RPG Superstar 6 Season Star Voter. Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 188 posts (194 including aliases). 3 reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 22 Organized Play characters. 1 alias.
My main issue with Hero Lab Online is that it requires network connectivity. At least some of the cons I attend are in cellular data dead zones and provide no wifi. That makes Hero Lab Online a non-starter.
What do the players want? I play PFS for the ability to play with different people, take a character I like anywhere I go, and the flexibility to miss games without missing plot. For linear play, I either look to cons or home games.
I'm GMing a group of 5 teenagers (including my daughter) plus my wife.
Daniel Vance - human cleric of Milani
Flint - halfling wolf druid, former slave
Dirt Nap - half-orc skulking slayer (racial rogue archetype)
Splinter - ratfolk monk (and yes, he is)
Benigna - halfling rogue, former slave
Hawk - human bard, modeled after Han Solo
The entire party is CN or CG with the exception of the monk. The half-orc, ratfolk, and bard, started a rat breeding scheme after the proclamations came out.
No, Nefreet, you do not have that right. In fact, it is against PFS rules.
Galahad0430, could you please cite the rule in question?
I believe it falls under the "Don't be a jerk" rule.
If you have a legal character in terms of build, level for scenario, additional resources, chronicle sheets, and inventory tracking sheets, how are you as a player violating any rule? The words "character sheet" only appears in a few places: multiple mentions of pregenerated characters, duties of the GM to look over character sheets, importance of reporting sessions for rebuilding lost character sheets. That's it.
The only context would be forum posts from campaign leadership that home games can restrict players however they want because they are on private property and that public venues need to be as public as possible save for problem players. The broad category of people using Hero Lab does not equate to problem players. Period. The problem player categories that relate to Hero Lab exist no matter what form a character sheet takes.
There are zero interpretations of the Guide that would allow a GM to ban players from their tables as a category of player because every citation against HeroLab is not unique to HeroLab, nor do I believe they are necessarily more agregrious or more frequent.
As for the spells and feats, the main problem is that herolab gives a print out of it, but it was incomplete, meaning that the player in question was given a false sense of being prepared for the game. Only to realize during the game that herolab gave him an incomplete description.
That's user error in my opinion. HeroLab gives two different options for outputting spells and feats. For feats and abilities, there is a checkbox to turn full descriptions on and off. Although it does truncate longer ones, but typically that's obvious because there's no period. For spells, there is a brief description printout version and a full rulebook printout version. I always do the full version for players that don't already know their spells from memory.
Secane wrote:
These were just an isolated case or two, most of the time using whatever 3rd party character sheet, your own personal excel sheet or herolab is fine. GMs could however be given a bad impression of a 3rd party character record system if it has errors often enough.
I believe that's exactly what I think is happening for most of the people against HeroLab. HeroLab is no worse than hand-done character sheets and is better in most cases, especially when used as a game-play aid.
Sorry to the Luddites, but there's going to be more mobile devices at your tables as time passes, not less.
System mastery is a terrible reason to use against HeroLab. Just the other day, I had to look up the mechanical effects of being dazzled while GMing an online game. When I'm playing, I get a really fast answer by looking at the condition in HeroLab and it adjusts all the appropriate places automatically. I don't think there's any way I could play my master chymist without HeroLab due to the variety of buffs and modifiers he has going all the time, typically four to eight different ones.
I pay close attention to how HeroLab works and what it's giving me for numbers. All the same mistakes that can happen with it are the same ones that can happen with a paper sheet.
I would simply not play with this VL or these GM's. If I had a player ask me as their GM to interpret the spell as they suggest, I would laugh at them and say, "Nice try!" As a GM using it on PC's, it is gray at best by their interpretation, and gray areas should generally be ruled in favor of the players due to this portion of the Guide:
The Guide wrote:
The leadership of this organized play community assumes that you will use common sense in your interpretation of the rules. This includes being courteous and encouraging a mutual interest in playing, not engaging in endless rules discussions. While you are enjoying the game, be considerate of the others at the table and don’t let your actions keep them from having a good time too. In short, don’t be a jerk.
