Online GM in distress, need some tips!


Advice


Hello there! I'm a GM in a situation where I haven't been able to lead a game for about 1 year. I recently moved away from my country to my wife's home, life's been rough. Left my group back there and I don't speak my wife's language fluently, so finding a group for now is impossible.

We have used roll20 to roleplay for years as getting together was hard even when I lived closer. We primarily roleplay by chat because the internet speed of our countries isn't the best for long term Skype or Discord calls, specially when living with other people who use the same internet.

The thing is... we're only three people, me plus my usual two players. I've wanted for years, almost as a GM lifetime goal, to run Curse of the Crimson Throne. We had success running the first half of Kingmaker before some problems arose and we had to stop. Here are my issues and I hope you have some tips for me, I would eternally thank you and Abadar will grant you thousands of powerful buffs:

As mentioned before, third world internet. We usually can't enjoy video or voice communications for long, and one of them is specially reluctant to use voice or video with us (he's super socially awkward, even meeting with him in person for 9+ years and he still doesn't wants to).

I only have two people. The Adventure Paths are balanced for 4 or more players. In Kingmaker we had 3 players plus one NPC alchemist everyone controlled, it worked nice for the first few levels. I don't know which approach to take because the more levels they gain the harder it will be to keep up with controlled NPCs plus their players.

Speaking of which, handling the NPCs and monsters of the adventure has proven to be very difficult for me. I have tso stop to cross reference abilities, feats and spells all the time, keeping PDFs and SRDs open all around which significantly slowed down combat.

My players also have trouble remembering the details of their feats, half the time in combat we're spending time collectively trying to remember who did what, when and where. Combats that would be easier are harder because we forget about combat options and how the feats interact. Other times they're easier because I forget my monsters have Power Attack and Multiattack.

I personally can't stand maps and Roll20 isn't exactly friendly to the free GM who wants to make some. I see at least a couple locations in Crimson Throne (like the temple of the Rakshasa) are incredibly dependant on maps.

I have one to one hour and half to organize for Game Mastering. I know APs have everything ready but sometimes I feel I'm just not doing enough...

We struggle more against the ruleset than anything else, but we love the game. Heard PF Unchained rules help shake things up. How true is that?

Thanks for reading guys!


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Maybe not the best advice, but if you don't yet master the PF rules, I think the 5e rules are easier to learn and overall simpler.

I learned 3.x back when I was a kid, I'm not sure I could pull off learning such a system like that again as an adult. PF was very similar to 3.5 so it wasn't a huge learning curve.

That said, if you are sticking to PF, and everyone's finding it a bit overwhelming, the other thing I would recommend is sticking to lower levels. People have less feats, items, spells, abilities, etc. It's a lot simpler to keep track of.

I like the Masterwork Tools app for Android (and possibly iOS). While looking up d20pfsrd on crappy internet or crappy computers can be tedious, if you've got a decent mobile phone, the app works very fast, it's very practical. There are also a number of PF apps to help with character and spell management, though I haven't tried them yet.

I don't have a lot of experience with modules, I don't really like the idea of them. Every time I've tried them, it felt like ceding my powers ad DM over someone who had no idea who my players were, how they would react, and what they were looking for in the game. Both as a player and as a GM, I prefer homebrewed world.

One advantage of homebrewed campaigns is that you can do whatever the hell you feel is right, and not feel worried that it will completely break everything at a later point in the story.

When you say maps, do you mean for the world, or the encounters? In both cases, though, the strict minimum that's needed is just about nothing. I've had GMs who played the game without any visual support, we just said what we did, and he mentally kept track of it, and adjudicated on the fly if we were within reach or not. Not quite my style nor the players at my current table's, but it was fun nonetheless. We use a grid for fights, now, that's about 22'x26' I think. Often, it's very bare. I tended to put a lot more props and obstacles on it when I GMed, but then I also did a lot of "recycled props", I'd simply rotate the map and start the players in another random section of the mat. It required next to no time to prepare. As for world maps, again, the same. Many of our games were run with no map or just an extremely basic map. Sometimes the GM just draws a few squiggly lines on a blank sheet of paper and calls it a day. I've worked with mapping software, so I tend to put a lot of time in my maps, but even then I like to make the base come from a handy tool: video game map generators. Age of Wonders, Sid Meier's Civilization can make pretty nice maps, which won't require too much time to do. Often, game map generators have a randomize function! Tell the game what kind of map you want, and voilà! I believe there are many website that offer similar tools as well.

