| James Neal 58 |
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I have run through about 3/4 of the campaign at this point in 5th (2014) edition D&D. Which has taken 2 years and change of real life time I think.
The bestiary stats are fine. Whenever I use them I get a balanced encounter. However I do think they err on the side of HP bloat for humanoid NPCs a little, I like to retool those stat blocks to either be more PC-like or more realistic (this resulted in them utterly steamrolling Drelev, which was fine by me, I wanted that part of the campaign to be a stretch and strut tension release after running V's dungeon as a brutal grind).
They bring in the army stuff too late / at too high level. By the time Pitax attacks the PCs are their own army. I bet you have the same issue in Pathfinder though.
What they don't convert for you are skill check DCs and loot. DCs should be fairly easy to make up since D&D 5E skill check DCs are all improv loosy goosy anyway. My quick rule of thumb is take the PF DC and subtract 10.
Loot is uh. The real challenge. PF seems to expect the players get less gold or that gold is worth more than in D&D. Jewelry and art objects are given valuations that are way lower, almost an order of magnitude lower, than equivalent DMG examples. But if you are going to use DMG rules for things like building construction then you need the players to be on D&D economy numbers not PF ones.
Plus PF seems to throw out way more, but lower power, magic items, from a much broader list of possibilities. It seems like almost every treasure find includes some minor weird magic item that isn't in D&D. You kind of have to intuitively feel for when to just throw them out, when to replace them with the closest but more powerful D&D equivalent, and when to just let them have the PF item.
I don't recommend going through the whole book converting every treasure horde before starting the campaign. One that's way too much work. Two they're not going to get everything in actual play. Three (see two) the calculus around which magic items to keep vs throw out involves what magic items they already have.
However, it is probably a good idea to retool specifically the treasure hauls of "bosses" like the Stag Lord and Master V ahead of time using DMG treasure guidelines. So that players feel appropriately rewarded for those epic battles.