How am I going to do this?

[icyshadowlord]

Okay, I haven't been around for a long time now despite the fact that this is one of the very few forums where I find the people equally amusing AND smart, but I have returned (not that anyone gives a shit) with a question to ask!! I have an on-going D&D game which ended up being Pathfinder since the local stores don't even sell 3.5 books anymore (we only have a 3.0 Monster Manual, which my friend doesn't want to use due to obvious reasons), but I've been wanting to convince them to try the Tome series of books.

However, my arts of persuasion pretty much suck balls. How am I going to convince them that Tome is the better 3.5 and is worth reading? (Problem is that one of the players is a professional troll who VERY OFTEN has TL:DR scenarios whenever I throw stuff at him). Also, apologies if this is the wrong category to throw this topic in. Not that anyone is going to be formal enough to accept an apology from a random weirdo like me.

And outside of the topic, I still can't believe that those guys once managed to get me to try 4e with them. Thankfully, we all came to the conclusion that 3.5 is much better.

EDIT!! I seem to have a new problem. One of the players thinks Tome is overpowered when it comes to feats after I showed him a few (like Mage Slayer). I can't just say "no it isn't" as a viable objection, so how would I elaborate?

[RobbyPants]

What is it they like about 3.5? Do they see any problems with 3.5? Are any of those problems addressed in Tome?

If so, you might have an easy sell. If not, you're pretty much screwed. If the players think the Monk is overpowered or something, there's no way they'd go for a Tome game. If they get sick of non-casters not being able to do anything past level 7-10 or so, then they might like what they see.

Also, note that you don't have to use it in it's entirety. You can pick out the parts your group likes. Maybe they think the [combat] feats are enough to shore up the fighters and call it a day.

TL;DR: try to figure out what they're looking for first, then try your pitch.

[hogarth]

The best idea I can think of would be to run the same short adventure twice using both sets of rules and see which you like better.

[icyshadowlord]

Well, like I said, one of them felt the Combat Feats were TOO MUCH, which reminded me of the whole "Fighters can't have nice things" issue I've heard of and such. But yeah, I could try taking some part of Tome stuff and go with them. Also, I am worried since my group IS level 10 and the melee classes haven't complained about the overpowered nature of the casters yet.

And as for that short adventure twice idea, it won't fit into the schedule we have. Since after my campaign is done, we will end up playing GURPS and then someone else MC's a D&D game. So, yeah...

[RobbyPants]

which reminded me of the whole "Fighters can't have nice things" issue I've heard of and such...
I am worried since my group IS level 10 and the melee classes haven't complained about the overpowered nature of the casters yet.

From what I understand, they'll like Pathfinder.

[icyshadowlord]

...did you not read? We have been forced to play it as a Pathfinder game. Even though these guys started out as 3.5 players and I have told them of the flaws of Pathfinder a million times...

[Seerow]

...did you not read? We have been forced to play it as a Pathfinder game. Even though these guys started out as 3.5 players and I have told them of the flaws of Pathfinder a million times...

His point is if by level 10 they're playing melee and aren't noticing they're lagging behind casters, chances are they aren't the type of people to adopt the tomes, and are likely the sort who will be very happy with patfhinder.

If you're the only one in the group who has any complaints about being stuck with Pathfinder rather than 3.5, it's better to either suck it up or find a different group. Pathfinder actually isn't too much terribly worse than 3.5, its biggest flaw is it didn't actually fix anything it was supposed to.

[icyshadowlord]

...I guess you have a point there. Though I could play a dick move on them and send a legion of melee-immune monsters at them, forcing them to see that melee won't stand a chance at the level they are in. However, that MIGHT backfire, though I am confident in the success of my dickery.

[Maxus]

The best luck I've had with it is presenting Tome as a different take on D&D.

Try not to put it as better/worse, but as something different and a change from the usual grind. Say, yeah, it's stronger but...y'know, fuck it. Tell them to have fun.

