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A few thoughts:
One, the Agents of Edgewatch campaign has a houserule up-front in the player's guide that lets all PCs deal non-lethal damage with all of their attacks - including spells - without any penalties. Adding that to your game sounds like it might be a good idea. That way the one player can battle like they want (dealing non-lethal damage) and after the battle the other player isn't overly upset since the enemies are all still alive.
Two, giving feats is probably not going to be a game-breaking problem - especially if they are specific feats that you are giving rather than a player's choice feat slot that they can fill with whatever they wish.
One thing to keep in mind though is to give some sort of equivalent power boosts to all of your player's characters.
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This would be an incredibly tough situation to handle if the other players were going about business as usual.
Design encounters so your daughter has something to do while the others are fighting that suits her sensibilities. That's about the best I can think of.
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One, the Agents of Edgewatch campaign has a houserule up-front in the player's guide that lets all PCs deal non-lethal damage with all of their attacks - including spells - without any penalties. Adding that to your game sounds like it might be a good idea.
Non-Daughter Player: But I don't -want- to deal non-lethal damage with my SWORD THAT CUTS THINGS.
Daughter Player: (turns on waterworks)
Back to square one. Or your players quit.
Good luck, GM. Your daughter wants to exercise a veto over the other players. That rarely works out.
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Good luck, GM. Your daughter wants to exercise a veto over the other players. That rarely works out.
It strikes me more that she is invested in treating the world and inhabitants as real, and consequently cares about not hurting creatures that don't deserve to be killed. Now, Pathfinder may not be the best game for treating ones enemies as something other than experience fodder, but it seems unhelpful immediately to ascribe manipulative motives to people who are getting something different out if the game than the other players.
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Even though Pathfinder's mechanics favor combat, it has enough noncombat tools PCs could use to overcome obstacles. Trouble (obviously) is that Paizo caters its adventures to a baseline audience that prefers the simple solution of battle. So it's up to you to add alternate solutions.
I had to do a similar thing when running Dragon's Demand as a Scooby-Doo adventure. Fewer corpses strewn about, subdual & "turning over to authorities" > death, added skill challenges (mostly frenetic chase scenes), and mostly a table-acknowledged change of tone.
I recommend choosing some media familiar to the players, with their input, and tuning the adventure to match. Then you don't get one Conan player next to a My Little Pony one (noting that some of those cheerful cartoons have physical conflict, just different consequences). In discussing this, then you'll find out if maybe the table's too disparate to function together, or if there's a happy medium like G.I. Joe or Avatar:tLA (which do have some death, but typically only for irredeemable enemies). Older superhero shoes often had lethal abilities which seldom had harmful effects, so even swapping out damage descriptions might suffice, i.e. "killing blows" destroy enemy morale or their main weapon or their helmet so they feel too vulnerable or it simply knocks them out. Being able to talk to villains has the added benefit of uncovering more of the plot which can feel like a superior win to merely deleting their life, as does turning them to the side of good, strengthening your team (even if mostly offscreen or via advice).
As long as there's spectacle and dynamic choices, most young players will remain engaged, killing/harming usually being secondary to winning... and rolling, gotta have lots of important rolls, even if they're able to "fail forward" when blown so outcomes aren't as pivotal & monumental as advertised (though keep significant; nothing ruins a game faster than players having & learning their choices & rolls hardly impact the story.)
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Your daughter is just not compatible with the typical D&D-murder-hobo style of gaming.
Is she a younger teen or is this the way she is likely to be as an adult.
Other tRPGs might be better for that kind of player. Super Hero games or even 'Anime' games like 'Big Eyes Small Mouth'. Some twenty years ago we had a player that liked that kind of play so much she bought copies of the Sailor Moon RPG for the entire group, and ran us in a campaign of it. Weird as that was - it was actually a very well done campaign and we had a blast defeating enemies with speeches and posing and the 'after episode moral lesson for the kids watching on TV' just as often as with fights.
Murder-Hobo gaming is, when you think about, extremely strange. Why do we get our thrills out of roleplaying lethally violent encounters? Why are we not playing mysteries, or romance drama, or even less violent 'silver age' super heroics?
