Posted by Zachary

So you're a DnD player, and let's say you really love DnD. Say you've been playing for a long time and you really like it. Let's further say you've been playing a lot of 3.5. Maybe you've played nothing but 3.5, or maybe you cut your teeth on ADnD, but at the very least 3.5 is what you've been playing for the majority of your time.

Now, despite the fact that you love DnD, you know that 3.5 has all sorts of flaws. No, it's not 2nd edition, but it's still highly complex, and you suspect that it is needlessly so, though you're not really sure, but you don't want to go back to THAC0. Most painful of all is the combat system, which drags on and on and which has a tendency to stagnate. You know all about five-hour combats in which you take maybe 10 actions all together. You wait ten or fifteen minutes for your turn because people had to keep looking stuff up in the middle of combat, and then when you go to do something you miss, or fail a save, or roll a 1, and then you have to wait another ten minutes for the eight other people to do the same things. So you're torn; you love DnD, but sometimes it can be hard to justify the time spent when combat is so laborious.

Then you hear about this new edition, this 4th edition that Wizards has come up with. You hear it's a huge overhall, the game is totally different and everything is "fixed." You hear endless reviews about how much simpler and streamlined combat is, about how fun and active it is, about how everything is so easy and how the players are freed from tiring rules and are able to just have fun.

Your interest is definitely peaked. You feel a rush of excitement as you begin to wonder if this could be the solution you've been looking for. But as you research the new edition more, you begin to notice that something is very different, and not in a good way. Maybe it first hits you when you realize that there aren't nine alignments anymore, just five. You learn that the new alignments are a line graph that go like this: Lawful good, good, neutral, evil, chaotic evil. You find it curious that there is no axis for Law Vs. Chaos and an independent axis for Good Vs. Evil. You don't agree that Law can only be good, and that Chaos can only be evil. You liked Chaotic good characters, and you like Lawful evil villains, and all the fine shades the nine alignments had to offer. Maybe further investigation has shown you that the Great Wheel of the Multiverse has been dismantled, replaced by a loose cosmology of disorganized planes. Then you notice an infinite amount of other small subtleties that are no longer part of the game, and gradually it dawns on you that while the combat system may be wildly free and beautifully intuitive, the whole robust  world that your imagination once danced upon is no longer there. You have an efficient machine with no soul. But are the dragging combats really worth this "soul?" Then you reflect briefly the amount of money you already have invested in your 3.5 collection, and, knowing that 4th is not backwards compatible, touch your pants where your wallet sits and notice how light it has become.

And so you are torn. You walk into Borders, maybe by accident, maybe by providence, and a successful spot check points you in the direction of some 4th edition books on the shelf. You stare at them, not yet convinced, almost a little hesitant to touch them, when a casual search check lands your hovering finger on the Pathfinder Handbook. All at once you remember that this is the fabled "update" which was supposed to smooth out 3.5 and keep the old tradition moving. Suddenly you pick it up and wonder to yourself, "Is this the happy medium? The golden mean? The middle way? The narrow gate by which I will enter into roleplaying salvation?" You flip through the pages, you notice a lot of things you like, but a lot of things look pretty much the same. You are hesitant. You want to make an action, you want the rich flavor and noble traditions of all previous editions of DnD in your life, but as you cast a glance back to the shelves the allure of 4th edition's easy combat fills  your nostrils with increasing desire. A deep confusion begins to overtake you, one that threatens a coming madness. You make a Will save, and find you are still in control of yourself. You breath deeply a moment while you let your mind clear, but the nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach remains.

What do you do?

This was my situation, and hunger for an answer resulted in my spending several solid days committed to research. I read up on every review of 4th edition and 3d edition I could find, as well as Pathfinder; every forum, every debate, every criticism of all the systems. I collected opinions and wrote down key points and complaints, then I poured over the 4th edition sourcebooks and compared them to everything I knew of 3d edition.  After many hours, things started to make sense.

Basically, each system has it's own strong point, but that strong point has inherent weaknesses. For 3d edition variations, the robustness of the world, the breadth of customization, the acute attention to detail and realism which made the game come alive also spawned the problems of high complexity, cumbersome rules, and unchecked brokenness. For 4th, all of the great ease and elegance which made combat fast and fun and the world intuitive and shiny-clear also meant that the universe of 4th edition could not tolerate much variance; even the nine-point alignment wheel proved to be too complicated for it, and was abandoned. In short, the more complex things are, the harder they are to do, and the easier things are to do, the less complex they are allowed to be.

Ideally we want to be in the middle, and after much deliberation I find the following steps are acceptable:

1) Buy the Pathfinder core rules and use them. They solve so many of the little issues which plagued 3.5 for so long that the whole thing comes as a burst of fresh spring air to ease the tired mind. A lot of people underestimated Pathfinder, alluding to or even stating that it was an outright "repackaging" of old material and not progressive. Not so! It's still 3d edition, that hasn't changed, because that wasn't the point of Pathfinder. Pathfinder was supposed to smooth out the parts of 3.5 that were needlessly complex, and it did that wondefully.

2) Download the BecuzWeCan house rules supplement to Pathfinder and try it. We run with a new kind of action points, which really helps to speed up combat and make things interesting. There are also lots of good ideas that were stolen from 4th edition and incorporated into 3d which will make everyone's life easier.

3) This may be a bit controversial, but buy the 4th edition Dungeon Master's Guide and utilize all it's advice! Some things about DnD in general just needed to be fixed for all time, and some of them weren't done in Pathfinder. I am especially thinking of the way skill encounters are handled in 4th, which are a lot more interesting and engaging than in previous editions; and how the "minion" monster type serves very well in keeping the story going without bogging down combat. Some of these things are indispensable from solving problems that arise with both systems. We've included a great deal of these sort of tweaks and strictly DM advice/strategy in the BWC download as well, in case you're not too keen to pick up a DMG right away.

So how does that sound?

1) Buy and study Pathfinder, get to know it. It is your new core rulebook.
2) Copy the BWC house rules and see how they smooth over the final concerns in 3.75.
3) Get a 4th edition DMG (optional) and attempt to learn something from it. It's the real book that all of us wanted when we first stumbled into the strange world of DMing.
4) Have fun.