Does "pantsing" work well in Pathfinder?

[DRD1812]

Pathfinder can get complicated. Familiarizing yourself with rules subsystems, antagonists' special abilities, and 3D dungeon layouts can all take time and effort. And yet, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants GMing is a rewarding exercise in improv and wacky hijinks.

So here's my question to the board. Do you think Pathfinder lends itself to a pantsing style? Are there any tricks or resources that help to make making-it-up-as-you-go-along easier? Or conversely, is Pathfinder straight up better when you put in some minimal level of prep time?

(Comic related.)

[DungeonmasterCal]

Pathfinder (and prior to it D&D 3.5) seems to demand more game prep than previous editions. With 1e and 2e I could completely improvise a game with no prep at all. I once did a 15 hour session with 1e off the top of my head.

But PF (at least 1e - I know nothing about 2e) requires some amount of planning, at least for me. I try to already have a list of possible monsters, traps, NPCs, etc. ready to pull from as the adventure might require. My whole session is usually based off these lists and two, maybe three pages of notes on 6x9 inch paper. I guess that makes me an improv GM at heart.

[Darigaaz the Igniter]

You'd probably have to use the Steal combat maneuver, getting someone's pants off sounds about the same as trying to get their shirt. Oh, that's not what you meant.

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

Darigaaz the Igniter wrote:

You'd probably have to use the Steal combat maneuver, getting someone's pants off sounds about the same as trying to get their shirt. Oh, that's not what you meant.

I'd think it's a Dirty Trick maneuver to entangle...

But to the original question. I've run completely improvised sessions in Pathfinder 1e. I know the game well enough that I can do it very easily, at least at low to mid levels.

At highest level, the game benefits from a combination of solid preparation and improv combined as players gain more narrative altering spells.

[Temperans]

It depends a lot on your goals for the session and the campaign.

Random encounter tables work well for sporadic combat that might happen, its also not extremely hard to improvise turns and what monsters might do.

However, when you want a specific type of encounter for story reasons that requires quite a bit of prep to make sure things are were they are supposed to be.

******************

You could 100% run the game just pulling random monsters from the bestiaries and rolling dice.

Art and miniatures? Not needed.
Battle plans? No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Story line? If you can improvise well enough the story is what you make of it.

Honestly the biggest hang up (other than a bunch of creatures) specially at high level is trying to figure out how X weird ability interacts with Y weird ability when Z does a crazy move.

[Mysterious Stranger]

It’s going to depend on the type of campaign you run.

If you are doing a dungeon crawl where most of the encounters are monsters out of the bestiaries, you don’t need a whole lot of planning or prep. About all you really need to do is to design the dungeon and familiarize yourself with the monsters you intend to use. Designing the dungeon can be done with a random dungeon creator you can find on the internet. Choose a few monsters for a random encounter table and spend a few minutes reviewing them so you don’t slow down the game by figuring out their abilities during the game. You can probably get away with about a half hour or so prep for a session and still be fairly well prepared.

If you are doing an intrigue-based campaign where the characters interact with a lot of NPCs and most of the encounters are with NPCs with character a class, that is going to take a lot more prep. The major NPC’s will need to be written up. You may not have to go into as much detail as a PC, but you still need to take some time writing them up. For the most part the more time the GM spends on detailing the NPC’s the better this type of campaign is. You don’t need a lot of details about the duke's soldiers, but the duke and his major henchmen need a little more detail.

Most campaigns will probably fall somewhere in the middle of these. So how much prep for the session you need is going to depend on what is happening that session.

[Mark Hoover 330]

As with most game systems, its a blend of both. The players run when you think their PCs are going to keep fighting, and then they ask for a local cave to hole up in. You had nothing like this prepped, so you grab a wilderness locales book and roll up a random cave. A player thinks they recognize one of the improvised details about the area from their backstory and asks if there's a connection; you say yes and start riffing...

Seems like it's all improv right? Only then, at the end of the session, you've built up to a big fight with the cultists the PCs have stumbled on. You sweat a little; even at level 3, just throwing generic goons at the PCs could kill 'em and at the same time you want this fight to be memorable with tactics, unique foes and such. Then you remember the kobolds you had ready before the PCs ran!

