Is Pathfinder dying? No hate thread, honest question. There are fewer and fewer open groups in Roll20

Is Pathfinder dying? No hate thread, honest question. There are fewer and fewer open groups in Roll20.

No.

All Pathfinder games tend towards closed groups, because they've been playing these things forever and don't need new players. 5e is where new players go.

Yeah, it's dying. Paizo was only big because 4e sucked ass, and now that 5e is around to bring in the normies the only people sticking to PF are grognards.

You both can't be right.

I know this is an unpopular thing to say in the day of demographic shifts, but having zero growth means the community is dying due to sheer attrition.

I mean yeah, you'd be technically right, the same way any one of us personally is dying. But I still wouldn't yet use that word.

They actually can be, though. user 1 is right because all the new blood is going towards 5e while all the veterans stay in their insular ERP groups jacking it to their fetish campaigns. user 2 is right because Pathfinder really ONLY got popular to catch the disgruntled 3.5 players on the rebound, but now that 5e is the new girl on the block everyone who ISN'T part of the aforementioned insular groups is flocking to D&D once more.

Not to mention the quality of the average Paizo product is abysmal at this rate, charging $20-30 for some tiny "Companion" book that's already filled with the same fluff everyone's already read (except for the new stuff that's basically old fluff retconned to remove anything that might trigger their audience). And yet, they churn out splats and core books so often it's a nightmare for GMs, especially those doing Society. It's a bloated, festering system that is in drastic need of a 2.0 revision, but nah let's just copy and paste the rules to a SPAAACE setting to milk the sci-fi crowd.

It also implies there will be no recruiting ever.
Trust me, if one of those long-running groups loses a player, due to moving, or a change in job, or whatever, there's a really good chance they'll start poking around for a replacement.

If there are no new players that means the game can only ever lose players through people stopping or just straight up dying

therefore the game is dying

It's currently undergoing a downward trend. 5e is being more aggressively marketed and offers much lower barriers to entry which is stemming the tide of new players and making it easier for old players to jump ship. An increasingly large amount of resources are being put towards milking the PFS players for all their worth since the company has pretty much given up on making money from non-PFS players. Witness the "Occult" disaster where they tried to split a whole class across 3 hardbacks and 2 $20 pamphlets. And counting. Because they know non-PFS are just going to pirate it so they've got to extract as much from PFS players as possible to justify the line.

It's not un-fixable, but it's too big a bath for the current Paizo leadership. They could launch a new version of the rules updating the old corebook with the Unchained updates baked-in and use the Strategy Guide to eliminate some of the trap/tier issues, then go to smaller, more optional self-contained supplements and just try to me-too 5e, but they won't even if it could by them a few more years of viable TTRPG production.

What I actually think they will do is what they are doing: use a bunch of overpriced supplements to wring out the last drop of cash out of PFS before shutting the whole line down in favor of near-100% focus on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, which is actually a pretty spiffy product if you've got the cash to play it. I actually like the mobile version quite a bit.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that Starfinder is their attempt at a super-crunchy 5e and they just went with the "in SPAAAAACE" theme to further diferentiate themselves.

If only we were that lucky.

Perhaps Pathfinder itself isn't as big, but Starfinder has had a great reception (Among non Veeky Forums denizens of course as this board seems to be terminally asshurt when the topic of Paizo is brougthup). Paizo isn't going anywhere.

I had a friend that wanted to play table top, 4th edition was out I didn't feel like getting GURPS out and he wanted to do fantasy so I went with Pathfinder. I haven't had an issue with it, pirated to distribute info to players bought books for myself. House ruled here and there. Why is there so much asshurt?

I think you're vastly overestimating Paizo. Doing any of that, changing their direction and business plan, would require admitting they were wrong or that they made poor decisions.

This is the company that refuses to admit that caster supremacy exists.

They're going to run this shit into the ground and die penniless.

>charging $20-30
...who pays for Paizo, though? The books are readily available, and even if you're above piracy, it's all on Pfsrd and Nethys.

>This is the company that refuses to admit that caster supremacy exists.
Starfinder disagrees. Starfinder has no full casters and all casters are spontaneous.

Too bad it's SJW-tier trash that they've said they're not going to support as much as Pathfinder and basically only release Adventure Paths specific to their game world, instead of generalized splats, so there'll be little content, slow expansion, and you'll be stuck with the worst part of Paizo - shit worldbuilding of a kitchen-sink setting with zero historicity and verisimilitude.

