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It all comes down to what sort of world that you and the players want to be in. The more common place magical items are... the less magical they seem to be. For many people this is fine and my last campaign was somewhat like this. I do prefer the other style though and I'm returning to it for my new campaign, in this style, the players hear rumours of a magical item and it becomes the focus of multiple quests to attain it. If they do, it is far more than a +1 sword, non player characters react to it accordingly and simply unsheathing it can cause enemies to surrender and bloodshed to be avoided. That sort of world is very different, taking inspiration from legends like King Arthur and can be very satisfying to play.


From another thread, it looks like they are not going to do that, which is fine. We should all wish Paizo the best moving forwards as they put out some cracking products!

I'm theming my own Beginner Box campaign around the low level play (levels 1-5) and plan to have the heroes fight extremely difficult enemies by raising armies against them, so fifth level becomes the stronghold and politics point. Imagine going up against a Red Dragon with 50 men under your command ...

To support that, I'll switch the scale from 25/28mm minis to 10mm minis and use different maps. I've not yet got the experience gain rate knuckled down to really support this play style - the by the rules rate is very rapid I've noticed. My players are already half way to second level after just one session and I'll have to slow that down if level 5 is going to be the equivalent of level 20 in other campaigns.


I wonder if you are worried that they might produce an 'Expert's Box' which covers levels 6-10 and has more rules complexity in it, as a further stepping stone to the Core rules for players that aren't quite ready to graduate to it? Such an approach would have some merit (I suspect it could be quite a jump from Beginner Box to Core for absolute beginners), although I myself plan on staying with the lower level play as a focus for my campaign.


I agree, it is a good idea, but it does feel quite daunting to attempt to convert something from the full Pathfinder rules into the Beginner box rule set, so I'll leave that for others to do who know much more about the system than I do. Whether that is Paizo themselves who do this, or other more knowledgeable fans, I don't really mind. Of course, there is quite a lot of content already there.

One thing though, it seems to me that you are not the target audience for the Beginner box as you prefer higher level play, which there is already a ton of content for, so you may be speaking a little out of turn. I doubt that the Beginner Box threatens the Core line and will bring new players into the full system; I have had the idea for a while (years in fact) to run a low level campaign where most everyone you meet is level 1, level 2 is uncommon, 3 is rare and so on... now I have a system to do it, so I'm happy. :-)


For the slower leveling up rate, I was thinking of simply dividing the given experience rewards by 2 and seeing how that went. If they reach level 3 too quickly, I'll likely divide by a higher number.

I've got other rewards in mind that'll do as good stand ins for magic items as well, enabling me to make finding magical items actual quest goals. Its better to put Excalibur in a campaign instead of a bunch of generic Swords +x I feel.

I'll have a hunt around and see what I find on the forums as you recommend.


I was a little concerned by the amount of treasure on offer here also. However, I have only two players at this point, so I kept the loot in to help bolster them up a bit. On future adventures, magic items will be a lot rarer and I have a few ideas of how to do this, what to substitute for them and so on. I'm also wondering if the XP rate is too high, as Level 5 should take a long time to reach ... in my campaign it will make you Top Dog, Superhero, Hero of Myth and Legend.


I'd just like to say thank you for the conversions you have done. The non spell casting Ranger and the Alchemist were chosen by my two players for their characters and have proven to be a lot of fun. I think there was a skill on the Ranger that wasn't in the game so I just let the player pick the skill of his choice. Not sure what the skill was. Also, I really appreciate the Troll conversion. Good work and keep converting!


I'll be running Pathfinder Beginner as the core experience because I quite like the idea that 5th level makes you as good as King Arthur or Merlin and the campaign can therefore be quite low magic. The heroes become very big deals in the world this way.

I ran my first Pathfinder Beginner Box session on saturday and I got a very good response from the players, who are veteran RPG players. In particular, combat flowed nice and quickly. I supplemented the box set with the free PDF's on here and also some extra classes that had been ported from the full, core rules. Speaking of porting, I hope more people look at doing this. It is good that someone has ported the Troll into the beginner set and quite strange that Paizo left this terrifying monster out of the GM Pack.