Arnvior's page

I recently ran this for a few friends of mine. Here is what I learned and really helped me:

1) Slow down. If you have the actual adventure path books like I did, or even better, the electronic PDF's separate them and just focus of each one, one at a time. If you have the "epic" spell book looking Rise of the Runelords book, it can be very intimidating.

2) All you have to do is read through it. Get a tablet, the paper thing, not the thing you use your finger to scroll through the icons, and make notes. In other words: Go "Old School". Nothing says you cant have: Round 1 bad guys do this..Round 2 bad guys do this, and by the way have big letters of: DON'T FORGET THIS HAPPENS WHICH HAMPERS THE PLAYERS ABILITY TO DO THIS...

3) Just read the part you are on. Remember there is A LOT of fluff, pictures, background, and extra stuff. Once you have all of that hopefully you are not overwhelmed. So what do you have left?.. A lot of text that explains the encounters. Bite the adventure path off in small chunks. Read part 1 (Burnt Offerings) in a few days and then move to part 2 (Skin Saw Murders), read it through, and then go back and make your notes. Repeat for all six chapters. Once you have notes for each part, read the whole thing through (lock yourself in a room away form everyone else) and then put all of the pieces together, then go back and correct your notes. Trust me on this last step.

4) Finally, tell the story and have fun doing it. Rise of the Runelords is probably one of the richest storylines in the amount of depth of information that a gaming company has given in one set (or path) of adventures. Before Paizo created the adventure paths, I want to say the only thing close was maybe the Dragonlance original modules which took the PC's through the War of the Lance. Paizo has done an amazing job with the amount of detail of how some of the NPC's react with the party, and there is alot of stuff that goes on in the background.

Remember you arent or hopefully not doing this all at once. Rise of the Runelords takes along time, its meant to be fun, not a mad dash one shot weekend binge. Rise of the Runelords if run properly can take months or even years to finish depending how often your group gets together. Rise of the Runelords is something you want to look back on and say you had a boat load of fun, not: OMFG I would much rather had a root canal.

Soldier = Soldier either full plate on a warhorse or slinging fireballs evoker/admixture style

To bring this back to the original post:

Zelda,

Bottom line up front: if its in the rules and its allowed, they can do it, and you can not stop them.

I have had to change my mindset of: this doesn't make make any sense.. to: its in the rules, and its legal.

As much as I want to try reason why would the Pathfinder Society ever bring in a priest or inquisitor of Asmodeus, Shax, or Norgorber into the Society, I don't have leg to stand on. The justification; priests can be one step off the deity's alignment... That means the player is CNNNNNNNNNN or LNNNNNNNNNN repeating(chaotic/lawful neutral). Bottom line the Pathfinder Society's alignment is; Neutral.

Yes I was frustrated enough that one of the venture officers had to pull me aside give me a well deserved dose of reality. It just.. is that way. The same holds true for power gamers.

I have seen both fights of the argument, and before someone starts up, let me stop the insanity... Zelda there will always be players that can see the optimization between the lines, some players just have that ability. There are others that read (troll) the optimization forums. Again as much as you might disagree with them... let it go, you will only get frustrated. I ran 5-17 Fate of the Fiend, with two blade bound magus, zen archer, bard and a sorc, all optimized. I wanted to shake my head in disbelief of how fast they went through the fights, it felt wrong, but.. its legal.

Next, there will always be players which will pull the "gotcha". As a (now a three star) GM, players will pull things out of their "fourth point of contact" and completely break a fight or even a scenario, it happens.

The last piece of advice I can give you is this: be very careful auditing or calling players out. This is a bad habit of mine. It will get you in hot water fast with the local venture officers if you do it frequently. While it is in the new rules of organized play (and roleplaying) looking over a players character because you think something is fishy will really invoke some mistrust when you are the GM which may get some nastygrams sent to the local venture officers..not a good thing. Trust me on this.

Hope this helps.

I have been running a lot of games over the last year and I have seen a trend with the PC's that came to a head:

I was running Scion of the Sky Key. As I was reading the boxed text and it looked like none of the PC's were paying attention, so I read the boxed text a second time.

