What RL obstacles do you encounter when planning an adventure as a GM?


Gamer Life General Discussion


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I thought it'd help to compile some data. :D

For my own:
* I run a lot of online adventures. Therefore, "longer adventuring days" can be more difficult to run. This impacts overall class balance when they're tied to uses/day and is something I need to be mindful of.
* I often need to adapt on the fly. My players are creative. Whew! Knowing the PF 1e system as I do has let me do that. It's more difficult for newer GMs though, and this is an area I'd love to give them a leg up, on.
* I rely on free tools like Combat Manager, due to time and the above.


I play in person, but my players are mostly retail and most of them can only consistently get every other Sunday off. So we play every two weeks, for about 8 hours at a time. With that in mind, I would be very hopeful in PF2 being faster to run and combats being less of a slog.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Just curious. I run purely online games and don't find it causes any problems with adventuring days. What specifically gives you this issue?


Malk_Content wrote:
Just curious. I run purely online games and don't find it causes any problems with adventuring days. What specifically gives you this issue?

I'm in the same boat. I'm curious, too. I mostly do PBP games, and the length of the day has never been an issue.


bookrat wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:
Just curious. I run purely online games and don't find it causes any problems with adventuring days. What specifically gives you this issue?
I'm in the same boat. I'm curious, too. I mostly do PBP games, and the length of the day has never been an issue.

More than once, I've played sessions that entirely consisted of one combat encounter. I know that my group prefers to not split the same day/dungeon crawl across multiple sessions if we can avoid it. Sometimes we can't, and have to come back to the middle of a combat next week. Sometimes the GM fast-forwards through stuff at the end of a session to squeeze everything in.


Thebazilly wrote:
bookrat wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:
Just curious. I run purely online games and don't find it causes any problems with adventuring days. What specifically gives you this issue?
I'm in the same boat. I'm curious, too. I mostly do PBP games, and the length of the day has never been an issue.
More than once, I've played sessions that entirely consisted of one combat encounter. I know that my group prefers to not split the same day/dungeon crawl across multiple sessions if we can avoid it. Sometimes we can't, and have to come back to the middle of a combat next week. Sometimes the GM fast-forwards through stuff at the end of a session to squeeze everything in.

That doesn't sound like it's *because* it's an online game. It sounds as if it's because your group simply wants the game to line up nicely with the sessions.


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bookrat wrote:
That doesn't sound like it's *because* it's an online game. It sounds as if it's because your group simply wants the game to line up nicely with the sessions.

Oh, no. You're absolutely right. If anything, running online makes things go faster in comparison to in person games, because VTT programs take care of most of the math. I was commenting more on adventuring day length.


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Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

By far the biggest hurdle was coordinating the schedules of six players and myself, in addition to the space in which we were playing as it needed to be reserved.


Malk_Content wrote:
Just curious. I run purely online games and don't find it causes any problems with adventuring days. What specifically gives you this issue?

It just is one of those things. I guess we could stretch, but if a person gives up every Saturday for there months, they might want some time off, so a GM has to be mindful of stretching too far, you know? Mind, I run my combat rounds fairly on target, but since we're dealing with wildly different time zones across rpthe globe, differences in ages and responsibilities, and just rl circumstance, all at once...

Then add in time to read, describe each scene in text. Players need time to respond and work out their actions. You may not have the same players every story.

Not being able to gesture or sketch in person, and so on, has an impact on the time it can take to resolve something, as well. Overall, it means that a combat or rp element can stretch longer.

We don't use voice chat, and I don't imagine everyone would be comfortable, though I can see voice chat helping in some games.

The prd has been a great help bc it's easily referenced and a great teaching tool.

If the prd went away, well... I'd be running a different system.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Ah yeah that'll be it. Running games without voice will deffo slow things down massively.

EDIT: Depending on what you use you can mitigate this a lot though. For example I use Roll20 and with that I set up macro's for all characters (standard) abilities so that rather than have to type things out they click a button and it tells you what they are doing and how well they are doing it. You could also copy and paste descriptions into the text box to make things a lot faster. I also give players their own journal space so they don't mind splitting days up between sessions as they can leave themselves little recaps.


One of the biggest obstacles for me is getting to know the monsters' and nonplayer characters" capabilities.

