NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 4758003" data-attributes="member: 23937">Part of it is the simple fact that we're busy busy busy, and have been for the entirety of Paizo's existence—producing monthly gaming products, be they magazines or books, is a non-stop series of looming deadlines, and as a result we simply don't have time to be completely familiar with every d20 open content development. We're familiar with a lot of it, but the example you mention about  the alternate NPC creation methods are unfamiliar to me.That said, part of the PF RPG's goal is to remain as close as possible to the baseline of the SRD. In so doing, we more or less build in support and ease of use for other modifications publishers have been doing without forcing those changes on customers and gamers who don't like those changes as much. By remaining close to the SRD's baseline, even if we don't directly build upon those alternate NPC creation rules, we can ensure that those rules work as well with PF RPG as they did with the 3.5 SRD.There seems to be an erroneous assumption going around in some circles that the PF RPG's goals are to vastly "improve" 3.5, when in fact its goals are more humble—we just want to keep in print and supported by stores the incarnation of the rules we prefer. We ARE making changes, to be sure, but those changes are mostly inspired by both our and 3.5 players' reactions not only to our public playtest, but to reactions to 3rd edition in general over the past several years. In a way, the entire lifecycle of 3.5 was a playtest as well.But we don't want to drift TOO far from 3.5. Tightening things up here and there, offering more options without taking options away, and rebuilding the ability generation and experience point award sections (both of which were NOT open content) were the main goals of the PF RPG.After all, I want to be able to continue using all the great open content we've been using from other companies (primarily Green Ronin and Necromancer Games), and if we change the game too much, that makes it difficult for us to do that!It won't be 100% compatible, no. Nor was 3.5 100% compatible with 3.0. But I can absolutely guarantee you this—the final PF RPG game (which is in its final few weeks of editing here at Paizo) will be closer to 3.5 than the beta was. The beta was about testing limits and new ideas. Some of those ideas worked well and were popular; they'll be staying. Some of them were not or didn't work well, and in those cases, we've learned that the rules in 3.5 were better and will be staying the same or very similar.</blockquote>

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