D&D 4E What was Paizo thinking? 3.75 the 4E clone?

[HarbingerX]

I can count the number of people Paizo has lost that I have observed on one hand. (Although, if I put some effort into it, perhaps two!)

I'm three. I've decided that I'm going to move forward to 4e and just cancelled my Pathfinder subscription. While I could have used fan conversions, I'd rather get product for the edition I'm using. Hopefully Necromancer Games' Adventure Paths will be up to the same quality.

 

[Gundark]

Players will play whatever the hell the DM will DM. I find it very, very hard to believe a DM would say "I wanna run a game of Shadowrun" and the players will say "y'know, I'll pass". Because when it's all said and done, it's the actual getting together with friends that is the draw of RPGs, not the system. Friends will get together to play D&D, Pathfinder, Monopoly, Tunnels & Trolls, Macho Women with Guns, Shadowrun, Vampire, etc.

Wow I wish I had your group...my group is better than they used to be....but system matters very VERY much to them

 

[Nikosandros]

I'm three. I've decided that I'm going to move forward to 4e and just cancelled my Pathfinder subscription. While I could have used fan conversions, I'd rather get product for the edition I'm using. Hopefully Necromancer Games' Adventure Paths will be up to the same quality.

I don't understand people who are canceling Pathfinder subscription after the news.

Before the announcement it was already known that Paizo wouldn't have been able to put out 4e material before GenCon...

 

[WayneLigon]

So, how is the stuff in the Paizo Pathfinder RPG any different from, say, some of the latter WoTC material? There is 'powercreep' in both, as there always will be; there is no getting around that without simply reframing the same five or six feats with different wording.

It certainly looks like their goal is 'compatible enough'. You must expect them to put their own non-fluff spin on it, though. It's much more compatable than, say, Arcana Unearthed or several other d20 settings/rules.

 

[WayneLigon]

double post from board lagginess.

 

[Zil]

4) You instead choose to build your own NON COMPATIBLE version of D&D.​

Non-compatible? Non-compatible with what? 4.0? Or 3.5? I thought Paizo clearly stated that they aimed to be backwards compatible with 3.5? It's 4.0 that is non-compatible with anything else (that is what I've been hearing from WoTC with no conversion rules from previous versions). At least with what Paizo is proposing, I'll be able to continue to use my existing library of third edition books.

I really have not liked much that I've seen or read on 4E so far and this gives me some additional options for dealing with some of the flaws in 3.0/3.5. It also helps that they Paizo did such a good job with the first Pathfinder series. I've been enjoying that adventure path more than anything I've picked up from WoTC lately.

Even if I decide in the end not to move to Paizo's 3.75 (Pathfinder) OGL ruleset, I suspect it will be easier to reverse engineer their adventures back to 3.5 than it will be to reverse engineer a 4E adventure back to 3.5. Consequently, I'll stick with Paizo as long as they continue to put out high quality adventures I can use.

I'm actually really intrigued by this development. When WoTC effectively "open-sourced" D&D through the OGL, they gave up some measure of control over the game (through the OGL). Instead, the commons (i.e. you, me and anyone else who cares) now has some level of ownership. Now that WoTC wants to create a new version of the game, and make it less open, third party publishers are free to continue using the 3.5 version of the SRD or effectively "fork" off from the 3.5 version of the game (using the OGL) if they wish instead of going with the new version - just like what sometimes happens in the open source software world. Sometimes the forks can eclipse the parent. Will that happen this time? Who knows. The forks can never really be called D&D and the D&D brand name really counts for a lot so D&D 4E will still probably do quite well regardless. I suspect though that I'm not the only one out there who has a bad feeling about what they've been reading so far about 4E and this fork may be a good place for that segment of the RPG market to park their support.

 

[HeinorNY]

Players will play whatever the hell the DM will DM. I find it very, very hard to believe a DM would say "I wanna run a game of Shadowrun" and the players will say "y'know, I'll pass". Because when it's all said and done, it's the actual getting together with friends that is the draw of RPGs, not the system. Friends will get together to play D&D, Pathfinder, Monopoly, Tunnels & Trolls, Macho Women with Guns, Shadowrun, Vampire, etc.

I think it's more common in our country where most groups are actually a bunch of long time friends that do a lot of things together, RPG being one of them, instead of a group of people that have only D&D in common.

 

[Nytmare]

Say NO to Pay$o!

Wow. That somehow manages to make even less sense than $th Ed.

 

[HeinorNY]

Wow. That somehow manages to make even less sense than $th Ed.

That's not serious. Unfortunately, $E is.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

You're forgetting one thing with the "network externailities" thing:

Players will play whatever the hell the DM will DM. I find it very, very hard to believe a DM would say "I wanna run a game of Shadowrun" and the players will say "y'know, I'll pass". Because when it's all said and done, it's the actual getting together with friends that is the draw of RPGs, not the system. Friends will get together to play D&D, Pathfinder, Monopoly, Tunnels & Trolls, Macho Women with Guns, Shadowrun, Vampire, etc.

Exactly. This is precisely why the group I run switched to C&C (nobody else wanted to DM 3.5 so I got my way). This is also why the 3.5 group I play in was going to go to 4E (the DM said so) but now he's warming up to Pathfinder RPG so it looks like that is the route we'll take.