I'm in the roll, minimum 1/2 camp for my players. I use average for monsters/NPCs I adjust or create on the fly.
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Of the APs I own, Burnt Offerings and Haunting of Harrowstone are the best. Brinewall Legacy was okay, but it just didn't feel catchy enough for me knowing my players. Wormwood Mutiny will be hilarious if I run it for my group, so once it gets run it may be ranked high.
The adventuring company "The Iron Men" reached Feldgrau, Ustalav last week. Will do some villain cleanup this week, and possibly move on to Illmarsh.
I second the advice on making NPCs memorable to encourage roleplaying. My players slowly warmed to being in character for social exchanges. One even yells bad puns in battle now (he's an alchemist). What really turned my players on to roleplaying their characters, even though many are actors or otherwise involved in theatre, was having them choose NPC allies in Cauldron in our Shackled City campaign. A few memorable roleplaying exchanges from me as a now infamous Gnoll I made on a whim, and they had become "themselves".
I brought your warlock conversion up to my group yesterday, and you may have a convert. In case the gnome oracle dies, the player is now in hard deliberation between magus and your warlock for his replacement. Personally, it is slowing growing on me but I may edit it for my tastes. Still the most solid conversion for warlock I've read; and in original form or retuned, it has a place at my table.
The entire party in my current Carrion Crown game is Neutral and Evil. The players all agreed that if they had to fight horrors in the dark, they were embracing horrors fighting back. I was okay with this as I have been gaming with all but one of them for years. I knew they were intelligent and wise enough to only be foolish when it was warranted.
Restriction: If I don't own it, you cannot use it.
I don't ban a whole lot because I have been gifted with players who don't min/max or powergame. I haven't had any abuses since I began GMing Pathfinder, so hoorah for my players being nice to me.
I have only ever felt under-appreciated as a DM a few months ago when a couple that plays in my group started giving silly reasons to not game. It screwed over the whole group as they usually hosted the sessions. I thankfully had enough interested players that we began a second campaign another day of the week and it's going swimmingly. I still have a player or two that don't show some weeks, but both notify me the morning of session if they may not make it. Half of my players are involved in area theatre companies, so my standing policy has always been your work comes before your play. Rehearsals just mean your character is played by someone else and cannot die. If you don't show without telling me, I play your character and they may die.
I've had 5 deaths in the first two chapters of Carrion Crown. Three of those were that same player. They seemed to gravitate toward rivers (pun intended). I've only had four deaths in the prior two campaigns I've run. First campaign I was new to GMing and soft on the party. The second campaign only got about 40% done before hiatus due to life events for everyone.
As I mentioned in the necrotech topic the other day, I use d20 Cyberscape for cybernetics-like magic items in my homebrew setting.
Modern theme summary: The summary of the theme of my playets was thus: The Gnomish nation and the nations occupying an ancient technologically advanced empire eventually engineered technology that made magic easy to access to the masses. Give it a few centuries, two world wars, one plague that kills all Halflings,and an ongoing Abyssal invasion: add to blender and hit frappe.
I have two players who are veterans from my very first campaign who become quite paranoid in hallways and courtyards. They remember the many, many traps and ingenious death machines I made back then in ancient ruins and fallen temples.
For the record, my current campaigns have very few traps.
My last PC was a Tengu, which I chose because I like their thematic elements. Auto-proficiency in swords is always nice, but playing the mix of gregarious and fatalistic as a cleric of a death god was just plain fun.
I have used the d20 Modern supplement Cyberscape for magitech ideas in a homebrew campaign. I mostly limit to the wetware options given in the book, but a few of the bulkier hardware options might be useful to some people. I run the idea of a group called the Emerald Syndicate that offers the grafts and mutations. No one knows who sponsors them or where they get the materials, but the prices are right for heroes, villains, and other materially well off persons.
I have a reference for a roadside inn. It's an inn:
In the Shackled City AP, in Chapter 3 (I think) the party goes to the Drunken Monkey roadside inn to retrieve a rod of water control for Cauldron. The inn has been invaded, ransacked, and I believe the owner is murdered. The party I ran through it decided to take over ownership and employed one of my PC/NPCs as the new keeper for them. He shares about 5% profit with the whole party.
It's a nice floorplan in my opinion, so it's worth a look. I don't have my copy in front of me, so I am sorry for the lack of page numbers.
Same Shackled City AP campaign:
Second instance: Dwarven ranger decides to lasso the roc the party is fighting. Gets airlifted back to the Roc nest with party tanks in hot horseback pursuit. Dwarf decides to cut himself loose in mid-air. Third instance: Party main tank gets swallowed by an angry tyrannosaur. Party kills tyrannosaur and hacks tank out with a few rounds to spare before he succumbs to stomach acid. Party decides to discuss at length who has the spells left to get him back to the positive side of hp. Tank is melting in the pool of stomach acid.
"Leave the dead to lie. You might be unpleasantly surprised with what you find in their grave." My Tengu cleric of the god of death and innkeeper extraordinaire. Once a PC, now an NPC.
I must say I enjoy this. Fits my perspective on the Inquisitor much better. It may not fit as well in my homebrew world setting, but for Golarion I like it.
For my homebrew world, there were no monks until one Dwarf devoted his life to devout smiting of the foes of the Dwarf-Father with his fists. He went on to save the world, became the head of the church of the Dwarf-Father, and began an order of pious pugilists. I had to be given a really good, well role-played reason for monks to exist in even limited quantities. I was the same way about ninjas (Elven world savior), and gunslingers (Gnomish freedom fighters). So if you, dear OP, don't want a class or classes in your game, that is your right as the GM to decide. Please give your players logical reasons however, as zagnabbit also stated.
1) I use 4d6 drop lowest for adventure paths and 4d6 reroll 1s for my homebrew campaign. I never liked point buy for D&D/Pathfinder, but I use it in other games. 2) I have not used 3d6 in order before. I considered it once, and may consider it again for a future campaign idea I am nurturing... My players enjoy the thrill of rolling dice for their ability scores. They also have a very adaptive to bad abilities and just go with it, so it's not really a problem.
I GM two players who TWF. One is a fighter with a khopesh/morningstar mix. He does it partially for theme as his character is from a Mesopotamian-esque nation, and partially two get all three damage types in one turn to overcome DR. The other is a rogue with twin short swords who is infuriated by rolling really low on every attack.
I know that this may not be RAW (nor necessarily on-topic), but I agree with Absolut above in the thinking that Oracles are chosen/cursed by the gods and you just have to deal with it. I have an Oracle of Life that worships Lamashtu in my Carrion Crown campaign right now. We have a flavor idea that when he heals someone, they get a temporary cosmetic mutation. He has also took it upon himself to visit every brothel he can find and create as many half-gnome children as possible.
Interestingly enough, these modified rules are pretty much what my group has subconsciously done with Stealth since the beginning of our current campaign. I'm behind these changes fully.
My first character was a Lawful Neutral cleric of the god of death, who I played as the hand of his god for the most part. That was in 3.0, and his Pathfinder successor is merely lawful good. My second character was a neutral good dual-weapon ranger which eventually took horizon walker. I enjoyed that character just as much as my clerics.
I have my players use the following: roll 4d6, no drop. I have a history of raising the difficulty of the game (and the dice gods favor my DM d20 for some reason). And for good measure (using my system for kicks):
Clumsy dim musclebound sorcerer... nice. |