Hi
Alright so I'm new to Pathfinder, though I've played DnD a bunch of times both as player and GM in the past and I've decided to pick it up again using a premade game (Haunting of Harrowstone) for the first time. So far it's been going alright, but my party of 6 players is composed almost exclusively of curious and unlikely players that are new to the whole RPG thing... they've never played dnd, but they're pretty willing to learn (though reluctant to do any "nerd" stuff like speaking in character or over analyzing)and have been pretty thankful of the work I've done for them. In short, they're enjoying themselves... up til now.
My problem seems to rest on many issues, so bear with me, because I want to give you a good idea of what's going on. They started exploring the haunted prison last session and I had a pretty hard time to manage the whole thing.
I'm used to make my own adventures and I usually spend little time doing "dungeon explorations" on lengthy periods of times (like whole sessions). Since they're new and I kept telling them they can proceed pretty much however they want, they decided to go pretty much separate ways. I tried numerous times (in vain) to make them understand how this game works, meaning how they need to act as their character logically would... that means being cautious and making the distinction between what they know as a player and as a character (they can't instinctively know their friends are in danger and such).
Anyway,so they went separate ways on separate floors and, as I had to try to be detailed and immersive when I told them what they stumbled upon, each turn quickly turned out to be going way to slowly, especially for the characters that stumbled upon less interesting stuff. So to speed things up I spent less time being descriptive and also I skipped a bunch of haunts (that I find terribly boring) and modified some encounters like animated objects that I found too corny. But as I was doing that, I didn't have time to replace the haunts I was getting rid of, so the first floor turned into a huge empty husk. As the whole thing seemed to turn out like a huge boring prison, the players quickly took to misuse (in my interpretation) the perception skill, basically just saying they make a perception roll in ANY room they entered for "anything unusual" in general after I describe the room with what I consider to be obvious details. The point being I don't want them making perception rolls at every turn, sometimes twice a turn, leaving me with blank stares whenever I tell them they don't see anything out of the ordinary in general. They either think their roll wasn't high enough when it was, or that I'm not being fair if they get a high roll and there's nothing to be found. I also tell them to be more specific when they want to make a perception roll, to little avail as they always find their way back to just saying "I dunno, something unusual" whenever I ask them what they're looking for exactly or where are they investigating in the room.
So with them going around in every direction, asking to find unspecific "unusal" detail,I quickly got overwhelmed. I started flipping through the adventure book's pages to detail the rooms, draw the thing on their map and help them through their actions (they don't know most of the rules the first time they try using it, at my request usually). This had me skipping and forgetting a lot of things, which in turn had them scatter around more as nothing too bad was happening. The wizard did stumble upon 2 encounters, but as he's new, he used his most powerful spells right away on small encounters that would have required the rest of the players to vanquish, forcing them to group up.
As things got out of control for me, two players ventured too far ahead and were nearly killed (they were incapacitated for at least 1 hour in the result) by an encounter that they persisted in trying to handle on their own, telling the rest of the players that they were going to be fine.
The whole thing turned out to be quite boring for 4 of the 6 players who only got to do usually inconclusive perception rolls and frustrating for 2 players that were "cheaply" removed from the action. And from the perspective of a GM, the whole thing was a disaster, with players sighing, rolling eyes, playing games on their phone, etc.
So obviously, I will make notes for the next game (I'm used to wing things through with very good effect or so I've been told and proved, I guess, as I converted several people to the game through the years)so I don't have to search for the information I need AND for the details of every action they attempt.
But this being said I'm having a hard time with dungeon exploration. So my questions are the following:
1) How to you handle turns during this phase of the game? I tried to stick to the combat round format with 1 standard action and 1 move.
2) How do you manage the perception skill during dungeon exploration?
3) Do you usually try to force this kind of group to stick together or do you allow them to roam around and if you do, how do you manage simultaneous combats and such?
3) How do you keep things going smoothly and interesting without having to speed things up too much?
