comrade's page

It's a tricky balance to strike. Before initiative, you should be given a reasonable length of time to formulate a plan.

I'm of the opinion that you should be a little rushed in your decisions once initiative has been rolled. You're going to make mistakes, especially before the party has fully gelled, but I think that that is part of the game.

I'm definitely towards the 'fast game is a good game' end of our group though. The two most experienced guys lean towards taking more time in these situations.

The flipside is that GMs need to play NPCs/monsters fairly, and must remember that with multiple creatures, they won't all be following the same playbook, and often won't have any organized plans whatsoever.

We're playing Rise of the Runelords at the moment, and it's plainly killing our GM to play the goblins as stupidly and disorganized as he is, but to be frank it's adding to the experience and we're having some good laughs.

Got to agree with two parties of four and an extra GM if you can manage it. Works well, but it's a bit of a shame not to be able to discuss everything with the other table. We've actually grown to two parties of five.

The tricky thing, and I think it takes quite a lot of work from the GMs, is co-ordinating timelines.

We tend to have two or three short pauses per session so they can compare notes. We can guess how the other party is doing by the noises they make, but can't quite overhear what they're saying (as if we cared). They're rivals, with similar goals, but rivals nonetheless. The glory must be ours, and they must not usurp us.

To be fair to them we got TPK'd a couple of weeks back and had to create new characters, so they definitely have the moral high ground on heroism front at the moment.

We play on adjacent tables beside a weekly MtG tournament, and by the amount of noise and laughter we produce, I reckon we're having a much better time than the card players.

I am a non-optimizer. I just take whatever feels right for my character, whatever that happens to be. I'm currently playing an elf cleric who's a little bit rangery, and a little bit roguey. The fact that the other characters are a little more powerful than mine bothers me not a jot. Having a powerful character doesn't add to the experience for me, it's the roleplaying that counts. I still contribute in all sorts of ways - I'm just not quite as powerful as the others.

A couple of the other guys in my group most definitely are optimizers. It doesn't bother me in the slightest except insofar as it holds up gameplay. We had one criminally boring session in which they took the entire 2h30m trying to work out how to get the very best out of levelling up from level 2 to level 3.

Players who really want to squeeze every last ounce out of their character really ought to do some between session reading so they don't hold others up.

It's worth noting that those who do optimize in my group do roleplay as much and as well as any of the rest of us, including having their character do non-optimal things when appropriate from time to time.

I want to use the 4d6 (drop lowest) system for character creation, but the group I play with prefer the point buy system, which I think is criminally dull. Is it OK to impose the 4d6(-1) method, or should I acquiesce to everyone being the same?

I like RPGs to be just that, role-playing. I intend to award characters that are well played big XP bonuses which might lead to level disparities. Does anyone have any experience of this?

I'd also like to reward players for picking skills and feats that aren't necessarily the most 'gamey' choices but are a good fit for their character's backstory. Similarly, I don't want to reward number crunchers. I think that I should just say from the word go that I'm not going to look on optimizers kindly, but will reward natural players. Is that OK?

I've been railroaded into GMing our next campaign.

The bad news is that I haven't played an RPG for about 20 years, until a couple of months ago.

The good news is that I'm playing The Rise of the Runelords AP now (as a PC), and probably have until about March to prepare for this.

My intention is to run the Legacy of Fire campaign with a little bit of my own stuff and some Dark Sun nastiness thrown in.

I'm simply not sure what I need to make the whole thing work.

At the moment, I have:

Beginner Box
Core Rulebook
Bestiary
GM Screen
Gamemastery Guide (ordered, not yet received)

Before we start, I also want to get:

Advanced Player's Guide
Ultimate Magic
Ultimate Combat

Any other rule sources that players rely upon I'm planning to insist on them bringing either a hard copy, or their laptop with PDFs, to each session. Is that fair?

(there is more, but I just want to break the post up a little)