One of my old players emailed me yesterday that he and his group officially dropped 4e in favor of Pathfinder last week. He knows that I am losing interest in 4e and don’t have any Pathfinder books yet so he let me know how things went. From what I got out of his email he and his group are quite happy with the Pathfinder game. In his words “We decided to jump the 4th edition ship and swim to the Pathfinder bandwagon.” He went on to say “Compared to 4th edition this was a breath of fresh air for both Brian and myself.” In the past, I have talked with them about 4e and they felt their Characters had no purpose or dimension compared to 3.5e.
What bothered them the most was combat. Back to Nick, “I felt with 4th edition, everything was taking forever. I’ve had long battles playing D&D, but 4th edition takes the cake. With 4e, I often found myself looking at my watch thinking, are we done fighting yet?” He said in the Pathfinder game they played, which was a module called Crypt of the Everflame, the battles were short, but challenging, quick and fun. I can empathize with him, in the 4e games I played in, and judged, usually the DM calls the combat once the PCs get the upper hand, even if the monsters still have some fight left in them. We do it to just to get the excitement back and get the game going, which is odd because most play the game because of the combat.
He also pointed out that Skeletons are tough again. Pathfinder rules for skeletons made a relatively easy encounter with a group of 6 skeletons a bit more difficult for first level characters. In 3.5, for skeletons, you deal half damage if you hit with a weapon that does not deal bludgeoning damage. In Pathfinder that’s changed to damage reduction 5. That changes things a tiny bit because a hit dealing 6 damage in 3.5, would be reduced to 3 damage, while in Pathfinder that hit deals only 1 hp of damage. He said the new rules “gave the skeletons a bit of a sporting chance!”
All this has me more excited about the game and even more interested in purchasing the rule books required.
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About shent_lodge
It’s weird. I’m running pathfinder ,and was just in a 4e game and I’ve not found Pathfinder combat to “Be a breeze compared to 4e”. Both take a while and can drag on, IMO. In fact, the 4e combat was easier on the two newer and extremely rule-memorization-phobic players in my group.
Running and playing in the games I had no problem with either one. But when I sit back and analyze the rules, Pathfinder is frustrating me just as much, if not more so, than 4e was….
“In 3.5, for skeletons, you deal half damage if you hit with a weapon that does not deal bludgeoning damage. In Pathfinder that’s changed to damage reduction 5″
Actually, that is no change at all. In 3.5 skeletons had DR 5 / Bludgeoning, just like in Pathfinder.
@Dyson, Drat! I just checked the D20 SRD on Skeletons, I don’t have the Pathfinder Bestiary so I can not check there. Thanks. I got a little ahead of myself. Sorry.
@justaguy, I am just going off hearsay for Pathfinder. It is hard to get into a game around here to really test it out. I am waiting for an OK from the wife to order the books so I can try it on my own. The gamers I am writing about have all been playing strictly just D&D (2e,3e,3.5e & most recently 4e) for at least 15years; for these guys (and ladies) to email me that they are dropping D&D in favor of another fantasy RPG game really took me by surprise, so I blogged it.
Ok, since I’m the one doing the comparison, I thought I would chime in.
First, I would like to qualify the comparison, our group ran through ‘Keep on the Shadowfell’ and had just begun to run ‘Thunderspire Labyrinth’. With Pathfinder we started ‘Crypt of the Everflame’. These are the 1st module offerings for each rule set and thus should be the mods that put their products’ best foot forward to make a good first impression with fans.
@Justaguy, when I said ‘Pathfinder is a breath of fresh air compared to 4e’ my observation here are the players (and myself) are having fun, not that encounters are more simple or easier to run than 4th edition. When we were playing 4e, we just weren’t having fun with the game.
I’m not sure why it wasn’t working out with 4e but the lengthy encounters are part of it. There does seem like an extraordinary number of misses in the game which has fueled some frustration (couple this with misses on daily powers, ouch!). One player felt the rules in 4e were unwieldy, more like ‘lawyer’ rules rather than rules for an rpg. Also of note, when I dealt out xp rewards for an encounter, on more than one occaision I was asked, ‘is that it?’.
We continued to Thunderspire Labyrinth and that seemed to start off pretty well with the group deciding to just explore the labyrinth instead of tackling any quests. We didn’t get much further than that though. I purchased the Pathfinder Core Rule book a few weeks later and brought it over for some perusing by the group. When I asked if they wanted to give it a try, they said sure if it was ok with me. And so into Pathfinder we went.
The first night with Pathfinder’s first module went well and folks were having fun which I think is the most important part. That said, it was just the first night and those were my first impressions of it. We have a ways to go to get to the end of the module so things could go south and it could become unbearable. We’ll see.
@Dyson, my bad. I got my mind stuck in the 3.0 rules.