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Under the vegetable posted:Pathfinder is unquestionably a worse, more bloated, and more poorly balanced game. This is nothing special for tabletop RPGs. Pathfinder at least has enough material out and a large enough playerbase to have done the effort of making tier lists so that you can have a somewhat balanced party.
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May 10, 2017 18:22
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SerCypher posted:I know people don't have the best view of 5e in this forum, but is there even more pathfinder hate? I personally have found it hard to go from a less-crunchy to a more-crunchy version of D&D. I think you will miss the quality-of-life improvements that 5e offers over 3.x. And it might be a very hard sell for players who have never experienced it.
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May 10, 2017 18:23
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Going from 5e to pathfinder was like, I toss a flask of acid. Okay, I didn't hit the AC required, so I miss. Now to calculate how I missed. Go to the miss tables. How many significant figures did I miss by. Calculate the new miss direction by rolling a d8 stepping out the number of tiles by how many orders of magnitude over my optimal range I attempted to throw. Okay five minutes later, you missed hitting other people too. Lucky thing. Okay so that's turn one. I like how in 5e if you miss you just miss unless it's a nat 1 in which case guess what the worst thing that could have happened was? bad news buddy it just did. You shot your friend good job. I assume this is crunchy v. not crunchy. I'm trying to pick up this word through context clues.
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May 10, 2017 18:33
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Kibner posted:Pathfinder at least has enough material out and a large enough playerbase to have done the effort of making tier lists so that you can have a somewhat balanced party. and 5e made every class have the option of "just being a caster", so it's fine.
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May 10, 2017 18:34
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Pathfinder, mostly because Dreamscarred Press exists if you're only going by official stuff, PF because it has enough material that cutting out the egregiously bad parts still leaves a workable chunk of material EDIT: I also give PF more leeway because it's free, and 5e isn't
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May 10, 2017 18:34
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Krinkle posted:Going from 5e to pathfinder was like, I toss a flask of acid. Okay, I didn't hit the AC required, so I miss. Now to calculate how I missed. Go to the miss tables. How many significant figures did I miss by. Calculate the new miss direction by rolling a d8 stepping out the number of tiles by how many orders of magnitude over my optimal range I attempted to throw. Okay five minutes later, you missed hitting other people too. Lucky thing. Okay so that's turn one. if its a nat 1 guess what you also just miss. critical failures arent part of the rules
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May 10, 2017 18:34
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Yeah I guess I don't want to deal with that. Or 7 different attack modifiers. I'll just use 5e. I just wish 5e was better 
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May 10, 2017 18:36
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the idea is that rolling a 1 is an automatic failure even if your bonuses would put you over the DC, to represent stress in a high pressure situation or whatever, since if you're not under stress you don't even have to roll in that circumstance. i'm no historian but i'm not sure if it's ever actually been defined in the rules as "you fail EXTRA WORSE than normal and punch your friend in the nose!"
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May 10, 2017 18:37
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"You hit, you miss, or you miss and a bad thing happens" is dumb. "You hit, you miss, or you hit and a bad thing happens" is how smart games roll. Binary success/fail is somewhere in the middle. e: unless you're running something like cthulhu or danger patrol Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 18:42
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hell i give my players half damage on a miss, too. i cant be here all day
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May 10, 2017 18:43
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critical failures (and location/severity specific critical hits) are awesome. are they from that big d100 table in a dragon magazine in the 80s? they aren't in 2e combat and tactics https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/a-short-history-of-critical-hits-in-dd/ has a good recap of critical hits but I'm still looking for misses edit: ha I think that blogs author posts here , nice mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 18:50 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 18:44
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mastershakeman posted:critical failures (and location/severity specific critical hits) are awesome. are they from that big d100 table in a dragon magazine in the 80s? they aren't in 2e combat and tactics Critical failure was an optional rule in the 2e core rules, iirc. Edit: location-specific crits started in a third party AD&D supplement I believe, I've never seen them in an official 2e book. Masiakasaurus fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 19:02
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Masiakasaurus posted:Critical failure was an optional rule in the 2e core rules, iirc. Hm, I can't find it. Spells and magic has failed saves doing critical hits, which is a step towards failed combat rolls. edit: I see it. critical fumble in the DMG of 2e. 'the dm must decide what the exact event is based on the situation, although it should not be one that causes damage'. it also points out that crits should apply equally to monsters, of course, which is a bygone era edit: vvvv those are great. found some pics and they're fantastic mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 19:05
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For the best of critical miss tables, you need the old Rolemaster/MERP rulebooks, which included such gems as (paraphrasing from memory and handwaving the numbers) "Trip over unseen, imaginary, deceased turtle. Fall prone and take <some> damage. Stunned for 1 round, because you're very confused." and "Worst move seen in ages. Take <some> damage from pulled groin and <some movement penalty for some days after>. Opponent stunned for 2 rounds laughing." There were pages and pages of charts like this.
