Is pathfinder 1e actually an improvement on 3.5, in your opinion?
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Is pathfinder 1e actually an improvement on 3.5, in your opinion?
Is pathfinder 1e actually an improvement on 3.5, in your opinion?
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
No.
Paizo were always dogshit at rules and pathfinder is a worse version of 3.5
Would you mind elaborating? Between consolidating skills and SP revisions, CMD, buffs to garbage classes and tweaks like CHA to HP for undead it seems to be a straight upgrade. One of the only things I see that kind of sucks is that paizo went too far on the prestige class front. Yeah there was alot of cheese in third but there was still some decently executed ones. I pathfinder they're almost always dogshit.
The thing is that it's mostly consolidation, and that consolidation leaves it very bland and rigid compared to 3.5. And the editorial department made damned sure content accretion wouldn't meaningfully raise the ceiling, so while spellcasters got horrible mistakes like Sacred Geometry the Martials never recovered from Power Attack being gutted and feat chains being made even longer for some incomprehensible reason.
>CMD
CMD and CMB are pretty bad examples since it's literally proof of paizo being bad at rules and math and managing to make something worse than 3.5, maneuevrs are basically useless since they fricked the math on scaling to the point they had to print a bunch of stuff letting you add half your level or other big bonuses to some maneuvers to try and keep up which just makes everyone without those options awful at them. not to mention all the monsters just cheat and have rules that let them automatically succeed on hits anyways. CMD is legit terrible, one of the few good changes 2e made was just copying 4e and making shit target Reflex and Fortitude defenses.
It's about 25% improvement and 75% bad changes.
no, the class selection is worse
DFA is my favorite
Meh. CMB/CMD was just a standardization of various combat options, and adding a flat skill bonus for proficiency was somewhat less annoying than the old 1/2 point for non-class skills business. Class archetypes are fun and good, but there's a huge number of awful ones. Some feats got better but many, many bad feats were introduced too, and it didn't solve the basic feat chain issue of 3rd. Making cantrips usable at will was nice, but giving many non-martial classes more hp and other bonuses just made caster supremacy worse.
Back when I played it, my group preferred PF for all the options it offered, but the flip side of this is that you have to wade through a lot of dogshit to find the things that are actually good and workable.
No opinion on high-level math, prestige classes, etc because I rarely played PF with high enough level characters to take advantage of that sort of thing
The one thing I'll give Pathfinder is that it has one of the best summoner mechanics in a TTRPG. The rest is hit-or-miss or outright dogshit.
They fixed some dumb shit, but they never understood the foundational mechanics, so they managed to break plenty more shit. It got worse as time went on. Still annoyed at "mythic" and the dogshit psychic magic kineticist frickups.
No. To borrow from another anon, Pathfinder reads like it was written by people who knew terrible things went on in the depths of the CharOp forums, but had no idea what those things were. They shackled themselves to backwards compatibility when it would kneecap their ability to make needed changes, then made enough fiddly changes to make true backwards compatibility questionable anyway. Pathfinder stood on the shoulders of giants and did not see further. It sold entirely on solid production values (granted), seizing on good timing, and the received wisdom of the assumption that it was 3.5 but fixed, just pure buzz.
https://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=19240.msg347550#msg347550
There's someone's longer list of critiques. Personally, I even disagree with some of their pros, and some of the things I don't like are too specific to make it into such a broad summary.
Obviously. It's just glorified errata.
That's a picture of one of the basic boxes though.
homosexual OP here, I couldn't find a side-by-side of pathfinder 1e and dnd 3e and since I'm lazy I just posted that.
Honest question: what in your opinion did 3.5 do better? For myself I'm iffy on the power attack change, but I can see how some might hate it. Also have 0 clue why psionics weren't properly ported when it was also in the SRD, and it's a shame there's no artificer-like class.
They're so similar that anything you like better in one you can usually just port to the other.
>3pf gay is lazy and dumb. News at 11.
Okay. Carry on.
Cheers nerd
>since I'm lazy I just posted that.
It would've taken you less effort to just throw two images in paint rather than doing cursory google searches for a specific topic.
