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For Pathfinder fans, what aspects of Pathfinder do you want to be in D&D 5e?

Please, be specific, civil, constructive, (and patient).

1. Explain what you like:
• a specific mechanic
• way of organizing the mechanics
• avoiding doing something
• way of presenting the narrartive description
• way of using the narrative description
• way of building an adventurer character
Or so on.

2. Explain why you like it. How does it enhance your gaming enjoyment?

Here's things I like -

- Staying single-class to 20 is generally a very good option. The system generally uses the same multiclassing and PrC rules as 3.5, it just rebalances things so that you're not a linerally inferior character for not jumping out of most of the core classes ASAP, and in fact X 20 is a great character of nearly every class. Multiclassing is (at least for marital characters) an option, it's just not dramatically superior in every way like in 3.5. This is generally done by
A) Providing benefits for staying within your "favored class".
B) Making many class features for all classes scale with your levels in that class.
C) Not filling most of the classes with a bunch of dead levels or with levels that only advance spellcasting, which are things that are easily replaced with PrCs.
D) Not making base classes piles of suck.

- Archetypes. Archetypes are basically just options to trade out some class features for different ones, as a package. This isn't original or unique to Pathfinder, but it's done very, very well there. (Well, there are lame archetypes, but there's lame anything in any edition.)

- Every character has some degree of personalizability. In particular, rogues and barbarians both have feat-like subsystems that give them specialized abilities related to their class.

- Unified combat maneuver system. If I was goign to take only one thing from Pathfinder, this would be it. Pathfinder has a lot of defined combat maneuvers, and they all work the same way. You have a bonus to using combat maneuvers, every character or monster has a defense agaisnt them, and that's it. (With a few additional bonuses against certain maneuvers for certain monsters, such as additional legs making something harder to trip.) Combat maneuvers all work the same way and are awesome. This is the gold standard, state of the art for how combat maneuvers should work in a d20 combat game, and unless they come up with something even better, there's no excuse for not making things work more or less exactly how they do in PF. (Although maybe less feat taxy.)

- Along with the personalizability, there's a lot of built-in structure that allows characters to emphasize a theme. Sorcerers, for example, choose a bloodline that grants them their powers. This choice gets them a bonus spell at each spell level (including some stuff not normally on the sorcerer list), a passive ability, and a series of powers at different levels, plus the choice of some thematic feats. There's like two dozen choices including some pretty generic ones (like "arcane"), so it's not something that really ever limits sorcerers, but it helps give individual sorcerers a lot of backbone and pushes against the natural pull the game has toward "sorcerer who knows a selection of the best spells for sorcerers to know."

- Racial features are modular. Characters can trade out some racial features for other similarly thematic ones, allowing races to hit lots of tropes associated with the race without racial statblocks being too huge.

- Not a specific thing, but the new material (not imported from 3.5) for Pathfinder, as well as the advancements made with the existing classes, are generally of extraordinarily high quality, and Next could do a lot worse than to look to them for inspiration. Remember, PF is 3.5 with all of 3.5's lifespan as a giant public beta. It's not suprising that it turned out well.

- I know that there are some people who reasonably might hate this, but the way that shapeshifting works in PF is pretty good, and feels like a good middle ground between 3.5's "the most powerful ability in the game, oops, and it gets better every time we print a monster" and 4e's "this is secretly just a way of making only some of your moves be turned on at once." I get that there are people who are bothered if a character shapeshifted into a Tyrannosaur isn't identical to a Tyrannosaur, but I'm willing to pay that price.

- Decent work with templating. Don't get me wrong; Pathfinder isn't actively good at this, but it's decent. There are relatively few examples of things that are ambiguous or badly presented, although consistancy is kind of an issue.

Alchemists
SUMMONERS!!!!!!  Seriously, give me a pet class pleeeeeeeeease...
Gunslingers (although they need some work as regards 2-pistol combat; the musket class is amazing though; mind you, I wouldn't want this for all worlds but the -class- should be available.  The grit mechanic in particular works well for the two gunslingers I've run/played)

Their classes and archetypes are hands down better at controlling the 'dip' game than prestige classes were.  Of course, themes -seem- to be handling that similiar aspect and I like that.

The fluff seems to have more 'weight' in a majority of Pathfinder products (although not categorically).  This is, of course, subjective to the all-elusive 'feel'.

Superior art.  Seriously, the 3rd and 4th editions, with the exception of like three pictures, is atrocious.  Granted, I'm an Elmore fan and art is subjective.

They gave martials a lot of nice chains and more feats to use them with.  They needed more feats still though, and of course 'feat creep' is a huge problem.

THEY COMMUNICATE BY POSTING ON THE BOARDS AND ANSWERING FAQ'S FROM BOARD QUESTIONS!  Seriously, I can't emphasize how neat that was to me.  I like to 'see the direction' that a game is heading and the designer's words give me that more than 10 books of 'crunch'.

Rage Powers for the Barbarian -- They were a big improvement over the 3.5 Rage that was pretty mundane - allowing you to do some pretty special and unique things, but they were presented in a way that didn't require supernatural "primal" power connection such as was the case with 4e barbarians.

The Combat Maneuver Bonus / Combat Maneuver Defense system for things like Grapple, Trip, etc. This was a relatively simple fix for a complicated subsystem of combat rules that 3.5 never really got right and it managed to give melee fighters other combat options without having to resort to everyone having the AEDU power system.

Jul 9, 2012 -- 4:24PM, thestoryteller wrote:

I'm not exactly a Pathfinder fan--I don't believe it fixed the only issue I really cared about getting fixed in 3rd edition (caster/noncaster disparity), but I will say that I liked the concept of archetypes a lot.  I did not like that archetypes were all or nothing trades, rather than letting you pick and choose features, but it was a start.

But then, my favorite game supplement of any type to this day is the 2e Skills and Powers--talk about customization.  I want that again! 

You must mean barbarian/not-barbarian destrucity.  AM_BARBARIAN pretty much tore up the caster disparity thing on a nice long thread on the forums a couple months back.