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May 10, 2017 19:07
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SerCypher posted:So I'm firmly in the grips of nostalgia and thinking of playing my Rise of the Runelords game as pathfinder instead of 5e after all. Pathfinder's better by far, I think. Like you said, 5e is just so loving mushy. Both are bad but Pathfinder's problem is just having too many answers instead of 5e shrugging and going "we aren't even going to try." Also if you play it in Pathfinder you don't have to actually do a ton of converting and stuff. And as people have pointed out, Pathfinder has much better character balance and options for that over 5e. Pathfinder wasn't a great leap forward from 3.5, but at least it tried, instead of 5e's intentional retrograde approach.
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May 10, 2017 19:11
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Critical failure is a hilariously bad D&D houserule, and yet it's also one of the most widespread. Go figure.Under the vegetable posted:i'm not sure if it's ever actually been defined in the rules as "you fail EXTRA WORSE than normal and punch your friend in the nose!" It's been mentioned as a variant rule at some point, with pretty explicit warnings about why it's not a standard rule. Of course nobody ever actually reads the rules, so 90% of casual players fully believe Critical Failure to be a standard D&D rule, simply because so many people play that way. It's the "money on free parking" of D&D. Scyther fucked around with this message at 19:38 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 19:35
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Spellcasters force their opponents to roll, which can result in them having very few critical failures. Martial characters may end up rolling multiple times per round, resulting in more critical failures. So, yeah. Popular houserule.
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May 10, 2017 20:18
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St0rmD posted:For the best of critical miss tables, you need the old Rolemaster/MERP rulebooks, which included such gems as (paraphrasing from memory and handwaving the numbers) MERP fail tables were the best. The magic ones could effectively vaporize yourself if you failed badly enough. There was one result you could get by crit failing while charging with a Lance on horseback, getting it stuck in the ground and catapulting yourself onto your head, killing you instantly. Honestly I can't really imagine anyone surviving more that a few fights in that system, ever.
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May 10, 2017 20:23
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The Gate posted:MERP fail tables were the best. The magic ones could effectively vaporize yourself if you failed badly enough.
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May 10, 2017 20:29
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I uhh, really enjoy leaning hard into the critical failure of wisdom/intelligence checks. I asked the DM what I knew about mummies, out pops a 1 on a religion check, and I ended up throwing my teammate into a wall of fire because he was attacking my god. And then getting some mummy rot as I attempted to bask in their radiance. I was playing a black out drunk at the time. He was a monk, he was fine.
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May 10, 2017 20:55
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Ratspeaker posted:Hey thread--I've been skimming through Out of the Abyss, and it's unique among 5E campaigns in that the premise has really hooked me (I'm a sucker for stories where the PCs start with nothing and have to claw and scrape their way to freedom). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the adventure offers much explanation for how or why your players were captured by the drow in the first place--Princes of the Apocalypse, for all its flaws, had that nice little booklet of adventure hooks giving PCs reasons their characters might be in the starting town to investigate the cults. Are there any resources like that available for this campaign? I can't seem to find any. We just picked it up after completing LMOP. Upon returning to inform Sildar of our victory, he got us drunk, we saw his face flicker like one of the doppelgangers we'd seen, and then we got jumped by some assholes from behind. Woke up in the Underdark.
