For those of You who were left wanting by 4th Edition, this week at GenCon,
Paizo (former publishers of
Dragon and
Dungeon magazines), released the public beta of their OGL-based
Pathfinder Role Playing Game!
PfRPG is based on D&D 3.5 but aims to address some of 3.5's quirks while maintaining legacy compatibility with the vast library of OGL & 3.5 resources already in publication. The beta is a free download and has already gone thru 3 public alphas earlier this year. Playtesting has already commenced with the final handbook due in August of 2009.
I've decided to use PfRPG for my own upcoming campaign. For playtesting purposes we will be using point-buy for ability scores and static HP gains to cut down on the number of variables that need to be considered. Since optimizing even an Epic Fantasy point-buy is tricky, I created an MS Excel spreadsheet to help players figure out their ability scores. The spreadsheet is preset to 25 points, but this can be changed by unhiding the xPointBuy sheet and editing the number of points available.
