Hello everyone,

So over in the suggestions for the Weekly Wringer I posed the idea of 4th ed vs Pathfinder. Boomer made mention that he had heard about Pathfinder and wanted to try it, then said something I've heard fairly often: "I've been told it is an improvement, but that it still feels like a rules patch?"

I'd like to briefly outline the changes here for the people who aren't familiar with Pathfinder. Before I talk about that, I just want to say why our group went to Pathfinder instead of 4th Ed. When we looked at it and most of us agreed that the rules were good, and a lot of the changes were good necessary changes. However, we also agreed that it would make for a great table top miniatures game. But it wasn't D&D.

Earlier that Year Paizo announced they were releasing Pathfinder. I picked up the Beta some of the changes were similar to 4th ed, some kept closer to 3. So we went with it. So here's a very quick rundown on the changes.

Races and Classes are redesigned. They hold the same structure as 3.5 with one major change. Every class now has a reason to level to 20. In many cases you don't want to even multi class because of the things you miss out on. While Prestige classes are still an option, they really aren't 'needed' to power up the base classes and are more of a trade off in power.

The change to classes is (in my opinion) the single biggest change they made, completely reworking the way some classes functioned.

Skills have been simplified.  Like in 4th ed a number of skills got rolled up into a single skill to reduce the total number of them. Skill ranks and cross class skills were also changed to make book keeping easier.

Elements of combat have been changed. Like 4th ed, they removed pretty much all of the opposed rolls and instead added DC.

Asides from that, there are a lot of small changes to various feats and spells.

Like 4th ed, the changes they made did make a lot of things simpler, when we first started playing we thought it was great because we could still use all of our 3.5 books. Over the last 2 years we've come to realize that while we can use them for ideas and basics for things, but you can't really just take something as is from a 3.5 splat book.

So is it just a rules patch? Well, Pathfinder is based on the d20 system. So at it's core, yes,