Shackled City AP Conversion Question

[joca4christ]

TL;DR
Is it necessary to convert The Shackled City Adventure Path if you are playing by PF rules?

For those with a longer attention span:
Fairly green GM here, familiar with enough of both the 3.5 & PF mechanics to make me dangerous. I have the hardbound version of the SCAP. I have no books for PF, just using the PRD. I love the changes that have been done to the skills and some of the character classes. I do have some PDFs of 3.5 (mainly PHB, DMG, MM, & PHBII).

Truth be told, I'm kind of lazy and pressed for time. If I don't convert the baddies, who badly will that impact game play? Too hard? Too easy? What?

Also, have a small party, three committed players, a GMPC, and another couple possible players.
EDIT:
Party consists of a halfling bard, half Orc sword and board fighter, elven wizard, and my healbot, the aaismar oracle. Potential PC may be a gnomish rogue. All players but me are brand new to tabletop RPGs.

So?

[Agincourt]

Wraithstrike started a conversion guide (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12691093), but as far as I can tell, it never got finished.

I have not run SCAP for Pathfinder so I cannot speak from experience, but I don't think you will have too much trouble with the conversions. Experience points are awarded a little differently so you may want to make sure that characters are still advancing at the pace recommend in the module.

[The Glyphstone]

Pathfinder raises all the base classes by roughly 1 ECL compared to their 3.5 equivalents. With a 4-5 player group, I'd expect the inexperience to balance out the higher power, so unless you have anyone planning to use combat maneuvers, you could probably squeak by.

[Crazysaneman]

First off, let me say that this particular adventure setting is one of my personal favorites for fluff. Mad fallen angels imprisoned in carceri for everyone!!!

That being said, I ran this pretty recently in pathfinder against a group of 5: rogue (skirmisher), Magus (black blade), Cleric (neutral neg/pos necro), fighter (thf), and caster (sorc/wiz dual blooded, wild blooded, gunslinger, scroll master). I know gunslinger and scroll master don't stack but the fluff she wrote for her toon was so impressive i let her have them both.

For everything, I counted the group as a 7 man group (as far as encounter numbers for the enemies go) because the pathfinder builds they made were so effective. To make it a challenge :smallwink:

For stock minions I bumped their book effects by 2 (eg HP/AC/Saves/tohit/CL etc).

For more important characters i bumped them by 5 and gave them +1 spell slot/spell level. Also I did have to rebuild Adimarchus and the Cagewrights to make them work properly, as well as some of the chapter "boss" encounters.

This may sound a little extreme, but they were a little OP for the setting, we just made it work and we finished it successfully with everyone leaving each session with a smile and "waffles for everyone".

Good Luck:smallsmile:ith your adventure, and if you have any questions feel free to pm me :)

[joca4christ]

Glyphstone, thank you for the input! I had wondered about whether it was overpowered/underpowered.

Crazysaneman, I may take you up on the PM offer. Thanks for the help.

I've attempted to go through Shackled City as a player and as a GM at least on three or four different tries. So far, the farthest has been mid-chapter two.

Since the baddies are underpowered in reference to my heroes, I'll probably not do much tweaking initially. Give them a chance to learn the rules and what not without being overwhelmed. Course, I won't tell THEM I'm going easy, so if things heat up, they'll just think its par for the course. :)

Luckily, I understand CM enough to make any transitions I need to work well enough. They are way less complicated than the grapple rules. Plus, I tend to try to run it "rule of fun". If I get it wrong, we'll just do it right next time rather than stop game play to look up a rule. We'll have to stop often enough in the beginning as they figure stuff out.

I also have seen on other forums some conversions for the bigger bads, and will likely use them as opposed to trying to figure it out myself. As I said, still pretty green overall.

Thanks again for the help. Any other input is more than welcome!