We're all conditioned into this kind of gaming, but to a non-gamer it might seem really bizarre. I'd consider catering the kinds of games I ran to my daughter rather than trying to get my daughter into 'lets play serial killer'. ;)
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There's also another trick some kids' cartoons use of substituting out what would normally be human enemies. So you get a lot of robots, like in Thundarr whose sword chopped cleanly through most anything...except actual living creatures. Or G.I. Joe: Renegades which had legions of slime soldiers to blow up (so they could actually use their weapons on something other than vehicles for a change). So while you're emphasizing the humanity of many if not most creatures, you can have "obvious non-feeling enemies" too (without resorting to dehumanizing them because of "Evil!").
So the cannon fodder/nonspeaking members of a rival tribe could become a bunch of "wood men" made out of trees via a ritual, turning back to logs (or snow, dirt, clay, metal for the tougher ones, whatever works). Of course undead and actual constructs work too, though in a world of magic you could go most any direction you want, making clear delineations between feeling & unfeeling (rather than "us/them", "good/evil", or other simplistic notions which overshadow the pain being inflicting).
Or one could go with the "once subdued/wounded to where they'd normally die (by stats, not description) the spell controlling them breaks" or the "a dimensional rift sends them back home" which one Conan cartoon used vs. Set's snake warriors (when touched by Conan's sword's special metal).
Tangentially, if she or another player has a fear, i.e. spiders, you could add a sympathetic, sentient version to roleplay with. Then they'd be confronted with their own "icky-kill" preconceptions. :-)
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Yyyyeah it really does not sound like your daughter will be able to handle the expectations of a Paizo AP. If the thought of killing an aggressor brings her to tears then I doubt that she'd be satisfied with the "false pacifist" route of aiding her allies as they do the killing for her, and one way or another Pathfinder is fundamentally a game about killing enemies. You are eventually going to meet someone who is Just Evil and you will have to kill.
I agree with arcady that if you want to play trpg's with your daughter then finding a system more suited to the kind of game she wants to play may be more suitable. There's definitely a lot of fun to be had in systems that are designed around being able to talk your way through encounters - Pathfinder is a game where "talking your way through encounters" means skipping most of the meat on a single die roll and often time means that only one person gets to do anything, so not a great experience for the other kids at the table if you try to cater to your daughter there.
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I am playing with four young players, one is my teenage daughter who is very compassionate. She brings her personal virtues into her role-playing. Last week when talking to an aggressive NPC human female
** spoiler omitted **
she did not want to battle NPC and was trying to convince the group to be nice. Another player at the table was wanting to fight and try to deceive the NPC and my daughter starts crying (big tears). We took a break and I told her the NPC was going to fight no matter what she did.Later when NPC female surrendered, my daughter thought it was rude to read the conquered NPC's journal.
My daughter expressed with tears today, that maybe she should quit. I want to rather find ways to include and sometimes reward compassionate behavior.
I was thinking of the following ideas:
NPCs and creatures are less likely to attack her first if she is not being aggressive.NPCs befriend her and gift her with treasure for her kindness after the battle. In this case a salve of anti paralysis and a brooch of shielding.
An encounter with a creature who encourages her to become a druid (multiclass to add to her ranger) with an oath never to attack humanoids unless attacked first.
Is it too much to give feats?
Honestly it just sounds like the style of game your daughter wants and the other players want aren't really compatible. It's not your daughter's fault, your fault, or the other players fault. However it doesn't change that the tone of the game is going to be incompatible for at least some of your players.
You could try talking to the other players and ask if they are open to changing how their characters act, but you also need to accept that they might not be.
If they're not open to changing how they play their characters...there isn't a great solution. The only thing I can suggest is maybe running a game just for your daughter (with additional characters run by either you or her) that are more in line with the tone of game she would like.
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I'm honestly a bit surprised at all of the comments that the only viable way to play the game is to kill things.
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I'm honestly a bit surprised at all of the comments that the only viable way to play the game is to kill things.
I don't think anyone thinks it's the only viable way, but that is one of the basic concepts of the game. Someone coming to play Pathfinder or D&D should generally expect that many encounters in the game are to be resolved with violence. In fact, it's usually much more notable when encounters can be resolved without using violence.
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Yes, but it doesn't have to be lethal violence.
And it is more that people are saying that this teenage girl just simply shouldn't be playing Pathfinder2e if they aren't willing to kill things. That this isn't the game for them and that there is no real way to change things to handle that type of attitude at the table.
That is what I am shocked by.
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You are GMing a table of 4 younger players. Your daughter is a teen, are the rest of the players the same age? Younger? Older?
