Big McStrongmuscle's page

Piccolo wrote:

What happens to game balance when the DM maxes out the possible hit points of the monsters?

Depends on what else the monster has going for it and how big its HD are.

10 HP Skeletons aren't a big deal.

120 HP Vampires are a little worse, but not really all that bad.

240 HP Dread Wraiths? Yeah that's a big boost in the challenge.

Unless a maxed-out monster can still be killed in one hit, it makes them about 150% to 200% as nasty as the original was: CR +1 or +2. I actually really like doing this for important monsters, because it makes them live longer without actually granting them ridiculous attack and defense bonuses the way extra hit dice do.

Why would an alchemists fire prevent regeneration? (sorry, I am not very familiar with the rules of this game)

Also, we have a level 2 alchemist. Is there any way he could create some kind of crazy fire oil bombs?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The alchemists fire doesn't negate regen any better than real fire. The only advantage is that because it goes off when it breaks, the wind won't put it out during the 200' fall.

Fire or acid does prevent most regen. There are very few exceptions. If the monster has the tarrasque's regen, though, the only way to stop it is to MacGuffin it dead, or put it somewhere where it will take about 40 points continuous damage every round forever. Else you will have to settle for trapping it someplace it can't escape from.

EDIT: If the monster is *actually* a tarrasque, gods help you. I think they are actually *immune* to fire, along with a whole laundry list of other shenanigans.

Maybe so. I just think that lower HP messes up too many more things relatively than higher NPC damage does. Maybe it's all in my head.

It's not in your head. There's just a couple of subsystems that quietly and indirectly mitigate the dangers of this playstyle without being obvious about it. If you died right at zero, low hp would screw you very hard, but getting your Con as a negative HP buffer is actually really helpful. You might be out for the fight, but even when you don't stabilize, your party gets plenty of time to scrape you up off the pavement.

Big McStrongmuscle wrote:

Healing can get you back up almost instantly, and even once *that* runs out, most healers can stop you from dying with one cantrip and 100% chance of success.

Unless your healer also rolled a 1 for his HP... then you're pretty much screwed.

True, but anybody else who goes down any other way takes the same risks. Those are the breaks. Hey, at least you got stabilized.

All right, thats fair. While relatively few low-level mooks have them, those second attacks do make a pretty big difference at low hp. I'll cede the point about the damage, although I would point out that 3 skeletons is not actually a lower number of enemies than a CR1 encounter would normally contain, and that virtually no other enemy with that low a CR gets more than one attack. Were I running a game like this, I could fix it pretty easily by giving the skellies scimitars and shields instead of two claw attacks. And if I was using goblins or orcs instead, the problem goes away entirely.

You are right that there's a high chance of a knockout in this sort of game, but that's not really the point I was trying to make. What I *am* saying is that a knockout isn't the end of the world. Fighters only have about a 1/3 chance to be hit most of the time, and when they go down, you will usually get right back up. The fights are swingier, sure; but to some folks, that's a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, Definitely sounds like some cautious experimentation is in order, followed by a visit to a priestly library. You can't predict where to set your ambush if you don't understand what it does and why it does it.

Thoughts on how to make this better?

I think the wind of the fall is pretty likely to blow out the torch. Flask of alchemist's fire would be safer, probably. If your campaign has explosives you could also drop the cave walls down on the monster's head.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what more you could do besides drop more boulders. Huge bunches of guys with crossbows is probably out because the beast'll have ridiculous DR. If you have a truly absurd amount of labor and the mine was somewhere in the lowlands, you could maybe dig a trench between a large body of water into the pit, then drain the water into the pit after the fire burns out. That would take months, though, and I'm not sure the payoff would really be worth it.

You can move *very* heavy weights a long way using just basic labor, wheels, rope, and a block and tackle. The block and tackle is a simple machine that basically trades off distance pulled for weight pulled - if you pull your side of the cable 100 feet with 500 lbs of force, the load will move only 10 feet, but you will exert 5,000 pounds of force to do it. They've been used in construction for many centuries. It does require strong livestock or large teams of grunt workers, so it might help to find a local faction leader willing to pitch in for an end to the menace or a share of the glory.

Once you can move the rocks, building the boulder trap itself is easy - just move them into position, build a sturdy speedbump against its front, and jam a log under the other side. When the Moment comes, pull down on the log and lever the rock over the bump.

In terms of pit size, a colossal critter like a tarrasque has a 30-foot-wide space. It'll take looking, but it's not too unreasonable for the crazy sorts of dungeonmines that seem to litter the landscape of most RPG campaigns.

If your DM watches a lot of Godzilla movies, don't bother with siege weapons or conventional tactics. They won't work and they'll only make it stronger in the end. Planar banishment or imprisonment-type situations are pretty choice, if you can manage it, but are heavily reliant on MacGuffins and DMs leading you on long wild goose chases.

Really deep mine shafts are also choice. Spread a big net across, weight the ends, and bait it with something. You won't kill it with 20 dice of falling, but it probably will be stuck at the bottom. Push a bunch of boulders or flammables in after it if you want to be really sure.

If that is beyond your means, try exploiting its biological weaknesses. Does it breathe water? You could lure it onto a big barge or ship, cast it out to sea, then sink the barge and drown the monster in the deeps.

