WotC president Greg Leeds and I!!!

[Halivar]

Ha, you really think that what determines whether something is competition or not is one side "explicitly saying" that they have a problem with the other side?? Funny...

It doesn't matter if the WotC staff and the Paizo staff have daily group hugs, picnics in the sunshine every weekend and give each other "cause it's Monday" gifts... WotC made Paizo into competition, and they are both in fact now competition to each other. Whether one has an explicit problem with the other has nothing to do with anything.

Nobody said they weren't competing. WotC has merely said it welcomes the competition, and thinks rather highly of it.

 

[concerro]

My 4E PHB has an index... and I almost never use it since everything is organized into a few select pages that I have ever needed to look anything up (page 277 anyone?)

My 4E DMG has an index... the only other book where I might need to go look something up.

Everything else I don't really understand the need for an index (as far as my 4E books go). Things are organized either by class or alphabetically. I don't really need indexes when it's organized like that. I really don't have much trouble looking anything up I need.

3E's books are not always so neat, and I can't comment on 4th since the only book I now own is the PHB. I just want the issue corrected next time around.

 

[Festivus]

3E's books are not always so neat, and I can't comment on 4th since the only book I now own is the PHB. I just want the issue corrected next time around.

Sorry, I missed you were referring to 3e books. When playing 3.5 I usually look things up on d20srd.org rather than flip through books.

 

[concerro]

Sorry, I missed you were referring to 3e books. When playing 3.5 I usually look things up on d20srd.org rather than flip through books.

Sometimes the SRD is incomplete, and it only has core. Adventures/Campaigns should also have indexes. The Shackled City book, even though I know it was Paizo definitely could have used an index for finding NPC's.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

WotC made Paizo into competition

That's highly debatable. How did they make Paizo into competition? By making a 4e of the game? Certainly things were done wrong. For instance, the OGL for 4e should have been done sooner.

However, I was at DDXP running preview events of 4e. I managed to listen into a conversation with Jason Buhman. Even while he was at the event having played 4e for maybe 8 hours or something he was already complaining to people about how it was a horrible game and how he planned on going back to the office to recommend to everyone there who hadn't yet played it that they should not support it at all.

Plus in his blog post later, he talked about it as well. He had been working on an informal 4e out of his house rules for the last 6 months to a year. He expected 4e to be very close to his house rules, figuring that if he saw the problems with 3e, obviously WOTC had and they would correct the exact same thing.

The problem is, I've played a bunch of Jason's adventures for Living Greyhawk. He pretty much rejoiced in the imbalance in the 3e rules. All of his adventures abused corner rules, templates, overpowered monsters, optimal combinations of monsters, and death traps with nearly no way to detect them.

When he was DMing games at a convention I was at in Australia, he was tallying a death count of how many PCs he killed running his adventure. The other DMs added their names to the list as sort of a competition. Which I remember was easily won by Jason. He had 15 or something. The next closest DM had 5.

He strikes me as exactly the sort of person who would look at 4e and think that it was way too tame due to the lack of save or dies or wild combinations of unexpected templates. I think it was inevitable that he wouldn't like it. And Paizo rather relied on him to make their decision on what direction to go in.

Certainly WOTC had the choice to release a 4e that was horribly broken like Pathfinder is. But I don't think that was a valid option.

 

[JohnRTroy]

He strikes me as exactly the sort of person who would look at 4e and think that it was way too tame due to the lack of save or dies or wild combinations of unexpected templates. I think it was inevitable that he wouldn't like it. And Paizo rather relied on him to make their decision on what direction to go in.

Certainly WOTC had the choice to release a 4e that was horribly broken like Pathfinder is. But I don't think that was a valid option.

It's pretty funny how D&D was "broken" all this time until 4e came along. What some people call broken other people actually call messing with traditional archetypes and situations.

I think Pathfinder will do well.

 

[JohnRTroy]

The term Githyanki comes from a George RR Martin novel, and the githyanki/illithid relationship from a Niven novel. The culture of the Drow is Melnibone, plus a spider motif. Mind flayers were inspired by the cover of a Brian Lumley novel. Modrons are kind of unique, but definitely draw on Flatland, and remind me a lot of the beings in The Mote In God's Eye, who are also caste-driven.

Kender are a Dragonlance-specific phenomenon.

I'll give you the beholder.

It doesn't matter in the eyes of the law and literature yet. Ultimately, following your standards, there are only 7 plots and no real true ideas.

Specific expressions are protected IP. You can have a generic cape and flying superhero but there's only one Superman, for instance. The examples I provide above are those specific archetypical expressions that inspired the future generations, thus, WoTC is right to say those things are protected.