I've been railroaded into GMing our next campaign.
The bad news is that I haven't played an RPG for about 20 years, until a couple of months ago.
The good news is that I'm playing The Rise of the Runelords AP now (as a PC), and probably have until about March to prepare for this.
My intention is to run the Legacy of Fire campaign with a little bit of my own stuff and some Dark Sun nastiness thrown in.
I'm simply not sure what I need to make the whole thing work.
At the moment, I have:
Beginner Box
Core Rulebook
Bestiary
GM Screen
Gamemastery Guide (ordered, not yet received)
Before we start, I also want to get:
Advanced Player's Guide
Ultimate Magic
Ultimate Combat
Any other rule sources that players rely upon I'm planning to insist on them bringing either a hard copy, or their laptop with PDFs, to each session. Is that fair?
(there is more, but I just want to break the post up a little)
I want to use the 4d6 (drop lowest) system for character creation, but the group I play with prefer the point buy system, which I think is criminally dull. Is it OK to impose the 4d6(-1) method, or should I acquiesce to everyone being the same?
I like RPGs to be just that, role-playing. I intend to award characters that are well played big XP bonuses which might lead to level disparities. Does anyone have any experience of this?
I'd also like to reward players for picking skills and feats that aren't necessarily the most 'gamey' choices but are a good fit for their character's backstory. Similarly, I don't want to reward number crunchers. I think that I should just say from the word go that I'm not going to look on optimizers kindly, but will reward natural players. Is that OK?
Your stlye sounds a lot like mine. The plus side for me is my players all like my role play heavy low power game style so I don't have an issue. If your group is set on the point buy system you may have to make some compromises in your game in order to please everyone. I too started out giving extra xp awards for role playing and creative thinking but soon found it to be a pain due to level disparities so I bought a packet of those colored life counters and now I hand out what we call inspiration stones. A player can trade one of these in for a reroll during play or can trade two in to force a DM reroll.
First thing: don't use separate exp! It will be a pain for bookkeeping, and level disparities brings all kind of problems.
Instead, you could reward good roleplaying with the Hero Points system. It gives a boon, but not too huge: plus, it's a great way to ensure that inexperienced and/or chronically hated by dice players can get out of sticky situation. Enforce the rule that one character may have at maximum three points (so you will avoid players hoarding them) and that the points do not transfer from character to character. That way, the more someone fleshes out his character and gets attached to him, the less are the probabilities that a lucky scythe crit reduces him/her/it to half the man that s/he used to be. :P
Second: I would advise strongly against rolling for stats. If you get unlucky rolling once, you're screwed for the rest of the campaign. Or, if you had a concept in mind, you can't do it because the rolls won't allow it. Last but not least, it potentially creates huge gaps in power, making so that someone will feel way less useful than the others.
If you are afraid about min/maxing, do it like this and meet halfway with your players: do a 20 point buy, but whit the following restrictions.
1)No stats under 8 or above 18, AFTER racial modifiers.
2)No more than one stats can be lower than 10.
This will limit most of the crazy min/maxing. :)
Regarding the non 'gamey' skills, you could give a bonus skill point per level to anyone, but that can only be expended on a Craft,Perform or profession skill (and even one of the 'useless' knowledges, like engineering or nobility). I love when DMs do that. :P
This site will be your friend: http://paizo.com/prd/
It's basically access to the crunch that's in the hard-cover books (not including special edition adventure paths). Using this will basically allow you to vet/approve/audit a large number of builds your players come up with, while also giving you stat blocks for a more diverse set of monsters in case you need to adjust an encounter your party is going to come into.
As for dice rolling, tell them they could get arrays like this before racial modifiers:
10, 15, 14, 16, 16, 11
This was the very first array I rolled with a random number generator. It's the equivalent of a 33 point buy. And there have been people who roll three 18's with the roll 4, drop the lowest method.
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If your players are still dead set on doing point buy, but you still want that low-power feel, go 15 point buy. It worked with my "Hard Mode" Kingmaker campaign. (I basically ran the AP with hunger, thirst, environmental factors, food spoilage, etc. It was more an environmental campaign than it was combat on most days and my players loved the temporary change.)
