| AzureEternal |
Hey all,
So I'm a very new GM, only having GM'd one campaign of D&D 4e, but am interested in running some Pathfinder sessions for my friends. I have a question, though. Even as a new GM, I found D&D's 4E rules to be extremely confining in terms of creativity and narration. Because 4E seems naturally more geared toward miniatures-based combat, my group became bored of all the fighting. To avoid burnout, I finally started just house-ruling a ton of the action in the game, often throwing the rules out the window and employing a lot of narrative combat scenarios. My group loved this, but I always felt guilty knowing I wasn't following the 4e rules as they were designed. I also ran into some serious balancing issues with the combat because of these house rules, which only made my job all the harder, more stressful, and generally not as enjoyable.
Thus, with reading up on Pathfinder, I'm finding out that the game encourages roleplaying over actual map-based combat. There seems to be plenty of miniatures-based combat in PF, but it doesn't seem so rooted in hard and fast rules. So I guess what I'm wondering is if narrative combat is a possibility in Pathfinder? To clarify what I mean by "narrative combat", let me provide an example.
With my 4e campaign, my PCs were investigating an old manor, and were suddenly attacked by some assailants. Instead of breaking out the map and counters, I just simply asked the group: "what do you do?" The archer of the group responded back with, "I want to fire an arrow from the cover of the window facing the approaching enemy". I simply just had him roll a check, and that was that. The group would later barricade a door, jump out a window, bat some incoming arrows out of the air, and kill the group of baddies, all without ever using a battlemap.
Is this sort of thing allowed in Pathfinder? If anyone could answer that, I'd greatly appreciate.
Please excuse my excessive newb-ness.
Cheers,
Azure