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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NewJeffCT" data-source="post: 5790837" data-attributes="member: 10784">My 3.5E campaign finished up just about two years ago now.  Afterwards, we played a few "test" sessions of both Pathfinder and 4E to see what the group would like/dislike about both.   Nobody had strong feelings either way and said they'd play whatever I chose to run... In looking back at my 3.5E campaign, once the game got beyond level 9/10 or so, it became almost like a second full-time job for me to design and build challenging encounters for my large group of players.  Because they were going against clerics of an evil deity of slavery & tyranny, I was constantly building high level clerics.  And, since I'm kind of anal, I tried to give each cleric a different flavor, while maintaining ties to this evil god.  (i.e., one was a mystic theurge, one preferred domain 1 spells, the other preferred domain 2 spells, one had another PrC, another had a template, etc)So, I was picking out 60, 70, 80 spells for each of these high level clerics.  Then, each cleric had to have an entourage (lower level clerics, a mage or two, plus tough guy bodyguards, and the 3.5E equivalent of minions)... so, it was another 30-50 spells for each sub-cleric or wizard, not to mention feats, skills, magic items, etc.  Then, if they had any planar allies or could summon allies, etc, I'd have to prepare those as well (i.e., one summoned a fiendish beholder, another a pyroclastic dragon, another a balor)While I got to be pretty good at it and came up with some very memorable and unique encounters, I was also spending 20-40 hours/session in preparation just to build an encounter.  So, with work and fatherhood also taking time, things like story development and infusing NPCs with more personality sometimes fell by the wayside due to a lack of timeWhile I saw that PF made some improvements in terms of DM prep time, I could still see it being a problem at higher levels.With 4E, I can spend 20-30 minutes and build encounters for 3-4 sessions.  With my spare time, I can focus more on plot and story development, creating more role-playing opportunities, and also making some of my NPCs a bit more colorful than they have been in the past.So, it was a pretty easy decision for me as a DM to move to 4E.I don't love 4E - the magic items seem to be flavorless most of the time - but, it's done me a lot of good in terms of becoming a more well rounded DM.</blockquote>

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