3.5e/Pathfinder fans tell me what you think about essentials

[Windjammer]

3.5e/Pathfinder fans do you like essentials?
If not why is that?

Do you still prefer 3.5/Pathfinder?
If so, why?

The moment Essentials hit the shelves, I put my Pathfinder campaign on hold. We sold off our books, scraped our characters, and immediately started a new campaign. We never looked back, we've been truly blessed since, and here's why. This is our story, and may it be repeated by others until the end of times.

First of all, the Essentials books are beautiful. Glossy covers, full scale hardcovers, and tons of money spent on the art budget alone... These books are not just awesome games, they are any bibliophile's wet dream. I'm ashamed I ever settled for those flimsy things Paizo calls 'books' - sheesh.

Next, what we missed about 4th edition when it came out was the lack of customization - the variability of the classes, and the ton of support for all the classes. Where was my half-droid/drow ranger 5/arcane archer 2/hierophant 7? Conversion impossible? You gotta be kidding! Well, thankfully and truly, Essentials really freed up 4E's classes of yesteryear. No more locked class progression! Tons of support books!! Brilliant online-support it. You name it, WotC put all its heart and energy behind the new wave. They even released a whole book on magic items - a blessing hitherto withheld to previous editions - right out of the gate, this making it ever easier to outfit the new classes. Essentials seemed like 4E, except done right!

Next up was DM'ing support. Building your own stuff and customizing one's monsters, now here's something we never did in 3E. That 4E had rules for that seriously miffed us. Glad to see it gone, just like 3E!

And finally, to top it all off, adventure support. When 4E was released, WotC put out this H-P-E series which spanned all 30 levels of play. Ridiculous - who wants to play full campaigns?!? The whole point with 3E was that it was unplayable beyond level 10, so we rebooted our campaigns regularly, often by level 5 (if not earlier). And then Essentials came out, and it was like the guys at WotC finally listened to people like us! Who'd want to play a Kingmaker or a Carrion Crown (I'm ashamed to even mention these amateurish efforts) when you can play six heroic tier adventures, choose among three heroic tier setting expansions, and pick heroic tier monsters from two splats - and enjoy many, many more heroic tier products yet to come?

From top to bottom, start to finish, Essentials hauled in the masses, converted the defected, and made 4E the stunning success it is today. And best of all - it even feels more like 3E than 3E itself!

 

[Goblyn]

Essentials sounded good at the time, but it just came too late. Pathfinder happened and our group never looked back. Essentials just never got a chance.

If it's that much different from the first 4e, it makes me wonder if the 4e most play and advocate now is entirely different from the 4e that we tried when it first came out.

Does that make sense?

Edit: I realized that I never answered your question.

Yes, we still love pathfinder; but this thread has put in me the seed of suspicion that the 4e that exists now is not the game that many of my ilk railed against. Interesting.

 

[Shemeska]

About the same as 4.0 really, which is to say I don't particularly care for it, nor do I hate the mechanics. Honestly it was the massive flavor changes, reuse of monster names for different creatures, initial marketing language, and the retcons to settings that turned me off, rather than any changes to the mechanical structure of the game.

I'd play a game using 4.0 or 4eE rules if it was run for instance in pre-4e FR, or any sort of homebrew if it did away with some of the wierder flavor decisions from 4e PoL (random removal of some alignments, removal of half the outsiders and use of their names for different creatures, loss of diversity in tiefling appearance, etc).

 

[Ulrick]

As a 3.5e fan, I do not like Essentials. Why? Here's my logic:

I do not like 4e. Essentials is part of 4e. Therefore, I do not like Essentials.

Sure, I've flipped through the books, just to see what the big deal was. But in the end it didn't intice me back into 4e.

I've reconciled with the fact that I will not be brought back into the fold and that 4e changed/fractured the hobby into something I don't quite understand. I hated what 4e did to my gaming group and gaming club. Everybody either thought 4e was crap from the get-go, or like me, liked 4e until we played it a few times. It brought back similar memories of Magic: The Gathering breaking apart RPG groups in the 1990s.

I don't like it, wished it didn't happen, but there it is.

I do prefer 3.5e, because it remains more like "D&D" for me than whatever 4e is. I haven't played Pathfinder though.

But after I'm done running my current 3.5e campaign, I'm probably going to take break from RPGing for awhile. If or when I come back, I'll probably run either an AD&D game or a retroclone.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

3.5e/Pathfinder fans do you like essentials?
If not why is that?

Do you still prefer 3.5/Pathfinder?
If so, why?

This question ideally would make sense if posed towards people who are playing BOTH 4E and Pathfinder. I'm pretty much in the Pathfinder camp and dont / won't play 4E. Tried it and didn't much care for it.

So, Essentials is STILL 4E.
Not a huge fan of 4E.
Hence not a fan of Essentials.

Simple Really.

 

[Ahnehnois]

From what I know of essentials, it fixes none of the major problems of 4e. Or of 3e. Same as others have said.

What's more, it strikes me as a terrible business decision. The 4e designers insisted that there would be no 4.5, so they did essentials instead. Seems like a pretty blatant money grab.

As to why I still prefer 3.X, it has a tremendously flexible rules skeleton that lets me do what I want, and a mountain of high-quality products behind it that I can cherry-pick from. And I understand it and have house rules for it. To get me off 3.X, you'd have to release a system that fixed its major problems (which PF largely ignored) and allows me to run a game in any style I want and costs next to nothing. Unlikely.

 

[Sammael]

Essentials is the cleaner, more streamlined 4E that removes some of 4E's WTF moments and brings back some genuine D&D flavor to the table.

I still wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. But I think Essentials books are far better products than previous 4E books.

 

[billd91]

Essentials has some potential, but still doesn't have the same feel I'm looking for in my D&D. Pathfinder comes much closer to what I want, so there really isn't much a 4e-based game can do to woo me away.

 

[Oryan77]

Wait a second. Let me get this straight. There's a 4e?

 

[RangerWickett]

Wait a second. Let me get this straight. There's a 4e?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_DPrSEOEo]Dumb and Dumber - We Landed on the Moon! - YouTube[/ame]