TheIneffableCheese's page

@OP: It's generally a good idea to acquire basic system mastery before attempting complicated homebrew. Some people equate 'cleric' with 'healbot'. Healbot is generally the least effective way to play a cleric, yet it's the only way a lot of players know. What's your purpose?

For the record I've been playing Pathfinder pretty exclusively since it was released, and 3.0/3.5 for years before that. I have system mastery.

My purpose is purely getting away from active deities in the world as a flavor thing. This was really just some random musings the other night, and I thought about re-skinning "divine" spells as magic that is more "pure" than "arcane" spells; and I tied that to a fundamental difference between humans and the non-human races. But I also didn't want to throw the balance too much by eliminating a core class. Most of the other divine casters I could repurpose fluff-wise as being more like wizards or sorcerers, but the whole clerical shtick is their connection to a god (or at the very least a defined philosophy/church) as the source of their magic. That is pretty much counter to the whole idea of what I'm going for.

This whole exercise is pretty nascent at this point. I had forgotten that oracles are basically divine sorcerers, so I will definitely take a serious look at them.

As for Paladins, Inquisitors, Warpriests, etc - my intention with this would be to severely limit options to races and classes that fit into the concept of the world I'm building. More than likely, these things would just not exist.

At this point, the idea I have bubbling around is there is a strict divide between the human and non-human races. Non-human races are inherently magical and can access "true magic" - the divine selection of spells. Humans developed wizardry which uses parts of magically infused plants and animals to power their spells. This led to the rapacious harvesting of magical creatures and plants and resulted in a massive war between humans and the rest of the intelligent races (whichever ones I decide to keep). That's why I'm trying to draw a line between divine and arcane magic.

As for the no gods thing, it's not that they don't have religions, it's that active gods granting spells are not a thing.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. This has definitely given me food for thought.

I have the beginnings of an idea for a campaign set in a world without gods. My intention is to get rid of the cleric class, but I don't want to cut off access to healing magic etc. My initial thought is to have the option for sorcerers to choose either the sorcerer/wizard list or the cleric list at creation.

My question is do you think that having a sorcerer who casts cleric spells in some way break the game? I can't imagine that it would cause major issues - I just thought I'd submit the question to the collective wisdom of the community.

Thanks!

***Minor Spoilers Follow - Non-GMs have been warned***

I am starting War of the River Kings with my long time game group. We began the campaign with the whole kingdom building subsystem bolted on, but my highly gamerist players very quickly managed to break the system to the point that they created an insurmountable economic engine - they literally could not fail any non-screwjob event (except by rolling a 1), and they had so much in the treasury that any minor setback in kingdom stability could be easily fixed with cash the following round. Pretty soon we decided to handwave the kingdom building since it was just a time sink, and no one was really having much fun with it.

Now that we're getting into WotRK, I want them to have the experience commanding armies. I'm planning to follow the Will Save alternate rules to substitute for Loyalty checks, but I do want them to have the game of building and maintaining an army.

My plan at this point to is give them small militias as already constituted units in their settlements. They were always concerned about defense, so it makes sense they would have a low level of armed troops in existence. My idea is to set them up with a treasury of build points and a reasonable monthly income. That would allow them to build up forces and have to budget their resources to keep the armies equipped.

What I need help with is figuring out a reasonable size for the treasury and what their monthly income should be. They've basically "won" every challenge so far - they created an alliance with the centaurs, they rebuilt Varnhold after rescuing the remaining villagers, they liberated Ft. Drelev in no time and with no civilian casualites to speak of - essentially, they have done about as well for their kingdom as the AP assumes they could do.

Given those priors, what seems like a reasonable nest egg and income? We meet tonight, but we're just starting the module so it will be at least a week or two before I'd need to worry about it too much.

Thanks in advance!