It's an improvement in some ways, but paizo wanted 3.5 compatibility so much that they kept all the legacy problems. Like every system out there, PF requires adjustments before running.
Not that anon(s), but 3.5 had recharge magic rules and a proper warlock class. The fact that paizo didn't port those over will always be a mark against the designers. Additionally, there were so many 3e books that could fill any need it would take paizo ages to catch up.
>psionics
Psionics is just psychic magic and paizo got that part right, but made the fatal mistake of introducing it after the APG and related classes lost out on all the archetype potential. That said, their Psychic class is so limited because they dared not step on the cleric's sacred toes (despite being more than healers).
>artificer-like class
Alchemist could've filled that role (even as an alt class), but typical paizo tunnel vision kept that class relegated to vials and brews. It's a shame because the artificer was great when you needed a class like that.
Yes.
I played a Hobgoblin Daring General Cavalier in a Kingmaker campaign and by level 15 I had maxed out my leadership score and was rolling around with an army of 500 men and 4 level 12 champions.
Between me and the Cleric of Urgathoa our party was a genuine local power with a frickton of troops and resources even before the kingdom rules kicked in.
It was a fun Kingmaker campaign, we ended up the defacto head of a sort of monster hegemony since most of the party either started as monster races or (in the case of the Cleric who turned into a vampire) became one over the course of the campaign. We "incorporated" (beat up and vassalized) the Sootscales, Hargulka and his trolls, Irovetti and his city etc.
We ended up subjugating the River Kingdoms by the end of the campaign.
The point I'm trying to make is this: you couldn't do these sorts of kingdom building things in 3.5.
>Link to the part of the SRD that covers trannies you moron
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/core-races/elf
>Is [direct copy of thing] better than [thing]?
No.
Yes.
Overall? No.
Individually? Yes some of their stuff is an improvement. I broadly prefer the PF1 Ranger, for instance. And I like the PF1 Bestiaries more than the 3e Monster manuals after the first. And all four books of the damned are pretty good.
But their combat feats are a downgrade, and combat maneuver math does not scale in a usable way, it goes up so fast on the monsters that combat maneuvers are useless by the time you're any good at them.
IMNSHO the best move is to:
>Start with 3.5 SRD.
>Cherry pick from PF1 and FantasyCraft and d20 Conan and Arcana Evolved and the other Malhavoc Books and Green Ronin and Mongoose and FantasyFlight and AEG and Distant Horizons and Legendary Games and Dreamscarred Press and Skirmisher and Atlas Games Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine selectively.
>Use variant rules you like from all of the above.
So, PF1 is not an improvement overall, but there are parts of it worth grabbing and using.
contd
The main things it offered were the legacy PRD / d20pfsrd / archives of nethys making it free for players to conveniently reference stuff online, but that's not about the gameplay, and that stuff exists unofficially for a lot of stuff for 3.5 now, and a lot of great stuff is still PDF only.
And of course, their art production was good.
And Inner Sea World Guide and Inner Sea Gods are great examples of how to write a campaign setting book, but they're largely compilations of short articles bundled in adventures.
The Good
>CMB/CMD standardized a bunch of jank out
>Simplified skill point allocation is generally much nicer
>Skill list consolidation was also generally good
>Removal of dead levels means prestige classing and 6-way dips aren't just better than sticking on your class
>Core support for archetypes, swift actions, etc.
>Many of the later classes, like occultist, were interesting if still worse than core
The Bad
>core issues of the system still remain
>core issues probably got worse
>nerfs to things that weren't broken
>bloat is five times worse
>different enough that 3.5 isn't entirely compatible
I think it's an improvement but not a huge one.
CMB/CMD made maneuvers unusable. With the maneuver rule / feat nerfs, by the time you have enough feats to do them well enough to be worth trying, the monsters CMD has scaled out of being worth trying them on.
Unless you only fight medium size npcs after level 6, then yeah, maybe.
