Pathfinder 1E What Made You Switch To Pathfinder?

[discosoc]

Pathfinder had traction, so even though it was just a 'better than nothing' solution, I was never that fond of it. I honestly think it was really only successful because 4e was bad. Unfortunately, the rules just kept getting more and more bloated, so I'm not really seeing many groups play it anymore.

 

[Shasarak]

The main reason I had to switch to Pathfinder was all of the people on the WotC forums who told me how good it was.

 

[ARMR]

Me and my friends got so disheartened with 4e... And 3.5 was a jumbled broken mess, we saw Pathfinder as a godsend.

 

[UrbanSniper69]

Interestingly enough, I first switched from 3.X to Pathfinder because of D&D 4E. I hated what I saw when it first launched, and just didn't have the slightest bit of interest in playing it after reading through the PHB. Everything felt the same, not at all like what I was looking for. Pathfinder felt comfortable, familiar, especially since I'd been playing 3E since it launched.

Most recently, I switched back to Pathfinder from D&D 5E (within the last two weeks, after playing 5E for about a year). Pretty much everyone was just starting to feel fatigued with 5E and its lack of new products that weren't adventures, while Paizo kept up with a steady flow of new stuff. Granted, Pathfinder is pretty bloated now, but I can generally find something I'm looking for without homebrewing it like I had to do with 5E, and with the various classes and class archetypes (many more than 5E currently has), the player characters feel a lot less samey than they were getting to be in 5E. Literally, the last three campaigns we had with 5E always had at least 1 or 2 paladin/sorcerer builds, along with at least 1 or 2 players with at least 3 levels of barbarian, with nobody ever touching a ranger. Customization is a big thing for me too, and getting to spread skill points around and being amazing at some things and okay or kinda bad at others just feels so much better.

 

[GreenFiend]

Archetypes and racial traits: being able to customize a character without feeling that I'm sacrificing effectiveness for the sake of roleplaying.

 

[Hereticus]

Archetypes and racial traits: being able to customize a character without feeling that I'm sacrificing effectiveness for the sake of roleplaying.

You hit on two of three of our cardinal rules...
1) Be cooperative
2) Be interesting
3) Be effective

 

[Aloïsius]

WotC decided that there would be no translation of D&D 5. Thus, our group use Pathfinder, as support for 3.5 has ended a long time ago.

 

[CaptainGemini]

I can make a healing shiv that does exactly one point more of healing than it does damage and stab someone to health. And it's not too strange compared to everything else in the setting.

 

[PurpleDragonKnight]

Hey there, PDK from the Paizo boards here... I thought I'd come over and see who visits these parts. Long live Pathfinder!

 

[ccs]

The group switched to using PF as the core mechanics when it launched because we see it as a general improvement on 3.x

Concerning 4e: While true that we dont like 4e, we didn't switch to PF, or any other system/edition, because of that dislike. (We were already playing multiple editions when 4e launched. Still are.) Rather we simply decided (after almost 2 years) that 4e wasn't the system for us & that when the campaign wrapped that we just wouldn't play it again.