glomeo's page

It sounds like the game the players want to play and the game that you want to run might not be the same game.

I wasn't sure what you meant by " they're the type of players who don't simply want to beat up skeletons".

In response to both of these comments;

We're all a bit new to this, and they and I are all feeling out what sorts of interactions are possible and not. Knowing that they mostly picked straightforward beat-em-up characters, I attempted to give them a straightforward beat-em-up dungeon for our second session. They were fighting goblins and related monsters. In every single encounter they attempted to circumvent the combat, by negotiating with creatures that couldn't speak common, animals without meaningful intelligence scores, and an evil monster that enjoys the taste of humanoid flesh.

They didn't want to pick characters that could do that with any meaningful chance of success.

I'm earnestly trying to give the players something they want to play within the confines of the characters they've selected. By way of their actual play, they've communicated that they want to discuss, debate, negotiate and so forth. I consider it my responsibility to give them those opportunities, in ways that aren't setting them up for miserable failure.

And, unless the party is trying to work a deal or something, I can't think of any reason to have a Diplomacy check with a shopkeeper in the first place. The shopkeeper is going to have his initial attitude towards the party (probably almost always as Indifferent). When they walk in and say, "Hey, I wanna buy that cool magic bow," the GM's response shouldn't be, "Ok, roll Diplomacy." The shopkeeper wants to sell those items, so the party isn't trying to change the shopkeeper's attitude or get him to do something he wouldn't normally do by asking to buy it. The only reason to ask for a Diplomacy check would be if the party were trying to haggle on prices.

For more specific information on how to design stuff, what skills does the party actually have? Knowing that would allow us to give you better pointers.

I said they were using Diplomacy at a shop not because they'd be buying something there, but because I'm new to GMing and don't have a deep well of town NPCs to draw upon yet. Most of the NPCs I know anything about so far (this is week 3), I only know because they're shopkeepers, inkeepers, or the Mayor. Hence, if they're asking about rumors in town, they're probably asking one of those people. As I gain more experience I intend for this list to lengthen to include other named and unnamed NPCs, but I haven't had the time to develop that list yet.

Here's the list of skills that might be somehow relevant, possessed by any party member, with only the highest rank listed.

Appraise 8
Disguise 3
Handle Animal 6
Intimidate 7
K: Arcana 8
K: Geography 6
K: History 8
K: Local 5
K: Nature 8
K: Planes 8
K: Religion 6
Linguistics 8
Perception 9
Sense Motive 4
Spellcraft 8
Survival 7

In the first scenario I ran, the druid used Speak with Animals to attempt to figure out who a Goblin Dog was working for.
They debated, for five minutes, the merits of attempting to help a bugbear escape from captivity in hope that he might become their ally. A bugbear.
They used intimidate on the villain who didn't speak Common. I even let this work - I had wanted the villain to become one of their hirable NPCs anyway, so he was always going to give in to them after a few rounds.

In short, they're the type of players who don't simply want to beat up skeletons. I just don't know how to design checks for them that they can actually employ.

Ninja'd by lots of you; thanks all.

I've got an unbalanced party of five. We're all somewhat new to d20, and all completely new to Pathfinder RPG. As I had a better idea than most what was coming up, I strongly encouraged the players to select a balanced party, but instead they insisted on Bloodrager, Slayer, Druid, Brawler, Wizard. No one has UMD, Disable, or Diplomacy. Highest CHA is 15.

I advised against this, but everyone wanted to play this way and I wasn't willing to force someone's first experience in the game to be with a character they wouldn't like.

So I'm having a lot of trouble designing a reasonable investigatory phase to each session. A Diplomacy 15 check to press information out of a neutral townsperson is, on average, a fail. Almost any attempt has a 25% chance of making a shopkeeper unfriendly. What are some reasonable alternatives that aren't simply everyone being creepily forthcoming?

I'm thinking maybe I could use Kn:Local for some purposes, like knowing which mercenary company was hired to guard a caravan. Kn:Religion was going to pass for getting info from the local priest. But there are only so many ways I can think of to do this, and they won't work in a lot of situations.

Does anyone have experience with a party of this type? How do I give them any capacity to explore town and learn things for themselves? A writ from the mayor? Conscripting them into the town guard? I also don't want to just railroad them, but may be willing to if no other option is available.

My entire gaming group is pretty new to pen and paper, and rather than roll up characters from scratch everyone's selected pregenerated Society characters to play. The group has: Crowe, Ezren, Kess, Lini, and Zadim. I allowed Ezren to respecialize as evoker, but all other players are using the level 1 characters from this site. This isn't in Society organized play or anything, but I made this post here because that's how the characters were built.

While running the first session last night, Crowe did more than half of all damage. Crowe dealt more than 150% of the health of the biggest monster I wanted to throw at the party (a bugbear) in one hit. He crit on a goblin for 38 while not even bloodraging.

We had a bit of a laugh about it, but I'm deeply worried that if this situation is allowed to persist, no one is going to want to play more than two or three times before people get upset. I have no idea how to solve it, though. Last night I simply lied about how much HP the bugbear had, but that's not going to work forever. Can anyone give me some perspective here? Is Crowe really such a powerhouse, or did others inadvertently select underperforming characters? Will this resolve itself by leveling up?

Thank you for the quick reply, Hawkmoon269.

I'm relatively new to the subscription process, having picked up only in WotR. I'm also pretty far behind when it comes to actually playing these adventures; I'm still on AD1.

My concern is about what I can expect from my subscription going forward. AD6 just shipped, and the Upcoming Products list is empty (http://paizo.com/products/btpy8x6n?Pathfinder-Adventure-Card-Game-Subscrip tion), as seems reasonable. As I understand it, AD6 is the last adventure deck for WotR, but the subscription is still active, and I would automatically purchase any new, different PACG product which might be announced in the future?

I'm not fishing for product announcements, I'm just wondering how to decide if it's reasonable for me to leave this subscription on or if I need to cancel it in order to make sure that in November I'm not getting new products I won't realistically be able to play. Did S&S AD6 roll over directly into WotR's base set, or was there a gap between them?