Notisur's page

Why does everyone say a GM needs the bestiary? As a GM, I plan the evening beforehand and look which monsters will the group probably face and can print them out or store their information on my laptop which I always use during the evening.
So, why have the bestiary? The monsters and their info is freely available on paizo/d20pfsrd.

Hey everyone, it's me again. Got a question regarding poisons/curses:
I want my players to meet some NPCs and.. have dinner with them in some way. During the dinner, I want to poison some of those NPCs. However I want the PCs to search for the ones who poisoned them and get an antidote of some sort. However, with spells like remove poison/curse, it seems rather... senseless to use poisons/curses since they can cure them without a problem and may take their time to find the ones who poisoned the NPC or even do completely other things.
So, are there ways to have stronger versions (I want it for the roleplaying reason, like the NPC slowly going insane or so and not necessarily losing stat points) of poisons/curses that can't be cured? It seems kind of gimmicky to simply say: "You cast the spell on him, but he still seems to have the disease". But this seems for me to be the only way to bring this into the game (curses have such a high potential for some interesting NPCs imo, but if it can be cured with such a simple spell then if PCs meet cursed NPCs, they will simply heal them instead of maybe trying to find a cure which makes planning for me kind of hard :( ). Or do you see another way? Or am I thinking too hard and should simply say: No healing, find a cure!

Hi folks. This thread is a continuation of http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz6frk?Questions-from-soon-to-be-GM however I found that that's the wrong forum so I'm making this one with questions I'm having.

I played the oneshot with my friends and got good feedback. The usual GM even said this was the game which had the least amount of combat in all of his games ever :D (we only had a fight against some goblins which they even retreated from :) they went the peaceful way in the oneshot so there weren't more fights ) so I guess it wasn't bad in the RPing department and want to continue that way.
Questions for now:
Since I don't want to focus on battles and more on the RPing side, how would I go about giving the PCs experience? I want them to discover new lands or uncover the big plot of family X that is trying to kill the king or whatever. If it's only battles, I know how much exp each encounter would give and could plan accordingly. However if the PCs "only" roleplay, how would I do it then? I could estimate by rule of thumb however that doesn't sound that good...
I guess making adventures that take more RPing and less combat takes a lot longer, since at least for my oneshot I spent more time creating the character sheets for the NPCs I would need (and the PCs could potentially fight if the need arises so I deemed it necessary) than planning the adventure (at least for me the pregenerated NPCs weren't that useful since they're only humans afaik and I needed them with special skills to fit in). However as I see it from my previous games which had more battles, most of them were against monsters and with the bestiary 1 to x it's way easier to just select some monsters and toss em into battle. How much time do you spend on the stages (creating NPCs, thinking about the scenario etc.) when you create a campaign/adventure?

Also, what do you guys think about the idea given at http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz6frk?Questions-from-soon-to-be-GM#10 ? It sounds nice and seems to be great with RPing (so everyone can participate even if they are a fighter that hasn't much charisma or w/e) however I don't know what to do with classes that get bonuses for those skills since it would make those bonuses useless. What would be a way around that? Provide an alternative skill bonus?

Please provide feedback for this new GM :)

First, make a character sheet that has Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, and Sense Motive blacked out. Draw a box around Gather Information.

Second, when you sit down with the players to present the campaign, tell them the campaign is going to be heavy on the role-playing and intregue, and because of that, the above skills are not used other than...

I understand this and agree that it helps immersion a lot. I'll talk to my players about this. Very great idea indeed. It always bugged me that those skills are like a shortcut for players that want to end the talk and just go on killing... like one time when I talked to the NPC ingame and another player said "Just roll the dice for the diplomacy check!"...

Hello folks. After reading some books from The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, I couldn't stop my imagination from running wild and decided to start GM'ing so I could let it out :D

For this, I have a couple of questions:

When I want NPCs to lie to the PCs, do I have to secretly roll a sense motive/bluff check for every lie? Would be kinda strange... NPC X talks to the party, tells a lie. I stop talking for a moment to roll the checks and say "OH player X you figure that what he said doesn't really add up." Or how does it work?

What happens when my NPCs are in a town, talk to a person like a guard or whatnot and suddenly decide to attack the guy? I would need the stats for him, however this is possible for every NPC out there. When it somehow works out that they attack an NPC, what do I do then? If it's the village elder, his stats will differ from the guard and all. However that seems very tedious...

What's your opinion on this? When I got more questions I'll ask and I guess that won't take long :D

Where does it state that they have no material component? At least I can't see it at http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/gettingStarted.html#supernatural-abiliti es

I have a question about the lore oracle's automatic writing revelation. It is a supernatural ability and I do it by meditating. However, I asked my GM before taking it if the "no material component required" bit is only for the commune spell or the other two before it, too. He said it's only for the last.
But if I do this by meditating, shouldn't it be without material component for all the spells? Otherwise it's kind of pointless before level 8, I can't use it often because it costs me money (not much, but after 10 uses that's 250GM I can't use for other things and is important at low level). So what would you say?