>pathfinder 1e actually an improvement on 3.5
it is D&D 3.75 or D&D 4e, or the one after 3.5 whatever the assigned number, in all but name, it increased the complexity but overdid it and the fun of tinkering with mechanics becomes very much a 10 ton burden, when it was a 5 ton burden in 3.5 but still fun.
It is a failed attempt at an improvement of 3.5 but still fun. Its just a 3.5 variant, a deluxe one.
Good for computer games, fun in tabletop but gets tiresome due to its mechanics even faster than 3.5e.
There are some changes that are straight-up improvements (like Paladin), but there are also a lot of changes that are either pointless or actively harmful (such as splitting combat maneuver feats into two).
Yes and no.
Yes because of more module resources to scavenge through, yes because of more feat options, yes because of more magic items, and yes because occasionally there was even a new spell.
No because of everything else.
99% of people who "player Pathfinder" back in the 4e DnD era were just playing 3.5 with supplemental bits of Pathfinder thrown in.
And mostly just the Gunslinger and Magus classes.
Both systems are just glorified character deck buildersthat get in the way of playing the game.
Too many options to pour over too little to do in the system.
Acks is now far superior tho also bloated.
Yes. The gods make more sense, as they all have a common backstory w/the whole stop Rovavgug thing.
Also no penalty for mutliclassing rocks. Definitely good errata whatnot to make things more user friendly and useful (barbarian rage, paladin smite more versatile etc). I never GM'd Pathfinder 1E, but I found it was legit hard to got back to playing 3.5 bc it didn't have the quality of life improvements PF1E had.
But the question you want to ask is "Is Pathfinder 1E better than DnD 4E?" since that's what it was actually competing with.
I consider them the same thing.
I will say that the logic behind the perception super skill makes sense, though perhaps Search could've been left out.
A skill that doesn't function without a second skill shouldn't be two skills, and in 95% of cases this was true of Hide and Move Silently. Stealth being two skills was just a tax on rogues, offsetting their "high" skill points by making any given task take 2-4 skills to do.
But, without two skills, Spot and Listen had a conundrum. Which do you oppose a Stealth check with? Either, at the GM's discretion, making your investment in one useless? Both, making stealth vastly harder since you'd need to win two checks? The better of the two, making one skill useless if you have the other? Obviously, they'd need to be combined too.
Realistically, it doesn't make sense that this combined spot-listen skill would magically only work on living creatures, so why not fold in Search too?
...and so on.
Still makes perception vastly better than nearly all other skills (maybe not UMD), exacerbating skill balance differences that already existed.
Personally I like the granularity of hide/move silently, listen/spot. Makes it easier to run invisible opponents and the like.
And given the importance of perception (literally every game I've played where perception has been a single skills it's head and shoulders more valuable than the rest).
And I like the condensation making it so that a class with X+int skill points per level can do X+int things using skills. The split just makes Listen the better of the three, since you'll get both it and Spot in most cases, and Spot has its function eaten into by Search.
Could just do what PF2 did and move Perception out of "skills" and into "basic statistics" next to AC and saves. Then, it's advancing with some resource other than the one spent on skills, so its existence as a god skill is less overbearing since it's not directly competing with them.
I actually quite like how Perception is handled in Pathfinder Second Edition. Perception is moved out of a skill to something that everyone can do, but some classes do better. Then they build off of that, noting what things can't be noticed without a certain rank of Perception, what are the limits of Senses a creature can use to locate things by varying degrees.
Ehh, my group goes back and between the two. At this point we're really playing some heavily houseruled amalgam designed specifically to our tastes as a group.
Path of War is pretty fricking cool though. Always hated the fact that there was never a Tome of Battle II.
Whatever it improved mechanically the setting is beyond fricked. Instead of making different planes they thought they could mash the renaissance fair, pirate, Viking, Conan the Barbarian, and Van Helsing settings onto a single landmass and it absolutely does not work. It's idiotic. You can't just cross a border and get smacked in the face with idiosyncrasies like that. You have to put some fricking space between the jousting knights and Victorian era buildings and frigates with cannons and Viking longships and cavemen and robots and space aliens. Then as though there weren't enough incongruencies the euphoric developers had to include new atheism in their fantasy setting with actual gods.