With the level disparity... I tend to give items instead of xp. The only time we have level disparity is when a player misses a session or two and doesn't even give me warning that they won't make it. (if you give me SOME warning, we'll either play a one shot or I'll NPC your character if you really want us to continue.)
For instance, my wife was playing the bard and one of her "wish list" items was a whip that could do lethal damage, and she wanted flaming on one of her weapons. So wrote some poetry and songs herself, performed them during a month of downtime in the campaign, and got two 30s. I read up on the Perform Skill and found that a perform of 30 will garner the attention of outsiders... so I had a celestial come down during one of her concerts and drop off a +1 Scorpion Whip of Minor Flame (1d4 instead of 1d6) that could be swung overhead to give a +1 to countersong and fear effects in 30 feet and be used as a string instrument. So... yeah. Those are things I do. Oh, the bard was in my long-running Carrion Crown AP campaign.
Tell the players up front not to come at you hard.
I want to use the 4d6 (drop lowest) system for character creation, but the group I play with prefer the point buy system, which I think is criminally dull. Is it OK to impose the 4d6(-1) method, or should I acquiesce to everyone being the same?
I hate rolled statistics. My dice hate me. Yes, there is a link between those two.
With rolled statistics it is likely that one of the players will have a big advantage and another be at a disadvantage. The thing is it lasts the rest of the campaign -- one lucky set of rolls gives an advantage throughout the campaign.
I like RPGs to be just that, role-playing. I intend to award characters that are well played big XP bonuses which might lead to level disparities. Does anyone have any experience of this?
I'd also like to reward players for picking skills and feats that aren't necessarily the most 'gamey' choices but are a good fit for their character's backstory. Similarly, I don't want to reward number crunchers. I think that I should just say from the word go that I'm not going to look on optimizers kindly, but will reward natural players. Is that OK?
Pathfinder (actually any of the D&D derivatives) does not handle level disparity well.
Reward people for taking fitting backstories by working their skills into the plot. If someone actually has a good profession skill, put something in that allows that to shine once in a while. Perhaps the person with scribe is asked to scribe a letter for an NPC that gives them some information (local rumors) that they weren't aware of.
The people that work on background are likely to feel more rewarded by getting story time during play to display their abilities than they would by bonus XP or something like that.
That said, it can be fun to give a starting equipment bonus to those with a good backstory. A masterwork fishing pole (bonus to Survival for gathering food) to someone who loves fishing isn't going to suddenly disrupt all balance.
One way to keep dice rolling for stats without risking wide disparities between PCs is a method I saw here on the forums.
Step 1: Start with 4d6 (drop lowest) and have all players list their rolls on scrap paper.
Step 2: Allow all players to choose either their own rolls or another players' rolls. Yes, really. So if one guy makes amazing rolls, everyone can benefit.
Step 3: All players then allocate those rolls to the stats they want, according to their character concept, then figure out the rest of their character (race, class, etc).
This way, however, you'll spend 1-2 hours of the first session on character creation. One of the advantages of point buy is that everyone can come to the table at the first session with their characters already fleshed out.
An alternate would be to give 20 or 25 point buy, with maximum 18, minimum 8 (after racial mods). I'm partial to 25 point buy. Why? Players like having high stats, and with 25 points and a max 18, they'll have mostly good stats all round, which will make their PCs more well-rounded for skill usage and social interaction and so on. And MAD classes won't suffer so much.
At the end of the day, though, you've gotta go with what works best for you. You've been "railroaded" into being the DM for a while, which means that nobody else wants to be DM. Use that. Get concessions. Make the kind of game you really want to play.
Oh, and one more thing. Save yourself some heartache and ban summoners, witches and gunslingers out of the chute. As well as anything you just don't feel ready to handle. Say they are NPC-only classes.
YMMV.
You should add ultimate Campaign to your list of material.
My playstyle seems to be at odds with a few of your decisions. Ill just comment on a few. When it comes to APs I use the advancment track and skip XP entirely. I have just found that I dont like staggered level PCs and I dont like the book keeping. With the advancment track you have plot points where you can level the party up. Its a nice change unless you are looking for an old school feel which is undertsandable. For my money the game runs better without XP.
I also choose point buy because I like my players to build their PCs the way they want. I dont have to watch rolling and make sure nobody cheats. Also, it keeps the players fairly level at the table; system mastery depending of course. I dont even know my players attributes anymore and it has not mattered a bit. We seperate out the RP from the mechanics. YMMV of course but stats dont have to affect play at the table.
