Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 5790074" data-attributes="member: 2804">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... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification