aye
they see the writing on the wall, and it does not bode well for 4e. I like 4e, but LOVE PF. I mean, the archetypes, the rebalancing, the skill system, the combat maneuver system, it feels like you're not railroaded.
4e might be easier for DMs to roll out and execute a combat encounter, but from the 5-6 DMs I've played with, 4 were just playing the modules, which we all agreed were mostly of terrible quality and had no contiguity (an artefact of the system or a result of just poor writing...who can tell?), and the other two, who tried and gave up to make a believable game setting, found themselves frustrated with the combat-centricity of it, and how players would get bored with their characters because outside of combat, they were generally rather dull in comparison. Just looking at the massive character sheets in 4e is enough. How much space is devoted to skills in either one? I consider the fact that you're better off with custom character sheet templates for each class a feature, not a bug, not to mention the fact that everyone who made their own characters in 4e, from scratch, by hand, had tons of misc modifiers they weren't adding in right, and having to up all your stats every two levels, changing your powers a lot means wasting tons of ink. I can go through many levels in a PF game with the same sheet. Try that, and weep.
But, I'll say this : 4e did a number of things well : ranger's twin strike, (maybe it should have been -2, -2, to keep it slightly balanced), or iron armbands could have benefitted a sword and board fighter with +2 dmg with his sword AND +2 AC, or a two-handed fighter/barb/pally +4 to damage because he's using both hands. The problem with all those things is that the community was not allowed to fix the game. The second they went to online builder, they should have allowed community-driven houserules, such as free expertise (or none), fixing broken items, boosting poor items, purging others, pumping up lame powers or toning down OP ones. This could all have been done with a few tweaks and voila, shareable centralised house rules which would have allowed the system the thrive. Right now, it's dead. Check the char op boards, that's where the life of a system lies. It's almost completely dead there. And why? Why could they just not pump out more epic adventures while they wait, or hire some third parties to do it? Easy money.
I will pay for, and play DDN, but I would have loved to been able to modify 4e to be more realistic, e.g. you have 4 at-wills, choices of encounter powers at each level to use each encounter depending on the situation, fixed items, and a complete revamp of the skill system, which to this day, aside from rituals, is a complete flop. Rituals suck so bad in 4e, people rarely take them. And when they do, they just break the silly railroaded adventure structure just the same as any vancian wizard could do in earlier games.
