roccojr's page

the makers of CANDY CRUSH are telling all video gamer creators to stop using the word 'candy' because they now own it.

The makers of Candy Land, every candy store, candy stand, and 17% of strippers across the face of the planet are being hit with cease & deists as we speak!!!

Save that "removing someone from a culture" isn't the easy solution that you think it is. It's nearly impossible to remove the stamps that are put on a person from their cultural rearing. A person who is raised for example in a bigoted family generally becomes a bigoted adult, who will look for the same in a mate, and together they will raise bigoted children who perpetuate the cycle. "You can take the man out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the man."

That's getting a bit deep... and certainly isn't an absolute, regardless. Exceptions exist. In fact, I like to think of myself as one.

Someone had indicated that a drow that strayed from its traditional way of life would be killed or fleshcrafted. The point I was trying to make by saying she'd be removed from that culture was that this NPC wouldn't have to worry about being killed or fleshcrafted because she'd be physically removed from those possibilities. I wasn't trying to say that moving to New Jersey would take the Bronx out of her.

FWIW, this was never an "against the drow!" campaign. It just so happened that a couple of the main bad guys were drow... and now they're dead. There aren't likely to be any more in the campaign. If the PC's had cleaned house, as I thought they would, even THIS drow would be dead.

So is this for a Golarion campaign? Regardless, its really up to whatever you want to happen in your campaign. Do you want a drow to transform? Do you have to follow the rules that you can't find to the letter? Lots of things to ask yourself on this long moral journey... Or not. I mean its all up to you, hey.

Sure... I know that the GM can do what he wants... but if there was anything already supplied on the subject in official material, I'd at least like to know. At this point, I'm very sure there isn't.

Presumably roccojr's party's drow isn't in a position where she'd be handed over to fleshwarpers if she becomes good.

Yeah... she definitely isn't. The party had no idea that these antagonists were drow for the 3+ year duration of the campaign. They only discovered it upon entering their sanctum... which was a spell-created demi-plane that had been expended over the last couple of centuries, not somewhere in the Darklands.

Within the sanctum were slaves... a few of whom were drow. The particular drow in question was a wizard that helped the bad guys but surrendered once the head honchos were killed. Redemption has been a major theme throughout the campaign so the paladin allowed her a chance to speak. In their conversation, which she hoped she could use to bargain for her life, he offered that no information she had would save her and that her one chance to survive was to try to redeem herself.

She admitted, flat out, that she did not instinctively feel any need to redeem herself... but she did instinctively feel a need to survive. Seeing that returning home more than likely meant being killed or, worse, fleshcrafted, and if she could endure centuries of slavery to avoid either such fate, then she could endure whatever the paladin was suggesting. So it isn't like it's a done deal or that she'll succeed at this point.

PC drow aren't my concern.

Eltacolibre: Is the "No good drow in Golarion!" actually spelled out as such or is that a conclusion (however logical as it might be) you've drawn? If a demon can be redeemed (as in the WotR AP), I can't see how a drow can't be... particularly if it is removed from the culture you've described.

LazarX: I might be an aberration but I've played RPG's since 1978... but I *HATE* reading fiction. My players love it because they know the plots they get in my games aren't going to be rehashed novel plots... although, more than once, players have said that something in my game is just like it is in some book. My point is, I don't even know what a Drizzt clone would be other than a dual sabre wielding big ball of angst. The NPC in question here is a female wizard who spent the last couple of centuries as a slave. Not sure how similar that might be!

Elyas: You brought up a perfect example. As for those books, I'd check them out for reference material but I was oping for something more Golarion related.

Vivianne: I lean the same way you're saying regarding any transformations. It's a one-way trip. Maybe it's like the bleaching, in that regard. If there was something 'official' to indicate otherwise, I would have gone with it. From what I'm seeing here, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Redemption has been a theme in my Pathfinder campaign for some time. With that in mind, it shouldn't have been the surprise that it was that the PC's in my game have (at least for the time being) captured a drow and are giving her the chance to redeem herself. There's a lot to this but nothing really contributes information pertinent to my question.

I know that a particularly hateful elf can spontaneously drowify him/herself. Would a redeemed drow - one that truly becomes Good and displays that fact clearly by her deeds - eventually un-drow herself? Basically, would she become like a surface elf, lose the black skin, sight issues, special abilities, etc.?

