Why do I complain about 4E?

[Twowolves]

No, because if the goal is to make it stay compatible with 3.5, making it not compatible with 3.5 is violating their own mandate. It's like everyone started off with a goal in mind, but got excited about the possibility of fixing 3.5, and don't seem to notice that means they're no longer heading for their original destination.

First off, the rules are in playtest, an alpha playtest at that. What you see now is not what the final book will be.

Secondly, it is extremely backwards compatible while still making a lot of changes. But it's only one way compatibility. You can pick up most any 3.5 adventure and run it (with a bit of modification, the degree entirely dependant on your personal level of AR-ness) with the PRPG. Now you can't necessarily take future PRPG adventures/material and use them with 3.5 rules. The names are the same, but the effects are slightly different.

Everyone is excited on their forums, but that's a wonderful thing. It's up to the Paizo guys to weed through all the rule change suggestions and decide how far they want to go with it, but the #1 reason behind the Pathfinder game is because WotC screwed the 3rd party guys by withholding the new game license for so long. Now that everyone has an OGL alternative, the 3.x players aren't "left standing on the docks" as the D&D ship sails off without them.

 

[Erik Mona]

No, because if the goal is to make it stay compatible with 3.5, making it not compatible with 3.5 is violating their own mandate. It's like everyone started off with a goal in mind, but got excited about the possibility of fixing 3.5, and don't seem to notice that means they're no longer heading for their original destination.

Some people certainly feel that way. And the end goal is to keep our adventures compatible with 3.5, which ought to be achievable even with some new barbarian rage abilities and the like in the core book. Very little of those things will come into play in the adventures, and when they do we will spell them out just like a new monster ability.

AND, we've got a year-long open playtest to sound out the community on the changes we've made. If some changes (such as the Alpha 1 combat feats design) are not appreciated by a large cohort of the audience, we are open to revisiting them, and have done so.

I really don't think we have pushed things too far away from the core rules. Some people do, of course, but that's the nature of changing things. We're making the decisions we feel improve the game and avoiding really egregious stuff. If we've gone too far, we expect that the open playtest will make clear what we need to scale back on.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing

 

[IanB]

I can understand why Jeff wants/needs to proselytize for 3.5/Pathfinder (hi Jeff!)

Let's say one of his current players moves away, and he needs someone else for his Saturday game. He calls me up and says, "Hey Ian, haven't seen you for a while since I dropped DDM, but we're looking for another player and I thought you might be interested - we're playing 3.5 still."

I'll turn him down, even though I know and like him and think he'd be fun to game with, because I only have so much gaming time to spread around and after playing 4e, going back to 3.5 for me is like going to the dentist - and even though I like Jeff, I don't want to go to the dentist with him. I of course am going to choose to spend those hours on a game I will enjoy more. (Also I have basically written off Paizo after the misogynistic excesses of Savage Tide, which broke my heart after how great Age of Worms was, but that is a better topic for another thread, and probably another forum entirely.)

So *of course* he and others will continue to try and get people to stick with 3.5/Pathfinder, because you can't play D&D by yourself. And there's nothing wrong with that, nor should we 4e people begrudge him his particular soapbox on the corner.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Some people certainly feel that way. And the end goal is to keep our adventures compatible with 3.5, which ought to be achievable even with some new barbarian rage abilities and the like in the core book. Very little of those things will come into play in the adventures, and when they do we will spell them out just like a new monster ability.

Well, I say this not out of any animus against you guys -- believe me, the moment you put out a gnome book, or another one like the Monsters Revisited, I'll snatch it up in a heartbeat -- but I've got one player in my campaign who, frankly, seems kind of in love with the mechanical aspect of his character (as opposed to everyone else, who are more about the concepts, most of which look to translate well to 4E).

So I'm certainly open to just keeping on keeping on with 3.5E, if there's continuing support beyond eBayed copies of old books and printed out PDFs of the 3.5 stuff.

But it seems like every week brings more and more news of changes. If the goal is to provide an OGL fork, that makes perfect sense and, frankly, a lot of the changes sound reasonable and necessary.

The question, though, is if that's really what I'm in the market for. I'm pro-OGL, and while I understand why WotC has done what it's done in terms of OGL and GSL, it doesn't mean I'm happy about it.

AND, we've got a year-long open playtest to sound out the community on the changes we've made. If some changes (such as the Alpha 1 combat feats design) are not appreciated by a large cohort of the audience, we are open to revisiting them, and have done so.

I really don't think we have pushed things too far away from the core rules. Some people do, of course, but that's the nature of changing things. We're making the decisions we feel improve the game and avoiding really egregious stuff. If we've gone too far, we expect that the open playtest will make clear what we need to scale back on.

I hope so. There's a very vocal segment of the Paizo fan community that isn't exactly open to divergent opinions, though, so it's certainly not impossible that some complaints will be under-represented due to being shouted down by that contingent.

