Coming back to 3.5 and I have some questions...

[Reebo Kesh]

Hey all.

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D and was wondering what the new Pathfinder Rules were all about? I've seen the hefty tome in the stores and it looks impressive but do I need it? Has much changed from the WotC version of 3.5?

Also are the rules still OGL? Can anyone produce adventures for Pathfinder?

Basically I'm looking to be sold on the new Pathfinder rules and I would love you guys to help me decide on it.

Thanks in advance.
Reebo

[mdt]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

Hey all.

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D and was wondering what the new Pathfinder Rules were all about? I've seen the hefty tome in the stores and it looks impressive but do I need it? Has much changed from the WotC version of 3.5?

Also are the rules still OGL? Can anyone produce adventures for Pathfinder?

Basically I'm looking to be sold on the new Pathfinder rules and I would love you guys to help me decide on it.

Thanks in advance.
Reebo

Most of the people on the boards here will rave about it, obviously. But to try to answer your question...

Most of the core classes got a rebalancing, and are now more in line with both each other and the more robust splatbook classes.

It's about 90% backwards compatible with your existing 3.5 support books.

To me at least, a lot of the 'less than good' and 'marginally broken' stuff in 3.5 SRD has been addressed.

It's 98% OGC (Open Gaming Content) and there's a Paizo supported PRD (Pathfinder Resource Document) containing all the rules on the Paizo web site (linked in under the pathfinder resource page). So 3rd parties can write for it.

The Paizoans have stated they intend to make as much of their future rule books as OGC as possible.

[World of Dusk]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

Hey all.

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D and was wondering what the new Pathfinder Rules were all about? I've seen the hefty tome in the stores and it looks impressive but do I need it? Has much changed from the WotC version of 3.5?

Also are the rules still OGL? Can anyone produce adventures for Pathfinder?

Basically I'm looking to be sold on the new Pathfinder rules and I would love you guys to help me decide on it.

Thanks in advance.
Reebo

Pathfinder has a slightly less rulebook feel and a slightly more story feel. Short vignettes lead off each chapter for example.

I played my first Pathfinder game last Friday and I found several improvements. DCs for traps (Perception and Disable Device) seemed more accurate for 1st level PCs. The monsters also seemed balanced. If you had no trouble with these things in 3.5 then this may not be a selling point. For me, knowing Paizo crunched some numbers to determine DCs and average damage based on CR was a big selling point.

Rules are still OGL. I believe you have to register here before publishing adventures, but I'm not a game company owner so you'd have to search around on the Paizo site for the requirements.

Here are 10 reasons I bought PF:
1.) Many, many players will play Pathfinder if they enjoyed 3.5 and they can get the rules for it as a PDF for only $10. Big selling point for the money strapped.
2.) Paizo crunched damage numbers to tweak the CRs of monsters.
3.) Classes that had less bang in 3.5 become more robust and some get more class abilities.
4.) The Bestiary describes monsters well. For example, the ogre is a freakish deviant monster while orcs are violent and cruel. Bugbears like to hurt people to cause suffering to those who care about those people. Each monster gets a good description which sets them apart.
5.) Some OGL monsters went into the Bestiary from Tome of Horrors.
6.) Lots of product support: less pure rules and more roleplaying/idea options. A good mix of both.
7.) Feats are tweaked and there are many new ones.
8.) Skill list is shorter and skills are easier to crunch.
9.) NPCs are easier to crunch.
10.) I like the artwork and layout better than 3.5. Not a big selling point for me, but I like it.

[DM_Blake]

To add a bit more info.

Over the years that 3.5 was on the shelf, WotC and the 3PPs wrote book after book after book, full of new spells, new classes, races, magic items, new rules, etc. Over those years, things got more and more powerful as each book seemed to feel obligated to make their stuff just a little more cool than everything else out there. In the end, some of the stuff put out was clearly more powerful than the original Player's Handbook, DMG, and Monster Manual.

Which made it very hard for a player in a 3.5 game to choose to be a fighter, or monk, or bard, when everyone else is playing warmages and goliaths and whatever.

So Pathfinder came along and elevated a bunch of the core stuff up to today's standards, adding in a little rebalancing along the way. Now the races and classes are more equal to each other, and to the latest and greatest stuff in 3.5 splat books.

They've also streamlined some other rules, mostly for the better.

My gaming group is throroughly enamored of Pathfinder and showing no desire to return to core 3.5 stuff (and is repulsed by any hint of a suggestion to give 4.0 another shot).

