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I'm newish to Pathfinder (I was around in the early days circa Paizocon 1, took off for a long while and now find myself running a Pathfinder game again) but not to roleplaying. These last few sessions I've been really surprised how many times it feels like ordinary assumptions I have about fantasy adventure gaming just don't track with Pathfinder.
I had an idea that the corpse of one of the player's enemies got grabbed down from the castle wall where they'd displayed it, dragged off and reanimated as a ghoul--a regular old 1st level ghoul. Seems like the sort of thing your typical necromancer might do, right? Not so! It turns out the spell you need to cast to create one requires the necromancer to be LEVEL 11! Why a level 11 anybody would have any use for a ghoul is beyond me...but that's what it takes. Weird.
Or you've got a tribe of lizardfolk out in the woods. I thought it would be nicely Blair Witch/Supernatural feeling to have them make hex bags from the City of Seven Spears that they can imbue with effects...for flavor. The least expensive one cost hundreds of gold to make. The better ones cost tens of thousands. They're supposed to be literally a hide bag full of bits of bird bones, weird pebbles and knots of hair. Needless to say they're so expensive that no one who would be culturally inclined to make them could, and folks who have the money to afford them wouldn't because they don't come from a subsistance level aboriginal society.
And I feel like I keep running into stuff like this all the time, weird crossroads where I'm forced to either choose flavor and fun and a good story or following the mechanics of the game at all. I think maybe if it was clearer what the world is supposed to be like in a Pathfinder game my stories could hew closer to whatever reality they're supposed to feel like--but like I said I'm a rookie. And the world feels really weird. It feels like the only cool stuff can only be done by people of such high level that once you get there the stuff isn't cool anymore. And that's a bummer.
Oh! Here's another one. I wanted to have a plant--basically a dire flytrap as the base creature, but that has the ability to shoot little bolts of fire...something modeled off of the druid spell Produce Flame. Now you'd think grabbing a monster and adding a little goodie to it like that would be a common enough thing that there'd be an easy table somewhere--like +1 CR per level of the spell the creature can use or maybe count it as a potion or wand in terms of effect, translate that to gold and that gives you a CR adjustment you can apply to your well "equipped" plant monster. I can't find anything like this. There's rules for "advancing" a monster in terms of its combat numbers and there's universal monster creation rules...but that way lies madness (I tried to figure them out, but quickly forgot how to breathe).
Do I just not grok the setting? Is there a paradigm I'm just not in on? Or does it really feel like the game rules actively work to constrict what can happen in a game by burying it under layers of level requirements, extreme gold costs and over-complex detailed bean counting requirements? Does that bother anyone or is that what you sign up for?
Just curious what other peoples' experiences are so I can get my bearings.
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All right, here we go! You’re the GM. You can make plot excuses for things, homebrew stuff, and skip over the bean counting. I’ll give some by-the-book suggestions for how I’d handle these things. Some of the suggestions are “just use an archetype”, and for that, d20pfsrd.com andarchivesofnethys.com both have great search features.
Ghouls are intelligent. Turning someone into an intelligent undead is tricky, and not really something that beginner necromancers can do themselves. Fortunately, unlife finds a way, and ghouls are infectious. Your budget necromancer would be able to have a ghoul infect the victim, or the necromancer could turn an already deceased person into a zombie or skeleton as early as level three (if I’m remembering correctly). The rules for creating undead through spells are geared more towards avoiding handing nation-conquering power to the PCs (which was a bit of a 3.5 issue). Undead-focused archetypes are a good place to start, but you can also have them taking advantage of a necromantically infused location, or using other means (there’s a drug with a chance to turn people into ghouls, for instance, made from mummies).
Economics don’t work in Pathfinder. It’s part of the conceit. The players slay monsters (or humanoids they don’t like) and get loot. Additionally, power can’t really be free because that would mess with balance. Here are some suggestions, though. Those prices might reflect something like nobody else knowing how to make the items. It might reflect rare reagents whose prices are generally high because places they’re found generally have lizardfolk communities using them already. The lizardfolk might have a means of reducing the cost- using lots of animal souls, for instance (probably at a better exchange rate than the PCs get). A couple books have rules for harvesting monster parts for various effects. Or, and this would limit the loot, you can use class features instead. Occultist is a class with good archetypes for handing out objects of minor power (although that is a very bean-counting class and not something I’d pull in while new to the system), and reflavoring Alchemist extracts as one-use wards or blessings works. The standard approach is not worrying about it. Economics falls under recommended willing suspension of disbelief.
