Mirror, Mirror

So tomorrow I play my first Pathfinder game.
I am playing it with the kids, so it is not the same group as my 4e game.

But I am going to play the same character.

This of course will raise a cry from my GM saying "but you always play the same character".  This is true, to a degree.  Most often I am "playtesting" the same character and I hold it as my constant amid a sea of variables.  In this case I am not playtesting, but I am testing something, or somethings.

First I want to know exactly how this two versions of D&D differ from each other.  There are factions on both sides claiming that "Game X" is "Teh one true way!!"  I feel rather that they are two different interpretations of the same thing (that will get me comments).  But the only way I am going to get that is to play the same (or very similar) characters.  But which character to choose.

IF I were paying attention and planned this out I might have chosen a Paladin or Cleric.  Both have had rather large changes to them over the years and it would be a nice bit a symmetry to my first D&D character, who was a cleric and then I played his son, a paladin, as my first AD&D character.  
But in truth I wanted to play my witch.

I have written a lot about witches over the years and with me through all of that has been one character.  I use her in all my playtest and I have been using her a lot lately.  Plus both games offer, for the first time, a witchy-like character as a published choice and not something I have had to make up on my own.

In Pathfinder she is a witch, using the new witch class from their playtest.  Now I have a 3.x witch class and it is different than what Pathfinder has.    But I think it will work out well enough.

In D&D 4 she is a Fey-Pact Warlock.  Not a perfect fit mind you, but it is working out well enough too, for different reasons.

I am working making their skills similar to each other, taking similar spells, powers and feats.  Since these are all being driven from a central character concept this is really not that big of deal.  See, I can do high-level "role-playing" and the rules are only a manifestation of how my concept appears.

So if I am judging these games on how well they fit a concept I guess I could start now.
I am not ready to get into a lot of detail yet (no time today), but here are the basics.
- Pathfinder witch:  Has the mystery and background concept to fit the character well.
- D&D 4 warlock: Fey pact is a bit of a stretch really, but none of the other pacts are any better.  The powers though of the warlock are a better fit in some cases.  Maybe I need a new pact to make this work, but that violates the "rules" and making up for this (create nothing new).

So concept-wise the initial round goes to Pathfinder with only a slight lead, but D&D4 is rather close.
If I add some of the stuff from the newer books such as backgrounds then it is very, very close.  The biggest flaw in D&D4 is the Fey Pact is not what I wanted exactly.

Tomorrow is the true test.