TheRealHoratio's page

I've been playing D&D for about 15 years now, through editions 3, 3.5, and 4th. I've always been the DM, and have run content for groups of between 2 and 6 players. Everyone I've played with before has made fun, interesting characters using maybe only one or two sourcebooks, all of which you would probably say weren't exactly "optimized". I never disallowed any books in my games, or banned any races or classes because they didn't "fit". When someone came to me with a character that they wanted to conceptualize, I would usually help them get there, because being able to play what you find attractive is a big part of the game.

I had to take a break for about 4 years, due to moving away from my old players and not being able to find new ones, but I recently came across a group that wants me to GM a Pathfinder game for them. During the character creation questions, I disallowed 3rd party material, cause I've read threads on here talking about some of the stuff that's out there, so I decided to just keep it limited to Paizo books. They told me what classes and races they wanted to be, which sounded fine, so I gave the greenlight on everything. Now, it is getting close to our first session, and I'm discovering the actual characters these guys have made, and it honestly has me terrified.

We're talking about basically a flesh golem of rules, stitched together from maybe 5 or 6 books apiece, in what I can only describe as less of an actual character and more just shiny numbers on paper. From reading threads on these forums, it's what I suppose you would call min/maxing, or optimization, which as I understand is very commonplace in the Pathfinder game system. What makes me feel even worse is that I tacitly allowed it. I figured that since I had never played with these guys before, I wouldn't say no to anything, or disallow any content except for 3rd party stuff, but I had no idea of the extent to which it would be taken.

Is that just how people play the game now? Is it really treated like an adversarial tactical miniatures game, where instead of a group of people coming together to tell a story, it has turned into another game that one side feels they have to "win", by getting as much of an edge as possible? That's not my play style at all, so I don't think I'm going to be able to provide the experience these gamers are looking for. I'm not one of those DMs that whines about not getting to "play with their toys", but if all this game is really about now is me setting up bowling pins to be knocked down, then what exactly is the point?

I'm not putting anyone down, cause everyone is certainly entitled to play whichever way is going to allow them to have the most fun, but I will say that my excitement over meeting for our first session has been severely diminished. Are there people out there that still want a good story, with challenges to be overcome, where victory might seem uncertain at first, but eventually the day is won through hard work and a little bit of luck? My personal feeling is that the game has become more of "What can I get away with chaining together for my benefit?" rather than making a believable character that fits into the story.

Maybe I'm overthinking things. I've never played with people like this before, so I really don't know what to expect. I know it is my job to make encounters interesting, but I feel like my only options are to slap the Advanced template on everything, max out the hp, and double the number of monsters per encounter in order to rise to the level that these players need/want, but again, that just isn't my style. I don't know if it is worth doing all that extra work, or seeking a group that is more my speed.

I'm relatively new to Pathfinder, but have been playing RPGs for 15 years prior to this, only as a DM. I don't have a ton of time to write my own material now that I'm not shirking my homework in high school to write the greatest Eberron campaign you've ever read, so these days I make use of published adventures.

When I began my collection of Pathfinder Adventure paths, I picked up Rise of the Runelords, Wrath of the Righteous, and then signed up for the subscription, so I have Giantslayer coming in the mail. When on the Paizo website a few days ago, there was a rather large article about a number of products that have a limited number of copies left, and to my dismay, many of them were adventure path volumes that I really also wanted to acquire.

Based on reading the short descriptions of many of them, I had it narrowed down to Mummy's Mask, Reign of Winter, and Shattered Star that I was truly interested in, but I saw that a number of other AP volumes were going out of print as well, like a few (if not all) of Serpent's Skull, Carrion Crown, Iron Gods, Council of Thieves, Jade Regent, and even as I write this I see that Carrion Crown vol. 2 has been stricken from the list.

What I would like advice on is this: Were I to be able to only get an entire path of one of these that are going out, which one do you guys recommend? The group that I recently acquired are 3 people who have never played an RPG before, and one guy who played back in 2nd ed. D&D, and who thinks that rogues have a "stealth mode" like in WoW, so he may as well be starting over from nothing anyway.

I would like to assume that they would play anything I brought to the table, and my running Wrath of the Righteous is really going to test that form what I've read about it here on the forums, so when considering another AP to get, I'm really open to anything. Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions.