Completely new to TTRPG, hoping for some insight!


Advice


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Hey! I just got the beginner box after hearing the game be played ontheCool Zone Media Book Club. I think it will be a blast to play with my nieces and family. They're great kids, Super creative, love adventure books, the family loves game night, too. I'm pouring through the book and resources so I can GM the game. That being said, can anyone give some advice on how to make it extra fun? I was thinking of getting everyone their own dice set. I'd love to know some cool places to order dice from. can anyone recommend some videos or other resources I can check out so I can make it as fun as possible? I plan to have some fun background music playing, and hopefully play by candlelight to give some extra ambience. Really, any advice or resources you can give me would be super appreciated. Thank you all so much!

Sovereign Court

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It's always great to see someone new coming to The Hobby :)

It's a bit of a broad question, because it turns out different things really do it for different people. Some people love painting miniatures, others don't care. Some people love hard combats, others love feeling powerful in easy combats. Some people want puzzles. Some want deep character development. And so on.

So for making things fun, I think the best advice is to pay attention to what your players are to be reacting to, and leaning more into the things that work really well. Try things out, don't worry if not everything seems to be equally effective.


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I wrote up my experience in playing the Pathfinder 1st Edition Beginner Box with some 10-year-old children at Beginner Box in Sunday School. The Beginner Box has changed for 2nd Edition, but perhaps you can gain some insights from my report.


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If you have a local game store, they will have dice. Those are often Chessex and they're typically not super expensive. If you have the option, taking them to the store and letting them pick out a set might be a way to go.

Online there's tons of dice companies. I own sets from Die Hard, Heartbeat, and Kraken. It can be fun to get dice themed to a character, so if someone is playing a character that wears a lot of purple: purple dice. Wizard/Witch player might want dice with rune designs on them, and such. There's tons of variety here.

For background music, there's tools like Syrenscape. There's also tons of stuff on Youtube. If you run PF2 in Foundry, the premium adventure packages come with playlists for different areas included as well.

Otherwise, making it "extra fun" is like Ascalaphus said: you have to know what your players like and give them a chance to do that. Like my son loves running in and hitting things, so a combat heavy game with big personality enemies and minions he can get critical hits on is fun for him. He always talks about the time he killed things with Scare to Death or whacked a Hag out of the air with a crit from his Extending Greatsword.

Meanwhile: I love character drama and personal stakes, so I tend to have the most fun when we're doing tense negotiations, influence, or facing down the awful problems of my own backstory. Some of the most fun I've ever had was in game nights where we literally didn't pick up the dice at all.

That kind of thing comes with experience as a GM.

Mechanically, my advice is to use severe encounters sparingly, and when designing encounters, err on the side of "use more enemies". In theory a fight with a single strong enemy is just as hard as a fight with 4 weak enemies, but the fight with weak enemies will feel more fun to most players because they get to crit more often and their spells will land more reliably.

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