As I've said on the forums before, I'm not switching to 2e because I have enough APs and other Pathfinder adventures to DM into my early 90s. We were late to Pathfinder (stayed on 3.5 for something like 17 years), so all the 1e APs are still popular with my group.
I am an early riser (04:30 am) so on game nights, which run 7:30 - 10:30 pm, I am way past my bed time at end of game. So my transition is to proceed directly to bed. :-)
Does WotR allow Downtime? Not the way our DM is running it, but we've got 5 players and a cohort so he's amping up the encounters and generally working hard to keep things challenging. Our party has had zero time to craft anything and we're almost to the end of the second book.
My 8th level halfling ranger has the manyshot and rapid shot feats, which means during a full round action I can fire 4 arrows, or 5 if hasted. 5 arrows per round means I go through 20 arrows in just 4 rounds. In WotR, we just fought a battle with multiple demons and multiple summoned demons, which took us 4 game sessions (3 hours each) to resolve. At the end, I had remaining 3 cold iron arrows (started with 60), 10 bludgeoning arrows (started with 20), and 3 normal arrows (started with 30). If combat had lasted 3 rounds longer, I would have been out. I actually would have been out during that combat, but a demon used telekinesis to (just barely) succeed in wrenching my bow out of my hand a few times, so I had to spend time retrieving it, so not all of my rounds were a full-round attack.
X 1000 :-)
I get it since people usually can't play ap every single week and sometimes they have monthly schedules or such(aps take about 40-60 sessions depending on several factors), but I'm confused when some people apparently take multiple years to complete weekly ap campaign. Like does lot of time go to combat, do parties roleplay every single scene in extreme detail, out of character chatter and planning, homebrew scenes, etc? In my experience even when players roleplay a lot, aps take about a year. Maybe we're just slow with combat, but our combats sometimes take weeks to finish. We're in book two of WotR right now, and we're in our fourth game session of a single combat (granted, with bad guy reinforcements coming at us in waves). We play about 50 times per year but our sessions are only 3 hours in length...maybe that is the difference. Not sure how long everyone else plays for.
I'm amazed at people finishing an AP in 10-15 months. I've been running Jade Regent since 2012. Castle Whiterock (I know, not a Pathfinder AP) took us the longest of any campaign, from 2007 to 2012. Otherwise, we're about 2 years per campaign but we do play about 50 times per year.
We're trying to wrap up Book 2 of Wrath of the Righteous by December (I'm a player), then we're going to finish Rappan Athuk aka tpk (I'm DM), then we'll start Curse of the Crimson Throne (I'm DM). After 1-2 books of CotCT we'll start alternating WotR and CotCT book by book. Or at least that is the current plan.
We are currently doing Wrath of the Righteous, and we don't have a rogue. No one wanted to play one. So I (the halfling ranger) have been taking points in disable device, but of course that doesn't help with magical traps. What our DM did was decide to add a feature to Trapspringer’s Gloves that permits the wearer to detect/disable magical traps. It still means I have to devote a lot of skill points in order to be effective, but it essentially got our group around the need for a rogue (I just hit 8th level and just found a pair of these gloves, so it isn't like I've had this ability since level 1). Also from what he's told us, WotR isn't a magical trap heavy AP (but there must be some or he wouldn't have given us a way around not having a rogue). :-)
I think about this every time I go on a hike. What I'd give for cantrips that 1) Keep the insects away; 2) Filter UV light so I don't burn; 3) Maintain a comfy 68 degrees and low humidity for my person; 4) shield me from the rain. And around the house, something that would pull all the weeds out of my flowerbeds, water everything automatically, repel bad insects animals that eat my plants, etc.
We are on hiatus until I transfer the game from actual table to Foundry VTT. We have missed soooo many game sessions that could have been if we had VTT instead, so I am taking the dive. We're now 21 years playing remotely. Although almost all of us were in one place in the 90s, we're now in TX, NJ, NoVA, VA, and Toronto.
