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="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4787175" data-attributes="member: 7635">And thus the cycle continues.Pathfinder is trying to have it both ways. It wants to revel in the vast array of 3e but it also wants to fix 3.5's problems. I think WotC's own v.3.5 changes should reveal how well that works. If you change the system enough so that the intrinsic problems are fixed (magic vs. nonmagic disparity, high level play, etc) then you have to sacrifice something in compatibility. If you desire to keep the game compatible, you must keep the framework the same or else everything fits awkward and compatibility isn't achieved (akin to running Tomb of Horrors unconverted in 3e, while that can be done in 2e due to the lack of significant change, it doens't work so well in a land of upwards ACs and skill DCs). Going back to 3.0->3.5, think of the changes made. There was spells rebalanced (harm, hold, haste), classes revised (bard, ranger), racial tweaks (half-elf, dwarf), expanded info (new feats/spells) and revised rules both good (DR) and bad (weapon size). In the end, 3.5 was little more than lipstick on a pig (some tweaks and cosmetic changes, but no radical overhauls) but yet its arrival stopped 3.0 production cold.  Few people brought Sword & Fist to 3.5 games, and people clamored until 4e's announcement for a 3.5 Updated Epic Handbook. 3.5 made all 3.0 material (functionally) obsolete. Some stuff could be run with tweaks (modules and monsters mostly) but PC crunch all had to be revised (Hello Complete Warrior, goodbye Sword & Fist) converted by hand, or discarded. Most of the DMs I knew did the first or the last. Many (myself included) didn't allow 3.0 crunch after 3.5's arrival. Even as a DM, I rarely used MM2 because of compatibility headaches. Pathfinder is the same, but worse. It will change the underpinnings of the game enough to make most crunch obsolete, and the nature of WotC's OGL means much of the crunch produced by them cannot be revised. It leaves two options. Convert or discard. That is the crux of the matter. Some DMs will be content to convert and capable of doing so. Some will do it well, others will do it poorly. I think many more will be content to discard. It further aggrivated by the notion there will be plenty of fresh 3.5-era crunch (Third Age, Dungeonaday) that isn't Pathfindered. (For good or ill, once 3.5 hit, all 3pp converted to 3.5 to jump on WotC's bandwagon. I don't foresee the same universal acceptance of Pathfinder, though I may be wrong). Thus, Pathfinder stops looking like a "revision of the 3.5 ruleset" and more like "a new RPG based on the 3.5 ruleset", really no different than Trued20 or Castles & Crusades. I think at that point Pathfinder should have been more honest with itself and really fixed the problems of 3e (something more akin to SAGA in looks) and ditch the notion of "backwards compatible" OR pretty much done a few nip/tucks on glaring 3.5 problems (polymorph, natural spell, sneak attack) and reprinted the SRD pretty much as is. (Which was the original goal: keeping the 3.5 rules in print).Because by being beholden to two masters (innovation & compatibility) you compromise the best of both.</blockquote>

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