... here are its contents:
"Gamers,
First of all, some of you will have noticed that there is a new name in the gaming email address list. [EMAIL1] is [NAME1], who lives in Louisville. He is not a part of our regular D&D crowd, but some of you know him. He is a BIGTIME GAMER from way back. [NAME1], I have included you in our D&D email because I think that you may find this idea interesting as well.
I am proposing that we abandon D&D 3.5 and move to the Pathfinder game instead. [NAME 2] suggested that some time ago, and now [NAME 3] has been become a believer in Pathfinder as well. He convinced me to check it out, and I have to say that Pathfinder looks great. It has a lot of advantages over 3.5, especially at higher levels. But it doesn't require a whole new learning curve. It keeps everything that was good about 3.5 , but cleans up a lot of the inconsistencies and "broken" rules, like the polymorph rules. Some people have called it D&D 3.75, and I think that is a good analogy.
One of the big advantages of it is that it is a living game. By that I mean, there are still people out there that are actively writing new material for it, like new dungeons and new campaign source material. It is VERY popular at GenCon, with a large room dedicated just to it. Plus it fixed a lot of the rules problems that show up as you get into the higher levels of play. I am sure that the other DMs will agree with me that some of the rules go completely out of control as you get past 10th to 12th level. Some of the spells get crazy, like the aforementioned polymorph spells, plus others in that same vein, like the druid's Wildshape. And eventually the spell casters leave the other characters behind in combat effectiveness, unless the DM seriously restricts them with house rules.
I will admit that I am not yet fully conversant with the Pathfinder rules. But I am encouraged by the fact that they were created by players who saw the problems listed above, and set out to fix them. And they are constantly working to further refine the rules into a system that works at all levels. From what I have seen, the regular flow of the game is the same as 3.5, so it won't be hard to adjust our gameplay to the new rules. And the rules are consistent with 3.5, so all of the old 3.5 campaign supplements and other background info books will still be useful for our DMs.
But the character generation and level progression rules are substantially different in places. It gives a lot of incentives to keep your character as a single class. Multiclassing and prestige classes are much less attractive in Pathfinder. But there are a lot of options to customize your character within the classes. So every barbarian is not like every other barbarian, as under the 3.5 rules. And like wise with the other classes. There are enough options within classes to make everyone unique.
But that brings up the major problem with changing from 3.5 to Pathfinder. Since the character generation and level progressions are so different, it is very hard (but not impossible) to convert a high level 3.5 character to Pathfinder. If we change to Pathfinder, we will likely need to start all over again at first level. The DMs will likely breathe a sigh of relief at that thought, since we have been hard pressed to keep ahead of the increasingly godlike characters as they go past 10th level. But it will mean saying goodbye to characters that we have invested a lot of time and thought into. That is not an easy thing to do. But I really believe that those high level characters have already reached the point where 3.5 can't keep up any longer.
So I would like to know how distressed everyone would be if they had to give up their 11th to 12th level characters and start over again with new 1st level characters. I am not sure how the other DMs would handle it. But I would restart my campaign in Cormyr again, since I am already so familiar with it. All of your 3.5 Ravenloft characters would become NPCs. Maybe your new low level characters would be hired by your old NPC characters to do some work in the Hullack Forest. Your new characters would hear tales of the heroic exploits of the Lords of Ravenloft, and how they destroyed the undead menace and lycanthropes that had plagued the forest for generations. Your new characters could only dream of reaching such heights of glory!"