Sorry if this has already been discussed. I honestly did look but I didn't see anything on this particular subject.

Maybe I'm an oddball and I do things the opposite way...

As the 'nearly always tge GM' for the past 35 years when I get an opportunity to play, I behave the way I'd hope my players should behave so that when I am behind the screen, I can say, "Did I do that to you during your game?"

I never tell a GM that I would have run tthings differently but I have been asked how I would judge something. That's the only time I'd speak up... Well... In a perfect world, anyway.

One time a GM made what I thought was a blunder. I wasn't the only player to make an issue out of it but I think I could have handled that better. But, since en, this event has become a running joke so maybe we'd have missed out on several dozen laughs, too...

No one's perfect. Don't judge him a 'control freak'. If he causes a problem, just ttalk to him how you'd hope he'd talk to you.

How do I prioritize what I carry on adventures? And what is the best way of managing that stuff?

Probably obvious but Handy Haversacks are not terribly expensive and they make your choices much more verstile.

BTW, I've been enforcing encumbrance rules since 1978... Welcome aboard!

I've jokingly said I take bribes for years.

When 3e came out and we were all suddenly far more interested in miniatures than we had been previously, I told my players they could bribe me with miniatures... a straight 1xp per $1 spent on minis. A couple of players actually took me up on it! And since everyone benefited, no one complained.

Due to an injury, I was blind for a while. I still played and loved it all the more. It was one of the few modes of entertainment that were, for the better part, unchanged. At the time, we played a lot of games that didn't make much use of miniatures, though.

I suppose I'd have gotten even better at it vut, for those sessions, friends put the appropriate dice for me to roll and read the resukts. Other than that , it was gaming as usual.

The miniatures. Aspect would toss in a new wrinkle but it may actually enhance things as the gm (or a player) would have tomdescribe the scene. That's good for everyone's immersion. Too often, the minis end up making a game within the gsme.

Regardless of all that, I wish you the best of luck for your surgery.

Zen archer cleric?

Monk 2 or 4 and druid levels?

Paladin?

Kingmaker is also one of the most mount friendly games, so anything that can charge might be amazing!

Yeah... the paladin in my game is very mounted-combat-oriented... to the point where he goes to extremes (and takes full advantage of his ability to call his mount) to even take it in the few dungeon-ish sites the party has had to explore/clear.

I give the players with Animal Companions a lot of slack wrt controlling them...

Maybe too much...

As written, Kingmaker is the most crafting-friendly AP I've ever seen. You have your base of operations and you know you're going to be in the area. Sometimes months can pass where you can concentrate on crafting, research, etc. And I would imagine, since you're building a kingdom, you can attract the sort of NPC's that can help out or even do some of those tasks for hire. The magic items that are a part of the Economy rolls have to come from somewhere, right? So you an likely customize your items to facilitate any perceived gap your party might have... if not in other campaigns, definitely in Kingmaker, as written.

I'm running a Kingmaker campaign for a couple of years now. There has never been a cleric in the party except for one NPC for one very quick "escort" task very early on. They've had to pay out of pocket for some Restorations and Raises at a relatively close major city but, for the most part, they've gotten on very well.

More important than healers, in Kingmaker, you need outdoorsy types (Rangers, Druids), horses (or other mounts), and at least one Perception Monkey (the guy who spots the ambush, finds the ruins hidden within the dense forest, sniffs out the trolls, etc.).

And SMARTS! Its a sandbox! My players had a troll encounter at 1st level. You can end up facing your own Kobiyashi Maru several times over and you can't necessarily pull a Kirk every time. That's just how it goes. DO NOT ASSUME THERE IS A SAFE WAY OUT OF EVERY ENCOUNTER! In fact, assume there isn't long before you get into one.

I agree with the idea that, if it was a multi-session adventure, giving him a share seems right. If it was a single session, he's SOL.

Similarly, would you take equipment from him if the others somehow lost some of theirs? If so, then he deserves to take part in the reward. If not, then once again, he is SOL.

Enhancements. And no, there's no rule for it - at least none that I know of.

Actually... I misspelled 'Enchantments" but since we're talking about enhancements AND enchantments, I might call it an appropriate bastardization...

I hadn't found one, either. I haven't really looked through Ultimate Magic, though. I thought something might exist there... or elsewhere I might not know about.

