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I've been having problems with a particular player for a while now, but nothing seems to work.

This player - let's call him Bill - is an excellent roleplayer and a clever tactician. However, he's also several times more skilled in character building than my other players combined. We've had to make encounters at 4 or 5 above APL just to challenge him.

We're playing through the Emerald Spire module, and are on floor 6.

Bill is playing as a 4th level LN Hellknight Cleric, and used much of his WBL to create a Bloody Skeletal Dire Lioness, a Bloody Skeletal Ogre, and a Bloody Skeletal Bunyip. As such, his minions have ungodly attack power and defense for the character's level, and his minions just keep regenerating unless killed with positive energy or holy water - Neither of which the Evil opponents he's facing are likely to be using!

A high CHA means that Command Undead is likely to fizzle when trying to take control of his minions away, and he's clever enough to use a spell to avoid one of our GM's countermeasures (positive energy traps).

This wouldn't be such a big issue if this were the first time this happened, but Bill's characters are consistently several times stronger than anyone else in the group. Anything that challenges him simply flattens the rest of the party, and his ungodly luck means that the dice are almost always on his side.

I've talked to him about the problem several times before, and even tried having him help the other players in making characters. Inevitably, he ends up outshining almost everyone else in the party.

This has been going on for far too long, and I'm sick and tired of it. He's not doing it maliciously, but he doesn't see why he should be punished for being good at building characters. I honestly don't know what to do at this point.

I'm running an Emerald Spire campaign, but my players are bad with keeping track of experience. As such, I've abstracted it, and simply informed them of when they level up.

However, this means that I am uncertain about what level they should be at any given floor.

Is it possible for someone to let me know what level the party should be at for each floor of the Emerald Spire?

The party size varies, but is generally no less than three players and no more than seven.

They are currently at the start of the fifth floor, and are level 4.

So, I'm GMing for a group of rather inexperienced individuals, and it seems like we get way less done than we should.

We generally have 7-hour sessions once per week, and it seems like it'll take us a while to get anywhere.

For example, I am currently running the Emerald Spire module, and in one 5-7 hour session, the group explored...maybe three rooms?
And when I say "explored", I mean they set the cobwebs in the room on fire and closed the door, then waited for whatever was in the room to die. I still managed to get a couple of encounters in, since the spiders are rather intelligent, but a fight against one or two CR2 spiders can take upwards of an hour.

In addition, the party generally almost half an hour or more after each encounter before deciding what to do next, as well as when we begin to play.

To make matters worse, it's becoming increasingly difficult to arrange sessions, since most of the players have convoluted and frequently changing schedules, and usually half the players are unavailable for any given session.

If things keep up like this, I fear that we'll never complete much of the dungeon, and the group might even fall apart. I've discussed playing through chat programs or on a message board, but that doesn't solve the problem of having three players who are only available one day per week, with none of them having the same day available.

Does anyone with more experience than me have a suggestion about how to fix this?

In Ultimate Equipment, sets of playing cards are stated to come in many varieties, from thick paper to wood, ivory or metal.

The Deadly Dealer feat allows the character to use playing cards as thrown weapons, using the statistics for darts.

It occurs to me that a thrown playing card made of metal should do significantly more damage than one made of paper. Heck, you could sharpen the edges!

Does this have any basis in the rules? Even if it doesn't, what would be a realistic damage to houserule for more expensive cards?

I'm a little confused by this feat. Supposedly, it gives you a 100 GP "Resource Pool" to be used to acquire illegal goods.

So, how does this resource pool work?

Does the feat just give you 100 GP with the caveat that you can only use them to buy illegal stuff? Is the pool refreshed every time you return to town? Every level? Do you have to ration that 100GP over your character's lifespan? Can you just buy anything less than 100 GP for free as long as it's illegal? Does it just reduce the cost of illegal items by 100 GP? The feat mentions poisons and evil magic items as things that could be bought. I have a hard time believing that you could find any magic item or effective poison that costs less than 100 GP. Can you add GP from your WBL to this pool? What makes it different from your normal money?

I don't exactly understand how the feat is supposed to work.

So, I looked at the Portable Hole, and for the life of me I can't figure out what it's supposed to be used for. It costs about as much as 8 Type-1 Bags of Holding, and the average GM will just allow players to stuff as much stuff into a Bag of Holding as they want, without regard for the specifications.

