Pathfinder vs. 3.5?

[Aus_Snow]

It's house ruled 3.5.

But house ruled quite well, IMO. A lot of it needed to happen, most likely. Some of it, I can't really tell. And as I haven't given it a go yet, it's overall neither thumbs up nor thumbs down AFAIK.

It's also hard to say at the moment, because it's still in Beta. When the final version is released, I suspect it will do very well. Better than 3e itself is still doing though? I don't know.

Best thing to do would be: download the free PDFs (there are a couple of supplements, with things such as magic items, more spells, and prestige classes in them). Also maybe check out the Paizo boards for the latest developments, designer posts, and discussions of issues.

For e6 (or 'e6-like') I think it would probably work exceedingly well.

Other things to look at might include the Immortal's Handbook appendix v5 (and soon v6) and Trailblazer. But YMMV, of course.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Pathfinder does have a few rather weird changes, such as the apparent nerfing of trip and power attack (is the math that hard? PA is an option, not an obligation!). The attack maneuvers seem solely the purview of npcs, considering the fairly low success rate PCs will be expecting.

As an inexperienced DM, I will be happy if trip is nerfed, and its not the math.

I had a PC take down two powerful NPC bad guys in one round with two trip attacks... seemed kind of silly to me that an 8th level wererat fighter and a 10th level werefox sorceress could be knocked down so easily and automatically vulnerable to AoOs by so simple an attack from a Rogue 8/Fighter 1.

 

[Runestar]

I had a PC take down two powerful NPC bad guys in one round with two trip attacks... seemed kind of silly to me that an 8th level wererat fighter and a 10th level werefox sorceress could be knocked down so easily and automatically vulnerable to AoOs by so simple an attack from a Rogue 8/Fighter 1.

Fighter I can understand, but why the spellcaster? Just have her remain prone on the ground and continue casting spells defensively if you do not want her to provoke AoOs.

Now, pathfinder's trip seems to have a fairly low rate of success, and you no longer get a bonus attack. Against larger PCs, forget about it. At least in 3.5, a 10th lv enlarged fighter with improved trip still had a 50-50 chance against a fire giant.

 

[Shazman]

If you want combat maneuvers to have more chance of success, simply change the DC to 10 + CMB instead of 15 + CMB. How hard is that?

 

[Kerrick]

Pathfinder powers up the base classes to put them more on a par with stuff that appeared in later WotC supplements. Many people noted early on that it's "D&D turned up to 11". That being said, it is basically just a heavily house-ruled version of D&D; almost everything that we know and love is still there, and most of it still works the same. I'm not enamored of the changes myself, beyond a few specific examples (the combat maneuvers, though they need some tweaking), but lots of other people like it.

Oh yeah - they got rid of XP costs for everything. Spells with XP costs now have (increased) gold costs, as do magic items; the item creation feats have a skill rank requirement.

 

[Dagredhel]

Two things off the top of my head...

There are some very nice spell "fixes". The Polymorph Problem is resolved rather elegantly through a series of spells of scaling level and power. The spells aren't overly complicated, and cover a wide range of possibilities. I was surprised to find that I liked them, since I didn't appreciate WOTC's 'a seperate spell for each particular form' approach, and expected that a 'generic' version would be even less appealing. If nothing else, check that out as a solution to the Polymorph mess that WOTC made.

The other thing that occurs to me is that the class changes (additions) are geared towards offering an incentive to single-class for 20 levels. As such, the new abilities tend to either be cumulative bonuses or suites of powers that scale up with character level. A six-level system may therefore miss some of the "interesting bits", unless the higher-level abilities are reconfigured as feats (which would be *very* cool.)

BTW... I was on vacation from work last week... When the boards were slow, I took he opportunity to revisit and reread all of the E6 threads (that I could find)... thanks again for an inspired idea!

 

[Pants]

I like a lot of stuff in Pathfinder and I am, in fact, using a couple of the base classes in my 3.5 FR campaign. I'm only using some of the classes and some of the feats, nothing else. I also tweaked a few of the classes, sorcerers and fighters got more skill points and more class skills, the wizard, cleric, and bard were rewritten. The monk stayed the same, even though it sucks only slightly less than the 3.5 Monk, mostly because I didn't know what to do to make it suck less.

