I can see where you are coming from. I guess I was focusing on the open source aspect of it rather than the holes. I would humbly submit that 4e is not an upgrade but switching to another system since many of the things that make D&D, D&D are gone. I just feels like a video game crunch system with none of the soul to me. I don’t think Paizo’s Pathfinder will fill the bill completely either. I think I am going to end up make some sort of Frankenstein edition. 3.54 or something like that.

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I can’t help but feel your analogy is backwards… or else breaks down quickly. IE is the one that is riddles with holes and exploits, yet refuses to change significantly. IE7 is a step to seal some of those holes, while still trying to keep the same broken core yet trying to give the impression of “newness” by wrapping it in a somewhat-new-looking facade

Honestly, that sounds like the Pathfinder RPG to me.

If you have the time, I’d be interested as to why you are unhappy with 4e.

@Felonius: Those players are called Outliers, people who set themselves up for failure… Since players get full control of character design since 3e with the point buy system of attributes and can make unworkable characters in any system, I would very much prefer that 4e does NOT actually make it a design philosophy to factor in for those… The Outlier will make it a personal quest to find the lamest possible character combo in 4e regardless of how hard WotC tries to make all character as useful in combat.

My 2 cents here.

Yes, Paizo chose to allow all the old splat book content, and just beefed up the Core classes so that things balanced better by virtue of general power inflation. That’s a marketing decision. See, people who buy splat books are a key customer for the publishers, since these are people who actually buy product … lots of product. So when WotC says to the legions of splat book owners, “Throw away all your books,” Paizo says, “Keep them! They’re fine!” That’s Paizo’s market — diehard d20ers. And I can’t fault them for that.

But me, I’ve never held any truck with the splat books, and in my revision of D&D, I am happy to keep power levels low — at least on par with core 3.5.

Anyway, yes I agree that some people will choose sub-optimal characters because they want a challenge or want to play against type or want to make a particular character. More power to them. But the issue here is that some players want to make character multi-class combos that are on par with straight-up single class PCs, power-wise. We should be able to create a system that retains the near-infinite flexibility of 3E and yet also creates balanced characters easily.

Honestly, balance issues, especially when I comes to “splat” books is more the DM’s purview… There’s nothing in the rules (especially for 3.5) which will prevent players from abusing them…. Which is why class levels for monsters can be a lot of fun… Barbarian Trolls? heck yes. Half Dragon Barbarian Trolls? Hmmm… Suddenly it’s immune to fire, and has a breath weapon… Makes for a great solo encounter, without even being *too* crazy, that will mess with the players…

I think what Paizo is really trying to do is make the game more fun. And, from I’ve seen for the Pathfinder RPG, they’re actually doing a pretty good job… Wizards don’t run out of stuff to do after 2 encounters? Check. Combat Maneuvers simplified? Check. Races are more inherently interesting? Check. Skills even seem to be handled in a better fashion (It’s not the 4e route, it’s not the 3.5 route… It’s somewhere in between. If I recall correctly, it’s 1 skill point buys one rank, period. Skill bonuses are Ranks + Modifier + 3 if it’s a class skill for any of your classes…) Is Pathfinder RPG perfect? doubtful. Will the community be happy with it? The ones sticking to 3.5 will most likely find it to be (after all, they get some input into the process… They’ve already changed the combat maneuvers and skills due to community input).

@Cayzle

I would love to look over your rules, but some of the links, or something, seems to be broken… I did, however, look over some of the philosophies… and… Well… I don’t know if I agree with all of them… Some people will choose to play sub-optimal characters because they want a sub-optimal character… They want a bard with 8 charisma… They like the challenge inherent (I’m not fully up on my Robin’s Laws… What’s this type of player?). Is that one of the design philosophies in 4e? It seems that way, but it’s not a requirement that you take powers that fit your strengths (They posted most of what a rogue can do… You could always play a brutish rogue with a low strength, and take all the str related powers…).

Not all characters are created equally. Of course, that’s no reason to “nerf” a Wizard just because he decided to take 3 levels of fighter to fit a non-nerfed concept…

I think I lost my train of thought… If you see it, get it to a switching station and send it back to me…

And I’ve started to answer that question — by creating my own set of 4E rules! I’ve started with a philosophy of design, by looking at how 3E was such a huge leap ahead of earlier versions. Among those innovations:

– Elegance, ease of use, simplicity of mechanics.
– Transition from arbitrary rules and one-off creations to a unified design philosophy that applies to a wide range of simulations.
– Flexibility and player empowerment, especially in terms of character creation beyond first level.
– Balance among classes and multclass combos.

