Needing some assistance. As the thread says, I am a first time GM who is doing a home brew campaign with experienced players and am needing advice on a few things. Below I have listed the main problems I am having and I was hoping that there might be people out there who can give me advice on how to handle them. For context the party is currently at level 8:
1. One of my players is a ratfolk investigator with a feat that allows him to add inspiration to perception checks without expending an inspiration point. He also has a plus 20 to perception which means he can consistently roll in the 30's, meaning I can never surprise them.
2. I made the mistake of allowing one of the group to play a gun slinger, on the emerging category (the campaign is set at an equivalent of time period of assassin's creed 2, so very early technology and not common items.) so he is shooting against touch AC and doing a large amount of damage, which makes building a challenging encounter difficult.
3. My players seem to be very stuck in habits that don't let them vary styles when roleplaying social encounters. I get that these are their characters, they know them best, but one or two things have me pulling up: The first incident was I had them searching a silver mine for a cursed item. It meant they had to pass through a military road block, put in place by direct Baronial order and when they came out they were confronted by a group if paladins (two of whom were of the same church and higher level than the one in the party) and a 11th level inquisitor of Abadar informing them that they were under arrest for trespassing and violation of a Baronial order. The gunslinger, who is a lawful neutral follower of Abadar, refuses to co-opperate and just about pulls his weapons. The second happened when the Paladin was questioning a thug who had attacked one of the party members, which was later discovered to be a diversion so another party member could be kidnapped. For this campaign I have an NPC party member travelling with them to drive the story, a Sanctified Rogue. During the attack she was one of the party members to intervene and nearly broke the guy’s arm, so he is freak out by her and she is clearly not opposed to trying again. The paladin is aware of this and when the suspect refuses to co-operate, the paladin decides to leave him with the ninja, knowing full well what lengths she could go to if she has too. The problem is I feel like calling them out on these things is going to cause arguments in the group.
There are other problems I have but I don’t want to overload the message board at this time. No doubt these have come from a few rookie mistakes on my part, my question is how to deal with them without becoming a tyrant.
