the average quality of game experience and this gave it a positive reputation. One thing that can lower opinion of a game is having to sit through a fumbling new DM running their own inept content.
>>98924772>Liberal>Historically Literate>are you sure about that?Maybe I'm being too kind. I'm trying to articulate the difference between>The local bad guy of this small town is an industrialist who exploits his workers, pays them in company store tokens, and anyone who tries to organize a labor movement has a nasty workplace accident.and>Capitalism, amirite? or>This was written by a queer person of color.
>>98924828>Maybe I'm being too kind. I'm trying to articulate the difference betweenthere is no differenceone just sounds smarter but is the same breed of retardation
>>98924841I'm very much not a socialist, but I've done fantasy-industrial-revolution Dishonored-esque games and all that labor-movement worker-exploitation stuff made for great material. Sometimes the PCs fought the Pinkertons. Other times the PCs WERE the Pinkertons.I can respect the critiques of capitalism from the perspective of an exploited 1880s factory worker far more than those from the perspective of a blue-haired HR queer project manager who somehow still sees theyselves as oppressed.
>>98922780this is my biggest concern with the retarded democratic partyi didn't vote dem tuesday because i like woke i voted blue because i hate trumpbut retard boomer democrats so out of touch with everything will think it's because "woke 3.0" or whatever is "in"
>pathfinder is so woke it made a /tg/ thread into a /pol/ thread.
tabletop games?
>>98920919As a fan of Pathfinder and okay with Pathfinder 2.0.It's the lack of care they had later on. They started not actually reviewing their material, so the changeling class was broken from the start. But yeah having the identity of offbrand DnD didn't help.2.0 is nice, it's quick to set up characters but the raw put people into a boardgame mindset than a Dungeon Crawler/Roleplay, at least as I find it.
Justice for Gorum!
>>98924913>Sometimes the PCs fought the Pinkertons. Other times the PCs WERE the Pinkertons.The best splits the difference. >What do you MEAN they were on payroll? THEY SET A DAMN BUILDING ON FIRE!
>>98922780It’s funny that we can’t talk about politics, except to shill for the Democrats.
>>98924504>Given their numbers eclipsed PF1 by a longshot, and PF1 also had a problem in that it started fucking dying the moment 5E came outWhere are you getting that data? Link to it. You didn't just say some random shit and believe your bluster would pass as legitimate knowledge, did you?
>>98924782That still counts, though. And I've loooong insisted that tabletop game companies should have transitioned to publishing ready-to-play adventure content instead of game mechanics / rules.I really don't know how to emphasize that enough.
>>98924724That sounds like the real direction PF should take is making "I can't believe it's not 5e" that fixes all the problems people have with 5e.
>>98925089Isn't that the traditional business model of TTRPGs? The core/rulebook is the handle while the adventures and splats are the razors?
>>98925081No, fuck off faggot. You made the claim first, you prove that PF2 did worse.
>>98924504>Given their numbers eclipsed PF1Simply false, you're either retarded or being a troll
>>98920919It's not wokeness, they've always been woke. The OGL scandal got them too much competition in the "D&D but not" market. PF2e was designed to appeal to the critrole theatre kid crowd in terms of fluff and the "4e was good actually" crowd in terms of crunch, but now the former has Daggerheart and the latter has Draw Steel so neither has any need for a hybrid compromise.
