Blue_Lion wrote:Colonel_Tetsuya wrote:Nekira Sudacne wrote:n short, a third edition may make mechanics look pretty, but it has a very high chance of killing the company outright.
Or it can continue to die slowly and be gone in the next 5-10 years anyway.
Too many people assume a third edition would invalidate older books. It doesn't have to, plain and simple. About 10 pages of material should be able to explain the changes between old and new and offer rules for converting old material -
not that this should be that necessary anyway. I dont know that anyone is looking to scrap core mechanics, simply re-edit and re-write what currently exists into a flow that actually allows the rules to function and for new players to easily understand them. That in and of itself would be a monumental undertaking. On top of that, the literally hundreds of rules (i ran into a special rule in one of the SoT books for penalties for a deaths-head transport if it gets into weather trouble, etc that are printed nowhere else) that are printed elsewhere need to be examined and either codified into the core mechanics or thrown out.
New rules should only appear in sourcebooks when absolutely necessary, and currently they are thrown in willy-nilly to cover situations already covered by the core rules in a lot of cases. There are so many "special exception" rules in this system that my eyes threaten to bleed sometimes.
Back to my point, though:
Old books dont need to be invalidated. Honestly, too many of the books have new game mechanics that dont need them (I dont necessarily think of new magic types as new game mechanics - they function like other spells, and therefore are not a new *mechanic*).
Going forward from any new edition, better editing control should ensure that new rules aren't printed willy-nilly and if they are included in a lot of sourcebooks, they should also be added to the core rules via addendums (can be done electronically for virtually no cost).
Bottom line is, Palladium can die slowly if nothing changes, or (potentially) die quickly, but at the same time (potentially) finally fix their tarnished reputation as being a broken and unwieldy system and attract new blood. Witout new blood, the company is doomed in the medium-to-long-term anyway. I live in Michigan, the "homeland" of PB - and you cannot buy PB on shelves here except at maybe... four or five places that im aware of. Out of a group of almost 300 dedicated role-players that im part of (a LARPing group that also exhaustively tabletops) less than a dozen of us have ever even played a Palladium product and maybe half a dozen actively want to (including me).
Something has to give. I dont want to see Palladium die. They were my second RPG ever (after red-box D&D) via Heroes Unlimited/TMNT and i think the settings and intellectual property they produce are top-notch. But without some kind of overhaul or working hard to land a new license that will attract a ton of players (and keep them, which will mean an overhaul of the mechanics) the company is dying, slowly but surely.
Wait you know the future. You assume the company is dieing is that based on how you feel or have you been comparing how they are doing in sales compaired to how the market as a whole is doing in sales. You make it sound like no one new is buying the books.
From what I have seen PB lines are still one of the main lines that game stores support. 1 store 10 min from my house carries only about 8 companies games in stock one of them is PB. The stoped carring shadow run partaly because it was starting to focus on direct digtial formant sales for lines of suplements cutting off the stores abilty to carry the suplement. The company stoped supporting the game stores so the store stoped supported the company even stoped the weekly shadow run mission games.
I have also interduced new players to the system that started out in 3.5 and pathfinder games and it is one of the favorite games they have, one of 3 games they still play. So while I agree the system does have problems I do not think it will necary die in 5-10 years in fact it recently recovered from a major blow to its bottom line.
To me it is not that the system does not work but that it needs to be orginized better so that it is easier to look up and find the material that you need, and fallow the rules easier. (I have on a personal project tried gathering the rules or just lining them up in the right order the few poeple I have shown what I did so far seam to think it did clean them up a little.)
In point of fact, since i work with wholesalers and retailers of gaming products because of the work i do with various area conventions, yeah, i do have some idea of how Palladium's sales are doing. Hard numbers? No, because im not part of those companies, but when the woman who does tabletop gaming for two of the conventions i'm involved in (and which Palladium has a booth at at least one of them) who is herself an owner of two local gaming stores with her husband wont carry the product because it sits on their shelves for month (and keep in mind, that is here in PB's backyard in Michigan) if it sells at all.
The wholesaler who supplies her (with PB material) is the only one in the midwest still carrying PB product.
The company is (straight from Kevin) not making enough money to even pay the employees enough that they dont have to do other work.
I'm not denigrating PB. Kevin is a good writer. The company had a hard time - no joke. But it isn't JUST the malfeasance that cost the company so heavily - readership/sales were down even then, and that was the better part of a
decade ago.
Kickstarters just to get a book published. That's not a good sign.
As much as i detest the d20 system (unbalanced doesn't begin to describe it) it has the benefit of being stone-simple to learn. The same cannot be said of Palladium, and what Palladium needs is an influx of new players. You cant tell me that there arent people out there who will spend a lot of money on the hobby; one of my good friends, who is not exactly rolling in the dough, has probably 1,000$ worth of Pathfinder books. He games three times a week, with three different groups. On top of that, probably half of that is purely digital sales which that company gets to keep FAR more of the money.
Why isn't Palladium making that money? Bad rep. Clunky system. Tons of barriers to entry, including an entrenched and unfriendly fandom, as perceived by the outside world.
It isn't, by any means, JUST the system (though if you go back and read my post, im not calling for a total rewrite), but it certainly is a big factor. I busted out all my Rifts books a few weeks ago, and my basement apartment tennant, while he was upstairs chatting, noticed them. He's a 25 year old gamer, who has been gaming since he was 14. He's lived in Michigan his entire life.
He had never even heard of Palladium Books. He was intrigued, and i loaned him one of the several copies of the RMB i have. A couple of days later he came back to me with "man the setting looks awesome and fun but these rules are terrible."
That is what is wrong right now. People like him are who Palladium needs to be courting - disposable income and free time, loves gaming - how is it even possible that this guy who lives in Michigan, PB's "hometown" as it were, and who has gamed fairly obsessively (goes out to various game shops to partake in boardgames, MTG, Warhammer 40k, and tabletop RPGs several nights a week)
has never even heard of the company?!That is what Palladium is fighting. The industry is changing, and Palladium is barely treading water. Adapt or die, and right now, Palladium's not adapting too well.
Im loving the Foes list; it's the only thing keeping me from tearing out my eyes from the dumb.
do you even comprehend how much time is involved in the proposed project?