You pop open your notebook (or laptop, or cuneiform tablets or whatever) and make up a new description: instead of a kobold "shaman" (Adept 4/Warrior 3) you use the same stats for... uh... quick glance at your phone, on Donjon.com... Scarlev, the Cult Priest!

Especially at high levels, randomly grabbing a monster you don't know out of the Bestiaries means you're going to miss most of their cool powers; you might as well just throw an Ooze at your PCs and call it a day. Interesting combat needs more than just improv'd terrain, you need to know how to use your antagonists in it.

At the same time, I haven't met a player yet in over 40 years of running games in multiple systems that doesn't revel in seeing the look of fear on their GM's faces when they make some ridiculous choice said GM never anticipated. If you can't tap dance out of those moments, when your players flip the script, no amount of prepping will ever be enough.

Put another way, be prepared enough to have your own plans as "bookends" and be able to make stuff up between them.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

At the same time, I haven't met a player yet in over 40 years of running games in multiple systems that doesn't revel in seeing the look of fear on their GM's faces when they make some ridiculous choice said GM never anticipated. If you can't tap dance out of those moments, when your players flip the script, no amount of prepping will ever be enough.

Put another way, be prepared enough to have your own plans as "bookends" and be able to make stuff up between them.

I've always said that you can plan for contingencies A, B, and C but the players will nearly always choose Q so I end up winging the whole thing from there on out, just shifting things they were supposed to encounter in the original plan(s) and they never know the difference.

[CorvusMask]

If you at high levels make your own npcs and do it by rules as written, then not really because making npcs can easily take hours ._.; If you have the ready pre session(whether from bestiary book or are good at fast reflavoring or whatever) then probably yeah like any other system

[Tim Emrick]

I've always tended to overprepare, regardless of system, because I don't want to have to wing stats (or whatever) during a session. I've had to learn to rein that in at times, because I can burn myself out pretty quickly if I do an excessive amount of prep compared to the time actually spent playing.

The best balance I've found was when I was running a BESM mini-campaign to get to know the system. I had a rough outline of what I wanted to do with the campaign, and I worked out stat blocks for the NPCs and monsters I knew I would need for those sessions, but I improvised a lot of the other details as needed in play. Having done the prep work for the stats ahead of time, I could focus my energy during the session on telling the story, and rolling with the surprises the PCs threw my way. The campaign was a resounding success, largely because I was challenging myself to be more freeform than I and my players were used to.

I've found that balance to be more elusive in Pathfinder, because there is a LOT more crunch to the system. Characters have more options, combat and environments have more fiddly rules, and so on, so I have to review more rules on a regular basis to be comfortable using the bits I want to showcase.

In one of my homebrew PF1 games, the final adventure was an extended visit to a lost island populated by various simians, dinosaurs, and drakes. I prepped certain location-based set-pieces, but I also collected a number of stat blocks for creatures that fit the setting to use as "wandering monsters" when the PCs were exploring parts of the island that didn't have specific denizens. Those encounters involved a fair amount of improvising, but I always had the stat blocks to fall back on so I wasn't completely winging it.

[DeathlessOne]

Oh, no! They are on to me! They are going to find out my secret!

"I am always improvising..."

Well... to be entirely concise. I've already got down the work for my own setting, know how it functions and responds intimately, know the possible plot arcs and background events taking place, etc, etc. I only have to focus on what the players are doing at the game table. To that end, my game prep is exceedingly simple. Map. Tokens. Dice. Notepad. Everything else is already done.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Ad libbing a boss fight, in a swamp, by flipping through the bestiaries against an APL 9 party: I'm shooting for a CR 12, I'm in a swamp... how about a black dragon?

A quick glance at the SRD ( I know, don't use the SRD but whatevs) and I see a Mature Adult Black Dragon is a CR 12 encounter. Cool. Click the link, pull up the monster, put it here on the battle map and wait to hit the PCs with it's breath weapon.

I think dragons also get some other attack types, like tails and stuff, but I'll just stick to claw/claw/bite since I don't have the time to refresh my memory. A few rounds of combat against well experienced players who have taken 9 levels to get to know what their characters can do... boom, done, fight over.

