Is D&D 3.5E better than Pathfinder 1e?

Okay, here we go. Prepare for impact.

I love Pathfinder 1e, one of my all-time legendary games. No question the entire game is a masterpiece. It fixes many of the 3.5E problems. The design is solid. The expansions are legendary. The volume of work, to this day, beats any edition of the game.

I love Pathfinder 1e.

Is it an S-Tier game.

Hands down.

But the game has problems, in fact, it inherits all the 3.5E ones and adds its own. There are a lot of "gimme" powers, like the force missile (and other similar 3 + INT mod per day) shootee-powers that all wizard schools got, which were the precursors of today's cantrips. In 3.5E, the wizard is closer to the AD&D 2e wizard, and you get no "laser pistol" like you do in Pathfinder or 5E - your memorized spells are it.

Yes, that means in 3.5E, wizards are back to slings, hand crossbows, or buying wands of magic missiles, but that is spending money and thinking cleverly at the low levels. This is old-school and cool; it isn't a problem. Also, you are spending money, which is good. Too many modern games have nothing to do with money, and it is useless as a concept.

The hit dice are too high in Pathfinder 1e. I like the classes with the d4 hit die, and that feels like D&D to me. Damages are higher in Pathfinder 1e than in D&D 3.5E.

Pathfinder 1e also has the Golarion new-car scent all over the game, and it is hard to break it apart. It heavily leans into the imagery of Golarion, with the football-headed goblins and Paizo tropes, and I can't get away from that flavor. Pathfinder makes the same mistakes D&D 4 did, as it heavily leans into product identity and owned IP. Pathfinder and D&D 4E do not feel like generic fantasy games.

Some of the cutesy tropes in Pathfinder changed the world. Goblins are not enemies anymore since they are so iconic to the world and setting. You make the art appealing and endearing, and the entire game slides down into relativism, making every monster your best buddy and pal. Evil doesn't want its own space, and any land given will be used as a base to attack others. They want to sack, desecrate, and burn down everything that doesn't worship the horned devil.

Why?

The horned devil says so.

The line between good and evil was obvious in D&D 3.5E. There were no "story game" mechanics tracking corruption (Rise of the Runelords, later, Pathfinder Horror Adventures) that gave you an excuse for why your character did something evil. In D&D 3.5E, if your character did something evil, it was 100% player choice, and you lived with the consequences. I was shocked when I realized how stark the choices are in D&D 3.5E versus Pathfinder "padding" your choices with "uh-oh!" style rules.

In Pathfinder, the line between good and evil is blurred, and in Pathfinder 2E, there is no line. the evolution of tieflings from being half-demon blooded dhampirs who fought against demonic urges to pastel-skinned cosplay costume horn and tail options to use with a Russian accent - and this tells you everything you need to know about modern performative, influencer-friendly gaming.

Today's games are Fortnite-inspired dress-up pop-culture tripe. We left story gaming a while ago; it is all cosplay adventures. It might as well be the "banana guy" in the dungeon.

D&D 3.5E felt more generic and usable for any fantasy world.

Pathfinder 1e was written for Golarion.

The classic D&D 3.0 Deities and Demigods book had 40 pages devoted to the D&D pantheon. Another 100 pages were devoted to classic pantheons, such as the Greeks, Egyptians, and Asgardians. Most of today's DDG-style books focus exclusively on the "Licensed IP" deities, and Pathfinder does that, too.

Generic fantasy gaming feels like it died with D&D 3.5. Past this point, you either had to go to the OSR, or ignore huge parts of Pathfinder, D&D 4, and D&D 5 just to get what we had back then.

A nice 3.5E SRD can serve as a generic set of fantasy rules for any world, and it makes consistent sense while preserving a lot of the old-school assumptions of magic, classes, and how a fantasy world works. A 3.5 SRD does not have the "owned IP" of Wizards and Paizo and feels genre-neutral.

We need a Creative Commons 3.5E SRD, and that would go the next step into fixing the damage done to the community. I hope this happens, and I am ready to mend those bridges.