You could also stock up on supplies and lure it into an trackless barren desert. Use endure elements on yourselves, then lure it in as far as your supplies hold out. Let the thing die of starvation and exposure. If you find a hopeless place hotter than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, living creatures start making cumulative saves against nonlethal heat damage every ten minutes.

Or if you are feeling subversive, scamper to the nearest ubervillain's Dark Fortress of Doom and surrender to the mercy of its dark master. When the monster follows you, sit serenely in the crumbling jail and regard it as a divine gift in the crusade against evil.

If you have 2 hp you could reasonably say you're always in over your head, as you have a chance of going down if you stub your toe. Tactics and AC only go so far when one lucky shot from anything will definitely take you down. You can't plan for some things like "the peasant rolled a 14 on his stone throw, take 3 damage and start dying" or "you all rolled 3 on perception, and here's the surprise round."

My point is that in a game where the cleric can get you back on your feet, going down to a lucky hit is not really all that huge a disaster. You make the best plan you can, suck it up, and get hit now and again. You're going to get hit and drop eventually, and when it does, *that's okay*. Unless you are trying to tackle monsters way over your party's level, the odds are pretty good you will not end up at -10 in one shot. Healing can get you back up almost instantly, and even once *that* runs out, most healers can stop you from dying with one cantrip and 100% chance of success.

Unless I am taking 12-damage hits at first level (which qualifies as way over the party's head), odds are very very much in my favor that I am not going to be ground into chunky salsa in one hit. And if I am? So what? I was *first level*. I've had plenty of PCs die on me. It's not the end of the world, and there's really no reason to let the death of a fledgling character bring the whole game to a crashing halt. You just reroll and move on.

I'm not saying rolling your first HD is the only way to play, or even the best way to play. My table prefers maxing the first die too. But I've played like this before, and it's a valid style that doesn't wreck the game.

There is with the way damage in Pathfinder has been boosted.

When a lowly CR 1/3 skeleton can deal 2d4+4 damage on a full attack at level 1, having 2 HP isn't really an option.

If you only have two hp, it doesn't really matter much how much the monster deals, you are still going down in one hit. Even with Pathfinder monsters, you can get a very long way based solely on armor class, solid tactics, and an understanding of when you are in over your head. Even if you do happen to go down, a healer can pretty much always get you back up after the fight. It's not like PCs instantly die at zero anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that kind of play is for everyone, but it doesn't inherently destroy a game.

Pathfinder does specify max hp at first level, but Rule Zero of All RPGs is that house rulings always trump anything in the rulebooks.

That said, I've played my share of one- or two-hp weaklings, and there's really nothing wrong with playing that way. A little risk of PC death focuses the attention wonderfully and can be a perfectly healthy part of your game. You just have to adapt a little more to circumstances and not just hurl yourself into the meat grinder without a plan. Play it smart and you'll probably be fine.

If you are really that worried about it, you can always invest points in Constitution for extra hp. But really, the absolute worst case scenario is that you lose a first-level character and roll up a better one.

Sounds like your PC is doing his job very well. No need to single him out for meta-game targeting. His schtick works great, and it seems to involve most of the group, based on the sheer number of people buffing him. That's desirable play, and you do not want to be shutting that down. That said, there are ways a smart villain can get around a character like his. Most enemies shouldn't be doing this, but if now and again the party is going up against a tactical mastermind, you have some ways to sidestep around him.

His CMB will high, but its not likely *that* high, and the fancypants armor does no good at all against touch attacks. Flank and you can almost certainly trip him, grapple him, or net him, then dogpile minions to attack him while he's at a disadvantage. This was historically a common way conscripts were used to defeat armored warriors. His saves are probably not too great either. Disabling spells like entangle, hold person, or worse, charm person will do the trick, but you should definitely not use those very often - those are complete shutdown options, and they can suck the energy right out of a game when you use them on players. For a less brutal version, have an enemy caster try to dispel his buffs.

If you've got a little tactical creativity, you can also try walling him off from the group with some obstacle. You might also try using one enemy to force him to defend one of the party's flanks, then attack the other flank with a second threat. He can only be in one place at a time, and if he's buffed, that's a sizable fraction of the party resources. And of course, you can always have guys who just ignore him and go directly after the squishies instead. Ranged attacks are especially good for that.

Best advice I know: Don't think of a mega-dungeon as one homogeneous area. Think of it as a collection of mini-dungeons, connected at a few obvious choke points - each one maybe 10-40 rooms each and holding its own themes and stories. That way its easy to tell when you are going to a very different area, and the number of possible directions is too low to feel overwhelming when you prep it.

I posted about pretty much this in another thread last week. You might find some of the advice useful.

THE single most important piece of advice for dragonslaying wizards: Just about all mature dragons have magic resistance. Unless you have built your character to pierce SR, you should avoid casting spells directly on the dragon, as between SR and the beastie's usually-good saving throws, there is a very large chance that any direct offensive spell will completely fail. If this happens the dragon will laugh at you for wasting your precious spells. Don't glory hound with damage or save-or-die effects. Instead focus on buffing the party, summoning help, and doing basic battlefield control. If for some insane reason you absolutely must use a direct attack spell, pick a ranged touch attack or a Reflex save.