This is pretty much exactly what happened with the group I'm running through Kingmaker. The player who is running the Ruler of the kingdom is a pretty hardcore tabletop gamer, and he absolutely broke the kingdom building rules in a matter of about a year's worth of turns. He had an economic engine rolling and resources built that essentially no check could fail except for natural 1's, and even those didn't matter because the treasury was so full nothing was more than a minor setback that could be pretty easily bought off. It ceased being anything but a chore to get through. As soon as I realized it was just spinning wheels so they could roll some checks they weren't going to matter, I talked to the group and started hand-waving the kingdom details.

However, now I'm starting prep for part 5 and I'm realizing the mass combat stuff is going to be more difficult to hand-wave. I'm thinking I will give them a BP budget to build armies, maybe with a monthly refresh rate to force them to think longer term. Does anyone have any idea what a good BP budget would be for this? I may just go back to the last point we were doing the kingdom building (we were using an Excel sheet found through these forums), and base their current levels on that, but just multiply things by a factor of three or whatever seems reasonable.

My goal is to have the mass combat campaign be a fun diversion that requires some strategic thought, but not get too bogged down in the minutiae.

Thread necro!

I just got a copy of RA for Pathfinder, and I've gotten my group fairly excited about playing around with an old-school meat grinder of a megadungeon. I definitely want to up the old-school feel of the module, but I also want to deal with the lethality by giving the players plenty of back-up characters so no one is stuck at the table without playing for too long. To that effect, I'm planning on implementing some XP adjustments and house rules to (hopefully) achieve these goals. I thought it would be a good idea throw some of these ideas onto the boards to make sure I'm not completely off track.

Character creation: my plan for generating characters is to have everyone (myself as GM included) roll an array of ability scores using 4d6 drop the lowest. This will make a pool of 6 total arrays. Players can then choose the array they want to use from the pool and apply the ability scores as they see fit. We'll save these arrays, and they will become the basis for any future characters made by the group as well.

Back up characters: I plan on using a variation on a rule that comes from the Dark Sun campaign setting for 2e. Basically, each player has a stable of 4 characters each starting at 1st level. Only one character is active at any given time, and that character earns XP normally. However, whenever the active character goes up a level, the player gets to level up one of his other three characters automatically putting that character's XP to the minimum amount to get them to the new level. These back up characters can be subbed in either when the party is back at town (at which point the currently active character gets put into the stable with the two remaining back-ups), or if a character dies one of the back-ups can be dropped in with some hastily constructed DM Fiat ("Wow, we're sure lucky you happened to be in this part of the dungeon - let's try to get out of here!"). If a character is subbed in after a PC death, the player makes a new 1st level character to add to their stable. I'm not sure how to handle equiping the back-ups - I could just say typical WBL until they're played and once they hit the "real world" they lock in their equipment and from there it's whatever they have or loot.

Treasure for XP: I'm thinking about adjusting XP from killing stuff down and adding XP from treasure to increase the motivation of exploration and clever problem solving. My basic thought is axing all XP from wandering monsters (that makes them resource sinks with basically no reward, so stealth and speed are important), and only granting 1/10th the noted XP value for "laired" monsters. Any treasure the party finds that's just worth money (coins, gems, art objects, etc.) would grant XP in a 1 GP of value = 1 XP awarded ratio. I think equipment and magic items will not grant XP as those are fundamentally useful and make the PCs more powerful (I am considering giving them 1/10th XP for sold items, but even at that reduction one powerful magic item could really skew the curve, I think). I haven't really dug into the amount of treasure available in the dungeon to know if this will keep them moving up the power level at a reasonable rate, but I am definitely digging the basic idea behind it. And it's not like Rappan Athuk is known for it's balanced encounter design in the first place.

Character advancement: I have gamed through several scenarios using the above ideas, and I realized there is a potential problem - wildly disparate party levels. In 3.5 there was the built in mechanic of lower level characters getting more XP for the same enounter. The math was cumbersome and it took longer than I liked to calculate (though a spreadsheet I finally made helped). That said, the built in catch-up mechanic was nice for this sort of situation. I do think that it is possible to replicate something like this using Pathfinder. My idea is setting the basic advancement to the Medium XP track. Any active character that is more than one level below the Average Party Level would use the Fast track, and any active character more than one level above the APL would use the Slow track. That should help pull up any lower level replacements while slowing down any higher level PCs. Once all the characters are back to parity, then everyone would be back on the Medium track.

