Dungarees Master's page

Hi there,

I am just trying to figure out how this works out.

I have a character who has a bat as a familiar and it has a perception of 20 at level 6.

I am trying to figure out how it gets that high?

Can someone help me with the math here?

Here is the link to a bat animal stat block

Ok here is the deal. I am running an adventure path (Serpent Skull) and I am playing with a very diverse group of players. I have my wife and 2 actor friends of mine who are all new to the game. They picked it up pretty fast and they are enjoying the game.

My problem comes from my other two players who have been playing quite a bit over the years (at least 3.5).
So the big problem is that they have asked to switch out their characters a few times and are asking me to kill off their old characters so that they can make new ones. So I do this for them, but at the same time this really put a hamper on the storyline and the overall experience in my opinion as we are not getting a chance to build party connections and really make a "group mentality" with character coming and going every 2 to 3 sessions.

I am getting really tired of the constant switching, and its kind of a pain trying to figure out how to weasel in a new character when the party literally in the middle of no where.

To limit this I have imposed a gold penalty about on par with the cost of raise dead to their new characters.

They seem frustrated with this, but I get the feeling it is because they want to optimize further with gear they have not been able to find or that they have come in contact with. If i just let it slide they are the type of PCs that will just run the table over on me so to speak and make the experience really dull for the other 3 players as the optimize the hell out of everything.

What are some suggestions I can use to make sure everyone comes out of this happy?

(My latest idea is to give the new characters gold in the value of what is party average, and they have to buy their gear as if they were in a town that was a size equal to our last town visited)