D&D 4E Reconsidering Pathfinder over 4E

[Charwoman Gene]

So, every once in a while, I like to back off from an entrenched philosophical position and reevaluate things.

I've been a very big 4e booster for a while. And there are things I love about 4E. And some things I hate. There are things I hated about 3.X, and things I loved. I am considering just doing a straight fallback to 3.x, but I'm wondering if anyone would engaged in a dialog with me about some specific questions for pathfinder as an alternative. These are sometimes character specific. I'm asking instead of reading because I'm terrible at reading "rulesy" text, and don't own a copy of PF.

Can I use 3.X characters with Pathfinder with no conversion? Or tiny amount of conversion? Can I use 3.X crunch materials (prestige classes especially) with Pathfinder with little conversion?

Does Pathfinder keep skill points allocated level by level and some synergy bonuses?

Does Pathfinder have any way to make a druid that cast spells a little bit, Turns into goonish forms for battle and gains skill bonuses in certain forms for scouting and sneaking? Are wildshape forms just as complicated, involving math of multiple spread sheets to compute?

 

[Azgulor]

So, every once in a while, I like to back off from an entrenched philosophical position and reevaluate things.

I've been a very big 4e booster for a while. And there are things I love about 4E. And some things I hate. There are things I hated about 3.X, and things I loved. I am considering just doing a straight fallback to 3.x, but I'm wondering if anyone would engaged in a dialog with me about some specific questions for pathfinder as an alternative. These are sometimes character specific. I'm asking instead of reading because I'm terrible at reading "rulesy" text, and don't own a copy of PF.

Can I use 3.X characters with Pathfinder with no conversion? Or tiny amount of conversion? Can I use 3.X crunch materials (prestige classes especially) with Pathfinder with little conversion?

Does Pathfinder keep skill points allocated level by level and some synergy bonuses?

Does Pathfinder have any way to make a druid that cast spells a little bit, Turns into goonish forms for battle and gains skill bonuses in certain forms for scouting and sneaking? Are wildshape forms just as complicated, involving math of multiple spread sheets to compute?

1. 3.x characters. Yes, you can... However, be aware that PF characters are slightly more powerful. Feats are gained every 2 levels. Classes are built with no dead levels. Sorcerers & Wizards get d6 hit die.

Are these changes signficant enough to stop 3.x introduction? No, IMO. However, I've found the PF implementations to be superior to the 3.x across the board and would do the conversion from 3.x to PF.

2. Crunch Materials & Classes.
Again, easily included. Feats, weapons, armor, etc. no problem. Prestige Classes - again, no dead levels in PF. Easily adjusted by filling in gaps with bonus feats.

3. Skills.
Largely the same in terms of pts/level. 1st level distribution is different, however. Rather than 4xSP, class skills get a +3 bonus when taken for the 1st time. Greatly streamlines skill point allocation without modifying the underlying math/mechanics. Skill synergy gone (either largely or in total - I'd have to check).

4. Druids & Wildshape
Not a lot of druid characters in my campaigns for 1st-hand assessment, but I'd say everything you could do before, you can do now. Wildshape has been streamlined/simplified (for the better, IMO).

Also, a huge improvement over 3.x is the introduction of archetypes in the APG. Rather than building a ton of variant classes, archetypes enable you to swap out class abilities for alternate sets that allow you to customize a class to better fit a player concept. If nothing else convinced me to convert full-bore to PF, this would have done it.

 

[Dingo333]

While I haven't tried to convert anything to PF from 3.5, I have also found that I don't really need to, besides for very specific builds everything I want is already PF material

I can find no skill synergies but keep in mind a lot of skills were rolled together
Spot/Listen/Search is now Perception, tumble/jump is now acrobatics, forgery/know language is now linguistics and concentration skill is gone entirely (different way to do that now)

I played a Druid for a bit and I liked it, wild shape is easier now. Instead of changing your sheet you get a bonus to ability scores depending on the size of the animal you are going into. You do gain some abilities like scent of flight if the shape you are going into has them but you don't get racial skill bonuses of the shape.

If you have someone who wants to be a druid but focus on the martial side, I do not know of any official rules for that but they could always go for spells summons and heals and go with one of the animal shaman archetypes from the APG. I would recommend the wolf as you can pick up tripping pretty easily and it fits better in terms of summoning flavor wise (calling the pack)

 

[udalrich]

Does Pathfinder have any way to make a druid that cast spells a little bit, Turns into goonish forms for battle and gains skill bonuses in certain forms for scouting and sneaking? Are wildshape forms just as complicated, involving math of multiple spread sheets to compute?

One difference between 3.5 and PF druids is that the PF druid cannot be great at everything. Since Wild Shape gives bonuses to your existing stats rather than replacing them, you cannot put a 7 in strength and dex to get an 18 wisdom, and rely on wild shape to let you fight well in melee.