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May 10, 2017 22:43
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ProfessorCirno posted:How did nobody comment on how amazing this post is? I was considering it. Because it is really funny.
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May 10, 2017 22:55
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Nihilarian posted:Pathfinder, mostly because Dreamscarred Press exists It's just as free. There a several big free documents for 5e. Arivia posted:Honestly it's not surprising that this would be a sticking point for people used to Pathfinder APs. The Player's Guides are a good part of the "secret sauce" that really makes them work, because they provide players with all the information necessary to tie their characters into the campaign in rewarding ways and get players interested in the narrative. Considering OotA is a piece of poo poo that just badly describes stuff that happens to the PCs while fingerpainting with poo poo all over the FR, I'm not surprised they couldn't be bothered to actually put some effort in. Adding your own ideas isn't going to work too well because OotA gives you no space to incorporate them, and putting your own stuff in is just going to reveal how bad the entire adventure is. Kind of a catch-22. Feel free to Ignore Ariva on stuff like this Ratspeaker. Her Heavy bias even makes her think Pathfinder is somehow better then 5e. Like I can understand liking 4e more, but Pathfinder is a 100 times more broken. Plus general bad opinions about solid adventure Out of the Abyss. (Though its chief weakness is that it does not have much of an introduction.) MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 23:11 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 23:05
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Nihilarian posted:EDIT: I also give PF more leeway because it's free, and 5e isn't
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May 10, 2017 23:21
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MonsterEnvy posted:It's just as free. There a several big free documents for 5e. Splicer posted:Just want to point out that this is a consequence of using the OGL rather than something they do out of the goodness of their hearts. Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 23:23 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 23:21
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Nihilarian posted:last time I checked the free version of 5e came with like 4 classes. When did that change? When they updated the SRD and OGL. It does not have everything, but neither did the 3.5 version Pathfinder took to make their game. http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-document-srd http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/SRD-OGL_V5.1.pdf MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 23:29 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 23:27
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Krinkle posted:Going from 5e to pathfinder was like, I toss a flask of acid. Okay, I didn't hit the AC required, so I miss. Now to calculate how I missed. Go to the miss tables. How many significant figures did I miss by. Calculate the new miss direction by rolling a d8 stepping out the number of tiles by how many orders of magnitude over my optimal range I attempted to throw. Okay five minutes later, you missed hitting other people too. Lucky thing. Okay so that's turn one. My friend, if you find D&D too rules crunchy and hate adding lots of modifiers and multiple roles...boy do I have a system for you. Whats your thoughts on the star wars, hot/cold? MonsterEnvy posted:When they updated the SRD and OGL. It does not have everything, but neither did the 3.5 version Pathfinder took to make their game. Yeah but the Pathfinder version is completely free and includes pretty much everything while the DnD5e doesn't. Thats a legit decent reason to give it some leeway, you get what you pay for. kingcom fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 11, 2017 |
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May 11, 2017 00:15
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Edit: Double Posted so I'll make use of it I guessSplicer posted:"You hit, you miss, or you miss and a bad thing happens" is dumb. "You hit, you miss, or you hit and a bad thing happens" is how smart games roll. I would say you want 99% of checks to be: You Hit You Hit, Something Bad Happens You Miss, Something Good Happens You Miss, Next turn is absolutely the worst most backwards way to run a roleplaying game and is basically only a thing because of ancient game design principles people won't let go of. MonsterEnvy posted:Feel free to Ignore Ariva on stuff like this Ratspeaker. Her Heavy bias even makes her think Pathfinder is somehow better then 5e. Like I can understand liking 4e more, but Pathfinder is a 100 times more broken. Plus general bad opinions about solid adventure Out of the Abyss. (Though its chief weakness is that it does not have much of an introduction.) I mean I guess but she's right on why people like Pathfinder Adventure paths, they give solid set up and for the most part a clear in for your character to leap into if you like that world or don't have any understanding/knowledge of it. Hell the most complained about adventure path is the one that bait and switches the campaign premise so that you're left out in the cold for a lot of the character concepts that 'made sense' initially (also it does the black people are all evil poo poo which is a hilarious loving mess of a concept to try and pull). kingcom fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 11, 2017 |
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May 11, 2017 00:21
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MonsterEnvy, is Sean Spicer a close family member? You should really check. Paizo doesn't provide everything free of access from Pathfinder, but they certainly provide a lot more than WotC is providing, and more than they ever did. And Out of the Abyss is horrible. It's wringing every last drop of mystery out of the FR Underdark, from years of effort from many authors, and used it all up in a bad Greyhawk insertion. Don't forget all the posts about "what. did my party seriously beat a demon lord at level 9, just from an appearance on a random encounter table." It's so bad, no tension, no real plot; nothing, just a bunch of names in a blender and smeared out. And you don't even care about the names unless you know enough to dislike the lovely adventure in the first place!
