I've started a Pathfinder game using Minecraft in place of a virtual tabletop. One of my players suggested that since it's available, the characters should be able to use some of Minecraft's features, namely the ability to build stuff, which sounds like a great idea to me since it'd mean I didn't need to build it all myself. So now the players are minor nobles sent to the area to help develop a growing town.
Now, what I'm posting to ask is if anyone has any suggestions on ways of balancing building stuff, adventuring, etc.? That is, while they're there to help build the town, they don't have unlimited resources. They'll also be expected to do some adventure-type stuff (although I need to come up with some justifications for why the nobles were sent out instead of the guards). I am currently planning on using the Stronghold Builders Guidebook to compile a list of common buildings with sizes and prices and then giving the players a separate fund to build from.
So, any thoughts on other ways to keep things moving? Any city-building details that I've overlooked? Has anyone else tried this or something similar?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We should collaborate with decent Minecraft mod-makers and MAKE a MineCraft Pathfinder servermod. Actually lets you set up certain things, lets the DM actually have access to moving all the monsters, etcetera.
There are too few models, or I could use the Citizens mod to do most of that. There's already a dice roller mod. A character sheet mod might be nice, but might not be worth the trouble.
To deal with the lack of models, I'm just going to be using colorful stacks of wool to represent all the monsters. I ran through a brief test combat and it seemed like it should work. I've already gridded off the floor at potential encounter sites. (The whole world has been build on a 2 blocks = 5 ft. scale.)
If anyone else wants to try this, I would recommend comparing the 2 block and 3 block scales before building anything big. 2 block gives a fairly accurate eye-level view in Minecraft, but 3 block might be worth it for the added detail and thinner walls. It'd also take longer to build things though, so it'd be a trade-off.
I just realized that I'm not actually trying to homebrew anything in this thread and that it may have been more appropriate in the advice or general discussion areas. Oh well. (I do have some homebrew questions, but I was saving those for later.)
I guess that's not strictly true since I was talking about using the SBG...
Now, what I'm posting to ask is if anyone has any suggestions on ways of balancing building stuff, adventuring, etc.?
(...)
So, any thoughts on other ways to keep things moving? Any city-building details that I've overlooked? Has anyone else tried this or something similar?
Use the Kingmaker Campaign book 2+. In the first book the player characters "only" explore the lawless wilds of the Stolen Lands.
You can also - for example - use the RunebladeX's Kingdombuilder Document- Openoffice.org Version document or take a look in the The-Overlords-Guide-to-Kingdom-Building - Thread or take a look on the Guide (word document.
I approve of this use of minecraft.
I Guess the best way to balance building things is to have it take lots and lots on in-game time. Possibly base the time taken on skill checks. That way players could build flimsy structures relatively quickly, but they'd have to make profession miner checks and so on to build a decent castle.
I should reiterate that the players are nobles and aren't building things by hand, at least not in-game.
I don't have time right now, but I'll look over those links. (I've seen the Kingmaker stuff before, although I don't own the books. I feel like it's a bit vague to be used with Minecraft.)
GM: "And then you see something that is not of this world! It is a geometrical form, for which even the great god Notch would scarcely find a name. It is an uniform arrangements of matter and mad grotesqueness. Looking at it boggles your mind, its shape seem to twist and turn before your eyes, although it is barely moving or transforming into something different. This thing that must have come from a realm, further away than even the "Nether", because it has neither edges nor corners, but still exists! Now you remember the ramblings of the mad townsman, who lived alone in a church in a desert: “That is not block which can eternal roll!”
And then you realise... this thing is ROUND!
(Sorry, totally cool idea to use minecraft, but I just had to...)
We've run one game and so far it's going very well. The players began in the bar (of course) when they heard some commotion outside. Someone's child had disappeared. They managed to track the child to a cave before the guards did, went it and saw a hole up the cave wall. Spent some time trying to get up there and then found it was a giant spider's lair. The ninja and (goblin) gunslinger snuck up on the spider and got a critical shot on it.
Further in the cave, they found three bundles of web. The first one they cut open dumped a spider swarm on the goblin's head. The swarm chased them all the way back out of the cave before they finally killed it (pellet rounds).
For being unprepared nobles (no one brought a torch) they're doing really well so far. The king heard about their heroics and sent them to investigate something going on at the ruined castle south of town.
On the way they were ambushed by goblins. (Minecraft makes it much easier to sort out who has cover, partial cover, etc.) One got away and they chased it into a cave where there were a bunch of other goblins waiting. Having the gunslinger peeking around the corner taking shots while the goblins wait to shoot him was an entertaining scene. The bard sat at the cave entrance singing, but is now out of rounds of performance.
