|
I'm planning to run a game set in the Diablo universe and could use some advice on several things. We'll roughly follow the plot of Diablo II or III and the players will be Mythic. I'm pretty familiar with the lore of the setting but if anyone has some cool ideas share those, too.
In most of my previous PF games I simply use wealth-by-level and have players buy their own equipment rather than figure out where to place loot for them to find or calculate how much gold they should have.
In the Diablo games, however, acquiring sweet loot is a huge aspect of the series. My players do like finding stuff and I feel they would be missing part of the experience if I didn't have at least some random drops.
What is the easiest way to handle this kind of thing? I know I can roll on the tables in the PH but is that the fastest method? Whats the best way to avoid players having too much loot or getting a lot of junk they can't use or don't need (which they will probably sell)?
Another aspect of the Diablo series is fighting a whole mess of dudes at once. Sometimes it might just be swarms of peons, but other times it could be a dozen very powerful enemies.
In my experience it is very cumbersome and takes a very long time irl to run combat with a dozen creatures. Are there simpler ways to do this in PF? What about houserule suggestions? I'd like the combat to feel dangerous and epic but not slow it down.
ps. I really want to run a chase scene with a Treasure Goblin.
roll color coordinated dice 10 at a time, both attack power and damage. Keep all the minions at the same attack, damage, and AC.
The dice can be the next 10 attacks against said player. Hell you could have hundreds of attacks lined up before a battle even begins.
Then you get to a sub-boss and have it be an encounter as normal. Then later a boss again run it as normal.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There is a 3.5 series of books for Diablo 2 that you might want to check out.
I know it might be a bit late, but one option for running massive battles is to treat lesser enemies like groups, effectively going at the same initiative, standing in clusters, and using the aid another action to increase their combat effectiveness while still being relatively weak opponents. Think of a group of goblin-like creatures that can share their square with another small size creature at no penalty. Each round one attacks and the other aids its attack roll (maybe even just have it do so automatically instead of always rolling).
Then whenever you have larger groups, say 5 to a group, and maybe 2 groups per PC, they get +8 to hit, but still deal relatively low damage.
Elites can be higher CR creatures with special templates, like Boreal, or even Mythic Templates for the speed one.
There is a 3.5 series of books for Diablo 2 that you might want to check out.
I recommend finding this (or at least some printouts from some pages.
I played it like 15 years ago, and it had some really good stuff.
Instead of a "+5 Longsword", you'd find an "Obsidian Claymore of Carnage" or something. They had huge tables of prefix/suffix weapons, and it really made the loot a lot more varied.
I don't remember how much the combat changed, but it's worth noting that even high level Pathfinder PC's are fairly vulnerable if you throw 400 low level mosters at them. You'd probably need to tweak the combat somehow, or just drop bazillions of healing items on them.
Just throwing this out there the thing that always gets me in trouble is chasing treasure goblin cause i always ignore rest of mobs until its dead then i have a million mobs including elites on me (i am a whirlwind barb but those amounts of mobs have still taken me down)
For treasure, maybe come up with a "Mana Encumbrance" that equals wealth by level in gpv? And the limit of it would go up as you level up. (Not based on Str score or anything like that). Maybe not the most "realistic" option, but it would let the GM have lots of treasure available in the campaign, but the PCs could only equip so much at a time.
For fighting mobs, just let the big fighter types make their normal attacks, and apply any extra hit points to other adjacent (or even nearby if you let them 5 foot step in the middle of a swing) opponents.
So if the fighter hits "a" goblin (4 hit points) for 20 points of damage, and he is surrounded by 8 goblins, he kills 5 goblins.