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May 11, 2017 00:28
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Pathfinder 'as core' or with 'all material' is obviously a worse game than DnD5e but tier lists exist for the glut of material it has so you can say "OK guys this is a tier 3 and 4 game" and because the SRD is both very complete (including third party material) and also free you can knock it into a shape that's both mechanically engaging and balanced. Do I want to play a guy who wears magical psionic armor, next to a guy who has an opportunity attack range of 15 feet, next to a guy who's Alchemist Sherlock Holmes? heck yeah Think of it like playing a moba game like LoL or DotA where everyone has wildly different wacky abilities but they kinda-sorta fit within enough of a power band and operate within the same ruleset for it to work. As compared to playing tier 1 classes, where everyone is Invoker with infinite time to consult their spell list and input commands. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 00:36 on May 11, 2017 |
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May 11, 2017 00:34
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I've been running a Pathfinder adventure path in 5e. Converting has been pretty easy and the quality is way above the 5e modules I've tried to run so far (OOta/hoard).
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May 11, 2017 00:35
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Arivia posted:And Out of the Abyss is horrible. It's wringing every last drop of mystery out of the FR Underdark, from years of effort from many authors, and used it all up in a bad Greyhawk insertion. Don't forget all the posts about "what. did my party seriously beat a demon lord at level 9, just from an appearance on a random encounter table." It's so bad, no tension, no real plot; nothing, just a bunch of names in a blender and smeared out. And you don't even care about the names unless you know enough to dislike the lovely adventure in the first place! How is it a Greyhawk insertion? And how does it suck the mystery out when all stuff in it was already know about the FR Underdark. There is a decent amount of a tension, I know the names and I don't dislike the adventure along with a ton of other people. The Demon Lord thing is more impressive for the party. As I saw a level 12 ground encounter the same guy in the random encounter. (Juiblex) and nearly get wiped out until they ran away. It's not the greatest adventure ever, and has its flaws, but its still perfectly solid.
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May 11, 2017 00:38
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bewilderment posted:Pathfinder 'as core' or with 'all material' is obviously a worse game than DnD5e but tier lists exist for the glut of material it has so you can say "OK guys this is a tier 3 and 4 game" and because the SRD is both very complete (including third party material) and also free you can knock it into a shape that's both mechanically engaging and balanced. I don't agree that Pathfinder is a worse game than 5e taken core-against-core. Pathfinder is certainly more complicated, but it runs a lot better once you get used to it - it actually has rules, and relatively consistent ones at that instead of 5e's morass of "ask your DM." Once you're playing Pathfinder's much better because it's actually playable out of the books, instead of requiring negotiations and so on. And Pathfinder's math is a lot better. Not as good as 4e's, but one advantage of the system having been around for over a decade is that Paizo was able to rebalance monsters and so on so they actually numerically work just fine. You'll still find overpowered and underpowered stuff in both games, but you've already pointed out how that's so much easier to address for Pathfinder. Really, the only reason to play 5e is "it's the current D&D" with all that entails.