Sorry for the wall of text; I appreciate anyone who has read this far. I'd like to hear any feedback regarding these basic ideas - do you think they will game out like I intend, or have I laid traps for myself.

I’ve been running Kingmaker for my group for more than two years now. We just finished The Varnhold Vanishing.

The elements that originally drew me to the AP – specifically the exploration and kingdom building – have proven to be less than engaging for my group. They still enjoy uncovering the map through, but the random encounters are never a challenge as they generally epitomize the 15 minute adventuring day. And the kingdom building was completely busted by one of my players who figured out how to game the system before the end of the first year of kingdom building turns. With his guidance, they built an economic engine that allowed them to build whatever they wanted and got their kingdom stats to the point where they could only ever fail a kingdom check on a roll of 1. I also brought in a sample of the mass combat rules with a small army of trolls fielded by Hargulka, and we found the experience to be lackluster. I’m thinking of dipping into my 3.5 library to pull from Heroes of Battle as a way of covering large scale conflicts in the future.

So, with this in mind, I discussed it with my group and they agreed that the kingdom building portion of the game was actually not that much fun given the time it took. We’ve moved to more of a Kingdom in the Background sort of model. Everyone is interested in where the story is going, and so far they have not missed the kingdom focused stuff.

At this point, I’m interested in streamlining the rest of the AP to get us through the rest of the story satisfactorily, but as quickly as possible. Basically, I’m trying to turn the rest of the AP into more of a traditional linear adventure, but with a bit more freedom to poke around the edges. I’d personally like to cut to the chase because I don’t want to be running this path for another 2+ years (I have too many other campaigns I’d like to run). To that end, I’d like to possibly combine Blood for Blood and War of the River Kings to try to get us to the endgame as soon as possible. I also wouldn’t be opposed to dropping in a different module to bridge some of the story if that makes sense.

I’m wondering if anyone else has attempted something similar, and if so what did you do? Any thoughts or suggestions are quite welcome.

These are some great ideas. Game night is tonight, so I'll have a nice long chat with my players about how they want to proceed. Fortunately we're at a pretty good place to confront this right now, so whatever we decide tonight will probably set the tone for the rest of the campaign.

Everyone seems to be having fun, so I'm sure we'll be able to come to some sort of arrangement to keep things moving forward smoothly. I'll report back with what we end up doing if anyone is curious.

I think you will find that the most commonly used "solution" is "Stop using XP".

I actually considered this. The problem, however, is two fold - one, since Kingmaker is so non-linear it makes choosing leveling points difficult, and two, we use both Action Points (a la Eberron) and Hero Points, both of which are resources that renew when the players level. Part of the metagame is managing those resources, and that's difficult if the players don't have a metric to consider.

Game night is tomorrow, so I may just need to sit down with my players and hash this out at the start of the session.

I'm GMing a Kingmaker campaign. Long story short, between running slightly elevated combat challenges to keep up with my very tactically minded party, and adding some additional encounters and subplots to round out the AP, the PCs are well into fourth level (almost fifth, actually) and we haven't really even started Rivers Run Red. I kind of feel like the PCs are a bit too far ahead of the curve, but I don't know what to do.

If I pull back on the challenges, they're going to walk all over everything. Reducing XP awards seems like kind of a jerk move. I've thought about switching over to the Slow progression table, but that seems like a jerk move and possibly taking things too far in the other direction.

I can keep bumping up encounters, but that just adds to the feedback loop of the PCs advancement. Has anyone else run into this issue? How did you handle it?

Dotting for interest.

Thinking about starting CotCT in the next few weeks. This is a fantastic resource - thanks to all who contributed!