Thanks.

Is there a way to change the enchantments on an item? I mean pulling part of an enchantment out and replacing it.

A good example would be an Amulet of Mighty Fists. It holds up to +5 in enhancements and special abilities. Let's say you have one at +5. Can you 'pull out' a +1 and replace it with Frost?

I can figure out some house rules to allow it... I'd probably just let the player pay the cost for the +5 enchantment and replace the old bonus with a new one... but that's off the top of my head. And other items might be more difficult to manage.

I'm more curious about whether there is a rule in a book that says something about this.

Old Earthdawn campaign I ran, a pc got cursed tso that evey victory he'd achieve would be tainted by some form of defeat. The Horror (closest approximation would be demons) worded it far better at the time than I'm doing now. Bottom line: the player stopped having fun with his character who he'd thought of as a carefree, swashbuckling hero (a t'skrang swordmaster, for any who know the game). Once he got on the path toward defeating this Horror once and for all, he bounced back.

The lesson I learned is that you can beat pc's and mess with them a whole lot so long as they have hope... Even if they only have hope that there IS hope. So I agree with Gonturan. Talk to the players... even if all you tell them is that hope isn't presenting itself to the PC's and they'll have to work to find it,

I wouldn't need to see the rolls. Therre's no valid explanation I could ever come up with for rolling a player's stats for him rather than letting him roll for himself. Maybe he's superstitious and believes one person rolling balances everyone's luck? Even in that case, I'd argue that karma knows who the rolls are for and doesn't care about the hands on the dice!

If you accept rolling, you have to accept the possibility of a bad set of rolls so: Yes, I would play those stats. That aside, I would not play with this GM unless I had good knowledge ahead of time that this was his one quirk and that level of control wasn't spread throughout his whole game. I'm sure I'm not without quirks...

D&D always had aoo's even if they went by another name. Even though it grew from a miniatures game, I don't think I saw anyone use miinis for m first 20 years of playing the game so the free attack you got on spell casters who tried to cast or anyone using a ranged weapon cast while you were in melee range were kinda hand wavey. Heck, AD&D had flank and rear AC's, too. So harkening back to old editions of D&D to naysay aoo's doesn't really work... Unless they've been ignoring them for all those years, too, of course.

I screwed up a DM's plans. He was kinda railroady but ran an enthralling campaign. He carefully planned out several months of adventure as we had to transport a criminal (in a low-magic setting) across a continent and an ocean to bring him to justice.

Earlier in the campaign, I had gotten a veritable artifact that allowed a group to teleport without error one time. Somehow we went off the tracks and I didn't use it when it was supposed to get used. I tucked it away and it was about two years of real time from then until we were about to embark on this journey to deliver this criminal.

It was almost scripted. My friend just went through this long spiel about how much opposition we were going to face on his journey and I said, "Are you kidding? This is what that teleport rod was for!"

My friend beamed and I looked over at the DM and I could see by the look on his face that he forgot all about that item. He showed us the BINDER of notes and maps and stuff that he said he'd worked on for TWO MONTHS!! But he was so railroady that I was sure this was the moment for the item and he explained that the moment had passed and he simply forgot we still had it. I felt so bad, I said I'd be ok with the item not working for one reason or another but, to his credit, he said it would be wrong.

We got to triumph. While this criminal's allies were moving to intercept us, we delivered him to the authorities and watched as he was drawn and quartered. It honestly felt great to know the extent of our victory.

The big turn off for guys and rpg's is shopping. Guys hate shopping! And think about it.: you have to shop for a game system you'll like, maybe try a few on for size, pick one you like then shop for accessories. Then you finally get ready to play and the first thing you do after statting up is shop for gear!

Pathfinder has an entire book devoted to shopping! I mean SERIOUSLY!!!

If you've ever gone shopping with your gf/wife/so, you know exactly what THE HUSBAND CHAIR is. Well, with all the shopping going on in rpg's, it starts to feel like your seat at the game table is one of those.

Leave room! Your players may, while discussing their own thoughts othe campaign, present some idea that would actually be really cool. Take the opportunity to incorporate it into that extra room you've left in your plot... Without telling them. You get to use a great idea and the players get to feel a greater connection with the game because they've figured something out (even if they really didn't).