As for cool stuff only being high level, it kind of depends. I find fourth level to be a pretty important level- all casters either have gotten second level spells or just gotten casting for the first time, and the last major features come online at fourth level (Wild Shape, Studied Combat and Studied Strike, etc.). That’s a good starting point if you want more action. It also means a boss at that level could be CR 7, enough for fourth level spell stuff in moderation. Starting at level one can be a bit of a slog, and not for everyone.
The closest thing to your Produce Flame deal would be adding the Sorcerer simple class template to the plant or tacking on a class level. There’s no table for small tweaks, though, because something as small as Produce Flame is really up to the GM’s judgement. If I gave something Unseen Servant at-will, that shouldn’t alter CR at all. If I gave something True Strike at-will, that’s going to make a difference. The gold and so forth is just a guideline- you generally check every so often to make sure your PCs have around wealth by level rather than giving every monster a set amount of gold. That means you can eyeball the fight- could the PCs handle the fight against the base monster? (Sure, ranged attacks deal with it easily and maybe that’s their focus.) How does the change alter the fight? (The monster can now make weak but flashy ranged attacks, making it no longer useless against flying or mobile ranged attackers, while also fitting the Mario theme better.) In the end, unless the only hope the PCs had was killing the plant with ranged firepower, it’s probably going to be a largely unchanged fight.
If prep work is too much hassle starting out, I found running a published adventure path with a good rating to work well. You can check the boards and reviews for heads-ups on problem spots. Having a lot of the work in preparing combats done for me let me get a more intuitive sense of balance.
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I mean, I don't see any reason you can't just say "here's a monster that's identical to some other monster but it can cast produce flame as a SLA" and just go from there.
"Calculating the CR" of that is where the big problem is, but the epitome of bean-counting in this game is "experience points", which is a thing you can easily do without (printed adventures give guidelines for progression without XP). So I would suggest just figuring out what level a planned scene is appropriate for and making sure the players are that level before they get to that scene.
The important thing to keep in mind is that you are every bit as empowered to make custom items, spells, races, archethypes, etc. as Paizo writers do several times a month. So you can have your hex bags, but have them fall apart and do something bad if a good-aligned (for example) creature tries to use them.
The rules do get in the way sometimes, Pathfinder has a lot of rules, but the endless treadmill of new stuff serves to enable your creativity, not impede it.
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As long as it's a home game and not PFS, Pathfinder is great for the GM being able to tweak minor things within it to suit what you or your group needs/wants. The complexity of the system means that there are more moving parts independent of one another that won't affect each other if something is changed or houseruled.
Also, to linkify the resources QuidEst mentioned: d20PFSRD and Archives of Nethys
Cross-referencing both is a good idea, by the way.
So long as the effect you want to add to the plant isn't sharply over their level, you can get a pretty good sense of how dangerous it will be by adding one or two of them to an otherwise somewhat weak fight. Once you know you didn't count wrong, add in an entire encounter with the plant monsters redux. And flat out ignore the XP track and instead level them when you feel ready to have them gain power.
Unchained has Simplified monster creation rules that have less hassle to them.
You can choose CR you want, then just attach stats, type and elemental spell list to it and tada, flame spitting plant.
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To add to QuidEst's ideas for the hex bag, basically as long as there's some reason the PCs can't loot the item and keep it / sell it for money, you can include any sort of item-based effect as a hazard encounter or a part of a combat encounter as long as you give XP for the increased challenge. So maybe these lizards have a way to make simple hex bags that lose their power if moved from the spot.
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All right, here we go! You’re the GM. You can make plot excuses for things, homebrew stuff, and skip over the bean counting. I’ll give some by-the-book suggestions for how I’d handle these things. Some of the suggestions are “just use an archetype”, and for that, d20pfsrd.com andarchivesofnethys.com both have great search features.
Ghouls are intelligent. Turning someone into an intelligent undead is tricky, and not really something that beginner necromancers can do themselves. Fortunately, unlife finds a way, and ghouls are infectious. Your budget necromancer would be able to have a ghoul infect the victim, or the necromancer could turn an already deceased person into a zombie or skeleton as early as level three (if I’m remembering correctly). The rules for creating undead through spells are geared more towards avoiding handing nation-conquering power to the PCs (which was a bit of a 3.5 issue). Undead-focused archetypes are a good place to start, but you can also have them taking advantage of a necromantically infused location, or using other means (there’s a drug with a chance to turn people into ghouls, for instance, made from mummies).