Yay Mike! We are playing our level 4 ratfolk rogue and magus.
I'll play either my greed wizard 3 (transmutation) or oread occultist 3 (pretty good melee fighter for a couple more levels before full BAB classes pass him up).
Although now that I see that it features the Sovereign Court, I think my most likely character is my gnome fae sorcerer 5 in the Sovereign Court.
14. As a GM, you are there to facilitate a fun game for the players and yourself. If there's a gray area of rules, rule in favor of the players. ALWAYS. You are not the opponent.
I think this reinforces my thinking about improvisation skills to make this scenario good. I'm upping my earlier statement to be that if you can't improvise well, you shouldn't try to run the scenario.
Good GM improvisation means many things:
making up information on the fly that makes sense with the plot
recognizing when the PCs do or say something "close enough" to what was expected to trigger an event
creating NPCs or adding personalities that seem like they are part of the scenario
knowing some GM tricks to make improvising easier
One of the keys to improvising as a GM is listening to the players and using "yes, and" for their ideas. "Yes, and" is an improvisation trick where instead of negating the person who just spoke, you build on top of their idea. So if one of the PCs suggests that maybe Scenario X is what happened, try to make Scenario X the reality within the framework of the written scenario.
The reasoning is that "No" or "But" kills the story's progression and should be avoided as much as possible.
Player: "Maybe she's actually a demon pretending to hear the voice of Iomedae."
GM: "Yes, and there's even a rumor you've heard that she's actually a succubus."
Player: "The second victim had a family, I want to try to find them."
GM: "Great, you can roll a Diplomacy to gather information to see if you can find them."
... after successful roll and going to visit them ...
Player: "I am really sorry for your loss, ma'am, but I have to admit that I'm not sure that the Pathfinders are the ones who killed your husband."
GM: "Why does this matter to me? My husband is dead, whether he was killed by a demon, a bandit, or a group of scheming Pathfinders, he's still dead."
While exploring an ancient ruin trying to track down an evil overlord, we encounter some enslaved minions guarding an altar and a set of double doors. We try to talk our way passed them by telling them they were free to go. They didn't buy it and said we had to leave.
"Is your overload behind those doors over there?" I ask.
"No comment," say the minions.
"Okay, I guess we'll just leave then, see you later, " I say.
I step over to the rest of the party and cast Dimension Door to take us all just behind the doors. We see the BBEG across the room who is then hit by a full-round of attacks from the archer, a Blindness from me, and a Fireball from the sorcerer, killing him before he even gets to his initiative.
We open the doors behind us less than 6 seconds after disappearing, "Okay, NOW you can go."
The players arrive with no high physical damage or spell damage characters, none of them carries oil of bless weapon, and there's an encounter with all DR 10/good or cold iron creatures plus DR 10/good or cold iron incorporeal creatures.
I had Adivion (as simulacrum) appear at the funeral as well as a new NPC, an alchemist by the name of Dr. Jamison Kelly (Dr. Jekyll if the players realize later). Dr. Kelly came on behalf of Count Galdana who was unable to attend. A Sense Motive from the PCs revealed that Adivion was little disappointed at that information. Both are members of the Palatine Eye, and the PCs also picked up secret gestures between Kelly and Adivion.
Since this is a four-character group, I wanted to have NPCs around that the PCs could go to for help. This will include Kendra but also Dr. Kelly. I've also decided that Adivion is going to try to groom these PCs into allies. He will hear about their assistance with Harrowstone and investigation of Prof. Lorrimor's death, and he will send them each some special armor once they reach Lepidstadt as gifts. That armor will be the first step in his effort to turn the group into Graveknight body guards as well as keep an eye on them.
There's a pretty good chance they will get the book open on the Secret Order of the Palatine Eye, and I think this group will likely attribute the gifts to the Eye and not to something more nefarious.
If you have problems with players not paying attention to you as the GM, you have two options.
1) Don't repeatedly try to get their attention.
