Dragnfly's page

I follow this approach for all my games:

If the setting is very serious: Custom-make each name and consider the character deeply when I do.

If the setting is generally serious: Use a name generator and scrutinize for general people, and focus on giving special, researched names to really important people.

If the setting is fairly light: Important people get names from a name generator. Less important people get the Maoyu treatment. i.e. the weapon store owner's name is actually Weapon Store Owner. The crazy old lady's name is Crazy Old Lady, etc.

If the setting is a goofy one-shot: break out the references and joke names.

I feel that, on one hand, names add a lot to the world and a personal touch to NPCs. On the other hand, it's important to balance if the players will even remember them.

It's also fun sometimes to borrow official NPCs you may have encountered in other Pathfinder adventures. This works especially well if they happened to fit the general mould you're gunning for anyway. Near Sandpoint and need a surly, self-important goon NPC? Look no farther than the local junk heap etc etc.

Honestly, I just wouldn't have 7 players but I know it happens sometimes. And I honestly might just kill one of them. If they have to make a new character, 6 other people are going to berate them until they make a cleric, and then problem solved.

Bran, -NEVER- do this. NEVER EVER. You've made it clear that your party is having fun and enjoying the game right now. Following this advice and forcing one of them into a role they don't want will just make a player -very- unhappy. And unhappy players make it bad for everyone.

The infernal scroll is a fun idea. You could also have them get healing from somewhere other than the church, at large gold cost and some... shady side dealings. The mob runs thick in Sandpoint^.^ And RotRL is one of those settings where the town's view of you is important.

Basically, IMO, it seems like your players would enjoy a solution that doesn't TPK everyone, but does create troublesome yet fun hijinks. It's not about punishing them for their hubris. It's about letting them know "This is going to be really rough on you guys and you need to come up with solutions just as much, if not more, than I do."

I'm in an on-hiatus Runelords campaign and I don't -think- we have a dedicated healer. Maybe somebody can do a few points a day somehow. But we mainly focus on potions and wands. Yeah, it eats into our cash flow. Yeah, we suffer status effects. But between smart combat tactics and wise spending we've managed to survive up until now (Just finished the 2nd part before going on hiatus)

We have 5 players plus 2 NPCs... wow. 7, now that I think about it. So yeah, potions, scrolls and wands do work. Also, the DM does provide us with some healing treasure at times, though I don't know if it's in the set or if he added it himself. I don't read the set for campaigns I'm playing.

Most of my characters would make a note of where it is and tell the next trustworthy-seeming Druid or nature-caring person where it was. My greedier ones would dig it up and try to sell it. Plot hooks, however obvious, mean nothing without associative context and it's bad RPing to say "this is weird, so let's waste a few hours deciding what the GM wants us to do with it before he pities us for not being telepathic like he is and just tells us why it's relevant."

The best advice I can give is to simply give your encounter areas enough space to make them interesting...

I hear you about not worrying about realism. I prefer to follow the "rule of cool" and throw realism to the dogs once somebody mentions "My elven druid dismounts his giant platypus and casts a magic spell at the reanimated dinosaur skeleton." I see realism as the malleable putty shell surrounding the game world- ultimately unbreakable, but very very flexible.

Also, I've no doubt that they'll use cover and other such tactics. I plan my monsters to. Actually, I expect more than one place to turn out like a firefight. My videogame design background sometimes leaks through with puzzle bosses and cinematic encounters.

Thanks for the advice, guys. Yeah, I should have specified these were for indoor battles on dungeons I create myself. My outdoor battles generally don't use a grid map because, to me, "we're in a forest" means there's trees, and "we're on a plains" means there's not.

I'll just run a few quick test scenarios to make sure there's not a clog where there's not supposed to be one.

When I visited Thailand, I was surprised to see the amount of elephants walking the streets with their owners. Since then, I've been much more lenient about animal companions

Aye. I was discussing the dangers of moose on the road vs. monkeys on the road with somebody yesterday. Heck, a former employee of mine (an American. I'm Canadian) a decade ago told me they had to hang up because an alligator broke into their home. I didn't even think that happened until I looked it up.

Ours is a big, vast world. And fantasy is even bigger.

(EDIT for context LOL)

I've always rolled with the theory that it's a fantasy world, and adventurers are a pretty common sight. This came up once with weapons armour. The conversation went like this (summarized. The actual conversation was painfully long):

Player1: "We need to hide our weapons and armour outside of town somewhere."
GM: "Why? Keep your swords sheathed and there won't be a problem."
Player1: "If I walked down the street with an AK47 over my shoulder, the cops would still arrest me."
GM: "That's because unless they're from a war-torn country or in the military, most people go their entire lives never holding a real gun. There's places in the world where seeing people with weapons on the street is common. Sad but true. In this fantasy setting, the entire world is like that. If you leave town, some monster is likely to eat your face. Go into an alley and some thief will gut you. It's a dangerous world, so people are accustomed to people wearing armour and carrying weapons. You're not a threat until you're casting or drawing your weapon. An adventurer and all his wacky crap is no more odd here than a guy covered in tattoos with a rainbow coloured mohawk would be in the real world. People might stare or keep away from him, but nobody's going to call the cops over it unless he's got a wanted poster."

Eventually the conversation involved beasts, unusual race cohorts, etc and it was generally decided that the fantasy setting needs to be considered. City streets could be wider to accommodate the wider varieties of sizes, much like how real cities started widening their streets when motor vehicles started taking over. Of course if the setting called for more paranoia on the part of citizens, like in Ustalav or Ravenloft, then yeah. But for normal places I'd say people would go "Meh. Adventurers. Maybe he'll do a quest for me."

Actually, it's only barely related but here's some funny food for thought: the next time you play an MMO and run through a populated area, consider that collection of people at your local food court. See? Setting always needs to be considered.

I'm going to be running my first game with a grid map in a long, long time but something worries me. I've found myself too influenced by my S-RPG videogame roots when looking at a grid, so I'm worried that battles won't have enough room. When I extend this, I feel like I've overcompensated and now battle zones seem gigantic.

So is there a rule of thumb for "number of tiles for # of enemies of medium size" that works well for you guys? I mean in general. Naturally some fights will have arena-sized locations and some will be in tight hallways. But I mean in general.

Things to consider with this:
-My players this time are smart and not cheap. They'll find advantageous tactics to deal with enemies. So (depending on enemy) the foes are smart as well. They tend to not just sit there like an SRPG boss and suck up the damage. If they get fireballed once, they'll move to a better spot.
-Sorry for not explaining further, but systems for AoO aren't used here. I realize this is odd and may change the advice given.

Thanks for whatever advice is given.

I had a Lich once in a different system who was a fairly swell guy. Obsessed, and it basically boiled down to the Lich's goals prevented the player's goals, but both could be seen as "Good" goals. After he was defeated, two players actually tried to find a way to achieve both their goals to honour him. I was pretty touched by that sentiment.

He's been brought up in gaming conversations a few times since, and I was very pleased to hear somebody who didn't know he was my creation, to bring him up very favourably. So the story actually travelled from one group to another.