I mean 'picked up' physically, not 'purchased'.  Something I couldn't help but notice skimming through this...

Now, I've never played 'Pathfinder' because it's one of those games that comes up all the time by some over-enthusiastic weirdo, and he's like "Oh yeah?  Well PATHFINDER is waaaaay better you guys, you've never played it?  I can't believe it.  You need to play it."

Call me a contrarian, but when something's pitched like that to me I kind of get a little irked by it.  BUT- I couldn't help but notice...

Just skimming through this thing, it looked like... D&D third edition.  With 'multiculturalism' or something, which is fine, but.... this is D&D 3e... right?  Or what am I missing?

Do I need to go back to the store and get this thing, and pay actual money for it... or did I discover something that's 'old news' to everyone else?

Old news.

Yes. Pathfinder is 3/3.5e D&D. Its why Pathfinder was so popular as IT kept 3e alive when WOTC abandoned it for 4e.

Dont feel bad. I did not know PF was 3e either till about 2 years ago.

Quote from: Crüesader;905145I mean 'picked up' physically, not 'purchased'.  Something I couldn't help but notice skimming through this...

Now, I've never played 'Pathfinder' because it's one of those games that comes up all the time by some over-enthusiastic weirdo, and he's like "Oh yeah?  Well PATHFINDER is waaaaay better you guys, you've never played it?  I can't believe it.  You need to play it."

Call me a contrarian, but when something's pitched like that to me I kind of get a little irked by it.  BUT- I couldn't help but notice...

Just skimming through this thing, it looked like... D&D third edition.  With 'multiculturalism' or something, which is fine, but.... this is D&D 3e... right?  Or what am I missing?

Do I need to go back to the store and get this thing, and pay actual money for it... or did I discover something that's 'old news' to everyone else?

It's D&D 3e with bolted on, and often, badly implemented house rules in which they needed to add a whole know mechanic system for dealing with certain issues.  It was touted as 3.75 by the fans who've also claimed at the time that it was (and I wish I was making it up) the Second Coming of D&D.

Pathfinder is possibly the best reason, from a business standpoint as to why the OGL was a terrible idea.  For an amazingly (and I'm serious for 40USD, or your regional equivalent, unless you're in Canada, and then they roll 3D6 and add that many dollars to the price) low cost, they rewrote all of the D20SRD, added on some changes and art, and are now reselling it as a whole 'new' product.  It was a brutally intelligent and shrewd move.  It changes JUST enough to invalidate most of the 3.x stuff, yet looks so much like it, that some people convince themselves that their old stuff is still good.  And then spend about 20 hours more than they want to convert, and end up tossing it out because Paizo has already put out a book on it, replacing the one they were reworking in the first place.

Quote from: Crüesader;905145I mean 'picked up' physically, not 'purchased'.  Something I couldn't help but notice skimming through this...

Now, I've never played 'Pathfinder' because it's one of those games that comes up all the time by some over-enthusiastic weirdo, and he's like "Oh yeah?  Well PATHFINDER is waaaaay better you guys, you've never played it?  I can't believe it.  You need to play it."

Call me a contrarian, but when something's pitched like that to me I kind of get a little irked by it.  BUT- I couldn't help but notice...

Just skimming through this thing, it looked like... D&D third edition.  With 'multiculturalism' or something, which is fine, but.... this is D&D 3e... right?  Or what am I missing?

Do I need to go back to the store and get this thing, and pay actual money for it... or did I discover something that's 'old news' to everyone else?

Pathfinder is basically D&D 3.75. They made a point of updating a lot of the totally cockamamie rules, fixing some of the really broken spells, giving lame duck classes more stuff, etc. But it's still an OGL 3.5 basis game.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/

Complete with SRD.

It is, I'd say, better than 3.5 was. It's still D&D 3.x

Quote from: Crüesader;905145I mean 'picked up' physically, not 'purchased'.  Something I couldn't help but notice skimming through this...

Now, I've never played 'Pathfinder' because it's one of those games that comes up all the time by some over-enthusiastic weirdo, and he's like "Oh yeah?  Well PATHFINDER is waaaaay better you guys, you've never played it?  I can't believe it.  You need to play it."

Call me a contrarian, but when something's pitched like that to me I kind of get a little irked by it.  BUT- I couldn't help but notice...

Just skimming through this thing, it looked like... D&D third edition.  With 'multiculturalism' or something, which is fine, but.... this is D&D 3e... right?  Or what am I missing?

Do I need to go back to the store and get this thing, and pay actual money for it... or did I discover something that's 'old news' to everyone else?

It D&D 3.75e and you can read all the details here as 90% of the rules are open content.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

So basically if I have 3/3.5 D&D this book would be a waste.  Got it.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;905151Pathfinder is possibly the best reason, from a business standpoint as to why the OGL was a terrible idea.