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May 11, 2017 00:42
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MonsterEnvy posted:How is it a Greyhawk insertion? And how does it suck the mystery out when all stuff in it was already know about the FR Underdark. There is a decent amount of a tension, I know the names and I don't dislike the adventure along with a ton of other people. The Demon Lord thing is more impressive for the party. As I saw a level 12 ground encounter the same guy in the random encounter. (Juiblex) and nearly get wiped out until they ran away. Zuggtmoy is a Greyhawk character. Using up all the mystery and DM possibilty of Araumycos on getting her married is just really, really sad. Actually it's full on 3am mad Trump tweet Sad! it's that bad. OotA isn't about the Realms' Underdark, it doesn't actually care about the Realms as a setting. It just exists to parade the demon lords in front of players, like they're all contractually required to put in their one appearance for this shambles of an edition and then they can go back home until 6e. Having a demon lord like Jubilex on a random encounter chart is fine - that's how I originally found out about him and Geryon, with Gygax's wonderful purple prose about them in the 1e DMG - but it's so completely at cross purposes with the modern narrative campaign arc something like OotA is supposed to provide. Princes of the Apocalypse is the same with different serial numbers. More Greyhawk poo poo with the ToEE variant. More bad, paint-by-numbers design. The only reason anyone keeps buying this poo poo is that 5e players don't have anything else to buy, and there's little of actual quality in the edition to show them what they're missing out on.
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May 11, 2017 00:49
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bewilderment posted:Pathfinder 'as core' or with 'all material' is obviously a worse game than DnD5e but tier lists exist for the glut of material it has so you can say "OK guys this is a tier 3 and 4 game" and because the SRD is both very complete (including third party material) and also free you can knock it into a shape that's both mechanically engaging and balanced. Holy poo poo, comparing the method of sale and audience of DotA and pathfinder is cracking me up so much. That's perfect. That's the best post anyone's made about rpgs on this forum in years.
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May 11, 2017 00:58
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Arivia posted:Zuggtmoy is a Greyhawk character. Using up all the mystery and DM possibilty of Araumycos on getting her married is just really, really sad. I dont know, it sounds like some poo poo Ed Greenwood would do.
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May 11, 2017 01:00
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bewilderment posted:Pathfinder 'as core' or with 'all material' is obviously a worse game than DnD5e but tier lists exist for the glut of material it has so you can say "OK guys this is a tier 3 and 4 game" and because the SRD is both very complete (including third party material) and also free you can knock it into a shape that's both mechanically engaging and balanced. I love this argument (whenever it comes up) because "you can just ignore the parts you don't like" is a feature in PF but a bug in 5e, because PF has more parts you can ignore...? 
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May 11, 2017 01:04
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Arivia posted:Zuggtmoy is a Greyhawk character. Using up all the mystery and DM possibilty of Araumycos on getting her married is just really, really sad. Actually it's full on 3am mad Trump tweet Sad! it's that bad. OotA isn't about the Realms' Underdark, it doesn't actually care about the Realms as a setting. It just exists to parade the demon lords in front of players, like they're all contractually required to put in their one appearance for this shambles of an edition and then they can go back home until 6e. Having a demon lord like Jubilex on a random encounter chart is fine - that's how I originally found out about him and Geryon, with Gygax's wonderful purple prose about them in the 1e DMG - but it's so completely at cross purposes with the modern narrative campaign arc something like OotA is supposed to provide. Zuggtmoy is no more a Greyhawk character then any other Demon Lord like Lolth or Orcus. And she was not actually getting married to Araumycos, she was preforming a demonic ritual to take control of it. While loosely making the ritual take the form of a wedding to make it more mocking. With Princes Elemental Evil has appeared in the Realms before, and it has very little to do with the original adventure. (In fact other then their being cults that say they worship an element there is nothing in common) the Elemental Princes are generic D&D as well and feature in the realms, they also were not even involved in the Old Temple of Elemental Evil. The Adventure is also not bad. It's just a traditional Dungeon Crawl with a mega dungeon, not for everyone, but other groups like it. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 01:12 on May 11, 2017 |
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May 11, 2017 01:09
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Now it sounds even more like something Ed Greenwood would do.
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May 11, 2017 01:13
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The Imagery itself is pretty cool too.
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May 11, 2017 01:16
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