Pathfinder 1E Hints welcome

[Dannyalcatraz]

Out of the blue, one of the guys in our group asked me about Pathfinder. As in, wanting to borrow some of the books.

Assuming he's interested in running a game, I need to know:

1) what are the MAJOR differences between PF and 3.5Ed

2) given my taste for oddball PCs AND his preference for limiting player source material, what are some fun things I can contemplate?

 

[Gorgoroth]

As long as you can use the advanced guides and the ultimate X books, you should realistically never run out of viable archetypes to try out. Pathfinder rocks in that way.

An oddball PC to try is the synthesist, but I'd work with the DM in that case to limit your evolution points or house rule it to not be so OP. I played one once in an off-game and I completely p0wned the big set piece battle. The rest of the group was getting creamed and I was just flying around everywhere, doing an insane number of attacks and just making the enemies run in terror. Not very balanced. But then again, a normal summoner is even more powerful, due to better action economy. It is very, very cool to build a summoner from the player side, and was one of the most interesting things I've done in Pathfinder.

Alchemists are also very cool / powerful, especially the beastmorph ones. Sick, sick stuff. In some ways, they are better barbarians than barbarians, due solely to the number of rounds you can be morphed vs rage and the benefits thereof are easier to maintain. They should seriously buff up the barbarian rage rounds or limit the mutagen durations to match each other.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

No guarantees on sourcebook selection- when he ran 3.5Ed, his usual method was each player got to design PCs using the PHB + any 2 of the Completes, no Psionics.

 

[Wycen]

Out of the blue, one of the guys in our group asked me about Pathfinder. As in, wanting to borrow some of the books.

Assuming he's interested in running a game, I need to know:

1) what are the MAJOR differences between PF and 3.5Ed

2) given my taste for oddball PCs AND his preference for limiting player source material, what are some fun things I can contemplate?

1. Major changes. Hmm. Well, there are several changes that affect combat, but I guess the biggest is Combat Maneuvers. Now you also have to calculate Combat Maneuver Bonus and Defense for grappling, bullrushing, tripping, that kinda stuff. Can still be confusing but organization is certainly better.

Another combat change, monsters immune to crits in 3.5 aren't necessarily immune anymore. You can sneak attack skeletons, but you can't sneak attack incorporeal creatures. Also, incorporeality no longer requires you to essentially hit twice. If you hit, you just do half damage (read this one on your own because we haven't needed to use it in over a year so my memory could be wrong).

Classes have been tweaked. Some get cool stuff from this like sorcerers. Others, like the bard, may have had certain abilities nerfed, but having never played a Pathfinder bard and it being nearly a decade since playing a 3E version, I can't tell the difference.

When you die, if you are lucky enough to come back to life, the negative consequences are a temporary hindrance - you no longer lose levels/experience points.

You get less skill ranks, but they have somewhat streamlined things like Perception replacing Listen, Search and Spot. This is one thing I'd like to sit down and compare level to level as far as DC's are concerned. Are the DC's for a 5th level adventure made for 3.5 easily compatible with the DC's for a Pathfinder created adventure? Dunno.

2. Well, with the Core book and Advanced Players Guide you'll have an opportunity to make plenty of characters. You'll have to determine what oddball is. If you start adding in the Advanced Race Guide, well, your DM should probably just smack you right now and say "no, bad!" because you can build wacky stuff since it has a race building system. I would not recommend adding in too many of the other hardbound books until you are all comfortable with the Core/Advanced Players Guide content. But in this I'm coming from a place where I've essentially dropped out of a game because the DM shouldn't really be running the game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm somewhat familiar with the PF Sorc...some good ideas.

Any major differences in multiclassing?

 

[paradox42]

Big change in skills: no more HD+3 limit (skill ranks are limited to a number equal to character level/HD) and more importantly, no more half-ranks. Spending on cross-class skills gives you a full rank just like spending on class skills does. The only difference between them now is, class skills- regardless of which class actually gave them to you- give you a +3 bonus if you have at least 1 rank in them. Makes the math much easier to do on the fly, but it makes for radically different power distribution in solving skill challenges (this was one of the big things that effectively hit Rogues with the nerf-bat- their skill points are no longer so powerful compared against other classes), and a GM used to 3.5 or 3.0 is going to look at monster/NPC stats and go "Huh?"

Multiclassing no longer hits you with any sort of XP penalty. You can just do it. Cross-class skills no longer matter for this, for the reason detailed above; what matters now is that class skills from your new class that were not already class skills for your character will start to give you the same +3 bonus if you're trained.

Favored Classes no longer happen by race, instead the player just picks one at 1st level and it gives you a little bonus each time you take a level in the favored class (standard choice is 1 hit point or 1 skill point, but others exist). Race CAN affect this if you use the advanced race rules introduced in APG (Advanced Players Guide) and (vastly) expanded upon in ARG (Advanced Races Guide): each race lists new benefits it can grant characters of that race who pick specific favored classes. For example, a Human who picks Sorcerer as his Favored Class can take the hit point, the skill point, or gain one spell known from the Sorcerer spell list (as long as it's at least one spell level below the highest spell level the character can cast). The third option is the one from the race. By contrast, a Half-Orc who picks Sorcerer as the favored class gets "Add +1/2 to Fire spell damage" as that third option instead, which means you have to take the benefit twice (that is, using two level-ups) to see a change. If he does, he gets +1 damage to every spell he casts that has the Fire descriptor.

Regarding book selection, if the GM here prefers small selection, my advice would be to limit things to Core+APG+the two Ultimate books (Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat). That gives you every base class that Paizo has published for Pathfinder, and a wide selection of spells, feats, and Archetypes. With just those four, you could play for a lifetime and not run out of options.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Thanks, all! That gives me something to work with.

(Feel free to keep adding any other suggestions.)

 

[Dykstrav]

Just a thought...

I don't know if I'd count it as a "major" difference, but one of the things I really like about Pathfinder is how the skills are consolidated. For instance, Balance, Jump, and Tumble were all folded into the Acrobatics skill. Hide and Move Silently are now Stealth, Open Lock was subsumed into Disable Device, Gather Information was subsumed into Diplomacy, and so forth.

Narrowing the skill list into fewer skills that can accomplish more was sort of awesome, I think. It makes players a bit more interested in skills because they have broader uses, and it slightly increases the power of characters but not in a broken way. The revised skills have by and far been one of the things I'm enjoying the most about Pathfinder, even if it's a more subtle change than, say, the Combat Maneuvers.

 

[Jester David]

The Combat Maneuvers change is the most interesting in my mind. It unifies the oddball mechanics and also adds some new ones (in the Advanced Player's Guide). But it also works lovely as a stunt roll. Want to try something odd or unique, something cinematic but not quite covered in the rules. Roll a d20 and add your CMB.

 

[Empirate]

As usual, there's a handbook for that. "That" being the major changes from 3.5 to Pathfinder. A very useful read.