At the part where the PC's are supposed to ask the NPC questions, I saw five blank faces. I stared at them, they stared at me, nothing. I then tell them if they want to but any equipment they have the option to do so.. they all look at each other. One PC buys a wand of endure elements then returns to staring at the me... I give a rough overview of the trip to Ft Bandu.. more disinterest.

First encounter with the Aspis Agent. Things really go sour. The PC doing all of the talking is terrible at diplo. As soon as I said make a roll, there were four shouts of "I assist" from PC's who had not said anything. None of the PC's had knowledge nature and proceed to blow all of the diplo rolls.

The Aspis agent at this point is mocking the the Pathfinders and is convincing the Praetor to have the PC's leave Ft Bandu. One of the PC's gets mad, then gets another PC mad, saying this is all BS.

Long story short: the five PC's say they don't want to do any role playing and that they just want to roll dice. A four hour scenario was done in 45 minutes.

What was supposed to be fun turned into: shut up and put the monsters on the map, so we can kill them, and give us our chronicle sheet.

This just me or is this more common than I think?

I think this is a smart move that I wholeheartedly agree with for a few different reasons.

It breaths life into the core rule book and the core classes. It also brings (sanity) Pathfinder back to a place in my opinion that it should be at. Pathfinder like any other game has experienced power creep and I will agree with the above threads that class in the last couple of books the: advance class guide or the advanced players guide (advance players class guide or the players guide to advanced classes coming soon??) or the archetypes has made scenarios from seasons 0-5 a walk through if not a snore fest.

I have been delightfully surprised with Season 6 scenario's and the Emerald Spire. Its been quite a rude awaking for many players.

Same story for races. I was overjoyed that Paizo put restricted the Tiefling and Aasimar character races. With all of the bonuses of the Tiefling and Aasimar classes there was virtually none of the base races from the core rulebook with the exception of maybe the Half Orc. There have been times I have ran games with only Tiefling and Aasimar present for races.

Call me a purist but I think that this is a good option for those of us who want play Pathfinder this way. For those who don't good for them they can continue to creep along.

Things that kill PFS for me:

Any type of archer. Swift action favored enemy, bane, cold iron or adamantium arrows, fast shot-many shot-precise shot whatever shot, being invisible adding my sneak attack damage, allows that class to basically solo any scenario.

Alchemist is one step behind the archer because of the number of bombs per day. However alchemists at mid to high level never miss; adverage touch is 10 and there is no saving throw.

Any combination of those two and scenario's become a snooze fest. PFS might as well hand out free gold, boons, and levels.

2). Immediate action counterspells, effectively at will. I probably sound like a broken record, but that is incredibly strong. Arcanists will effectively dominate any caster vs. caster encounter if this makes it to play. Sometime later when I have time, I will tell the story of how our 18th level playtest went with our Arcanist vs. Karzoug in Rise of the Runelords.

Have been saying this like a broken record also. Even at 10th level this class will effectively shut another caster down. And to boot, the Arcanist can do this, no V/S/M.

"Your lack of imagination doesn't mean the class doesn't have conceptual space. It just means you can't see the myriad conceptual options for such a character."

Wow that's about the third time you lashed out at someone... Maybe you might want to take a step back from this thread.

So a fourth level Arcanist can shut down my sixth level Wizard? And this gets worse… At higher level not only does the Arcanist lock down a “conventional” caster with their immediate actions but they can also recharge their pool with a successful counterspell? The other issue I have with this is, it looks to be that there are no verbal or somatic components to this ability. So even under a silence spell or a lipstitch, this character is still counterspelling casters with no issues.

This was the problem with 3.5 with the Wizard and Sorcerer against the Warlock. Any type of refillable pool or infinitely reusable ability, will beat spell slots any day of the week. Sure I might have more spells, but if I can’t cast them because immediate actions act outside of initiative, what good am I if my spells are instantly countered before any of them take effect. This relegates a wizard to a buff or summoning bot and sitting on the sideline during the combat.

This is why Pathfinder is inadvertently pushing classes to have pets. Why should I risk a saving throw, magic resistance and now being counterspelled when my big bad pet can eat them?

If the devs are going to move to a pool based characters and characters with more supernatural abilities then please spend some time and revamp the original core characters to make them competitive.