Ecaterina's advice about admitting mistakes is invaluable, too. You completely eliminate the Players vs GM feeling that sometimes creeps into a game if you're willing to do this. I've retconned an entire night's Shadowrun session because I forgot a camera was somewhere that would have busted the npc's as they tried to ambush the pc's.

There are knowledge skills that are supposed to allow PC's insight into the beasties they encounter so sifting through a book at the table can be construed as cheating. I had a high school teacher that dealt with cheating students like this: people who collaborate on a grade when they're not supposed to get to share the points. If two did it, he cut their marks in half. Three, in thirds. He let us decide for ourselves if that was acceptable to us and allowed us to cheat all we wanted!

I subscribe to this philosophy. They can reduce the challenge for a reduced reward. Warn them ahead of time and your problem is suddenly their problem. Now its in their hands.

His powers are beyond our comprehension.

Can you reflavor stuff? If the non-munchkin wants a Pegasus, but you don't want everyone to have one, can he have a horse? Then just say its a Pegasus but cannot fly anymore because of old war injury, under a curse, afraid of heights, etc. Allow him the mechanics you allow everyone else just let him call it something different.

Its not like I said he can't have it. He can. The rules (including a house rule) simply make it less attractive than he'd like. The house rule says cohorts take a share of xp if they adventure with the master pc. Seeing as its his mount, it would be adventuring most of the time hte pc is.

Btw, I tried to let everyone have Leadership for free seeing as we're pkaying Kingmaker. I simpky said that if it was abused, it would go away. We didn't get passed one session when there was a discussion and everone agreed (mostly because of everyone else but not themselves) that the free Leadership feat had to go away.

I think there should be some reward for roleplaying. If the one non-munchkin gets nothing for his efforts, he is being penalized. Perhaps if you started giving the roleplayer more rewards, the other munchkins may start getting the idea, and start roleplaying more. Instead of penalizing good behaviour (as you are suggesting you plan to do), you should reward good behaviour. Conversely, by treating all your munchkins exactly the same as the good roleplayer, you are rewarding the munchkins, since they are seeing no penalty for their bad roleplaying.

I doubt the poop storm will be too bad, if the munchkins realize that if they change their ways, they will get the same beneficial treatment.

Trust me, the storm would be epic. One of the munchkins wants the same thing.

Plus it opens the door to hearing everyone's individual arguments about why they deserve special consideration at some point. Maybe 15 years ago, that would be fine. Now, its just far more enjoyable to minimize the rulings that someone's going to take personally... And if they're asking for something someone else was allowed to do or have, its completely within reason to take that personally.

That's awesome. I can see it now:

Roccojr: There's no way I'm allowing you to play that!

Player: OK, that's cool. I mean I only allowed you to have one of my kidneys...

Roccojr: Fine! Fine! OK I'll allow you to have the transforming battle suit but I'm drawing the line at the orbital weapons platform.

We've definitely joked about it. When the situation seems to be going his way, I',, turn to the others and say, "See the benefits of giving me a kidney?"

And when he jokes about deserving speciaal treatment, I usually tell him that he'd have to give me another kidney if he expects me to be impressed.. Or a heart (bad genes.... Kidney transplant, cancer survivor, heart patient.... But I have great teeth!)

Thanks for all the replies and sorry for disappearing. My daughter got sick and by sick I mean I had to clean the floor and a couple of walls... stomach virus. Yuck.

I can see the merits of the Tim Taylor method while dealing with my family. I have one child who throws herself into her homework as soon as she gets home and needs no reminders to bring what she needs (music instrument, books, etc.) when she needs to bring them. She LIKES me to be involved, though, so I always check with her so she can feel proud and tell daddy she's on top of things. Her twin sister, however, has walked out to go to school WITHOUT her book bag, needs to be nudged to do her homework or she'd "forget" and misses due dates all the time... but HATES when I stay on top of her and just needs to make her mistakes to really learn. So long as we're just dealing with a forgotten book or assignment, I'm ok with dealing with each of them on their own terms (but when its something that can have serious consequences, daddy's doing it HIS way).

Games are different. I wouldn't agree to let a player have Boardwalk for free in Monopoly because he comes to the game dressed in beach attire and painstakingly altered the shoe to look like a sandal no matter how much he explains why he deserves it. Granted, a rpg is supposed to be more than a board game. In Monopoly, I wouldn't agree that a player is scamming vacationers by replacing their valuables in the hotel safe with replicas and selling the originals but in a rpg, that sounds like a great plot. But at the very basic level of how you apply the rules, the analogy works.

