Completely new to TTRPG, hoping for some insight!

[Frame.By.Frame]

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!

[Ascalaphus]

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.

[Mathmuse]

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.

[Tridus]

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.

[Pronate11]

To start with, run the adventure "Trouble under Otari" before running a custom game. The adventure is the perfect tutorial, and is the best way to learn. Having more dice is always a good idea, but also make sure to have snacks, those always help.

[Frame.By.Frame]

Mathmuse wrote:

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.

Absolutely going to try to lean into the things they'll enjoy. I have a feeling combat will be a hit as well as determining plans. I'm going to try and pick dice sets for all the players as we're all going into this for the first time together. Thank you for the advice!

[Frame.By.Frame]

Tridus wrote:

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.

Thank you so much for the advice and the link! Definitely going to use that as a resource while planning. Also that's such a fun thing to do with a class! I'm sure they all really appreciated it!

[Frame.By.Frame]

Tridus wrote:

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.

Thank you for the recommendations for online stores! Exactly the type of thing I'm looking for. From all the comments I'm seeing I'm going to have to really map out the adventure. I'm hoping we can spend some time building characters then we can play the beginner box together as a family. If they like it we can get more trinkets and gear and stuff. I appreciate the recommendation for music and stuff as well! I think interactions and battles will be the most fun for them. I'm guessing one of the adults in the party will need to be a healer because the kids certainly aren't going to be!! The more I read the more excited I'm getting! I'm trying to find some local stores to go to. It's hard because the stores around me either specialize in typical board games or card games. I'm going to keep looking around though. Thanks again!

[Frame.By.Frame]

Pronate11 wrote:

To start with, run the adventure "Trouble under Otari" before running a custom game. The adventure is the perfect tutorial, and is the best way to learn. Having more dice is always a good idea, but also make sure to have snacks, those always help.

Oh, for sure! I'm going to pour over everything in the beginner box I got to make sure I'm familiar and can keep it going for the party. There will be 5 players plus myself, so I want to make sure I'm as prepped to run this as I can. I'm a long way off from running a home brew! The podcast I was listening to was playing through Dawn of the Frogs which just sounds to fun!

[Ascalaphus]

Frame.By.Frame wrote:

From all the comments I'm seeing I'm going to have to really map out the adventure.

Talking about that, yes!

I've discovered that for me it's quite hard to imagine spaces when people describe them to me. Someone giving me directions on the street is tricky if I can't refer to a map. The gamemaster telling me to use theater of the mind and just imagine where enemies are: also pretty hard.

But miniatures on a grid-map? Totally easy.

There's a bunch of different ways to go about it. Some adventures come with maps that you could get printed at scale at the local print shop. Paizo (and some other companies) also sell specific maps that you can draw on with whiteboard markers and erase again. Aside from Paizo itself, Loke Battle Mats also has pretty good taste in map design. One of the really neat things they sell is static-cling things like treasure chests, magic circles, furniture etcetera that you can easily stick on a map and take off again later.

Finally, you can just draw them yourself. You can use erasable battle mats like Paizo sells, but you can also use flipover paper. Standard flipover paper tends to have a 1-inch grid on it that's just a little bit bigger than Paizo's normal flipmats, so most designs fit nicely.

The convenient thing about drawing your own maps on flipover paper is that you can prepare ahead very nicely. You can pre-draw all the encounters in an adventure and just store them. You don't have to erase the first encounter to make room for the second because you only have one map to work with. If you don't get to an encounter tonight, you just fold up that map and unfold it next week.

[rainzax]

Hand Drawn Maps:

I use 1-inch graphic chart paper, then draw in light pencil first, followed by sharpie to give solid definition, and finish with a light shade of color pencil.

If an obscure rule will be used for a given encounter (ex. needing to Balance on an icy terrain), I write the rule right on the map for ease of reference.

In a pinch, I keep at least one blank sheet in my travel container - sometimes those pesky players have a surprise idea that might involve a "map" you didn't plan for!

[Frame.By.Frame]

Ascalaphus wrote:

Frame.By.Frame wrote:

From all the comments I'm seeing I'm going to have to really map out the adventure.

Talking about that, yes!

I've discovered that for me it's quite hard to imagine spaces when people describe them to me. Someone giving me directions on the street is tricky if I can't refer to a map. The gamemaster telling me to use theater of the mind and just imagine where enemies are: also pretty hard.

But miniatures on a grid-map? Totally easy.

There's a bunch of different ways to go about it. Some adventures come with maps that you could get printed at scale at the local print shop. Paizo (and some other companies) also sell specific maps that you can draw on with whiteboard markers and erase again. Aside from Paizo itself, Loke Battle Mats also has pretty good taste in map design. One of the really neat things they sell is static-cling things like treasure chests, magic circles, furniture etcetera that you can easily stick on a map and take off again later.

