[url=http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/31250/icv2-interview-paizo-publisher-erik-mona wrote:ICV2 INTERVIEW: PAIZO PUBLISHER ERIK MONA[/url]]
Are you seeing any impact from the D&D [5e] launch last year?
Not really. What I’ve been hearing anecdotally from a lot of the retailers, especially at some of the presentations that we’ve done here, is that it seems to kind of invigorated the category.
I’m sure that some people who used to play Pathfinder are now playing 5th Edition but we’ve been picking up new people as well so we’re not seeing deleterious drops in our sales.
We’re also doing in April a book called Pathfinder Unchained, which is sort of the opposite of that. It’s a treasure trove of optional rules
letting the Pathfinder RPG design team loose to do whatever they want, damn the consequences. Here’s an alternate version of combat; here’s a different way to increase your character’s level, really a lot of experimental stuff that players can pick and choose what they want to implement. So maybe you like Pathfinder but you feel it takes too long to make encounters or make monsters, there’s a streamlined version of how to do that in this book.
There’s also revisions on four classes so there’s a revised rogue, revised monk, and a revised barbarian. Now that we’ve done almost 30 classes and we’ve got several years behind us and people think in retrospect, maybe the rogue and the monk are not powerful enough vs. some of the stuff that’s come since, so we’ve retuned those classes and given people an optional version if that’s a concern of theirs. Also the summoner, which is a class that we put out in the Advanced Player’s Guide, very, very powerful class, perhaps even unintentionally so, this is a new version of that brings its power in line with everything else.
In late July/August is Occult Adventures and that’s the big, major Pathfinder release for this year. It’s our answer to Psionics. It’s a lot of mental magic, a lot of spirits, a lot of ghosts, forbidden knowledge, all that kind of stuff.
Traditionally in fantasy roleplaying psionics and psychic magic has been sort of bolted onto a whole other rule system you have to learn on top of the rule system. That’s always been the way with D&D for example. With Occult Adventures, we’re taking the way that spells work in Pathfinder, the rules people already know, and mapping the conceptual stuff like psychic combat on the astral plane or astral projection and things like that onto the existing spell structure. One of the things that’s cool about that is while we’re still using the framework of how spellcasting works in Pathfinder, we’re doing some really interesting and unique mechanical things with these classes.
With the six classes that we’re introducing in Occult Adventures they are still six legitimately, totally new things, they are not revisions of anything. They are full on new frontier game design and some conceptual things that we’ve never done in the game. We’ve never had a psychic in the game, for example. We’ve never had a character who can summon spirits and have the spirits inhabit their body and gain powers from them like the medium can do. So there’s the medium, there’s the mesmerist, who’s sort of a reverse bard. The bard buffs up his party and the mesmerist de-buffs his enemies, who is about mind control and things like that. We’ve got the kineticist who choses an energy type and does not have spells but can manipulate that energy in terms of shapes and do different things with it. That’s a totally different style of magic than we’ve ever done in Pathfinder before.