Gencon in Review
I was treated to a short adventure of my own on my way home from Gencon: my return flight was evidently booked for September 16, instead of August 16. Of course, with a hundred thousand gamers leaving Indianapolis on Sunday, all of the flights out were fully booked. Fortunately, a ticketing agent for Continental went beyond the call of duty and managed to get me on a flight out on standby. I regret to say that I didn’t get his name. I can only say that I was a bit stressed at the time. Still, I’m very grateful and will definitely keep Continental in mind for next year. I’ll also keep a certain ticket-brokering website in mind, in a less favorable light.
Enough about me, though. I’ve got a couple of impressions about the convention to report about. Some of them might merit further discussion later on, but best to get the bullet points down now, while it’s fresh.
This post is part of August’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Chgowiz.
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Pathfinder Sells Out
Is it just me, or does that wizard look like the same one who's on the 4e PHB cover, aside from the hair color?
According to Paizo, as of Monday, their Pathfinder game’s core rulebook has sold out its first printing. Now, this is mostly distributor orders — not actual sales — and there’s no indication of how large the first print run is. Still, it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment. I suspected that the initial sales would be very strong, and I hope it’ll bring people to the hobby, and not be confined to the existing 3.5 audience.
I have my doubts, though.
I haven’t seen the final revision of the rules, obviously, but the beta was not promising. While the stated intent of the developers was to address some of the problems of 3.5e, and in particular to make melee characters a more viable choice, I found that the beta did the exact opposite — spellcasters were given a variety of bonuses. Some problem spells were addressed, like Glitterdust and death spells, but there remained a wide variety of “I remove the enemy from combat” spells — including some new ones added by Paizo. Fighters, on the other hand, were given more bonus feats… but they also need to spend more feats in order to achieve the same effect they used to get from a single one. For instance, the +4 from Improved Disarm? That takes two feats in Pathfinder.
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