It's up on WotC's site as an official announcement here. And not just straight reprints, but premium edition reprints.
This is a smart move. I can honestly say I think I'd prefer the more structured and less inflated (ironically!) mechanics of a good core 3.5 ruleset with a choice selection of splatbooks and add-ons over Pathfinder. Don't get me wrong, Pathfinder is good, but it's design bumped up player power by a noticeable margin without doing a lot to also bump up the equivalent challenge levels of monsters. I have also never liked the increased rate of feat acquisition in Pathfinder. I do, however, love the way Pathfinder manages skill ranks so I'd probably houserule that into a 3.5 game.
Also, and this may sound petty, but I really do prefer playing the game with the official stats for mind flayers, beholders, githyanki and other D&D icons. Call me shallow, but...well...SHALLOW! Now gimme!
So yeah....going to be pre-ordering these new editions ASAP (saves me my eternal ebay search for the pefect set that's also at a decent price; an impossibility for 3.5 edition books!)
POSTSCRIPT: After comparing and studying the Pathfinder books and the D&D 3.5 material online, I realize that Pathfinder really is, by and large, still a pretty decent progression of the system on its own. Funny, but I'd never noticed how much nicer the PF art is compared to the 3.5 art until directly comparing the two (at least in the core books).
Anyway, I'm not sure having mind-flayer stats, beholder stuff and so forth is quite worth the price of these premium editions, but from a collector's standpoint I think I would like to have them. A shame WotC can't actually produce their own direct sequel to 3.5 (as opposed to what they actually did do with 4E, which was an entirely different game system that coincidentally shared some mechanical relationships and existed in the same general world-space). I'd be keen to see what sort of organic development a hypothetical 3.5 would look like if someone worked it over in a way that kept the 3.5 core intact while trying to address issues with it. Pathfinder, of course, does that but maybe in a way that feels a bit less like a "fix" and a bit more like a "work-around."
I for one am excited. I do prefer playing with the official rules and books for D&D 3.5. I tried converting to Pathfinder and it felt... wrong. Not because Pathfinder is a bad system, it just has it's own feel and it's own appeal. I couldn't do it. But as you said, searching for decent original printings online is a pain. And I'm tired of scribbling out some other jerks name from the inside cover.
ReplyDeleteI was angry with Wizards over 4E. Now I am very happy with them once again.
They are really nice reprints, and have all the errata, it seems (or at least seems like it to me). I'd rather run them over Pathfinder....the system is tighter, I realize, and the Pathfinder math on progression just feels overblown and off compared to straight 3.5. And like you said, its nice to get copies with no one's names in them!
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