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Since they have made many volumes of the bestiary for PF1, for PF2 I kinda expected them to make the first volume have monsters A–F, the second to have G–K etc etc. Like an encyclopedia. Since they already know all the monsters (from making them for PF1) I mean.
It's easy enough to run PF1E stuff with 5e (if you're like me and dgaf and are ok with just using the WotC advice of "AC = average of touch AC and normal, max 22, and to-hit bonus is ability modifier +3") but does something similar hold true for PF2E adventures?
I've never been into FR before 5e came out but now I love it. The fact that the PHB shows people from all over Toril… it's cool. I can come up with a "vanilla fantasy" world quickly. But FR is really… it's just really solid and good. It took me a long time to come around to ut. When I saw that FR was to 5e what Greyhawk was to early 3e, I was like "Yeah, yeah, but when are the real settings coming out? Dark Sun etc". But… I've come to really like it!
Again, DM's only, especially for players in my city! For those that have Tales from the Yawning Portal, or another version of The Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give the player this letter in an unsealed envelope, along with 22d6. On the envelope it'll say "Grab a pen, your character sheet, this letter and these dice and leave the room." We're trying a mashup of D&D and Dramasystem so I'm going to use this version of the letter that has one extra line about "Dramatic Pole" which is a rule from Dramasystem. Never mind that version if you're using "normal" D&D. Cool, right?
I'm adding a hex map to a published campaign (Razor Coast, I'm using the S&W version and some conversion formulas) and I want to be as lazy as possible prepping that part because it's so tertiary to the focus of the campaign (the Razor Coast book itself has dungeons, politics, monsters etc, and I'm also adding in the Yawning Portal dungeons). But on their way to the Lost Shrine of Tamoachan there's going to be some jungle adventures I guess? I'm looking for things like ruins, lairs, encounter tables etc that are suitable for the region (jungles, mountains, rivers etc in a piraty setting). If someone knows a good PDF product (or blog entries) for it or similar. (We're using 5e.) Thanks to Yawning Portal, I already have plenty of "megadungeons" for the map, so I'm looking for a large quantity of smaller, more backgroundy stuff. Just to make the world more complete and epic and big. I dunno. BTW, if someone else wants to do something similar, the crude maps I made are here. razormap.png is the overworld map with 24-mile hexes and I tried to un-colorize the map from the Razor Coast book as best I could. Then I only crudely also split it into 48 sub-maps where the hexes are 6-miles. It's not detailed at all (some of the ocean maps are just completely blank) but it's a foundation for where you can add in dungeons, islands, town etc etc. My GM style is such that if the players would spend all their time in some far-away tiny little hex that's fine by me. They're in the driver's seat. I'm not married at all to the main threads outlined in the Razor Coast book.
As DM, I want a sense of "the game is deciding things" over "we are playing at my whim". I played totally improv for a decade and when I looked back at it, I found that most of the sessions had gone pretty much my way. Instead of freeing up players and enabling their agency, I had kept things pretty much in the narrow realm of my own whim. I branched out to like story games type games like Fiasco and had fun with those. Tried things like Fate and BW. But when I discovered the OSR (and I was late to the party, Grognardia had been blogging for a few years for example. But Next hadn't been announced), I thought that this was had I had been missing. I played in a few games and it was amazing. What was best? Dungeon crawls with a dungeon where every item was already placed and meaningful. Like a magic mirror that we slowly interacted with and discovered it's properties. Everything was this amazing toybox, the dungeon was this living system. If we moved a rock, the rock was moved.
But to me, who had at that time been roleplaying for 25 years, this was a revelation. All games I had played up till then had been talking about "story". (I started with some Runequest-spunoff heartbreaker in the early 90:s.) Here we had games that talked about creating a place. I've since DMed a couple dozen sessions and every single time it has been so much better than what I had before with the improv gameplay. (I can see how this happened, too: how games started to talk more and more about "story" once they had these basics down and was in a position where they could add those elements. But since I and my peers and the people I was learning from hadn't played D&D or Traveller, I was missing out on this fundamental understanding.) So where do the random tables come into play? Because I want to create a world, right? And they're the best way to convey a sense of a place concisely. Instead of a hefty tome detailing the 1000 year history of a city that I have to learn, give me a few tables of sights, sounds and events that the players can experience in the city. Lists, fine, but why random? Because while I'm very comfortable and used to spontaneity and improvisation, I want to get away from it being based on my whim as opposed to the whim of the dice. I want to be along for the ride just like the players. Instead of looking back at the game and finding it to be a story I told them, I want the game to be about the choices they made with the situation that came up. Is it better to have a fully stocked dungeon with every magic mirror and its behavior pre-set than to run the game from a random dungeon table? Yeah, I think it's way cooler.