Besides, if I were running Wizards, there would be a drop down of "what edition do you want to play" on D&D Beyond, and it would be an inclusive, for every fan place - zero-edition all the way to 5.5E. The company needs to get out of "owning rules" and deeply into the "social network" part of the hobby, and this is where there is money to be made. Same maps and figures, same micro-transactions, the rules are just the backend parts you swap out for your favorite version.

Wizards, please, Creative Commons all your edition SRDs. This is the only way to force yourself to move forward. Holding onto these will force you into "old think" and keep you from realizing the dream of creating a space where everyone can play, no matter what edition they prefer.

You won't make money selling books.

You will make money being the place to play them.

D&D 3.5E feels closer to AD&D than it does 4E or 5E. Pathfinder 1e feels closer to D&D 4E and 5E. There was a point there in the 2010s where things moved away from the old-school, and embraced the Internet and social networking. The games embraced identity. The old-school assumptions were cast aside. You saw this even in the creation of the OSR at this time, D&D 3.5E could hold its own against the OSR, and you didn't need older editions. When Pathfinder 1e came along, the same rules felt and played like something modern and slick. This was the fork in the road that created the split between modern gaming and the OSR.

D&D 3.5E is the last of the old-school games. I still criticize it for the scaling-hit points, but that trend started in AD&D 2nd Edition. It is also heavily inspired by MtG, but not to the point where character builds take over the game. Since you don't get "heaps of special abilities" when you multiclass, it isn't as beneficial as in Pathfinder or D&D 5.

If you do multiclass, you are likely working towards a prestige class, which was mostly done away with for the most part in Pathfinder and all versions of D&D after this. Prestige classes are fantastic, and they give you something to work towards. I miss these. In new games, they constantly make "new classes," and you have nothing to work toward. The prestige classes in 3.5E are still amazing; you have a laundry list of prerequisites to fill, and once you do, you can start leveling up a new excellent class.

Parts of 3.5E are hilariously anarchistic and silly, like the "use rope" skill (that had a synergy with the climb skill) or how there is no "acrobatics" skill, and it is split into "jump, tumble, and balance." But these quirks make the game endearing. Skills have synergies! There is no penalty for unskilled use; it just defaults to your ability modifier. Some skills disallow unskilled use. You get a lot of skill points and can customize deeply.

In fact, these skills are very narrowly defined and apply to specific dungeon situations. I could see a wizard buying a few points of the balance skill (not a class skill for them), especially if dungeons have parts like shimmying along cliffs or narrow ledges. I can't see a wizard in modern games buying "acrobatics," a terrible skill with an awful name. Acrobatics sounds like my character will jump through flaming hoops in a circus. Pathfinder 1e adopted the acrobatics skill and piled jump, balance, and tumble under it - and it was a terrible decision.

D&D 3.5E skills were designed with the dungeon in mind.

Pathfinder 1e was designed as a generic RPG ruleset.

Skills' quirky and clunky nature is a charm of the system, not a problem that needs to be fixed and streamlined. Sometimes I feel the "acrobat" skill in newer games gets ignored, whereas here, having three different parts to improve means you will use them - or decide a few parts aren't for you, so you will pass on them. Plus, "use rope" is so stupidly nerdy and geeky that it has a charm of its own.

Pathfinder 1e was designed to sell "adventure paths," which were the beginning of "story gaming." Thus, the skills had to be more like a generic game to cover all the situations in the paths. D&D 3.5E was designed as a tabletop miniatures game, with skills and abilities that laser-focus on dungeon crawling. In D&D 3.5E, the story was equally the reasoning for the dungeon and the stories the players wrote through play. In Pathfinder, the story was primarily a sales vehicle for adventures.

I can play D&D 3.5E without a story and just as a dungeon crawler. Oh, you need to make a balance check for these squares to pass! D&D 3.5E was designed for a younger audience as a board game.

With Pathfinder, I can, too, but the game is designed for story gaming and leaned into mature themes to sell itself as such (and, in many cases, pulled them back from 3.5E).

Pathfinder 2E, ironically, abandoned the mature themes and returned to being a board game.

Story gaming is not dungeon crawling. I can play story gaming with any rules-light game and have a better time. True dungeon crawling is a board game.