I think consistency is what I have to live with.

My players are munchkins... except one. They accept this designation so its not an insult. I'm not even complaining because they try and they laugh when they catch each other exploiting or whatever. Generally these questions get answered with "find new players" so I have to head off any such advice by saying that I've GM'd for these guys for 12, 23, 24 and 17 years. One of them gave me a kidney. For real.

My issue is actually with the non-munchkin. Its not a complaint, again... its just an issue. Basically, he makes choices motivated by roleplaying and ultimately feels bad when he gets policed like the others who may be denied something or have the strictest interpretation of a rule enforced because they're munchkins and they know it. He's basically said that if he's going to get treated like a munchkin, he'll start acting like one. Yeah... 47 year old men are sometimes children. Well... mostly they're children but they hide it better.

So I told him I pretty much have two choices: Treat people on individual merit so that I can reward them based on what they do and not on what I expect from everyone else. In this case, I would have to face the poopstorm that happens when I say one person can have or do something that another can't. "I have the same resources as him. I have the same access as him. Why can he have a Pegasus mount and I can't?" etc.

Or, I can treat everyone consistently. "One guide to rule them all." Everyone knows what to expect because, like almost every other game, everyone's okaying on the same field with the same rules. If I disallowed something for someone, you don't need to ask about it. If I allowed it for someone, you can do it, too.

I've chosen the latter route... but I figured I'd be open to discussing it with others to gain more insight. In a game with very close friends, is this the path you'd choose?

My campaign has gone so far outside the original sandbox that I basically had to put that sandbox inside another sandbox in an enormous sandbox its like Inception...

[spoiler] Brevoy's civil war is well under way. I had made a side trek to stop it from happening but the players didn't feel they should get involved.

They also interacted with Varnhold so much, I couldn't let them die. Once Brevoy's war started, Restoc seceded a few months in. Varnhold annexed them (seeing as the restov Aldori prefer to be the power behind the throne) and quite a bit of surrounding land. Surtova is too busy fighting rebels to effectively deal with that but said he'll take care of it asap.

So the party's kingdom is currently between Varnhold (and the Restov Aldori) and Mivon (and the Mivon Aldori) and they're nervous about when these distant cousins might reunite the family (which won't ever happen... Too much cultural drift between them in the last century but the players don't know it.

Mivon has stayed quiet but its about to move from dressing to stage front soon...

Then again, they could spend the first week of month A then the last week of month B doing kingdomly duties. That could put a full 6 weeks between appearances.

I was more concerned with allowing the PC's to.. well... be PC's. I explained to them, early on, that this was ok... sort of. If the kingdom could get in touch with them and they could be back in a decent amount of time, this would likely never be a concern (Grigori notwithstanding).

In the beginning, the challenge was ensuring that they could receive messages. Now that they're 11th level, they travel through trees, teleport, have flying mounts, etc. so its getting to be less and less a concern.

I actually added a little drama to this room by stepping out of storyteller mode and, once things were in full swing, I told my players, "I just want you to know that I had to read this room's description about 50 times because I kept thinking I missed this trap's solution. Turns out, I didn't. The author doesn't give one. So its up to you."

Rather than looking for triggers, switches, catches or what-have-you, they went old-school. Jokes were made ("So what's my 'bend bars, lift gates?"), drama was had, all in all, it went better than if there was some built-in solution.

My players don't worry about the numbers so much as the plots I weave around them. In the thread-author's example, that 1 point of unrest eliminated by the Royal Assassin has implications that someone's being threatened, at the very least, and that would be a plot they'd ultimately have to deal with that could bite them far more than the numbers might indicate.

I'd make it a plot device within the plot device she already sems to be. As far as she's comcerned, she can do as she said. How? Why? She has no clue. She simpky can. The ability awakened with her sorcerous skills.

The truth: there's something about her background that gives her the ability. Perhaps its a curse (she can do it but it will ultimately be a bad thing and that's theInquisition's TRUE interest). Or its a blessing. Or maybe some artifact was woven into her bones and flesh even before her birth and such a thing will ultimately lure out the bad guys the Inquisistion is after and that's the inspiration for their true interest.

