NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raithe the Dreamer" data-source="post: 5108290" data-attributes="member: 55982">See, as a DM, I want that complexity too.  Generally, I only DM about half as much as I play, but my world is like a giant character to me, and I'm the sort that loves spending hours precisely statting up my deities and epic level NPCs.  I also actually rather dislike the hard schism in 4E between monsters and characters in terms of mechanics.  I prefer to play by the same rules as my players when I DM.Other than a few snags, I always felt 3.x played brilliantly too, and thankfully, Pathfinder has addressed most of those snags.  I'd rather have a game that is exciting mechanically and plays pretty well, and has room for varied playstyles and mechanical options, even with a few snags, than a game that *only* plays brilliantly.2nd PHB, I'd disagree, though the 3rd one is finally starting to play within the design space, finally, with the Psion.  I also despise classes being hard-wired with roles.  It's nicer for newer players, I suppose, but I don't want to *have* to play my Fighter as a Defender.  It should be perfectly viable to play a Ranger with a sword and shield that acts as the party's frontliner, or a Fighter with two big old longswords that's just a damage machine.  One of the roles (battlefield controller) means almost nothing and has left the Wizard with an identity crisis, too.  I don't think 4E's designers understood what battlefield control really was, since they eliminated most of the spells that actually got used for it.Yes, they were.  The whole of the game didn't need to be neutered and reubuilt from the ground up to narrow that gap, either.  Pathfinder's classes are much more balanced than the original 3.x ones.  Fighters are absolute powerhouses again, and all melee characters have options available to them via feats that give the benefits of maneuvers without having to design sixty powers for each class.Are the casters still ahead?  In terms of raw power, yes.  In some sense, they should be--a 20th-level wizard has mastered the fabric of reality.  It's boring if the only thing he can do is do the same +10d6 (or whatever) that a Fighter can do with some high level maneuver.  The balance is achieved in different ways.  No one can match a Pathfinder Fighter in terms of raw damage output, but the Wizard's versatility is his strength.  CoDzilla is a thing of the past, and while Clerics and Druids are still powerful, they can't do everything at once anymore.Well, if we're taking the whole of 3E into account here, you can play any number of classes, such as those from Tome of Battle, if you want a melee character with varied options.  The nice thing about that book was it let players who like that style of play for their warriors have the option, while still leaving the simplified style for others.In Pathfinder, combat maneuvers (bull rush, trip, disarm etc) are much easier to use and therefore provide a lot more options for non-casters at the table, and other feats let them diversify their combat styles as well.For the most part, the 4E classes don't feel diverse to me at all, with the recent exception of the Psion, and even that's still very much within 4Es narrow paradigm.</blockquote>

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