So, are Portable Holes just useful for when it'd be easier to just shovel coins into a hole in the ground than to put them in a Bag of Holding? Is it just for instant pit traps? Is it just an item that evil GMs use to screw over players due to the interaction between a Portable Hole and a Bag of Holding? Does it have some other use? What happens if the surface it's placed on is less than 10 feet? does it just open a temporary hole to the other side?

It just seems odd that such a useless item is so expensive relative to the Bag of Holding that serves a similar purpose.

Are there any archtypes, spells, races, classes/prestige classes or anything else that improves a character's usage of items?

I'm not talking about UMD, I'm talking about grappling hooks, block and tackle, fishhooks, soap, chalk, the works.

I've been thinking for a while about making a MacGuyver-esque character who primarily uses adventuring gear to fight/maneuver their way out of situations.

Is this anywhere near being a viable idea? It seems wasteful to have the Ultimate Equipment book full of obscure adventuring gear and never using it...

A friend created a build that uses a combination of weapon materials, spells, and traits that can do enormous amounts of damage via hitting with the equivalent of a Colossal-sized weapon. One of the traits that allows this is the variant Tiefling ability 16:

"You have over-sized limbs, allowing you to use Large weapons without penalty."

My friend argues that, for a Large-sized tiefling, the ability would allow them to use weapons the next size category up.

Is this how it would work, or are my friend's dreams of 3d8 weapon damage with 30 ft. reach fated to disappear?

Looking around the forums, I've heard a lot about the various options you have when designing a character. Specifically, I'm a bit puzzled by the seemingly universal assumption that certain feats, racial traits, spells, and magical items are "necessary" for any given class to be effective. For example, it seems to somehow be common knowledge that every fighter ever takes Cleave and Power attack, and every rogue takes Weapon Finesse. Furthermore, some feats are considered "traps"; in other words, they're considered objectively useless in almost all situations.

How is a relatively new or inexperienced player supposed to know? How do I determine whether or not lowering my chance to hit in order to do additional damage is a good idea?

Is there some sort of list somewhere regarding which options are good and which ones aren't? Some sort of guide to tell me which feats to always choose and which ones never to touch with a 10-foot pole?

How do new players deal with playing classes like the fighter, where one misspent feat can apparently send your character into the black hole of obscurity and lack of contribution to combat in any way whatsoever?

Seriously, if there's any way for me to learn which feats are good and which aren't without spending three years doing in-depth calculations of DPR and action economy, I'd love to hear it.

What would be an appropriate cost for a magic item that allows metamagic feats/rods/whatever to work on spell-like abilities?

A friend suggested that a ring that allows the wearer to use the Intensify Spell metamagic on a SLA once/day with only 1/5 the effect would only cost around 1600 gold.

Is this reasonable?

At one point during a campaign, a player attempted to harvest the poison from some miscellaneous beastie. I pointed out that the player would have to roll to see if they were exposed to the poison, but the player retorted that, since their character wore gloves, there wasn't any way for the poison to affect them.

This got me to thinking...

Poison in general is almost comically useless. Applied to a weapon, it only lasts for one hit, and any opportunity that players could be exposed to it while attempting to harvest or apply it, they'll invariably be wearing gloves or other kinds of protection - especially since the typical explorer's outfit is explicitly stated to come with gloves.

In addition, most poisons do a pitiful 1d2 or 1d3 of ability damage every minute or so, and are essentially only capable of reliably killing someone with a below-10 ability score in that stat.

Even the strongest of poisons have a chance of actually killing, and they cost more than a lot of minor magical items and have DCs of around 20 - fairly reasonable for a number of martial characters.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that, since all poisons require fortitude saves, almost all monsters with high fortitude saves (that is to say, almost all monsters) will shrug off the poison as if it was nothing?

Honestly, I'd rather chug a bottle of poison rather than fight just about any monster. It's most likely the safer option, after all. Seriously, poison seems to be a threat only to characters below level 3 or so.

And yet, players invariably go crazy over poison, going into a panicked frenzy whenever some monster injects them with something and eviscerating any monster with a sickly-green tinge to it in search of the beastie's precious sack of useless, useless poison.

Are poisons really just that lame, or is there something I'm missing? Some sort of feat that makes poisons to triple ability damage or doubles the DC or something?

What adjustments and alterations should I make for a non-standard campaign?

