Oha's page

Great advice from all! Very much appreciated, thank you. If there are more thoughts, let's please keep the thread going!

Great ideas, all. Thanks so much!

Searched the boards but to no avail. How do your parties store all of their coin and loot. I seem to remember something about a small vault under Deverin's office but nothing that could handle the level of wealth they'll eventually be encountering. Do they need t keep their valuables in Magnimar for safe keeping?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

All great ideas, thanks. And I really hope my players decide to start tasting their beasty kills. Lot of room for ridiculousness there.

Hi all, if this is not in the proper location, please feel free to move.

As a new GM, I'd like to have my players deal with the transportation of coin and loot realistically. So if they score a total of 5,000 sp, 500 gp, and lot of other loot and they have no magical means of transporting large portions of it (bag of holding, etc.) and are far from town, for example, how do you have your players deal with the issue?

I don't want them to get bored having to rent a cart and walk it 20 miles, etc. every time they come across a lot of loot, but I'd prefer not to hand waive the issue as the opportunity is there to move story along. The party is seen carting a cache of weapons one week, a cart full of chests the next, etc. This raises eyebrows, gets people talking, and opens up opportunities within the game.

TLDR: how do you make dealing with the transportation of loot realistic but fun?

Thanks so much for any help!

I don't mean to hijack this thread so apologies if this question doesn't apply here but. . . how did your players (or anyone on here) get the helmet to town? Rent a cart or something? I'd prefer not to hand waive this detail for my players and am just wondering what other folks have done.

Thanks!

First off, I have to simply say that this forum community is insanely supportive and welcoming and absolutely top shelf. Such a pleasure to ask a question and get more constructive feedback than I know what to do with.

Many thanks to Nobodyshome, Anguish, and Latrecis for those last three posts. Phenomenally helpful. I think you're all spot on. A.) I'm expecting us all to be much further along than we really have a right to be given the fact that we're just returning to rpg's after 30 years and B.) we're all sharing in that feeling to some degree which is making us feel all the more self-conscious.

Extremely astute observations and one that I had not been able to see. I'll just breathe a bit and allow their characters, their capacity to roleplay, and their ability to relax into having more fun just sort of unfold organically.

Sage advice from all, many thanks. Truly appreciated!

Can't wait to dive in, Nobodyshome!

@Misroi. . . that. Sounds. Amazing. Will definitely have to check that out. Though, if I have a tough time getting my guys to roleplay a simple, "I whisper a word of pre-epmtive thanks to my deity, calling upon her power to aid in my smiting this foul fiend," I'm not sure yet how I'd get them to rp the amazing gift exchange. Will definitely have to check it out, though, thanks!

@Nobodyshome Sincere apologies for the miscommunication but please accept the following as an equal compliment. As much as I'd like to, I haven't actually sent my players your ROTRL campaign journal as I don't want them to stumble upon spoilers. However, I write up a journal for their campaign and I send that out after each session. Its tone and style are completely thieved from your magnum opus and it's a poor man's version at best. So. . . you know what they describe as the sincerest form of flattery!

Seriously. . . not blowing smoke here but I live in New York and your journal has become my daily subway reading. I take local trains rather than express just to get a few more minutes with your party and their adventures, the thing is such a blast. Many thanks for that. . it's been a tremendous inspiration for the campaign and a ridiculous amount of fun to read for its own sake! If I were on the committee, I'd be sending a Hugo your way without a second thought.

@thenovalord Thanks for the suggestion. Are there any that you might recommend as I'm familiar only with the D&D/Pathfinder setting, though I realize that there are tons more out there. Thanks!

Excellent suggestions from everyone. Truly appreciated, thanks so much.

Nobodyshome's Rules Monkey idea will definitely be implemented, as will a non-gaming trip to the local dive. All of the meta-management ideas are great and i'll be including more fluff in the future. I've been keeping a log a la the ones that can be found here (looking at you, Nobyshome, with your genius-ROTRL-logging-self. . . that thing is like crack to me) which gets sent out to them after the session, something they seem to enjoy a great deal.

Some info that I hadn't mentioned before. . . we're a group of five total, with usually one GM and three players around the table. Whoever can't make it has their character played by someone else that night and we are, indeed, playing ROTRL.

Will also try cutting down the sessions a bit and streamlining.

Thanks again to all! If anyone else has anything they'd like to add, please don't hesitate!

