Savage Pathfinder character design

[Hex08]

I'm not sure how popular Pathfinder for Savage Worlds are on this board but I was looking for some opinions from other players. I am going to be running Rise of the Runelords and I am thinking about abandoning the converted classes and letting my players design their characters using the standard character build options from the core Savage Worlds rules and the Fantasy Companion. Obviously I will need to rebuild some of the bad guys using the same design idea. Any reasons this might be a bad idea?

 

[Reef]

I believe the Pathfinder classes are tuned slightly stronger (if I recall). Although that may be just because they get the class edge for free.

I ran it for a few months, and originally thought about ditching the classes. In the end, I decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze and just went with the Pathfinder setup. Although I did let one player use the Fantasy Companion version of the Summoner instead…just swapped it in one for one. No one had any issues with anything.

 

[kronovan]

I think that's a good thing. I've never been a big fan of Savage Pathfinder, because it seemed to intro a fair amount of power creep into PC builds. I've DMd and played PF1e and played PF2e, so I can understand why Peginc felt they needed that. That said, for SW I go back to 2007 SWEX, so zero rank SWADE PCs already seem plenty powerful enough.

Were your players to build PCs using the standard system and you left threats as are, you'd probably end up with a challenging campaign, but not to a TPK level of challenge. The mantra for Savage Worlds has always been builds monsters as you want them, so it wouldn't be exactly breaking with that. All said, I've only ever read the books and never played it, so maybe those who have can make a better case for maintaing the status quo.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

I'm not sure how popular Pathfinder for Savage Worlds are on this board but I was looking for some opinions from other players. I am going to be running Rise of the Runelords and I am thinking about abandoning the converted classes and letting my players design their characters using the standard character build options from the core Savage Worlds rules and the Fantasy Companion. Obviously I will need to rebuild some of the bad guys using the same design idea. Any reasons this might be a bad idea?

It's not a bad idea, but is it still Savage Pathfinder if you're not using the SP book?
others have touched on it, but the classes/ancestries in SP are a bit higher power (+4 instead of the standard +2).
Rise of the Runelords is gonna just be a 1 to 1 with the orginal pathfinder books, just with SP stats on the encounters. So the monsters will be a bit above the players if using the standard rule book, imo. But that's not really a problem.

 

[dbm]

We’ve played a fair bit of Savage Pathfinder. Both the ancestries and class edges are slightly up-powered compared to the versions in core Savage Worlds and the Fantasy Companion, so you would potentially want to adjust for that.

It probably isn’t a significant factor, especially after the first few advances.

A bigger thing to keep in mind: the initial Adventure Paths are a 1-for-1 adaption of the Pathfinder modules, but Savage Worlds isn’t set up to need ‘filler encounters’ in the way that D&D or Pathfinder can do. This is for two reasons: first, Savage Worlds does not have an attrition based system like D&D-alike games do, and second even a goblin can kill a legendary character on an extreme result. So, when running the adventure path you probably want to convert some of the minor encounters into Dangerous Quick Encounters, or just drop them all together. That should give you a better overall experience for your players, reduce grind, and avoided completely random character death.