4E to Pathfinder - what is it like? What do you miss? Pleasant surprises?

[Saint Mac]

You know, you are getting some great info on this thread. After re-reading, I thought jbear and the others pointed out some things that are worth noting.

Death. Please note that Pathfinder APs have random events that can wipe a party out (little twerps lol). So use your best judgement or at least make sure there's an "out" when first playing in lower levels. 4E has healing surges, Path assumes that your party has an adventuring sense to have healing potions Jbear mention getting knocked prone. Yah, he's speaking the truth on that one! But if you are concerned about it being too much of a learning curve, houserule it!

I was also thinking of you as a DM making the transition. Can I suggest something to you? Because I was going from 3.5 to 4E to Path, I was nervous about all the rules. I had the benefit of playing 3.5 which made it a bit easier, but I still did this. I sat done with both the 4E and Path core books. Opened to the Fighter class and compared JUST what made them fighters. I looked at what they "got" at first level and then continued to level 5 in each book. This helped a lot. I did not focus on feats or anything but how they fought and progressed. Then I went to, oh man am I going to get hate mail on this, the more challenging classes like the wizard and did the same. ONLY then did I look at movements and feats and spells. After that, I looked at what the H*ll is CMB

When you do it this way you will probably notice something. PF does two things that stand out. The characters are "beefier" and they really give something to the player at each level (one of things that make it 3.590384 instead of 3.5). You can also make a test characters and try killing him off with wolf or goblin to get a feel of it.

I'm honestly not trying to sound like a big brother on this, but remember this is YOUR game. I've ran games that, had you sat there listening, would appear more like a 1E game. ALL the editions and such can be run this way, its the old story vs strategy thing. Seriously, if movement rules bother you, all squares can be the same value, call them squares instead of feet for that matter. If Opp Attacks or prone recovery mess with you, drop them and help a rogue out in another way. If player levelling feels slow, use the "fast path" point levels. Its your game, have fun, the rules will settle into place as you go. Promise.

 

[Saint Mac]

I would skip Kingmaker as a first run with your group. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED it, but its tough enough running a new system with a group and adding a sandbox world makes it harder. I agree with you, an AP will help you as a DM/GM to make the transition. Would suggest Rise of the Runelords (they are going to put it all together and re-release if you're not in a rush).

 

[Mercurius]

Thanks again, Saint Mac - you're my Pathfinder guru (or saint? ;-).

I think what I'm going to do is this: read through the Beginner's Box, play the solo adventure. Then I'm going to make a couple characters, and read through core a bit (I already own core, beginner's box, gamemastery guide, and a bunch of setting stuff). I'll probably purchase a few first modules of appealing Adventure Paths and read through them, if only for ideas.

No, I'm not in a hurry - I probably wouldn't start DMing it until about the time the Runelords book comes out, so that might be a good idea (although my sense is that it isn't too difficult to run Pathfinder characters in a 3.5 adventure?). Serpent's Skull and Legacy of Fire also sound appealing to me, so I might try one of those (although the reviews of SS later on aren't so great, but the "find the lost city in the jungle" theme was similar to what I had planned).

I also do own the first book of Kingmaker but haven't read it. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I'll be wary of starting with it. Maybe after running the short adventure in the Beginner's Box?

I'll come back to this thread throughout the process and re-read advice given, maybe occasionally post questions.

 

[Mercurius]

I've read the BB but not played it yet. It seems to me that the BB game is very simple, smooth, and should be easy to play and run. I'm also worried about the complexity of the full game, I'd think the best approach was to bring in additional elements gradually, not all at once, and assess if they cause problems or slow the game down.

Is it just me or is Pathfinder (and 3.5) easier to house rule and "port in and out" rules elements than 4E? 4E is so tightly designed and balanced that changing it is a bit like playing pick-up sticks - move one part and you risk effecting everything. I'm wondering if I could start with the BB and, as you say, gradually bring in other elements, and maybe even add in a couple things I liked from 4E like--gasp!--healing surges, maybe Action Points, perhaps at-wills for spellcasters.

 

[Dragonblade]

I played 4e for two years when it came out. Then played Pathfinder for the past year and currently still play it. For combat rules, I far prefer 4e, but Pathfinder has some good points as well and does seem to encourage RP a bit more.

My biggest dislikes about 4e were fiddly commoditized magic items and uniformity of class structure.

But once I started playing Pathfinder, combat at least felt a lot more confining to me than 4e combat. A lot of petty little rules that seem engineered to stop you from ever doing anything cool. As a result, I started picking up my 4e books again and fell in love with it all over. Though I still enjoy playing PF, I'm looking forward to getting back to 4e with our next game.

Here are the things I disliked about playing Pathfinder having played it and 4e quite extensively:

Save or lose spells - Paizo toned down some things, but nothing frustrated me more than failing a save and basically sitting out the game. After playing 4e and getting a save every round this was a bitter pill to swallow. I'm currently negotiating with my Pathfinder DM about incorporating a save every round house rule of some kind.

CMB rules are fiddly and frustrating - One thing I loved about 4e is if you use a power that lets you slide an enemy, or grab them or something, you just do it. But in PF, anytime you want to do anything like that you have to make a CMB check and most monsters have so many modifiers to their roll success is pretty rare. Likewise, any monster that has a grapple attack usually has such an insane CMB bonus, that escape is impossible. That's really stupid.

Crit confirmation - I thought it was stupid in 3e and just as stupid in PF. Let people enjoy rolling their nat 20 for crying out loud.

Diagonal double counting - Even the pro-PF guys unanimously decided to adopt the 4e rule in our PF games so this ceased to be an issue.