[Reebo Kesh]

MDT and World of Dusk. You've sold me.
$10 PDF rulebook?! You can't beat that.
Thanks guys!
Reebo

[seekerofshadowlight]

just in case your want to look first Pathfinder reference document

[Skeld]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D...

Hi Reebo -

What have you been playing since last you played 3.5D&D?

Pardon the threadjack.

Welcome back.

-Skeld

[mdt]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

MDT and World of Dusk. You've sold me.

$10 PDF rulebook?! You can't beat that.
Thanks guys!
Reebo

LOL

Happy to drag another doomed soul down... off stage murmering

Oh, sorry about that, wrong speech. ruffles through notes

Happy to bring another happy customer to Paizo, welcome. Someone will be by soon with cookies.

offstage murmering

Oh, bring your own milk please, thank you.

[World of Dusk]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

MDT and World of Dusk. You've sold me.

$10 PDF rulebook?! You can't beat that.
Thanks guys!
Reebo

Having just joined the collective myself, let me say that we are now one. Embrace the glory that is Pathfinder.

And pass a cookie, would ya?

[Mairkurion {tm}]

Welcome home, Reebo. :)

[Dennis da Ogre]

One of us.

[anthony Valente]

Reebo: If you GM, the quality of the Bestiary will speak for itself. If you liked the 3.5 MM, you'll love the new Bestiary.

As for the core rulebook, it's an entirely new update to 3.5. Having read most of it, and played a few sessions with the rules, if still feels like we're playing 3.5 D&D, but at the same time starting "fresh".

[Dennis da Ogre]

I agree, the Bestiary... even if you skip the Core book the Bestiary is awesome, vastly better than it's 3.5 counterpart. It's also a $10 PDF and formatted in a printer friendly 1-2 monster per page format which is great for game prep.

[DM_Blake]

anthony Valente wrote:

Reebo: If you GM, the quality of the Bestiary will speak for itself. If you liked the 3.5 MM, you'll love the new Bestiary.

Really?

I mean, I like it fine enough and all, and it's a good bestiary, but I miss some of the stuff that the 3.5 Monster Manual had in it.

No, I'm not talking about some monster or two that didn't make the cut.

I'm talking about the detailed explanations of how the monsters prefer to use their abilities in combat.

It's all fine and dandy to look at an orc, or a skeleton, or an ogre, and figure out in the blink of an eye just what they will do every round in combat.

But the tricky monsters, especially hich-CR monsters with lots of unusual special abilities, even moreso when those abilities play off of each other (like grab and swallow whole for example), are not immediately apparent when you glance at the monster's stat block.

Sure, sure, I can de-engineer the monster. I can pore over its special abilities and plan out my method of attack, but that requires me to be much more familiar with the monster than I had to be in 3.5 and it also requires me to be more of a tactician than I needed to be in 3.5.

Yeah, I'm a professional chessplayer, so I don't mind being tactical. I rather enjoy it. But it is somewhat more exhausting to have to figure out every monster for every fight - sometimes I just want to relax, whip out a random encounter, and start rolling dice without all that over-thinking.

I'm not saying the Bestiary is bad. I really like what they've done. I just think that "you'll love the new Bestiary" probably oversells it, at least for me.

(don't let this scare anyone away from Pathfinder. I love Pathfinder and I'm not going anywhere else. I just felt I needed to inject a little bit of honest counterpoint here - everything is not all sunshine and lillipops in the Pathfinder world).

[Zmar]

Needles to say that the books look much better than the PDFs.

...

Squeee ^^

[kyrt-ryder]

DM_Blake wrote:

anthony Valente wrote:

Reebo: If you GM, the quality of the Bestiary will speak for itself. If you liked the 3.5 MM, you'll love the new Bestiary.

Really?

I mean, I like it fine enough and all, and it's a good bestiary, but I miss some of the stuff that the 3.5 Monster Manual had in it.

No, I'm not talking about some monster or two that didn't make the cut.

I'm talking about the detailed explanations of how the monsters prefer to use their abilities in combat.

It's all fine and dandy to look at an orc, or a skeleton, or an ogre, and figure out in the blink of an eye just what they will do every round in combat.

But the tricky monsters, especially hich-CR monsters with lots of unusual special abilities, even moreso when those abilities play off of each other (like grab and swallow whole for example), are not immediately apparent when you glance at the monster's stat block.