So to pick up with a new session, I think I've pinpointed some of the issues. Forgive the wall of text below. There's a TLDR at the bottom.

First, I'm the common denominator amongst the players, meaning that I know them all personally while they're all meeting each other solely through the game. So their lack of familiarity is greatly limiting they're level of comfort in terms of roleplay.

Which brings me to another issue. . . we're all quite self-conscious when it comes to roleplay. The ironic thing about it is that we're all, save one, professional actors who make our living solely through that work, so it's not as if there's a lack of imagination or an incapacity to roleplay.

The fact that it's what we do in our professional lives makes doing it in our personal lives oddly uncomfortable. At work, we can always channel that self-consciouslnes through the character and fear no judgment because, hey. . . it's just the character.

But in Pathfinder, we're all sitting around my living room, we're wearing our personal clothes, the setting is a personal one, etc. Playing a character in that environment feels infinitely more naked than on a stage or a set, etc. I'm surprised that we're all in this position, but there it is. I've read a number of threads about how to improve roleplay in a game and will try to implement some of the suggestions I've found there.

And the last issue is that, due to my general lack of familiarity with the rules at this point, I'm constantly looking through the Core Rulebook which greatly slows things down. The two solutions seem to be either to hand wave a lot of the rules or study the book more thoroughly. The GM screen has helped a bit. Skipping the rules actually seems less fun as it's rewarding to see your character beat a tough Acrobatics DC or Ride DC, etc. May have just answered my own question there.

Anyway, many thanks to all for any thoughts you may have on any of this. My players seem gung ho before each session but there's a fair amount of yawning during actual play.

TLDR: Group of actors are having a really tough time roleplaying and a lack of familiarity with the rules is really slowing things down, leading to a lot of yawning during the sessions.

Thanks to all!

Oha

Aotrs,

Just want to say that these have been such a blast to read and extremely helpful as I'm just starting to GM my ROTR campaign. Great work and keep 'em coming!

Thank you, Hangar ! And thank you, Askren!

OK, here's a big ol' newb question but I'm wondering to what scale you all blow up these great community created maps? And how do you do so? Just save the image and then take it to a Kinko's or something and have them blow it up to scale?

Thanks for any input as I'd love to use these in my campaign. Great work, all!

Thanks, Nynphaiel! Yep, the Community Created thread is what I've been leaning on very heavily. Absolutely invaluable resource.

Will keep folks posted.

Thanks again, all!

Absolutely fantastic advice, all, thanks so much. So simple that I somehow neglected it. I'll contact them and see how they're feeling, what they'd like to see more of, what they enjoyed in the session, what they used to enjoy as back in the day, etc. and make adjustments from there.

Your advice is truly appreciated, thanks so much. I have no doubt that I'll be hitting you up for more input soon.

Hi All,

First post. I'm a 44 year old new GM who used to play AD&D as a kid. I've rounded up two friends, also in their late 30's-early 40's, who used to play as well and we've just begun ROTRL. We're looking for one more player to join us. They're in Burnt offerings, right in the middle of the first goblin attack.

I'd set up a ton of the Swallowtail games found on these boards for our last session but there seemed to be little interest in them and after just two I moved on.

In the midst of combat, I'm trying to be as descriptive as possible. . . "Your greatsword tears through the goblin's chest, leaking gore and ruptured organs onto the hard-packed earth. He stares at you helplessly and then drops to the ground in a heap," kind of thing. . . but even combat seems somehow lackluster. I've created background battle music specifically for different fights on ambient-mixer.com and play those or rousing music during the fights. Or I've got tavern, market, ambient sounds, etc. depending on where they are in the town or AP. These they seem to enjoy or at least appreciate the effort on my part to help them have fun.

Are we too old and jaded? Have the video games and MMO's of their past ruined their capacity to enjoy an RPG? I've tried to set up relationships to Sandpoint as quickly as possible (one PC comes to the Swallowtail Festival every year so knows a lot of NPC's, etc.) but somehow they just don't seem to be having a great time.

For whatever it's worth, I work as a professional actor so storytelling is something I enjoy and invest in quite easily.

I know there are a ton of "New GM Requesting Help" threads on the boards but I thought I'd throw out one more with my specific issue.

TLDR: my players seem bored thus far and we've only just begun. Help!

Thanks so much in advance for reading this wall of text and for any thoughts you can send my way!

All the Best,

Oha