So Far we have:

Human Rogue
Air Genasi Fighter
Human Sorcerer
Tiefling Wizard
NPC Half-Orc Cleric

Everyone really likes the changed classes so far, especially the fighter who likes having some options that don't involve fighting.

As for some of the things I don't like, well, IMO the PF wizard, bard, monk, and cleric suck. The monk sucks because not enough was done to make it a class with an identity, it's still a mish-mash of rules, though it is slightly better than the 3.5 version, just not much.

The bard has some nice changes, but overall, it doesn't feel like enough was done to fix it.

The wizard and cleric are okay, I just don't like that they seem to get just a collection of spell-like abilities, whereas the sorcerer gets some unique stuff. I wrote up my own version of the wizard and cobbled a cleric together.

I'm not a fan of some of the feat changes. Power Attack and Cleave are staple 'fun' feats IMG even if they are abusable, my players would never let me take them away, and I wouldn't really want to either. However, some feats do get a nice boost. Toughness is now a worthwhile feat fer instance.

The CMB thing is pretty nifty actually, though I have no idea how it plays in game.

As for the powerlevel. I don't mind since that means that I can give out less treasure to the PC's and still challenge them with monsters.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Now, pathfinder's trip seems to have a fairly low rate of success, and you no longer get a bonus attack. Against larger PCs, forget about it. At least in 3.5, a 10th lv enlarged fighter with improved trip still had a 50-50 chance against a fire giant.

Honestly, you need to play it before you cement your opinion about this.

(1) Trip in Pathfinder no longer requires a touch attack. (Granted, the touch attack in 3.5 is usually pro forma, but still.)

(2) Trip in Pathfinder no longer requires a STR vs. (STR or DEX) check. It's all Combat Maneuver Bonus (CMB).

(3) The size modifier for Large creatures is only +1 to their CMB. (Irrelevant for comparison to Trip in 3.5, but meaningful for stuff like Grapple, where in 3.5 it was +4.)

(4) At least so far, trip in Pathfinder is in place of a melee attack, and the CMB bonus doesn't go down with iterative attacks. So using your last attack for a maneuver like trip is often a good idea, since the last attack often won't hit anyway.

So, a fire giant has BAB +11, STR +10, Size +1, for a CMB of +22.

An enlarged fighter 10 has BAB +10, STR +7, Size +1, Feat +2, tripping weapon +2 for a CMB of +22.

The DC is 37, so the fighter 10 has a 30 percent chance to trip a giant. (On one attack. On a hasted attack routine, the chance rises to about 65 percent, although this doesn't count the fighter being counter-tripped (25 percent), and it doesn't count duplication of tripping.)

Is that chance too low? A lot of people on the Paizo boards seem to think so, but I'm not so sure. A 30 percent to 65 percent chance to take away the giant's full attack routine (or force it to attack at -4)? To cause the giant to provoke AoOs at +4 to hit?

Maneuver effects are very powerful mechanically in 3.5, and they remain very powerful in Pathfinder. I want them to be relatively difficult to perform.

That said, I do think the +2 feat modifiers should be +4, and I think it's likely Jason Buhlman will drop the base DC from 15 + CMB to something like 12 + CMB. But if that happens, about a month after the finished game is released, be ready to listen to people complaining about how special maneuvers are broken.

 

[Thondor]

I would note that while most of the classes got 'powered up' and give many more options the druid remained almost identical, if i recall correctly the cleric didn't get much of a power boost either. In my opinion this is good as these classes were in many ways the most powerful. The warrior classes certainly got a nice boost, they're all a lot more complicated of course. I really like the changes to the Barbarian, a lot more versitile, more choices and they might actually be able to stand up to a well built fighter. Someone says the fighter gets a "feat" every level, this is incorrect. They do however get something every level.

 

[Pants]

I would note that while most of the classes got 'powered up' and give many more options the druid remained almost identical, if i recall correctly the cleric didn't get much of a power boost either. In my opinion this is good as these classes were in many ways the most powerful. The warrior classes certainly got a nice boost, they're all a lot more complicated of course. I really like the changes to the Barbarian, a lot more versitile, more choices and they might actually be able to stand up to a well built fighter. Someone says the fighter gets a "feat" every level, this is incorrect. They do however get something every level.

No, they do get a feat every level as characters in PF get a new feat every odd level regardless of which class they're playing and fighters get a bonus feat on every even level.

So, a feat every level.