Sure, sure, I can de-engineer the monster. I can pore over its special abilities and plan out my method of attack, but that requires me to be much more familiar with the monster than I had to be in 3.5 and it also requires me to be more of a tactician than I needed to be in 3.5.

Yeah, I'm a professional chessplayer, so I don't mind being tactical. I rather enjoy it. But it is somewhat more exhausting to have to figure out every monster for every fight - sometimes I just want to relax, whip out a random encounter, and start rolling dice without all that over-thinking.

For what it's worth, I myself absolutely LOVE the tactical aspect. I wouldn't bother running combat encounters if I wasn't intimately familiar with the monsters enough that I could run them as well as a solid, experienced player could be expected to run his PC.

Also, it should be pointed out that often the advice given by WotC was actually bad advice, it's better that Paizo leave the tactical choices up to the GM (who will modify it based on the situation anyway) than to slap down a few notes.

Granted a tactics section done right would be awesome for new GM's, but eh, we can't have everything lol, adding a proper tactical section to each monster very well may have increased the page count by 20% or more)

[A Man In Black]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

Hey all.

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D and was wondering what the new Pathfinder Rules were all about? I've seen the hefty tome in the stores and it looks impressive but do I need it? Has much changed from the WotC version of 3.5?

The changes are comparable to 3.0 -> 3.5.

Quote:

Also are the rules still OGL? Can anyone produce adventures for Pathfinder?

Yeah. There's even an SRD for it to boot, just google PRD. There are a couple decent sites in the style of d20srd.org.

Quote:

Basically I'm looking to be sold on the new Pathfinder rules and I would love you guys to help me decide on it.

Here's what I can remember of the rulechanges, coming from the perspective of someone who is super-critical of pretty much every game system. (BTW, take KaeYoss's advice with a large grain of salt when he hits this thread; he's Captain Pathfinder Fanboy.)

The PHB and DMG are one book.

Races are buffed all over. Humans are +2 to a stat of your choice, +1 feat, +1 skill per level. All races are this good now (and half-whatevers are better now).

Feats come at odd levels, not 1/3 levels.

At chargen, you pick a class. Every level in that class gives you +1 HP or +1 skill, your choice. This is to encourage single-classing, and replaces the old favored class/XP penalty system.

Skills are completely revamped, to make the order in which you buy skills less important and to raise the non-class skill cap to +level on a skill (as opposed to +level+3 for class skills, which is the same as 3.5).

Classes have been revamped, to remove "dead levels" where you don't get a new ability and to rebalance the classes. Short version: paladin and monk got superbuffed, fighter got buffed some, druids got nerfed, everyone else got fiddled with.

HP is generally higher across the board, and corresponds to BAB now. So 1/2 BAB is all d6s, 3/4 BAB is all d8s, and 1/1 BAB is all d10s (except Barbs).

0-level spells are all infinite use; some of them got changed to reflect this.

Extra party members in the form of animals (animal companions and mounts) don't use monster stats any more. They use a special animal companion class, then get stat mods based on their type. Also, all extra party members (animal companions, mounts, and familiars) are optional; you can replace them with an alternative class ability.

Every class has a level 20 "capstone" ability. They are of greatly variable utility.

Barbarians and rogues get a bunch of D20M/SWSaga-style talents. The barbarian ones are poorly designed (mostly once-per-rage situational abilities of negligible effect or defensive abilities), the rogue ones are interesting and useful.

Bards are now a paperwork cluster...ahem. You can still run out of bardic performance in a day (although it's harder now, since you get more) but you're ticking off rounds of use of the ability, even in non-combat uses.

Bards can replace Perform for a bunch of different skills, and Bardic Knowledge actually works in a reasonable way.

Clerics lost heavy armor and had one or two spells nerfed, and got a free weapon proficiency and super-improved domain powers.

Turn undead is gone, replaced with a healing/negative energy wave.

Druids are super-duper nerfed. Nobody is really complaining.

Animal companions are weaker now. You can have any sort of animal at level 1-20, and the only difference between animal types are size, sort of natural attacks, and minor stat mods. Their feats are also limited to a small pool.

Wild shape is much nerfed, as it is now minor stat mods on top of your base stats and only certain special abilities from a small pool. It still requires dumpster-diving in order to find the stats for the animal you want, though. >:| You get continuous boosts from magic items now, though.