One of my favorite names was my friend's gnome Frothingslosh (off a can of some weird beer). Hanslan Frothingslosh. We ALL thought it was the greatest name ever... Until encointer 1, he introduces himself, "I am the gnome.... Hanslan... Get it? Gnome Hanslan.... No mans land!"

..... Groan ......

Frothingslosh was still too good so we let him get away with Hanslan if he never introduced himself that way again.

A couple of tactics I use:

I use real name lists a lot but I tend to shorten and combine names. Saying them aloud definitely helps since Uress Melson might look great when you write it but when you say it and realize it sounds like you're commenting on the olfactory quality of your son's posterior, you might want to change it. It will never pass the table test as soon as someone else realizes it... And they will.

Take real names and swap or add a letter, two or three. Its still close enough to the original to sound like a name to you but just different enough to contain some fantasy exoticness. Eric becomes Ervic, Becca becomes Kessa, Alexander becomes Xander, etc.

I think I like the 'emotional investment' criteria for my own purposes. I'm definitely not emotionally invested in these npc's. However developed they might become, they are plot points - either creating, furthering or deepening the involvement of the PC's or, more rewardingly, the players. They may appear as important to the campaign as a pc but, in reality, they're just adding their own importance to that of the pc's... and never the other way around... even if the npc in question might disagree!

Unless you would force the party to keep one of these NPCs with them if the players at some point decide to "relegate" that NPC again, you don't have a GMPC on your hands :)

Actually, I've forcee it the other way most recently. They began to elevate an npc ranger into that status. There was a pc ranger in the party and while there are tons of ways to make characters of the same class different enough, ultimately there were too many similarities in their combat abilities for my own comfort. The party raised the ranger after a bad combat. I decided that the ranger was so traumatized that they retired from adventuring. They still kept the ranger around as the Spy Master of their kingdom...

The fact that the party seems to prefer your NPCs to their own fellow PCs is... well, odd, but that's on them, not you.

Well... Not always and not all (though I won't debate my players being odd). There are usually a couple of pc's that are at odds so they might pref the npc to their frenemy or, in my current Pathfinder campaign, there are two pc's with well-played dumpstatted Charisma while the NPC is a high-charisma sorceress. Its easy to like her more!

The way I see it:

A GMPC would be a character on equal terms with the other PCs. They would participate in adventures on equal footing with the PCs, and get an equal share of treasure and experience.

An NPC is what you have described.

If your NPCs were GMPCs, you wouldn't hand their sheets to others to run, just like you wouldn't hand your PC-sheet to another player to run.

I'm getting mixed signals!

The 'special' npc's DO perform on equal terms with the pc's. They participate on adventures (perhaps by invitation, but still...), receive equal shares of treasure (again, the players actually decide, at some point, that the npc has become integral to the party so they deserve it) and experience (i used to give half-shares but, in Kingmaker, it was very easy for the players to load up on npc's so I had to make it a heavy consideration for them). So by these criteria, I might have a GMPC with the party.

However, everything else says I don't...

Not that it matters... Whatever works and is fun is good, after all. Its more a matter of curiosi for me.

Depends on how you define DMPC.

It's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's all in how you handle it. So, it's just 'a thing'.

How do you define it? When would you say that an npc is a gmpc?

I don't feel like I use GMPC's but I'm beginning to wonder...

I'll preface my explanation by saying we're playing Kingmaker so there are a TON of NPC's and that I've gotten a lot of compliments over the years for making my NPC's seem like real people so I do invest more than passing effort into them - particularly those the players seem to latch onto, for whatever reason.

Often, my players may try to fill a gap in their party configuration by retaining the services of an NPC. Sometimes, that might be a short term relationship ("Guys, Rith is a good rogue but far from a trap expert and we know this dungeon has some nasty traps. Let's see if we can find someone to deal with the traps for this.") but, throughout the years, there have been certain NPC's that they've come to accept as members of their party - sometimes even preferring their friendship to other PC's. I don't start them that way but once the players give an npc a recurring role, I will flesh them out, give them backgrounds with at least as much development as the pc's (because my players will inevitably try to learn more about them), eventually graduate them from a stat block to a character sheet (mostly so I might hand the sheet to someone else so they can control them during a combat scene), etc. I've always felt that the best analogy is that if the PC's are Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and most NPC's fall into the yoeman to redshirt category, then these special npc's are more like Sulu, Scotty, etc. To me, they are not gmpc's but I've seen the term bandied about to the extent that I wonder if my personal definition of what that means might be too narrow.