Pathfinder has a lot of flashy, beautiful art. This was the game to play in the 2010s. It did a lot of things right. But it changes a lot, and it introduces a lot of modern mechanics. The game exists because Wizards made mistakes and abandoned a good thing. Pathfinder and D&D 5 feel closer to ARPGs and MMOs than the tabletop gaming I grew up with. Pathfinder 2 went its own way.

Pathfinder 2 also has this corporate aesthetic, a definite look and feel, and it is warping into an extreme style today, almost entirely stylized and overly careful and in some ways, oddly pedestrian with a softer feel. Pathfinder 1e had an edge to it.

D&D 3.5E has a unique style, stylized but classic in some ways. I liked the "lost tomes of knowledge" feeling, like the books were a part of the world you were playing in. Parts of the art were sketchy, like the books were created by adventurers or wizards, and informing you on how to survive in this world.

But more than presentation, playing D&D 3.5E felt like you were navigating through rules, class progression, levels, stories, and the world. When you got to a prestige class, it was the feeling of arriving to a new land after a long voyage. The books as tomes of knowledge helped reinforce the concept, and they were a part of the game.

No, it isn't better. Both games are products of their times. But D&D 3.5E is completely different than Pathfinder 1e. Calling Pathfinder 1e "D&D 3.75E" is a false statement, since Pathfinder embraces modern design theories, which you see advanced in Pathfinder 2E.

Also, D&D 3.5E feels more like Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to me than D&D 4 or 5E ever will, or for that matter, Pathfinder 1e. This is the world's "home system," and this is when all the new content for these worlds stopped. The world books, gazetteers, and guides all stopped here - and there is a reason for that. Modern designs need to do specific worlds better, while 3.5E's design, especially with prestige classes, could see you working towards taking a particular job or role in the world as part of your progression. I can buy a book covering a part of the world and find new prestige classes in there.

In 5E? Every character multi-classes and combos these generic base classes, and you don't work towards anything except more damage and greater power.

But 3.5E exists as a system that was "taken away from us."

Pathfinder 1e was a reimagining with a modern style and art, and it was not the same thing. A lot of the rules were SRD clones, but going back and reading 3.5E again, I can say PF was a different game entirely built out of the same parts with a few upgrades and designed for a specific setting and story gaming.

We have never had anything like 3.5E since.

While D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e are almost the same game, there are two key areas of difference.

Design and tone.

One is a story game that sells a world and adventure paths and begins the slide into identity gaming.

The other is a dungeon game meant to be played with miniatures, which preserves the old-school tone.

Dungeon Crawl Classics and the Early Years

You can see the Dungeon Crawl Classics seeds being planted with these early 3.5 adventures. They had the short adventure format down perfectly, the tone, the old-school feeling, the deadly nature of the dungeons, the shorter scenarios, the creepy factor, and the sense of fun in these early DCC releases.

But the game just wasn't there with D&D 3.5e. I feel what Wizards was releasing as rules just could not do these adventures justice. This is always my problem with big-publisher games and third-party material, and this applies to Pathfinder 1e and 2e as well, along with every version of D&D from 3e to 5e. You buy a third-party "cool setting" and it changes the feeling in a great, new way. And then the main rules trundle on with new releases and the main rules diverge in tone from the "cool thing" you want to keep cool.

And you have this cool dark elf sourcebook, and someone wants to play their war-forged fae-aspect plane-walking druid introduced in a later supplement. Not that I would say no, but the cool, unified, focused feeling of living and surviving in an underground world of shifting alliances and treachery feels lost with a plant-loving robot wandering through there. Sure, that robot is an outsider like a human down here would be an outsider, but this outsider is so outside the tone and feel of the setting they might as well be from outer space.

The D&D 3.5 Feel

D&D 3.5 feels like D&D 3.5, not really old-school. To me, there is this D&D 3.5 power gaming going on that feels hard to ignore. Cleave to great cleave. Feat choices. Multi-classing, and taking some of this and some of that. The higher-level builds that break the game, like the infamous whirlwind build. It starts off great like B/X, and then the characters get really inwardly focused on making their builds even more powerful. Old-school games don't have that tree-like build as you level, and to me, the characters feel more outwardly focused on the world, story, exploration, and strategy.