From 18 goblins including a level 2 fighter chief, they're down to 4 without taking any serious damage. I was trying to play the goblins smart. They've tried to take cover from bullets, wait around corners and ambush the party whenever possible, but the ninja keeps ambushing the ambushers and the gunslinger critted the chief, so they're just stomping all over these guys despite being a party of 3 with no blaster and no frontline fighter, which is great. (And still no one brought a torch.)
Having the 3D view of the scene, even if it is so blocky, really helps visualize what's going on and really helps the mood I think.
Are you still using PF rules? If so, you might need to establish two separate "pools" of money, or economies: one that can be spent on magic items, and one that can only be spent on mundane stuff.
Otherwise, if Noble A builds a castle and a city grows up around it and he hires an army and so on, Homeless Hobo B casually waltzes in with his full WBL magic gear and takes over the castle and city without breaking a sweat.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I've already got that set up. The king has already given them 100k each, but that's not exactly in cold hard cash and they can only spend it on building up the town. They have their own personal money they can spend on gear. I'd have no problem letting them put their personal money into building projects, but it won't be easy to go the other direction.
I'm also thinking about putting in some treasures that apply to their kingdom account rather than just their personal wealth. An example would be a vein of silver. Such things would require some investment to develop though.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The second session went pretty well, right up until the end.
The players finished cleaning up the goblins, although the last three goblins released a trapped giant bombardier beetle that KO'd two of the party members. Fortunately the one left had some healing magic and they weren't too far from the next town. The beetle got away.
After resting, two of the players went back to the cave to pick up some of their stuff they'd dropped only to find the bodies of the goblins have vanished. They decided to get their stuff and go without exploring the cave further.
The town elder told them how they've seen movement in the abandoned castle and that some of their livestock had gone missing. A very good gather information roll found a kid who said he'd seen a little blue man riding a giant black spider. A very good knowledge roll said that was probably a mite.
After resting and preparing for a couple days, they set off for the castle. Once there, they did see a skeleton laying out in the open and scattered the bones just to be safe. Inside, they found a number of spiders, mites and centipedes. The mites attempted to use prestidigitation to scare the players off or slow them down with limited success. It didn't take too long to clear the mites out.
In the castle basement, they found an odd hole leading deep underground and decided to see if there was anything down there worth reporting to the king. The tunnel lead into a vast network of caves and the players stumbled into a group of stirges (a random encounter). Unfortunately, a series of bad rolls left one character with 1 con, and another with -1. The remaining player ran back to town and got the local druid to help haul the other two out. They immediately left for the city where the king payed to have the dead character raised (although he put that on their tab, so it wasn't completely free). They sent some people back to the castle to brick that hole up.
The king now has to send away for a new diamond, so it'll be a couple months before such a speedy res is possible again.
----------
The first character death made us reconsider the raise spells. I don't want to ban them, and it won't be too long before they'll be able to afford them on their own anyway, but there should be some consequence to dying.
The dead character's player and I came up with the idea of a table of effects that would apply to the raised character. Most of them are purely RP issues, although there are a couple of mechanical effects. We'll see how that goes next time.
I would like to know how to get to the site and play a worker/fighter. I have had trouble buying the minecraft program with visa gift cards. Has this been resolved? Is there a specific internet money card I can buy?
Also, I would like to build a dungeon containing some of the rooms from the cleaves. I would let in some monsters, and everyone who slays something, gets the XPs. Creapers might be the equivalent of a 6 or more dice undead.
The first character death made us reconsider the raise spells. I don't want to ban them, and it won't be too long before they'll be able to afford them on their own anyway, but there should be some consequence to dying.The dead character's player and I came up with the idea of a table of effects that would apply to the raised character. Most of them are purely RP issues, although there are a couple of mechanical effects. We'll see how that goes next time.
There's one thing built in. They lose their stuff. That's more of a melee with native monsters thing.
I'm not using Minecraft's built in combat engine. I'm only using it as a virtual table top. Colored blocks of wool still make pretty good monsters though.
(BTW, it looks like you can just buy a Minecraft pre-paid card in stores http://minecraft.net/prepaid if you don't want to use a credit card or PayPal online.)
I have statted up creepers (as aberrations though) but I haven't thrown one at the party yet.
Is that the 20 something card in 7-11? I'll get that. Just reassure me that I will have access to the server. I can make a towns person for your game. We can build like the guy who made a model of the enterprise. I'll build the cleaves rooms on another site to represent the other plane aspect of it. (My version of the green blaster infects those it damages making them a green blaster.)
