Tag Archives: Pathfinder

Breaking Down Roll20’s Orr Group Industry Report for Q1 of 2015

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Orr Group Industry Report Q1 2015 Summary

The following article was originally posted by the author on The Mad Adventurers Society, and is reprinted here with permission. You can find the original here.

The Orr Group, the analytics arm of popular virtual tabletop app Roll20, has released its Industry Report for the first quarter of 2015. This is the third installment of the report, and as we’ve previously discussed, this is still a very noisy set of data. Don’t put much faith into the numbers, but the directional data is useful for showing trends.

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I Read Some Things: Week of February 9th, 2015

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

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I Read Some Things: Week of January 26th, 2015

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

Enjoy the Super Bowl.

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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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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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I Read Some Things: Week of January 5, 2015

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

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