That exponential curve of power is built into a lot of the D&D 3 and later games. Where B/X games tend to be more linear power progression, games like D&D 3 and later start you off in a B/X feeling level one, and then quickly pile feats, choices, and power-ups to your class as you level. It is satisfying for players, but the downside is slow and complicated high-level play, tons of monster hit points and super-high ACs, an MMO-like dependence on magic item gear, and all sorts of interlocking combat rules, conditions, and rules interrupt mechanics that drag down play.

This is the shell game a lot of the newer editions play. It starts just like B/X, look! And then you hit high levels and the complexity of the system pulls the old "system mastery" platform lock in on you. If you don't stay on top of the builds, strategies, errata, new options, increasing combat choices, party synergy, and system complexity you can't perform well at the table. And often playing these games is so mentally demanding you don't have the time or desire to learn a new game.

Some people like the increasing complexity. I prefer games that have a fixed level of complexity at the start and to the end with a linear progression curve, so you have similar options, but you are better at them.

While these adventures at a low level may feel old-school, as you level things will progressively get more complicated and gameplay will slow down considerably.

The Early DCC 3.5 Adventures

They are still fun adventures, totally worth converting to your OSR system of choice, and this includes the DCC game itself. But they are not really DCC in spirit since they feel more like old-school tributes to the classics, so they have that AD&D tone and feeling to them.

This 3.5 series of adventures started in 2003. Of course, Pathfinder 1e steamrollered everything 3.5 back in 2009, and the world these were set in and the adventures themselves were sort of forgotten. D&D went 4e in 2008, and we liked that as a tactical miniatures game more than a roleplaying game. Pathfinder 1e, to us, was a continuation of the Grayhawk legacy of the level 1 to 20 heroic path. And we did find Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord back then as well, as the OGL was just getting started.

Dungeon Crawl Classics was released in 2012, and these adventures were more legacy throwbacks and it is still cool to be able to pick them up in PDF form and read them.

The Game, Refocused

Dungeon Crawl Classics was developed as an Appendix N rebuild of an AD&D-like game using the OGL if the conventions and tropes of the Appendix N books were seen as "more important" to the rules and systems of the game than the older Chainmail-based rules of the early era game. I love this reimagining of the game since it is almost like this Moebius-level art and style that changes your perception of roleplaying and fantasy gaming.

It is Heavy Metal, Moebius, grimdark, deadly, crazy, and gonzo. Once you get it, you cannot unsee it, and your perceptions of fantasy roleplaying are forever changed.

The old DCC 3.5 modules almost feel like "don't entirely get it" throwbacks in comparison, written for someone else's game and of high quality, but they feel like early works leading to the DCC game that feels like the result of someone's vision quest in life. There are hints and little clues in these adventures that you can see are clear inspirations for what is to come.

And DCC changed it all entirely and became a phenomenon.

Part of my problem with some of the 5E versions of AD&D modules is this tonal thing. D&D 5e just isn't AD&D anymore. The tone has moved on. To me, D&D 5e does not feel like a game where you wander into a room full of 30 kobolds and slay them all for 50gp and a tapestry. It feels wrong. It does feel more like a superhero game these days, with a lot of pop culture appropriation and anime emulation, with a dash of lifestyle branding and bucket-list life experience simulation tossed in there. The tone is way different.

Just like DCC's tone is way different.

And the tone matters. This is like Guardians of the Galaxy compared to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Worth Playing?

I still see the older DCC 3.5 modules as worth playing, perhaps in the Greyhawk-like world of Aereth, and this world could fit in all the classic A-series, S-series, B-series, and other classic modules in the world as sort of a throwback retro-remix sort of experience.

