Disclaimer: Be warned, there is heavy nerd content to be read ahead. I try to not lose you in the lingo being thrown around. If you've played roleplaying videogames, then you should be able to understand what I'm talking about. If you're familiar with D&D, you should be able to follow all of it very easily. If you don't fall into those two categories, I hope I don't lose you in the next few paragraphs.
In the previous two articles, I talked about 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder separately. I didn't really compare the two, which is what a lot of people are doing out there in the tabletop community, so I'll try to sum it up to you guys.
SIMULATIONIST VS. FOCUSED CONTENT
3rd Edition tries to simulate all aspects of what it would really be like to really create a black-hole in the middle of a battlefield. 4th Edition would have you roll and move on. What I mean is that a single spell description in 3rd Edition could take up a page and a half. In Spells were very complex. Too complex. If you had even one spellcaster in the party, combat would slow down dramatically whenever they would have to look up a spell description. Not only that, at high levels you could end up with an upwards of one-hundred spells known. This was a headache for players and DMs alike, not knowing what the other had prepared and having the problem of too many spells to choose from.
Even if you didn't have magic, the number of physical attacks you had to roll for were staggering. Even the Wizard could attack twice with his staff if he was high enough of a level. A well specced (link) Fighter could end up with anywhere from seven to twelve attacks every round. These aren't even interesting rolls, these are just to hit. A Wizard would roll once to see if he disintegrates a guy, but the fighter hits someone a few times with his sword requires multiple die rolls?
So what does 4th edition do to alleviate these problems? Now the Wizard gets far fewer spells and all classes have access to "powers", which are special techniques that have limited uses per day or per encounter. No longer does a Fighter just have to roll to hit an enemy with a sword every round. These "powers" have far simpler descriptions with an average of eight "powers" fitting on a single page.
Though the powers system is dramatic, we have seen similar systems in videogames. The most innovative idea that has been brought to D&D is the "Healing Surges" system. Since players have abilities that recover Hit Points every encounter, wouldn't that mean that the party has access to indefinite healing? No, good sir, because with almost all healing abilities requires the use of the player being healed to expend a Healing Surge. At base, a Healing Surge recovers 1/4 of the player's maximum Hit Points. This base amount is often modified by the healing ability used on them. A player only gets a certain number of Healing Surges per day based upon their class and their constitution score. In my opinion, this is more realistic than any of the previous systems used in D&D. Healing Surges represent the limit of wounds that your body can recover in one day. Hit Points represent your short term health while your Healing Surges represent long term survivability.
They also ditched the Challenge Rating system for a plain experience point label for every creature. This saves a lot of trouble. I was never a fan of the CR system anyway.
SIMPLIFICATION VS. DIVERSITY
What many players have complained about is that it is too much like a video game. Why play a tabletop game that, yes, moves more quickly than it previously did, but doesn't move as fast as World of Warcraft with its no-time-flat calculations and button clicks.
The difference in D&D has always been narrative. You are a part of a story that only you are a part of. Not part of a story that 10 MILLION other players are a part of. Still, should combat feel different from a videogame just for the sake of it feeling different?
I think players are confused when they say that 4th Edition is simpler. Compare a Rogue in 3rd Edition to a Rogue with 17 powers in 4th Edition. The Rogue in 4th Edition is a more rich and capable character, with the exception of its adventuring skills. The 3rd Edition Rogue will always feel more like a character that is the master of out-of-combat events. That aside, the Rogue has more options. The Warlock and Cleric are just as complex as they used to be, the Cleric maybe even more so because of how many actions it can take in one round. The only class that feel truly simplified and hindered by it is the Wizard. Now a Wizard at level 20 has only fifteen spells as opposed to one-hundred. I wouldn't be able to keep track of even half that many spells in 3rd edition, especially with the greater complexity that individual spells had. Even at that, Wizards do feel less capable. Its more than just the lack of complex spells or the overabundance of them. Now that all of the other classes get just about as many powers as they do, they aren't special. They aren't even more capable than them. A 3rd edition Wizard was just as essential to adventuring capabilities as a Rogue . That's not the case anymore. So what should you do? Go back to a 3rd Edition Wizard or just don't pick a Wizard. Maybe put some house rules in place to help it out. I'm sorry, but they broke the Wizard, plain and simple. Low HP, lame armor, weak weapons, and spells that are outpowered by the Cleric make for a class that is extremely unattractive to play.