The dragon's nastiest attack is assuredly its acid breath. Prep as many acid resist spells as you can. Cast them on the tanks first and yourself last - if you are doing it right, the dragon will barely notice you. Be ready for lots of physical attacks split into several average-strength hits. DR buffs like Stoneskin are glorious if you can manage it. AC buffs are a close second. The dragon probably has some damage reduction, so strength spells, enlarge person, etc on the warriors will be a big plus. General-purpose DPS buffs like Hasting the fighter will get you much farther than fireballs and rays. Summons are also nice, but very situational against dragons, whose wide array of combat tactics can render many of them completely useless. If you like summoning, you want high-damage monsters like the rhino, but seriously, don't even bother if the dragon can just escape by ducking underwater or taking to the air. Don't summon swarms of little monsters because acid breath. You're probably best off calling up one big flying monster with a lot of hit points.

Black dragons are aquatic ambush monsters and usually lair in swamps and areas with a lot of water. If your DM is clever, you are overwhelmingly likely to encounter the dragon either on the wing, or hiding beneath a large bog or pool. Half the battle is just getting into position to actually deal damage - bows and magic arrows are useful for this, as they can hit almost any position the dragon can attack from. If you can corner the dragon in a dry cave, half the battle is already won. Minor note: Black dragons have darkness as a spell-like ability, and do not need to see you to pinpoint and kill you. Unless you have a way to dispel or counter that, your party will be at a major disadvantage.

Know what battlefields are likely based on where you are adventuring that day, and prepare specifically for the terrain. If the dragon is likely to come from the air, use fly spells on the strongest melee guys, and prep a feather fall or two to catch anyone the dragon tries to drop from three hundred feet up. If the dragon is hiding in a swamp or pool, there will usually be too much cover for the dragon to fly, but the dragon will utterly ruin anyone that gets in the water with it. Either don't get close enough to be grappled and dragged under, or get the fighters some piercing weapons and cast water breathing and free action spells on them.

Dragons are incredibly fast and have a lot of truly nasty ways to kill PCs from very safe positions, but one evil trick I've seen used effectively (and hilariously) is to exploit their low maneuverability. Let it get up in the air and divebomb the party, then just before it hits you, cast a wall of force (or similar) spell ten feet in front of its nose. SR generally does not affect solid walls once they are conjured, and few dragons have enough maneuverability to turn aside in time to avoid the huge amount of falling damage. This is about the only thing (beyond blind idiot luck, enormous volleys of magic arrows, and siege weapons) that I've ever seen drop a full-grown dragon quickly and painlessly.

While I agree you should often put something cool in dead ends, if you do it all the time, it gets really predictable, and it's not nearly as rewarding.

True, but cool doesn't always have to mean powerful, mobile or useful. It just has to be interesting.

It could be a pile of monster dung for the ranger to look at, or a narrow window into another room, or a defensible place to rest in, or a little shrine, or a statue of the Builder, or a throne, or the wrong side of a one-way door, or just a dead guy with nice boots and a half-dozen arrows in his quiver. You just don't want an empty room with nothing in it at the end of a dungeon branch.

Besides, if something built the place, it probably has a purpose. Who would go to all the trouble to build a room, then not put anything there?

Glad I could help. The real trick to a megadungeon is that it shouldn't be just a series of homogeneous levels like you'd get in a computer game; its more like a collection of different subdungeons, each with its own story and character, all stitched together by rooms and corridors.

Another useful place to get inspiration is to check out the level designs in Metroidvania-style video games. Nintendo's Super Metroid is one of my personal favorites. It is very *very* skillful at putting in sectioning, shortcuts, secrets, and interconnections, although it is a little too railroady at the beginning for an RPG group. If there's one thing to take away from it: You should put something cool in every dead end. That way it never feels like the party just wasted their time exploring. Maps are here, but it's no substitute for playing it.
Main Map
Developer's Map

From Software's Dark Souls also has an overall structure well worth looking at. You have your choice between at least two or three directions for almost the entire game after the tutorial, (even if some of them are likely kill you if you attempt them early). Likewise map, likewise playing (although this game definitely isn't for everyone).
Some guy's map

What chaoseffect said.

My general house rule for leadershippery these days is that you can use your cohort as an alternate PC on a session-by-session basis, but only when you are not also playing your main character. No one player can control two characters in the same session. Your cohort also has to be an NPC you find and recruit, not a character the player generates, so that helps on the free crafting front. And the rest of your followers are mostly for patrolling the countryside, scouting, manning the fort, and other such flunky work.

I have also been known to let players use their cohort to get a warhorse that won't die in the first two rounds of combat.

I can't speak for either of those modules, but I do know a lot about running megadungeons. A few major pieces of advice for changing big dungeons from dull slogs to fun sandboxes:

1) This might not come up for you, since you aren't drawing your own map, but DO NOT block major corridors with puzzles, strong monster lairs, traps, or locked doors. Sandboxes are about interesting choices. If you put obstacles on a major corridor, it ceases to be a major corridor. Part of the megadungeon experience is the players getting to decide how deep they want to risk going. I don't know how those two modules handle it, but published adventures constantly make this mistake, and it's largely responsible for the bad reputation of dungeon crawls as grinding slogs. By all means use obstacles to seal away interesting side paths, shortcuts, and optional areas, but *never* the main path to the more dangerous regions. On a similar note, be sure to place keys to most locked or magical doors so that the people who aren't wizards or thieves can actually go through them.

