Why did I choose Pathfinder?
I have been playing D&D since I got the old-school red box at the age of 12 (I'm 32 now) and had graduated to all the 2nd edition AD&D core books in a matter of months. Countless hours with me and my friends in our main hangout (my best friend's room was a converted garage with its own entrance and very lenient parents, quite the refuge for any adolescent) and many all-nighters.
Growing up and life intruded, as it will, and besides a brief dip into White Wolf's stuff in the mid-90s I didn't do table-top RPGs for a long time, until in 2000 I was working on the phone doing tech support and the guy next to me was reading something about this "New D&D" that was about to come out, I pulled up the page he was looking at and knew that my RPG days were coming back.
By 2003 I had found a dedicated group of gamers that still plays together every 2 out of 3 weekends to this day, and we played many campaigns, the first I played with them was 3.0, then the 2nd 3.5. We then would take turns being DM when the campaign reached its reasonable conclusion or we needed a change of pace.
I found out about Pathfinder from a different gaming group that I would sometimes play with when my main group was on a break, and a friend in that other group was filling out a survey about the release of 4th edition on the WoTC website, filling out the "other comments" section with "if I wanted to play World of Warcraft I would do that, for now me and most people I know are waiting for the release of Pathfinder", I asked him about it and he filled me in and brought up the Paizo website.
About a year ago one of the other guys in my main group was up for running the game, and by the time the core rulebooks for D&D 4th edition had come out each of us had read as much as we could handle of the PHB and each of us decided it was blasphemy of the worst sort.
By this time I had been following the playtest of Pathfinder from Alpha through the actual game's release and bought the PDF version of the Core Rulebook online, and I brought up changing from 3.5 to Pathfinder since I had pretty much memorized all of the changes.
The DM (well, soon-to-be GM) said for me to bring as much Pathfinder stuff as I could find to the pre-muster session before we made characters and the group would decide what we wanted to do, "We've been playing the same game for over 5 years now, a change may be the best thing yet," he said.
Every day I would check the local bookstores (since I always have discount coupons and at the time was living off of unemployment) and finally a few days before the session the Core Rulebook and the Bestiary were there, one copy of each, and I swooped them up and the vote to switch to Pathfinder was unanimous.
That campaign is on probably-permanent hiatus, and I was the next in line to run the game, and I am currently GM-ing a wickedly delicious Golarion campaign and we are all loving every minute of it.
Thank you for keeping this game alive and well, Paizo, you have my eternal gratitude!