ExaltedBagel's page

It's important to take into consideration the intelligence of the monsters when you are designing the encounters. In the current situation however, orcs and goblins can be expected to five foot and maneuver is fights considering their whole culture is based around warfare.

The situation would be different if the orcs had designed a clever trap requiring mechanical gears and a trigger, this would surpass their usual cleverness which might however lead them to dig a crude pit trap at an ambush site.

I always value challenging players and doing so fairly, they have the option to 5 foot in order to reposition as well. You players might have been surprised by the fact that your monster's have brains, but they should learn how to manage!

GM says: "I can't believe you beat him in less than 2 rounds..."
GM means: "I'm gonna bring him back... As a vampire."
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GM says: "What's your marching order?"
GM means: "Here be traps laddies!"
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GM says: "I know you're a fighter, but you might want to pack a bow..."
GM means: "You will face a dragon."

I'm curently having my party defend a small village from an orc tribe. After they had concluded that the orcs had someone patrol the hills at night in order to spy/put traps everywhere, the party's rogue decided he was going to be on the case. Needless to say he decided the best disguise would be to dress up as a bush in order to play the best game of cat and mouse.

The thing was that they both didn't notice each other, until the Orc ranger tried to go hide in the bush.
Bush: CR 4.

Personnally, I would always prefer packing an extra weapon instead of taking an extra feat. Besides, being forced into melee range as a ranger can be a blast and you hold your own pretty well in the frontline.
This being said, of course for later levels you might want to benefit from your bow and feats. At this point, depending on what money permits, your might want to look into a Holy Bow, the extra damage vs the undeads should be more than enough to counter the DR.
For ranged attacks, you may also consider bringing a few throwing axes, as they are slashing weapon and ranged as well!
Enjoy killing zombies!

The way I used to work with hirelings from level 1 to 3, it would be 3sp per NPC level per day, x2 or x5 that price depending on risk factor as well.

For higher level characters, it really depends on the mission itself, since we are talking about specialists at that point. A 6th level fighter hired by a 8th level party might ask for a few hundred gp to accompany them to a troll's fortress. You might want to look into the total rewards you are planning on awarding your players, and have a certain percentage of that go to the specialist.

Once again, there is no set rule since after the first few levels, mercenaries have made a name for themselves and will be asking for a price depending on the job.

Also, as the game master, they will always want you to succeed, that's where all the fun is created.
A good thing might be to look into what type of characters they are making, see what their strenghts and weaknesses will be so you can gauge how you are going to challenge them on those.

2) Puzzle - Most RPG puzzles are something for the player to solve rather than the character, but do offer tie-ins for the character's skills to affect the outcome. For example, if you have to push columns in a certain order, perhaps the ranger can look for tracks in the dust on the floor, or the rogue can use Disable Device to figure out part of the mechanism, or the wizard remembers an arcane tome which describes how to build one of these devices. Popular choices have been Minesweeper, Mastermind board game, riddles, number sequences or tessellation shapes

This is something I really like since it allows the players to use their own solving skills in addition to their character abilities to get hints. Everyone loves a good puzzle!

One small thing as well about experience: it represents the learning of the player characters. This means that death of the ennemy is not actually mandatory to get the experience points from the encounter. If an ennemy ends up being subdued, or routed out of the combat, he was technically defeated. I do advise to consider these ennemies as well in the count of the experience points.