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So for my next entry in my blog, I was thinking about writing adventure content. I don't know if anyone from Paizo was following along, but I was also putting a little fiction in the blogposts. I was wondering if it was against the community use policy to write that Fiction in the setting of Golarion? Also, more importantly, if I wrote adventure content and the setting was also Golarion, would that be against the CUP? I would be making money eventually through Ad Revenue, but otherwise, I wouldn't be charging any money for the content. Is that a possibility? Thanks in advance.

Reposting this here based on a suggestion from a fellow Paizo fan. I began writing this blog in the hopes that us Pathfinder Gamers would have something to look at during their commute/breakfast/what have you. The first three posts are up, the latest being a nice long look at the Barbarian. Feel free to comment and let me know what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right. Thanks guys!

The Blog.

As the title says, I'm writing a blog specifically for the Pathfinder RPG. The first two posts are up, with no mechanics as of yet unfortunately, but the third is going to feature the Barbarian. Give it a look, if you please. Hopefully, I can update it at least two or three times a week, to give you guys some decent reading material. Thanks in advance, everyone!

Here it is.

My last trip into Golarion was a sandbox game that ended up drawing a nice big plot arc, which for this particular game I was trying to steer away from. One of my goals for the game was to make the game feel more like a realistic world, not a video game scenario with merchants who have endless pockets, and the players would have to pick and choose what loot was worth carrying with them, and whether it was worth holding onto until they could find somewhere to offload the goods.

I had visions in my head of the players funding merchant fleets with their adventuring profits in order to make more money, and I had even begun development of my own shopkeeper system where the players would own a business, and fund it in whatever way they saw fit. My GMing power ran out of juice, and we've put the campaign on pause while I recharge my batteries(luckily, they seem to be recharging quite well). I couldn't help but feel as though there wasn't a good enough system in place to give the game a sort of random and yet believable economic feel.

The players started off in Ustalav(after a brief venture in hell), then decided that they would make their way through Lastwall to Varisia. A couple of adventures later, they found themselves in Vigil, resupplying. I wanted to make certain locations unique as far as the economic side of the gameplay was concerned. Vigil was essentially a military city, so I decided that Vigil would buy any and all arms and armor equipment, but at 40% instead of the usual 50. It had the advantage that Vigil was truly an inexhaustible amount of income, but at less than normal. Most other weapon shops can't afford to give out more than say, 300-500 gold a month, but at least you could haggle with the shop owners.

TLDR - Don't worry about it. Just tell me how you handle the economic side of your games. Thanks :D

I'm in the process of making my own campaign setting, but there's a problem. Like the title says, I suck at making maps. I try to draw some kind of land mass, but all I really know is "Okay, this city needs to be next to the ocean. Okay, this city needs to be next to a forest." I have no idea in my head of what a continent is supposed to look like. After drawing a "continent", I look at it and note that it looks like some kind of bastardized trapezoid or the like, and quickly toss it. I don't have an eye for making rivers, or forests, or deserts. Reading the GM guide makes me believe that anything I'd draw would be wrong on every account.

So for those of you who have your own homebrew worlds and feel as I do, how do you deal with the map situation?

Okay, so this issue came up in our kingmaker game last night. There's nowhere in the RAW that talks about skinning, and we got into an argument about how someone would do it. My friend believes that it's a survival check, with a roll of the dice regardless of whether your trained or not in survival, because you don't have to be trained in survival to use the skill. I have a bit different of a view. I don't believe that you could pick up a knife and skin an animal well at all for the very first time, and if you had experience in skinning animals (i.e. a rank in survival) there would be no need to roll a check. Here are some of the points I made as a counter-argument.

1. No where in survival does it say that skinning can be done. It's just the skill that makes the most sense for the issue.

2. I couldn't randomly skin a creature so well any more than you could randomly stitch me together a t-shirt. Skinning is such a delicate procedure that it has to be taught, or you had to have years of practice in it, it isn't something that you could randomly do the first time you picked up a knife and used it in such a way.

3. With time and practice skinning becomes second nature to a lot of people. So I'd believe that with a rank in survival, there's no need to make a check on skinning an animal.

What do you guys think about it? How would you rule in your games?

I searched the archives a bit, and I couldn't find an answer, but perhaps only because it's so obvious. Just wanted some clarification. If you're invisible and you make an attack, does the invisibility go away after the attack? For example, I want to Vanish with my rogue, move to attack a creature, and attack. Does the creature lose it's Dex bonus when I attack and thus allow me sneak attack damage, or does the effect end when I start the attack? I'd imagine it would end AFTER the attack, because the condition invisibility seems kind of silly seeing as most invisible effects end as soon as you attack. I know there are exceptions, but still...

Okay, so here's my issue. I have a cave that my PCs are going to be hired to clear, to stop the monster attacks on a nearby village. I'm expecting my PCs to be positively drained after the first two encounters. I have four 6th level PCs, two wizards, a cleric and a fighter, and one of the wizards is a new player (my girlfriend, x_x). The first encounter is a wyvern, backed up by two small fire elementals (CR 7, if I'm not mistaken, a challenging encounter for 6th level PCs). After that, my dungeon splits a bit, but a pile of rubble blocks them (for now) from the final encounter. The next encounter consists of a pair of Manticores(also CR 7 encounter), which I'm going to be utilizing the 60 ft tall cavern for flying and the like. Finally, I'm going to have the rubble cleared by some manner, or perhaps an opening in this room of the dungeon to lead to the final encounter, which is a young green dragon. CR 8, or a tough battle.

