Bihlbo |
I have been a huge fan of the original Everquest, so recently I looked online to see if it's still possible to get a hold of the EQ RPG books. However, I read that they were based on the 3.0 rules system. Is it possible to convert 3.0 games to Pathfinder?
The original EQrpg was indeed written before the 3.5 revision, but for the most part it's OGL, not the core rules. This means that most of the game is using information you can only find in the EQrpg books, so the classes and all of the magic (even the mechanic for how many spells one can cast) is all different from 3rd edition and by extension Pathfinder. That's not to say it couldn't use a facelift - the skills are a complete mess and there are a couple of classes that suffered greatly in the conversion from the online game to the d20 product.
The EQ2rpg book(s?) are both interesting and infuriating. See, they introduced a cool new way of character progression that better mimicked the online game (start as an archetype, advance to class, then to advanced class) and all "class" abilities were selected from a broad list, allowing for incredible variation. In some ways it looks more like 4e in this regard. EQ2rpg is absolutely not a 3.5 product, and it would take much more work converting it to Pathfinder than EQrpg.
However, the core book for EQ2rpg did not feature any spellcasters (so about 3/5ths of the options for character advancement). They did finally print a EQ2rpg Spell Guide, which is now nigh impossible to find in print (I've seen only one and if I'd known how rare they'd become I would have got it). So while you can still buy the pdf, you only have the option of playing the game neutered with a dead tree book, or playing the game with full rules but with pdf restrictions.
Still, even though mechanically EQ2rpg is probably objectively better than EQrpg, the first iteration has far more complete options for reference material (none but the core and spell guide were ever made for EQ2rpg), especially in setting reference. They actually succeeded in making Halas and the barbarians very interesting, and overall the writing is quite good on those books.