Hello,
Our group is running the relatively new reprint in Pathfinder rules.
I am a player, and we wanted to know the assumptions made about the player characters.
The only books our GM has allowed is core and APG.
Also we are at 15pt buy.
We are getting trounced...badly. There is only one original member of the group left. We have five players. I'm on my 4th character, so is another of my friends. The third player is on her second, same for the fourth player.
Is this adventure that hard? Is it supposed to be 15 pt buy?
We are all enjoying it immensly, but we did wonder what the assumption was for the baseline of the characters.
Also, the DM is not modifying encounters. He doesn't have time so he's running the books as is.
The AP is not generally considered one of the hardest, especially in the new reprinted rules which toned down some infamous encounters.
AP's are supposedly written for four characters with a 15 point buy, though if my group is four or less I allow a 20 point buy. Shouldn't make that big of a difference with five players. Not sure what to tell you - are there certain encounter(s) that's giving you difficulty?
The AP is written on the assumption of 4 pc's with a 15 point buy. In general, I would not expect casualties at the level you describe with 5 pc's if the DM is running it as written. Though it's not clear where you are in the AP...
However, my optimized may not be your optimized. Your preferred tactics may not seem logical to me, etc. Without more detail it's hard to even offer a diagnosis (which, technically, you did not ask for.). Have you discussed this with the DM? What's his opinion? It may be more effective to A) engage him and B) suggest he post to this forum - we can more easily assist if we can interact without concern for spoilers.
Even if he's not interested in broaching this topic here, suggesting he visit this forum would be a favor to him (assuming he hasn't found it already.). This board is filled with a lot of community created material to enhance RotR and is frequented by several DM's with a lot of experience as game masters as well as the AP and a genuine willingness to help and collaborate.
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As others have noted, the AP is designed for four characters at 15-point buy.
I am running for five characters at 20-point buy. But they are 1 level behind the expectations of the adventure. We are in book 4 and have had 4 PC deaths and 1 animal companion death in that time.
I don't know how much of the AP the OP's group has played through, but I cannot imagine having 12 deaths total in the whole campaign! That is a lot.
I wonder what is going on.
Are you using fast track for Exp.?
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We need more information.
In the absence of details, something is definitely off (things that could be easily explained). Your point-buy is on the money, your number of players is not unusual, but your mortality rate is high (especially if you're in the earlier parts of the AP).
I appluad your initiative by looking for some non-spoilery explanations from the community, but it would be really, really, helpful if you would point your GM to this thread so we can talk to him about the details of your group and get into potentially spoilery territory.
-Skeld
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I got a spoiler for you skeld
I ran Runelords through the first half of Fortress of the Stone Giants a few years ago, and I'm running it again right now as a PbP on the boards.
My IRL game just stomped their way through it, to the point where I had to seriously beef up the encounters to make it a challenge. (I ran Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw Murders with the original 3.5 versions, converting them to PFRPG on-the-fly. I switched as soon as the Anniversary Edition was released.) I ran a 5-PC party with a 20-pt buy. (Party was: wizard, barbarian, cleric, paladin, ranger/rogue.) The cleric was optimized for healing, and the barbarian optimized for killing things dead. We had exactly one casualty, in a side-quest I'd added in. But that's what raise dead is for.
It's possible that your GM is upping the deadliness of the game. It's possible that you're using sub-par tactics. It's possible that your GM is running every monster and NPC as a tactical genius. Hard to say what's happening.
As a GM, I'm not a fan of meaningless PC death, and I try my best to avoid it. Because meaningless PC death isn't fun!
Classes?
Because the most common reason for people dying is poor character choices.
(Still bitter about the healer who changed class at the last minute before the game)
Offering some perspective: I'm running a group of newbies to tabletop, 20 pt buy. (it is 'supposed' to be 15 pt buy but since theyre new i upped it). They do not use the internet to build their characters, basically just the CRB and APG, and more recently, UC and ACG. I've directed them in the direction of some of the better feats and spells. We're at the very final dungeon of the game, and across the entire game we have had 24 deaths, 2 PCs brought back quickly with breath of life, and two TPKs. We use hero points, or else I would have started toning down all of the enemies (or at least the save DCs for some spells/traps) in an effort to stop the deaths. The hero points mean that we have only had 5 permanent character deaths.
In contrast, I've seen reports on here that more optimized players have breezed through with only 1 or 2 deaths across the entire campaign.
That being said,i'd chalk up about half of our deaths to poor player decisions. Splitting up the party, kicking doors in, forgetting about their own spells and abilities, and sleeping in the middle of enemy territory are all common things that have caused deaths. The other half are attributable to the innate difficulty of some of the encounters in the AP. (Or just bad rolls.)
I'll echo everyone else here saying that you need to give more info if you want help. I can't even tell you if what you're experiencing is normal or not without knowing how deep into the AP you are. 8 deaths woudn't be TOO strange if you told me you were in the middle of book 2. If you haven't finished the first book, though, it is very surprising.
There's seriously a lot of stuff that could be causing your problems.
>Poor party composition.
>Poor player builds
>Poor player decisions
>Legit difficult areas of the AP (there are a few encounters that are notorious player killers)
>Under-leveled PCs
>PCs under wealth
>GM playing the enemies as "too smart" (there are several encounters where enemies are given pointedly bad tactics to tone them down, if your GM ignores them this could be problematic)
>Bad luck
In any case, how do YOU guys feel about the amount of death in your game? If it is hurting your fun, you should bring it up to your GM. If you enjoy the adventure being especially deadly, then there doesn't seem to be a problem! (Maybe keep back-up character sheets around!)
The easiest mistake to make with running RotR is to miss the part about it being intended for the fast XP track. As everyone else said though anything further would be pretty speculative without more detail.
what i suspect the major underlying issue to be