I have run some RPGs with some younger crowds and I have been delighted by their desire to talk through encounters instead of fight, and the creativity of some of their solutions. Pathfinder APs are not really written to work great this way as default, but are pretty easy to modify to make age appropriate and to allow multiple paths to success. As the more experienced player/GM and the person setting the tone for this group, you want everyone to have fun, but you also don't want to traumatize anyone or discourage compassion or empathy in young players.
The easiest way to get more players engaging NPCs as multi-demensional characters is have them stop fighting occasional, especially when losing, and talk, offer to surrender, try to run away, bribe the heroes, etc. The books rely on "fight to the death" in far too many encounters because it is narratively clean and least complicated, but "run away and are never seen again" is a very close second.
As a GM, you obviously want to talk to your table at the point that real human feelings are getting hurt and maybe this isn't the best game to play with your group if getting caught up in the narrative means too different of things to different players, but it is also possible to walk the line between the want to fight players and the not want to fight players by not letting starting a fight be the end of diplomatic options or less-violent conclusion be possible. Reward creative thinking and all the players might start enjoying getting the expected enemy to become a "sometimes" ally.
Yes, but it doesn't have to be lethal violence.
And it is more that people are saying that this teenage girl just simply shouldn't be playing Pathfinder2e if they aren't willing to kill things. That this isn't the game for them and that there is no real way to change things to handle that type of attitude at the table.
That is what I am shocked by.
You're not gonna nonlethally pacify a demon, breit. If it was a homebrew campaign then the OP could probably craft a campaign where getting to 0 HP means that they surrender and realize the error of their ways but you really just aren't going to get that in an AP.
What's your daughter playing? Some classes can do better than others at avoiding bloodshed. Bards and sorcerers are usually the best at it.
You can totally create more room for non-violent solutions. There are two problems:
1. You'll probably need to rewrite the AP a bit. Quest for the Frozen Flame at least has a communal/recruitment element, so you could lean further into it. But it will be more work for you.
2. If other players want to regularly engage in combat, then how do you please both sides? Some option is making most enemies mindless or pure evil types like undead or fiends, but that only gets you so far.
Strength of Thousands might be a better fit for her vibe.
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You're not gonna nonlethally pacify a demon, breit. If it was a homebrew campaign then the OP could probably craft a campaign where getting to 0 HP means that they surrender and realize the error of their ways but you really just aren't going to get that in an AP.Yes, but it doesn't have to be lethal violence.
And it is more that people are saying that this teenage girl just simply shouldn't be playing Pathfinder2e if they aren't willing to kill things. That this isn't the game for them and that there is no real way to change things to handle that type of attitude at the table.
That is what I am shocked by.
And yet there is already a published AP that does exactly that. One that I mentioned at the very beginning of this thread.
Though I am not sure that I would recommend Agents of Edgewatch for someone with sensitive emotions. But it is certainly workable to swipe that rule from it.
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There's also another trick some kids' cartoons use of substituting out what would normally be human enemies. So you get a lot of robots, like in Thundarr whose sword chopped cleanly through most anything...except actual living creatures. Or G.I. Joe: Renegades which had legions of slime soldiers to blow up (so they could actually use their weapons on something other than vehicles for a change). So while you're emphasizing the humanity of many if not most creatures, you can have "obvious non-feeling enemies" too (without resorting to dehumanizing them because of "Evil!").
So the cannon fodder/nonspeaking members of a rival tribe could become a bunch of "wood men" made out of trees via a ritual, turning back to logs (or snow, dirt, clay, metal for the tougher ones, whatever works). Of course undead and actual constructs work too, though in a world of magic you could go most any direction you want, making clear delineations between feeling & unfeeling (rather than "us/them", "good/evil", or other simplistic notions which overshadow the pain being inflicting).
Or one could go with the "once subdued/wounded to where they'd normally die (by stats, not description) the spell controlling them breaks" or the "a dimensional rift sends them back home" which one Conan cartoon used vs. Set's snake warriors (when touched by Conan's sword's special metal).
Tangentially, if she or another player has a fear, i.e. spiders, you could add a sympathetic, sentient version to roleplay with. Then they'd be confronted with their own "icky-kill" preconceptions. :-)
I've never known how badly I wanted to play in a campaign like this because I had never considered it before, but it sounds actually awesome. It reminds me of Dragon Quest anime where he talks to the crocodile man and they eventually become strong allies, as well as one of the stronger lieutenants.