Fighters get some new class-specific feats. There's some boring bonus stuff, like +1 AC when using a shield or ignoring 5-10 DR (at high levels only). There's some stuff that penalizes casters who try to cast defensively in your threatened area, and a feat that lets you apply two of the new on-critical effect feats at once. (More on the crit feats later.) Most of the new fighter feats kick in at level 10+.

Fighters also get some extra +hit/damage on a chosen weapon family, and reduce the penalties/dex-to-AC cap on armor.

Monks work somewhat better. They get full BAB as long as they are punching people, and they get a pool of points to spend on their class abilities that they can also use as action points.

Paladins are dragonslayers now. Smite is now "Pick a target, you completely rock its face for the rest of the day."

Lay on Hands is also buffed, to heal for more and to remove negative conditions.

You can trade your paladin horse for the ability to cast Super Duper Greater Magic Weapon that includes the ability to add special abilities (like flaming and holy and such).

Rangers are pretty much just rangers. They get favored terrains (small-ish skill bonuses in your favorite terrain), and they can trade their pet for the ability to share half their favored enemy bonus with the party.

At high levels, rangers can pick a favored enemy target and get a ton of bonuses against it until it's dead.

Rogues get a bunch of D20M/SWSaga-style talents at even levels, and benefit from some of the skill consolidation.

Rogues also got stealth-nerfed (c wut i did thar) because Blink/Ring of Blinking don't make enemies flatfooted any more. I seriously do not understand why.

Sorcerers now choose bloodlines, which give special abilities at different levels.

Specialist wizards get a bunch of free abilities. The two best free ability sets go to two of the three best specializations (Conjuration and Divination). Isn't that lovely?

Specialist wizards can also learn and prep spells from their banned schools, they just take two slots instead of one. Scrolls and wands and such can be used unhindered.

Wizards can trade their familiar for a free spell slot of their highest level. This spell slot is a spontaneous cast of any spell they know.

Generalist wizards are still strictly inferior to specialists, as you might have guessed.

Skills were consolidated all over the place. Balance, Tumble, and Jump are all one skill (but Climb and Escape Artist are still their own skills), Open Lock and Disable Device are one skill, Spot and Listen and Search are one skill (and the new rules are a confused muddle, due to the sloppy combination), Hide and Move Silently are one skill (and ditto on the confused muddle), languages and Decipher Script are one skill, Use Rope is just gone, and there's a new Fly skill for reasons altogether unclear.

Concentration is now a caster level check.

Synergy bonuses are gone.

There are a lot of new feats.

All of the combat maneuver feats (Improved Trip and the like) are now two feats, and work basically like Improved Trip once you have both of them.

There are new feat chains. Notable new chains are Vital Strike (extra damage when you take a standard action to make a single attack, hilariously badly worded for such a simple feat), some new TWF offshoot chains (particularly TWFing with sword-and-shield), and a bunch of Fooing Critical feats (when you crit, save-or-suck, all of them kicking in at level 12 and higher).

Go back and read whatever feat you think you already know. Some basic staples like Cleave and Manyshot work very differently.

There's a Power Attack for ranged attacks. This is about as good an idea as you can imagine.

Medium and heavy armor all get +1 AC, and mithral armor no longer lowers the weight with regard to proficiency.

The spiked chain doesn't have reach any more. Why? Who knows?

Cold iron is still inexplicably and retardedly expensive. This isn't specific to PF, I just wanted to complain about it.

Combat works basically the same, except for maneuvers, like disarming, tripping, grappling, etc. All maneuvers have a single bonus (BAB + str + feats + 2(size modifier) + d20) and everyone has a unified defense against them (BAB + str + dex + 2(size modifier) + 10). The upshot of this is that giants are really bad at grappling now, outsiders are really good at it, and specialist PCs are less viable.

Grappling is still a huge snarl of confusion. It's just a huge snarl of confusion without opposed rolls.

Some spells were nerfed. Glitterdust and Hold Person/Monster allow a save every turn, and save-or-dies got nerfed similarly to how Disintegrate was nerfed. Forcecage has a save, Irresistible Dance is...well, resistible now, and some other spells were twiddled with in trivial ways.

XP costs are gone across the board. Magic item crafting is just half cost now, and XP-costly spells are now money-costly spells.

There you go, everything I can remember. I'm sure there's some other stuff.

There's also a new monster book that replaces the monster manual. It has some issues. Read around for that, since it's brand new.

-EDIT- BONUS DRINKING GAME: Take a shot every time I say "though"!