Finally, you can just draw them yourself. You can use erasable battle mats like Paizo sells, but you can also use flipover paper. Standard flipover paper tends to have a 1-inch grid on it that's just a little bit bigger than Paizo's normal flipmats, so most designs fit nicely.

The convenient thing about drawing your own maps on flipover paper is that you can prepare ahead very nicely. You can pre-draw all the encounters in an adventure and just store them. You don't have to erase the first encounter to make room for the second because you only have one map to work with. If you don't get to an encounter tonight, you just fold up that map and unfold it next week.

That sounds like a good time! I'm hoping to have more structure for the first few sessions before I try and customize things too much. Walk, then run, then fly, you know! I'm excited to get to the point of home brewing campaigns though!

[The Raven Black]

The Combat Pad is an extremely useful tool IMO.

As is the Pathbuilder App too.

[The Raven Black]

Frame.By.Frame wrote:

Pronate11 wrote:

To start with, run the adventure "Trouble under Otari" before running a custom game. The adventure is the perfect tutorial, and is the best way to learn. Having more dice is always a good idea, but also make sure to have snacks, those always help.

Oh, for sure! I'm going to pour over everything in the beginner box I got to make sure I'm familiar and can keep it going for the party. There will be 5 players plus myself, so I want to make sure I'm as prepped to run this as I can. I'm a long way off from running a home brew! The podcast I was listening to was playing through Dawn of the Frogs which just sounds to fun!

5 players?

Then you will need to get comfortable with the Encounters budget rules to properly adjust written encounters to the size of the party.

[Loreguard]

5 players is better than 3 players. With 5 instead of 4 encounters will end up being easier for them, which especially for newer players is probably better than harder because of too many. Do I wouldn’t worry too much about rules on making the encounters harder until you feel more comfortable.

But eventually you will want to up the challenge a little and will want to add some to some encounters. But as an example, going from one boss (tough) creature to two of them on an encounter that was supposed to be hard, might become deadly.

The Encounter budget rules helps you understand how tough an encounter is likely to be, and leaves you with adding some extra minions to help balance the difficulty out better. But as an example, if you had an encounter against four orcs or goblins, as adventures are often balanced for four characters, you can probably expect you can add a fight and the difficulty would probably balance out.

There are some other options you can leverage by adding a weak or elite creature templates to one or more creatures to adjust the threat level a bit.

[Frame.By.Frame]

Loreguard wrote:

5 players is better than 3 players. With 5 instead of 4 encounters will end up being easier for them, which especially for newer players is probably better than harder because of too many. Do I wouldn’t worry too much about rules on making the encounters harder until you feel more comfortable.

But eventually you will want to up the challenge a little and will want to add some to some encounters. But as an example, going from one boss (tough) creature to two of them on an encounter that was supposed to be hard, might become deadly.

The Encounter budget rules helps you understand how tough an encounter is likely to be, and leaves you with adding some extra minions to help balance the difficulty out better. But as an example, if you had an encounter against four orcs or goblins, as adventures are often balanced for four characters, you can probably expect you can add a fight and the difficulty would probably balance out.

There are some other options you can leverage by adding a weak or elite creature templates to one or more creatures to adjust the threat level a bit.

This is the type of advice I'm looking for! I got the beginner box and I want to make sure the first session is a fun night and a success. I want this to be something we can do and create and enjoy as a family, None of us have any experience with a TTRPG. There are so many terms and abbreviations and "things." It's difficult starting from scratch.

I tried to find some videos on YouTube but there are so many and every one I watched kind of left me with more questions than answers. I'm still trying to find a local store I can go to that will have the patience and knowledge to bring me up to speed some. I haven't had much luck yet as most are either more about board games or are about card games. Hopefully I can find a jumping off point for learning soon.

[Conscious Meat]

With regard specifically to the Beginner's Box, note the guidance re: the final enemy's behavior. It is explicitly intended that it not use optimal combat tactics.

Regarding videos, maybe check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTxtn8ARB0 from the "Narrative Declaration" channel, which features the GM (who at one point was a social media producer for Paizo) run four new players through the Beginner's Box using FoundryVTT, so there's a fair bit of explaining that happens.

Something to keep in mind is that it's absolutely okay to get things 'wrong', and that it's better to make a ruling and move on (and look things up after the session) rather than have a prolonged argument. This is pretty normal for new groups. If you think you understand a rule and why it's written as-is, but you disagree with it... likewise, feel free to run it differently; it's your table, your group, your fun.

Re: dice, I would second Chessex dice if you want very inexpensive but very very usable ones (e.g. 7-die opaque polyhedral sets go for $4.18 from them). My fancier dice are from Die Hard Dice. You can also get a dice tray for rolling (and, if you ever get metal dice, you *should* get a dice tray in order to protect the table...).

[Frame.By.Frame]

Conscious Meat wrote:

With regard specifically to the Beginner's Box, note the guidance re: the final enemy's behavior. It is explicitly intended that it not use optimal combat tactics.

Regarding videos, maybe check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTxtn8ARB0 from the "Narrative Declaration" channel, which features the GM (who at one point was a social media producer for Paizo) run four new players through the Beginner's Box using FoundryVTT, so there's a fair bit of explaining that happens.

Something to keep in mind is that it's absolutely okay to get things 'wrong', and that it's better to make a ruling and move on (and look things up after the session) rather than have a prolonged argument. This is pretty normal for new groups. If you think you understand a rule and why it's written as-is, but you disagree with it... likewise, feel free to run it differently; it's your table, your group, your fun.

Re: dice, I would second Chessex dice if you want very inexpensive but very very usable ones (e.g. 7-die opaque polyhedral sets go for $4.18 from them). My fancier dice are from Die Hard Dice. You can also get a dice tray for rolling (and, if you ever get metal dice, you *should* get a dice tray in order to protect the table...).

More fantastic advice, thank you so much! I'll definitely watch that video it sounds perfect!

[The Raven Black]

I used The Great Toy Heist, which was a free pdf then but appears to be 5$ now, as an introductory adventure for my wife, one of our friend and our 9 year old kid.

It is a lot of fun and includes 4 pregenerated characters for the players.

After playing this one, they all wanted more.

[Perses13]

The $5 price for Great Toy Heist is for the print version of the adventure.

Paizo's new webstore doesn't support having store pages for free stuff so now the Free RPG Day adventure PDFs are just hosted online. Some appear to be linked on the store page for the print edition (like Great Toy Heist), but that seems to be inconsistent currently.

I do think the Free RPG Day adventures are pretty great. Personally I really enjoyed Little Trouble in Big Absalom and Threshold of Knowledge.

[Loreguard]

Conscious Meat wrote:

....

Something to keep in mind is that it's absolutely okay to get things 'wrong', and that it's better to make a ruling and move on (and look things up after the session) rather than have a prolonged argument. This is pretty normal for new groups. If you think you understand a rule and why it's written as-is, but you disagree with it... likewise, feel free to run it differently; it's your table, your group, your fun.

....

I want to stress this is very true. The important part is to have fun with the story and play. It is important to be able to say, here's what we do... and realize if you find out better later on, you fix things from that point on, you don't worry about the water already under the bridge.

So, play how you understand to play it during a session, only changing things that become very clearly apparent when revealed and then only worry about fixing in new encounters of the applications of the rule. If people question something that isn't ultimately clear upon revelation, then agree to handle it how you thought you were supposed to and agree to research and fix future processes for it in between sessions, not bog down the current session investigating the 'right' answer.

Also, as people learn the rules and what abilities do, let them change their chosen abilities in between sessions if those abilities were not what they thought they were. There are rules for retraining, but you need not stick to that when you are first learning the game.

edit:
Toy Heist is one I have never gotten to run, or play in, but at least skimming through it when I got it, it looked like it would be a wonderful introductory adventure.

[The Raven Black]

Perses13 wrote:

The $5 price for Great Toy Heist is for the print version of the adventure.

Paizo's new webstore doesn't support having store pages for free stuff so now the Free RPG Day adventure PDFs are just hosted online. Some appear to be linked on the store page for the print edition (like Great Toy Heist), but that seems to be inconsistent currently.

I do think the Free RPG Day adventures are pretty great. Personally I really enjoyed Little Trouble in Big Absalom and Threshold of Knowledge.

For the Great Toy Heist, I did not find the link for the free pdf on the store page of the product itself.

Do you know where it can be found ?

[Loreguard]

The Raven Black wrote:

Perses13 wrote:

The $5 price for Great Toy Heist is for the print version of the adventure.

Paizo's new webstore doesn't support having store pages for free stuff so now the Free RPG Day adventure PDFs are just hosted online. Some appear to be linked on the store page for the print edition (like Great Toy Heist), but that seems to be inconsistent currently.

I do think the Free RPG Day adventures are pretty great. Personally I really enjoyed Little Trouble in Big Absalom and Threshold of Knowledge.

For the Great Toy Heist, I did not find the link for the free pdf on the store page of the product itself.

Do you know where it can be found ?

I believe it is: https://downloads.paizo.com/PZO14001E_TheGreatToyHeist.pdf

Or download

[The Raven Black]

Loreguard wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

Perses13 wrote:

The $5 price for Great Toy Heist is for the print version of the adventure.

Paizo's new webstore doesn't support having store pages for free stuff so now the Free RPG Day adventure PDFs are just hosted online. Some appear to be linked on the store page for the print edition (like Great Toy Heist), but that seems to be inconsistent currently.

I do think the Free RPG Day adventures are pretty great. Personally I really enjoyed Little Trouble in Big Absalom and Threshold of Knowledge.

For the Great Toy Heist, I did not find the link for the free pdf on the store page of the product itself.

Do you know where it can be found ?

I believe it is: https://downloads.paizo.com/PZO14001E_TheGreatToyHeist.pdf

Or download

Thank you !!!