2) Your PCs don't have to know all the details of the different areas on the way to where they are going. They *do* need to know which area to search. They also need to be able to tell when they've reached a different area of the dungeon. Long stairs down, thousand-foot-long passages, gigantic sealed doors, major changes in architecture, trailsigns, magic runes, directional signs, graffiti, half-dead or all-dead NPCs, journals, half-assed map fragments, and magic mouths are also all fine and very traditional ways to make the point. It helps a lot if you give each area a name. They also need to be able to make at least a decent guess that the new area is harder or easier than the one they just left. Traditionally, dungeons get harder as you go deeper down or further off the beaten path, but that's not necessarily the only system that works. The PCs must have enough information at any major crossroads to at least make the choice of direction interesting, even if they don't know all the consequences yet. If they want more details than you want to give, don't cave and tell them. Make them cast a divination or beat the information out of a goblin.

3) Reward players that take exploration and divination spells by not shutting them down when they try to use them. Light, detection spells, augury, clairvoyance, knock, create food and water. Let it work. You *want* your players using that stuff. Survival spells help let the party reach further into the really fun areas, and divinations are a great way to feed the party exposition they wouldn't otherwise get.

4) You need some form of time pressure and dwindling resources to stop your players from just resting all the time and get them playing the should-we-forge-ahead-or-slow-down game. Tracking light and food is optional, but useful at low levels. You should use wandering monsters, because unlike supplies, they stay useful for time pressure after the casters get "Create Food and Water". Make encounter checks every time the party takes a long time about anything, makes a loud noise, or (gods forbid) sleeps in the dungeon. If for whatever reason (guy on watch, rope trick, locked saferoom) the monster knows they are there, but can't attack them immediately, have it try to stalk them just out of sight until the first time someone isolates themselves or looks vulnerable.

5) Megadungeons are about claustrophobia, sprawl, endurance, and the stress of attrition, not usually about focused firepower. This depends a bit on the party, but 60-75% of your wandering monsters should be no more than EL+0: just tough enough to bruise the PCs and make them waste a spell or two in a quick fight. You want to have a rare few out-of-depth monsters (maybe 5-15% at EL+3 or more) around most areas that are so terrifying the players *should* escape, and that are either slow enough or stupid enough that players *can* escape. Variable-level monsters help keep "run, fight, sneak, or talk" an interesting choice. Make sure the players can learn ahead of time about about the scariest wandering monster in each area via rumors, NPCs, tracks, dung, giant piles of burned corpses, etc. Monsters in their lairs can potentially be tougher than wandering ones (EL+0 to EL+2), but should be much more rewarding to fight.

6) DON'T use damage traps to cause attrition. Constant use of boring damage traps on hallways and chests give you paranoid PCs who spend years cautiously searching every inch of dungeon and then don't get anywhere. Traps work much better and slow down the game much less when they are protecting side rooms instead of main hallways; when you us one long-term status effect trap instead of a whole bunch of damage traps (poison works well); when they cause exploration problems instead of straight attacks (like sealing passages, turning out the lights, or setting the complex on fire); and when they are used by intelligent creatures to harry intruders and buy time to scramble a defense. They work especially well as a dare for bold PCs. Make the trap itself blatantly obvious, but use it to guard a valuable treasure, an unexplored passage, a big red button, or some other visible bait so tempting that the PCs might risk it anyway.

7) Most monsters shouldn't just kill victims. Figure out what each monster *wants* for the party. Goblins might interrogate prisoners and take slaves, which makes for good future missions, and even a cave bear can drag unconscious characters back to the den to eat at leisure. That gives the other PCs a brief chance to plan a rescue op, or the injured character a chance to escape. Consider letting people play alternate characters or hirelings if their main PC is unavailable.

8) This is important. Award XP for achieving goals, but NOT every time they kill a monster. Give the XP for loot, explored areas, cleared lairs, quest completion, new monster types encountered, whatever you want. The specifics don't matter that much. But you should NEVER EVER EVER let killing wandering monsters be worth the party's trouble. Wandering monsters are there as a disincentive for wasting time and a way to wear down player resources. If you make them profitable, it defeats the entire purpose of deterrence and encourages the party to just fight them as they come for the XP. Save the rewards for lairs, secret treasures, deathtraps, and the like. The only real exception I can think of is if the party is specifically *trying* to lure monsters out of their lair and kill them.

Hopefully some of that is useful to you!

Wow, that's rough. Admittedly, I was a much more cautious player back then, and my group might have been more forgiving than most, but I only ever remember losing two characters in those days. After a few vicious 2e and 3.x games I played back in college, my record is now much worse, heh.

One was a youngish mid-level wizard who got on the bad side of an archmage by breaking his concentration with magic missiles for five rounds in a row while he was trying to blow up the party with his mega-spells. Those stupid casting time rules work in your favor sometimes. My shield spell did stop one return hail of max-dice magic missley death, but you apparently do not need concentration to throw out a Finger of Death from the Hand of Vecna. We unanimously agreed after the party rezzed me that while it did save several other characters' bacon, what I did to provoke that guy was incredibly stupid.

