Why I Chose Pathfinder Over 4th Edition

In 2004 I started playing Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. At the time, I was working for Wizards of the Coast as a member of their Delegate Program, and got the core books for free. I had been out of RPG's for a few years at that point, after playing White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension through most of the 1990's. My last experience with DnD at that point was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition, so I missed a lot of the problems that I had heard about with the 3.0 version of the game. So in late 2004, I decided to start a game up with my wife, and some friends. It was there that my home brew fantasy world, Alarn was created.
 
Alarn had three different incarnations, coinciding with various groups of people I had playing. The first was lots of fun, but after my second group disbanded in June of 2006, I picked up World of Warcraft. In late 2008, I was playing WoW with some friends Brandy and Jason who had heard that I was a Dungeon Master. After some cajoling they talked me into running a game for them. After getting a few other players involved, we started playing. I think that this third incarnation is when I really came into my own as a Dungeon Master, when I finally, after so many years of playing games, really understood what it was to craft a story for a group of people. I learned that it was not an adversarial relationship, but one that was shared storytelling. I may have been the Dungeon Master, but I was still a player in the game, albeit with a much larger selection of roles.
 
After playing for a year or so, one of my players came to me and asked if we could change to Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. I balked at first, having heard horror stories of the weaknesses of 4th Edition, but decided to give the books a read. I bought the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Masters Guide, and gave it a read, and I was not impressed. While each class was thematically different, they were not separated very well. Each had various actions that you could do, and damage you could deal, but whether it was called magic or ranged or melee it all felt the same. It felt so much like what we were doing in World of Warcraft, in the fact that it felt like all we were doing was managing cooldowns, that I didn't want to switch. Lastly, I decided not to switch since we were in the middle of a long term campaign. One that continued until they reached 21st level in May of 2011.
 
Around that same time, I had been turned on to Paizo's Pathfinder by a friend of mine online, and after picking up the Core Rulebook I found that it solved a lot of problems that I had with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 such as opposed rolls and skill points. Once again I was faced with a choice, would I stick with Wizards of the Coast, and 4th Edition, or switch to Pathfinder and the young upstart Paizo. In the end, as you are no doubt aware due to the title I chose for this blog, I chose Pathfinder. I felt that Pathfinder took all the things I liked about Dungeons and Dragons and enhanced them, whereas 4th Edition changed things so dramatically to make it feel like it wasn't Dungeons and Dragons anymore. It felt more like playing World of Warcraft, and that wasn't fun for me.
 
In the end, I feel like it was the right choice. My players (Brandy, Jason, Amber, Jeff and John) seem happy with the system, and I have not had to teach them anything that they didn't know before. One thing I have enjoyed from Pathfinder is the Adventure Path's. These are like standard adventures, but much longer, something Wizards of the Coast experimented with late in the development of 3.5 with things like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde. We are about halfway through Paizo's Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, something I plan on discussing in future editions of Yellow Dragon Lair.