Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

I know less than dick about D&D. Are eladrin archers some insanely broken bullshit, or from some asspull supplement that spoil the game for other players? Either way, if the DM okays it, it's in.

It's not necessarily that they're broken or anything, They're basically just like really pure elves that are more close to fey than anything. They can teleport 30 feet once per short rest which is really the only difference between them and any other elf mechanically. Though I was using that ability quite a bit to create creative shots like jumping off of trees to get a cleaner shot only to teleport to another branch mid fall. The only other thing was my liberal use of a grappling hook. Think Solid Snake, but an elf. That's basically what I was doing.


My stats were the only thing that was really anything close to broken and that's being generous. See, he insisted on a 32 point buy even after I told him that point buys could be easily abused. He said it was fine so I made an elf with 20 Dexterity and made an archer.

 

[Swiss46]

Anyone know anything about that new cyberpunk edition? I read about the starter set awhile ago and while I might cannabalize it for house rules, it didn't seem to outshine 2020.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I got Genesys and the Realms of Tenniroth supplement recently and ran it for my friends.

It's pretty much the generic fantasy version of the Fantasy Flight Star Wars system, which is great because I love that system but don't want to do fucking star wars.

It's pretty rules light and the dice allow for a lot of narrative direction. Easy to custom kit out stuff. I've been reading a lot of Berserk lately so I want to do some twisted dark fantasy stuff with it.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is my go to for Dark Fantasy games. Warhammer Fantasy also works.

Anyone know anything about that new cyberpunk edition? I read about the starter set awhile ago and while I might cannabalize it for house rules, it didn't seem to outshine 2020.

The voodoo LARP group got their shit kicked in by actual voodoo priests from Haiti and now they control the entirety of the group. Imagine TRUE and HONEST voodoo priests with cybernetics.
In D&D 3.5, I really want to try out a Changeling Wizard. Changelings have substitution levels for Wizard and have an entire prestige class just for them and it's honestly good despite losing a single caster level. Specifically, the Recaster. I'm also gonna take advantage of Geometer for more flavor. A wizard that specializes in changing spells on the fly and transforming not only himself, but the perceptions and power of others. Wizard 10/Geometer 5/Recaster 5.

 

[Adamska]

So as a palate cleanser we covered more homebrew, and also Jake Alley's strength rant:

 

[Next Task]

He has a habit of being overly competetive and
getting incredibly upset if he loses among a few other odd quirks but really he's
a great guy.

Yeah, doubt. You got yourself a Piss Wizard GM if his waifus are part of the game, and it's not good at all to be picking on you specifically in such obvious a fashion (arguably even a worse sign - giving a harder challenge to a player who's doing exceptionally well/has min-maxed sometimes is a necessary evil, but for god's sake you can't ever be obvious about it). You give him half a millennia of backstory and he doesn't know how much that gives him to work with, he's too narrow-minded to be a decent GM.

He might improve when he grows up - he's acting so immaturely that I hope he's just a kid, rather than some 30+ neckbeard with maturation issues. I'd also be interested to hear how the other players were reacting to this all going on.

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

Yeah, doubt. You got yourself a Piss Wizard GM if his waifus are part of the game, and it's not good at all to be picking on you specifically in such obvious a fashion (arguably even a worse sign - giving a harder challenge to a player who's doing exceptionally well/has min-maxed sometimes is a necessary evil, but for god's sake you can't ever be obvious about it). You give him half a millennia of backstory and he doesn't know how much that gives him to work with, he's too narrow-minded to be a decent GM.

He might improve when he grows up - he's acting so immaturely that I hope he's just a kid, rather than some 30+ neckbeard with maturation issues. I'd also be interested to hear how the other players were reacting to this all going on.

He's twenty-six and I don't think I even bothered to mention the not so subtle My Little Pony references what with one of his god's being a former wizard lady named Twil who's symbol is literally just Twilight's cutie mark. Then there was the one who he told me in private had the head of a bull the body of a woman and the cock of an echinda... called her the Mother Of Monsters or something. Then there was the Trickster god who had a lute.. His name was Luto. I could go on.