The PCs took some damage, dropped the mature adult black dragon, and now I have to ad lib it's treasure hoard. I make up a bunch of stuff, tack on tons of coins and gems, and we call it a night.

Or

I plan ahead of time for the mature adult black dragon Mordalith the Destroyer to be the villain of the piece. His plot is to complete a draconic rite that will unnaturally age him up to the next age category, making him more powerful than his years in the swamp should give him.

Glancing through the stat block of a Mature Adult Black Dragon on the SRD, I see they can Speak with Reptiles, use most of their abilities while submerged in water, corrupt 10 cubic feet of water per day and cast Darkness at will. The final encounter then should have plenty of reptilian minions for the dragon to command, with Mordalith himself in a large body of water he can submerge into.

Did you know that being completely submerged in water grants Total Cover to the dragon against attacks from land? Even emerging up to chest height, say to make a Bite attack at the end of a Charge using Reach, is still Improved Cover. Tactics are starting to form up.

Mordalith can cast Alarm, Mage Armor, Magic Missile or Obscuring Mist up to 7/day like a sorcerer at CL 16. That means from up to 260' away, so long as he can see a PC, he can deal 5d4 +5 damage (unless that PC has defenses against magic missile). These spells alone mean the dragon could have approaches to his swamp trapped with Alarm spells, zones within the Darkness spell that are also filled with fog, and so on.

Looking at a swamp battle map online, I start to consider where best to layer these defenses. Where can I funnel the PCs to on this map so they're close enough to the water for the dragon to surge up and bite attack them, yet still far enough from where I intend to make the dragon's actual underwater lair?

If Mordalith is going to be rearing out of the water once or twice with a charging Bite attack, if I choose not to change his feats that's a single +21 attack with a 10' reach that, if it hits, deals 2d6 +27 with Power Attack added in. Instead, if I don't have the dragon charging, he's only got a +19 attack but thanks to Vital Strike/Improved Vital Strike that's 6d6 +27 instead. With his Initiative of +5, Stealth +22 and the layers of Darkness and Obscuring Mist, its entirely possible Mordalith is targeting Flat Footed ACs.

And while I'm at it, I should think about what's in the dragon's treasure hoard. There might be something in there he can use in battle, like some kind of Wand or Wondrous Item with charges or uses/day. This might only net out to a +1, maybe +2 here or there but it might have a combat impact. Speaking of that treasure, if the dragon is storing it underwater, I should think through what kind of things Mordalith would be collecting that can survive in such an environment, or what containers the dragon has for whatever can't.

Yes, all of that extra prep takes a while but it also gives me a chance to marinate in the mindset of Mordalith the Destroyer. He isn't just some bundle of numbers that jumps out of the undergrowth and melees with the party; this dragon has survived all threats to his life for literally hundreds of years.

He may have developed ties to servitor humanoid types or giant subtypes in the area near his part of the swamp. Not just kobolds, this could involve bullywugs, certain kinds of gnolls, or ogres. He's got a 14 Int, Handle Animal +18 and talks to reptiles; how many mundane snakes, lizards and such do you think he's domesticated and trained over the centuries to do nothing more than spot intruders?

Mordalith, given a good hour of thought and consideration, should be understood and known to me as the GM. He isn't something to be trifled with and fighting him should be an event, not an afterthought. If the PCs survive and recover that treasure, it should be impactful.

Finally there's the story to contend with. Mordalith has lived in this swamp, ruled his portion of it by fang and wit for over 200 years. Even if he's somehow existed for more than 2 centuries without ever being sought by civilized folk, any intelligent beings on the outskirts of his domain that he's subjugated may have spread rumors or myths about the dragon. Going toe-to-toe with Mordalith and surviving to tell the tale will be campaign-turning.

[Mark Hoover 330]

DeathlessOne wrote:

Oh, no! They are on to me! They are going to find out my secret!

"I am always improvising..."

Well... to be entirely concise. I've already got down the work for my own setting, know how it functions and responds intimately, know the possible plot arcs and background events taking place, etc, etc. I only have to focus on what the players are doing at the game table. To that end, my game prep is exceedingly simple. Map. Tokens. Dice. Notepad. Everything else is already done.