And when they walk into Mahabba or Huzuz or wherever, I'm still going to need those random NPCs and that name list. So why not give that part a little bit of a heavier load and the long prep-texts a little lighter load? It's kind of like how Magic: the Gathering told the story of Antiquities through cards. You didn't need to read a big book in order to understand the story, you learned it while you were playing. 3PP has some books with ok, kind of dubious and NSFW settings, but they use this technique to well effect. Red Tide, Vornheim, The Land of Nod, Wilderness of High Fantasy and come to mind. In the TSR era, we had The Isle of Dread and even now my favorite The Lost Mine of Phandelver dabbles in this to make the whole Triboar Trail come alive as you quest along to various more detailed points.
4e is great but here is a part of it I don’t love. OK, so take as an example this utility power from Dark Sun: Level 2
To me, playing with actions like this feels like glimpses of another hero's life. It feels like the flavor text in games like Magic, Arkham Horror or Netrunner.
Chris Perkins is a charismatic guy and it’s always interesting to see him DM. One of his videos is about him playing 4e with large parts of the writing team of Robot Chicken (I don’t watch it but I’m a big fan of Zeb Wells’ comics) and one scene in particular illustrates everything that’s wrong with 4e in a single exchange. Chris has set up a room with a flame-throwing trap and a door that’s frozen shut. It’s possible to bust through the door on brute force with time, but he has the solution in mind to melt it with the flame thrower. One of the players, I think Tom, has a power called Darkfire that can set a creature on fire. He tries to cast it on the door, Chris asks him to carefully read the power — it says “One creature” — and says it doesn’t work. That’s it. Here we have the one moment. A creative solution — shot down. I’m not blaming that on Chris. He’s been with D&D through thick and thin and many editions. He’s in a context where playing the game by the RAW is important for didactic purposes. And following system in the long term over a particular player’s feelgood moment in the short term is also a good choice; creating a solid foundation to build further adventures on. I agree with his call. The problem is with the base design.
When I first saw 4e, I was stoked, because it to me had a closer resemblance to American Thematic style board and card games — which I could understand — than to 3e, which was to me at the time looked daunting and hard to run. But I’ve since gained a lot more understanding about what makes RPG:s so special. Over the years, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with AT-style games like Netrunner and WHFRP 3 and more into simple RPGs that place a few simple tools in your hands and ask you to do what you want with it. Take the 5e version of Burning Hands. It deals damage, sure, but it also sets things on fire. It could have melted that ice door.
So I started the campaign with three people who were new to D&D and they were REALLY careful about everything. Taking several days to slowly scout out the initial goblin cave, sneaking and hiding in the water to survive the bugbear etc. Then a new player joined, a veteran from 3rd ed. He introduces them to tanking tactics but didn't survive the experience, he got killed by the goblins he was trying to tank. 1 character dead: the dwarven cleric pregen. Later, his new character and another new player, another veteran of 3rd ed, join the game. They have level 1 characters and this session only one of the level 2 characters are attending, and those three decide to take on Cragmaw Castle (which they've somehow found their way to before dealing with Tresendar Manor). They slaugher plenty of hobgoblins until they come to a place where they can choose between three doors. One has an owlbear behind it and I make it pretty clear that that's the most dangerous door, showing claw marks, saying that they hear claw sounds and roars, saying that the door is held shut by a heavy wooden bar. Of course that's the door they choose and I play the owlbear fight as per the RAW. The level 2 character runs away after the owlbear killed the level 1 characters. 3 characters dead total: another copy of the dwarven cleric pregen, and a human cleric pregen I made. Later one character went out into the woods alone and happened to roll stirges on the encounter table. Two stirges crit him and he died. We retconned this one as a dream because the table said that only a half an hour little forest trip so close to Phandalin wouldn't trigger a roll on that table. I was fine with that and switched it up to only being rolled on full days. As for NPCs, Sildar died to hobgoblins on another forest trek and Gundren died in the hostage situation when the party returned to Cragmaw Castle.
I love LMoP, love my group and love this game! |
