I see that the iconic PC's for RotRL have a point buy before Racial Mod's of 25. We are in the process of creating a group on four player for RotRL is 30 points to high or should the DM rather opt for 28. He wants to open this group question to the Paizo floor?
We are still waiting for the modules to arrive (living in South Africa)
so the DM has yet to see the strengths of the main protagonist.
Still it would be great to start working on the group already.
We have the RotRL Player Guide (the free Pdf) so far.
Could those who have played/are playing or DM'ed (even better) RotRL please advise.
Filler: Our DM is exceptionally good at roleplaying NPC to the *hilt*, having been D&Ding since 1988. He is also very much of the "the dice fall as they fall" approach. On top of that he has studied squad level tactics and ambushes. I think he hates having to play Chaotic NPC's. We often see hobgoblins at early PC levels.
We are playing RoRL with 32 point buy characters and the AP is really hard : we are near the end of the 2nd adventure and we've suffered several losses.
We are playing a group of 7 players built on 25 points and only Core books (including any pathfinder stuff). The characters find it fairly easy to build good all round characters, but much more difficult to have one ability that is very high. For example the human cleric has the following stats before any pathfinder racial adjustments or any level bonuses:
Str 12, Int 8, Wis 14, Des 14, Con 12, Chr 13.
As you can see he has no outstanding attributes, with 28 points he would of increased his Int to 10 and Chr to 14.
The group is finding most of the adventure fairly difficult, but that is more a problem of a big group and the lack of organisation than the ability scores in my opinion.
The last campaign we played allowed "splat books" and I have seen a huge decrease in the characters power by going back to core rules. The last campaign was also built on 32 points and with that I found that there was a lot of overlap with ability scores. As an example the Thief did not shine by having a high dex, because 2 of the fighters had done the same.
Please note, we do not die in my campaign at -10 hit points, as we use a house rule that allows a fort save at minus to stabilise. If they did die at -10, then they would of played more cautious, but I still think I would of been looking at 4 character deaths by this point (half way through the second AP). As it is I have just killed the first character.
If you use standard death rules, I would suggest you do something to make the party harder, either more starting hit points as mentioned in the Alpha book, or some sort of action points rule. The point buy ability scores is going to be purely down to your playing style, 30 will mean a party with no stats at 8, 28 will mean at least one stat at 8.
Just a quick note to your DM from a DM running the campaign. The main protagonists of the first adventure are completely off their rockers, if he plays them as tactical geniuses the group is going to suffer a lot of deaths.
I personally played them up as very disorganised, stopping in mid fight because they were distracted by food and so forth. Later on when it gets more desperate for them he can start having fun with his tactics, but the early encounters would be far too deadly if he makes them into Ninja/Special Forces style attackers.
I have in the past tended to have my villains fight to the best of their abilities, this AP took me back to basics with a lot of my DMing. I am now more likely to have unintelligent creatures flee from combat, or have disorganised opponents make mistakes, even over confidence can be used to make the opponent a little weaker and gives the DM some good fun to mock the characters for a round or two with out pressing the advantage.
Ditto - running it at the moment. I gave 32 point buy and attribute increase every 2 levels, and even with this it has been tough going on Burnt Offerings. I believe the iconics are perhaps a shade underpowered for the adventure. Personally I would recommend a 30 or 32 point buy, and a slightly flexible GM to avoid needless deaths (still let them die if they are stupid, though!)
We are really enjoying the first adventure on the AP.
Creative Director
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My preference when running a game is to have players use 32 points to build their characters. Gives them a bit more survivability, which is good. The "threat" of death is better for the game than actual death, after all.
For the Pathfinder Pre-Gen characters though, we go with the standard 25 point array. Which is the same array we use for all NPCs in the adventures.
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When I ran Burnt Offerings for my group, I had them use the 25 point buy like the Icons. I wiped the floor with them.
For The Skinshaw Murders, I let them raise their stats to 28 point buy. They held their own.
We will see how they do on Hook Mountain Massacre.
Also, there were 6 PCs, not 4 like the Icons.
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My preference when running a game is to have players use 32 points to build their characters. Gives them a bit more survivability, which is good. The "threat" of death is better for the game than actual death, after all.
For the Pathfinder Pre-Gen characters though, we go with the standard 25 point array. Which is the same array we use for all NPCs in the adventures.
If you were (or are) running an RotRL game, would you be using 32 point buy? And if you did would you be upping the encounter difficulties at all from the way they are in the books?
Just a quick note to your DM from a DM running the campaign. The main protagonists of the first adventure are completely off their rockers, if he plays them as tactical geniuses the group is going to suffer a lot of deaths.
Unless your throwing in the spoiler tag this, I feel, pretty inappropriate. If the players DM comes looking for advice then certianly handing it out is what we do here. I am however not sure that we ought to be recommending to players that they lecture their DM on how to play the end bosses for an AP.