APs are designed for 4 players at 15 point buy. I have 5 players and I use 20 point buy. The result is that at about level 6 I start to hold the players back a level going forward. I also max HP on enemies and a few other minor tweaks here and there.
I posted contrary positions not to say playing one way is the right or wrong way. I really just wanted to share my perspective I why I chose not to use rolling and XP. I also have a bit of experience with the APs and find the methods mentioned hits a sweet spot at my table. The APs are a lot of fun I hope you are enjoying the experience so far.
Oh, and one more thing. Save yourself some heartache and ban summoners, witches and gunslingers out of the chute. As well as anything you just don't feel ready to handle. Say they are NPC-only classes.
I respectfully disagree. Summoners, Witches and Gunslingers are three really wonderful classes (Witch is my favorite class in PF, so I'm a little biased) and I don't think that banning the whole classes for a couple of broken options is fair.
For summoners, you may want to disallow the Syntethist archetype: it's a rule nightmare, and a little over the top in terms of power. Furthermore its premise encourages to min/max.
If I'm not mistaken, even one of the devs disallowed the archetype in his home game. :P
For Witches, get rid of the Sleep hex: it trivialize most of the other witch's options, and it basically forces you to rewrite every encounter to up considerably the number of enemies. Witches are strong in locking away an enemy one at a time, usually taking three Full Actions to render someone harmless: Sleep does the same thing, only in one turn. <.<
For Gunslingers, just ask your players to justify why do they have a gun: in Golarion, for example, there are only guns in the Mana Wastes, a place a little cut off from the rest of the setting, if I remember correctly. If you really hate the idea of guns, you could swap the base Gunslinger for the Bolt Ace archetype: all the same pew pew, only with crossbows. ;)
The archetype has some little problems (still has gunsmithing, some proficiencies are off...) but you could find a fix here on the forums easily.
Also, a last thing: both the Summoner and Witch are very broad in flavor for the most part, so you can reskin them quite easily. Take the Eidolon for example: it could be the spirit of an ancestor, an extraplanar creature, a resurrection spell gone awry, an imaginary friend made real by the mind of someone with a very powerful magical potential...
Hope this helps. :D
I'm pretty old school so I've always preferred to roll sats as opposed to a point buy system. In my second edition days we did a straight up 3d6, roll your stats in order, what you roll is what you get method.I can see where those that support the point buy are coming from, I have witnessed some wide stat differences between party members. Some of my more experienced gamers have had a lot of fun playing weaker characters due to the challenge but that isn't everyone's cup of tea. I've considered going to a point buy for sometime now but I haven't quite pulled the trigger yet.
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I respectfully disagree. Summoners, Witches and Gunslingers are three really wonderful classes (Witch is my favorite class in PF, so I'm a little biased) and I don't think that banning the whole classes for a couple of broken options is fair.For summoners, you may want to disallow the Syntethist archetype: it's a rule nightmare, and a little over the top in terms of power. Furthermore its premise encourages to min/max.
If I'm not mistaken, even one of the devs disallowed the archetype in his home game. :P
Synthesists are actually less overpowered than regular summoners. They give up dual actions in exchange for eliminating the Summoners nominal weak spot - the Summoner himself. Turns out, Summoners are not actually that squishy. They were banned from PFS for being a) poorly written and b) being unambiguously better than Monks and Fighters on their home field.
For Witches, get rid of the Sleep hex: it trivialize most of the other witch's options, and it basically forces you to rewrite every encounter to up considerably the number of enemies. Witches are strong in locking away an enemy one at a time, usually taking three Full Actions to render someone harmless: Sleep does the same thing, only in one turn. <.<
Agreed.
For Gunslingers, just ask your players to justify why do they have a gun: in Golarion, for example, there are only guns in the Mana Wastes, a place a little cut off from the rest of the setting, if I remember correctly.
Come on. If you're going to ban the Gunslinger, just ban it, don't ask the player to come up with an elaborate backstory, and then berate him for munchkinism or disapprove of his character, forcing him to waste effort. That's passive-aggressive b~*@&%+$. Conversely, if you allow it, no amount of backstory is going to keep him from obliterating enemies.