We already had the cost of switching from 1ED&D to 2E, 3.0 and 3.5, plus the switch to PF1...(and the dabble into 4.0 and 5e) and quite frankly we're tired of the extra cost, so we're very happy for now and have no intention of spending that kind of money again. Exactly! But add Basic/Expert in front of 1e. :-)
For me, honestly, as we just switched from almost 20 years of 3.0/3.5 to Pathfinder ~5 years ago, and as it take us (playing pretty much once per week) about 2-3 calendar years to get through an entire AP, and the fact that I have 11 un-played APs on my shelves (plus another 3 or 4 in Fantasy Grounds), plus all the Dungeon magazines I own, I'm looking at a minimum of 40 years of material I already own...enough to last me into my mid-90s. And that is just for games I DM...I also swap out with another player the DM duties so I can play every few years. At this point, I've pretty much bought all the Pathfinder v1 material I'm going to buy. I just don't need any more. Maybe if I'd been playing v1 since it came out, and had already burned through all the v1 stuff I'd be looking for more material to stay with v1. But that just isn't my situation. Maybe I'm in the minority, but maybe not.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Castles_of_the_Inner_Sea And also Curse of the Crimson Throne.
I don't know how people get through adventure paths so fast, do people not add entire sidequests and adventures tailored to their PCs throughout the AP? That tracks...we play weekly but only for 3 hours, and we get through an AP in 2-3 years.
And I also would talk to the players and let them know that when they agree to play a pre-written adventure, that they may have to sacrifice total freedom of their PCs in order to keep the story basically on track. If NPCs are giving them story hooks, they shouldn't fight against it. This. Exactly this. When we started Rappan Athuk one of the players joked, "What happens if we just don't decide to explore the dungeon?" MY answer was, "We decided as a group to play Rappan Athuk so you're going in that dungeon." When you've all agreed to play an AP, the players have to give up 100% total player agency.
Because we switched from 3.5 to Pathfinder just a few years ago, we are new to all the adventure paths. We were doing a campaign I cobbled together from Adventure a Week when we transitioned to Pathfinder, and when that wrapped up we started Rappan Athuk. But one of the players is taking us through Wrath of the Righteous right now to provide me a chance to play (and a break from Rappan Athuk), and after a brief return to Rappan Athuk to finish up this December, I'm going to take the group through Curse of the Crimson Throne next. But I've got enough APs to last years and years, and as long as they are available under Fantasy Grounds to minimize my prep time, we'll keep working our way through them. We have zero plans to switch to Pathfinder 2.0...after all, we were on 3.5 for something like 17 years.
Hummmmmm...I downloaded the latest beta (or pre-release or whatever they call it) months ago for the PC and had no issues. It has probably been a year or more since I downloaded the current release. Not sure why it isn't working for you.
Hummmmmm...I downloaded the latest beta (or pre-release or whatever they call it) months ago for the PC and had no issues. It has probably been a year or more since I downloaded the current release. Not sure why it isn't working for you.
I use PCGen, which is free.
I made this sort of thing work once, and not work once. The time it worked (3.5e), the character's backstory was that he was a 20th level wizard who was part of a group of wizards of all alignments (the Circle of Magi). The evil wizards framed him for the murder of one of the wizards, magically stripped him of his powers, and turned him out into the wild as an old man (~60 years old). The character took all the age penalties and started over as a 1st level wizard, collected a group of adventures, and spent the campaign slowly (and secretly) building up power and influence so he could confront his accusers at the very end of the campaign in an epic battle that resulted in his death, along with the deaths of the conspirators. It was a cool concept that provided a story arc for the entire campaign. The time it didn't work one of my players wanted a character who for some backstory demigod-like reason stole a piece of the soul of every thing he killed, giving him access to some of their memories and the ability to speak with their voice. This was literally decades ago (2e), and I let him go forward with these abilities, but I was never able to really make it work in game as it really didn't fit well into the campaign (IIRC I was combining Against the Slave Lords and Against the Giants). Eventually he just dropped those abilities from the character and we just ignored that part of his backstory.
Not that anyone probably does this in an actual game, but red light would have an advantage in that deep red lights do not trigger the neutralization of rhodopsin, allowing night vision to continue. So if your (red) light spell gets neutralized (or expires), as long as there is some dim light the party wouldn't be temporarily blinded as their night vision would be intact. Otherwise, the party could experience several rounds of blindness if their (non-Red) light is suddenly extinguished (think of turning off the bathroom light in the middle of the night and then trying to get back to bed).