If I'm running a low-resource campaign, where the players start with a paltry 2 GP each, should I advise against classes like Gunslinger? If I'm creating an underwater campaign, what magic items should I give the players free of charge? If I'm going to be GMing a low-magic campaign, what monsters should I avoid having the players fight? If I'm running an evil campaign, are there any races or classes I shouldn't allow?

This is the kind of stuff I have trouble with.

I'm really bad at looking at the implications of certain factors on the game, like the fact that many high-CR monsters assume that you have a certain amount of magic items, so a centralized list of guidelines for unusual campaigns would be helpful.

So, I may have indirectly caused the death of a fellow party member via the rarely seen cause of CON damage.

So, our party's summoner has been knocked down to 7 HP by a single attack from a stone giant. The party's oracle (me) figured that this would be the perfect time for a spell. Compassionate ally!

Now, this is where things get interesting. The GM had apparently written out various bits of giant society, just in case they were needed. As such, since the giant had no magical means of healing our summoner, the spell indicated that the giant would simply make a heal check on him.

Apparently, giant medical practices involve giant dire leeches that do 1d8+2 CON damage immediately. And the 1d8 was an 8. And the summoner was a Halfling, thereby only containing approximately 1/2 of the amount of blood in a standard human.

This brought his CON down to 7 from 17.
It also brought his HP down from 7 to -23, since he was level 6.

And so he died. Horribly. Of exsanguination.

Admittedly, the GM gave him the chance to break out of the grapple, as well as a Fort. save to take half damage, but neither of those tend to be a summoner's specialty.

What should I/we do? Should he get another chance, or should we let the dice fall where they may? Did we mess up in determining that a reduction in CON also changes the negative HP value the character dies at? Is it even reasonable to come across a leech capable of doing 1d8+2 Constitution damage? Should I get the player something to apologise?

I'm relatively new to GMing, and I've been having some trouble with a few things. Of course, most of my players are also new to Pathfinder, but I still want to do the best I can.

Firstly, I've found that I have trouble with NPC dialogue. "Spontaneous" is not a word that I think could ever describe me, and as a result, most NPC conversations involve a lot of stammering, saying "You know" a lot, and generally having each NPC be identical in personality. Honestly, it's a bit embarrassing when your players feel less awkward in-character than the GM does out-of-character. I've tried doing NPC conversations in the third person, but it just feels impersonal, and I still have trouble figuring out what I'm going to say next. Does anyone have any advice on dealing with a lack of improvisational ability?

Secondly, I can't figure out if I'm being too easy on my players, or too hard on them. On one hand, due to my inexperience in GMing, all but the most recent sessions had me handwaving away any rules that I had trouble memorizing, like carrying capacity (where I essentially said that the players could basically carry as many objects as they wanted, within reason, as long as none of the objects was over 60 Lbs), as well as HP regained from resting (where I basically said that a full night's rest restored all HP). In addition, whenever one of my players argues that something should logically work (which is often), I generally end up agreeing with them, even if it would cause problems. On the other hand, some monsters and traps in dungeons that I "made" (AKA made in a random dungeon generator) could easily reduce a PC to half health in a single blow. All the same, though, the players always seem to be able to breeze through encounters, even those that should be above their level. How can I know if I've got the balance of difficulty right? Or the balance of traps to monsters to puzzles to NPC, for that matter?

Finally, and I save this one for last for a reason, is that one of the players annoys the heck out of me. He only ever uses cantrips, even against incredibly powerful enemies, and after I made the mistake of allowing him to make his own spell, he uses it almost exclusively. Annoyingly enough, it does more damage than any other cantrip, and apparently creates magical snow that can be eaten to regain 2 HP, but only once per day per character. He points out his 2 HP of healing incessantly, constantly argues that the cold spell should freeze or slow the enemy, and his idea of roleplaying is to talk in an awful indian accent. He has almost no interest in doing anything himself in combat, placing more focus on his monkey familiar than his character who's backstory was directly ripped from a book series that the player had talked to me about at the time. His character's name is literally "Gandalf" wit one letter changed, he refuses to use an actual paper character sheet rather than fumbling with a PDF file that takes 3 minutes to load whenever he goes from one page to another, he seems to fail to grasp the concept of "Just because this creature shares a name with a creature from Harry Potter, it does not mean that they are the same creature", and he repeats things 7 or 8 times, even after people have told him that they understand or that they heard him the first time.

