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Have some fun with the sorcerer doing some shock and awe magic on them, then as the smoke clears, the antipaladin emerges in all his intimidating glory. He challenges the Oracle/Paladin to a duel, the terms of the fight are that the others won't be involved. Seal the deal with a handshake (then secretly roll fort saves, since antipaladins can carry diseases, then reveal the results after the fight).

The duel happens, then the rest of the anti-party launces a surprise attack. The party doesn't know how many enemies there are, so have some fun harassing them from cover.

Even if the party wins, the diseases should reap some sorrow on them, and depending on how you feel about screwing with Paladins, maybe have the anti-party surrender if things go south.

But for BONUS points, equip the anti-party with some cursed gear, this way when the party kills them and loots them, their WBL will be kept in check a bit more, and the party will again suffer.

The party may be unstoppable in combat, but there's plenty of other ways to make them hurt. Crafty ways like diseased handshakes and cursed gear should put them on edge a little :)


One thing my DM does to drive the sense of impending doom into us is already listed here, by asking how long we're taking or tracking time. He makes it in the forethought of our minds by having one of the players track it. This way, we know we've taken 35 hours to get from A to B, but we don't know how much time in total we have.

If we capture an enemy and interrogate them, we may get some information about the deadline. A foot soldier may know it's a weekish away, but a lieutenant may know the day or place the conspiracy is going to happen at.

Beyond letting us know time is being tracked, you have to make it matter.

For example, once we were a bit slow getting to the objective and by the time we arrived the enemy was already positioned and starting their attack so we showed up as the walls were crumbling, rather than in advance to help prepare.

Other times, we'll make good time and have a chance to gain an advantage. Setting up an ambush, preparing traps or defenses, etc...Whether it's a round or two of buffs, or a week before a siege, time can make all the difference.

We're less tempted to explore the treasure trove if we think the town we're going to sell it too is going to be a smoking crater in a day and a half.


I prefer rolling for stats, for one thing I usually don't roll anything lower than a point buy would get me. For example, we reconstructed our very first characters (standard rolling) as point buy, but noticed we were pretty much lower than our original builds. When we looked at our original builds, the rolled stats were all around 25-30 point value. The transition to a 15 point buy meant we went from being well rounded characters to having to decide where to cut so we could do well in our main strength.

From an RP perspective, rolls reflect the randomness of our births. Point buys mean most builds fall into a standard mold.

From another perspective, I just prefer not being having to build a stat array along with everything else. I have enough choices to make, this is one less thing to kick myself about.


Step 1 is to stop thinking Aggro is a thing.
Give them a reason to want you deaded first, they only won't ignore you if you make yourself unignorable. And if they do decide to avoid you to engage the cleric you should be in a position where you can punish them for it. If you're trying to defend the squishies it should be next to impossible for enemies to get to them without first facing you. This can either be by you literally standing between them, throwing a spell in their way, or even just making them have to eat an AoO from you.

Thus, Aggro isn't a thing, but battlefield control is, and I'm sure if you look into that, you'll find a wealth of information.

Control can be handled by a wizard dropping walls, pits, and obstacles on the field, or a fighter with reach and combat reflexes making it quite painful to try to walk through a zone, so if you want to control the field you see AC doesn't matter nearly as much as tactics.


I kind of picture them as having a type of Pikey accent ( a la snatch). It's common enough, but has enough variation/slang/mispronunciation/made up words to make it nearly unintelligble for someone else.

Since Halflings have a history of being , or still are, actively enslaved I could see them having a language that would be difficult for their masters to understand so as to facilitate, escape, uprisings, insubordination, etc...


Maybe have a friendly slaver in the camp, that if they get enough intel they'll learn who he is and that he's a sympathizer with the party. If they try to befriend him, he could prove useful later, and this way you can work a few more steps into the session that would reward a subtle approach. Make him valuable enough they want to find him, and this also means they're less inclined to firesnake the barracks since they could accidentally kill him to.

Have the corpses of other would-be rescuers adorning the camp, decked out in their equipment still to show that an 11th level, heavily armoured paladin with a flaming greatsword was taken down by the slavers somehow, so clearly an outright confrontation could be bad.

I also find from personal experience that whenever there's guard towers with archers or ballistas on them, my party gets much more cautious. If we blow our cover, we may get annihilated from them, and so we are more inclined to try to blend or hide. This way, the warnings should strongly discourage them from direct confrontation, but if they decide to go rambo, they had fair warning. The joy of ballista towers is that a single failed diplomacy check against a guard won't likely result in a volley from the towers since they may not be aware there was a problem right away, giving the PCs an opportunity to troubleshoot rather than "Bad roll, fight your way out".


I'm playing through now, we've been on it about a year by this point. It's varied in story and play style. There's more than just killing the bad guy on moving on, and we've had a few surprises. I think for that reason, playing through first could be good so you'd be familliar with where things go and how a party may sidetrack it. If you don't play through before DMing, you'll need to spend more time and effort familiarizing yourself with things.


To avoid one-encounter syndrome, just have them do some type of skill check for each unit of time/distance. So let's say survival checks for every 5 miles. If they roll over a 17, they progress fine, if they roll under they get a random encounter.