We have 2 Pathfinder v1 campaigns currently underway. I'm DMing Rappan Athuk, and we are about to hit our 100th session. This is our first pure Pathfinder campaign, as the one prior was a hybrid of 3.5/Pathfinder. RA characters are 17th level and rapidly approaching the end. We've all grown a bit tired of that campaign, so we're skipping lots of levels / side-quests and focused on the levels that are needed to get to the end. The same group is also playing Wrath of the Righteous, but I'm playing and one of the Rappan Athuk players is DM. We're at 4th level, having just finished "book 1" of the AP. We took a break from Rappan Athuk back in November 2020 to start WotR and then picked back up with Rappan Athuk in May 2021. Haven't decided how far we'll go in RA before switching back to WotR. Once RA is over, I'm planning to DM Curse of the Crimson Throne. We'll probably rotate between WotR and CofCT every 6 months or so. We play over Fantasygrounds, with Discord for voice and out-of-game communication. We've been playing virtually essentially since the start of 2002, which is shortly after I moved away from the group. Now only 2 of us remain from that original group, and the current players are more spread out geographically (New Jersey, Virginia, Texas, and Ontario) so we'll be virtual forever.
I suspect it's less that 2E killed it, and more that most questions have been answered and much advice given, so there's a bit less to talk about. Obviously there are no new Paizo 1e products and no 1e APs, so that's reduced it. As someone who moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder only in the past few years, this statement seems very likely. All of it is pretty new to me, so I see posts all the time where I'm interested in the discussion and then see that the original post was from 2012 or some other way back time. But my question is already answered in the discussion so there is no need for me to pile on. Another example...I'm going to run my players through Curse of the Crimson Throne once we wrap up Rappan Athuk, and I've been reading the AP material here. But I haven't posted anything because most questions are asked and already answered.
It's not logic. It's how pathfinder writes the rules. You asked the question, 3 out of 4 responses say RAW mean no penalty.
For me, it is a time thing. I used to knit together a series of adventure from Dungeon, writing some filler or side quests to tie everything together into a story arc, But these days between kids, house maintenance, work, boat maintenance, and life in general (and playing virtually) I just don’t have the time. If I couldn’t get ready-to-play APs for FantasyGrounds I might not be playing at all.
(Started this post but fumbled on the keyboard and I think I erased it). I started with Basic in 1980 or so, and gradually moved on until 2003 when we went to 3.5. We stayed in Forgotten Realms/3.5 until around 2017, when we were on an Adventure-a-Week "adventure path" and suddenly the modules were only available for Pathfinder on FantasyGrounds (we've been playing virtually since 2001). So we did a bit of a hybrid until 2018 when we went full-pathfinder. I thought for a while about trying to use the Forgotten Realms setting with Pathfinder (we'd been on FR since 1990), but we were trying to minimize DM prep time in FantasyGrounds by buying ready-made APs. So starting late last year when we started Wrath of the Righteous we went full-Pathfinder, including the Pathfinder setting. Because we were on 3.5 for SO many years, and because we'd just started using Pathfinder 1 when 2 was announced, we're not moving to Pathfinder 2 anytime soon (if ever). I believe I have enough 1.0 material to run campaigns until...well, until the end. ;-)
I was gonna be snarky, but yeah, you need the table's buy in or risk hard feelings. I confess, I'm a little surprised at the reaction to my story. Maybe it is because at that point the players had all known each other for 10+ years, or maybe it was the trust they had in me as a DM not to railroad their characters, or maybe the twist was too good for them to be mad, or for whatever reason while their characters were mad at that character, the players were not mad at that player (or at me!). And again, nothing was done to the other characters apart from losing a portion of the treasure that, if the alignment had never been discovered, would have gone to that character regardless as his fair portion of the party treasure. Everything past that point was just another NPC working against the party, albeit one with more details on the party members than a typical antagonist.
In games I've played, familiars who are common for the climate / location don't usually attract negative attention / attacks from the bad guys. An owl scouting ahead outside, a rat scouting inside a dungeon, a cat scouting inside a barn...these are unlikely to get attacked/killed. It can get a little trickier if the Owl is in the dungeon, the rat is in someone's home, the cat is in a temple. Even in those cases, I don't think they would automatically result in an attack...it might depend on the intelligence of what spots them. A wizard in a dungeon might see an owl and think "familiar / animal companion" and attack, but I'm not sure the average Orc / Goblin / etc. would...they might be confused but that confusion wouldn't necessarily lead to an immediate attack. In summary, at low levels, (pre-Invisibility), the party is likely to be facing low-level and/or low-intelligence enemies that wouldn't necessarily see all familiars as an immediate threat.
