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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9776515" data-attributes="member: 907">You sort of need to have something along those lines to discourage excessive long resting (as discussed in another recent thread).Pathfinder can really mean two things, with both being created in response to things happening at Wizards.First, there was the Pathfinder Adventure Path. This was created because Paizo had been doing the Dragon and Dungeon magazines under a license from Wizards of the Coast, and Wizards decided to bring those in-house in preparation for 4e. But without those there pretty much wasn't a Paizo, so they decided to gamble on monthly adventures with a chunk of non-adventure material in them as well. This worked out pretty well for them, because they could use their subscription mailing list to advertise them, and because they owed people money for pre-paid subscriptions where they could ask "Do you want your money back or do you want these new adventures we're doing?" A lot of people took them up on that and then kept going because they liked the adventure path thing.Second, there was the Pathfinder RPG. This was created because 3.5e was leaving the market, and making adventures for a system that was no longer for sale was thought not to be a good long-term idea. This left Paizo with two options: make adventures for 4e, or make their own 3.5e variant. They decided against 4e for two reasons: the first being that the original GSL was incredibly restrictive in what you could do under it, and also toxic in various ways (IIRC, one of the original terms was that you could no longer do material under the OGL), and the other being that what they had heard of 4e simply didn't appeal to the folks at Paizo. The latter was confirmed when Jason Buhlman went to a con to playtest 4e. So PFRPG wasn't created because a lot of people preferred 3.5e to 4e. It was created specifically because the people at Paizo did. It became successful because a lot of people agreed with them.As for Draw Steel, I wouldn't call it a direct descendant of 4e (unlike 13th age which is like if 3e and 4e had a baby and then that baby grew up and went to college and came back with blue hair and a bunch of new and strange ideas). There's very little of 4e's mechanics in Draw Steel – the only thing that's sort of close is Recoveries, and that's not really a 4e innovation (it goes back at least to Earthdawn in the early 90s). Draw Steel is more like if someone who was very enthusiastic told someone else about 4e, with a focus on the good ideas rather than the wonky math, and then that person went off to build their own game that's like what they heard of 4e. It's sort of 4e-shaped, but completely different under the hood.</blockquote>

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