Economics don’t work in Pathfinder. It’s part of the conceit. The players slay monsters (or humanoids they don’t like) and get loot. Additionally, power can’t really be free because that would mess with balance. Here are some suggestions, though. Those prices might reflect something like nobody else knowing how to make the items. It might reflect rare reagents whose prices are generally high because places they’re found generally have lizardfolk communities using them already. The lizardfolk might have a means of reducing the cost- using lots of animal souls, for instance (probably at a better exchange rate than the PCs get). A couple books have rules for harvesting monster parts for various effects. Or, and this would limit the loot, you can use class features instead. Occultist is a class with good archetypes for handing out objects of minor power (although that...
That is some top notch advice! Thank you.
To add to QuidEst's ideas for the hex bag, basically as long as there's some reason the PCs can't loot the item and keep it / sell it for money, you can include any sort of item-based effect as a hazard encounter or a part of a combat encounter as long as you give XP for the increased challenge. So maybe these lizards have a way to make simple hex bags that lose their power if moved from the spot.
I was hoping to use one-shot ones that are basically reflavored potions except hexbags. So you put a hexbag on a scarecrow and you can animate it once as Animate Object, for the spell's duration and then it goes inert. Maybe another hexbag has Contagion, so it makes the victim sick once you activate it, then it runs out of juice. That sort of thing. So if PCs get them, they'll basically be one shot chances to use spells they might not otherwise get, but after they use it once, it's done. But it also feels really flavor appropriate.
That work?
To add to QuidEst's ideas for the hex bag, basically as long as there's some reason the PCs can't loot the item and keep it / sell it for money, you can include any sort of item-based effect as a hazard encounter or a part of a combat encounter as long as you give XP for the increased challenge. So maybe these lizards have a way to make simple hex bags that lose their power if moved from the spot.I was hoping to use one-shot ones that are basically reflavored potions except hexbags. So you put a hexbag on a scarecrow and you can animate it once as Animate Object, for the spell's duration and then it goes inert. Maybe another hexbag has Contagion, so it makes the victim sick once you activate it, then it runs out of juice. That sort of thing. So if PCs get them, they'll basically be one shot chances to use spells they might not otherwise get, but after they use it once, it's done. But it also feels really flavor appropriate.
That work?
One shot items usable by anybody usually cost 50 gp x spell level x caster level. One of the tricky catches with handing that out to a low level party, even if you pick an effect that wouldn't be overpowered for the PCs to use as a one-off, is that they could sell it for half that and cause you problems. But that's not anything special to the hexbags, that's just generally true for any magic item. The hexbag refluff idea isn't going to cause any further complications and just adds cool flavor.
Also consider homebrewing up some Lesser Talismans from Occult Adventures (just Ctrl+F "Talisman, Lesser"; hey, the official PRD is useful for something! I really didn't want to have to manually transcribe from my book and the general text for the Talismans doesn't seem to be on either of the staple sites). They're thematic, single-use, super-specific, and you can wear three at once in your neck slot!
Honestly, I understand why all of those things work that way. Everything in Pathfinder is designed around the assumption that at some point the players are going to get their grubby little hands on it (even things they really shouldn't, like the monster creation rules). Remember 3.5, where magic items were in the GM book? That's not true anymore (and wasn't by the end of 3.5 either).
*Whistles innocently*
Glad I could lend a hand! Best of luck with the GMing.
The other thing about "this item is way too expensive to include at this level, because the PCs might decide to sell it" is that you are free to come up with a plausible reason that people might not be willing to pay full price for it.
So while everybody will pay market price for +1 swords, potions, scrolls and the like, it's fairly plausible that it might be hard to find a buyer for this evil foul-smelling bag of decomposing stuff that lizardmen like. You can provide a merchant willing to pay a level appropriate amount of gold for the item, but to find someone willing to pay the full amount you may have to find a friendly lizardman.
I wonder a bit if those kinds of obvious stretches and GM fiat to try and keep the players from doing what they want in order to keep their characters to the wealth the level table isn't worse, in terms of ill will and the damage to the world you're presenting, than just letting them just enjoy selling the potion and having a little extra unaccounted for gold.
