Pathfinder only exists because people weren't wanting to let go. Paizo had been debating on converting to 4th edition, but WotC were dragging their feet so they went to Mr Jacobs and got his revision (house rules) and decided to publish that.
This is actually incorrect. Golarion was James Jacobs' campaign setting, but the Pathfinder ruleset came out of Jason Bulmahn's revision of 3.5 rules.
When Jason returned from D&D Experience, he laid out all the information that he had gleaned. From the moment that 4th Edition had been announced, we had trepidations about many of the changes we were hearing about. Jason's report confirmed our fears—4th Edition didn't look like the system we wanted to make products for. Whether a license for 4E was forthcoming or not, we were going to create our own game system based on the 3.5 SRD: The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. And we were already WAY behind schedule.
Thankfully, Jason had started to experiment with an alternative 3.5 rules system in Fall 2007. It was initially a lark that Jason was hoping he might be able to sell as a PDF somewhere down the road to the inevitable fans of the 3.5 ruleset that weren't going to 4E. He had dubbed the project Mon Mothma. Early in 2008, Jason had presented this document to us, a revision that added a variety of new options to a ruleset we already had experience and comfort with. Knowing the future was uncertain, we encouraged him to start turning his ideas into a complete, coherent rules set.
Pathfinder only exists because people weren't wanting to let go. Paizo had been debating on converting to 4th edition, but WotC were dragging their feet so they went to Mr Jacobs and got his revision (house rules) and decided to publish that.This is actually incorrect. Golarion was James Jacobs' campaign setting, but the Pathfinder ruleset came out of Jason Bulmahn's revision of 3.5 rules.
When Jason returned from D&D Experience, he laid out all the information that he had gleaned. From the moment that 4th Edition had been announced, we had trepidations about many of the changes we were hearing about. Jason's report confirmed our fears—4th Edition didn't look like the system we wanted to make products for. Whether a license for 4E was forthcoming or not, we were going to create our own game system based on the 3.5 SRD: The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. And we were already WAY behind schedule.
Thankfully, Jason had started to experiment with an alternative 3.5 rules system in Fall 2007. It was initially a lark that Jason was hoping he might be able to sell as a PDF somewhere down the road to the inevitable fans of the 3.5 ruleset that weren't going to 4E. He had dubbed the project Mon Mothma. Early in 2008, Jason had presented this document to us, a revision that added a variety of new options to a ruleset we already had experience and comfort with. Knowing the future was uncertain, we encouraged him to start turning his ideas into a complete, coherent rules set.
Thank you for providing the link to the blog. That's the one I was referring to, but my brain "remembered" James instead of Jason, so that's the reason for my mistake.
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Mike Mearls said that around 100,000 people playtested 5E. I don't think that many playtested 4E. So a lot of issues got hashed out before the Player's Handbook came out. A few issues remain and the conflict is mainly around healing, melee damage on a miss, cantrips at will, and a few other things.
DMG will likely fix many of those issues with module options. Heck, it is even going to offer THAC0.
Also, any person can talk to Mike Mearls and the D&D team on Twitter. If enough people want a change they have said they will do a mini-playtest to test any possible rule changes in the future that change the existing rules.
Better communication from the current designers seems to help keep the fans civil.
The reason it doesn't seem too "edition war-y" to me is because among my large pool of tabletop gamer friends, none of them have cared to pay any attention at all to the fact that there's a new edition of D&D even out. It's a relatively irrelevant game in my neck of the woods compared to things like Pathfinder, Numenera, etc...
