Edition wars are nothing new to video gamers.. as people maybe its inherent that we grow attached to things in our life.. it makes no sense why people cling so desperately to one game system over another or voraciously attack anyone who disagrees with their choice of system but it’s the state of Internet fandom, especially where games are concerned.
Why should traditional gaming be any different? Just as we have fanatic devotees to Halo or Sony or Nintendo, the traditional gaming world, especially role-playing games, there seems to be a similar tendency to cling to what we like.
You can find fans of games so obscure fighting it out with the latest Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition converts discussing and often debating the merits of their Religion err.. gaming system.
Recently Wizards of the Coast made some fairly drastic design changes that moved away from the popular d20 based 3.5 version of the game. This change and a modification to the way the publisher allowed other companies to use their new system and its intellectual properties allowed third party publishers to create a rift in the already fractured RPG publishing market.
Among those who supported D&D and its spin off rules, the already small niche of role playing game books fracturing into an even smaller niche of publishers: those who continued to use the open source d20 rules to produce new products and those who accepted the more restrictive rules for moving to the 4th edition support role behind Wizards of the Coast.
One of the larger third party publishers, Paizo, a company made up of many of the creators of the 3rd edition of D&D and former publishers of Wizards’ Dungeon and Dragon magazines observed the shift in the larger publishers approach and decided that they would move in a different direction using the d20 rules as a basis.
The product they created became a sort of hybrid enhancement of the established 3.5 version of Dungeons & Dragons titled Pathfinder. These new rules form a sort of D&D 3.75 and integrate a number of basic changes discovered through play testing and development over the ten years of version 3.x’s life.
Originally released as a free “Beta” test, Pathfinder’s initial drafts took fairly large steps away from some of the sacred cows of Dungeons & Dragons while working to maintain compatibility with all the established and printed D&D supplements and third party rules. Before the end of the book line, even Wizards’ own rules required some cleaning up and clarification, which led to the printing of a Rules Compendium to clarify things for the befuddled players and dungeon masters.
Pathfinder spent over a year in Beta until it recently premiered at the 2009 GenCon in Indiana. The resulting book however is different even from the free Beta rules and feels more like a return to 3.5 with some enhancements than a sea change revision.
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