The thing is though that outside of games he was the sweetest guy you'd ever meet, genuinely seemed to care about people and was so innocent to the point of being adorably naive at times about a lot of things. Basically a completely different person entirely. Though it his behavior did start to bleed over eventually I suppose near the end which is why I decided it was best for me to leave the group before it turned into major drama. I figured the others shouldn't have to deal with all that since they're new enough to D&D that they don't see anything wrong with it.

 

[Memento Malum]

My stats were the only thing that was really anything close to broken and that's being generous. See, he insisted on a 32 point buy even after I told him that point buys could be easily abused. He said it was fine so I made an elf with 20 Dexterity and made an archer.

New DM thinks they can handle anything, oks god stats, and quickly discovers that they cannot in fact handle anything. Tale as old as time really. DEX is also the OP stat in 5e so that doesn't help either.

If I'm being generous, I'd say that all these mistakes are those of a new DM that is in over his head and doesn't know how to deal with someone who is "breaking" his game. The problem is that every DM runs into this, and the good ones improvise and overcome, and the bad ones teleport snakes into the fight to target one particular person.

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

New DM thinks they can handle anything, oks god stats, and quickly discovers that they cannot in fact handle anything. Tale as old as time really. DEX is also the OP stat in 5e so that doesn't help either.

If I'm being generous, I'd say that all these mistakes are those of a new DM that is in over his head and doesn't know how to deal with someone who is "breaking" his game. The problem is that every DM runs into this, and the good ones improvise and overcome, and the bad ones teleport snakes into the fight to target one particular person.

I think this is mostly an issue caused by dnd being a low lethality system with a very weird [for someone used to vastly different rpgs] penchant for 'balanced' combat.
In something like CP2020 if you were to allow your players to pick every possible toy in order to make a combat monster, they'd still be one phonecall away from being dead meat. Here, a character having some extra optimization and better rolls actually poses a problem.

 

[Adamska]

I think this is mostly an issue caused by dnd being a low lethality system with a very weird [for someone used to vastly different rpgs] penchant for 'balanced' combat.
In something like CP2020 if you were to allow your players to pick every possible toy in order to make a combat monster, they'd still be one phonecall away from being dead meat. Here, a character having some extra optimization and better rolls actually poses a problem.

Uh... no, DnD can in fact easily be high lethality; it just depends on how hard the DM wants to play with you that day. If you're competent, you can usually do fine. But sometimes you just get wrecked... and sometimes you wreck the DM's encounter.

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

New DM thinks they can handle anything, oks god stats, and quickly discovers that they cannot in fact handle anything. Tale as old as time really. DEX is also the OP stat in 5e so that doesn't help either.

If I'm being generous, I'd say that all these mistakes are those of a new DM that is in over his head and doesn't know how to deal with someone who is "breaking" his game. The problem is that every DM runs into this, and the good ones improvise and overcome, and the bad ones teleport snakes into the fight to target one particular person.

I think a big part of it was him being in over his head but I don't think my stats played that big a role in it considering that I was going out of my way to let the other players be the star while I played support. I think what frustrated him most was my tactics. For instance, the last part of the campaign I took part it was set in a hidden city in the jungle where a snake lady was mind controlling people, so being around six hundred years old and very experienced my character is quickly able to pick up that something is wrong and immediately begins investigating while the rest of the party just kind of followed the gimmick hook line and sinker. Like when the weird shop keep wanted my hair I deduced from his body language and general vibe that it was most likely for a scrying spell and chose to give him way more than he needed as to make it clear to whomever was trying to watch me that I knew they were watching and had nothing to hide. In this way I had begun earning the villain's trust and before I had even met her. Later once we had all figured out it was the queen I began confiding in her that my teammates didn't trust her and even gave her access to my notes on creating an army of Vegepygmies. I let her believe she had me wrapped around her finger and the DM couldn't do much about that considering how he wrote her. It was so good in fact that she released the geas she had on me to keep me within the city. This made the moment when I revealed my ace in the form of my familiar so much better because not only had she supplied me personally with the components for the Find Familiar spell but also the paper and pen with which I scrawled down our coordinates and sent them to the capital city. I pulled it on her when she finally decided to try torturing me and got to be real smug as I explained my plan to her and secured the safety of my teammates through the recall of the Familiar. I swore 'loyalty' to her after that and she bought it, even convinced her to let me out of the cell that night even though I had just drunkenly shot an arrow at her in anger just a few hours before.