This way, they don't know if they'll have 1 or 8 encounters.

To keep things interesting, you could have non-combat encounters too. Like, maybe they find a horse in the wilderness but it has full tack and saddle gear so it isn't wild. Then they come across two parties blocking the road arguing over who's horse it is and the PCs have to arbitrate the dispute before they can move on. Or they can just attack them out of the way, but who knows what repercussions that would cause...


Guards posted on the Storval steps to prevent an easy climb towards Jorgenfist. Maybe the giants had enough time to sabotage the steps so that there's missing stairs requiring some crafty thinking to cross.

You could have scouts lying in wait and as the party passes by, they get ambushed with nets and boulders, maybe one of the PCs get's carried off and now the party has to decide if they follow the kidnappers, or continue towards the fortress.

If the giants made off with any captives from the raid on Sandpoint, there could be slavers working with them, so just run throught he NPC codex and find some people to make up your slaver company. When in doubt, hobgoblins could be a good option since they're sneaky, militant, and a bit more subtle than a stone giant :)


The mass assassinations could be bolstered in their success rate though since odds are there are only so many guards available to protect people, or so many covert hidey holes to disappear into. Of course the number of assassins and their style will have varying impacts on the outcome, for example if a bulk of them are "knife in the dark" types, it'll be harder than a blockbuster mage leveling the neighbourhood the nobles live in, or the royal chef poisoning the feast because he's been an assassin all along. So without firm details, it's kind of a crap-shoot.

I assume someone taking on such an endeavour would follow standard security protocols like compartmentalizing information, using unaffiliated cells, etc... so that even a leak in one job wouldn't compromise the others. If I hired 10,000 assassins to kill 1000 people, some may have false information so that when they get busted, authorities are chasing red herrings. Cops may pat themselves on the back because they found out about this murder plot against the Bank manager, when the real target was the Accountant all along. Since they stopped the conspiracy, they let their guard down figuring the job is done, then BAM, the bodies start piling up.

But it all depends on how much people are expecting an assassination, after all, the beloved king who's on good terms with his neighbours is less likely to worry than the tyrant barbarian warlord.

Overall, I'd put their success rate higher, at around 65% assuming it was well planned, used tactical professionals, wasn't expected on a large scale, and the assassins fully exploited their targets weaknesses.


pteromath wrote:
...but if you're not a dunce, you should stay alive.

Here lies the problem, lol.

He just enjoys playing the game and socializing, I don't think he really sets out with a goal of what he wants to accomplish 5 levels from now, it's more of a "Oh, that's cool, can I make a character do that?" while enjoying friend's company. The group doesn't particularly mind, we're fairly casual, but given his track record it's now become a bit of a running theme (his characters dying), and we're trying to have fun with it, giving him the bestest defensive character and seeing how long it takes for him to break it, I think to some extent he's proud of wearing the mantle of most dead PCs.

Hence why this is a two part challenge, building one survivable mechanics wise, but then also something that can survive a player with a high inclination towards dying.

I think Grurk, Snot, OoV Paladin and one of the Invulnerable ragers will be handed too him, next opportunity and he can choose which one to try next. I'll keep you posted!


We're trying to avoid the industrial manufacturing Character plant for him just spitting out Hero 1, Hero 2, Hero 3, Hero 4, Hero 5, Hero 6, Hero 7, ad infinitum lol. I'm seeing lots of good ideas, keep them coming! I used a similar heal yourself paladin in an arena fight we did, and he was a beast, eventually died but it was a slog for the baddies, lol.


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Hello there boards, here's a quick rundown of the situation.

We have a player in our group who burns through characters faster than a quick burning thing burns through easily burnable things. His characters have perished due to poor builds, or just straight up bad player choices, he's not actively trying to die, but he's just really really good at it. Things have gotten so bad, it's become a running joke, and we figured we should come to you esteemed folks to find the most him-proof character possible.

Character creation rules we use are as such:

4d6, drop the lowest, for stats
Only player races and Paizo products, not 3pp or older edition stuff
Build to level 7, Standard WBL.

Now, building an unkillable character mechanics wise can require system mastery, but the real challenge comes from reducing ways he can kill himself or get into bad situations, so keep in mind, the build will be run by someone who doesn't think things through (Collapsed a cliff face onto a group of zombies, while we were standing on said cliff face above said zombies) and forgets complicated class related things (i.e. Summoner spells, Barbarian Rage, going melee with a gunslinger), not a system guru keeping detailed notes.

In the last two sessions, he has 3 PC and 2 Ally NPC (All PCs were his) deaths on his hands via poor decision making and lack of forethought. To that end, what can you put together that can survive any monster and encounter, as well as this player? We'll review the entries, and select the best few, then he'll run them and we'll let you know how they did/died. Given the player, it'll probably be more effective if the character is simple to play, but don't let that stop you from min-maxing, before we hand him one of your builds, we'll make sure it's something he could follow :)

I figure, we'll collect some builds, screen them, choose some for him to use (we'll post the selected builds), then provide information on how things went in order to determine who is the most himproof. Sometimes the largest threat to a PC is the P.