So what you're saying is... you did TONS of prep work well in advance, so now you can use that pre-prep and ad lib with it? Kind of like, I don't know... a balance of prep and improv?

[DeathlessOne]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

So what you're saying is... you did TONS of prep work well in advance, so now you can use that pre-prep and ad lib with it? Kind of like, I don't know... a balance of prep and improv?

In a sense, yes. But it is a lot more nuanced than that. If I had to compare it to something ... it would be like having learned music theory, spend countless hours practicing with an instrument, composing your own arrangements, and then getting up to play in front of an audience to free style. You know the music. Your muscles remember the placement of the notes. You've got this idea of how you want to manipulate the music in order to communicate specific feeling, so you play.

Of course, I'd say running a campaign is a bit less complex than THAT, but the idea is the same.

Hmm, after taking a moment to self-reflect, I do believe therein lies one of the reasons that I gravitate towards Bards and Skalds. I tend to immediately leap towards music and mathematics in order to communicate certain concepts.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

A quick glance at the SRD ( I know, don't use the SRD but whatevs)

What's wrong with using the SRD? I have Archives of Nethys and d20pfsrd already set up in multiple tabs so I can access things faster. I own nearly all of the hardback books because I love books and the illustrations are fantastic, but it's super fast using one of those sites on game nights.

[SheepishEidolon]

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

What's wrong with using the SRD?

My personal example:

d20pfsrd.com wrote:

Weapon Expertise (Ex)

At 3rd level, a samurai gains an unparalleled expertise with his chosen weapons.
(...)
Finally, his samurai levels count as fighter levels and stack.

Ultimate Combat wrote:

Weapon Expertise (Ex)

At 3rd level, a samurai gains an unparalleled expertise with his chosen weapons.
(...)
Finally, his samurai levels count as fighter levels and stack with any fighter levels he possesses for the purposes of meeting the prerequisites for feats that specifically select his chosen weapon, such as Weapon Specialization.

Became quite relevant when a samurai among my players had access to Critical Mastery, forcing targets to do two saves against save-or-suck instead of one.

I actually checked older versions of Ultimate Combat, but it never was the generous / sloppy version d20PFSRD uses. And according to archive.org d20PFSRD had it right back in 2014.

I will write them and see what happens.

My second example would have been reincarnate: They used a random table while implying it was the table. To be fair, by now they mention the CRB table first, then the previous table as an unofficial one.

[Andostre]

So, I think that when people say "SRD," it could be a more general reference to Paizo's available content online, and that's not necessarily the same thing as the website d20FRSRD, which is the website you've quoted.

Everyone knows that d20PFSRD.com, aside from being restricted from including lore material, is just not as reliable as Archives of Nethys (aonprd.com), right? Everyone knows that?

I do think it's easier to find material on d20pfsrd using both the search feature and general navigation, but AoN is where you should go for the official language used.

[Andostre]

DRD1812 wrote:

So here's my question to the board. Do you think Pathfinder lends itself to a pantsing style?

Also, I've gotta point out that "pantsing" means something than different than referring to the expression seat-of-the-pants. Not to discourage any prepping vs. improv discussion, but...

[Azothath]

It depends on the GMs knowledge of the Game System, the Type of game being run (comic/silly, close-to-RAW, realistic, intrigue), the level of detail in the product being run (if any), experience with the group at the table.
MANY PFS games(a generic close-to-RAW game) were run with little to no prep. The later products (yr 4+) had more details to assist the GM. The APs require the GM read it and fill out the details.

The jargon term "pantsing" has a meaning and it's not applicable to your post.

[Ryze Kuja]

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

I'd think it's a Dirty Trick maneuver to entangle...

I came here to say this, but it looks like this thread is in good hands.

[DRD1812]

Darigaaz the Igniter wrote:

You'd probably have to use the Steal combat maneuver, getting someone's pants off sounds about the same as trying to get their shirt. Oh, that's not what you meant.

I will refer you to the precedent of Nimble vs. That Guy At The Bar.