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Welcome back to the seat of ultimate power …
It is your game so your rules. Ban whatever you wish, I usually suggest people don’t play gunsligers myself, witches with the slumber hex are problematic too.
I am old school and use 4d6 rolled 7 times and drop the lowest. This tends to cut out that one bad roll you may have. I have not seen a huge disparity of power between characters. My players and myself dislike the point buy as it encourages a min/max play style.
Legacy of Fire will need a little reworking I think as that is from the old 3.5 days? Please correct me if I’m wrong. Never ran that one and I don’t have it so I don’t know.
Hope you guys have fun and let us know how it turns out.
Regards
Sic
-Gunslinger snip-
I have no problems with gunslingers, mechanically and flavor wise, I actually really like them: it was not my intention to be passive-aggressive, I'm sorry. :(
It's just that I've seen on the forums million of times people going 'Guns in my medieval fantasy? Never!', banning an entire class for flavor alone, and wanted to point out that it made sense flavor-wise (if the setting is Golarion. I'm not familiar with the 3.5 APs).The 'explain why' is something that I would ask to every character, not only the 'slinger, especially in a RP-heavy game like the one comrade wants to run: "Fighter, why do you smack things?" "Wizard, why are you magicky?" "Rogue, why are you rouge?"
Again, I'm sorry if it came as passive aggressive. :(
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There's a lot of perspective in RP advice.
I am 43 and starting playing at age 8. The days of egregious imbalance and uber ambiguous rules were long, but not nearly as disastrous as the young'uns seem to think (no offense to anyone).
You can set flavor without imposing rules on players or pulling GM rank. Just make characters as you feel led.
Roll or point-buy depends a lot on how heavy you rely on books. If only as reference, as GM you can craft encounters that offset any peaks and valleys in stats/build. If an AP with Bestiary-only encounters, rolling stats and customizing classes can cause some warbles, but usually nothing that will break the table.
Then, ask folks to write up their "commoner" background (origins, family, appearance, how/why became a pathfinder) and character sketch. This helps them visualize the role and setting more viscerally, vs as a video game.
I find it helpful, as stated above, to either talk to my players and find out how they feel about the amplitude of magic, divine/religion, silliness, races, realism and grit; or, just self-inventory my own desirements. You can do any game you want and tweak these filters to come up with setting flavor, even within the subtext of an AP.
Opinion, but there is nothing beyond the core book you will absolutely need.
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4d6, drop the lowest pip. Roll six sets of six. Pick ONE set. That's how I've been doing it for twenty years.
It's just that I've seen on the forums million of times people going 'Guns in my medieval fantasy? Never!', banning an entire class for flavor alone, and wanted to point out that it made sense flavor-wise (if the setting is Golarion. I'm not familiar with the 3.5 APs).
Yes, that is part of it. I was tempted for a while after Green Ronin Press did such an amazing job on Freeport, and guns go along thematically with pirates far better than they do with typical flavors of medieval fantasy.
My biggest problem with firearms is their mechanics in Pathfinder. For many reasons, not least of which is the ridiculous muzzle-loader reload rates. So rather than get involved in a complex nerf-fisted homebrew of firearms and the gunslinger class, I just ban em.But hey, whatever works for you & your players is great.
I remember rolling straight 3d6 for our stats in order, then trading off a few points at a 2-to-1 exchange rate, then making class choices based on what we rolled up rather than assigning stats to fit the character concept we had in mind. Ah, the glorious and naive 70s, we just didn't know any better.
-Gunslinger snip-I have no problems with gunslingers, mechanically and flavor wise, I actually really like them: it was not my intention to be passive-aggressive, I'm sorry. :(
It's just that I've seen on the forums million of times people going 'Guns in my medieval fantasy? Never!', banning an entire class for flavor alone, and wanted to point out that it made sense flavor-wise (if the setting is Golarion. I'm not familiar with the 3.5 APs).
The 'explain why' is something that I would ask to every character, not only the 'slinger, especially in a RP-heavy game like the one comrade wants to run: "Fighter, why do you smack things?" "Wizard, why are you magicky?" "Rogue, why are you rouge?"Again, I'm sorry if it came as passive aggressive. :(
Ok, let's just agree that this hypothetical other GM I described is a terrible person, yes? ;-)