So - quick question to all who have followed this path. How have you handled it if the PCs didn't manage to uphold their end of the bargain?

I'm thinking some or all of the BP from the offer gets "repossessed" by settlers leaving and taking stuff, and probably added Unrest to the kingdom (maybe something like 1d4-1 added to the Unrest score).

Thoughts?

We have another few house rules that I feel have been genuine improvements.

- When rolling HP at each level, you roll until you get a number better than half the total value of the HD - e.g., roll a d8 until you get a 5 or better. This allows for some variability, but keeps your barbarian from rolling a 1 on his d12.

- We have a form of table currency called Chits. Chits are awarded by players (or the GM) to other players for a particularly funny joke, remembering an obscure rule, doing something totally great in character, and just generally making the game more awesome. They used to be a bump in XP, but I'm now giving even XP to everyone, so now Chits can be cashed in as a +1 on a d20 roll, or two Chits can be cashed in for an action point (à la 3.5 Eberron).

- We also use an additional class of tactical movement, the Juke. It's basically a step between a double move and a run, and it can open up some nice tactical options. From our house rule document:

Juke

The juke is between a hustle and a run. The character sacrifices some maneuverability for an increase in speed, but not the speed of a straight line run.

As a full round action a character may move three movement increments up to her full speed. Each of these three increments must be straight lines, however the character can change direction between each increment. If the character changes direction before using all her available speed for that increment then the unused movement is lost.

For instance, Hograth the Half-Orc has a speed of 30'. He hears a cry down a corridor that is around a corner from him. Hograth spends his full round to juke toward the source of the cry. He moves 30' to get to a right turn in the corridor. He turns right to find the corridor is a short dog leg - he moves 20' to the left turn in the corridor. After turning left he moves another 30' further down the corridor. The remaining 10' he had from his second movement increment is lost since he was unable to move his full 30' in a straight line.

A character wearing heavy armor or carrying more than a medium load cannot juke, unless special abilities counter the normal movement penalties associated with these situations.

A character with the Run feat can move in four straight line increments during a juke when wearing light or medium armor and carrying no more than a medium load.

A character cannot juke when she has any reduction to speed.

When I joined my current group, the GM had a house rule for fumbles on a natural 1 attack roll. The rule was on a natural 1 you had to pass a DC 10 DEX check - if you failed, you dropped your weapon.

There were several problems with this. It overly punished martial characters, it didn't do anything to unarmed characters or creatures with natural weapons, It never really affected casters even if they had a critical miss with a ray based spell or the like.

The GM tried to fix these discrepancies by making it that the character missed their next attacks even in the case of natural weapons. This really just made it worse, particularly in the case of multiple attacking characters because an unlucky roll at the start of a string of attacks meant the character was screwed for that round.

However, I like the idea of critical misses to much to completely scrap it. When I picked up the GM duties this time around, I decided to make some changes to our established house rules, and put my sights squarely on this one.

Ineffable Cheese's New and Improved Critical Miss House Rule

It's sort of a mirror of the critical hit rules. If a creature rolls a natural 1 on an attack roll, it is a threat of a critical miss. The creature makes another attack roll using all the same modifiers and against the same target AC. If the confirmation roll misses the target AC, the attacking creature gains the Unbalanced condition until the start of his next turn. The Unbalanced condition is a -2 penalty to AC.

We've been using it for about 20 sessions now, and it has been very well received. It adds some texture to combat without overly screwing the martials, and without adding too much complexity.

As all the others discounts, it was only one-shot. The difference was that it could be any kind of building, not a static one.
Mine players spent it to gain a Free Castle in their capital (50% Staglord ruin + 50% free from the Halfling).

Now they are facing the political consequences, and trying to recover on the diplomatical/political plane what they unconsciously lost in the last month when their halfling vassals proclaimed the new Republic of Vilʹne, protectorate of the Barony of Arendelle.

That makes more sense. I'm definitely grabbing this one - my players are softies, and I can't imagine that they will turn down a chance to help halfling slaves. I think it will be a fantastic introduction to the law of unintended consequences.

