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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6295621" data-attributes="member: 3400">The challenge here is you will often see the same effect even with the same character builds as long as the players are different. It's part of the glorious messiness that is role playing games in general. Even regular games can see pretty extreme variations of results because of choices made by the players. I think RPGs just exaggerate the effect because there are no clear victory conditions, the roles players ascribe to their PCs can be pretty out-there, and then there are the random dice elements. I agree that you have problems when play styles are mixed, but that's a group composition problem more than a game problem. The only way to significantly compensate for it is to radically reduce the scope of choices available to the players. 4e took a stab at it by redefining virtually the vast majority of powers in combat move terms and even then you could see a big difference between groups that built up with stun-lock powers and ones that didn't.More choices breeds more differences in characters. The best remedy for it that I've seen is guidance from the referee. The 3e/PF rules could use more guidance on the implications of certain choices (the point of Monte Cook's Ivory Tower article) like Champions has included since the late 1980s. That's probably one area where PF would have been better off with 2 volumes instead of a single Core Rulebook or perhaps a slightly different direction in the Game Master's Guide.Sure, they got some more powers, but they were "improved" in ways that weren't particularly powerful. Most of the changes offered a bit of flavor rather than the sorts of improvements made to the barbarian, fighter, monk, ranger, or paladin. I remember that some of the complaints levied at 3e were that wizards were expected to rely on non-spell abilities more often than they should - that they weren't "magical" enough. Well, the school powers give them some more distinct magical powers without significantly increasing their power. Plus they give them goodies based on their class level - discouraging multiclassing for power which too many spellcaster-based prestige classes were willing to give away without enough trade-off. Honestly, what was the point with sticking with your primary class if you could hop over to a prestige class with a new benefit every level and which still gave you full casting progression? What did you lose - familiar advancement, a few bonus feats? Well, now you have the potential to lose a lot more with that trade-off. So multiple masters are being served by these power-ups you think the game gave them. This strikes me more as a pot shot aimed at 4e critics who are also PF fans than a criticism of PF itself. Neither needs to be tossed out in PF - but neither is open content (for which there can be nobody to blame but WotC) so neither can be directly incorporated and updated by Paizo. If you like them, convince another GM to allow you to use them. But that's an issue between you and them - not between you and Pathfinder. The game's about 90% compatible, I'd say. When I run PF, I generally don't allow warlocks because they're way too superhero game for my tastes, fitting more with M&M than with D&D. The flavor's all wrong, as far as I'm concerned. And I didn't like Bo9S either so I don't run with that either. I run a PF game because I like to do so - I might entertain some feats bubbling up from 3e (I like the luck ones) but I'm going to be pretty choosy. Plus, all of the PF rules are open content, meaning I can get them in various formats on my iPad easily whereas I can't with the 3e stuff (again, because WotC didn't make most of the splat stuff open content - entirely WotC's fault). Paizo has made their game much more accessible to me the way I like to run the game than WotC ever did with 3e - is that a problem with PF? I don't think so - but if that does make it more difficult to play your favorite stuff, that's unfortunate, but it's not the fault of PF.</blockquote>

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