I feel that my PCs are going to need to be up to full strength in order to deal with the dragon, because this is the farthest we've gotten in a campaign thus far, and this is the first dragon any of us have encountered. But it is CR 8, and according to the book, my players should be able to handle it. I guess my question is, is there a way to suggest to my players that they should rest before going into the last room, short of telling them to do so?

Being a fairly new enthusiast to role-playing games, but especially Pathfinder, I find myself very intimidated while I read these threads about the balance issues, such as the underpowered monk or the overpowered wizard. I am GM of one of the campaigns my friends and I play weekly; the main one really, as it is usually the one we play weekly, and has progressed the farthest. Two players in my group have campaigns that have basically been put on hold, though one is about to start up again. Another's campaign we are running, but he finds himself lacking inspiration so the campaign moves fairly slow.

Sorry for digressing, but that train of thought was intended to let you guys know that I'm the GM. I'm the one that sets the standard for the games that are going to come. I set the example for the others. And I'm terrified of making mistakes. Will I be too soft as a GM, because I'm not giving my players a real challenge? Is it my fault, as a GM, that my friend's wizard is far too powerful, and thus all the other players are simply a supporting cast? That's not the kind of game I want to play. Sometimes reading these threads gives me a "Why bother?" attitude.

Going off-topic for my own thread, I apologize. The reason I created this thread was to hear of far more experienced GMs and players the mistakes they've made, both as a GM and even as a player. I've only been playing tabletop RPGs for about a year and a half, and roughly 6 to 8 months using the Pathfinder system? I'm not quite sure. I know I've made tons of mistakes, both mechanically and RP/realism. Towns that don't make sense, misreading or misinterpreting rules, or just being wrong with the rules outright. The biggest mistake I feel I've made thus far happened about two months ago.

My campaign is different in the fact that my players are both the antagonists and the protagonists of the story. There are two parties, a good party and an evil party. One stands out as the villain, whose other character is also stands out as the "hero", so to speak. That isn't to say that the other PCs lose time in the spotlight; the party makes decisions as a whole, it's just that a single character is the driving force behind these decisions. Jeez, I'm not even sure if I'm making sense. Anyways, the city I made them start at was essentially a cesspool. Little law enforcement, gambling, prostitution, overdrinking, all of which were factors. A city of thieves, if you take my meaning. I feel as though this gave the PCs a sense that they could run rampant through the town, especially since I gave the antihero control of the city's underworld.

The city's council decided that no longer would they stand idly by while this man dominated the underworld, not without some kind of compensation. A councilman and his aide showed up, so my antihero decided it would be a good idea to kill the aide by chucking a scythe at him. I think I got power hungry, and decided that this man was going to live, for no other reason than me wanting to check the PCs power. So, even with a natural 20 on an attack roll, the NPC caught the scythe and tossed it away. This annoyed the players a great deal; weeks later and I'm still hearing inside jokes about my use of deus ex machina. I've come to realize what I've done is a mistake, and based on what I've read in the "Last Straw" thread, I feel like this would be grounds for players leaving my game. What do you think? And please, share your experiences of your own mistakes of GMing.

On a side note, Wowee I'm sorry for throwing a wall of text at you guys.

I've considered throwing in a mission in my current campaign in which the party is to capture battle plans from a high ranking official, who happens to have quite a fortune along with him in the caravan that he is traveling with. The idea is that the party gets to keep the spoils as long as they bring back the battle plans. However, I don't know if this is pushing the boundaries of a paladin's alignment too far. On the one hand, this is an enemy who would be using the funds for nefarious deeds, and on the other stealing is stealing. I'd like to hear your thoughts on such things.

I just noticed that wizards have knowledge (all), and one of the prestige classes has knowledge (all skills taken individually). Does this mean that wizards have one skill for all knowledge? Perhaps a dumb question, but I can't find the answer anywhere on the boards. :(

Last night I was running my campaign, my overly vocal player disagreed with the rest of the party on how to approach a situation. 10 minutes OoC talk went on as my players argued on working for the bad guy, or trying to kill him, despite the four armed guards that he had in the room, and possibly more on the way. Tempers got hot, the tension was high and my girl player got upset when he said "Oh you're stupid!" Not actually meaning it, of course, he meant more on the lines of "That's stupid", but still her feelings were hurt, and the usually quiet but extremely nice girl told him not to say things like that. "Well do whatever you want, but don't ever call me stupid." And you could tell by tone of voice, and her expression that she was clearly upset.

Everyone told him that they disagreed with his way with the situation, so after I managed to calm everyone down, he said "I cut my head off, because this is getting stupid." Now I'm really making him sound worse than he really is, usually it's a blast to RP with everyone, including him, but I'm growing concerned. What happens the next time their opinions come to a head? I mean, I managed to get everyone back on the same page, we took a break, came back and put the campaign in high gear for the rest of the night.

I guess I'm asking how do you experienced DMs deal with situations like this? I've DMed a couple times before, but this sort of thing is brand new to me.