I don't know of a variation with less spell casting. However, if you put your 3 best stats into physical stats, you will be effective in melee when wildshaped but your casting will not be impressive. You'll need magic items to access your higher level spell slots and your save DCs will not be impressive. (I'd expect to have mostly buffs, cures and utility spells prepared.)

Other than the size based bonuses for becoming the smallest creature you can and the option of "it's just a cat, we can ignore it", the standard druid does not get skill based bonuses. The Advanced Players Guide has a lot of variant options for druids. I'm not familiar with them but one of them might be what you are looking for.

 

[jimmifett]

I'm in a similar boat since I picked up the APG at a steal of a price. I borrowed a friends PF core yesterday and am starting to digest it. Very pretty.

 

[MortonStromgal]

check out the srd Pathfinder_OGC
especially look at feats and spells you knew before, you'll find a lot of good minor changes to them (for example toughness and grease) that either clarify or help to balance them off similar abilities.
I think once you dive into pathfinder and learn the changes you just cant go back to 3.5 again.

 

[1Mac]

Kobold Quarterly #15 has a spell-less druid variant. It swaps out spells for more shapeshifting and quasi-shapeshifting. The marquee ability is that you gain monster abilities periodically.

 

[Papa-DRB]

Can I use 3.X characters with Pathfinder with no conversion? Or tiny amount of conversion? Can I use 3.X crunch materials (prestige classes especially) with Pathfinder with little conversion?

You can use them as is except for CMB (Combat Maneuver Bonus) which is a simplified method to handle grapple, sunder, trip, etc. It is easy however to simply create the CMB (bab + str + size) and it's opposite CMD (Combat Maneuver Defense), so it is really a tiny conversion. Depending on level, PF characters will be tougher than 3.x characters. If it is a "bad guy" (ie. meet and kill) just adding some hit points and a few feats or skill points makes it easy. If it is a PC, I would rebuild.

Does Pathfinder keep skill points allocated level by level and some synergy bonuses?

Skill points per level, but skills were combined (move silently, hide in shadows is now stealth, etc.) Also, no half ranks. You put a rank in the skill and if it is a class skill, add 3 once, otherwise don't. No synergy skills/boni.

Does Pathfinder have any way to make a druid that cast spells a little bit, Turns into goonish forms for battle and gains skill bonuses in certain forms for scouting and sneaking? Are wildshape forms just as complicated, involving math of multiple spread sheets to compute?

The whole wild shape / polymorph issue has changed. It is based off the druids statistics, so the math is much less involved.

Above was a link to a fan built site that has all the Pathfinder rules. Here is the link ( Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document ) to the Paizo site with the rules. D20 SRD (above link) is a very good and useful site, how ever it does have 3rd party stuff and conversion (all good! but not core).

-- david
Papa.DRB

 

[DaveMage]

So, every once in a while, I like to back off from an entrenched philosophical position and reevaluate things.

*thunk*

*DaveMage faints*

 

[Kaisoku]

I've had a bit of experience converting a pile of NPCs to Pathfinder when I ran a pathfinder War of the Burning Sky game (up to 8th level stuff, uh... I think getting into the Mad King's Banquet stuff).

Specifically, I converted a decent level Druid, so I have some experience at their capabilities.

While they have been greatly "Equalized" in power (can't be awesome at everything), if you are willing to invest in the right magic items and buffing in advance, you can pull off some great combat ability alongside the full spellcasting.

As for the other classes, one thing I really noticed was that even with the less starting skills, the consolidation and lack of "half ranks" really makes it so that characters felt like they end up with more skill options.
I had to keep giving NPCs extra things to do with skills, because either a skill was folded into another one, or concentration was now a caster level check, or Favored Class bonus allowed for an extra skillpoint per level... that made it so they could pick up a knowledge skill or social skill or some other nice "extra" that they would never had before.

For example, in re-writing a standard "Soldier" build, based on a 10 Int Half-Orc Fighter, I could end up having positive modifiers in Climb, Intimidate, Ride, Survival, and Swim... including any armor penalties. Token scores in Climb, Ride and Swim (so they can get around), but an actual focus in Intimidate and Survival.
This was something I didn't expect from building the "basic grunt". It gave me a lot of opportunity to use them outside of combat, if needed. If the PCs needed to interact with them, I had decent options available.

I feel that the multitude of skill changes (and a number of them are subtle), created the biggest change to character gameplay.. and in the process they made making a character easier to do (especially building high level characters from scratch, yay DMs!) and without overpowering the character (giving more to do, not a higher bonus).

If you take nothing else from Pathfinder, the changes to the way skills are treated would be the most important and likely well received on all parties (players and DMs alike).