Cascading buffs and debuffs - We are back to the 3e style of uber buffing, then getting ability damaged or drained, or dispelled and having to then recalc our bonuses and stuff. Its such a pain.

Wizards with crossbows - Ugh. I don't play a wizard, but if I did this would the first thing on my house rule discussion with me DM. Some sort of at-will magical attack I can always do.

You have to have a cleric - Seriously, so many monsters inflict diseases, curses, ability drain or damage, blindness, or what have you that literally our DM provided an NPC cleric to follow the party around and remove afflictions and heal after every fight. Until he provided that, we had several encounters end in TPK's where the following conversation took place:

DM: "I can't believe you guys died."
Players: "Well, the fighter had his strength drained to 6. The wizard is permanently blind from the last encounter, and the rest of party failed their saves and were either paralyzed or cowering in fear with no way to recover."
DM: "Well, lets do that over guys, I didn't mean to kill you all."

So of course we now start every fight back at full health. No different than 4e really, except we didn't need an NPC cleric on auto-follow...

DM prep - We have gone through 3 PF DMs over the past year, all of them getting burned out for various reasons. Our current PF DM spends about 6 hours of prep time to run us through a 3 hour session. We are currently playing Serpent's Skull. He took over after our last DM got burned out and quit DMing. Ironic since he was one of the big PF advocates who wanted to stop playing 4e and run through a Paizo AP. Anyway, our current DM's prep time involves reading ahead, but mostly looking up all the feats and spells that all the enemies have in their stat block, and calculating out what they would like have pre-cast before the party finds them. He also relies heavily on his laptop and d20pfsrd.com at the game table.

But its not all negative. Once we get into playing, we can usually overlook the 3e baggage that PF failed to fix and actually enjoy the sessions. The APs themselves are amazing, and unlike 4e, I do feel like I can make a richer more detailed PC in Pathfinder. At least on paper.

And though I like how 4e combat runs much better than PF combat, I do feel that 4e tended to focus a bit too much on combat. I also think Paizo fixed a lot of the bad stuff in 3e, like fixing Polymorph.

So overall, while I still prefer 4e, I don't mind playing PF and have fun in our sessions. Paizo really has made the definitive 3.x version of D&D for me. I sold all my 3e stuff and now would only use Paizo's stuff when playing that edition with one exception. I still have my Tome of Battle. Its my favorite 3e book of all time.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

After not really playing 3.5 for awhile I jumped into a level 7 game and was paralyzed by all of the rules at first. Definitely start at level 1 if at all possible. After playing a few games try to read the whole core book front to back once. Then the game should start to feel much easier. I notice rules-savvy players are dramatically more powerful than casual players who don't fully understand their powers. PF rocks but it is definitely D&D for the hardcore crowd.

If you're a really good 4E dm (use page 42 and emphasize terrain) that should make for some awesome PF combats.

 

[Lwaxy]

With the adventure paths, you should keep in mind that some of them are better placed in order because they reference some things from the earlier ones. I've at least seen this once and suppose that's not the only time (RotRL NPCs referenced in SD)

 

[S'mon]

Is it just me or is Pathfinder (and 3.5) easier to house rule and "port in and out" rules elements than 4E? 4E is so tightly designed and balanced that changing it is a bit like playing pick-up sticks - move one part and you risk effecting everything. I'm wondering if I could start with the BB and, as you say, gradually bring in other elements, and maybe even add in a couple things I liked from 4E like--gasp!--healing surges, maybe Action Points, perhaps at-wills for spellcasters.

With 3e I had very bad experiences when I tried to house-rule it; even something seemingly minor like allowing 3pp splatbooks could break the game. It felt very brittle - a big shock to me, I was used to 1e's dissociated mechanics. I've found 4e actually a lot more robust and accepting of house ruling.

But I think taking the streamlined Beginner Box and gradually adding elements offers the possibility of avoiding the brittleness problem.

 

[Tallifer]

Recently I have been unable to play with the Fourth Edition. The only current games I can find where I live are Pathfinder and 3.5 Birthright.

Wow. After playing AD&D many many years ago, and now the Fourth Edition with the benefit of a Character Builder, the Third Edition is overwhelmingly complicated for me. Huge spell lists, huge skill lists, huge lists of everything and a huge catalogue of books upon which to draw.

Pathfinder less so at this stage i its development, although most of the players keep petitioning to allow various feats and stuff from the 3.5 books since they are compatible.

However. When we are actually playing the game. I notice almost no differences at all. Combat is just as varied and just as lengthy as in Fourth. The same roles of defender, leader, controller and striker appear. The same skills are just divided more finely, but the Athletic person has most of the athletic sub-skills for example.

It gives me hope that the Wizards can blend these things into a Fifth Edition.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I started a PF game back in September and have played about 10 sessions since then. Before that I ran 3 4E campaigns to various levels and played in 2 others. Most of my group was pretty pro 4E but were willing to try PF.

The first thing that got changed was the 1-2-1-2 diagonal movement rule. 1-1-1-1 is just easier to track and the minor advantage it gives is meaningless if everybody has it imo.

Some feats had prereqs changed or removed entirely. These were house rules left over from our 3E days and since PF didn't change the original rule in these case we defaulted to our own.

In play the role play is about equal and we get into more fights but they don't last as long. I would say 80% of fights are over in 2 rounds. I have to admit I do miss the more tactically rich combats of 4E in this case. My ideal would to have the richness of combats we had in 4E but knock the play time down by 30%. So far I haven't found the sweet spot for this in PF.