The second death was entirely the fault of a jerk player. The party MU/Th in a Ravenloft game had a spat with the cleric and decided to betray and murder the entire rest of the party at night during his watch. He snuck away invisible, then sicced a pair of double-strength beholders on us while we were all still asleep. Cleric got disintegrated in the first round to start a TPK. My ranger died last, and for the only time in his unlucky fumble-filled existence, he had such a hot run on his saves that the one surviving beholder had to bite him to death.

There were a lot of subsystems, instakill parasites, and magic gimmicks (especially if you used psionics) that could make AD&D crazy deadly, but our group didn't use that many of them, and I don't think most of them are really all that necessary for an old school game. I didn't know too many people who thought rot grubs made for fun play.

That last bit sounds perfect, sorta. I don't really like putting the monster up to the highest player's stats because it seems like sometimes that makes it difficult for the lowest party member in that stat to make a difference at all. I think putting it somewhere between the second highest and the highest, or directly on the second highest might be better for this group, because there's a pretty large gap between what one guy's good at and what another guy sucks at.

That works. The important thing is that every character should usually be able to do their strongest schtick to it without failing most of the time. I can only really think of two exceptions:

+ Those cases where you want your monster to have a very strong resistance or immunity to a specific kind of attack (Say, a dodgy NPC rogue vs a PC blaster wizard, or powerful undead with Turn Resistance). And for most mooks, a strength like that has to come with a weakness somewhere else.

+ The (very) rare monster you actually *want* to be an unbeatable terror and that your players know in advance they will need to flee from. And there, you have to be sure they *can* actually get away. Speeds higher than 30 are evil.

I still can't decide if I should point buy or have them roll for stats. Pros and cons of each?

Be warned: Rolling for stats will also make your characters less optimized, especially if you use 3d6, and especially especially if you do stats in order. This is doubly true in 3.x/Pathfinder because ability score modifiers are larger, and they kick in more quickly than in older games - the AD&D threshold for a +1 to anything was usually 15.

You should definitely expect encounters to be a little bit tougher for your group if they don't get to optimize their own stats. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - a lower power level won't stop an encounter from being fun - but it is something you will need to keep in mind when designing. You'll probably want to start off by lowballing your estimates and nudge the difficulty upwards till it feels appropriate for the group.

It sounds like it didn't go that badly unless everyone was bored during the fight.

That said, as far as making more powerful monsters go, IME its nearly always better to just increase HP than it is to raise attack and AC bonuses. It's much easier to predict the outcome of your changes based on changing the size of a health bar than it is when you screw with all the various characters' different odds of hitting. Rather than double their HD (with the double-dipping into attack bonuses, AC, saves, and feats that implies), you are usually better off just saying "These skeletons have maximum HP on all their dice!" Makes the monster reliably twice as difficult with less luck involved all around. Give them a special ability with damage or DCs appropriate to the original level if you think they still need a little something something.

As a rule of thumb, I suggest that if the main attack roll of the most accurate fighter in the party has less than a 50% chance for the player to hit the monster's AC, its too much for the party to handle.

It's not foolproof, but it usually works, and you can adapt that to other comparisons too; Use the highest stat in the party against the monster's average counterpart. Party's best spell DCs vs monster's average save, Player's highest saves vs. average monster ability DCs, Highest player AC vs average monster attacks.

A number of people have mentioned this but the more I read it the more I recall.

Randomness. You rolled for stats. You rolled for HP. Often within adventures you found items or locations with random effects. Random encounters were part of the landscape.

So much of these things are now gone. Most or all encoutners are at or near level. Point buy at creation. Items are linked to economy in a purely systematic way so without consulting the GM a player can assume what items he can find and for how much.

This. A lot of the charm in the old school style lies in not being totally sure what your cards were going to be. You couldn't rely on getting standard stats, or finding a particular item or spell, or (in the better class of game) on meeting a standard palette of enemies. You had to be willing to adapt a lot more to the circumstances and play for the moment. Once you got into the mindset, that's a lot of the fun part - you didn't have to worry about being underpowered once you hit level 13, you just sort of just rolled with the game and found out where the cards would fall. That part isn't too hard to do with any system. I wrote an excel sheet a few years back that generates a character with random stats (3d6 or 4d6-lowest), race, class, sex, description, alignment, deity, and one-sentence character backstory. These days, when I start a character in almost any game, I usually just hit start and play whatever comes up.

How generic older-edition characters were actually helped deal with a lot of that randomness. In OD&D up through about Core 2nd, if you made a bad decision leveling, there just weren't many places for specialization or customization options. The few you had (including ability scores) were low enough impact that a badly-made or unlucky character wasn't much worse than a well-crafted or lucky one of the same level. The further back you go, the more that holds true: IIRC, the maximum modifier for ability scores in OD&D is +/- 1. Each class also generally had a very wide range of proficiencies, so you could capitalize on a wide array of nice finds. It didn't matter that much what kind of weapon you found, the fighter could always wield it to good effect - you weren't limited by taking a lot of spiked chain specialization feats. And since your character's stat growth also virtually stopped at level 10, there weren't too many scaling problems at high levels (other than the entire quadratic casters / linear fighters thing).

PF definitely has less flexibility in character builds - almost every character is somewhat specialized, even if only by a few feat choices. I played with a guy once whose fighter had an overly narrow specialty in lucerne hammers, and would always complain that nobody made magic ones. If you are going to embrace a lot of randomness, it's important your players understand that awesome powers within narrow specializations are not always going to be a very good choice.