I can't give you access to the server since it's just running on my personal computer and isn't always up. It's not too hard to set yourself up a server though, if you have a decent machine. (3+ gigs of ram is the main thing, I think.)
I think the game card will grant me some server space. I get paid biweekly. Minecraft started allowing group accounts, so let me know if you put a version of this game on a server. Keep posting the rules.
Server space where? Minecraft doesn't have any centralized servers. (Yet. They're working on Minecraft Realms, but it's still in closed beta last I heard.)
We've played three weeks now, and besides a little lag every now and then (which, given what we're doing, isn't a big deal) things are running fine as is, so I don't really want to change that. (Just saying, don't get your hopes up too high about me moving this game to a public server.) Also, I'm cheap and running it from my computer is free. :)
Anyway, I will be keeping my house rules and setting details on the wiki up to date so my players (who are all over the US) can access it.
I think this is on a public server.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94
It might be, but the server admins have to pay for server space separately from Minecraft.
In the previous session:
When the dead character was raised, another ghost followed him back. No one else has any idea why he keeps telling people to shut up for no apparent reason.
A few days later, the king sent the players out on a supply ship to a nearby island where a wizard was doing some research for the king. He hadn't reported in recently, but that was apparently a bad habit of his. The king said that the sailors wouldn't go inland because the wizard used skeletons for labor and protection and they didn't want to have anything to do with that.
On the island, they set off for the wizard's tower. Along the way, they spotted a large patch of poison ivy and avoided that (almost free XP :) ) before running into one of the skeletons on the way to collect stuff from the ship. It apparently hadn't been told not to attack, so it did, but one skeleton isn't much of a fight.
Once they got to the tower, they saw the clouds overhead swirling ominously. (That's a pain to do in Minecraft. Thank goodness for my math background and WorldEdit's function generator.) No one answered their knocks but the door was unlocked. Just inside, they found another 5 skeletons standing guard (and 4 more broken ones that I forgot to mention to them). The ninja managed to climb up over them and tumble through the opposite door, but the goblin decided not to try that and just shot one. That got their attention, but by funneling them into the narrow doorways, they managed to defeat all 5 with only minor scratches.
Exploring the tower, they found a few pieces of treasure and then ran into an animated bucket in the bedroom. As a tiny animated object with a clunky, metal construction, it was too much trouble to defeat, but also posed very little threat. The pretty quickly decided to just shut it in the bedroom and ignore it. (They didn't really notice at the time, but the bucket was meant to carry waste out so the wizard didn't have to.)
A bit further up, they ran into something new, a devil. Fortunately, it was a martite (custom creature) which is very low rank and ended up being not much of a threat. They tried to talk it down but couldn't really offer it much, so they tried fighting it instead. With it's DR, it withstood most of their attacks until they finally just held it down and threatened to go get a silver dagger. It gave up enough to tell them a little of what happened. Then they shut it in the room with the bucket.
Finally, at the top of the tower, they found a giant open portal with a pair of huge demonic hands sticking out forcing the portal open wider. After a bit of digging around, they found some notes that suggested that the crystal hanging over the portal was supplying extra power. The gunslinger pulled out an adamantine bullet and brought it down easily. (I didn't notice he had adamantine bullets, so I thought that was going to take a bit longer to solve. Being prepared paid off.)
After searching the rest of the tower (and finding a scroll to summon another martite), they headed back to report to the king. On the way out, they ran into a plant creature (another custom creature) they had avoided coming in. It was immobile and they spotted it in time to simply avoid it, but the ninja wanted to collect some seeds. When he went to cut it down, it grabbed him and began squeezing. The goblin shot it and him with an alchemical fire round knocking both out. When the bard recovered from his fit of laughter, he revived the ninja and they finally left. (There's not many CR 1 creatures of certain types.)
After the report, the king said he'd give them some time to rest and suggested they could help out with the festival coming up in about a month.
With a slight retcon, one character paid to have the lyre of building teleported over rather than wait two months for it to be delivered, with that in hand, and a bard to play it, a town wall sprung up in no time. (Materials for the wall were still quite expensive.)
I really should take and post pictures. Edit: A picture of the wizard's tower.
Anybody find a Minecraft mod that implements Pathfinder rules?
|
No, but this thread is awesome. I, too, am planning to run a game on a Minecraft server in the future, and love the idea of a die-rolling mod (there should probably be dozens of these already). Honestly, that would be all I'd need for running a game - die rolling and map placement. With each block as a five-foot square, colored wool (or actual buildings for bigger creatures), and imagination, Minecraft could make a fantastic means by which to play.
