Caravan Issues

[BorisMarkov]

So I am GM'ing a game for a group of friends and we have been playing this adventure path for quite some time. We typically have very small slot to play in (3hours if we are lucky) and spent forever grinding through book 2. Book 3 has a lot more caravan encounters in it and since we skipped over them, I was hoping to get a little bit of feed back.

The group is wanting the npc's to do more stuff in the fight, but dont want caravan rules. Has anyone tried for anything that would allow the group to take on those kinds of encouters that the caravan would face without the rules? Or would it be better to skip over them because the of our time constraints?

Thanks for Feed back!

[Matthew Downie]

I played Hungry Storm without using the caravan rules. I created encounters based on the caravan encounters from the book. Sometimes the caravan would be attacked from front and rear simultaneously, so the PCs would defend one side and the NPCs would defend the other. Sometimes the PCs would be attacked while scouting. Often one of the NPCs would be around, awake and close enough to help the PCs - more than one allied NPC in a battle slows things down too much.
I didn't use random caravan events either - I just picked the ones that seemed interesting.
There are existing threads on this subject:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2mns5?Concerned-about-the-Caravan
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2mptv?The-Hungry-Storm

If random encounters grow boring (or it's too difficult to provide a balanced challenge when the PCs aren't generally fighting more than one battle a day) then you can skip ahead to the next interesting bit and level up the PCs when they need it - no big loss to the campaign.

[Strannik]

I agree w/ Matthew. The endless string of random encounters do a fine job of showing how treacherous the journey is, but add little to the story.

[nevermore75]

I used the random encounters in Forest of Spirits, but treated it a bit like a mini-game. I totaled the number of days in the journey and then asked the PCs to make percentile rolls around the table, looking for 10 percent or less. It was a bit of a Press Your Luck "No Whammies" vibe.

They got two encounters in about a month. I tried to make each of those encounters tie in to the story in some fashion. For example, when they got a random encounter with oni-masked bandits, I tied that back to the Minkaian control of The Spirit Road. It added just enough context to make the encounter feel connected to the storyline.

We are using caravan rules with some minor modifications

- The trader feat doesn't add to the Resolve roll, it multiplies it.
- Every 100 miles of distance between where a trade good was bought and where it is sold adds +1 to that special trading Resolve roll.

Obviously, our group is really into the trading aspect of the caravan rolls.

[Piccolo]

Actually, I have a better idea. How about instead you do the whole "irritating" caravan thing, and instead you concentrate on presenting your characters as different personalities?

It's just an idea, but that could create a real immersive (spelling?) experience.

I just bought a book not too long ago, and in it are deceptively useful blurbs about different characters, with little mannerisms as well. There's about a thousand of them, and each is different. You use the index in the back to look up what you want, and then use that blurb to hang a NPC gimmick on. Creates really memorable NPCs.

I did much the same thing once, using the old Kolchak tv series. Took all the odd bit characters and made them possible NPC's in my Chicago by Night campaign (VtM). One of the most epic games I have ever run, lasted more than a year, and even now one of my former players has vowed to move back to St Cloud just to play my game!