Torches aren't a bad answer to the swarm issue either. They deal a decent amount of fire damage.

Thinking outside the box, a Little Bad Evil Guy.

Awakened sewer rat with a level or two in druid. Awakened by passing druid for use as a spy and then promptly forgotten about. Proclaimed himself God-King of the Rats. Started killing the townsfolk's cats in his spare time so his brood could be safer. Is thoughtlessly using some kind of mcguffin to stave off the winter and the rains so the rats aren't killed by flooding.

It belongs in a museum!

Usually for things like this, though, I would make the ogre hook non-magical and raise the ogre's strength 2 points to compensate. Net effect on game mechanics is virtually nothing, and you don't have to deal with trying to offload ridiculous pieces of gear.

Alternately, say that the fighter can wield it just fine provided he wears gauntlets of ogre strength.

Oh, I remember reading that Angry DM article a few months back. It was pretty solid.

Yeah, I do something very similar to what he does, but a bit less formal and without the fancy-pants stat blocks. I like my dungeon notes to be a lot shorter than his so I don't have to constantly leaf through them. But the divide-and-conquer approach with regions, zones, and faction rosters is basically the same.

My current efforts are going toward designing the destroyed remnants of a giant subterranean fortress kingdom of darkness, inhabited by the now-splintered fragments of the once-monolithic armies of evil still entrenched within. A bit like Angband from the Silmarillion would look after World War III got through with it. I'm not a hundred percent sure what the Mad DM's method is, and a quick Google didn't bring it up, but basically, what I do is a zoned approach.

This is the third megadungeon I've attempted, and if my previous efforts taught me anything, its that you have to subdivide the thing into small chunks or you never get anywhere on it. If you'd like I can give you more details on a more topical thread.

Eh, no problem. It's a thing I've thought about a lot recently for a megadungeon I'm building. It's hard as hell to implement one of those properly without a few oldschoolisms, and its not always easy to sort ideas that were actually stupid or broken from principles that I just used to misinterpret.

Yeah, sounds like you were using the they way they are meant to be used, then. As amusing as the tiger chest must have been, I had to watch that kind of "random encounter" trainwreck an entire campaign before I figured out where I'd gone astray.

Please don't misunderstand me about punishing, either - I don't mean you have to get vicious and kill people every time one shows up. Just that you use random monsters as bad consequence to poor choices, like standing outside a monster lair ringing a dinner bell. I like to keep about 2/3rds of them level appropriate or slightly weaker - just enough to force the party to waste a couple of spells or potions - and make sure any out-of-depth monsters I employ (I try to have at least one really big and scary one) can be reliably tricked, bought off, or run from.

That xvart story is exactly why. Short of surrendering and offering a bribe or a service to the tribe for a guide out of their territory, I don't see much you could have done to escape.

I apparently also played a different 2e.

Optimizing and minmaxxing was constant. High str dart specialists, humans dual classing level 1 everythings before game even started, twinking proficiencies to autosucceed on everything but a 20, choosing rogue or ranger race and armor to max out certain percentile skills... more random death meant more rerolling new characters meant pulling out all tricks to keep a character alive to be able to roleplay more with them..

Faerun, at least, was full of magic shops. Xoblob Shop and the Aurora's Realms catalogs come to mind...

Corebook had rules for crafting items (spend money, roleplay, DM fiat, get xp) as I recall.

Frustration on lack of perception and sense motive skills lead to even more paranoia, thieves that can steal your pants without you noticing, dopplegangers getting you alone and naked..

There were plenty of attack and ac modifiers to keep track of.. the only thing i saw that spend up combat was system mastery... DM describes a beasty, and the players all immediately rattling off its stats and best tactics against it...

Yeah, a lot of the stuff with maxing skills and magic shops got started in 1e and 2e. There was a lot of variety between games, and how much crazy stuff there was in your game depended a lot on your DM. The 3e mark is not a magic cutoff where Old-School stops and New-School begins - there's kind of a weird gradient of schoolishness from the original books through AD&D and Basic up through the modern editions. The 2e Player's Option and Complete Guide books, for example, were like a candy store for minmaxers. I remember reading those as a teenager and thinking "Wow, actually using all of this stuff would completely destroy my game."

That said, the current old-school crowd is largely made up from the sort of people who liked to be able to fit their character sheets on index cards, but found the recent editions too complicated to support that well. So the rules-light approach is mostly what they mean when they talk about old-school.

Faerun's an interesting case, since it was TSR's flagship setting for a long time. Apparently it started fairly at a pretty normal magic level for the time, but proceeded to ratchet it up every time a new supplement or novel was published. It's real easy to open Pandora's Box, and very hard to get it to close it again.

@ Mark Hoover: Yeah. I had a huge goblin barbarian named Mugtukluk guarding a bridge over a deep ravine on the way to the Lost Temple of Gold. With a build the size of a large dwarf, a two-handed spiked club the size of a tree limb, and a brain the size of a walnut. When I put him in, I figured that since my oldest cousin was a ten-year-old boy, he would probably just step up to fight him, his little sister would throw in one or two of her spells to see what they did, and we'd be done with it. Nope.