Though, really, we're talking about thousands of gold as though it's a pittance. Like a regular average guy probably spends 60 gold on food for two months. That's a healing potion for an adventurer--not even worth thinking about. It's a wonder adventurers aren't hated more. They spend more on trivialities than the typical person ever sees. Talk about the ultimate 1%!
"Hey guys look at this swank quiver I bought so I don't have to worry about carrying arrows, it was only 1800 gold!"
*peasants jump him*
I wonder a bit if those kinds of obvious stretches and GM fiat to try and keep the players from doing what they want in order to keep their characters to the wealth the level table isn't worse, in terms of ill will and the damage to the world you're presenting, than just letting them just enjoy selling the potion and having a little extra unaccounted for gold.
The main reason to keep PCs at their wealth-by-level is that the CR system relies on the assumption that PCs aren't too far from normal expectations.
If you're confident that your game balance won't be thrown off by the party buying a few +1 items earlier than normal, then don't worry about it.
Though, really, we're talking about thousands of gold as though it's a pittance. Like a regular average guy probably spends 60 gold on food for two months. That's a healing potion for an adventurer--not even worth thinking about. It's a wonder adventurers aren't hated more. They spend more on trivialities than the typical person ever sees. Talk about the ultimate 1%!
"Hey guys look at this swank quiver I bought so I don't have to worry about carrying arrows, it was only 1800 gold!"
*peasants jump him*
My rule of thumb is that 1gp = $100. A $6000 food bill for two months is actually pretty high.
To go with the PRD:Though, really, we're talking about thousands of gold as though it's a pittance. Like a regular average guy probably spends 60 gold on food for two months. That's a healing potion for an adventurer--not even worth thinking about. It's a wonder adventurers aren't hated more. They spend more on trivialities than the typical person ever sees. Talk about the ultimate 1%!
"Hey guys look at this swank quiver I bought so I don't have to worry about carrying arrows, it was only 1800 gold!"
*peasants jump him*
An adventurer's primary source of income is treasure, and his primary purchases are tools and items he needs to continue adventuring—spell components, weapons, magic items, potions, and the like. Yet what about things like food? Rent? Taxes? Bribes? Idle purchases?You can certainly handle these minor expenditures in detail during play, but tracking every time a PC pays for a room, buys water, or pays a gate tax can swiftly become obnoxious and tiresome. If you're not really into tracking these minor costs of living, you can choose to simply ignore these small payments. A more realistic and easier-to-use method is to have PCs pay a recurring cost of living tax. At the start of every game month, a PC must pay an amount of gold equal to the lifestyle bracket he wishes to live in—if he can't afford his desired bracket, he drops down to the first one he can afford.
Destitute (0 gp/month): The PC is homeless and lives in the wilderness or on the streets. A destitute character must track every purchase, and may need to resort to Survival checks or theft to feed himself.
Poor (3 gp/month): The PC lives in common rooms of taverns, with his parents, or in some other communal situation—this is the lifestyle of most untrained laborers and commoners. He need not track purchases of meals or taxes that cost 1 sp or less.
Average (10 gp/month): The PC lives in his own apartment, small house, or similar location—this is the lifestyle of most trained or skilled experts or warriors. He can secure any nonmagical item worth 1 gp or less from his home in 1d10 minutes, and need not track purchases of common meals or taxes that cost 1 gp or less.
Wealthy (100 gp/month): The PC has a sizable home or a nice suite of rooms in a fine inn. He can secure any nonmagical item worth 5 gp or less from his belongings in his home in 1d10 minutes, and need only track purchases of meals or taxes in excess of 10 gp.
Extravagant (1,000 gp/month): The PC lives in a mansion, castle, or other extravagant home—he might even own the building in question. This is the lifestyle of most aristocrats. He can secure any nonmagical item worth 25 gp or less from his belongings in his home in 1d10 minutes. He need only track purchases of meals or taxes in excess of 100 gp.
So, 10 GP for "average" montly living expenses...
Hey Grim, long time no see! How've you been?
I think at the end of the day it comes down to this: Like its D&D predecessors (and parallels), PF is often a game first and a fiction second. It has this veneer of fantasy-reality-simulation, but if you spend much time thinking about things you'll either go crazy, give up and play GURPS instead, or learn to accept the gamism.