I am going to disagree slightly with ShroudedInLight, in that if the GM and the player handle it well I'm not sure you need to coordinate with the rest of the players. Here is a typically really long example from me: I had a player once who was joining a party/campaign in progress and asked me (as GM) if he could play Lawful Evil. We had a discussion around if that would mean doing anything negative / traitorous to the party, which I was firmly against. As the character's intro to the group was going to involve them rescuing him, he said he'd play the Lawful component strongly - he'd be in their debt, he'd agree to work with them, and therefore he'd not have any reason to work against the group. So I permitted it. At some point, one of the party members got suspicious due to some of his comments (like what to do with captured prisoners) and without permission or discussion cast detect alignment on him, which was noticed. So the evil character pulled the mage aside and essentially told him to mind his own business and not say anything to anyone else in the party. Of course, the mage told a couple of party members. To make a long story even longer, the evil character decided this violated the oral contract the party made with him, and while on watch one night he stole what he felt was his fair portion of the current party treasure and abandoned the group (and to his credit, it was a fair portion of the treasure). The other players were pissed at the character (but not the player or me...they thought it was an interesting and unexpected twist). The player had to leave the group at this point (returned to university for the fall), so I had his evil character join the bad guys working against the party. As an NPC he made for a terrific re-occurring foil to the group, and in the end he was defeated in the final, difficult battle. In summary, after the initial shock of the "reveal" that he was evil, the group had a fantastic reaction to trying to beat him throughout the rest of the campaign and it made the final battle even more cool for them. If we'd pre-cleared this with the players, I don't think it would have had the same effect, nor would have been such a cool reveal.
Kere - Is this the same guy you discussed in a thread back in October last year? Or is this a different person? I ask because there seems to be some commonalities between those two but there also seem to be differences in what you are describing.
In one of my games decades ago (2e) the rogue was at the back of the party and while they were occupied with a small battle he snuck down a hallway they had not explored yet, found a secret door, and without telling anyone snuck inside and closed it with the goal of keeping any treasure he found for himself (essentially stealing from the party). He picked THE WORST room to enter alone. It had continuous darkness and continuous silence on it and a specter "living" there. The rogue was killed and the party characters never knew what happened to him as they never found that door. The group found it hilarious.
One way to "fix" this perceived problem is to apply the same rule that affects Dimension Door: "After using this spell, you can’t take any other actions until your next turn." So they can pop into the middle of a party, but the party has a chance to react (e.g. readied actions go off) before the baddie can act. That lets them keep their "get out of jail free" card, but makes popping into the middle of an adventuring party a bit more risky.
The author is very responsive if you email him directly through the email address on the generator web page.
We've been playing virtually since 2001 when I moved out of Virginia (without video...just a VTT and audio). It is easier to get distracted when you are just in front of a computer, waiting for your initiative to come up (for example). It is frustrating to get to a player and have them either want to do something that was already tried and failed, want to do something that was possible when they took their last action but is no longer possible, or ask the same question that the previous player just asked and had answered. Essentially, not paying attention is a faux pas...and it is super-easy when playing virtually to not pay attention. Harder when everyone is looking at you.
I agree...I think I'd probably house-rule this and not permit it to be used while "in the shop"...but this specific situation has never come up in my games...probably because I used to enforce down-time for training / upgrades (1 day per new level, maximum of 14 days), so no-one was ever trying to upgrade an item while adventuring. I think training time was a hold-over from 2e, regardless, I recently dropped that requirement so it is more likely this situation will come up in my games.
It has multiple editions for different D&D versions, including Pathfinder, and the final battle is pretty much impossible, even if the party does all the "weakening" steps outlined throughout (without those there is a 100% chance of a TPK at the end). Module name: Rappan Athuk
Coins. I guess that isn't really weird. Also have used dice before.
As you can see, we stuck with 3.0/3.5 for a very long time, and I plan to stick with Pathfinder 1 for a very long time. These are all the campaigns I've DM'd (or occasionally played in) since my University days. I edited this to fix the horrific formatting my original post had. Campaign/Party, Dates Played, Version Damage, Inc., 1990-1992, 1/2
Oh, and I should add, almost all games have been virtual since late 2001 when I moved out of Virginia. First with a webcam and NetMeeting, then with Screen Monkey, and finally with FantasyGrounds.
I would definitely buy adventures: APs, modules or scenarios I second that!! I don't need more first edition rule books, but adventures, adventure paths, and scenarios would be great.