Children of the West
An Halfling organization, focused on freeing the slave Halflings from Cheliax and the others country, very infiltrated inside the servants of the major Houses.
An Halfling waiter approached the PCs during the dinner, proposing an agreement between their future kingdom and his organization.
Offer: 5 BP, half the cost of any kingdom building!
Stated: Forbid slavery in the kingdom, give asylum to all the escaping Halfing (no matter where they come from), have the kingdom's alignment be non-lawful and non-evil. Make a Vassalage Edict within one year to rise a Vassal Halfling State inside the boundaries of the PC's Kingdom.
Hidden: The Vassalage Edict will move one step down the attitude with all the big houses when a lot of their Halfling servants will depart their villas, castles and palaces, provoking a lot of technical troubles to their business for the first month..

@T.A.U. (hopefully you're still keeping an eye on this thread) - I particularly love this idea, and the whole unintended consequences thing with the Brevic Nobility is brilliant.

My question for you - do you have the half price building thing going on in perpetuity, or was that something that only lasts for a set period of time. If you do have it ongoing, have you found it to be unbalancing?

This is all fantastic! Thanks so much! Keep them coming!

My group has started a relatively new campaign. We built the world we're playing in using the (really awesome, and highly recommended) world building RPG Microscope, and the world we came up with is much more grimdark than we normally play in.

The biggest differences that take it away from "standard" fantasy are no humans in the world, and the whole structure is predicated on the dwarf "world" and the elf "world" are merging over time. This really pushes the traditional "Elves and Dwarves don't get along" trope to the fore, and amplifies it to elves and dwarves actively hating each other.

We're playing a dwarf centered group, and I'm playing a particularly xenophobic dwarf. It's a big departure for me as I generally play Chaotic Good humans, elves, or half-elves with a very live and let live attitude. Playing a Lawful Neutral (bordering on Evil) staunch traditionalist, and more than a little racist dwarf is not really in my wheelhouse.

So - my crowdsourcing request - I want to gather potential racial epithets for my dwarf to sling at other races in the game. We have an orc in our party, and I already called her a snout which went over pretty well with the group.

Everyone in the group is pretty thrilled with my character's concept, and I'm trying to embrace the character, but it goes against my personality so much that I need some go-to insults to keep in my back pocket.

So far, I have a couple of ideas, but I'd appreciate any further thoughts.

Orcs: Snouts, Greenies
Gobinoids: Gobbos
Tieflings (which ended up being surprisingly central to the world): Shades, Skulks

I'm having a really hard time coming up with anything for Elves, which is a problem since that should probably be the biggest focus of my character's persecution complex.

Thanks for the help!

Dotting for interest.

I'm about to start Rivers Run Red, so something like this is exactly what I've been looking for.

dot for intrest

Spoilers for Stolen Land ahead - you have been warned.
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I'm going into my ninth session in our Kingmaker campaign. So far my players have managed to not kill and bring in for trials every single bandit except 2 (one killed, one escaped).

That's Haps and all the bandits that showed up at Oleg's, all the bandits at the Thorn River crossing, and a beefed up Falgrim Sneeg and a couple of rangers I gave him as an ambushing party.

I want to reward the utter non-murderhobo-ness of my PCs by giving them some inside information on the Stag Lord's operation, but I'm not sure how much to tell them.

My justification is information they learned from Sneeg and his cronies; I was thinking I'd give them a bit of the internal power dynamics between Akiros and Dovan - possibly give them a little bit of an edge in playing the factions off each other.

What are the forum's thoughts on this? I'd like to give some actionable intelligence, but I don't want to obviate the challenges either.

I played him as an evil Thurston Howell....

I played his wife like Mallory Archer.

This is BRILLIANT! Consider it yoinked. :-)

The description of Stunning Fist says that the unarmed strike must do damage to the target before they need to make a save against the stunning effect. Does that include nonlethal damage? Can a Monk choose to deal nonlethal and still apply Stunning Fist?