[Wrathzog]

His point is if by level 10 they're playing melee and aren't noticing they're lagging behind casters,

Maybe their casters suck or are otherwise gimping themselves in ways we don't know about. Imbalances in the game aren't going to be noticeable unless the upper bounds of power are being stressed.

It's sounding like it really doesn't matter what version of 3E you play.

[Josh_Kablack]

However, my arts of persuasion pretty much suck balls. How am I going to convince them that Tome is the better 3.5 and is worth reading?

1. It's cheap-as-free. FREE is the best advertising word you can use. Another good advertising word is NEW, as in "While it's been on the interwebs for a coupla years now, there is a bunch of NEW thinking about D&D tropes in the Tomes."

2. Mechanics aside, the explanations about why dungeons, alignment interpretations and adventures in the lower planes are all well worth reading and highly entertaining. And if you keep refusing to do that you won't know why my next GURPS character is going to answer everything with "giant frog"

3. Unlike Pathfinder and 4e, the Tome authors don't pull shit like denying that they aren't following their own rules - don't get me wrong the tome guys are still grade a assholes - but they're assholes who will say "that wasn't working so I changed it, here's why" instead of defending skill challenges as written by discussing stealth houserules for them or dismissing a mistake by being unable to check the text of a book they had credit on

EDIT!! I seem to have a new problem. One of the players thinks Tome is overpowered when it comes to feats after I showed him a few (like Mage Slayer). I can't just say "no it isn't" as a viable objection, so how would I elaborate?

The best response is "No shit Sherlock!" Dude, you are totally right in that Tome feats are massively more powerful than core feats - that's the intent. The guys what wrote it thought that core feats were massively underpowered and didn't do enough to meaningfully differentiate characters." You could even quote stuff from this part of Races of War where Frank and K felt the need to sell the reader on their changes:

The Failure of Feats
"How about instead of being able to travel anywhere in the multiverse, transform yourself into anything you can think of, stop time, and slay everyone you can see, we just give a nice +1 to hit with your secondary weapon? Deal?"

Feats were an interesting idea when they were ported to 3rd edition D&D. But let's face it; they don't go nearly far enough. Feats were made extremely conservative in their effects on the game because the authors didn't want to offend people with too radical a change. Well, now we've had third edition for 6 years, and we're offended. Feats are an interesting and tangible way to get unique abilities onto a character, but they have fallen prey to two key fallacies that has ended up turning the entire concept to ashes in our mouths. The first is the idea that if you think of something kind of cool for a character to do, you should make it a feat. That sounds compelling, but you only get 7 feats in your whole life. If you have to spend a feat for every cool thing you ever do, you're not going to do very many cool things in the approximately 260 encounters you'll have on your way from 1st to 20th level. The second is the idea that a feat should be equivalent to a cantrip or two. This one is even less excusable, and just makes us cry. A +1 bonus is something that you seriously might forget that you even have. Having one more +1 bonus doesn't make your character unique, it makes you a sucker for spending one of the half dozen feats you'll ever see on a bonus the other players won't even mention when discussing your character.

We all understand this problem, what do we do about it? Well, for starters, Feats have to do more things. Many characters are 5th level or so and they only have 2 feats. Those feats should describe their character in a much more salient way than "I'm no worse shooting into melee than I am shooting at people with cover that isn't my friends." This was begun with the tactical feats, but it didn't go far enough. It's not enough to add additional feats that do something halfway interesting for high level characters to have – we actually have to replace the stupid one dimensional feats in the PHB with feats that rational people would care about in any way. Spending a single feat should be enough to make you a "sniper character" because for a substantial portion of your life you only get one feat. Secondly, we have to clear away feats that don't provide numeric bonuses large enough to care about. The minimum bonus you'll ever notice is +3, because that's actually larger than the difference between having rolled well and having rolled poorly on your starting stats. Numeric bonuses smaller than that are actually insulting and need to be removed from the feats altogether. 3.5 Skill Focus was a nice start, but that's all it was – a start.

