An interesting situation popped up last week: while fighting an NPC with Hunter class levels, the NPC dies, leaving his large ape AC behind against five angry PCs. The ape is gravely wounded, and he gets Grease cast on him. Bewildered by the sudden magic and almost falling over, it grabs the headless (the PC said he decapitated him) body of his master and retreats in a very agitated state.
This was a surprisingly emotional moment at the table. I was trying to act according to the instincts of the ape, but it was pretty upsetting to some of the players. Would this be an issue to you if you were playing? Was it too dramatic?
Also, one of the PCs (the same that killed the hunter btw) tried to finish off the ape when it was obviously retreating. While I have noted the.. tenacity of some people in discussions regarding alignment, I would still like to know: would you consider this an evil act?
The group of 5 players in my homebrew campaign seem to be wading through the "hard" (APL + 2) encounters I set before them. They are constituted of the following characters at 4th level:
Human White Mage Arcanist trying to fulfill that trait that doubles healing (forgot what it was called). He sat out last combat, i.e. didn't do anything. Reason for this forthcoming.
Dhampir Bloodrager with the Undead bloodline, has a glaive-gusarme and is not optimized. He has not raged in a real combat encounter thus far, because there has been no need.
Human CRB Bard. Buffs party attack rolls and shoots with crossbow. Uses Grease occasionally, but again, not really necessary.
Kitsune Swashbuckler with WF and Dervish Dance. Her MW scimitar has a +12 to hit and deals +11 damage when Bard-buffed with song. With high AC and Parry, she is hard to hit, much less kill.
The fifth character was an Elf Paladin of Iomadae with longsword and griffon as bonded mount. The griffon has been complete overkill, has not even been involved with the last couple of fights. Smite evil, also had a Str +3 or 4 bow. His AC against was high 20s last fight thanks to a spell. Changing characters now, but he always plays mostly optimized melee characters, maybe a cleric/warpriest of Asmodeus.
Ability scores were done with 4d6 drop lowest, which was my mistake. They rolled well, to say the least, and it was legit. Most have primary stats at +4 or 5, with at least a +1 in most of the others. This makes their saves at least decent, if not terrific. AC's are pretty high too despite all of them being quite a bit below WBL. Last combat was against 2 ghouls, 4 skeletons, and a ghast cleric 4, and they never damaged them except for 4 or 2 points with some negative energy, which is why the White Mage didn't do anything. Favorable terrain too, with negative energy pools that would lash out at living things.
CR seems to be junk when making encounters for my group. Since I am on a limited schedule, I really do rely on premade material, but these encounters are not close to challenging. Since I am going by fast XP, CR is pretty important to keep track of leveling progress.
I honestly don't know what to do. Should I trash the CR and trust my intuition? If you have experienced the same issue or have any ideas, please share your wisdom.
I'm looking for some suggestions to make a homebrew city called Amoch interesting to visit and explore. It's in a heavily agricultural temperate region with a population in the thousands. I have been running this game with a slightly Roman theme when it comes to the national government, the Regency, so I want to keep that theme going to some extent. The party will likely, in part or as a whole, will most likely be visiting at least a church of Iomedae, a magic supplier/shop (with no gold on hand, just items to barter, in a talismanic component crafting system), and, of course, a tavern/inn.
It's not much to go on, but I would love to hear all of your ideas. Any idea that can help to flesh out a city and its inhabitants is welcome. The more detail the better.
Is it right to target a specific player in the creation and execution of a combat encounter? I have run into sort of a wall in trying to figure this out. On one hand, I want to create a challenge for each player when designing my encounters, but when I have run into characters that are disproportionately more powerful than the other characters I end up basically changing the encounter to challenge that specific character. I believe that you are supposed to be somewhat ambivalent as a GM when creating situations so that you don't appear to just be targeting certain players to the possible detriment of others, but I don't see any other proper way around it.
Well, it seems that I am in a pickle, as Shakespeare quipped once upon a time. I recently GMed my second session as a "test" encounter for my 3 sibling group with a fairly simple dungeon crawl. The results were... unsatisfactory, at least for myself and one of my players, whom I will refer to as "B" from now on. There is much that I could detail about the encounter, but I will try to be concise.
To begin, though, here are the details of the group at that time:
1st player: Dwarf Fighter
2nd player: Goblin Summoner with spidery eidolon
3rd player (B): Gnome Sorcerer with Elemental(Fire) Bloodline
All are at 11th level.
So, after entering a cave to find a puppy who led them there (yes, I did that...), investigating a random side path with crevice, and escaping a moving-wall-death-trap-of-doom (or was it?), the party walked into a large cavern that had a strong magical aura (as detected) that was ringed with lava. Soon afterwards, they were jumped by 6 Large Magma Elementals, and then proceeded to slaughter them over the course of an hour to an hour and a half. I expected this, as this was purposefully an APL encounter. After they slayed the last Elemental, they met a lovely Ancient Magma Dragon, who proceeded to belittle them and bite the eidolon on the leg "to see what it tastes like." This was also done to show the experienced player (the summoner/eldest brother) and others that this beast was not to be trifled with in combat (player's face for the summoner physically changed when I said "does a 49 hit your eidolon's AC?") After this he told them to destroy a chest further down the dungeon that he couldn't for unexplained reasons.
However, the encounter abruptly stopped when, after B had taken a 15-minute break to get lunch in the middle of combat earlier in the session, I asked him if he actually wanted to play anymore. He said no, so we stopped right there. He claimed that he was bored, and that he had stuff to do, and when I asked for what he found boring he would not say. He basically stated that he found nothing entertaining. I tried to convince him that we still had more to do, and that it would get better as we went on, but to no avail. It was probably a bad call on my part, and I practically gave up on GMing or doing any PF at all right there. This is the only way I would be able to do any PF, so it really downed me.
However, all was not lost, at least I think so. After discussion with the other two players, who seemed to enjoy the encounter overall but had other issues (detailed later perhaps), I think B can still be brought back around with the proper application of awesome setting/fights and comedic characters. He has always tried to do silly, crazy stuff like cast Scorching Ray on the puppy when it first went up to him, probably because he does not treat the game with even a smidgen of seriousness when RPing. He really doesn't get into his character at all during sessions, and I really don't know if he ever will. On the other hand, he has somewhat enjoyed very challenging encounters in the past (example: 3 person party against adult brine dragon, characters fairly poorly made combat wise plus almost constant use of obscuring mist, took some coercing to make B admit this). Basically, I need to create an encounter that is a home run with B, or I am afraid that he will turn his back on it for good (if he has not already). So, here is my idea thus far (and, for this session, to heck with rules in creating characters for now):
My dungeon setting where we left it, with the Magma Dragon, but with an abrupt and gloriously comedic entrance (busting through a cave wall in a flashing cloud of... butterflies?) of Sir Clocksalot the Mighty Clockworkian of Duremnagarnia and his trusty, albeit whiny, intelligent Greatsword named Amaeus and his buddy, the serene, very monk-ish intelligent Nunchuk named Noni. Immediately upon his arrival he unleashes upon the marauding dragon of ole' a diatribe of stuttering proclamations and threats and promises and so on, with his stuttering moments to be cleared by his ever-sighing sword. After this attempt at chivalrous glory (he says he is doing it for the gnome, and for all other fairness/handsomeness in the world), he charges the dragon, who flies into an insane rage. Backstory here; Dragon is trapped in this cave by the sword perpetually casting a powerful version of planar binding, among other things, and it was his destiny to be slain by the sword, who knows this, and has been in that chest mentioned earlier for a long time at the other side of one of the cave walls. Epic combat hopefully ensues, and this is as far as I have gotten.
So, thoughts, tips, advice, encouragement, support, and all of forms of engagement, including criticism, are encouraged. If you have any questions about any of what I have said, feel free to ask. I look forward to your input, and when giving any ideas for the planning of this next session please keep in mind the feeling I am trying to put across to B, the other players have already been alerted and agree to some possible silliness and such with this session.
If we can, let's try to blow his perception of Pathfinder and how entertaining it can be out of the metaphorical water. If possible, I don't want him to want to leave the table to do anything except maybe some character sheets to start whole new ideas, and a notebook and pencil to start writing his own adventure. In other words, let's get nuts!