If you are short on prepping time, I think it's valuable to learn to improvise. Takes practice, though, and some are naturally more gifted at it than others. But beats spending all of your time prepping stuff that ends up never coming up. Also making players pick the next session's quest at the end of the previous one. In other words, don't start a session with "you are at an inn and they offer you these two jobs, which do you want?", END the session that way.

About the software and all, that's very player-dependant. Some people would not enjoy playing merely over text, some would not enjoy seeing their own faces on screen. That's just how people are, though, hard to do much about that. Voice tends to hog less bandwith than video, but even that, with crappy internet, can get frustrating.

Sorry I can't really think of much to help you with your specific problems of playing with only 2 players a specific module over bad internet, though.

Silver Crusade

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One option is play by post (PBP); you don't need a fantastic internet connection for that. You can get an idea of what a play by post game on the Paizo boards looks like here.

Guide to Play by post gaming.


You can run games online in ROll20 and just use the in-game text chat without a problem. As long as people don't make a ton of posts all at the same time, it's usually pretty easy to keep up with during play.

Also, you should take advantage of the Roll20 community to recruit some more players. If you make a post on their forums that you are looking for players, you will find plenty of interested players.


Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

RPGing for expats can be tough. When I first moved away from the US, I simply gave up RPGing in resignation. It didn't help that my wife at the time had a negative attitude towards the hobby.

For a few years, I player Neverwinter Nights with folks online, that was a really innovtive game at the time where you could actually DM online games with players from around the world, with a load of DM tools to make it close to a tabletop gaming experience, while still providing the immersive visual experience of a video game.

Many years later, I did finally discover that there was actually a quite significant community of RPG players in the country I've chosen to live in, France, especially in the larger cities lmike Paris, Lyon or Marseille. Even where I now live, near the Loire valley (near Châteauroux, in fact) I did manage to scrounge up enough players to have fairly regular monthly games. For the last three years, we even had two Pathfinder groups going.

What country are you currently in?

My advice to you is to reach out to the gaming community on your current country and try to get into a tabletop gaming group, rather than playing long-distance games with an ever-shrinking group of players. Face-to-face gaming is just so far superior to any form of computer-mediated gaming that it's worth a shot.

Failing that, maybe try email-based gaming.


Thanks for the replies guys! To adress some of your questions...

* I still play with the two friends. One of them GMs 5e so we're all familiar with the 5e rules. I personally like Pathfinder more because of the vast ammount of options presented, but I don't have a very good memory and since we roleplay online it gets tiresome to cross reference from various PDFs and the SRD.

* I want to use an AP because they greatly diminish the time I have to invest on prepping, time which sadly I don't have anymore :(

* They are all as interested in Curse of the Crimson Throne as I am, but I bet two players won't make it through. They want me to introduce playable NPCs because they like my NPCs, but I don't know if that's the best idea since it will burden them in the long run with more stats to check.

* I live in southern Brazil, in a rural community. Luckily for me roleplaying here isn't as obscure and they have a pretty healthy RPG scene, and we live close to a city, they even have their own version of 3.5 (Tormenta). Thing is, I'm still learning Portuguese which hinders my ability to GM or even play a character.


Haha, I got suckered into PF because, at the time, it had significantly /less/ content than the system I was playing then (3.5) (even if theoretically stuff was portable). More choices tends to mean more bad choices, and more time prepping, cross-referencing abilities, archetypes, feats, etc.

Maybe that's what I prefer lower level play, haha. Less focus on analyzing a million mechanical options, more focus on the crux of the action.

Actually, you could kind of revert to simpler PF. "Core rulebook material only", for example. But I guess that as you said you like the additional options, so I'm not really sure how to help you on that. More options = more complexity = more remembering and cross-referencing. Other than having the material on hand and being familiar enough with it to find desired stuff quickly, there's not all that much to do, other than possibly just winging stuff more on the spot and verifying the rules later perhaps.

If APs help you save time, then by all means keep using them. Especially if you've already sold the other two on it. But as you said, that's more stuff to memorize, and books to waddle through. I'll be honest and admit I haven't opened up one of these since Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, though. Which I started a few times but never finished...

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