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Drache64
2019-11-18, 06:49 PM
A long time ago I played Pathfinder with my Wife, my Brother-in-law, and a few of our friends.

I then moved to 5e and started teaching a group of youths how to play. One day they went through a portal to another dimension to hunt a Mystic Nomad and wound up in another world. In this world they ran into my Wife's Pathfinder character and I had her play from her old character sheet as is.

The players were amazed and surprised when this Pathfinder Bard started playing Bardic Music like Inspire Courage giving them all +3 to combat rolls instead of Bardic Inspiration Dice.

It worked out very well and was fine for a surprise encounter in "another dimension" for 1 session as they then returned to the 5e world.

Have any of you tried mixing systems with something like this? How did it turn out for you?

Psyren
2019-11-18, 11:30 PM
Uh, that's pretty dangerous balance-wise; a +3 bonus is a massive increase in 5e terms because of its Bounded Accuracy design. If you look at 5e items and abilities, you'll find that passive bonuses above +1 tend to be pretty rare. Pathfinder meanwhile showers you with bonuses, because it's dealing with a much wider range (like the edition it was based on, 3.5.) and stacking as many of them as possible is how you compete with monsters that have stats in the 40s and 50s lategame.

If your group is having fun that's the main thing, but it's the sort of fun you might get from running around with unlimited rockets in Grand Theft Auto - a different sort of fun than the game was designed for, and the sort that has compatibility issues with challenge or difficulty.

MoiMagnus
2019-11-19, 08:47 AM
We often mix D&D with ad hoc systems (GURPG-like or FATE-like, or any of those systems where character sheet are essentially personality traits).

Usually, that's when dealing with important NPCs. Creating a D&D sheet for them will require to give them a level and standard capacities, which on top of being long, is not something we want. So instead, when we need character sheets for them, we use systems where character creations is much easier and much less technical.

That's particularly useful when doing "rescue missions" for our main characters that have been captured.

Essentially, mixing system works well as long as peoples are ok with the boundaries between the systems are unclear and changing depending on the situation, and as long as you don't explore too much those boundaries.

zinycor
2019-11-19, 12:10 PM
I had a GM who sometimes did this sort of thing, I hated it

notXanathar
2019-11-19, 01:32 PM
I haven't done this yet, but one thing that I would like to try is using pathfinder 2e with dnd 5e bounded accuracy. The main way of doing this would be lowering proficiency bonus to one quarter of your level rounded up, +1 for each proficiency rank. I'd then probably do some monkeying to work out things like multiple attack penalty and lowering bonuses. critical success and failure boundaries would probably be plus or minus five, like the pseudodragons sting. etc., etc.. There's a whole load of cool stuff in pathfinder, but AC 50 at high levels just gets on my nerves.

zinycor
2019-11-19, 07:14 PM
I haven't done this yet, but one thing that I would like to try is using pathfinder 2e with dnd 5e bounded accuracy. The main way of doing this would be lowering proficiency bonus to one quarter of your level rounded up, +1 for each proficiency rank. I'd then probably do some monkeying to work out things like multiple attack penalty and lowering bonuses. critical success and failure boundaries would probably be plus or minus five, like the pseudodragons sting. etc., etc.. There's a whole load of cool stuff in pathfinder, but AC 50 at high levels just gets on my nerves.

I feel like it would be easier to add the things you like from pathfinder into 5e... or the opposite.

CharonsHelper
2019-11-19, 09:20 PM
Despite of how similar they seem at first glance - the two systems don't mix. Oil & water.

If you use them as-is, the Pathfinder character would slaughter any 5e character after the first few levels because their bonuses are so much higher.

The most you could reasonably do to mix them is to use the vibe of various Pathfinder abilities to try to homebrew D&D 5e feats & spells - but they would have to be redesigned rather than being lifted from Pathfinder as-is.

Aotrs Commander
2019-11-19, 09:50 PM
Despite of how similar they seem at first glance - the two systems don't mix. Oil & water.

If you use them as-is, the Pathfinder character would slaughter any 5e character after the first few levels because their bonuses are so much higher.

The most you could reasonably do to mix them is to use the vibe of various Pathfinder abilities to try to homebrew D&D 5e feats & spells - but they would have to be redesigned rather than being lifted from Pathfinder as-is.

Yeah. I mean, my only experience with 5E are the Role with Me and Unexpectables podcasts, and they're going "oh no, 15 damage, ouch," and meanwhile my PCs - BEFORE I shove my PF-upgrades - are doing like, one, two hundred points of damage per round at level 11-ish, and are stacked with that many buffs, we had to make little cards for it. (It's not uncommon for the party to be on, like, +6 to hit, +7+3D6 Fire to damage and stuff.)

zinycor
2019-11-20, 12:15 AM
One thing nobody is mentioning is concentration, the fact that the concentration mechanic exists in 5e makes a huge difference between PF and 5e.

Anachronity
2019-11-20, 01:54 PM
In a campaign I'm looking to run, the players may briefly switch to playing a version of FATE if a certain villainous inter-dimensional gateway is destroyed while active. But that's not really mixing so much as a temporary substitution.

But I feel that any substitution or mixing of systems is best kept brief; a whole session at most, but preferably only part of one. That way the thematic strangeness of the circumstance is still in full effect, but the glaring balance issues are harder to notice because the PCs don't have much time to explore the resulting mixed system.

Otherwise...

Despite of how similar they seem at first glance - the two systems don't mix. Oil & water.

If you use them as-is, the Pathfinder character would slaughter any 5e character after the first few levels because their bonuses are so much higher.

The most you could reasonably do to mix them is to use the vibe of various Pathfinder abilities to try to homebrew D&D 5e feats & spells - but they would have to be redesigned rather than being lifted from Pathfinder as-is.This pretty much sums it up.

exelsisxax
2019-11-20, 09:46 PM
I don't think it would be hard to make a level 10 PF character that can win a fight against a 4-man 5e party at level 20. Combining the systems is always a very bad thing to do that will cause massive problems with even the slightest bit of pressure.

Altair_the_Vexed
2019-11-21, 04:07 AM
We did a couple of one-off adventures like this, where the GM asked us to bring our most powerful characters, regardless of system.
We then had an elder Vampire from V:TM, a 16th level wizard from 1st ed AD&D, a 36th level Cleric from BECMI D&D, and a cybered-up Solo from Cyberpunk. In space. Now I think about there may even have been someone playing a Starfleet Captain from one of the Star Trek games - counting their Galaxy-class star ship as "equipment".

We each played our characters using our own game rules, and the GM translated between them. We were all familiar with the other rule sets, so we had a handle on how things worked.

It was kind of silly fun, but it must have been a hell of a lot of work for the GM, mashing those systems together.

Aotrs Commander
2019-11-21, 05:54 AM
I don't think it would be hard to make a level 10 PF character that can win a fight against a 4-man 5e party at level 20. Combining the systems is always a very bad thing to do that will cause massive problems with even the slightest bit of pressure.

Realtively low-level Shock Trooper Barb/Fighter could probably do it fairly easily in 3.5, on damage output alone.