One of the lovely things about Pathfinder and 3.5e is that they allow the players a great deal of scope to build their characters. Occasionally too much, but if the player has an idea of what they’re doing, they can have a lot of fun with what is possible.
4E is more constricted, but – at this late point in the system’s development – it’s got a lot of options available. And, what’s more, they’re pretty balanced and fun to play. Mostly. 🙂
I’ve just finished running the first true-Pathfinder adventure path, the Council of Thieves. I’ve got a lot of session reports on RPG Geek and EN World about our progress through the campaign. A campaign from 1st to 13th level that took us 14 four-hour sessions. Not entirely sure, but that seems a bit fast for me.
Overall, I’m not very impressed by the campaign. There are some lovely ideas in it, especially the Murder Play of The Sixfold Trial by Richard Pett (one of my favourite writers for roleplaying adventures), but it is wildly inconsistent in how it is balanced. Combats tended to be walk-overs or near-TPKs with little room between. After playing through the HPE series of 4E adventures, these Pathfinder combats left me very disappointed.
However, the most disappointing thing came from a lot of the high-level threats the party had to face. In particular, the Council Captains; the elite 11th level NPCs that the BBEG had working for him. There are a *lot* of them in the final adventure, and it’s worth pointing them out because it really shows the drawbacks of the 3E/PF system of NPC/Monster creation. Basically, PF says “if you follow all these steps, the final numbers will end up as a CR X encounter.” Compared to 4E saying, “these are the numbers for a CR X encounter. Go and customise as you like.”
And here’s the thing: 3E got it wrong, and PF just continues the problem.
Here are the important stats for the Council Captain:
Human Rogue 8/Assassin 3 – CR 10
AC 19, hp 79, F+5, R+13, W+3
Melee: +11/+6 (1d6+3)
Ranged: +14/+9 (1d6+3)
SA: Sneak Attack +6d6 +6 bleed
Ft: Deadly Aim, Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Vital Strike
and here are the stats that the Pathfinder monster manual says should be about where a CR 10 monster should be:
AC 24, HP 130. Attack +18, Damage 33-45 per round, Ref +13, F+9, W+9
Notice quite a bit of a gap there? Yeah, there is. The Ranged attack is also a bit of a problem, as it’s very, very likely in this series for there to be cover, making it 4 lower.
If you made up the stats of the Council Captain and then assigned a CR, the actual value you’d get based on the average stats would be about CR 6. No wonder the 12th level party had no problem with them.