Geremy's page

Mazes are really really tricky to make work. Players often don't want to have to map things out, and even when they do the game often becomes about as fun as tracing a path through a maze on the back of a cereal box.

To that end, I'd say you should put something at every "fork" in the maze that can guide the players down the right path, some sort of challenge. This can be a riddle, some sort of skill check, a trap, a fight, just about anything. For example, the PCs might come across a "Stone Wall" trap. If they successfully disable it, they can tell which path it would have blocked off, and take it. If they trigger it, they set it off and it blocks the quick path, forcing them to take the long way around. At the next fork, perhaps a Survival or Knowledge Nature check can figure out the correct path, while failure will send them to a dead end. A third path might be guarded by monsters, who will tell the players which way to go if they're conquered but not killed.

Second, consider the most famous maze in Fantasy, the Labyrinth of Crete. It had a particular guardian, a Minotaur eager to kill anyone who wandered it. Adding a similar threat to your maze can create a real sense of tension. This could be as simple as a high level monster stalking the group, or a spell that's coming after them. Or if you wanted to get real creative, maybe a party of Evil Adventurers is also trying to get through the maze, to pledge loyalty to the creatures who created the maze, and the PCs have to get through first in order to deal with the threat before they're reenforced.

This sort of goes back to the most basic acting question there is. What's her motivation? We all want things, obviously, and most people even with unlimited power, will go for petty things first. I assume there's a guy, or perhaps multiple guys she has a crush on. If she finds out that people obey her every command, I'd bet a crush is the first person she'd go to, and depending on her personality, she might bag herself a new boyfriend, or a harem. She might soon find that easy love is unsatisfying, or she might very much enjoy her new status.

From there, just figure out what she wants, and why she wants it. Does she have family she wants to set up? A rival she wants to destroy for petty reasons? You mentioned her not liking the nation's leaders, but unless she has ambitions to actually rule, I'd think she's more likely to threaten or black mail them then just kill them, or use enchantment magic to make them change their mind to agree with her.

But why are you throwing such a powerful character at the party? What purpose does she serve to them? She's way too powerful to be an antagonist, you said yourself you need an excuse for her not to just vaporize them. She's too powerful to be manipulated by the group, or at any rate, if she is she can probably solve any problem they have for them. And what will she want from the group? If there's a wizard in the party, she might seek him out for advice on using her powers since she's inexperienced. If one of the player characters is especially attractive, she might mind control him and require rescue. But I really don't see the need for such a powerful character to be in the campaign at all.

Hello everyone. I've DMed a lot of 3.5 in my time, but I don't have a lot of experience with Pathfinder. I just started a pretty casual game as a player, and was looking for a little friendly advice on Multiclassing. The campaign leans a lot more towards RP and story telling then it does combat, but when a fight does break out, the DM doesn't pull any punches. I've been on a Japanese mythology kick lately, so I decided to play a Samurai, and since my DM really dislikes Animal Companions and swords are cool, I decided to throw him a bone and went Sword Saint as well. As I said, we're more familiar with 3.5 as a group, so we decided to roll for stats instead of point buy, and I rolled stupid good for stats, which means among other things, I have more skill points then I really need as a Samurai, enough that I've taken ranks in "Profession Caligrophy" for simple flavor purposes, even though its almost certainly never going to come up.

Anyway, the game has been great so far, but its very much based in a city, and the PCs are basically cops. This means most of our foes thus far have been enemies we don't want to kill. In addition, due to Sword Saint's Iajutsu Strike requiring my character's sword to be sheathed, I havn't been pulling it out very often. Enemy NPCs have been doing a lot of things that would provoke attacks of opportunity from me, but without my sword drawn I havn't been able to make them, so I was considering taking Improved Unarmed Strike as my feat at third level. But then one of the other players who's a little more min-max oriented than me suggested I just take a level in Unchained Monk instead.

I don't normally like Multiclass characters, but it seems like a good idea. As far as I can tell, all I lose out on is a single hit point (Since Samurai is my favored class) and potentially the Samurai capstone ability. Last Stand is really really cool, but its not likely that this campaign is going to get to level 20 anyway. In exchange, I get Improved Unarmed Strike like I wanted, plus Stunning Fist which should help take down opponents our party doesn't want to kill, Perception as a class skill, a +2 bonus to reflex saves, Combat Reflexes, which should help even when I'm not using unarmed strikes, and improved damage while unarmed. Not to mention Flurry of Blows and the Monk's AC Bonus, neither of which our likely to come up a lot, but they aren't bad to have.

Is there some major downside to a one level dip in Monk that I'm just not seeing?