Keshori Sadhil Saatatya's page

For RoTL go with a classic D&D archetype, nothing too fussy. It's got a really cool old-skool feel to it, and the basic core classes with no archetypes-- we're finding-- are doing really well.

We have 10 players. For the love of God, don't do what our GM did for the Skulls and Shackles campaign. He looked on the forums and it was suggested for him to just double everything and give it the advanced template. We died so often, and we were a party of min-maxers. It was awful.

My boyfriend is running the RotR campaign and is taking my advice from running a 12 person Jade Regent:

First of all, do act XP. Giant time-saver, and we house rule that if you miss a session when we level, you have to be present for three consecutive sessions until you level to party level.

Do a 2-part session: RP phase and fighting phase, therefore everyone has a time to shine and can glaze over stuff their character sucks at.

I tended to blend encounters by drawing a big square the size of the map with terrain features and ran it kind of like Mad Moxxie's Thunderdome from Borderlands. A room with four goblins can safely be blended with a room of three oni. Just take note of how well the party does, and roll behind a screen if necessary to avoid TPK until you find out what works for your party.

Add in WAVES of enemies. When I ran Jade Regent, that's what I did and the waves were pretty effective. Oh, the encounter is a stone giant? When the party finishes killing him, they have two rounds to heal everyone and position themselves before seven Hobbs are going to come in.

For things like the haunted house in book 2, do a RP walkthrough of everything (screw the map for this) and let them find treasure that way after the Thunderdome challenge, and in each room that there was a fight, narrate it the way it went in the fight.

I say let them keep the animal companions, but at a diminished level, maybe -1 or -2 level and ban the truly terrifying ones.

Definitely rule out summoners, they have too many weird rules to deal with.

Only allow inquisitors for advanced players, they have a lot of stuff to deal with every turn, like their judgements and such.

Make sure that any casters have printed out spell cards, or at the very least their OWN book, and any spell they cast needs to have either a book or printout.

Ban Herolab. We used to have 4 people in our group use it. It's unwieldy to look things up, half the things in there are wrong if you don't input it JUST SO, and they'll get distracted by tablets and labtops, their turns will take forever.

If they whine, make them print out their character sheet but leave the tech in their bags until the RP phase.

Everyone had a ton of fun and it was still very organized.

I don't see law as MAKING others do the same. Because that's actually more kind of evil than anything. Law/chaos is more structure/unstructure than anything.

Organizing people into guilds and setting up a democracy within the structure is an example of lawmaking. You can do that as LE, NE, and LG... depending on how votes are cast.

Law- you must think outside yourself for the betterment of the whole
neutral- you care about yourself and your own
chaos- screw the whole picture, I'm an individual snowflake

It's a great idea, though.

My pc's HATE the caravan stuff. Its boring. One person gets to roll attacks and security for the caravan and everyone else sits around bored. I nixed it because people loved the NPC's ( a lot of liberties were taken with their personalities because they got shunted aside developmentwise in this book) and the rp/battles but the travel sequence was awful.

As a DM: Please make the maps Black & White print-friendly, please. My local Staple's is getting a lot of money out of me for printing the color maps out for my PDF's because when printed in B&W, I can't see a dang thing and end up winging the maps for the players so it just looks like blobs on the playmat.

As a player: For the love of Sarenrae.... PLEASE let us replay pathfinder society scenarios is the biggest one I can think of. I do a lot of local conventions and store meets for PFS and I see the SAME mods being offered time and time and time again, and I didn't spend money to go to a con to "play for funsies" and not get credit for my time and cash! I want to level my characters and be a Hero! That's what PFS is about!

I understand Knowledge: Metagame is a hard thing to work around, but honestly, if people are going to cheat at Pathfinder (sad though it it) they're going to cheat if they play the mod once or 50 times, and the lack of replay only hurts those who love PFS the most.

Also, more ranks for Pathfinder organizers would be great incentive to get more involved. I play A LOT but I know I'd dm more if I actually had some responsibilities to the area as a upstanding member of the hierarchy instead of just a disgruntled home-game GM who just wants to play for once. I'm sure the Lieutenants and the Captains wouldn't mind more support, either.

Warhorn.net and set up a reoccurring game day.

All the "old guard" of players/GM'S who are jonesing to play/gm again use it, you'll attract a LOT of competent GM's that way.

It's the best way to set up meets for games, too, because of the ability to call dibs on playing at a certain table, which other sites don't have.

x.x I hope the Advanced Races will be PFS legal... it'll sell more copies if it will be.

What's the point of buying a 30-50 dollar book to NOT be able to use the material at conventions...?

"Oh, you can use it on home games."

...and I also allow d&d 3.5 feats in moderation at home games, but I'm not buying any new D&D books to use them at home.

Need to keep up the nerd cred levels and show off the shiny books at cons. >.<

For race? Dwarves. Hands down.

I've got to be one of the only women that love dwarves, judging by the picture content on google.com when searching "dwarven female" Their fluff is awesome: lawful, skilled and family-oriented but stubborn as heck and slow to adapt.

I'm playing a Dwarf Bard in a game, and love her personality (the power gamer in me cries at the 14 CHA score, but she's just SO COOL.) She's not Scottish at all, I made her more Beowulf, I guess and went the Viking route. They make good druids, too. I made a Whack-a-Mole dwarf druid that had a crocodile companion and used shillelagh on a size large club. Fun times. She was very Redneck(5 CHA) but my team loved her healing and face-beating qualities.

My favorite class is cleric. (which dwarves kinda of suck at now that they're more CHA based) The PFS powers they get (Travel domanin FOREVER) are great incentive to play them over 3.0 and 4.0 D&D. I have a high-level PFS human cleric of Irori that owns at battlefield control with the Inevitable subdomain and a 26 WIS. Clerics are always welcome at any table, but they can be hard to make if you don't go pure caster. I've seen a lot of horribly made "battle cleric" ones, but since they heal, nobody minded at all. xD

Also: GNOME FIGHTER. The two-hander greatweapon kind. ADD (got distracted by bugs in the middle of combats) and hits HARD, even moreso than the human caviler did, even with being size small. All travel-sized for everyone's convienience-- someone tossed him at a baddie and the fighter smushed him. And made of awesome.

That sounds like @$$hattery on the DM part to me.

I agree with Bruunwald, players shouldn't make rolls they don't know about, but as a DM, I tend to assign my players colors that were established at the beginning of the campaign arc and roll behind the screen, then lift the screen to show I'm not fudging. (My boyfriend tends to have max ranks in Knowledge: Metagame)

If I see my players using Knowledge: Metagame, I throw terrifying monsters with multiple crazy templates at them, then when they apologize, I take it away, but make them suck the hit point loss and tell them tough cookies.

Then I give them a cool but (mostly) useless item to reward their lack of metagaming if they don't do it for a few sessions.

I'm also probably too nice, because I refuse to kill ANY pc within the first book and a half of an adventure path.

Perhaps send him a link to this thread for ideas?