Many monster's have abilities that are better in some situations rather than others.

Some monster's have abilities that work off of each other and need to be used in tandem to work effectively.

Many higher level monster's and nonplayer characters have what I call "bookkeeping abilities" that are not expected to be used at all in typical encounters. Kind of like firstlevel spell for a wizard.

I would like it to be clearly spelled out what a monster or a non player character's capabilities are. This can sometimes be found in the tactics section of an adventure, but it would be nice to have a "tactics" section in the Bestiary entry.


Mechanically speaking, I tend to have issues with spellcaster utility late game.

Have a wide access to utility spells makes it difficult to build a dungeon that makes sense and can't just be trivialized with spells like teleport, spider climb, fly, etc.

I hate the idea that I have to have the BBEG paint his dungeon walls with lead based paint just to stop the party caster from scrying on his location and teleporting to his dungeon. If I don't, the dungeon is trivialized, but if I do, the caster feels like they wasted their spells.

I'd like to see the following done to address this:

1) Utility spells become "ritual" casts to prevent their spamming in combat.

2) Number of spells per day limited at later levels to force casters to pick and choose when they want to trivialize an obstacle.

3) Number of spells known reduced so that full casters don't always have an easy solution.

I know people probably won't agree with this, but that's just my opinion.


Oh, and I thought you wanted to know what prevents us entirely from preparing anything at times. Like Netflix, procrastination and stuff.


thflame wrote:

Mechanically speaking, I tend to have issues with spellcaster utility late game.

Have a wide access to utility spells makes it difficult to build a dungeon that makes sense and can't just be trivialized with spells like teleport, spider climb, fly, etc.

I hate the idea that I have to have the BBEG paint his dungeon walls with lead based paint just to stop the party caster from scrying on his location and teleporting to his dungeon. If I don't, the dungeon is trivialized, but if I do, the caster feels like they wasted their spells.

I'd like to see the following done to address this:

1) Utility spells become "ritual" casts to prevent their spamming in combat.

2) Number of spells per day limited at later levels to force casters to pick and choose when they want to trivialize an obstacle.

3) Number of spells known reduced so that full casters don't always have an easy solution.

I know people probably won't agree with this, but that's just my opinion.

Something I'd wondered about for some time would be to tie certain spells to skills. For example: invisibility giving a stealth bonus, instead.


Malk_Content wrote:

Ah yeah that'll be it. Running games without voice will deffo slow things down massively.

EDIT: Depending on what you use you can mitigate this a lot though. For example I use Roll20 and with that I set up macro's for all characters (standard) abilities so that rather than have to type things out they click a button and it tells you what they are doing and how well they are doing it. You could also copy and paste descriptions into the text box to make things a lot faster. I also give players their own journal space so they don't mind splitting days up between sessions as they can leave themselves little recaps.

Oh, yeah. We use those; I mean, they are great ideas, you know?

Some of the biggest "timegaps" end up just being different time zones, and having a mix of ages, and therefore different social responsibilities that impact the game in varied ways. You need to be as respectful of the student as you are of the working mom and dad.


"So we got enough XP to go to level 10, should we do that or are you guys fine with staying level 9?"
*crickets*

Shadow Lodge

People in my group tend to get voluntold into familial obligations. We all seem to have the kind of families of the general mindset of, "Why do you sit around making stuff up when there's Lots of Important Stuff to do?" Understandable, but it leads to people feeling like they're letting everyone down no matter what they do. Fortunately, rescheduling's easy to do.
Also, players that keep forgetting what their characters can do. It hits especially hard for prepared casters, so whenever that happens, I supply flash cards, or sticky notes, or just help out when the team gets to level up. My group has an Illusionist-based Arcane Trickster who tends to favour evocations instead. He's seen how handy illusions can be, though he mainly sticks to having Mirror Images around when he isn't invisible.


In the case of my group it's family obligations, vacations, distance, and illness. This past weekend I, the GM, was fighting some stomach monstrosity and had to cancel a game that had already been postponed once. Now it will be another month before we can get together to play it.


Running a PbP

Not to guilt trip my players. I love them and I wouldn't be able to play without them. But as GM, I'm 10 steps ahead of them, and it's hard sitting on all this story.

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