If you are interested, my first post on the topic is up:

http://www.cayzle.com/screeds/book067.html

Almost all of the changes to 3.5 are things that WotC is changing in 4E. However, since Pathfinder RPG ports in all of the 3.5 splat books the late edition balance issues are still there. Pathfinder RPG is a half measure that will attract the people who want to treat the change of editions as some kind of betrayal by WotC.

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I don’t think that maintaining only vanilla 3.5 products would have been viable and they just couldn’t close shop until 3rd parties were allowed to publish 4e stuff.

At least with Pathfinder RPG they create a ‘need’ and by being all open about it, the maintain the necessary buzz to keep interest in the product while surfing on the ‘I won’t go the 4e way’ undercurrent.

I think that the months of June-July will be critical for that decision as the true reaction to 4e based on actual facts will be plastered all over the place… this blog included.

I believe Paizo will need a bucketload of bells and whistles to be heard over through the noise during that time…

But I’d love to be proven wrong!

A lot of the complaints about 3.5 are valid: grapple (to name just one of the problem combat maneuvers) is overly complicated; casters (especially wizards) are prone to “run out” of stuff to do. I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s just the first two that come to mind for me.

Paizo is actually doing a decent job of fixing those issues (the latest alpha is starting to look pretty good). Will it introduce other issues? Of course. Will they be resolved before release? Hard to say. The problem with a community effort in the gaming community is that there’s a lot of opinions out there, and they don’t all agree.

All that being said, and going back to the debate issue at hand… I think there are a couple things working against Paizo. I think the project is great idea. I think, however, that they started too late. They should have started work on this when 4e was first announce (or shortly after), for a release within a short period of time after 4e release. I think that there’ll be a window in there where 4e is trying to gain traction which would have been the best time for a “3.75″ or whatever you decide to call it. With the large body of work for 3.5 material, anything that is “100% compatible” with it has a solid body to work from, especially with the delay in 3rd party support 4e (WotC’s own fault, really).

If Paizo could have released a “better” 3.5 during that first 6 months to a year, they would have had something there. All the people who wanted 3.5 fixed, but not replaced. With a release of August 2009, I think they’re just going to come to the party a little late. People who wanted 3.5++ will either just keep using 3.5, or switch to another 3.5 system that currently exists, or switch to 4e once the quantity of 3.5 material starts to dwindle. (There’ll always be the stuff that exists already, but how many times can you play the same module?)

That’s just my 2 pennies, though.

@all: Thanks for participating. I couldn’t keep up with individual comments but I do read them all!

Keeping this huge list played a role in us yearning for a new edition. (Altough some of the fixes of the Rules Compendium killed a few of them).

It’s cool that your group is comfortable making the games fit their style. I can’t recall a game printed in the last decade or so that hasn’t explicitly mentioned that everyone should be doing that. And the only reason the earlier games didn’t mention the topic is because they were so certain it would happen that it wasn’t worth mentioning.

The point I was trying to make with the statement you quoted is that there is a point where if you mod the rules past it, you really should stop and compile all your changes. Since numerous people have made an open source software comparison here I’ll use one such project as an example since I’m reasonably familiar with the topic.

Normal open source software practice is a bug is found and fixed or a feature is desired and someone not on the core team sends a patch in. The patch would be looked over and if the people maintaining the source code thought it was worth adding, it would become part of the code. There was a project called qmail that was open source and could be patched but the author released it under a special license that said only he could actually add things into the code. You couldn’t release a patched version of the qmail source. You had to send out the base qmail source code plus your patches which someone else would have to apply. After awhile the author stopped adding patches to the code, deciding it was perfect as it was. Many people disagreed and made patches to add all manner of functionality to it.

Eventually qmail got to be much less popular because it didn’t adapt and having to patch the code yourself was clunky. The patches didn’t all play nice with each other either.

The analogy works pretty well here. If you have enough patches and have to continue to refer to them, at some point the only way to really make it clear how things work is to write up a document that has the base rules you use, including some unmodified information from (in this case) the player’s handbook. Where that point is can differ depending on the individual but at some point you are spending more time trying to correlate data from different sources than you would by making one document that defines your game.

If enough people do pay to get digital articles, the online supplements to books and buy some of the compilation in PDF, the money generated should foster a loop of continuous improvement.

It’s quite possible that the DIgital initiative is WotC’s kneejerk reflex to fix that historical weakness.

Regardless, much like you didn’t ‘miss out’ by not buying the Dungeon or Dragon Magazines, D&D insider will remain entirely optional.

That said, I think that WOTC is shooting itself in the foot with trying to focus on the online/long-tail component too much. I know what they are trying to do and get every gamer paying $15.00 per month, but it is doomed. WOTC makes bad web sites. They cannot even get the RPGA site to work correctly and that is vastly simpler than the DnD online stuff they are pitching.

I will play 4th ed, but I have faith that WOTC’s online component will exceed my lowest expectation.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

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