Even the iconics could be straightmout of Tumblr; a Mary Sue bisexual race-mixed powergurl with colored hair that once dated a literal god, a literally genderless asexual android who has the fact that it has no gender called out for seemingly no reason in it's description, a super-buff warrior woman from a lizard race that of course lacks sexual dimorphism, and Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy: Pyromaniac Ratfolk Bogaloo.

Not really, but Veeky Forums will do everything in it's power to make you believe that it is.

>Tumblr ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEEL
>asexual genderless toaster with persecution complex
>buff strong-womyn body-builder fat acceptance warrior can-do matriarch
>Guardians of the Galaxy So Hot Marvel XD
Jesus Christ, it's like Pandering: The Game.
>

This is the company that banned people from playtesting and their forums for pointing it out.

Name one game that isn't pandering currently please.

Oh, you can't.

PFS players.

Song of Swords. Modiphius's lines.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition.

>Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition.
>currently

Pointing what out?

Yes, currently. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition didn't suddenly disappear just because production ceased.

That doesn't mean it's a current game you fuckwit.

It's certainly not pandering to tards like you :^)

Keep moving the goalposts, mang. You're just looking to be really offended about them SJWs and /pol/acks and whatever else are out there, paranoid that they're going to come in to take your hobby away from you - but don't you worry, your fears are unfounded.

It'll be okay.

>I don't understand what words mean
>but it's the other guy who's retarded

Of course it's a current game. I know tons of current Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay games.

Who the fuck plays PFS and why?

>This is the company that banned people from playtesting
TSR?

There's a difference between the blatantly token amount of pandering done by, say, 5e to the gay pride rally in San Francisco that is Pathfinder.

Paizo started pandering to those people HARD in 2012 and it's been killing them ever since. Frankly, I hope they die penniless in some dingy back alley, alone and scared.

I get a kick out of this.

On one hand, I've heard lots of bitching on this forum that some Pathfinder is everything D&D without a context. Which is a good thing, here's your toys, go use your imagination for the rest.

The other hand is bitching about lore that's never put forth outside of PFS stuff anyway.

>Oh no, my fragile imagination is ruined because reasons.

Which is it?

I think it's some weird-ass sunk cost fallacy where the more someone has spent on PFS the more sure they are that the next thing they buy/participate in is what's going to fix it, but then when they buy/do whatever and it doesn't that just means they're more desperate for the next thing.

I'm relatively new to rpgs compared to most here (played in 2 campaigns over a span of about 1.5 years) but those 2 and the odd number of ones I've sat in on with friends have all been custom worlds. I've never known what it's like to play the standard setting for pathfinder or D&D and I don't really want to at this point. I like being given the assets and told to run free. With standard settings you don't get moments where a guy willingly has his arms chopped off to be replaced with metal-organic ones by a magic forge only to have them turn normal and then whole person gets transformed into a spider, die, revive then end up as a psuedodragon all from drinking from a magic fountain in an ancient library tower.

At least that's what I think. In any case I feel content like classes, monsters/creatures, items should be focused more than their own world to let plays have more to use on their own instead of the same thing as others.

Pathfinder will die with the baby boomers.

I'd say it's winding down a bit, yes. I think that some posters up above has the right of it when they said it's stagnating: PF isn't getting the huge influx of players it was getting during 4e, and by it's nature the system is hard to get into for an entire group of newbies. You play PF if you like the complex character building aspect of it, but it's practically impossible to get into it if there isn't at least someone else in your group to point you in the right directions and hold your hand a bit: New Player Neville can look over the 5e classes and see which he likes, but he probably isn't going to be able to do that for the 80+ PF classes if you're using 3rd party (and you really should) without falling into trap options.

About that, while 3rd party content is still going strong and is on average better than Paizo if you keep to big Third Party publishers, Paizo core books have been getting worse since the Advanced Class Guide, that was a complete disaster. When I still followed the Player Companion line each month, it was much better than their core stuff, mostly thanks to the fact that it mostly uses freelancers for content. From my experience, that has contributed to a lot of people leaving/losing interest, accelerating player attrition. The rampant soapboxing also didn't help: while not really monstrously in your face, it's so pervasive that it makes you groan continuously as you read the content. A bit of a shame, considering that their APs are still reasonably good, with some recent homeruns in stuff like Iron Gods; in other cases, pandering is just all there is (See Crystal Frasier vs Amber Scott).

Starfinder is definitely their attempt to differentiate and to test a "PF 2.0", but I'm cautiously unoptimistic on how that will go: while I trust Seitfer and Mcfarland, Bhulman is still the lead designer, and Wesley Schneider leaving doesn't assuage my fears that much. We'll see how it goes, but I probably see Paizo carving their niche and staying in it.