Eel's page

So I'm not new to GMing in general, but this is my first time trying to run anything with a d20 in its ancestry. I've noticed that I'm not the only new Pathfinder GM to pick up Jade Regent with the intent of running. Actually, it looks like this is going to be a pretty popular AP all around. My hope is that some of us poor, inexperienced greenhorns can leverage the collective wisdom of the Pathfinder veterans that populate this board. We could scatter it out across specific threads, but that could clutter up the board. Collecting it in one place could make a valuable resource, too.

That said, I of course have a question to kick this off.

I've been told that the APs are generally balanced around a party size of four PCs, and I've heard about fan conversions of other APs for parties of about six PCs. Do parties of 3 or 5 need much adjustment, or is there enough wiggle room that you can generally run an AP as-is with one more or less player?

I've had my eye on Jade Regent for a while and when I got a hold of the Jade Regent PG, it looked like Paizo had made an AP just for me. The long overland trip to an exotic new world, strong cast of interesting NPCs and systems to support both of these conventions are the exact kind of things that get me really into a game. So now I'm excitedly drumming up interest with the friends in my Kingmaker group and it looks like as soon as we can squeeze our schedule together, I'm going to be running my first PF game.

While the four NPCs presented in the AP are great, and I'm sure that later adventures will provide more options, I'm thinking of providing a couple extra characters with relationship options. I'm doing this partially to balance out the male-to-female ratio, but I'll probably also throw a new lady or two into the ring, so to speak, as well. I'm also trying to account for the fact that my players may decide to buck the expectations of the AP and play matchmaker by hooking the NPCs up with each other, rather than trying to romance them on their own. You never know with these guys.

I'm not too worried about the additional relationships inflating the XP too much, as I think I'll be replacing the XP rewards with Hero Points. I am a little concerned with balancing out the social rewards, but I think as long as the Devotion/Enmity rewards offered by these "bonus" NPCs stay relatively minor, cover different areas, and don't stack, it shouldn't be too bad.

Is anyone else thinking of doing something similar? Is anyone planning on modifying the system somehow? Or are you guys mostly running it straight, as-is?