My two cousins ended up having to cross that bridge four different times, and every time, they conned or tricked him into letting them cross in a different way. I was having the poor dimwit get new orders between every encounter to specifically stop the same trick from working twice, and every time they just ran circles around him regardless. Probably one of the most entertaining sessions I've ever run.

1. Speed: I don't remember fights being all that quick.

This was pretty normal for our group, too, in big fights against major enemies. It was smaller combats against weak enemies or wandering beasts that tended to be much faster, and that's the point. You could throw that kind of thing in fairly painlessly.

2. The Magic Shoppe: I always had these.

Nothing wrong with this either. For a lot of old-school GMs, disposable items were always a nice, if expensive, resource to grab up while in town. I usually had the shops in town sell potions (especially healing), scrolls, and the occasional wondrous item (and since 3e, low-level wands with a 4-8 charges or so). The magic item shop only really becomes a problem with the paradigm when PCs start thinking they can just walk out and buy magic swords, mithril chain mail, and staves of fire.

3. High death rates = fun or acceptable: my players hated dying.

Also pretty normal after second or third level. My group would sometimes lose characters to freak accidents while still level one, but after that, we rarely had anyone die for good except in very unusual circumstances. As a whole, I always found the high death rate of old school games to be more exaggerated in the telling than true. Maybe it was a Killer DM thing.

Tomb of Horrors is not the best example of old-school play, either. While all the traps are very survivable with sufficient paranoia, the way I hear it, ToH was specifically written as a tournament game because Gary was sick of people telling him his convention games were too easy.

4. EVERYTHING about random encounters: I barely used these...

Here is about the only place you diverge from my current grasp of the old school paradigm. The fun in random encounters is really less about actually using them, and more about the reaction the threat of them inspires in the players.

Random encounters suck the fun right out of a game if you aren't using them for their intended purpose, which is a tax on time that saps your resources and gives you no treasure in return. They are the thing that should be stopping the party from frivolously sleeping in the dungeon every time the MU casts all his spells. What they are is a way to punish PCs for loitering around a dungeon too long and making a lot of noise. They work best when used least: ideally, your players know every time you make a random encounter roll and are desperately trying to avoid giving you excuses for it.

You should never base the entire adventure around random encounters unless you are extremely good at improvising; and most of the time when you do use them, you should write your own table based on the monsters that already live in the area. You also have to find a way to communicate when there's a chance of running into something way out of the PCs depth, like that ettin. That way, your players know its a possibility, and they can prepare for it (maybe by getting hold of some giant raw steaks laced with iocaine powder).

5. Slow EXP and level progress was fun: slogging through lower levels was really a drain on a lot of my players.

I've heard that Gary himself actually used character levels 1-2 as a kind of newbie tutorial and let his experienced players start PCs at level 3. Personally, I think the concept of adding your whole Constitution score to your first level HP was one of the few good things to come out of 4th edition.

I don't know that the speed at which you level matters all that muchto the old-school mindset. I think the bigger idea there is that you carve out a niche in the world, build a domain, get minions, and become less of a murderhobo as you advance.

Seconding the statting up of movies and such. You don't really need anything all that ornate to get someone new to roleplaying into the game. A couple of by-the-book encounters with rats, bats and goblins, a small pile of coins and one or two well-described minor magic items are usually all it takes. As a starter game for kids, I'd recommend a hand-built movie-, book- or video-game-themed Five Room Dungeon over just about anything that's professionally published. You can fill a whole session with it, your players will automatically know a little about the lore going in, and it's usually faster to prep than modules are. If you have an idea where you're going with it, you can usually have 90% of the necessary detail ready in an hour or so.

If you are working with children, I strongly suggest keeping the number-crunching to a minimum, and giving the party lots of chances to try out weird Bugs Bunny antics (they probably will) and use the magic items they find. I once watched an eight-year old go completely mad with power over a simple ranged touch wand that threw a 1d3 fire bolt when her sorceress said a magic word. Putting in one or two strong but extremely stupid monsters goes over pretty well too, because kids are often keen on outwitting things bigger than them.

And of course don't put in any one single riddle or puzzle that you require them to solve to progress through the main story of the adventure. It's not that kids are dumb, but they are much less likely to play along with railroady stuff than seasoned players might be, so you need to be willing to run a little with their approach to problems.

Pathfinder Starting Equipment List.

A lot is similar to your list. This is what My group will probably be using as our equipment checklist.

Have I missed anything that might be necessary to a starting group assuming 900GP (Max Starting Gold for a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, & Wizard Party)?

We normally buy our basic personal gear then come together to get things for the party to use.

Looks pretty solid - sometimes even more thorough than I'd bother with. I think the only thing I've got that you don't is a bag of rocks for throwing, sling ammo, and setting off traps. You can pick those up almost anywhere along the trail, though.

I confess I hadn't thought of making sure you have all three damage types covered. That's a really good idea. A spare dagger (S/P) would cover that pretty well, since you can nearly always just improvise a club from something sturdy at hand for bludgeoning (or just wield your crowbar or sledgehammer). I hadn't thought of packing warm- and cold-weather clothing, either, but I'm not totally sure that much climate coverage is really a priority right at the start of a campaign. Taking whichever set is most likely to apply to the starting region is probably enough. Well-thought, though.