I guess what I'm saying is that while my stats where certainly a factor to be considered, in this case I believe it was more due to playing the character competently.

 

[Memento Malum]

I think a big part of it was him being in over his head but I don't think my stats played that big a role in it considering that I was going out of my way to let the other players be the star while I played support. I think what frustrated him most was my tactics. For instance, the last part of the campaign I took part it was set in a hidden city in the jungle where a snake lady was mind controlling people, so being around six hundred years old and very experienced my character is quickly able to pick up that something is wrong and immediately begins investigating while the rest of the party just kind of followed the gimmick hook line and sinker. Like when the weird shop keep wanted my hair I deduced from his body language and general vibe that it was most likely for a scrying spell and chose to give him way more than he needed as to make it clear to whomever was trying to watch me that I knew they were watching and had nothing to hide. In this way I had begun earning the villain's trust and before I had even met her. Later once we had all figured out it was the queen I began confiding in her that my teammates didn't trust her and even gave her access to my notes on creating an army of Vegepygmies. I let her believe she had me wrapped around her finger and the DM couldn't do much about that considering how he wrote her. It was so good in fact that she released the geas she had on me to keep me within the city. This made the moment when I revealed my ace in the form of my familiar so much better because not only had she supplied me personally with the components for the Find Familiar spell but also the paper and pen with which I scrawled down our coordinates and sent them to the capital city. I pulled it on her when she finally decided to try torturing me and got to be real smug as I explained my plan to her and secured the safety of my teammates through the recall of the Familiar. I swore 'loyalty' to her after that and she bought it, even convinced her to let me out of the cell that night even though I had just drunkenly shot an arrow at her in anger just a few hours before.

I guess what I'm saying is that while my stats where certainly a factor to be considered, in this case I believe it was more due to playing the character competently.

Christ, now I'm just mad at your ex-DM for having such a lack of imagination. There's about 50 different ways of stopping you screwing with his plot that are more interesting than kicking a temper tantrum and booting you. I mean, heck, why did she believe your loyalty vow. "You have betrayed me for the first and last time. The punishment for betrayal is immediate death. BANG." Dead eladrin archer. You might be a little annoyed, but not as much as getting booted from the game, and he gets the thorn in his side character gone. Roll a low WIS character thats a bit naive and a little too trusting and everyone lives happily ever after.

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

Uh... no, DnD can in fact easily be high lethality; it just depends on how hard the DM wants to play with you that day. If you're competent, you can usually do fine. But sometimes you just get wrecked... and sometimes you wreck the DM's encounter.

Of course it can be, like any system. I posit it's not meant to be, and you can verify that by looking at the encounter difficulty as per the DM guide. The default outcome of a standard combat in dnd, as per the rulebook and the threat rating math that supports it, is victory with maybe a little bump along the way.

Compare that with the blurb on a DCC module, which I'd consider a high lethality system:

There's an obvious paradigm difference between those two systems. We could compare official module to module if you want to, as that seems to be a decent yardstick. I think it's clear that the guiding principle behind combat in D&D is different to systems like DCC.

 

[Adamska]

Of course it can be, like any system. I posit it's not meant to be, and you can verify that by looking at the encounter difficulty as per the DM guide. The default outcome of a standard combat in dnd, as per the rulebook and the threat rating math that supports it, is victory with maybe a little bump along the way.

