Jess Emerson's page

There seems to have been more QQ over the most recent installment of this fantastic AP than previous installments. I figure I would present the other side of the coin. There are groups that have fun with dungeon crawls and high level gaming. RotRL #5 is a fantastic upper level dungeon. Having said that I'd like to put my two cents on Pathfinder in general.

Pathfinder is a tool for us GM's to put into our Nerd toobox. Any inconsistencies with the story continuity or mispellings of "the" as "teh" shouldn't be a reason to lay it down and throw up our hands and demand our 20 bucks back.
I think it is a well agreed upon fact higher level adventures are hard to write for a general user-base. High level adventures require a very detailed and intimate knowledge of your party make-up as well as what your players are apt to do.
Taking that into consideration, what we have in issue #5 is a fantastic main course for any of our RotRL campaigns. It is left to us as talented and brilliant GMs to adapt certain elements to our personal tastes. Sins of the Saviors and the adventure path as a whole provides a great environment and story for us all to tell together.

If all I have to do is add "...up the stairs to a broad landing...", change a few NPC/Monster tactics and maybe replace 1 or 3 traps with something that I like better, then Pathfinder still saved me countless nights of sleep loss tryiing to craft an adventure of mine own.

Hurray and Huzzah, as I for one am tickled prismatic over this adventure path as well as the current installment.

The leadership feat really can get out of hand unless there are some ex-oficio limits put on it. My group is made of four PCs and our half orc fighter took the leadership feat and managed to convince a number of the mercenaries that he was the bees-knees due to some events that transpired. Things are still going well for us and we're about to chapter 8.
In previous campaigns we managed to hone our rules on leadership because we had enough situations like the OP's where we had a small army controlled by four characters. We still wanted the feat to be fun, but we didn't want to leave it open for intentional or ignorant abuse. Here are our table rules on leadership.

1. You can only attract followers that you have been in contact with for a significant time (up to the disgression of the DM)
2. Only your first follower will have any heroic (standard class) levels. All followers gained later on will have NPC class levels or non-adjusted base race stats.
3. Only humanoids will be available as co-horts (this was after a number of supernatural co-horts ran amok).
4. Co-horts are friends, not slaves. Comments like 'Send Jimbo to activate the doomsday device' can result in removal of followers permanently.
5. Lastly. Co-horts are NPC's. And as such are under the umbrella of control by the DM.

Most of our rules are just regurgitated and slightly focused version of the published rules for Leadership. But #5 is known as the 'Trump Clause' in our group. My players are very respectful of the power of Leadership, and as such we rarely have to resort to DM intervention. But every so often it is necessary for the greater fun of everyone at the table.