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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 5508928" data-attributes="member: 5834">My players are lvl 15 now. It's a five person party with three henchmen. I'm doing the Kingmaker adventure path, so it seemed only fitting to allow Leadership.We regularly reach lvl 12+. I have run 3.x, Pathfinder, and 4E up to lvls 12 plus regularly (though I quit 4E some time ago).They are still quite long. Require a great deal of preparation and system mastery by the DM.Unless you are running 15 point point buy characters, you will need to tweak every encounter in a module. If you do most of your own work, you won't have to worry about  that aspect.I would say average encounter preparation time is 3 to 5 hours at lvl 15+. Not sure how you run modules. I tend to let the PCs mow down common encounters. I plan usually 2 to 3 challenging encounters a module. When I say 3 to 5 hours, I'm speaking about the end module BBEG encounter which I plan carefully. The 3-5 hour timeline is usually an opposing party.If it is a single powerful monster like say a dragon or demon. I can usually spec the encounter out in an hour or two.It's about like you remember in 3.x for time. Just different abilities.I make up my own NPCs. I very rarely use the NPCs as designed in the book. I am very meticulous about designing challenges according to the players I'm going against and their tendencies.I usually start with the monster in a given module and modify it to suit the challenge. I rarely make up my own monsters. I tweak some already existing monster.My players are loving Pathfinder. The one player that did really like 4E really likes Pathfinder. He was not a big fan of 3.x. He likes to play melee characters and 3.x didn't make melee characters all that interesting other than doing insane physical damage. Pathfinder now makes designing and running a melee character a great deal more fun and interesting. He was a bit worried that physical damage characters would be left out in the cold again as far interesting play options were concerned with Pathfinder, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that Pathfinder allowed him to design a really cool physical damage character that wasn't just about swinging his weapon.Rough like usual. Five on one almost always favors the players. They do a lot of damage. They have a lot of tactical options as a group. It's a lot of work as a Pathfinder DM. A lot more prep work than it was as a 4E DM where the monsters and characters were simpler. Though not as much work once the combat is going as I found tracking all those one round modifiers in 4E a huge pain in the behind in large combats.I find challenging the players to be the same degree of difficulty as all the game systems. In 4E my players crushed solos and most of what they faced because of their much wider variety of tactical options. Pathfinder it's pretty much the same. And lucky rolls also have a great deal to do with them winning and the new hero point mechanic greatly favors the PCs. It's different from 4E's hero point system, but no less potent. Maybe more potent than 4E's hero point system. They can really swing a combat in favor of the PCs.If you could be specific about the problems you had in 3.5, perhaps you could get some answers. What specifically gave you trouble? I can answer if those problems still exist if you want to specify them.</blockquote>

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