Pathfinder and Ravenloft

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

#1: Yes. If WotC wasn't greedy enough to make a new edition solely to get us to rebuy the books, and instead made the move in a way that respected the decades and countless hours of games and fan material of the past, it wouldn't have backfired.

#3 if 4e had been, I dunno, good? Or at least not such a huge tonal shift, PF wouldn't have been seen as a safe harbor for the 3.5 fans.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

They did that when WoC made 4th ed and abandoned 3.5 thought. Wizards left the field it was obvious someone would step in.

Two things:
#1: Yes. If WotC wasn't greedy enough to make a new edition solely to get us to rebuy the books, and instead made the move in a way that respected the decades and countless hours of games and fan material of the past, it wouldn't have backfired.

#2: If WotC didn't have such lax OGL and had a much stricter SRD, someone could not have stepped in. So, now we will never again get such a wonderful open license because the stream has been tainted.

Interesting; I never thought about it this way. Based on the historical chain of events, the more restrictive Game System License certainly precipitated the existence of Pathfinder, but I can see how the existence of Pathfinder precipitates further license restrictions to avoid competition. If Pathfinder hadn't happened, I suppose it is possible that Wizards might have reacted to the GSL blowback and remained more open with future licenses. Or they might have tried restricting the license again later and ended up in the same place with a major competitor. Impossible to say.

Does anyone have a spell to view alternative timelines?

[alhoon]

Does anyone have a spell to view alternative timelines?

Yes, but we're not sharing it with you, pleb!
Personally, I always get distracted when I cast it and end up checking alt-timeline funny cat / baby videos. There is a hilarious meme about a politician you know that ... meh, you have to know the timeline to appreciate it.

[Rebel Mage]

#3 if 4e had been, I dunno, good? Or at least not such a huge tonal shift, PF wouldn't have been seen as a safe harbor for the 3.5 fans.

I'll be honest and say that I like 4e? I've only played a bit of it (as much as I've played of 3.5e) but I do like it. There is a shift in style, though, but that isn't necessarily bad. I can't pretend to know what players at the time experienced, since I started playing in the 5e era, but I wonder how much of the dislike of 4e is because it's a lot different versus it actually being bad.

I've heard a big reason for the creation of Pathfinder was also the more restrictive gaming license for 4e, which made Paizo, who'd been developing stuff for 3.5e, unable to continue doing what they did before, which made them "have to" create Pathfinder. So, it wasn't the OGL that created Pathfinder, but the switch from the OGL to something much stricter.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

Does anyone have a spell to view alternative timelines?

Yes, but we're not sharing it with you, pleb!
Personally, I always get distracted when I cast it and end up checking alt-timeline funny cat / baby videos. There is a hilarious meme about a politician you know that ... meh, you have to know the timeline to appreciate it.

Drat. I guess I'll have to ask around the local physics department to see if anyone has made a device to do this. Sadly, it's probably secret government technology that I will also never get to see.

I'll be honest and say that I like 4e? I've only played a bit of it (as much as I've played of 3.5e) but I do like it. There is a shift in style, though, but that isn't necessarily bad. I can't pretend to know what players at the time experienced, since I started playing in the 5e era, but I wonder how much of the dislike of 4e is because it's a lot different versus it actually being bad.

I think I came into the game somewhere around the tail end of 3.5e and the start of 4e, and I played a fair amount of 4e after mistakenly trying to mix both rulesets together (I was a bit young to patiently learn the rules). There were certainly fun aspects of 4e, like when I mixed a warlock and a paladin together so I could use dire radiance (extra damage if the target moves closer), divine challenge (damage if the target doesn't try to attack you), and hit-and-run tactics to ruin my enemy's day.

[alhoon]

I didn't like 4e because it was very different than what I knew but also because I didn't like the shift in style and how tons of books and lore were now outdated and impossible to do with the new rules AND I didn't like how tons of books and rules didn't fit in any more because of the difference in tone.

What 4e did very well IMO, was to be a good platform to play... miniature games. It is a much better version of tabletop games like descent. You have your "per encounter", your "per day" and your "At will" powers, not many of them and you go around bashing things.
The way I run 4e was to cut in half the hp of the enemies and that saved me a LOT of headache. A lvl 16 monster with half hp is as dangerous as a lvl 14 monster in 4e. So, you throw those to your enemies.

4e would be good for computer games IMO as long as they were in different universes than the ones we know. What I mean is that a computer game in a Might & Magic kind of word would be BETTER with 4e than 5e IMO although 5e can be retro-run 4e adventures! It is easier to change 2e and 3e adventures to 5e, but you can do that with 4e as well.


Things I appreciated from 4e are:
- Solo monsters (kinda in 5e), Elite monsters (you can do that in 5e by giving one extra action per turn to a monster you make) and ... minions. Now, these are hard in 5e. More or less to make the equivalent of a 4e minion, you make a monster with higher AC and saving throws and you calculate its hp as 2 + it's proficiency modifier. And it doesn't work as nice as 4e minions.
Minions are the one thing that 4e did better.
- Lots of customization options... despite them being mostly flavor as every class could do everything. A party of 4 fighters would be slightly better or slightly worse than a party of F/M/C/T but they were all ruthlessly balanced.
- The beginner/heroic/paragon/epic tiers. Which you can see in 5e too as you get 2 attacks, 2 and two cantrip dice in 5th lvl (and fireball), 3 attacks and 3 cantrip dice at 11th lvl (and serious, 1/day spells) and 4 cantrip dice at 17th lvl (and meteor swarm, wish, etc).
- Got rid of the christmas tree spells of 3e where everything stuck and the party was expected to walk in an encounter with the wizard being polymorphed to a troll with mage armor, shield, blessed by the cleric, mirror imaged while the cleric was blessed, aided, share-life, divine favor, divine shield, bull strength and more. Oh, so much more... <=== And this is the reason I moved to 4e when it showed up despite also running 3e games.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I understand there are people who enjoy 4e, but for the most part they are not the people who enjoyed 3.5. That's what I was getting at. Those of us who liked the "christmas tree" feeling, the logical simulationist focus of 3.x, and didn't like the extremely balanced, but videogamey feel of "push the B button, get X amount of damage and Y amount of healing dressed up in the flavor of your class" felt like the game had moved on from us, which made PF a welcome alternative source of new content in the same game (or close enough) that we enjoyed. I was around for the 1e->2e and 2e->3e shifts and neither of those were as contentious, at least not as I recall them. (3e had a lot of haters at first, self included, but most of them came around.) I don't think think that if a 2e equivalent of PF existed at the time it would have done very well at all.