That said, I hope that Paizo prospers at whatever it does and I will be a consumer of at least some of the fruits of your labor, no matter what road you guys or my group goes down.

 

[pemerton]

The Adaptability of 3e lies in the breadth of concepts it allows, as well as play style choices.

<snip>

3e allows me to choose the resources I want to manage.

Kamikaze Midget made a similar point on another thread (I think Hong's Casuals thread).

I agree it is an interesting difference between 3E and 4e that the first but not the second allows PCs with different resource management techniques. But, as I said in reply to KM, the real question that needs to be answered if we are to establish 3E' adaptability is this: does it succeed in what it aims at?

I think for many (most?) players the answer is No, because the per-day resources (healing, firepower) and the PCs who deploy them (clerics, wizards) end up dominating play, so that other resource-management styles end up having to dance to the per-day tune. And therefore, in the process, often find themselves unduly weakened, because they don't get to deploy the flexibility that they were promised.

(I should add: 3E is not the only game with this problem. For example, many years of experience have shown me that it is a huge problem in Rolemaster.)

If you were not one of those players who had this sort of experience - that is, if you could get different resource management approaches in 3E to successfully coexist - then I can see that 4e might seem more limiting in that respect.

 

[SSquirrel]

In any case, I think it is over the line to call everyone not switching to 4e "closed-minded", just like it's closed-minded to assume that only pre-teens would have an interest in 4e, and that it's been "dumbed down to a board game."

That's b/c you can post your issues w/4E w/o resulting to hyperbole Henry.

As far as Pathfinder goes, I have to agree that the changes seem to move more toward 4E, but still keeping the bad math of 3.5. For a system that claims backwards compatibility is one of their top issues, they don't seem to be handling that very well. Oh and before anyone tells me to post the things I dislike about the PFRPG changes on the paizo boards, I already have. I just get yelled down by fanboys there.

Time to go pick my gear for my first playthru of KotS and then I need to figure out what I'm going to want to run in my wife's first DMed campaign ever! 4E made her actually want to run a game. Awesome!

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I can understand why Jeff wants/needs to proselytize for 3.5/Pathfinder (hi Jeff!)

Thanks, Ian. Hope DDM's going well for you. I haven't been following anything but the Previews since I dropped it, but I get the sense Louis is a little disillusioned with it. (He mentioned some specific serious problems he thought it had, but I don't remember what they were exactly. Oh, wait ... one of them was Wild Mages and being able to nuke minis you can't see?) I didn't get the feeling he was giving up on it or anything, but he's definitely less gung-ho for it.

Enjoy 4E! If you happen to make GenCon and notice me rumbling around, stop me and say hi. I miss you guys. (As you said, not enough to go to the 1-1-1-1 dentist, but still.)

 

[jinnetics]

Why would I want to "think critically" about a game when I could be playing it? That's when it ceases to be fun.

 

[SSquirrel]

I've never understood the pain people feel about the 1.5 to 1 change for diagonal movement. A square blast radius makes as much sense to me as a ridiculous looking stairstep pattern. When you look at a square and count out 4 from it and the arc passes 2/3 thru a square but no one in that square takes damage, that damages MY belief. A square blast radius just shows that a fireball isn't a perfect sphere and some bits jut out farther..specifically at the 4 corners. Or it allows for the effects of the heat and blast to be felt more fully.

I know that 1^2+1^2=1.4 and change so the old 1.5 is more mathematically correct, but how big a problem is this really? Do you get many problems of the players in your group running everywhere at a 45 deg angle b/c it's somehow faster? Now you can zig and zag back for the cost of 2 movement....or you can walk straight ahead those 2 squares for th cost of...2 movement.

 

[IanB]

Thanks, Ian. Hope DDM's going well for you. I haven't been following anything but the Previews since I dropped it, but I get the sense Louis is a little disillusioned with it. (He mentioned some specific serious problems he thought it had, but I don't remember what they were exactly. Oh, wait ... one of them was Wild Mages and being able to nuke minis you can't see?) I didn't get the feeling he was giving up on it or anything, but he's definitely less gung-ho for it.

Enjoy 4E! If you happen to make GenCon and notice me rumbling around, stop me and say hi. I miss you guys. (As you said, not enough to go to the 1-1-1-1 dentist, but still.)

Actually because of various work issues and scheduling collisions, I've barely been playing DDM myself - won't be making the qualifier this weekend, etc. Unfortunately I probably won't be at GenCon this year for various reasons.

I think a lot of the local (and probably national) disillusionment stems from the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 not being handled very well in terms of rules support, timetables for older set conversion, etc. I feel bad for Peter Lee having kind of been thrust into the fire on this one, it seems to me like most of the internal resources ended up working on D&D rather than DDM and the new guy got left holding the bag a bit. My personal feeling (maybe it is just a hope) is after GenCon things will be much more stable and things will return to normal.