Furthermore, the fundamental structure of feats has been a disaster. The system of prerequisites often ensures that characters won't get an ability before it would be level appropriate for them to do so, but actually does nothing to ensure that such characters are in fact getting level appropriate abilities. Indeed, if a 12th level character decides that they want to pursue a career in shooting people in the face, they have to start all over gaining an ability that is supposed to be level appropriate for a 1st level character. Meanwhile, when a wizard of 12th level decides to pursue some new direction in spellcasting – he learns a new 6th level spell right off – and gets an ability that's level appropriate for a 12th level character.

[RobbyPants]

...did you not read? We have been forced to play it as a Pathfinder game. Even though these guys started out as 3.5 players and I have told them of the flaws of Pathfinder a million times...

I did read. It just sounds like the players would rather play vanilla PF than Tome. You answered the questions I asked in my first post. If they don't see a problem with 3.5/PF, then they don't want Tome. If they don't think that Tome addresses those problems, then they don't want Tome.

Conclusion: They want PF.

[icyshadowlord]

I'll try and go with Josh's advice before simply going "Well I wanna try this shit and if you guys were willing to put up with the shit 4e was, I see no reason to leave this aside as well." But hey, thanks for all the advice, from everyone.

[RobbyPants]

Good luck!

[DeJoker]

I played 4e as well did not much care for it but if it was what the players wanted to play it was workable. Most systems are workable but my motto has always been if it seems broke then fix it and/or at least explain within the world terms why it works the way it works. For instance why can Wizards not cast healing spells in the world? Most of the time all I get as answer for this is because the rules say so and never a cosmological or in-world reason for it. Even when I point out that Wizards can heal in a round about fashion.

Next I hated the whole fire and forget spell casting system of DnD from get go eventually towards the end of 2E I created my own magic system and other house rules that fixed most of the issues present in the game. When 3e came out my magic system dovetailed in rather nicely (and gave names to some of the abilities I had already created -- for instances I had Meta-Magics in 2E as part of the Wizard class granted my versions were actually useable so I just replaced theres with mine).

As to what game system a group plays -- well if your willing to be the GM and your fairly good at it I have found the players will play what you want to run. I like to run AAD&D 3.5e which was the name the players dubbed my game which stands for Advanced Alterred D&D. Secondly in 3.0/3.5 I pulled all the class abilities out and made them all Feats -- created a Feat Tree and now you there is no need for Multi-classing at all since you can basically eventually build whatever you want within game balance. Seemed like a fairly easy solution to fix the brokeness of multiclassing. My focus is "game feel" and not mechanics -- if it the mechanics cannot support how things seem like they should work then I try to find a change that keeps it simple but fixes the issue and go from there.

From my limited exporsure to the game I found Path-Finder is not horribly broken -- however, if I were running it I would just take all the changes I created for 3.5e and slide them over into Path-Finder since the difference between Path-Finder and AD&D 3.5 are not all that glaring.

Lastly I feel for you as a player I have often played in systems I felt were broken under GMs that did not and/or would not accept changes in anyway shape or form -- I even purposefully created game breaking characters for these games in and effort to emphasize the flaws... it was of no use. So subsequently I began GMing more than playing and then became rather selective about what game systems I would play in. Still if I am with in a group and the game system is not too bad then I do my best to create a functional character that I can have some fun playing. If its too broken of a system that I know I will not have fun with either because of the system or how the GM chooses to run it -- I simply bow out and do something else.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Icy, if you're DMing then just throw bits at them. When someone goes to grapple, use the Tome rules (unless the PF ones actually work). Maybe toss in the Edge rules. Tell them that they can take combat feats if they want, and replace existing crappy feats (no pressure). If someone wants to play a monk, show them the Tome monk class. Give them some scaling magic items as rewards, and some fantastic armors.

But if you're playing PF, from what I've gathered the main compatibility issue is the spell lists.