I'm a mod developer for Minecraft. I'm currently busy now working with the KGBlocks Mod (which is not yet released), but I'm intrigued by your idea.
I found a mod called Mythicraft that sounds promising and has cool videos and screenshots. It says it featured D&D like stats and some character classes similar to Pathfinder. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work.
Another mod called Hexxit is part of a multi-mod launcher called Technic. It worked fine and has a server pre-configured. Unfortunately, it is more generic fantasy RPG than D&D or Pathfinder.
|
|
Update: My players and I have built the majority of the local city, an arena to be featured in a future adventure, and most of an old dungeon they visited at level 1 (and are destined to re-visit in the future).
No games played yet in Minecraft but everything looks beautiful and some of my players are incredibly excited about the idea (a few are hesitant).
I wonder how it would work with characters of different BAB and abilities.
Hello again. I'm still kind of around despite my silence, and our Minecraft Pathfinder game is still going, although it's slowed down to biweekly. (I don't think I'll start posting logs again though.) If anyone was wondering, after playing for a while, here's what's been working for me.
I'm using a bukkit server. The only downside is that bukkit often isn't updated fast enough to use the latest version of Minecraft, but the current launcher makes it easy to switch versions, so it's not a huge deal. With bukkit, I use the following plugins:
- dynmap (a live-mapping plug in)
- Multiverse (not perfect, but nice for segmenting large vertical areas and whatnot)
- SafeFire (so decorative fire doesn't burn houses down)
- VariableTriggers (not essential, but nice for traps, big doors, or the like)
- WeatherGod (I think something like this might be doable with the normal commands, but this works for me)
- WorldBorder (only used in conjunction with dynmap to force it to fill in large areas of the world)
- WorldEdit (must have; the various tools and the ability to make new ones is essential for preparing larger areas)
- A dice roller, but I ended up writing my own (due to bugs and desired features, plus it's about the smallest plugin you could write)
I'm sure there are other plugins that could be helpful (and there are a few I've disabled for compatibility reasons).
It's also been nice to be able to code to get the most out of Variable Triggers and especially WorldEdit. I've made some fairly specific scripts such as one to place a hex grid on my world map or one to build some generic houses.
If you take a 2x2x2 block cube to be a 5-foot cube, it gives a fairly realistic scale to the Minecraft characters' perspective. 1x1x1 would make things way too small (you'd look like you were 10 feet tall, doors would be too big and small passages wouldn't be passable) but there's ways you could make it work. 3x3x3 would make it look like your characters are about 3 feet tall, but it might actually work better. There'd be more room for detail and more room to get around the wool enemies in tight passages. Of course, it'd take longer to prepare for a game. (4x4x4 might work for a small character only game.)
I originally thought of starting on a superflat world and building small vignettes on that, and if I were using an existing campaign, I might revisit that idea, but the world generator has been a decent time saver for the world map and wilderness encounter areas (although the new extreme height generator might be better for a world map). If you're doing vignettes though the 1x1x1 scale could still work.
I've been thinking about writing a mod for character sheets (probably in conjunction with my dice roller), but it hasn't seemed to be worth the trouble so far. I haven't looked at what existing mods there are for that though.
How do you handle the different Pathfinder class abilities? For example, how do wizards cast spells and how do you adjust BAB for fighters?
All that's handled pretty much the same way as for a tabletop game. That is, we don't actually use Minecraft's combat system at all. So the wizard just says I'm going to throw a fireball over here and I'll go and work out what enemies that hits, etc. There are some WorldEdit commands that can speed that up a bit (you can have it place a circle of blocks and then undo that so it doesn't mess up the terrain) but combat is mostly manual.
Now, with Variable Triggers and some work, traps and such can be somewhat automated, which is kind of nice. Still not too sure if it's worth it in most cases, but the occasional pit trap out of nowhere is fun.
If someone finds the trap, can they disarm it or should they just put it on the party map and try to maneuver the enemy to there?
You'd just need to delete the trigger for the trap, although I keep forgetting the commands for that. Or you can put pressure plates down to mark the trap area. Wool blocks won't trigger things though so pushing enemies into the area would require a bit of manual work, but not too much. (Also, I have to remember to call for a perception check for the trap spotter.)
We should collaborate with decent Minecraft mod-makers and MAKE a MineCraft Pathfinder servermod. Actually lets you set up certain things, lets the DM actually have access to moving all the monsters, etcetera.
Can't you just add skins to different monsters?
Well, looking at the Citizens mod, it may not be that simple. I suspect that without a lot of extra work, each creature is limited to a single skin (so you couldn't have two different kinds of zombie at the same time). I haven't really looked in to it too deeply though.