Aside of the options for powers, classes are not very deep. They don't even gain new ones as they level, which feels kind of wrong. What they have done is given all players 18 feats by level 30. At level 30 you would have had 10 in 3rd edition. This crazy number of feats is to help keep the classes balanced at base. This is not a reduction in complexity, but it is a reduction in diversity.
My basic beef with 4th Edition is that it normalizes too many things. I don't mind balance, but it should be done in more creative ways than just making everyone the same.
It's not a simpler game in combat. Heck, the player has to think more during combat than they ever did. What is simpler are the number of dices rolls, the math, and the simplicity of how everything is defined. Just by the sheer change in wording, spells seem more concrete in three sentences than they ever did with five paragraphs of descriptions. Spells still have less utility than they used to. You can't suck people into other dimensions or cast Wish or do some crazy combo with the spell Contingency. That's where the element of the game feeling like a novel and the game feeling like a MMORPG comes in. That one essential element. That and 4th editions crippled skill system.
The removal of the skill rank system is radical but seems like an obvious move that was much needed. No one with even a little basic knowledge of the skill system put partial skill points into skills. They just put a full number of skills points into as many skills as they could. It is better to be specialized than spread out in 3rd Edition. They have also combined some skills to simplify some skill checks. Search, Spot, and Roll are now Perception and Move Silently and Hide are now Stealth. This is also a move that has been made in Pathfinder, but Pathfinder thought of a skill called "Linguistics" for languages, forgery, and deciphering script. There are also less skills than there were in 3rd Edition, so some people might be missing a few things that they liked.
The problem with the skill system is that the number of skills that a player can learn has been normalized far too much. All players get four skills and some get six. That's it. That's all there is too it. You're intelligence score doesn't matter. This, in my opinion, is bogus. It was a good move to give more skills to the less skillful classes, but reducing the number of skills for the core adventurers is just wrong. There's nothing wrong with having 12 skills. They aren't complicated and all relate back to things you can do in real life. If you can understand them easily and use them easily, why get less of them?
They've introduced a "Skill Challenge" system, which is more for unimaginative DMs and players. If the DM likes skills or the players like skills, the system is moot because skills will be getting used to solve situations no matter what.
PATHFINDER FIXES 3rd EDITION
The martial classes have gotten huge boost. The Barbarian and Rogue gets a set of special abilities to choose from that act like small spells. The Fighter gets new class features every level. The spell-casters still have a lot of spell to choose from, but they have made a balance in what the spells can do.
There are still too many attack rolls per round, but some people like that. Its a part of the simulationist aspect of 3rd edition.
The combat maneuvers, which I never really talked about, are much simpler to execute. It is as simple as one attack roll vs. one score and you've done it. You've disarmed them or grappled them or knocked them over. Not bad considering these are the only real tactical options for Fighters during battle.
They haven't really gotten to the monsters yet. I have no idea if they've made them simpler or not. They're sticking to the challenge rating system, which I was never all that found of.
Races have been beefed up In a different way to 4th Edition. They still give stat penalties and they don't have Racial powers, but they still seem more significant than they did in 3rd Edition, even if it is only by a little.
Feats have become more balanced, notably things like Power Attack and Combat Expertise. This is good because you could create some characters that are regularly dealing more damage with their physical attacks than a Wizard is with his Sphere of Annihilation.
WHO WINS?
Both.
WotC is selling books and Paizo is building up lots of interest for when they finally have a release. Even copies of their Beta are selling extremely well. Paizo the first RPG to even seem comparable to D&D because, well, it still is D&D at heart.
I've played a lot of 3rd Edition and I've been playing 4th Edition. Well, I haven't exactly been playing 4th Edition. I've been playing a weird hybrid of the two with lots and lots of house rules thrown in. That's how we like it. There are many ingenious things done with 4th edition, but we liked the old skill system better and the amount of damage dealt and rolling our saving throws instead of using a static score. We do like only rolling once or twice to attack each round and the radical healing surge system.
It is all a matter of preference if you want to stick to one system or another. One lets you play the game like a novel might play out, the other lets you play the game more like a video game might play out. One is more complicated than the other (kind of). One has more options than the other (kind of). Both are phenomenal in very different ways.
If you've got the money and you like working on your own house rules to manage your tabletop games, buy them both. It would be totally worth your money and you can create the greatest tabletop game ever conceived with a 4th & 3rd edition hybrid.
