Opinion: better or worse encounter format?

[N'raac]

Does it, though?

Yes and no. The abilities are written up, but an ability which may be balanced for a one off battle may not be balanced for a full adventure or a full campaign. The example of the Troll above is a good one. Regenerating 3 hp a round is a powerful, but not overwhelming, power in an encounter.

But the ability to fully recover all hp lost in between successive encounters is a massively powerful ability. It doesn't make the troll any more dangerous to the adventuring party, but it sure gives a troll PC a hefty advantage over his teammates.

As well, putting a power or ability on an NPC may not create an unbalancing situation, but combining it with certain skills, spells, feats or class abilities that the single NPC does not have may prove vastly overpowering. Slapping it onto the one NPC requires only ensuring it is balanced with his or her abilities. Allowing its general use requires its balance be evaluated in light of all of the Pathfinder rules (and even then, Pathfinder may later add something that makes this third party ability unbalanced - I doubt they will check every third party Pathfinder option when they write their next book).

 

[Rugult]

Some very good points here! I'd like to answer a few things and bring up some additional thoughts, as I do like how positive this discussion has been.

1) So far, every Zeitgeist adventure has been written in 4e first and later converted to Pathfinder after the 4e manuscript is completed. In order to keep up with the release schedule of adventures, the PFization side is pretty short time wise. I know with Dying Skyseer I had about a week to a week and a half with the 'final' manuscript (not including a couple extra weeks with some unfinished acts). As Dying Skyseer had some 25+ statblocks in it that needed to be worked on, this is no small task, and requires a lot of time, even for a simple "create as Fighter" conversion. Luckily, most of the encounters have something unique in them that makes them more than just a generic class X switchover, and as was pointed out, smart GMs should be able to adjust weird things on the fly.

That being said, we're well ahead of schedule now with Adventure 3 and I'm likely going to start editing it next week. This should keep us well on track for our December release schedule.

2) While I'm not using it as an excuse, the time crunch does allow certain 'wonky' things into the final drafts.
I would love to write up tons of new feats/abilities/monsters that can justify some of the cool flavour-box 4e stuff, but our current timeline does not allow for that level of detail with the PF versions. This is ESPECIALLY bad at the current lower-levels that we're working with. As you may have noticed, there's a lot of human roguish opponents in the first few adventures and it's hard to make those encounters all unique and special without doing a fair amount of tweaking.

One situation that PF doesn't handle very well (again, at low-levels) is the 4e concept of minions. I've been doing a lot with NPC classes to try and mitigate this, but PCs should only be fighting low-level warriors for so long.


3) Wolfgang's class choice was a casualty of storytelling VS. rules. Flavour wise he fit a vivisectionist very well, but there was actually another archetype that fit him better for story purposes (to be revealed later on). This being said, if I gave him that archetype, then he would have seemed even more wonky at this stage in the campaign. In retrospect, I should have put him in as a vivisectionist and changed him when he showed up later. My bad.

4) I play Pathfinder. While I do like a lot of the 4e mechanics that can be used by GMs, I know that my game of choice is PF. Don't think everyone on the Z team are 4e only players (though, I may be the only PF loyalist...).

I chose my 'flying into a rage' comment as I know this can be a hot topic for a lot of people, it's not meant to offend, and was instead meant to be a little joke. Stupid internet, not allowing humour to get through...

5) I had several talks with Ryan during Adventure 1 about making sure that PF rules were adhered to, and we ensured 'everyone plays by the same hymnbook'. We laxed up a bit on this in adventure 2 partially due to time and partially to see some reactions. We'll re-evaluate the position for adventure 3 - based on discussions like this!

6) Not sure if I'm allowed to say this... (but it's late and I just ran a bunch of mods at a local convention and am pretty tired).

As of now it is looking like Adventure 5 will be written in PF and ported over to 4e. This will be a departure from the current 4e to PF system we have now, and (hopefully) will not be too visible to the reading audience.

7) Zeitgeist is not a standard campaign setting. No matter the discussions here, there's going to be cases where some creatures/NPCs get special things that the PCs won't necessarily have access to. Even published Pathfinder works will include odd variants like this, and we're far-flung from a fantasy settings like Golarion. So trust me when I say, we'll do our best to fit things in with the core PF rules, but certain things will be well beyond that scope to make thematically work without tweaking.
GMs, check out the campaign guide adventure path synopsis and you'll understand why. (Seriously, Ryan is crazy!)

8) I'm rambling and should probably get some sleep now. I get to spend tomorrow GMing using nothing but my goblin voice...

 

[ridingsloth]

I just wanted to chime in as another Pathfinder DM, I for one would prefer more of the uniqueness and "weirdness" from 4E in the Pathfinder version. I started reading Adventure 2 in 4E when it came out and was immediately struck by, frankly, how much more interesting the NPC abilities were. I muuuuch prefer "fun and surprising" to "strictly legal" myself.

From my perspective: my players won't care if the NPCs can do something they can't, and we all enjoy encounters more when there is plenty of cool unique stuff going on. I'm about to start running Adventure 2 and I'm thinking I'll dig through the 4E version just to pull some of the cool ideas (and flavor text) to use during combat.

I'd love to see something like what Cheezmo suggested: a kind of "alternate abilities" box for some NPCs that gives suggestions for more unique abilities that might break strict PF rules. I know this might be a bit more work but it'd save me a ton of time cross-checking the other version to see if there's something cool there that I'd like to use.