You could open up a free DropBox account and share a specific folder/file, I believe. If you aren't too happy with Google Docs...

Seconded. I've used Dropbox for this sort of thing in the past - works great.

Nice work, by the way.

Well, about 30% of magical weapons glow like a Light spell, but they can't be turned off at will.

True - I definitely considered that, but since it's a flat 30% chance, it is not really something that the PC's can choose to have or not. And to be honest, we've never really enforced that 30% chance before.

Is there any particular reason it needs to be a weapon?

Mostly trying to keep PC's hands free, or at least holding something useful in a fight instead of an everburning torch. :-)

We're using a VTT in place of a battlemat, and things like vision and light that we'd always just handwaved become WAY more obvious and important when the computer is handling those sorts of things.

Thanks to all for confirming what I had already sort of figured out. I will probably work up a house rule to include something like the Illuminating quality as an option.

EDIT: Clarity

Basically it is a +500 gp enchantment that makes a weapon into the equivalent of an everburning torch that you can will on or off. Does anyone know of anything similar in an official Pathfinder supplement?

Obviously, it is a super simple house rule to allow it in my game, but my group comes from a long 3.5 background and I'm trying really hard to enforce a "Pathfinder Only" policy in my current campaign. The last campaign I ran ended up being a sort of mish-mash between 3.5 and PF rules and it was a tremendous pain by the end of it, so this time around I am trying to draw a line in the sand from level 1.

Thanks all.

@RobRendell - some very interesting ideas here. I love Fate, so I will definitely need to take a look at this when I have some more time.

Thanks for the perspective guys; glad to know I wasn't completely screwing it up. I definitely like the idea of giving info instead of treasure sometimes, and that will be going into my bag of tricks.

I'm running Kingmaker, and there are quite a lot of random encounters - some of which are well above the character's APL. My first and second level PCs have already fought and defeated both an owlbear and a troll.

With the troll, I generated treasure using the guidelines in Ultimate Equipment. I guess it's from years of playing 2e/3.xe, but I think I misunderstood the process and basically generated treasure for a 5th level party since the troll was CR 5. Looking at it now, I think the intent of the tables is the treasure should be generated based on character level, not opponent level.

However, I kind of feel like getting some more potent goodies for defeating something bigger and stronger than you is not necessarily game breaking. I was just wondering how others handle situations like this. I think in the future I'll generate at APL +1 for somewhat challenging encounters or +2 for very challenging encounters, but not more than that. The Troll was APL +3 and they got a lot of pricey stuff for 2nd level characters.

I used Hexographer to make a large map image that tied the four maps from the books into one continuous map - you can find it here. Oleg's is in Hex 27.14. It's definitely a work in progress, especially since I didn't really bother with anything in Brevoy, but it is working so far. My plan is to continue working on it in Hexographer and exporting new versions as needed.

I am using Realm Works from Lone Wolf to manage my campaign, so as the players explore the lands I'm uncovering more of the map in the Player view on a second monitor as we play. I have pins on the map that link to entries about the various things they find. So far it's been working pretty well.

I need to check out DaddyDM's program that Bradley mentioned - it looks like a really good way to manage a kingdom once we get to that stage.

I've had the program for a couple of years now. It is a FANTASTIC resource for building/updating encounters.

In the game I just started, I brought my two laptops that have HL installed and my group used the program to build their 1st level characters. Putting them together was a snap, and now five of my six players have gotten the software to manage their characters (admittedly two of them are married and another two are roommates, so they're sharing the installs within the households, but still).

As for the cost for the datasets, I personally think Lone Wolf is more than fair. There is a HUGE amount of stuff that comes with the base purchase (including the NPC Codex, for instance). They have included the Editor, so if you really don't want to part with your cash you can certainly build what you need; it is not the most intuitive thing in the world, but after a few tutorials it's not that bad either. I've built feats and classes, implemented alternate versions of class abilities from house rules, and even set up full mechanical differences from the core rule set to keep our house rules working smoothly. Any and all of this (and a lot more) can be done through the Editor.

