Advice for a DM?

[The White]

I'm taking over as DM for my gaming group in a couple of days and running Burnt offerings (and hopefully the rest of of RotRL). We're running it in PF rather than 3.5 (I'm fairly confident with being able to convert it over) but I have a few questions
1: Character creation. I'm doing it point buy and have given them the standard fantasy build (15 points) figuring that it would be better to find out that they are a bit under powered and award them and extra 5 to work with than to give them 20 and then have to take 5 away. I've already had one player complain a bit about only having 15 points but I stuck to my guns. Does this seem like a reasonable approach or from other's experience are 15pt chars going to be too weak?

2: How many players was the module written for? I assume it was written for 4 PCs, am I likely to have to make encounters a bit harder for 5?

3: Leveling. Given that the PF 'fast' experience will have characters leveling up faster than 3.5 I'm a bit worried about setting it to that but given how much slower the 'medium' setting is I'm not sure on that either... I'm thinking medium experience and awarding a few extra bonuses at the end of each part if needed. Opinions?

[Dennis Baker]

Runelords was written for 3.5, PFRPG characters are going to be a bit tougher so going with a 15 point buy should be fine.

Module assumes 4 characters, with five you might consider adding in one additional 'mook' in a fair number of encounters to help with experience. Don't forget to add a little more treasure for them too.

I ran this at the medium experience progression and they lagged. With five characters you have to either add 20% more encounters or something else so they keep up.

[The White]

Good to know that I've made the correct assumptions on most of these. Looks like most encounters are getting an extra something thrown in to compensate for reduced XP and difficulty. If characters lag a bit on medium leveling would it be better to go for fast would that be over-correcting too far?

[Greycloak of Bowness]

The official story from Paizo folk has been Fast progression for the pre-pathfinder APs.

Out of curiosity, I calculated the numbers for Burnt Offerings (added up all the encountered baddies' XP), and found the progression should indeed be fast, not medium.

If you run medium (as I am), expect to add a lot of sidetracks. There's enough XP room running Medium Progression to add almost all of the Kingmaker Adventure Path, excluding any bonus/story bonuses from that AP. As it was, I just had to give my group about 2000xp extra at the end of Skinsaw because they were quite a bit short for the start of HMM.

[The White]

Wow. OK. Fast it is. Thanks for the info guys, that's pretty much everything I needed. Looks like I'm probably sticking to 15 points, adding an extra mook to most encounters and changing my mind to fast leveling. Looking forward to it, it's about a year since I DM'd anything

[godsDMit]

Just as a heads up, another thing to keep an eye on for the AP is party's wealth by level. This AP is already notoriously stingy in respects to useful treasure, as alot of it is either sized for large or small creatures, and somewhat stingy overall as if they dont get every single bit of treasure they could ever find, they might fall behind. Aside from that, adding in a fifth player will just push the amount even further from the correct amount. Im currently running the AP for 7 players and have to add alot, but since lots of mooks seems to make for a tougher fight than adding a few levels to a boss, the generic gear goes a long way to balanacing.

A couple other suggestions:
~ Since it was written for 3.5 and so Pathfinder has alot more options than Paizo used for the original adventure, you can easily switch out npc classes for something newer. I changed Tsuto from Monk/Rogue to Ninja and it worked pretty well, while still keeping the flavor.
~ Scour these boards for suggestions/ custom creations/ideas/stuff thats already done for you so you dont have to do it/ handouts. Lots of good stuff can be found on these boards.