Pathfinder 1E Newbie Pathfinder question

[caudor]

So I'm ready to take the plunge into Pathfinder; however, one thing has me puzzled.

Do the early Pathfinder Adventure Paths use different rules from the more recent ones? It appears Rise of the Ruin Lords uses D&D 3.5 rules and the newer ones use the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game rules. Is there a big difference in these rules.

I guess what I want to know is: If I buy the Pathfinder Roleplaying game, should I skip over the old stuff and just look at what is compatible with PRPG?

While learning the Pathfinder rules, I'd hate to have to do some complicated conversions. But I like the look of the early adventure paths as well.

Anyway, thanks in advance for your advice. I'm excited about Pathfinder now that I learned more about it.

 

[gdmcbride]

If I were getting into Pathfinder for the first time I would buy the following: The Core Rulebook, The Bestiary and if you've never GM'ed before the Gamemastery Guide. The Advanced Player's Guide is a fine fourth purchase and vastly opens up your play options. With those four books you have enough rules material to last you a lifetime. If after playing for a while you crave more complexity or attention to another topic-- suffice to say it is available in spades. Paizo.com has details.

Now you need an adventure. If you don't care to roll your own, then the Adventure Paths are a complete campaign package and are mostly well put together and entertaining.

The original adventure paths use the D&D 3.5 system as opposed to Pathfinder. While similar, there are many small but important differences that may frustrate new players and GMs.

Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, Second Darkness and Legacy of Fire are all written in 3.5. For you first purchase, I would avoid these, with one important caveat. Rise of the Runelords is getting a pathfinder compatible hardcover release in June. Many consider it THE classic Pathfinder campaign.

Otherwise, Council of Thieves, Kingmaker, Serpent's Skull, Carrion Crown and Jade Regent are all entirely Pathfinder.

Kingmaker is an easy campaign to recommend. It is all about building your own kingdom.

Jade Regent is not quite finished but I'm told is great. It's all about an epic journey to the mysterious east over the top of the world and stopping the machinations of a mysterious tyrant.

Carrion Crown is a gothic horror campaign complete with Frankenstein, werewolves, vampires, cthulhoid monstrosities, mad scientists and more.

Pick one of those three and you will be set.

If you purchase all those rulebooks and a complete AP, you will be spending almost $290 full retail. However, you will be purchasing potentially years of excellent adventuring material.

Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games

 

[caudor]

Thank you very much. That is just what I needed to know before opening my wallet again.

I still have a gigantic stack of Dungeons & Dragons magazines picked up during the 3.0/3.5 era. Once I'm comfortable with the Pathfinder rules, can these old adventures be used with Pathfinder (with some light converting of course)?

If you was me, would you hang onto these magazines or sell them to buy more Pathfinder specific stuff?

 

[gdmcbride]

Yes, they can be easily converted.

Yes, I would hang on to them, but then I'm an incorrigible pack-rat who still has the first roleplaying product I was ever given (my birthday present basic D&D set complete with B2 Keep on the Borderlands).

Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games

 

[enrious]

IMO, how much gaming experience and how mature you as a gaming group are determines how easily 3.x and Pathfinder resources work together.

Here's what I mean:

Pathfinder is different from 3.x, but not enough to render 3.x stuff useless (Judging from your join date you were around for the 3.0 to 3.5 switch and in many ways it's like that) - so the concepts and ideas you had with 3.x will carry you over in Pathfinder.

Pathfinder is different from 3.x, but not different enough to prevent a lot of second guessing of "fundamental" concepts - a lot of things changes and often the changes were minor, but they will trip you if you expect them to work like they did in 3.x.

This is why a mature group is a godsend if you use prior material - they understand that such occasions may arise where you need a mulligan (or they may) when mixing the material. Most of the time mixing them is harmless (although in a lot of cases I've experienced, 3.x stuff can be underpowered compared to Pathfinder) but it's the few occasions it isn't that can lead to problems.