But why would I do that, spending hours and hours of my free time adding feats and spells and archetypes when I can get a whole book's worth (with really responsive customer support and bug fixes mind you) for a measly $10. Yes, it can be a lot if you buy a bunch all at once, but after the initial investment it's just not that much per book. I tend to just buy the big hard backs, and if I need to add a feat or something here or there from one of the smaller releases I just pick those up as needed.

The amount of time it has saved has made the purchase a no brainer. If you are a GM, it's worth the cost (though you might want to limit your initial purchase to books you use a lot). If you are a player, I also think it's worth it, because you only need to buy datasets for the books that pertain to your character. And from experience, running a character in Hero Lab at the table, being able to apply the Enlarged Person as well as, Blind, Staggered, Stunned, Entangled, Sickened, and Prone conditions to the character and being confident that the numbers are all correct is really just the icing on the cake.

@RobRendell - That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to clarify your concepts.

Now that my players have finished Stolen Lands, here's an add-on I put together to replace Svetlana's Moon Radish quest. As well as giving Svetlana some more history, it also foreshadows Nyrissa a bit more overtly than Stolen Lands does.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/NewSehir.pdf

And a stand-alone map image for 3D Virtual Tabletop or similar: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16299287/Kingmaker/Ruins-tactical.jpg

I hope it's of use to someone!

@RobRendell This is a great little scenario - I'm definitely going to work this into Stolen Lands.

Question for you - how did you tie the orb into the bigger Nyrissa plot? I am trying to make her more present in the AP so she doesn't come out of left field in the last couple of adventures.

@pennywit - I love the idea of having Kesten and Jhod disagree on their fates. That's a great source of conflict and I think I'll be yoinking that one.

Unfortunately, with the holidays coming up it is going to be about four weeks before we get to the next session. On the plus side it will give me lots of time to prep upcoming events...

I have now run two sessions of our Kingmaker campaign, and so far it's been a blast. I ended up with six PCs, so I'm heavily leveraging the fabulous six player conversion documents found here.

One thing I'm loving is my players really latched onto the stop banditry language in the charter are totally diving into their role as frontier sheriffs. At Oleg's they set up an ambush for the bandits and thanks to a well placed color spray they managed to capture all the bandits alive. They locked them up in the barracks and headed immediately to the Thorn River Camp.

Once there, they had a pitched battle and managed to capture (not kill) ALL of the bandits there. Even to the point of tying up the ones that were at the camp, then laying in wait for the bandits out on patrol to trickle back in so they could capture them as well.

With the increased numbers, they now have 18 bandits in custody. They just got the Thorn River prisoners back to Oleg's.

Now they've got to figure out what to do with all of them. I'm pretty sure Kressle is going to fall into the "unrepentant" category, and I thought I'd have Kesten recognize Happs as an ex-guard wanted for various crimes in Restov, but I am not sure what to do about the other 16 generic bandits.

I am so thankful to be running a game for a bunch of Not Murder Hobos.

@plober - thanks for the compilation.

And to everyone else - thanks for the great suggestions. So far I just had some boot straps tied together and someone walk into an unexpected spider web - kinda lame. These will give me great fodder for the next several sessions.

Thanks to you all for the input. I think i will end up going with two traits plus a campaign trait (we're running Kingmaker). I think that will strike the balance I am looking for.

I also really like the idea of the later, more powerful traits that tie into the PC's stories a bit more. I will definitely keep that as an option in my back pocket.

I am about to start a new campaign, and we have our character creation session scheduled for tomorrow. I am thinking about increasing the number of traits each character gets up to four (one must come from the campaign trait list).

This is our first pure Pathfinder game (3.5 and 3.5/PF hybrids to date) and the first time we're using traits. Does anyone have experience running with more than the recommended two traits? Did it cause any problems? We are a pretty experienced group, so complexity isn't really an issue.

Thanks for the thoughts and feedback.