Tome of Horrors Complete Pathfinder or Swords and Wizardry?

[Snoring Rock]

So I checked out the monster sized books at the Frog God Games booth at GenCon. It appears that I must own the Tome of Horrors Complete. I do not play Pathfinder. But the Swords and Wizardry version is short on stats. A few small things are missing. The Pathfinder version has the full stats, more that is logically needed and costs 10 buck more. So what do I do?

I can buy the stats free book and wing what is not there, or get the PF and wade through what I do not need. I am leaning toward Swords and Wizardry. Any one out there have these books? Opinions?

[Treebore]

What "stats" are missing? As far as I can tell all that is missing is stats needed for PF, not S&W.

[tadkil]

I have the Pathfinder version and just got the pdf. I have been running Pathfinder for about 3 years so I would go with that. Easier for me to reverse engineer. What works for you is going to be based on that same sort of familiarity.

[Snoring Rock]

Tree, the stats for Swords and Wizardry are much shorter than C&C stats. I will be using it for C&C. There is no number encountered, full alignment, size, or creature typs for example. I can do that myself, but sometimes type can be tricky. I just dont know if I want all the extra business of Pathfinder. Then again, the short stats are easier to deal with.

[Treebore]

Yeah, I went with the S&W version as well. The missing stuff didn't really exist in the Little Brown Books of OD&D, so I imagine they went with that "feel" for the S&W rewrites. I know why I didn't note them missing, I've never really paid attention to those "stats", except for size.

[NJPDX]

I just got the S&W version myself and it converts very easily from what I can tell. As far as I know there's another minor difference between the PF and S&W versions in that the S&W version has the blocks of flavor text for each monster and those are almost worth the price of admission alone for me because they get my brain working when I'm stuck for a good hook.

[treant_on_fire]

Pathfinder has more stats because it is a crunchier game. In many old-school versions of the game, some of what the monster did was actually included in the description itself, which was a bit of a hassle in the middle of combat when you had to read some specific attack stuff without wanting to go through the fluff again. :p

How I'd see it: If you don't play 3.5, buy the S&W one since it has more fluff. If you play 3.5, buy that one because it's easier to convert the monsters to old-school than vice-versa.

[Snoring Rock]

Ordered the S&W! Thanks all.

[TheMetal1]

Glad you picked up the S&W version. It seemed easier to convert IMHO as mentioned up thread, it has the sample encounters for each monster. Does anyone know if the Pathfinder version has this? Regardless it is a great book, though now it's title is somewhat dated, considering FGG is releasing Tome of Horror 4. It now seems I have the Tome of Horror Not So Complete!

[treant_on_fire]

Glad you picked up the S&W version. It seemed easier to convert IMHO as mentioned up thread, it has the sample encounters for each monster. Does anyone know if the Pathfinder version has this? Regardless it is a great book, though now it's title is somewhat dated, considering FGG is releasing Tome of Horror 4. It now seems I have the Tome of Horror Not So Complete!

The S&W version is the only one with the sample encounters because they had to fill the pages with something, since the stats took way less space. In that sense it is a superior product. However since I play both 3.5 and osr games, I got the Pathfinder one because I can convert 3.5 stuff to osr pretty easily and I can think of encounter situations just fine.

[Treebore]

The encounter material in the S&W version is also available as a PDF for the Pathfinder fans.

[treant_on_fire]

The encounter material in the S&W version is also available as a PDF for the Pathfinder fans.

Awesome, gonna download it. Thanks