Our path through Pathfinder winds through Strategicon
Ramen Sandwich Press' frustrating, but hopeful journey with Pathfinder FRPG, part II
[My rant about Ramen Sandwich Press’ frustrating relationship with the Pathfinder market continues. It began here.]
Perhaps we made a mistake in that we never did much research into the actual size of the audience for Pathfinder and the consequent demand for third-party products. From the start, Found by the Way did not sell nearly as well as Places by the Way. Publishing for Pathfinder grew our Kickstarter following, but only a little. When we launched The Book of Chance Meetings, our book on random wilderness encounters for D&D 5E, we snagged almost 400 backers. It seemed that the concept of a deep-dive into random wilderness encounters met a need, or at least a want. So we went ahead with a Kickstarter campaign for Book of Hidden Paths — a similar book using the Pathfinder 2E Bestiaries, which offer much more open-license content than the D&D SRD. It drew barely 100 backers, and as I pointed out at the time, it would not have funded at all if we hadn’t offered some extra copies of Book of Chance Meetings as a reward, targeting laggards who had missed it the first time around. In other words, a campaign for a Pathfinder book would have failed to fund if not for a handful of D&D fans plumping for a D&D book that just happened to be piled at a corner of the table. One of our sympathetic backers offered the opinion that a culture of supporting third-party publishers had not yet taken root within the Pathfinder 2E community. Maybe that was true; maybe that was just a polite way of stating that the community just isn’t big enough or enthusiastic enough to support third-party publishers. Post-Kickstarter sales of Book of Hidden Paths lagged Book of Chance Meetings’ sales, and lagged badly.
At that point, the conclusion that Pathfinder was not worth our trouble seemed unavoidable. We published Places by the Way #11 and #12 last year, but we didn’t bother with Found by the Way equivalents.
And then Wizards of the Coast pointed a shotgun squarely at its own foot and initiated the Great OGL Crisis of 2022. I’m sure we all know RPG enthusiasts who gave alternatives to D&D a fresh look based on sheer outrage at WotC’s incomprehensibly shoddy treatment of its third-party publishers, and that so many of them took up Pathfinder that Paizo experienced a run on the 2E core books. Samuel Johnson is said to have said that marrying a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience; but we would’t have gone into game publishing if we weren’t suckers for hope. We put Found by the Way #11 and #12 up on Kickstarter. They did better than I expected. Ramen Sandwich Press decided to re-commit to Pathfinder.
Our Pathfinder-compatible sales experienced a brief surge this winter — and then promptly returned to the oblivion in which they had languished until late last year. You could argue with justification that of course they did, because the audience for Pathfinder remains much smaller than the audience for D&D, WotC’s propensity for scoring own-goals notwithstanding. After GenCon 2023, roguecaliber posted on Twitter a table breaking down this year’s RPG event ticket sales by rules system:
Lots of D&D, not nearly as much Pathfinder. Even taking into account that this does not break down Dungeons & Dragons by edition played, and that it surveys nothing more than the official events that took place at GenCon, it does suggest that you’re selling to a larger and more enthusiastic audience if you place your bet on D&D 5E.
Even so, there were certainly Pathfinder players present at Gamex in May and Gateway Con last weekend. The Los Angeles chapter of the Pathfinder Society reserved an impressive block of conference space for their events at both conventions. And yet, at both, I barely sold any copies of Found by the Way or Book of Hidden Paths. Sold plenty of D&D books, barely any Pathfinder books. There were plenty of Pathfinder Society people wandering the dealers room, at least on Saturday — I could tell by their purple uniform t-shirts; not a one of them so much as stopped by the Ramen Sandwich Press table for a look.
If Paizo didn’t want to coax third-party publishers into supporting Pathfinder, they would not have bothered publishing it under an open license. But in the end, their players have to support those third-party publishers (like Ramen Sandwich Press) or else it makes no sense for us to put in the effort. I left Gateway reflecting, with some discouragement and a bit of disgust, that since I started hand-selling at Strategicon events at Orccon 2020, we have had to re-order Places by the Way modules several times; but we have never had to order more copies of Found by the Way. We have a couple of boxes full of unsold Book of Hidden Paths; we’re starting run out of Book of Chance Meetings.
But then, after I left the show, I checked our DriveThru RPG account. All of our sales from the first four days of September have been Pathfinder books. So where do we go from here with this plucky fantasy RPG system that refuses to be a mere also-ran? For now, at least, hope continues to triumph over experience.