Heresy, I know. This world isn't even as detailed as Greyhawk or Mystara. But it does have a lot of the D&D 3.5-isms that later turned into main-game staples, such as tieflings and eladrin, which don't feel right in Greyhawk, at least not to me. And it has more than 50 brand-new adventures to collect and play. And if most of this world is undeveloped, well, I am breaking out my book of stickers and my sharpies and creating parts of the world myself - and that is a good thing. Hex-crawls here we come, and we are not stepping on anyone else's lore, sourcebooks, or novelizations.

A blank slate is a good thing.

I am a little torn on what system to use to play this with though. I would like to say Castles and Crusades for a more modern feel, but a part of me is just wanting to use Old School Essentials Advanced and have the perfect classic experience right there. Maybe throw in a few OSR things from Labyrinth Lord and other games. Sometimes simple is the best, and if you are going for classic feeling emulation, OSE is still one of the best games out there for that style of play.

I would not use the DCC system though, since that tone thing feels like a disconnect. With DCC, I could hex-crawl the entire world and just say "well the darkness has lifted like something out of Forbidden Lands" and go out and explore! Build the world as you go. Have crazy adventures in a post-apocalyptic world of the ancients, cross into extraordinary realms, and travel to the far future.

Comparing these early DCC adventures with what was to come is fascinating to me, but it also opens my eyes some to these classic-style adventures and what best to play them with. To me, the tone needs to fit the adventure. With the classic AD&D modules and these early DCC 3.5 adventures, the tone of OSE fits perfectly.

D&D 5e is a different thing entirely.

So is DCC.

Retainers and Hirelings Through the Ages

The original B/X rules had rules for hirelings, specialists, mercenaries, and retainers; and also the books contained rules for buying ships and building castles. One could surmise that putting together a large expedition is a part of the game.

We go to the seaport and spend a thousand gold hiring a small force of laborers and mercenaries to excavate the ruined temple while guarding our work site from the tribal lizard-men who surround the site. Make sure to find a good captain to commend the men and an experienced crew boss to manage the workers. Oh, and we will need boats too to haul everything out - let's plan on a large haul.

You spend money to get money. You spend a thousand gold because you know there are tens of thousands of coins down there in that ancient temple to haul out with pack animals (you had to buy) down narrow mountain tracks while protecting your haul from the lizard-men who see that temple as a shrine to their ancient lizard god and will do everything to keep your almost-colonial ambitions for loot and wealth in check with a poisoned spear and ritualistic shaman magic.

The hirelings? In it for the money too - probably more than they will ever see in their lifetime, so they accept the risk of being eaten by a basilisk in exchange for making what would take years with sustenance agriculture, taxes, levies, droughts, family costs, and unplanned economies that eats a hole in the bottom of the money pouch for the average peasant.

People forget medieval economics these days.

The AD&D Era

By AD&D we started to see the shift towards the more traditional "adventuring party" style of adventure, and don't worry, enough bags of holding will keep your labor costs down to a minimum. You could teleport in and out with a small team and clean out almost any location with just five people.

There were some notable mentions of large groups of hirelings being needed for adventures such as The Tomb of Horrors and others, but I don't really remember any module requiring you to manage a large group of hirelings during the time we played AD&D.

To be fair, the rules for all types of hirelings are here, but the ramp up in character and magic item power moved our games from more of an expedition-based adventure model into a super-heroic one where a small party of adventurers could do anything. Given enough gates, teleports, bags of holding, floating discs, and other cash-hauling magics there was this work multiplier with convenience magic that allowed a small group of mid-to-high level adventurers to haul huge loads. This was one of those forms of power creep that entered the game at this time, "Here's a common problem, let's solve it with magic!"

You get these types of popular wishes of players and the magic naturally rushes in to fill the void, and I wonder at times if some decisions are better left as they are, and some core concepts left alone.

AD&D 2nd Edition I felt moved farther along the "party of heroes" model and retainers moved to the back in importance. Your characters adventured alongside the heroes from the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance - just like those characters - and who needs an army of unskilled labor weighing them down when adventure awaits! We kept the super-hero model of the iconic D&D party, based our adventures off the Tolkien-like book heroics, and never really fussed with hirelings in most cases.