So my main question is: what separates an NPC from a GMPC?

Sub-questions are: Is a gmpc always, at the very least, a warning sign? Or is it just 'a thing'?

We've brought up, many times, that each character (PC or NPC) in a leadership role has a competent staff of characters under them. If there were any irrecoverable deaths, then they could easily promote from the staff and those newly promoted characters could be the new PC's... giving the players the option to swap, shift and redefine roles as suits them... maybe with a point or two of Unrest for the shake up.

The only role that wouldn't really work that way is the ruler. It would be easiest if the ruler came from a large family and obvious, traditional lines of ascension would be readily apparent. In our campaign, the ruler is an adopted PC with no real family to speak of so the players actually drew up lines that go through several of the existing leadership roles... at least until the ruler married (he did) and they produced an heir (baby's on the way... though its not the Duke's child, as he recently learned... but that's a whole different plotline...)

At my table, the cleric woulld be playing right. However, ithis case, I would have the player ask the GM how to rectify what's going on. If the GM interprets Pharasma differently, then just go with it. If he's outting a player in one of those no-win situations usually reserved for "That GM" when someone plays a paladin, then just "accidentally" catch the horse when you channel....

Better yet, leave it up to Pharasma! Use your undead turning ability on the horse. If Pharasma lets it live, then there's no issue. If not, the ranger can take up her issue with Pharasma...

First of all, the soul only returns to the body if it wills to, otherwise the spells fails. So if said doppelganger had offed himself, for example, the soul prolly wouldn't want to be raised again.

Yeah... she was executed after an interrogation where she basically pleaded for her life. There's no mistaking she wasn't thrilled about the prospect of dying...

Your other option is convincing those who would want him back that's he's not worth trying to raise again (such as by providing false evidence he offed himself, or pointing out to the other villains the doppelganger offered to turn traitor and work for the good guys, as he seems to have done in your case). Using a simulacrum or some such here may be useful in doing a fake out if they're careful about it, for example.

Ahh! That certainly sounds interesting. The PC's actually have the resources to pull this off IF they can figure out how to get their ruse back to the people involved.

Barring playing head games with your enemies, a soul bind or some similar spell is probably your best bet. Securing the petrified body into an antimagic field or dead magic zone might be another option.

In general, yes. In this specific case, I'm not too sure about the PC paladin, though. Futzing with souls is bordering on naughtiness. I don't bother the player about good/evil so much. I know him far too long to need to. He'll police himself plenty well-enough.

Didn't that used to be a drawback to elves way back in the old days? They had "spirits" rather than "souls" and could not be raised from the dead? Maybe I'm making that up. I'm kinda old myself. *grin*

You didn't make it up. You're right. I think that distinction was removed after 2nd Edition, though. They could be reincarnated, though... which made pretty boy/girl elfie come back as something yucky and didn't usually make elf players very happy.

Destroy the body as totally as you can and scatter the parts far and wide, in places no-one would ever look.

I see your utter destruction and raise you one True Resurrection... that's sorta what the subject was.

Monstrous humanoids have souls. Outsiders have their bodies and souls as one unit, and they can not be raised by traditional magic.

Constructs and Undead do not have souls either.

True Res will raise an Outsider.

This spell can also resurrect elementals or outsiders...

I follow the Samantha Stevens nomenclature and refer to male witches as Warlocks...

Thanks for the various options. I don't know if anything is actually proof against bringing back an enemy but some of the suggestions and options would certainly make it more difficult.

A really powerful organization that uses dopplegangers probably has access to clone spells as well.

Ixnay on the lone-cay...

PFSRD: If a bag of holding is overloaded, or if sharp objects pierce it (from inside or outside), the bag immediately ruptures and is ruined, and all contents are lost forever.

Eureka!

Though... if this happened to someone the PC's cared to look for, I can't say I wouldn't give them the chance to find their buddy.

I figure the PC's should get the benefit of some favorable consideration from time to time. IMO, they're the main characters in my universe. We're telling their story. There has to be a reason they were chosen out of all the other possible choices, no? George Lucas didn't make a movie about Owen's Adventures In Moisture Farming, after all.