[anthony Valente]

DM_Blake wrote:

anthony Valente wrote:

Reebo: If you GM, the quality of the Bestiary will speak for itself. If you liked the 3.5 MM, you'll love the new Bestiary.

Really?

I mean, I like it fine enough and all, and it's a good bestiary, but I miss some of the stuff that the 3.5 Monster Manual had in it.

No, I'm not talking about some monster or two that didn't make the cut.

I'm talking about the detailed explanations of how the monsters prefer to use their abilities in combat.

It's all fine and dandy to look at an orc, or a skeleton, or an ogre, and figure out in the blink of an eye just what they will do every round in combat.

But the tricky monsters, especially hich-CR monsters with lots of unusual special abilities, even moreso when those abilities play off of each other (like grab and swallow whole for example), are not immediately apparent when you glance at the monster's stat block.

Sure, sure, I can de-engineer the monster. I can pore over its special abilities and plan out my method of attack, but that requires me to be much more familiar with the monster than I had to be in 3.5 and it also requires me to be more of a tactician than I needed to be in 3.5.

Yeah, I'm a professional chessplayer, so I don't mind being tactical. I rather enjoy it. But it is somewhat more exhausting to have to figure out every monster for every fight - sometimes I just want to relax, whip out a random encounter, and start rolling dice without all that over-thinking.

I'm not saying the Bestiary is bad. I really like what they've done. I just think that "you'll love the new Bestiary" probably oversells it, at least for me.

(don't let this scare anyone away from Pathfinder. I love Pathfinder and I'm not going anywhere else. I just felt I needed to inject a little bit of honest counterpoint here - everything is not all sunshine and lillipops in the Pathfinder world).

Mr. Blake, I actually find the stat blocks themselves much easier to read and more intuitive to the 3.5 counterparts. For instance, if a monster has an ability that comes into play initially, it's listed at the top of the block, for example, auras. If a monster has an ability tied to an attack, it's written along with the attack bonus and damage, such as grab. Detailed entries for combat, if I recall, weren't all that detailed in the 3.5 MM, except for a few monsters, like the Pit Fiend and Titan. They were for the most part a brief sentence or two on how a monster fought, and then a list of its powers. I can see if you like that format better, but I prefer the new one, with most monster abilities in the stat block, right where they're most likely to be brought into play during a combat.

[tejón]

A Man In Black wrote:

-EDIT- BONUS DRINKING GAME: Take a shot every time I say "though"!

I'm still sober. I demand my money back.

[Dennis da Ogre]

DM_Blake wrote:

I'm talking about the detailed explanations of how the monsters prefer to use their abilities in combat.

huh, I hadn't noticed this.

My only guess as to why it's absent is because they felt it was more appropriate to be built as part of the encounter design rather than in the Bestiary. Regardless some generic tactics would be nice.

[Snorter]

Reebo Kesh wrote:

Hey all.

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D and was wondering what the new Pathfinder Rules were all about? I've seen the hefty tome in the stores and it looks impressive but do I need it? Has much changed from the WotC version of 3.5?

If you had a habit of multi-classing, or as a DM, you had to make plenty of monsters with class levels, then the new skill system is a godsend.

• making Int bonus retroactive,
• losing the (X+Int)*4 skill points at level 1,
• making all skills cost one rank,
• giving a one-time +3 bonus to any class skill with a rank in it,

all make the math far easier and quicker, and make it irrelevant which order you took classes in.
It also means that humanoids with more than 1 HD are no longer incompetent at what was their favoured class (like gnoll rangers in 3.5, shafted by their racial skill points to have less skills at 3HD than other rangers at 1HD).

[Reebo Kesh]

Skeld wrote:

Reebo Kesh wrote:

I've recently decided to come back to 3.5 D&D...

Hi Reebo -

What have you been playing since last you played 3.5D&D?
Pardon the threadjack.

Welcome back.
-Skeld

Thanks Skeld. I haven't been playing much as Real Life (TM) dragged most of the group off kicking and screaming. I have played a bit of 4th edition and liked it mainly because it's pretty much like playing WoW with the way the powers work but it's a different game than the D&D I grew up with and still love.

I'd like to come back to 3.5 because some of my favourite campaigns (ahh the memories) were based in that edition (well AD&D and 3.0 anyway) and to be honest I always wanted to take a crack at publishing my own adventures.

I'm certainly going to go ahead and purchase the Pathfinder rules but in the mean time if there are any 3.5 players in the Sydney, Australia area looking for players or a new DM send me a PM!
Thanks guys
Reebo