And that's some cool stuff, 626. I kinda wish I'd had a resource like that back during a survival horror campaign I played in. First session started by abruptly stranding the entire population of the planet in a vast monster-filled wilderness with only the tools we were holding at the time. >_<

Mine is meant for individual survival not teamwork... Though I tend to play Martial Characters with nice Strength.

Oh. That'll do it. I'm mostly a fighter or ranger (occasionally wizard) kinda guy myself, but since my group works well together and we mostly have each other's backs, I seldom find much need to go full-on solo survivalist.

I thought my list was short and now it just looks long after McStrongmuscle's list...

Really? Wow. I'd be interested to see what is in it. I thought mine was pretty complete for starting characters.

The essentials for me are this.

Every character should be carrying this stuff if possible (in order of importance):
+ Food and water.
+ Firestarters and actual torches. Wolves and bug swarms aren't afraid of sunrods.
+ Your weapon of choice.
+ Armor.
+ Backpack, cloak with pockets and/or belt with pouches.

At least one person in the group should try to have this stuff, too, especially if you plan on doing any dungeon crawling. Likewise order of importance:
+ A long stick, or better yet, a polearm.
+ A bag of stones or half-bricks for throwing.
+ Rope, hammer and spikes.
+ A sheaf of paper and writing implements (charcoal will do in a pinch, and you can make it yourself), along with an accurate map and compass if you can get them.
+ Some empty bottles or wineskins. Sometimes you gotta take samples, and the Tao of Zelda has much to teach us.
+ A few suits of cheap spare clothing, and some needles and thread. Failing all else, you can tear it up for cloth or to wrap around a stick as a makeshift torch.
+ A first aid kit and clean bandages.
+ Several doses of 'surprises' caltrops, lamp oil, or marbles. A friend of mine likes to mix those three things together into a very fun concoction he calls Mulligan Stew. This is also one reason you want actual torches instead of expensive alchemy junk.
+ Some kind of fine powder for bursting into concealing clouds and coating invisible things: talc, flour, sawdust, whatever. Keep the torches away because odds are it'll be something flammable.

Other things to get for the group before you leave, or at least as soon as humanly possible:
+ A whole bunch of slings for everyone, plus some extras. We once massacred a very very large band of goblin raiders solely because we sat on a rocky hill and equipped a dozen freed slaves with slings made from the hastily-stitched pieces of our torn-up shirts.
+ Several pieces of chalk - colored, if possible.
+ Hooded or Bulls-eye lanterns and plenty of extra fuel. Veiled light sources are a major win.
+ A bell, whistle, horn, or other way of making a loud noise, to announce your position and wake people up.
+ At least one mule with a pony cart, to carry all this junk and haul treasure back to town. If you can't use a cart, take pack mules.
+ One to four cheap flunkies to watch said pack animals, set up camp, lift heavy things, do other manual labor, and maybe hold torches if one feels brave. Pay them double the very low wage you initially promise, give lots of small bonuses, and don't let them get near monsters unless you have no other choice.
+ A crowbar, a sledgehammer, a pick, and a spade, to be used by your hired chumps. You're much too good for grunt work.
+ A fishing pole, a small weight, some kind of bobber, and some spare hooks. Great for grabbing small objects like keys out of deep holes, windows, and other obvious traps.

Unless you are incredibly, even stupidly, rich, I do not recommend buying magic items at first level. Most of the low level magic items don't do anything you can't duplicate with mundane goods and are a complete waste of your limited monetary resources. Some rare exceptions that *might* be worth your time:

+ Healing items above all else. Natural healing rules in Pathfinder (or any D&D variant) are crazy slow, and a few potions or a wand of cure light wounds with a few charges is a life-saver. Save them for emergencies, though.
+ Next, dirt-cheap items that can potentially shut down or avoid an entire low-level encounter, like scrolls of sleep or obscuring mist, or a wand of silent image with a couple of charges.
+ Finally, cheap items that let you block off entire passages, or make you flee pursuit extremely quickly or undetected. Potions of expeditious retreat, pass without trace, jump, and longstrider are good for this, and to a lesser extent, wands of silent image. Just don't bother with hold portal. Use iron spikes for that.

ZugZug wrote:

Saganen Hellheart wrote:

When have you used chalk?

What use have you got of fishing hooks, sewing needle + thread?

Chalk is useful in Dungeons when you feel like you're going around in circles or don't feel like mapping. Putting markings on the ground and/or walls, either pointing the direction you chose or pointing back toward the entrance.

Fishing Hooks for Fishing.....also for "Enhanced Interrogation" Techniques. The Needle and thread for replacing holes in clothing, useful in a pinch to help Heal Checks. Granted, mostly for "Roleplay" purposes when used in their intended purposes. But when you're on watch at night, it helps pass the time and shows the GM you're actively taking care of your equipment/stuff.

Thank you sire.

I hate to resurrect dead threads, but an important addition: chalk is also occasionally great for *mislabelling* stuff. One time, I was with a group being pursued by a bunch of slaver thugs through Undermountain (the big ruins under Waterdeep). There were two identical corridors next to each other. We'd made a map on the way in, so we knew that one led to a vicious blade trap near the entrance to a gnoll lair. The other led around a corner to a safe hallway and the stairs up. We labelled the safe hallway BLADE TRAP and ducked into it. The slavers saw the sign and went the other way. Cue screaming and snarling and bloody chunks. We took the last surviving slaver as a prisoner without a fight.