All of that said, I have almost never had a problem using a 3.x monster on the fly (you can either treat the CR as one less (Pathfinder CR = 3.x CR -1) or add +1 to all rolls the monster makes and use the CR straight up. Likewise, I have no issues using even 3.0 NPC statblocks without issue (although you may have to calculate CMD/CMB on the fly - valuable skill) with a minimum of handwaving minor issues.

As for the APs, I'd say that you could run the 3.5 APs as-is, but I'd strongly suggest you gain more experience with Pathfinder first. That way, you'd be more likely to notice any areas in the APs that you may need to convert and be better at doing them.

Having run the Kingmaker AP, I agree that it's a good AP and gives the Players some emotional buy-in to the campaign, but from experience I wouldn't use the kingdom building rules (or mass combat) all that much, because they bog things down later on and honestly you're just as well off as narrating progress (and thankfully that sort of approach is also covered by the APs - it caters to both approaches).

Here's a link to the Official Conversion Document and I think you'll find there aren't really any complicated conversions, but a lot of small details to note.

Finally, I use Herolab for most of my character creation and it makes things much, much easier to prep for. At the table I use Combat Manager (www.combatmanager.com) to keep track of initiative, hit points, status, roll attacks/saves, and much more. It's free and can import in Herolab or PCGen resources as well!

 

[SkredlitheOgre]

If it helps, my Pathfinder group is currently running Rise of the Runelords and so far, other than the stat blocks for monsters not including the Combat Maneuver Bonus or the Combat Maneuver Defense, we haven't run in to much that we've had to convert. We're having a lot of fun with it. Granted, the DM is having to adjust things for our challenge rating a little as he goes, but that's not out of the ordinary.

I agree with [MENTION=2126]enrious[/MENTION] that PCs in Pathfinder are more powerful than 3.x. For example, our group has a joke about the DM simply adding a 0 to the end of the enemy's hit points. He often increases their hit points fair significantly and their armor class and to hit bonus slightly (+1 or +2 in most cases).

When I DM for the group, I use almost exclusively 3/3.5 modules to either run or for the idea of the module and there hasn't really been any problems.

 

[Henry]

To all of the above awesome advice I'll add, one thing the PF rules does is to give the DM ideas on tweaks to various characters when doing said conversion to PF. Oftentimes, the characters are so well-written that you see things in the PF rules (especially the Advanced Player Guide stuff) that fit the NPCs even better than the rules as presented in the pre-pathfinder adventures themselves. For instance, our DM for Curse of the Crimson Throne converted some monks in the AP to one of the archetypes listed in the APG, because they fit the flavor better --- and I will say that flavor darned-near killed us all.

One thing Skredli said, though -- keep in mind to be careful with those conversions, because just as the PCs are a bit mroe powerful, those same options on monsters can cause an overestimation of a homebrew conversion. Our PCs ultimately died on the 4th AP (Total Party Wipe) because the monsters, technically two CRs below our APL, caught us on round 1 fast and hard, and took out two of our party before we could say, CRAP! RUN!" We were a little sad, but we had already made it to level 12, and really we wouldn't have had it any other way. Korvosa is still in trouble in our campaign...

 

[Thotas]

I got convinced to get into the Pathfinder bus a few months ago, haven't found a game yet, and am trying to figure out how usable my old stuff is in the new context ... you're me, a while back.

I'm loving everything I'm seeing, and while a pure Pathfinder game sure seems perfectly viable, I do look forward to bringing some 3.5 into the mix when the time comes. From what I see of the old APs, most of the monsters have been updated to Pf rules in the Bestiaries, and those are the biggest rule changes between them that will matter.

 

[caudor]

So here I am, a new Pathfinder gamer. Actually, I never thought that would happen, but after looking closely at the game I felt that feeling of excitment that I haven't felt in a while.

I ended up buying:
PF Core Rulebook
PF Bestiary
PF Gamemastery Guide
PF Advance Player's Guide

and just to taste the campaign setting:
PF World Guide: The Inner Sea (Revised)

I can't wait until the books arrive. Thanks again for all the advice!

 

[enrious]

Solid choices, IMO.

I'd play with those for a while before eyeing Ultimate Combat / Ultimate Magic (Bestiary 2 is a far better "next" book)