Jeremy.Smith wrote:

The_Mess wrote: Pathfinder, in my admittedly minimal glancing at it because I couldn't afford to buy an actual book lately (long term unemployment completely sucks, in case you were wondering) didn't seem to have addressed most of the problems. If you are interested, Paizo puts all the rules on the PRD (Pathfinder Resource Document) for free. That's the core rulebook, the monster manuals, the advanced player's guide, ultimate magic, ultimate combat, the game mastery guide... It's not every rule they've ever put out (since they put out content in the different Pathfinder magazines), but it's probably 95% of the mechanics they've released...

and, to complete that thought...

www.d20pfsrd.com/

enjoy. (that particular site iirc doesn't put in the stuff from new books until they've been on sale in dead tree form for two weeks or something like that, so the very newest material may not be there).

Ooo, thank you very much for that. If I'm nothing, it's a sucker for reading rules. There goes my week. : - )

Casters last longer than they used to. Pathfinder gave unlimited level 0 spells which means a mage that runs out of spells for the day is not completely useless like it used to be. There is also a nice trait system where player characters can take two traits. Most of my mage players take Rich parents for the 900 gp starting gold. A wand of Magic Missile at level 1 with 50 charges makes for a great weapon when you run out of the rest of your spells and want to deal a decent amount of damage. The hit dice bumps are nice too.

As for 4th edition, a large part of what turned me off about it was the way they redid the cosmology and planes. I have to agree about the fighter abilities as well. When I ran 2nd edition the fighter could use his abilities as much as he wanted, but things like whirlwind attack would eat a small amount of hit points. Fighters had to gauge how much damage they were willing to take. 1 hit point here and there eventually eats away at you. No one can fight all day for hours on end without becoming fatigued, but I feel they basically took all the classes and turned them into mages. Ultimately what made me go with pathfinder was the character builder software. It is buggy as all hell and crashes a lot. I really hope that when 5th edition launches they outsource the software to lone wolf development. Since Hero Lab will soon have a Mac version, it would be cheaper for hasbro to go ahead and outsource it. The lack of 3rd party products also made it extremely unfun. Paizo puts out a lot of cool card decks for pathfinder like critical hits and fumbles, condition cards, plot twist cards, etc. that add a nice element to the games I run.

I gave my group two campaigns, one in 4th edition, one in pathfinder, both dark sun games. I let them choose which system they wanted to play. The vote was unanimous for Pathfinder. We decided that elements from 4.0 that we liked we'd keep, but for the most part we still use a lot of 2nd edition stuff in our games. We added teiflings to dark sun because we felt the race was a nice addition, but we are not going to go out of the way with the changes 4.0 did. We like the skill choices in Pathfinder, we like the flexibility of character options and overall how the game plays.

Hasbro needs to learn that cutting off all 3rd party support is a bad idea. I hope they learned that lesson. Personally I'd like to see them simplify the initiative rolling in 5th edition. I still miss the weapon speed factors from 2e.

There is one other thing that has irked my ire about 4.0 and that is the lack of adventure module support. I could have lived with the changes made if they had kept the support going through written adventures that explored familiar ruins and places. Forgotten Realms is just starting to see new releases this late into the production run and they are hardback books detailing places like Neverwinter. Great for reference material, but I won't be running them. I don't like how they did away with campaign specific modules and ran with generic ones that were over priced and not really giving the value I expected out of them.

TSR often used modules to advance storylines and let players have a chance to do things differently than what the novels presented. They also fleshed out areas of the game like important cities, famous dungeons like Undermountain, etc. The only reason any of my 4.0 Dark Sun games were good is the library of 2nd edition resources I have for running these games. Hasbro only produced setting books and left it at that.

I really hope that 5th edition turns things around for them. I've run this game since it was in its 1st edition (No I am not buying the reprints of those books, the cause is nice, but I am not paying the prices they want for books I will never use to run a game) and overall I felt the best versions are 2nd and Pathfinder. 3.5 was nice but pathfinder fixed some of the issues I had with it and rounded out the game nicely.

If your wondering why I won't do 1st edition, its rather simple, it was a nice system to start with but 2nd edition fixed a lot of the problems in it. The reprints are overpriced for what used to be very affordable gaming books. The other reason I have for not picking up the books is that it will just be reprints of the core set, nothing else from that edition will see the light of day for reprinting purposes.