If you call their turn in initiative and they don't acknowledge you in 5 seconds, move to the next player. The same goes if you call for Perception, Knowledge checks, etc. If that doesn't bring them back to the table, you can also not repeat in-character details that you gave them while they weren't paying attention. If they complain, you can explain what you're doing.
2) Improve your GMing
RPGs like Pathfinder are pretty engaging until you get up above 5 or 6 players. There's always something for people to be doing while it's not necessarily their turn - looking up a rule, thinking about their next action, coordinating with other players, etc. If they are doing things outside the game while you are GMing, you should really think about what you are doing as GM at the table. Maybe you take too long to put combatants into initiative order. Maybe you aren't prepared enough to keep combat moving. Maybe your reading of box text puts people to sleep. The point is to look at yourself, too.
It's not correct to say that technology is solely to blame. Technology just gives another outlet when the mind is not otherwise engaged. If players are bored at your table, they will either be quietly bored or destructive to the game. University faculty are told the same thing when they think banning technology in their classroom or lecture hall will get their students to be more engaged. The truth is more often that they have never been engaging instructors, and technology has made it more obvious.
I have serious concerns about the first encounter. It would fit in Bonekeep, I think.
First encounter in Tier 6-7 discussion:
I'd like to hear how other parties faired in the first fight. We had two dead and one at zero after two rounds of actions by the clockwork soldiers near the top third of the order.
We were playing up, but two of the three were 6th and 7th level (5, 4, 4, 4 for the rest). The second death was due to a Shield Other on the 7th. There were also two crits involved: 3d10+39 each. One of those one-shotted the cleric with 22 AC. Invisibilities allowed the rest of the party to grab bodies and continue the scenario after raises at lower tier thanks to our generous GM (which was a cakewalk as expected).
Even without the crits, we couldn't imagine any parties coming away without at least one person dead or negative. Their to hits mean that even an AC 25 character is no better than 50% chance to avoid damage. The damage of 1d10+13 drops a 7th level barbarian in two or three rounds with little chance of being able to return the favor because of the very high CMB.
We compared them to Flesh Golems, and either Flesh Golems are over CR'd or these are under. We felt the soldiers should be more like CR 8.
There is no way to judge how a player or GM is going to utilize technology they bring to the table. It is naive to think though that tablets are not going to become more and more common. The challenges are in GMs being engaging enough to keep players entertained and in players not doing things that distract them from being engaged in the game.
Once upon a time, I found a web page somewhere that listed the PFS Scenarios by their geographic region. My search fu has failed to divine it's location though. Does anyone have a link to it or have better search fu?
there is no rule in any book that allows for Re-Skinning of Companions/Mounts what have you, there for I don't allow it and would not let my PFS players back home do."
Well there are no rules saying you can't and the rules as Rubia pointed out--
The whole "The rules don't say you can / the rules don't say you can't" argument is a terrible base to start a discussion from in any situation.
This. So let's take the whole skinning thing to the extreme. My character looks like a very young bronze dragon with the Draconic sorcerer bloodline. Mechanically, he's a human, but he looks like a bronze dragon.
Taking an earlier example, he also uses a quarterstaff re-skinned to look like Darth Maul's double-ended lightsaber. It still works like a quarterstaff, but I always say, "I attack with my lightsaber with a 15 to hit. Did I hit?"
Additionally when I cast Color Spray with my sorcerer, it actually looks like there are My Little Ponies shooting out from my hands. "I call forth Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash to stun my foes!" (Yes, I have a daughter;)
If you're another player at the table, are you still enjoying your RP experience in Golarion or are we playing something else? The slope gets slippery really fast.
Allowing re-skinning is not just a singular player's experience, especially in a shared campaign setting like PFS. If you do something for your own fun that stretches the concept of the setting or the spirit of the rules via "the rules don't say you can't", you are expecting the other players and GMs to accept it for their fun, too. In a shared campaign setting where you GM and co-players can change from game to game, it just doesn't work well.
Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 188 posts (194 including aliases). 3 reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 22 Organized Play characters. 1 alias. 