So why don't I kick him out?
Well, the thing is, I honestly don't think that he does any of it deliberately. Everyone in the group, myself included, has some form of...well, let's just say "problems with socialization". So, I honestly can't be judgemental, since he's not doing these things to be a jerk, and I don't know whether he just doesn't know better, or if it's a behavioral thing. Not only that, but we barely have enough people for the group as it is, and I can't afford to lose anyone. Besides, I invited him personally, and even if I find him disruptive, I don't know if the other players feel the same. So, one way or another, I can't kick him out. I honestly like having him around in the group, but he just gets on my nerves. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could deal with this?

I'm aware of the fact that the vast majority of my posts basically boil down to "I'm a newbie GM, can you fix my problems for me?", but I just don't feel confident enough in my abilities to try to fix these kind of problems, given the possible consequences if I make the wrong move (people leave the group, my players start to resent me, etc.).

I posted a thread a little while ago, but due to a lack of input on my part nothing came of it, so I'll briefly recap:

I have a player whose 3rd level character is vastly more powerful than the other characters in the group. He has a beastly initiative and apparently a 60 ft. base speed, as well as more spells per day and spell-like abilities than any reasonable character should have. He's honestly one of the best role-players in the group, so conversation challenges aren't enough to let the other players shine.

I don't have his full character sheet right now, but I'll have it soon, so here's what I can remember about his character:

He's a level 3 Ifrit Sorcerer with either the Elemental (fire) or the Efreeti bloodline, but I suspect that he thinks he can use both, since he uses Elemental ray (from the elemental bloodline) but he claims that at level 15 he'll get an additional +30 ft. to his base speed (from the Efreeti bloodline). He took the Wildfire Heart alternate racial trait, which replaces his fire resistance with a +4 initiative bonus. He also claims to have taken an alternate racial trait that gave him +30 ft. of base speed in exchange for a Wisdom penalty, but I can't seem to find that particular trait anywhere, although I do remember seeing it before. His Charisma is stupidly high, which means that, with the Ifrit Fire Affinity racial trait, he can use Elemental Ray around 7 times per day, and with the combination of his Sorcerer levels and the Favored Class Bonus that an Ifrit gets, each of those 7 Elemental Rays does 3d6 damage. Even worse, his absurdly high Charisma means he gets loads of bonus spell slots, which he makes liberal use of with the Quicken metamagic feat to cast two spells per turn.

He regularly bypasses locked doors by simply burning them, and is in general a force to be reckoned with.

Does anyone see something majorly wrong with his character, or know any way to even out the power levels of the various members of the party?

So, one of my players has, through some combination of feats and traits and other things that I probably should have looked at more closely before I OK'd their character sheet, managed to basically make their character faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to blow through encounters in a single round. Their character has an ungodly initiative modifier and has a move speed of 60 ft. per round, along with more potential spells and spell-like abilities than any reasonable 3rd level character should have. At the same time, the other characters in the party are almost underpowered, even compared to a normal character, so anything that would challenge the first player would annihilate the others.

Does anyone have any idea how I could possibly turn his high initiative bonus, crazy movement speed, and seemingly unending list of spell-like abilities against him, without killing the rest of the party?

I'm running a group entirely composed of new players. They've reached the end of their first adventure, Crypt of the Everflame, but due to a rookie error on my part, they all reached 3rd level almost halfway through the module, rather than at the end. As a result, most of the encounters have been trivial for them, and they haven't really needed to use any sort of tactics.

Does anyone know of any good CR 2-4 monsters or other encounters that wouldn't be likely to kill them, but would force them to use things like flanking, AoO, and things like that?

So, I'm GMing for a group of new players, playing through Crypt of the Everflame.

However, being just as new to the game as they are, I thoroughly screwed up the XP rewards.

I didn't know how XP division worked, so I ended up giving the full encounter XP to each player. In other words, an encounter with three 135-XP orcs ended up giving each player 400 XP, rather than dividing up the total between the PCs.

My players aren't even halfway through the titular crypt and they're already level 3. I can't exactly take the levels back or anything, since not only would they likely resent me for it, but the fact that they've been so much more powerful than the monsters means that I don't know if they have the tactics required to beat the upcoming enemies without their current levels.

Any advice for a newbie GM as to how to fix this?