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There are far too many memes to the tone of "My friend-to-everything party adopted another one of my monsters/villains" for me to take credibly any claim that you cannot play this game without slaughtering every foe you come across. Maybe in your world demons are always irredeemable monsters who cam never be spoken to or dealt with by nonviolent means (and for all we know maybe OP's daughter has no problems fighting such objectively evil creatures--only humanoids came up in the examples!) but frankly the ability to make friends with or pacify an enemy is as much a common power fantasy as is the more traditionally Pathfinder defeat any foe you meet.
Now the vast majority of Pathfinder's mechanics are geared toward a fight, but it doesn't restrict you from peaceful resolutions. The number of people in here saying that you can't play Pathfinder with low violence speaks more to their preferences and assumptions about how the game should be played than it does the system. Imho the greater question is only whether the table is willing to shoot for lower violence or find a middle ground. A table of kill anything power fantasy and befriend anything power fantasy players will have differences regardless the mechanical support for either.
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Meanwhile thinking on the notes about giving an oath not to attack humanoids that don't attack her first, it's not the same thing hut I find a devout Shelynite gets some ways toward striking that tone of "I want to make peace if I can, and am always willing to hear you out if you just surrender". Doesn't even have to be a class thing, though naturally there's more mechanical weight if the Shelynite is also a Cleric or Champion
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There are so many ways to think about this situation and many of them have been pointed out.
Simplistically, what do you do when everyone playing monopoly plays competitively except one person? Do you change how everyone else plays the game just to suit that one person? If you don't, then that one person is essentially left out (fun-wise). It is a no win situation.
Separately, these are young people. When it comes to that, how they process the game can really matter. Each individual's ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality probably should be a consideration. And the degree to which they can separate. How well do they separate between themselves and their own characters? How well do they grasp that the fantasy world operates off of different foundations than our own?
On the other other hand, the ability to practice creating hypotheticals is certainly of value. Practicing thinking through likely actions and motivations of an individual other than themselves is a practice in empathy, which I'd say is certainly valuable. And also practicing talking things out instead of resorting to violence is valuable.
I'd say that there is no completely perfect answer here. Diminishing other player's fun for one player is less than ideal. However, resigning most conflicts to violence is also less than ideal.
If I were in your shoes, I'd simply have a serious conversation about it with all of them together, with you being completely honest with them about your thoughts. Maybe even show them some or all of this thread, to show that not all adults agree on things. And, all in all, help them come up with a solution of their own. While they may be children, I see no reason why they shouldn't be a part of the decision making process. It is practice in solving no win situations.
I truly hope my thoughts are helpful. Teaching young people simple philosophy and delving a little into ethics is something that I am very passionate about. It is sadly not a part of many young people's basic education as I think it should be.
I am playing with four young players, one is my teenage daughter who is very compassionate. She brings her personal virtues into her role-playing. Last week when talking to an aggressive NPC human female
** spoiler omitted **
she did not want to battle NPC and was trying to convince the group to be nice. Another player at the table was wanting to fight and try to deceive the NPC and my daughter starts crying (big tears). We took a break and I told her the NPC was going to fight no matter what she did.Later when NPC female surrendered, my daughter thought it was rude to read the conquered NPC's journal.
My daughter expressed with tears today, that maybe she should quit. I want to rather find ways to include and sometimes reward compassionate behavior.
I was thinking of the following ideas:
NPCs and creatures are less likely to attack her first if she is not being aggressive.NPCs befriend her and gift her with treasure for her kindness after the battle. In this case a salve of anti paralysis and a brooch of shielding.
An encounter with a creature who encourages her to become a druid (multiclass to add to her ranger) with an oath never to attack humanoids unless attacked first.
Is it too much to give feats?
So, first of all, it doesn't seem to me that the problem was yours as GM, your daughter's, or even the AP's. But probably from the discrepancy of thought among the players.
As you said, the NPC was aggressive, your daughter wanted to reach a peaceful solution, but her allied players wanted to solve it with violence.
The first friction here seems to be between your daughter and the NPC, but it's actually between her and other players, a type of friction that reminds me a lot of friction between players in a group where one player is playing a Redeemer.
Her being able to convince an NPC doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and resolving encounters without combat is something already foreseen and possible by the system using skills and role-play.
Maybe she just doesn't fit in with this group of players, or maybe it's a matter of everyone learning to compromise. It can be a good educational exercise that she won't always get the ideal solution, at the same time it can be a good exercise for the other players that not everything needs to be solved in a fight.
