ChiefMasterGuru's page

This is really great stuff everyone, thanks so much. Please keep it coming!

One thing I failed to point out is I am indeed running this on roll20. I'm using a map of Sandpoint the players move about on, as well as having the face cards imported from the PDF that's going around the boards (with NPC portraits on one side and brief personality descriptions on the back - great resource). These are imported as handouts and I use the "Show to Players" functionality whenever they interact with one of them.

Karolina, really solid advice, thanks! I especially found your one-off example at the end very useful. If you have the time and motivation, I'd appreciate a few more. Not necessarily to steal outright, but just to get the wheels spinning a bit. Also, definitely appreciate the rest of your points, all very valuable. I do indeed know Das Korvut quite well. I think part of the problem is that I studied up extensively on ALL the NPCs in town, rather than specializing in a few right off the bat at the outset and this leads to me just parading them out in a sea of forgettable names and quirks out to the PCs. Focusing on a few at a time is definitely great advice.

Suppose the session resumes tomorrow (though I have more time than that) and the PCs wake up in the morning. Can I get a few ideas on how to give them a little push out the door to explore the town and interact with the NPCs? The players are pretty good about getting into character and running with an encounter once they're IN it, but it's the creation of these minor encounters and directing players into them without just straight-up railroading that I struggle with a bit. I want them to go and experience the town with actual purpose. The idea of securing housing, maybe selling some spoils they picked up off the corpses of the properly smashed goblin commando are two great potential vectors. Can I get some more?

Hi guys,

First off, this is a fantastic community. Picked up a ton of valuable advice and lots of great resources for running the game from the various threads here. So straight off the bat, thanks for everything thus far!

I'm actually new to GMing Pathfinder itself (coming from some radically different systems). I just started running this AP for the first time. I felt the first session went well enough though there were definitely a few issues I'd like some help ironing out, particularly before the next session. I'll get into some details below, but as a brief summary of my request - please help me out with some advice on how to run Sandpoint during downtime while fleshing out the town's backstory as well as giving the players the opportunity to flesh out their own characters.

Right, so obviously it's a big topic which is admittedly hard to answer with one definitive "this will work". Different groups look for different things. That being said, I'm sure the combined amount of GM experience on this board is a well I can tap for excellent advice pertinent to my own situation.

Firstly, a summary of what I feel went wrong with the previous session (backed up by individual discussion with the players). I felt the need to rush through some of the festival to get to the "main event", as it were, to get the players working together. I ran some games ahead of time (again, thanks board, for all the awesome side game ideas) and threw in some very minor flavor, but for the most part it was a bullet train railroad to the goblin attack. NPCs popped up here and there to mostly offer one-liners and disappear. PCs were given little chance to roleplay during the festival. Serious issues, no doubt.

We ended the session on the evening of the attack. For the next session, I want to run things in a much more open-ended manner and really give the PCs a chance to experience the town and the various NPCs. I've read through the Sandpoint notes in the appendix (naturally in addition to reading through the entire AP) and through some of the threads on the board offering additional setting detail. My issue isn't so much a lack of stuff to present, but rather how to present it. I've always struggled running games in civilization-heavy settings with tons of buildings, dozens of NPCs prancing about, etc. In the past, I took the easy way out and most of the games I've run took place in mansions, backwater burghs with four buildings total, desolate frozen wastelands, and so on. I really want to challange myself here and learn how to do this properly though.

Again, I realize the difficulty of providing practical advice on this subject, but how can I present all this information without just constantly infodumping? How can I introduce NPCs and locations in a manner that invites the PCs to interact with them rather than just notice them passing by? How can I entice the PCs to go out and experience the town as their characters? Any tips on how to compartmentalize all of this information (that is, town and NPC detail) such that it's not just all in my head or in piles and piles of notes, which can oftentimes be a hinderance themselves? Usually I just handwave a trip to the store. Should I maybe draw this out, describe the route taken, the store interior, the interaction with the NPC? Any advice on doing this most effectively without just straight up boring the players with a tons of extra description they probably don't need to achieve their objective (buy or sell something)? How can I work in the elements of backstory without seeming heavy-handed with it, especially if the PCs themselves aren't explicitly looking for backstory themselves? Advice on running large towns in general?

Yeah, probably not really specific to running Rise of the Runelords, more GMing town life 101, but if the advice is specific to Sandpoint, so much the better.

Apologies for the wall of text, and thanks for reading if you made it this far!