In some fairness, the OGL worked as intended right up to the day WotC decided to reboot the line with a non-compatible new edition on the theory everyone would follow just for the brand name.  And even then, less of an "eff you" attitude on WotC's part around licensing for 4e might have brought by Paizo along, depending on who you ask.  But yes, poor long term or contingency planning, certainly.

Quote from: Crüesader;905156So basically if I have 3/3.5 D&D this book would be a waste.  Got it.

Well, no. If you want something that's less broken it's a perfectly cromulent investment. Unless you like referencing internet documents.

Now if you don't give a shit about where D&D 3.x explodes, then yes it's a waste of money.

Quote from: Dave R;905158In some fairness, the OGL worked as intended right up to the day WotC...

No.  It did not.  The thing is, you apparently never saw this, I forget who, but a third party publisher was cutting whole chunks out of the PHB and reselling them as their own books, because OGL let them legally.  The license was a horrible idea from a business stance.  For us the consumer, it was fucking AWESOME, we could by what we wanted, ignore the rest.  But for WoTC, when you have a company chopping out bits, like the Arcane Spells and Divine Spell lists and putting into an 4x6" paper back book and not seeing any profits from those says that's horrible business.

PF is sorta like the undead corpse of D&D 3E. WOTC thought they'd let it die, Paizo brought it back and now nothing can kill that monstrosity!

The deal with Pathfinder is that Paizo was the company that put out Dungeon (and Dragon) magazine for WOTC in the 3.5 era. As part of their company's  schtick, they put out "adventure paths", basically 8 connected modules. However, when WOTC decided to dump 3.5, they also dropped the magazines (at least as print products) and Paizo was kinda left in the lurch. So they decided to simply carry on, only with their own version of 3.5, dubbed Pathfinder (after Adventure "Path")

Quote from: Christopher Brady;905161No.  It did not.  The thing is, you apparently never saw this, I forget who, but a third party publisher was cutting whole chunks out of the PHB and reselling them as their own books, because OGL let them legally.  The license was a horrible idea from a business stance.  For us the consumer, it was fucking AWESOME, we could by what we wanted, ignore the rest.  But for WoTC, when you have a company chopping out bits, like the Arcane Spells and Divine Spell lists and putting into an 4x6" paper back book and not seeing any profits from those says that's horrible business.

Mongoose was the company that did that. But I'm skeptical they made much, if any, money off of it. D&D almost certainly had far larger print runs, thus the profit margin for WOTC was higher than Mongoose.  (And to Mongoose's credit, they released the rules of their Runequest Legend and Traveller games under the OGL, the former resulting in OpenQuest and GORE)

Quote from: Christopher Brady;905161No.  It did not.  The thing is, you apparently never saw this, I forget who, but a third party publisher was cutting whole chunks out of the PHB and reselling them as their own books, because OGL let them legally.  The license was a horrible idea from a business stance.  For us the consumer, it was fucking AWESOME, we could by what we wanted, ignore the rest.  But for WoTC, when you have a company chopping out bits, like the Arcane Spells and Divine Spell lists and putting into an 4x6" paper back book and not seeing any profits from those says that's horrible business.

That's just a conspiracy theory.

Mongoose was a successful third party publisher, but they were just one of many, and their Pocket Magica didn't push them into the lead. In fact, there's no indication it was even one of their best selling products. By the time it came out, most of the third party market had moved to OGL games (i.e. new games, based on D&D, like Mutants & Masterminds) and had largely given up on making supplements for D&D using the d20STL and just the bare OGL. (The shift was a response to the d20 bust, when Wizards published v.3.5 and the market for 3.0 supplements tanked.) Even earlier, there were a ton of SRDs, nicely formatted replacements for the core of third edition, none of which seemed to make the slightest splash. People bought third party products, and that led to the d20 boom. But far, far more people bought D&D. The brand, not the knock offs.

Paizo actually beat Wizards of the Coast for a while on the ICv2 sales charts, the first time an official version of D&D was beat by... well, anything. Even Vampire at the height of the goth craze in the 1990s didn't manage that. Pathfinder was a market changer.

The OGL contributed, because it allowed someone to jump in with a clear inheritor of third edition (and Piazo was perfectly positioned to do so, thanks to their long history of publishing both official D&D products -- like Dragon and Dungeon -- and their own successful line of third party products).

Without the OGL, Pathfinder wouldn't have happened. And without Paizo, it wouldn't have happened. But the only reason they had a chance was because Wizards shot themselves in the foot by fracturing their own fanbase.

And here I thought it would be a story how you dropped it on your foot, and limped for half an hour, thus deciding not to bother with books of such thickness:D!

Quote from: AsenRG;905182And here I thought it would be a story how you dropped it on your foot, and limped for half an hour, thus deciding not to bother with books of such thickness:D!

That was the other thing.  I tend to be apprehensive of books that seem uncomfortable to hold while you're on the crapper.

And now you know why no one steals my books.