[SPOILER] Don't Split the Party—A GM's Lament / *shakeshead* / rant / WTFaretheydoing


Rise of the Runelords

Liberty's Edge

I'm running a group through Runelords via Fantasy Grounds and having a good time of it. I have four players who, as a whole are fairly experienced gamers, even though they may not have much experience with PFRPG.

We are working throug Skinsaw, and the timing worked out as such that they had a choice to either checkout the farms, or go to the Misgivings. They chose to go to the Misgivings as they felt that was more related to the murders (certainly), and let the sheriff send 4 guards and one acolyte of Desna to investigate the farms—not a big deal; the PCs are just going to have 5 more "friends" to deal with if they go there.

They enter the house through the Manticore room, go by the spiral stain (all but ignoring it—though extremely concerned about the monkey head), through the library, and then up. The thief triggers the worried wife, and tries to drag the wizard out. Moderately successful, they both end up outside, see the ravens and go back inside, triggering the burning manticore.

Then they split up. The thief and the cleric go upstairs. The barbarian starts kicking in every door she sees. The wizard gets choked by the scarf, drops to -1, but stabilizes, is found and the cleric and thief comes back down to revive him.

Later, the barbarian—again after the party is split up—CdGs herself with the twig (though I only dropped her to -1 instead of killing her). She is finally found before she fails all of her stabilize rolls.

They were at least together when they found Iesha, and made short work of her.

They are pretty much triggering the haunts individually, and if someone who isn't associated with the haunt walks into the room, the haunt doesn't go off (though I do have it trigger when the person eventually walks by—if they don't go into the room themselves).

The whisper function of the program lets me describe the effects to that character only, so it's pretty interesting to see how the others naturally react to the given situation. Though, because they're spreading out and triggering the haunts separately, they're not getting the story of the house as a group, they're each getting separate parts at different times, and since they each keep triggering haunts, they're not giving themselves any real time to put the pieces together. Though, they did pick up on the fact that the guy they saved from the goblins is associated somehow—the wizard did see him when getting choked by the scarf, but none have concluded that he was actively involved.

I think they're enjoying the house, or at the very least, taking things in stride. I just can't help but shake my head in wonder as they all go off and do their own things.

EDIT: the humorous thing for me is that they're convinced that everything is a trap of mechanical or magical nature—and chortle as they fail in their attempts to deal with these things in the "normal" way.


As long as everyone is having fun...

I've never used Fantasy Grounds. How's it working out?

Doug M.

Liberty's Edge

Fantasy Grounds is awesome! I love it.


Do you play asynchronously, like in PBP, or is it more like a chat session?

Also, note that later in this module the Scooby-Doo approach may get them in serious trouble. The final encounter, in particular, is still pretty deadly (though they toned it way down from the original version).

Oh, and if they spend some time in Magnimar, and you want to do something a little different before the final act, check out The Lyrie Scenario on this forum.

Doug M.

Liberty's Edge

For all extents and purposes, it's just like playing a game at the table, except everyone uses the computer to facilitate the game and they're each sitting in different parts of the world. It's all in real time.

While there isn't a built in audio program, a lot of groups use Teamspeak, Skype, etc. to talk to each other. There's also a chat box that allows you to speak as your character, emote, etc so you could also play solely by text if you wish.

It also has the PFRPG mechanics built into the program (as well as 3.5, 4.0, 5.0 D&D), and assuming you've entered your information correctly, it will do a lot of the math calculations for die rolls automatically. It doesn't do everything, but what it doesn't do can easily be corrected by putting in a temp modifier before making the roll. All of the conditions (blinded, prone, grappled, etc) are included, so you can add the particular condition as an effect to the character and the appropriate modifiers will be taken into account during subsequent rolls.

If you're a spell caster, you can apply effects to your target, and the program will keep track of how many rounds are remaining as well as at what point during initiative the effect took place (so you can delay or ready or do anything to modify your initiative count and the program will keep track of the effect).

There are a whole bunch of stuff that the program can do that my fuzzy brain can't remember at the moment. This page gives a great overview of some of the things the program can do.

Here is a YouTube playlist of a group playing through The Skinsaw Murders using Fantasy Grounds. In the videos, the person capturing the video has the program spread across two screens, and is only capturing one of them.

I decided to invest in the Ultimate License (a one-time cost of about $150.00--though, there is now an option to have access to the ultimate license via subscription of $10.00/month), and I have gotten more than my money's worth out of it. In the last six months alone, I've played more frequently than I had in the previous 15 years.

There are other VTT (Virtual Table Top) options out there, and I am sure they are equally just as good in their own ways. For me, Fantasy Grounds did everything that I was looking for, and then some.


Think of it as a learning experience for them. They get to learn exactly why it's a bad idea to split the party.

And I actually rather like the fact that they're all getting bits of the story separately. It means they have to compare notes (preferably in character!) in order to figure out what's going on.

And yes, VTTs can be very nice. I've never tried Fantasy Grounds, but I've been a player in a Roll20 game, and GM'ed for a couple of years using MapTool.

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