EDIT: Forgot to mention that the summoner decided to change to a druid after he severely outclassed the fighter with his eidolon. Like, one-shotting the Elementals versus the fighter's 3-4 hits kind of outclassing. He kinda likes to powergame (played under a crazy hard DM for a while now, don't really blame him) and the fighter is the youngest brother that has to be constantly reminded of how to calculate things like skill checks, attack rolls, damage rolls, etc. even when they are unchanged from his sheet. When the summoner did enlarge person to try to bring him to somewhere near his eidolon's power (still didn't cut it), he got very lost of how much the size increase gave him to attacks, damage, etc. But he is a whole other issue that I am also trying to remedy, and feel free to comment on that as well.
Hello everyone, I just have a quick question: is it better for a new GM such as myself to plan for shorter, dynamic sessions or longer, possibly less dynamic sessions? I am not saying that the session has to end by X or Y, but I do wonder if I am prepping enough content for my first session. My thinking is that it is better to leave them hungry for more than to have them wishing the session would just end.
If you want to know details about this campaign (the size of my group, etc.), then feel free to take a look at this thread that I created.
Hello everybody! As the subject states, I am a new GM, but I am not necessarily lacking in Pathfinder knowledge. For the last better part of a year my older brother (he plays in a group outside of this one) has run a couple of campaigns as a GM with myself and the other two siblings as players and, for various reasons, those campaigns never really got anywhere. Recently, a decision was made by the group to forgo the previous campaign and allow myself to GM. This probably sounds strange to many people, being as that I have so little experience with this. I can say, however, that I have a good knowledge of the rules of PF given that I extensively studied the PF books (CRB, APG, Bestiary 1 & 2, ARG, Ultimate Campaign, Ultimate Equipment, Ultimate Combat) and other sources in the previous campaign. You could say I was VERY interested in how to play my character, so it ended up that I had knowledge of the rules that were on par with the GM.
However, despite my knowledge of the rules, I am certainly very new to this venture, and this is why I seek advice. So, let me present my progress thus far, for those who wish to see it...
Campaign:
First off, let me say that if you are not familiar with the Starcraft universe, the following information may not be very comprehensible.
I decided to try and convert what I consider to be an excellent universe, that is, the Starcraft universe (that is where the "ambitious" part comes in). I am not telling them it is based on that universe, since I don't want them to know the story ahead of time. This is not going to be a "straight-line" conversion at all, and my search for ideas on how to convert on this messageboard have shown me that previous attempts to do this have been far, far too transformative for what I was looking for. I am not going to introduce psionics or anything like that. I simply want to create PF "versions" of various races and things that are inspired by that universe. For instance, there are no Protoss in this world. There are, however, the Silvans, which are elves (not called elves in this universe obviously) in the created Silvan empire/society. There are various castes in this society that play different roles (classes), just like they did in the Protoss race. Humans are still called as such in this universe, but they are known as citizens of the Termanian empire, which is modeled after the Confederacy. Overall, I hope this point is clear; I am not seeking to recreate the SC universe, but to create a universe that can exist with the races, abilities, technology, and so on that is already within PF and is inspired by the SC universe.
As for the story, I hope to roughly follow the events in the games thus far, but I doubt it will last past the Brood War portion. This means that powerful NPCs may be part of the group for a large part of this campaign, but I am not sure I will do that just yet. I am dedicated to not hardlining them into that story, but it will be very difficult for them to not be involved with these events in the long term. I could go on about what I have thought of for this campaign, but I will stop here.
The main points of advice that I seek (there is a LOT that I want to ask) are as follows:
How much do I need to prepare ahead of time? How detailed should it be?
How powerful/influential should NPCs be that are with the party for significant periods of time?
Should I create the backstory for my player's characters, or should they? I have created a world where not everything is the same as outlined in the books, so it would be difficult for them to explain why they are in a part of the world far away from where their race resides. See spoiler above for details.
How do I create a balanced skill-check and combat-encounter campaign? Our previous campaigns never really used any skills beyond the combat-oriented ones, so I really want to use them here
I want to have one society where there is only divine magic and arcane is scorned, and the reverse for the other. I also want to create enemies that are susceptible to arcane, but not divine, magic. Is this feasible/a good idea?
Other questions will certainly come up, but I think that is enough for now. Oh, and by the way, all PCs (and the beginning party NPC) is starting at 11th level... with double feats! (This is something that we have enjoyed in our previous campaigns and it has worked out quite well. The balance of PCs to threats seems to work out pretty well.)
Any advice is greatly appreciated, and I am looking forward to your feedback!