A TTRPG, in addition to being fun, can also be a good exercise for children and teenagers to learn that things don't always turn out the way they want and that they need to learn to deal with adversity in the most different ways and also learn to reach consensus.
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I had a similar problem with my daughter, who played a druid, and always used and befriended animals creatively. It's actually a super useful and extremely powerful ability when used creatively (and given the time to do so).
The problem isn't the Pathfinder game. When I was playing with her solo or with her friend who was similar, we came up with lots of alternate stories, creative solutions, and cool ideas. I was actually more satisfied with those stories than "normal" stories.
The problem is when I added my brother and his two children into the mix. They wanted to kill everything and got extremely agitated when my daughter tried to find alternate solutions, or less direct methods.
In the end, she just got used to killing everything and as a player, doesn't try to use her resources as creatively. Which is kind of sad now that I think about it.
I think the answer is that someone's play style has to compromise. If they won't compromise to her play style, then perhaps you're better off doing solo games, or taking only a few trusted players with her.
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I think the fight to the death lines are important, as are the enemies that specifically don't. Having that morale informs GM both about the creature's mindset and the expected outcome by the author. But it does feel like the default settings uses fights to the death too much to allow solutions like what the OP wants, so deviating is necessary.
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Its one of nice things about cypher system games that they don't feel like they are built around combat resolution as much, but yeah the non violent way to play pathfinder is completely possible but also requires gm and players to co-operate (because its kinda hard to play things peacefully or non lethally if somebody is like "just kill them, its easier")
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There can be solutions for some combats. Maybe the human NPCs can be more open to reason.
Or remove the fight to the death morale condition.
Or you can go with the thing I saw in the game Earthbound and say that the various things attacking the party are under the control of a malicious external force and "killing" them simply turns them back to normal.
But it is possible this might not be the right game for her.
You might want to look at the plots of the media they enjoy. Study them for their methods of conflict resolution and see what elements you can use.
I enjoyed Call of the Wild and White Fang. There most things were hero vs environment. In a fantasy version you could even resolve the animal attacks in other ways. The plot isn’t based around defeating sentient opponents.
I also enjoyed several mystery series including Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Three Investigators and other similar stories. Here you would get sentient opponents and could even have combat. The thing was the intent was to capture the villains rather than kill them. This sort of adventure would allow for a mixture of combat, social encounters and skill challenges.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any prepackaged adventures that use these sort of plots. There are a few that come close and others that can likely be adapted. Based on the comments above it sounds like Strength of Thousands is one that could be adapted.
Good luck and I hope you are able to find things that work for you.
What I am a hearing is that it is mainly a mismatch between players and not the system perse. However, Pathfinder is a system that is particularly developed for combat - so the intuitive approach is to take violent solutions.
Other games (I loved the Dark Eye - but admit I played it mainly in German) have more developed skill systems, more risky (consequential) combat and wounds, so there people tend to avoid violent solutions more…….
How old are the players?
Glad to help! One other class that might be interesting to consider is the Redeemer Champion. It's edicts might be of interest to your daughter. And I like to treat the Reaction as a barometer for whether an NPC is redeemable. Instead of the NPC choosing between whatever is more tactically advantageous between taking the penalty or dealing their damage, I have the NPC take the "no damage" option if they are capable of feeling guilt or remorse about it.
Edit: Also, as someone who has run into this problem himself I've found it really satisfying to take an NPC or monster statblock meant for a battle or a short conversation and turn it into a full blown Influence Encounter via the GMG. They are a great way to keep the whole party involved in negotiations. I let the final boss of Ironfang Invasion go this route which helped promote the "good/canon" ending at my own table.
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Influence Encounters on Archives of Nethys
I believe he is talking about the Gamemastery Guide pg. 151 which has some subsystems/optional rules/toolkits to expand what types of encounters/challenges you may put your players through. You may well enjoy getting the book. But I'd suggest you go ahead and look at the rules first at the Archives of Nethys to get an idea.
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Yup, those are the rules I meant. The GMG is a great resource. My only reluctance about recommending purchasing it is that it's going to get remastered into GM Core into October: https://paizo.com/products/btq02ej3?Pathfinder-GM-Core
I imagine not EVERYTHING from the original GMG will make the jump over, but a sizable chunk will, and you can read the entirety of the rules on Archive of Nethys either way. Your call if the book is worth purchasing!