View attachment 1080900

Compare that with the blurb on a DCC module, which I'd consider a high lethality system:
View attachment 1080904

There's an obvious paradigm difference between those two systems. We could compare official module to module if you want to, as that seems to be a decent yardstick. I think it's clear that the guiding principle behind combat in D&D is different to systems like DCC.

Official modules are designed to avoid yeeting characters though usually, since it's designed to bolster interest in the game and allows you to keep using official characters for Tiered adventures.

 

[Spunt]

OK you nerds, a question. Later this year I'm going to start DM'ing again, I've not done it for a decade or so and I'm a bit out of touch with what the cool kids play these days.

I've got my campaign roughly planned out, it's a sort of high fantasy post-apocalyptic survival thing. Think Fallout but with background magic from some sort of ancient cataclysm rather than radiation. Civilisation has only just recovered and is either Iron Age or Bronze age depending on where you are. So we're talking a campaign where not starving to death or getting swallowed whole by some sort of mutated abomination is a serious achievement. Good gear is very hard to come by, anything magical will probably require delving into an old world dungeon filled with absurdly powerful ancient constructs and undead that will probably murder your face off.

I want the players to be incentivised to take non-combat approaches and try to keep a low profile rather than being all-powerful murderhobos. The world will be full of competing factions and city states and I'd like the players to get into the politics of the place, choose sides, and build alliances.

So, the question is, what system should I use? My previous DMing experience was in D&D 3.5. As I understand it, 3.5 still has a big following and I won't struggle to find players familiar with it and willing to play it, nor is it hard to find good resources relating to it. Am I correct about this?

The alternatives as I see it are 5th ed or Pathfinder. From what I've heard, 5th ed is more suitable to high fantasy hack and slash power fantasy killfests, with weak monsters, overpowered players and a tendency towards Monty Haul campaigns. Not really suitable for a dangerous survival campaign with few resources. Pathfinder sounds interesting, it's based on 3.5 which I know, but other than that I have next to no experience with it. I've heard it's best for people who want to build an autistically detailed character, which could work in my setting I guess, but is it worth converting to the new system and learning it? What are Pathfinder's advantages over 3.5?

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

Christ, now I'm just mad at your ex-DM for having such a lack of imagination. There's about 50 different ways of stopping you screwing with his plot that are more interesting than kicking a temper tantrum and booting you. I mean, heck, why did she believe your loyalty vow. "You have betrayed me for the first and last time. The punishment for betrayal is immediate death. BANG." Dead eladrin archer. You might be a little annoyed, but not as much as getting booted from the game, and he gets the thorn in his side character gone. Roll a low WIS character thats a bit naive and a little too trusting and everyone lives happily ever after.

Yeah, his lack of imagination was definitely a big point of contention between he and I. He would often claim that white people could never understand or relate to the plight of a black person simply because they haven't lived as a black person, a sentiment which I find to be ridiculous. Though I think his choice to not kill my character was just considering how I had managed to get under the big bad villain's skin and hurt her ego with my scheming. It's worth noting that after the reveal that I had sent my familiar away with the letter she asked that in return for my the safety of my comrades I recall the familiar and kill it in front of her. So I did, except I just dismissed it when I was done pretending to strangle it. To the DM's credit he played the villain's fearful paranoia very well and proceeded to make her use all of her uses of Geas one after another to make sure I killed the bird, which I finally did. There was even a point shortly afterwards during that same encounter in cell where I flat out told her that I could have escaped any time by teleporting through the bars and stealing a guard's keys at which point I revealed that I had in fact done so already by jingling the keys in her face. Basically convinced her I deserved a real room and not some cell, so she had the guards bring me down a bed and some books and candles under the pretense that letting me out that same night would look bad on her as a leader. However what was important about that was I now had free roam of the place and access to the bathrooms in the main palace

To be clear the reason I let myself back into the cell once I had the key was that the previous day I had given the villian's court wizard a jar of the vegepygmy mold I had collected with my notes on how to develop it into a trained army of nearly unkillable tiny soldiers. I was basically going to let them do all the beta testing for me since they had superior resources. This would give me time as well to devise a better plan for springing my allies and give the bird(my familiar) more time to reach the capital.

