Kaylea Moonshadow's page

Thanks for the link, but can't help you with Hero Lab. Going to guess not as this doesn't seem to be a really popular house rule system.

I like all the options for building and customizing characters. I think there is only so much you can play as a simple fighter/wizard/cleric type of party and having the new choices keeps things fresh. I think PF has done a much better job of keeping things balanced than 3.5, and I don't really feel the extra material creates a burden as most of it is available for free on the internet.

Fun story, I was in a group where we played D&D 3.5. We found some magic loot and wanted it identified. The DM said it would cost like 1,200 GP for five magic items. We as players said it costs 100 GP per spell so it should be 500. The DM said that's the wholesale cost, but there was only one wizard in town and there was a big mark-up. The party wizard player said "fine, I'll buy a scroll of identify, put it in my spellbook, and identify the items." The DM was pissed and said the scroll would cost way above the normal price, but it was less than doing all five items so we paid for it. This exchange took up most of a three hour session as we just wanted to know what we had and the DM thought we were trying to pull something.

That DM moves away, the group stays together, but we switch to Pathfinder. The next time there are magic items, someone makes a spellcraft check, and the DM says, "It's a +1 sword," and we move on with the damn game. Beautiful new rule there.

I would go with 20, some of the adventure paths can be challenging and it doesn't sound like you have a group of hardcore optimizers to worry about. If you feel like the characters are plowing through you can always make it more challenging later but I doubt that will be the case with the newbs.