| abstract | - Jason Bulmahn, Lead Designer for Paizo's Pathfinder brand, began work on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game in October 2007. Because of the flaws in the 3.5 rules set were now being acknowledged by both fans and the developers at Wizards of the Coast, Jason set out to develop a revised version of the existing rules available under the OGL to fix these problems and improve play without starting from scratch and negating three decades of Dungeons & Dragons history. Bulmahn kept several goals in mind when creating the Pathfinder RPG to maintain a focus in the daunting task. One primary goal of designing the Pathfinder RPG was to make the game easier to play for anyone continuing with the current rules set. While the 3.5 rules set is arguably the most thorough incarnation of the world's most popular roleplaying game, it is not without its inherent design flaws. Whether it is game imbalance between classes, confusing mechanics or complicated spells, there seemed to be plenty of room for improvement without throwing everything away and starting from scratch. Due to the various supplementary rules released since 3rd Edition was first announced, many of the core classes became relatively underpowered. Since the Pathfinder RPG would be limited to Open Gaming content, many of these options simply wouldn't be available for inclusion in the revised rules. In order to give players the incentive to use the core classes, and to promote backwards compatibility (see below) additional build options and power increases were provided to all 11 core classes. One of the primary inspirations for creating the Pathfinder RPG in the first place was to prevent existing gamers from finding shelves of 3rd Edition materials suddenly obsolete. To wit, the new system had to be compatible with the products released previously by Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and any other publisher operating under the OGL. While conversion would be inevitable for almost any pre-Pathfinder RPG source, making this process as simple and seamless as possible was also a major goal of Bulmahn and the Paizo development team.
|