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

OK you nerds, a question. Later this year I'm going to start DM'ing again, I've not done it for a decade or so and I'm a bit out of touch with what the cool kids play these days.

I've got my campaign roughly planned out, it's a sort of high fantasy post-apocalyptic survival thing. Think Fallout but with background magic from some sort of ancient cataclysm rather than radiation. Civilisation has only just recovered and is either Iron Age or Bronze age depending on where you are. So we're talking a campaign where not starving to death or getting swallowed whole by some sort of mutated abomination is a serious achievement. Good gear is very hard to come by, anything magical will probably require delving into an old world dungeon filled with absurdly powerful ancient constructs and undead that will probably murder your face off.

I want the players to be incentivised to take non-combat approaches and try to keep a low profile rather than being all-powerful murderhobos. The world will be full of competing factions and city states and I'd like the players to get into the politics of the place, choose sides, and build alliances.

So, the question is, what system should I use? My previous DMing experience was in D&D 3.5. As I understand it, 3.5 still has a big following and I won't struggle to find players familiar with it and willing to play it, nor is it hard to find good resources relating to it. Am I correct about this?

The alternatives as I see it are 5th ed or Pathfinder. From what I've heard, 5th ed is more suitable to high fantasy hack and slash power fantasy killfests, with weak monsters, overpowered players and a tendency towards Monty Haul campaigns. Not really suitable for a dangerous survival campaign with few resources. Pathfinder sounds interesting, it's based on 3.5 which I know, but other than that I have next to no experience with it. I've heard it's best for people who want to build an autistically detailed character, which could work in my setting I guess, but is it worth converting to the new system and learning it? What are Pathfinder's advantages over 3.5?

This sounds almost tailor made for wfrp.

 

[Techpriest]

OK you nerds, a question. Later this year I'm going to start DM'ing again, I've not done it for a decade or so and I'm a bit out of touch with what the cool kids play these days.

I've got my campaign roughly planned out, it's a sort of high fantasy post-apocalyptic survival thing. Think Fallout but with background magic from some sort of ancient cataclysm rather than radiation. Civilisation has only just recovered and is either Iron Age or Bronze age depending on where you are. So we're talking a campaign where not starving to death or getting swallowed whole by some sort of mutated abomination is a serious achievement. Good gear is very hard to come by, anything magical will probably require delving into an old world dungeon filled with absurdly powerful ancient constructs and undead that will probably murder your face off.

I want the players to be incentivised to take non-combat approaches and try to keep a low profile rather than being all-powerful murderhobos. The world will be full of competing factions and city states and I'd like the players to get into the politics of the place, choose sides, and build alliances.

So, the question is, what system should I use? My previous DMing experience was in D&D 3.5. As I understand it, 3.5 still has a big following and I won't struggle to find players familiar with it and willing to play it, nor is it hard to find good resources relating to it. Am I correct about this?

The alternatives as I see it are 5th ed or Pathfinder. From what I've heard, 5th ed is more suitable to high fantasy hack and slash power fantasy killfests, with weak monsters, overpowered players and a tendency towards Monty Haul campaigns. Not really suitable for a dangerous survival campaign with few resources. Pathfinder sounds interesting, it's based on 3.5 which I know, but other than that I have next to no experience with it. I've heard it's best for people who want to build an autistically detailed character, which could work in my setting I guess, but is it worth converting to the new system and learning it? What are Pathfinder's advantages over 3.5?

