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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 5267164" data-attributes="member: 467">I think you are underestimating the "shininess" effect, especially among GMs. While there are certainly those that have been playing with their same original 1E PHBs and DMGs, I think most GMs like having new stuff. They LIKE spending their money, because gaming -- specifically, D&D gaming -- is their hobby, and people spend money on their hobbies. This creates a powerful internal motivation to adopt the new edition of a favorite game. I love old school D&D, for example, but the retroclones have allowed me to spend money on shiny new D&D stuff, and this pleases me.But Pathfinder isn't a retro-clone. it is "current D&D" competing directly with official D&D, simply because it exists. Many of those people that don't like 4E may well have stuck with it if it was the only currently published and supported D&D, but because of Pathfinder it isn't. That means that the GM can get their "shiny" fix and not have to conform to a kind of D&D they don't like.I think it is important to differentiate Pathfinder from the FantasyCrafts and True20s and even Conans. While those are all great fantasy games based on the OGL, none of them are D&D in the way that Pathfinder is. D&D 3.x lasted nearly 10 years. That is a lot of time to build a dedicated following and create a whole generation of D&D players who, like the old school and my own "middle school", identify D&D as this particular kind of play and game -- plus convert and hold a bunch of earlier fans.Certainly more players moved on to 4E than switched to Pathfinder, but I don't think anyone is claiming that Pathfinder is bigger than 4E. Rather, I think the suggestion is that Pathfinder is *significant* in a way that no other OGL fantasy game is (I say it that way because I think M&M is a truly significant OGL game, but that's a different issue) and its success is going to impact 4E. Those pointing out the "grognardization" of Essentials are spot on.And here's one last anecdote: I run Pathfinder because the people I play with had absolutely no interest in 4E and preferred to stay with 3.5. I lobbied for Pathfinder because I wanted the shiny, as well as wanted a few "fixes" to 3.5. These guys have been playing D&D since 1981 or so. To them, Pathfinder *is* D&D now, and 4E might as well not exist at all. What's more is that we have introduced one new player via 3.5/Pathfinder in the 4E era, and one player and myself both have kids just about to make their first forays into gaming -- and we're not going to tell the kids that they can finally play Pathfinder with us grown ups; we're going to tell the kids they can finally play D&D with us and we're going to do so via Pathfinder.</blockquote>

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