This weekend, I hope to start what will be a long and fulfilling campaign: the Pathfinder Adventure Path, Council of Thieves
I've got two players who are quite eager to play Pathfinder, a third who is eager to play anything, and I'm still looking for a fourth. I was going to ask the D&D players at my FLGS store on the weekend, but quite a number of them were missing due to the long weekend, so I'll have to ask this Saturday if anyone wants to play in a Sunday campaign... which starts the next day. Heh.
I haven't run Pathfinder before, but I'm rather hoping that 8 years of running 3E (often about 6-8 hours a week) will hold me in good stead. There are a few significant rule changes that I will have to worry about, but I'm hoping that mostly the players can handle all the new powers their characters have.
Of course, the first step is to read the adventure, The Bastards of Erebus. My initial impressions of it aren't that favourable, mainly due to the hamfisted way it starts. After a meeting with the NPC who recruits the characters, the group are chased into the sewers where they stay there until they get bored.
No, really: the sewers are generated randomly, and they end as follows:
"The exit to the safe house is not something that can be randomly rolled; you should place this exit once the PCs have had enough encounters to reach 2nd level, or once their resources have run so critically low that going on for much longer becomes too difficult—when a PC is reduced to negative hit points or is otherwise helpless is a great point to have the exit be just around the corner."
Errata to the adventure indicates that the level 2 guideline is a mistake. I have some tremendous problems with adventure design in this manner, because it doesn't matter what decisions the players make!. They can't act well because there are no bad decisions. If there was any section of the adventure that would have been far, far better designed as a 4E Skill Challenge, this is it. (Skill Challenges have their own problems, but well-structured ones are brilliant).
All of this is made worse by how much space is given in the adventure for this set of generally uninteresting random encounters: ten-and-a-half pages!
Thankfully, once the party makes its way out of the sewers, the adventure begins to look up.
I'm going to run the first session slightly differently to how written in the adventure. Instead of Meeting, Sewers, Hideout, I'll begin it in media res with the party tracked down by a Hellknight patrol in the sewers, then (after that battle is done) return to where things began and the initial meeting (which will be quite short). After that, it'll be another sewer encounter and then onto the rebel hideout where the actual interesting part of the game can begin.
I'll probably have the exit having a bunch of sewer goblins in the way; Janath (the recruiter NPC) will alert the group to the way out, but the goblins block the path. The sewer goblins - as written - are hilariously incompetent. So much so that they aren't a credible threat to the party except through extremely lucky rolls. I'll have to consider whether I want them that stupidly weak. (-6 to hit, 1d4-1 damage? And still CR 1/2? Yeah, that's blindly following the CR rules.)
We'll create characters and start the adventure in the same session. I expect about 1-1½ hours for character generation and thus 2½-3 hours for play; finishing the session with the Ambush to rescue Arael would be the best ender, I think.
So:
* Character Generation
* Encounter One: The Hellknights (combat)
* Encounter Two: How we got here: the Meeting (role-play)
* Encounter Three: The exit from the sewers (combat)
* Encounter Four: The Rebel Hideout (role-play/planning)
* Encounter Five: The Rescue (combat)
I'll now go and review this part of the module in more depth and the rules I'll need. (As well as getting more familiar with the PC generation rules.)
If things go as planned, this will be a weekly campaign, which will be wonderful. (And I'll be very interested to see how it tracks with Crothian's campaign, as I can already see we have vastly different DMing styles...)
Cheers!
I've got two players who are quite eager to play Pathfinder, a third who is eager to play anything, and I'm still looking for a fourth. I was going to ask the D&D players at my FLGS store on the weekend, but quite a number of them were missing due to the long weekend, so I'll have to ask this Saturday if anyone wants to play in a Sunday campaign... which starts the next day. Heh.
I haven't run Pathfinder before, but I'm rather hoping that 8 years of running 3E (often about 6-8 hours a week) will hold me in good stead. There are a few significant rule changes that I will have to worry about, but I'm hoping that mostly the players can handle all the new powers their characters have.
Of course, the first step is to read the adventure, The Bastards of Erebus. My initial impressions of it aren't that favourable, mainly due to the hamfisted way it starts. After a meeting with the NPC who recruits the characters, the group are chased into the sewers where they stay there until they get bored.
No, really: the sewers are generated randomly, and they end as follows:
"The exit to the safe house is not something that can be randomly rolled; you should place this exit once the PCs have had enough encounters to reach 2nd level, or once their resources have run so critically low that going on for much longer becomes too difficult—when a PC is reduced to negative hit points or is otherwise helpless is a great point to have the exit be just around the corner."
Errata to the adventure indicates that the level 2 guideline is a mistake. I have some tremendous problems with adventure design in this manner, because it doesn't matter what decisions the players make!. They can't act well because there are no bad decisions. If there was any section of the adventure that would have been far, far better designed as a 4E Skill Challenge, this is it. (Skill Challenges have their own problems, but well-structured ones are brilliant).
All of this is made worse by how much space is given in the adventure for this set of generally uninteresting random encounters: ten-and-a-half pages!
Thankfully, once the party makes its way out of the sewers, the adventure begins to look up.
I'm going to run the first session slightly differently to how written in the adventure. Instead of Meeting, Sewers, Hideout, I'll begin it in media res with the party tracked down by a Hellknight patrol in the sewers, then (after that battle is done) return to where things began and the initial meeting (which will be quite short). After that, it'll be another sewer encounter and then onto the rebel hideout where the actual interesting part of the game can begin.
I'll probably have the exit having a bunch of sewer goblins in the way; Janath (the recruiter NPC) will alert the group to the way out, but the goblins block the path. The sewer goblins - as written - are hilariously incompetent. So much so that they aren't a credible threat to the party except through extremely lucky rolls. I'll have to consider whether I want them that stupidly weak. (-6 to hit, 1d4-1 damage? And still CR 1/2? Yeah, that's blindly following the CR rules.)
We'll create characters and start the adventure in the same session. I expect about 1-1½ hours for character generation and thus 2½-3 hours for play; finishing the session with the Ambush to rescue Arael would be the best ender, I think.
So:
* Character Generation
* Encounter One: The Hellknights (combat)
* Encounter Two: How we got here: the Meeting (role-play)
* Encounter Three: The exit from the sewers (combat)
* Encounter Four: The Rebel Hideout (role-play/planning)
* Encounter Five: The Rescue (combat)
I'll now go and review this part of the module in more depth and the rules I'll need. (As well as getting more familiar with the PC generation rules.)
If things go as planned, this will be a weekly campaign, which will be wonderful. (And I'll be very interested to see how it tracks with Crothian's campaign, as I can already see we have vastly different DMing styles...)
Cheers!