D&D 3.x and Pathfinder

The concept of "character build as deck build" came into play with the 3rd edition of the rules and all of its subsequent variants, and I feel retainers and hirelings moved farther back in the entire scheme of things. This is my character build, and it can take on all comers! Who needs hirelings when my character sheet is the length of a moderately complicated tax form and I am ready for any special case rule thrown my way?

Pathfinder's adventure paths are also a great example of adventures built for characters of this generation of the rules, typically focused on the party of four or five heroes and built around a mathematical challenge rating system that ensures a slow-but-steady drip-drip of resources that will be used every encounter.

And the 15-minute adventure day was born because players tended to alpha-attack the first encounter with everything they had and then headed back to the inn to rest a day before they tackled the next challenge. This was also a way to mitigate resource management and bad luck, as a bad encounter ensured you needed to bug out and rest to recover your bad situation.

But retainers and hirelings? Really pushed to the back further I feel, and the concept of putting together an expedition of NPCs and random swords for hire seemed as alien to this generation of gaming.

World of D&D 4-Craft

By D&D 4 a character was essentially an MMO character, and I don't even remember hirelings being mentioned all that much in any D&D 4 book. I am pretty sure they were mentioned somewhere but we never used them in our "battle chess" type games of tight hallways and chambers, grid based movement, and some really fun encounters during the early days of the game that we enjoyed. We never had room for hirelings on the game board since all our play were those tight, one map, small corridor and room fights the game did so well before the books piled on and the game collapsed under its own weight of revisions and expansions.

We had fun with the game, but we felt hirelings were so far removed from the game - and characters were so powerful and cool - that we never bothered with them. It felt like a cool video-game on the tabletop and that is how we played it.

D&D 5

Hireling NPCs rarely become important during an adventure...

That quote is on page 94 of the 5e DMG, and a 2 gp a day cost for any type of skilled hireling in the PHB and that is mostly all I can find on the subject. Also, D&D 5 does not scale that well (from what I hear) with large numbers of low-level characters assisting in a battle due to the flatter dicing mechanics, so I can understand why you shouldn't really cheese your way through every fight with Robin Hood and his 20-man sheaf of merry archers in formation behind you vaporizing any enemy in the Monster Manual with vollies of longbow fire. We are still in the "party as the base heroic unit" model of adventure and game balance.

B/X Style Play

I like the focus on putting together a Tarzan-like expedition of no-name hirelings and specialists for an adventure. I like having to hire mercenaries to protect our camp and supplies, and buy (or pay) ships and crews to haul back the loot to civilization. I like worrying about our supply of pack animals and food, where we get water from, and being called away from the temple we are exploring to deal with an attack or threat to on the group we hired.

That is cool, literary stuff for me, and it feels good. I like developing interesting NPCs for these groups, mostly no-names but there may be an interesting few people in the mix to interact with and add flavor to the game. Plus this matches some of the old-time movies that I love where a brave expedition heads down to a lost jungle or Antarctica and braves all sorts of hardships and dangers while seeking the lost treasures of the ancients.

And in B/X games those extra tag-alongs are typically weak, unless they are expensive and skilled hirelings (which you can have a limited amount of). The rules are also simple enough where you could battle out most any action scene with hirelings and mercenaries thrown into the mix without spending hours running the combat.

I don't like the "magic-superhero" style of play where we loot a dungeon by opening up a gate between point A and B and shove the piles of gold through the magic portal with farm tractors. I don't like magic replacing the need for hauling tons of loot, like owning twenty bags of holding and shoving everything in them for a quick teleport home. I like difficult and limited magic in these situations, and limiting the number of "ease of use" magic items so large expeditions are still needed and the way to do things.

The heroes can still be heroes, and it does not change the cool story moments where a classic skilled five-person party is needed to get things done.

This is all interesting how things changed over the years towards more 'cinematic' and party-based play and away from the classic 'expedition to nowhere' novel-style party-plus-hirelings model of play. Tastes and styles of play change, but I find it interesting (and informative in choosing a game) to reflect back on the history of hirelings and expeditions in gaming and how everything changed over the years. It is also interesting that many B/X games faithfully keep the hireling, ship, specialist, and mercenary rules around so this era of play can survive.