The Storyteller system is a good general system if you're looking for a dangerous post apocalyptic survival setting. The Chronicles of Darkness rulebook has base rules that would be well suited for building characters that excel in non-combat roles, and the health system makes combat super lethal (your average human is not surviving more than a few bullets, blows from a skilled swordsman, or getting hit with a semi-truck). Plus you've got a few ready made enemies good to go just by throwing a template on something, or knowing a basic dice pool for a construct. The World of Darkness - Shards book has setting hacks for a post apocalyptic world and a fantasy medieval one, and a few definitions of the scale of a disaster, depending on how far you want to lean into stuff. It's also compatable with Chronicles for the most part. The downside is you're going to have to look around a few more splatbooks than just the core to really get the most out of it. Creating a 'racial' system could also be a bit of a problem as Chronicles was designed with a humans only modern setting in mind. It's versatile though, and the system is easy enough to get an idea of as it's a dice pool. Each number of a stat represents a die you put in the pool for a roll. Attribute + skill = dice, count successes.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay might be a better choice. It has an unforgiving health system (though with a lot more wiggle room than Chronicles of Darkness), a variety of career paths and rules, weapons, plenty of source books to draw off of, and a variety of skills that can encourage non-combat solutions to problems. That being said, Warhammer Fantasy does lean heavily on the setting of Warhammer Fantasy (what a shock) so you'll have to refluff a variety of things. The upside with WHFRP is you've got stuff for demons, wizards, fantasy races, and crazy mutants poisoned by magical background radiation built into the base game and a few other splatbooks. The downside is all of it is tied to a well established world, and you might need to work a bit harder to file off the serial numbers and edges than you'd like. what also might be a bit of a problem is getting used to the success/failure levels of your average character. WHFRP uses D100 as its base system, so it's all percentage based rolls and that can mean encounters that do drag on a bit. But it also means that when you succeed hard, you really succeed hard. The critical hit effect tables are pretty brutal too.

Otherwise, you could use GURPs, or see if there's a 5e port for Dark Sun and look for setting rules for it. 3.5 has a lot of material, yes, but do also note that 3.5e is even WORSE than 5th ed at creating high fantasy hack and slash. Casters are extremely overpowered. You seem to be aiming for a roleplay rather than a roll-play style of game, and while 3.5 can provide that, it's harder for newer players and GM's to keep it from turning into that roll-play chasing the next +1 sword. Pathfinder fixes a few of the problems of 3.5e and then adds in its own problems. Pathfinder is 'better' than 3.5e from a pure mechanical standpoint but doesn't fix any of the core issues of 3.5e.

 

[Spunt]

The Storyteller system is a good general system if you're looking for a dangerous post apocalyptic survival setting. The Chronicles of Darkness rulebook has base rules that would be well suited for building characters that excel in non-combat roles, and the health system makes combat super lethal (your average human is not surviving more than a few bullets, blows from a skilled swordsman, or getting hit with a semi-truck). Plus you've got a few ready made enemies good to go just by throwing a template on something, or knowing a basic dice pool for a construct. The World of Darkness - Shards book has setting hacks for a post apocalyptic world and a fantasy medieval one, and a few definitions of the scale of a disaster, depending on how far you want to lean into stuff. It's also compatable with Chronicles for the most part. The downside is you're going to have to look around a few more splatbooks than just the core to really get the most out of it. Creating a 'racial' system could also be a bit of a problem as Chronicles was designed with a humans only modern setting in mind. It's versatile though, and the system is easy enough to get an idea of as it's a dice pool. Each number of a stat represents a die you put in the pool for a roll. Attribute + skill = dice, count successes.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay might be a better choice. It has an unforgiving health system (though with a lot more wiggle room than Chronicles of Darkness), a variety of career paths and rules, weapons, plenty of source books to draw off of, and a variety of skills that can encourage non-combat solutions to problems. That being said, Warhammer Fantasy does lean heavily on the setting of Warhammer Fantasy (what a shock) so you'll have to refluff a variety of things. The upside with WHFRP is you've got stuff for demons, wizards, fantasy races, and crazy mutants poisoned by magical background radiation built into the base game and a few other splatbooks. The downside is all of it is tied to a well established world, and you might need to work a bit harder to file off the serial numbers and edges than you'd like. what also might be a bit of a problem is getting used to the success/failure levels of your average character. WHFRP uses D100 as its base system, so it's all percentage based rolls and that can mean encounters that do drag on a bit. But it also means that when you succeed hard, you really succeed hard. The critical hit effect tables are pretty brutal too.

