Hey y’all. My group recently finished a Starfinder campaign and our normal GM asked someone else to take a turn. I’ve run a few one-shots for some of these players (3 of the 5) that have gone reasonably well, and decided to try my hand at something longer, so I’m going to run The Dragon’s Demand. It’ll be easily the longest thing I’ve run (the others were, like, The Scarlet Sun and a couple of PFS modules as random one-shots), so I figured I’d ask around. General advice as well as anything specific to the module would be great. Of the 5, 2 have played a fair amount of PF1, another a little bit, and the other two (the ones I’ve yet to GM for) none at all. Our group has tended to play more 5E. I’ve already made one probable misstep: I basically dropped a link to Archives of Nethys in our Discord chat and was like “Here’s the general thrust of what we’re doing, I wouldn’t play a Gunslinger or Merfolk, etc, given that they don’t really fit the adventure, but I’m not really going to go through and ban stuff either. Except Sacred Geometry, don’t take that. Knock yourselves out.” So of course one of the players, who’s known for being a bit of a power gamer, comes back saying he wants to play a Synthesist Summoner. I said yeah that’s fine, knowing from PBP recruitments that a lot of GMs ban them. So hopefully that won’t be too much of a headache, but I should probably also think more carefully next time. Any anti-Synthesist tactics are appreciated, though I’m trying not to modify things too much. Oddly, the guy that wants to play a Synthesist is one of the ones with no PF1 experience to my knowledge. It wouldn’t shock me if he just googled “powerful Pathfinder classes” or something. I doubt he found it by accident. Stats are 4d6 drop the lowest (I suppose that may help a bit, since the Synth can’t try and take all 8s in physical stats, though I’m sure he’ll put his high rolls in mental stats). I should perhaps note that I’m not trying be to be super-tough on them, I just don’t want one guy to steamroll everything and hog all the spotlight. The rest of the party isn’t set yet, we went over some things last week, the office Session 0 will be this week then we’ll start next week. I know our normal GM’s wife is playing a healer, as is usual for her (Cleric I believe, she said something about picking Domains). Our normal GM mentioned having a bunch of the knowledge skills, so he’s probably either playing something Roguish or a Wizard, not sure which. The normal GM’s brother is playing a Shifter, and I have no idea what the fifth player is playing, though I won’t be shocked if it’s a Catfolk. In our first two campaigns together he played a Tabaxi and a Leonin.
Although you are trying not to modify too much, I'd like to pitch in with a "Don't be afraid to edit the published material if it suits your game." if you think you can make the story, combat, npcs, or anything else more fun for the players, don't hesitate to do it. Whether that's incorporating a creative player's backstory, or making combats harder if your players are mopping the floor with the enemies and wanting more challenge (or vice versa). And finally, although Bjorn already said it, it has to be reiterated, the point of the game is to have fun. The GM's most important job is making sure everyone's having fun.
Just my two cents.
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Don't mess with the rules system until you have seen something not work in actual play. And then wait until you see it not work again under different circumstances. You can mess up all kinds of things with relatively small changes, so be wary of changing stuff until you know how the changes will impact other things.
I love Dragon's Demand! Such a fun campaign!
Be careful of the month in the middle of the story with nothing to do... player's may have their characters wander off looking for adventure. If I were to run it again I'd shorten the time before the auction.
(It's been 7-ish years since I've run it so these other things could be wrong but I'll try anyways):
The opening of "you're passing through this town and the guy leading the caravan gets arrested so now you're stuck here" felt a little too forced for some of my group but at the same time, having a character that lived in the town would be kind of weird too because getting to know the NPCs was great fun and would be harder to do if people already knew them. I'd probably have there be a festival or some reason for the group to WANT to go to the town, but also having the sheriff and main deputies leave town right away is important so... having SOMEONE get arrested for smuggling seems required. (Maybe have a group of people get arrested that way it makes more sense that all of the most skilled deputied have to escort them to Cassomir). Also, if you do go with the initial written set-up make sure that the group just came from Cassomir that way they aren't very likely to go "oh, well, we'll join you and go there instead of staying in this podunk town" (some groups might be totally fine with the set-up as written though... most of my players for that game were rather jaded so that probably skewed their opinions)
Levelling up happens incredibly fast in terms of what the PCs do (use milestone levelling rather than XP) both in and out of game, but that's okay.
Familiarize yourself with as many of the NPCs as you can... there's a lot of them but you also don't have to memorize everything about all of them.
Use the chart of page 61 listing the buildings and people and workers and everything; it's one of the best things I've ever seen Paizo put into a town write-up and I wish they did it more often.
My group sold the mcguffin between chapters because they had a month off and they decided to head off to somewhere larger but still close enough to get back in time for the auction... so, yeah, I'd definately make it a shorter amount of time between chapters 2 & 3. (It worked out anyways, but still...)
There are two paper mini sets for the module that I'd pick up if you're running this via VVT (or if you want to print them out). I like the art on them and it covers all of the creatures and NPCs:
Dragon's Demand paper minis (has all creatures for all combats and important NPCs)
The People of Belhaim paper minis (has a ridiculous amount of NPC tokens but not required. The first one I would consider a requirement but I'm biased because I love the paper minis)
As for the Summoner, if you really don't want the player to play it, "sorry, I should've also said that since I'm new to this I'm going to restrict things to only PFS Legal options until I'm more comfortable running Pathfinder" might work.
(I have no experience with someone playing a Summoner but I've also told my group that if someone wants to play one it has to be Unchained because the base one is too powerful as evidenced by how much earlier they get access to a lot of spells compared to other casters / compared to the Unchained Summoner.)