1. I saw "Niteshade" somewhere back in ~1991 when I was creating a Good Necromancer under 2e in Forgotten Realms and thought it would make a cool character name. I have no idea where I stole the name from...that was a really long time ago. 2. I played Niteshade in 2e, and he returned to adventuring in someone else's hands in 3.0, when I DMd the Bloodstone Lands series of modules. As a result of those adventures, he became the Chief Counsel to the player character who became King of the Bloodstone Lands (hence "High Lord"). He is still in that role in my home-brew version of Forgotten Realms (which is now played under Pathfinder 1.0 rules) and occasionally puts in an appearance as a plot point. But he is retired from adventuring. 3. N/A 4. USA
Really loving all the advice so far. I'll throw this out there in case it helps you or anyone else. I've posted my Session Zero document for my current campaign. (Hopefully it is accessible...I've had issues trying to share stuff before.) Couple of quick points...before the current campaign we played a 3.5/PFv1 hybrid as we transitioned mid-campaign, hence the rules that may seem obvious to PFv1 players but I had to spell-out as part of our final transition over to Pathfinder. Also, we'd been in Forgotten Realms for decades, and for Rappan Athuk I decided to make the setting a generic setting, hence all the items about Forgotten Realms. Hopefully this helps at least someone.
My suggestions are not specific to Pathfinder but more general, so if you are only looking for PF1-specific guidance skip the rest of what I've written below. I recommend if you have any house rules / table rules that you go over those. Everything from how food/beverage/clean-up is handled during the game to the leveling-up process (e.g., do you require in-game training time, can folks level-up in the middle of a game). If it is a group that hasn't played with you, some information on the type of game you run...do you focus on the rules-as-written? Rules-as-intended? The "Rule of Fun" that has been discussed on these boards? How willing are you to listen to dissention on a ruling, and for how long? I think the key item is no surprises...for you or for them. I usually put together a document with the campaign background, character creation/leveling up rules, and house/table rules.
After 35 years of gaming and spending tons of money on new editions and their material, just before PF2e hit the shelves, my group, most of us anyway, decided we'd draw our line in the sand with PF1e. Same. We were on 3.0/3.5 for something like 17 years and finally moved to PF1 because the Adventure-a-Week series we were campaigning in stopped being 3.5 part-way through and was just available on FantasyGrounds for Pathfinder. So we spent the $$ to move to PF1...and of course, PF2 came out something like 12 months later. I played my first D&D game in 1980 (if my math is right) and don't have it in me to move to another version after we as a group committed to PF1. And, quite frankly, I have enough material now to run PF1 campaigns until I am permanently retired. ;-)
This is really nice picture. Cool! Thank you! Make sense? Yeah, my picture breaks down for a couple of things like AoO and delaying. I was starting to think about how those might fit into that picture but too many higher priority things to do right now (like my actual job). ;-)
There was a permissions problem with my first link.
I'm just surprised nobody has mad a joke about enforcing age penalties on this thread. As someone born in the late 60s I resemble that remark...
I've always enforced starting age, with one exception. Back in 2001 I had a player who came up with a backstory where his wizard was 20th level and a member of a 20th level wizard organisation balanced across alignments (2 representatives from each alignment) who was framed for a crime by some of the evil members (who wanted to turn the organization to evil). The organization then stripped of his magic and relevant memories, and exiled him. So his character was in his early 60s and starting over as a first level wizard. And I did make him apply the ability score impacts of that age (actually, he offered before I could even tell him to do it). The entire campaign was his character trying to regain his power so he could return to that organization, clear his name, and turn that group back to neutral (or possibly even good). It was the one and only time that I used a single character's backstory to build the main thread of an entire campaign.
That's funny because I think monsters with levels were possible.I don't know about 1e, but it was sort of possible in both BECMI and 2e. We were playing a pretty straight 2e in Forgotten Realms, so to the best of my recollection (it has been 20+ years) it was either not possible or extremely uncommon...at least with "standard" Forgotten Realms. Or maybe it was one of those things I ignored until I determined I could surprise the players with it. ;-)
Wishing you great success! I am a huge fan of Forgotten Realms, and I've been mostly running (but occasionally playing) in a series of Forgotten Realms campaigns since 2e/1990. I used the Apocalypse Stone module to "upgrade" the campaign world to 3.0 in 2001 (and later we upgraded to 3.5 on the fly without such a literal ground-shaking event). We finally moved partially to Pathfinder in 2016 (playing a 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid) and then completely to Pathfinder (v1) in 2018. Back in the late 90s we took our old college characters through the Bloodstone Lands series of modules (starting with Bloodstone Pass), and they now rule the reunited Kingdoms of Damara and Vassa as the Kingdom of the Bloodstone Lands. And in that Kingdom is where all subsequent campaigns have taken place (except for our current campaign, Rappan Athuk, which I've placed outside of Forgotten Realms). Which is all just a very wordy way of saying that I really love Forgotten Realms and am sitting on a crap-load of FR material dating all they way back to Second Edition.
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