Finding a New Path
So, for those of you who tuned in last post, if I'm not seeing myself as a D&D player anymore, what am I playing? I've been getting my fantasy RPG itch scratched by Pathfinder.
For those of you not in the know, Pathfinder is Paizo's answer to developments by WotC in D&D. Back in the days of 3rd edition, Wizards of the Coast outsourced support of Dragon and Dungeon magazines to Paizo, a company founded by former WotC employees who struck out on their own after making a killing when WotC sold out to Hasbro. Over their years of magazine publishing, they experimented with formats a bit and hired several former WotC employees and free-lancers. And they did a fantastic job. I didn't subscribe to Dragon during that time because, frankly, I had quite a huge backlog of older issues from when I did subscribe and topics tend to come up cyclically. In other words, as good a job as they were doing, most of it covered stuff I already read before. But I did subscribe to Dungeon for the adventures and was loving it. Paizo really built up a reputation for listening to reader feedback and responding to it. They didn't always agree with reader advice or recommendations, but responses did lead to enough change that it was clear they listened to advice.
Fast forward to about 2006/2007 and Wizards of the Coast decides to let the license for Paizo to publish the magazines expire. Why? The smart bet was that WotC wanted to pull the publication back under their control, probably in anticipation of the next edition. But Paizo was now in a bind - what to do? So they shifted their subscription model from magazines to serialized adventure paths - adventure campaigns to take PCs from 1st level to about 15th in the course of a series published over 6 months time. I got the first few issues as the remainder of my shortened Dungeon subscription. And the materials were great. The adventures were imaginative and fun and for D&D edition 3.5. I was hooked. And not only did they publish in print, but if you subscribed, you also got the PDF versions of the materials for free. Double plus good.
Things were going great with the adventure path subscriptions and then WotC dropped the other shoe. 4th edition was announced. They said there would be a new 3rd party license and interested publishers could pay a fee for early info and use, so they'd be ready for the Gen Con 2008 release of the 4e system. Time passed and no license. More time passed. Paizo was in a bind. Should they suspend publication waiting for 4e's license, keep publishing adventures for a system out of print nobody's likely to buy with a new edition coming, or do something else?
They decided to do something else. Since 3e was published with an open license, anybody could take the text of the rules, modify them, and republish them as their own games. It was a groundbreaking idea when WotC did that. It was done, not only to make D&D the real lingua franca of the gaming world (it pretty much already was) but to make sure that the D&D game could never be tied up in bankruptcy litigation. The genie was out of the bottle and no lawyer could put it back in. And in 2008, Paizo took advantage of this to put out the Pathfinder Role Playing Game. It's based heavily on version 3.5 of D&D but with evolutionary changes to the rules to improve play. For those of us not thrilled with 4e's revolutionary approach, it was very attractive. The fact that this was Paizo with its excellent customer service just made it better.
So, since 2008, I'm a Pathfinder player. It's like living next door to D&D, I suppose. And, for my money, it plays more like classic AD&D than 4th edition official D&D does. So that's where I hang my hat these days. And I'm much happier than I would be without Paizo and Pathfinder.
For those of you not in the know, Pathfinder is Paizo's answer to developments by WotC in D&D. Back in the days of 3rd edition, Wizards of the Coast outsourced support of Dragon and Dungeon magazines to Paizo, a company founded by former WotC employees who struck out on their own after making a killing when WotC sold out to Hasbro. Over their years of magazine publishing, they experimented with formats a bit and hired several former WotC employees and free-lancers. And they did a fantastic job. I didn't subscribe to Dragon during that time because, frankly, I had quite a huge backlog of older issues from when I did subscribe and topics tend to come up cyclically. In other words, as good a job as they were doing, most of it covered stuff I already read before. But I did subscribe to Dungeon for the adventures and was loving it. Paizo really built up a reputation for listening to reader feedback and responding to it. They didn't always agree with reader advice or recommendations, but responses did lead to enough change that it was clear they listened to advice.
Fast forward to about 2006/2007 and Wizards of the Coast decides to let the license for Paizo to publish the magazines expire. Why? The smart bet was that WotC wanted to pull the publication back under their control, probably in anticipation of the next edition. But Paizo was now in a bind - what to do? So they shifted their subscription model from magazines to serialized adventure paths - adventure campaigns to take PCs from 1st level to about 15th in the course of a series published over 6 months time. I got the first few issues as the remainder of my shortened Dungeon subscription. And the materials were great. The adventures were imaginative and fun and for D&D edition 3.5. I was hooked. And not only did they publish in print, but if you subscribed, you also got the PDF versions of the materials for free. Double plus good.
Things were going great with the adventure path subscriptions and then WotC dropped the other shoe. 4th edition was announced. They said there would be a new 3rd party license and interested publishers could pay a fee for early info and use, so they'd be ready for the Gen Con 2008 release of the 4e system. Time passed and no license. More time passed. Paizo was in a bind. Should they suspend publication waiting for 4e's license, keep publishing adventures for a system out of print nobody's likely to buy with a new edition coming, or do something else?
They decided to do something else. Since 3e was published with an open license, anybody could take the text of the rules, modify them, and republish them as their own games. It was a groundbreaking idea when WotC did that. It was done, not only to make D&D the real lingua franca of the gaming world (it pretty much already was) but to make sure that the D&D game could never be tied up in bankruptcy litigation. The genie was out of the bottle and no lawyer could put it back in. And in 2008, Paizo took advantage of this to put out the Pathfinder Role Playing Game. It's based heavily on version 3.5 of D&D but with evolutionary changes to the rules to improve play. For those of us not thrilled with 4e's revolutionary approach, it was very attractive. The fact that this was Paizo with its excellent customer service just made it better.
So, since 2008, I'm a Pathfinder player. It's like living next door to D&D, I suppose. And, for my money, it plays more like classic AD&D than 4th edition official D&D does. So that's where I hang my hat these days. And I'm much happier than I would be without Paizo and Pathfinder.