Otherwise, you could use GURPs, or see if there's a 5e port for Dark Sun and look for setting rules for it. 3.5 has a lot of material, yes, but do also note that 3.5e is even WORSE than 5th ed at creating high fantasy hack and slash. Casters are extremely overpowered. You seem to be aiming for a roleplay rather than a roll-play style of game, and while 3.5 can provide that, it's harder for newer players and GM's to keep it from turning into that roll-play chasing the next +1 sword. Pathfinder fixes a few of the problems of 3.5e and then adds in its own problems. Pathfinder is 'better' than 3.5e from a pure mechanical standpoint but doesn't fix any of the core issues of 3.5e.

Great info, thanks buddy.

I have vague memories of playing in a couple of WHFRP campaigns in the distant past and disliking the system at the time (I accidentally created a ridiculously overpowered character without meaning to and the GM forcibly nerfed him to avoid breaking the campaign, which was a shitty, annoying solution to a shitty, annoying problem), plus as you say it would take a lot of work to de-Warham the setting to the one I've got in mind. I'll take another look but I'm edging away from that on my past experiences, plus I've never DM'd it and even as a player it was a very long time ago. Never used GUIRPS or WoD either, though my brother is an experienced GM in the latter so I'll ask his opinion.

Having looked about on Ebay and the like, the supply of original 3.5 material is not as high as I was led to believe, at least in the UK. I probably could cobble together the core rulebooks and some useful splatbooks (the splatbooks are actually easier to find because they're in less demand) but it might be a bit of an ask of all my players to do the same when there are only ever 2-3 PHBs on sale at any one time in the entire country. Maybe I'll have to get some pirated material, at least for them, or some de-DnD'ified D20 core rules books to get them started if they don't know the system already.

I'm not too keen to move too far from 3.5e simply because it's the system I have the most experience of running and I don't want to be learning a new system from scratch at the same time that I'm taking the players through a rather hardcore and complex campaign. I think adapting to 5e or Pathfinder will pose less of a risk of my fucking up and wrecking the campaign with a bad call and let us spend more time playing rather than figuring out the rules.

As for caster supremacy, I do have things in mind to mitigate it. Firstly, I'm going to ban mages because there's nowhere in the setting for them to learn - most arcane knowledge has been lost in the apocalypse and there are certainly no formal places of learning to gain levels in it (for the same reason I'm going to ban 3.5e's rather overpowered monk). As for sorcerors, casting innate spells in a place with unstable background magic could lead to all sorts of unpleasant consequences (wild surges, mutation, possession) so I think I can reign their power in a bit, or at least make it come with a price. Plus there are factions in the setting that really fucking hate sorcerors.

I'll take a closer look at Pathfinder again, see what exactly the differences are and whether I need to think again.

Lots to think about, thanks again.

 

[Dunsparce]

(for the same reason I'm going to ban 3.5e's rather overpowered monk)

I do hope you are joking, Monk is considered the weakest class in the 3.5's Player's Handbook by a fairly large margin. In fact, 3.5 has a thing people call "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards", where casting is exponentially more powerful than anything a punchy-fighty type class can ever even hope to do, and the gulf gets many times larger with each level up.

It also doesn't help that, in 3.5, most of the best options for casting classes are right in the Player's Handbook, while Martial classes need lots of splatbooks for their best stuff, but even with every book, web article or magazine ever made for 3.5 they still are significantly weaker than anything with level 0-9 spells(Or even 0-6 Spells with things like Bards and Jesters).

 

[Sable]

Yeah, they're one of the most MAD classes in Core.

Even with a bunch of non-core things to help them, they're still in a lot of trouble.