I’ve almost never seen this. Most folks, I believe, DO still roll their stats, although there is a very usable system in the DMG for “point buy” where you buy your stats, with the cost going up significantly for 17s and 18s.
Back to your questions:
Level 1 - Many folks might start their games at 3rd, but Pathifinder assumes a level 1-20 progression, so you’d be starting at 1st level.
Most published adventures are for 4 characters; its the default assumption of the 3.X rules that a party is 4 characters. Paizo (the publishers of Pathfinder) have a rep of creating extra tough adventures, so you could boost that to 5 or 6 pretty easily. Otherwise you could up the levels of the characters by 1 or 2 if you have fewer players. Mostly you’ll have to wing it.
I assume you mean “character” not “player.” It can cause problems, but if you’re all mature folks, it would be OK. Better yet, as DM, just add some non-player characters that are understood to be merely supporting characters to fill in the roles.
I’m a moderator at ENWorld, which is the biggest D&D fansite on the 'net, and while biased, I think its a great resource for that sort of help. There’s a LOT there, but starting a thread on the subject always gets good advice.
[quote=Euthanasiast]
Any tips on finding players, recruiting persons that have trepidations about role playing with dice but love the current MMOs that are running (WOW, Age of Conan, Vanguard)? How do I get them to step back in time, back to the dice era?
Back to ENWorld - there’s a gamers seeking gamers forum for posting games. I’ve also used postings at local game stores to great success.
I tend to split my baddies into a few groups. I might roll individually for each “main” NPC bad guy, and split two groups of (say) 5 orcs into two groups in order to split things up. If its only a few baddies, I might roll once for an entire group of them.
As a lazy bastard who’s gotten way to used to console RPGs…
Is there some way to speed up battles? I hate how damn long it takes to do encounters, especially since you have to roll dice for just about every action you want to take.
Also, are there modules where the emphasis is less on bashing things with a sharp pointy object and more on character interaction? Yes, sometimes I like to kill stuff, too, but other times I just want to have a nice conversation without having to deal with Diplomacy rolls.
Buy a thirty second or one minute egg timer. When someone’s turn starts, they have that much time to declare an action, or their character is paralyzed with indecision and they lose their turn.
Wow, that’s harsh. Really. And largely unfair to the rest of the party who aren’t at fault for the indecisive actions of someone else.
As someone who plays (played?) Living Greyhawk, what many DM’s do is when the table is running low on time, an indecisive person goes on delay until they make up their mind. That way the game keeps moving, but the person isn’t overly punished and neither is the rest of the party. They can jump in after anyone else’s turn once they make their decision. Granted this permanently resets their initiative, but at least they get to go that round, and it keeps things moving.
That would help, yeah, but I was also referring to the near endless “roll for attack/roll for damage/roll for just about anything else you want to do” thing. And don’t even get me started on attacks of opportunity…
One thing I’ve thought about doing, if I ever get around to DMing, is to eliminate rolling for attack and giving characters more HP to compensate for that.
That kind of saps the fun from combat. No more opportunity for critical hits? I’d rather take the average of what the damage roll would be rather than no more rolls to hit.
I don’t think D&D is the game system for you Dot. (I’m being completely serious)
The last session I ran for the PC’s was almost devoid of rolls. The session revolved around some political interactions, celebrations, parties etc for the group after completing a mission. But that was the exception I must admit.
I make all my players use point buy for stats and have done so for year now.
If you discount the cheating aspect, of a player turning up with a character with a bunch of 18’s “yep was real lucky on my rolls this time”. I think at character creation luck can have too much of an influence on the rest of the campaign.
For good or bad D&D has such a long term reliance on stats, that if someone gets super lucky, or conversely someone else gets drastically unlucky with stat generation it effects the usability of that character forever.
An uber-character with even just one 18, or a handful of 16’s & 17’s will by sheer ability steal the spotlight from the other characters.
In my group we kept different DMs for different campaigns/modules. We also played several games, so that if for example the DM for the current DnD campaign wasn’t available one Saturday and everybody else was, someone could step in with a very short adventure from another game.
When a character died; first, you can get a lot of mileage from everybody else’s efforts to raise the dead char (if this is still possible). Some players are willing and able to play a handful of NPCs while their carcass is being dragged around half the known world (and some foreign parts too). Second, if a character needs to be replaced, the replacement should be close enough to the others in level and eq. Note that a replacement can happen for things other than death. For example, we had chars get married, a paladin who was ordered by her order (excuse the redundancy) to stay in a monastery for a while and who later popped up again as an NPC sending the chars off on chases…
When rules are confusing, remember that you always have the power to simplify them. So long as you remember what simplification you did (i.e., you don’t make your players suffer through “Tuesday is simplified rules but Saturday you need a lawyer just to get out of bed”) it’s fine. dotchan, we didn’t use them for combat, but some of my DMs would ask us to roll and write down a bunch of throws on a page (one page per person) and use those for “random checks,” for example to decide whether your foraging was being good or not. It did speed things up.
This is a tough one. I don’t like the egg-timer strategy. I think that it is largely the DM’s job to keep things moving, and the biggest thing I do is to announce who’s “on deck” in the initiative order - “Kurgish, you’re up, Barick is up next, and Aleator is after that.” Try to impress upon the players that it is their responsbility to keep track of what is going on - I’ve seen so many players who pay NO attention to the combat until its their turn, and who don’t start to look up their spells/whatever until their turn comes around. I try to get them to work on that ahead of time, but its a constant struggle. I think I keep things moving pretty quickly, but I’ve been in other games where things just bog down.
Dotchan,
an experienced group of players will often bond during a combat - using a new strategy or having something amusing happen. Computer games are about speedy responses; tabletop games are about strategy.
It may just be that you have weak or inexperienced players
Miller, I don’t like the egg-timer idea. Does this mean a player can’t get a drink or go to the toilet?!
For me roleplaying is about entering a different World, enjoying the atmosphere and working as a team.
If your players take too long, maybe they are weak or inexperienced. Neither category improves under time pressure.
If the group all understand the rules (it helps if they take turns being DM), then they should know their numbers and be ready to go.
Not during his own turn, he can’t. If you need to get a drink or take a piss, you do that as soon as you finish your turn, not just when it’s starting. But really, the egg-timer idea is mostly intended to cut down on the amount of table talk. We don’t usually use it in our group, because even when we’ve got an unwieldy number of players (last Sunday, ten people showed up for the game) everyone’s experienced and focused enough to get through their turn in a timely manner. There are exceptions, though, like the guy who won’t stop making Monty Python jokes long enough to try and kill a goblin, or the player who sits on his hands for the whole round until it’s his turn, and only then starts flipping through the PHB trying to figure out what spell he wants to cast. That’s when you bust out the egg timer until they get their head in the game.
Nah, we don’t time those players. We just kill them and take their stuff.
Here’s a guide for DMs on another message board I frequent. It’s mostly good advice, but some of the terminology might be a bit new to you.
And zeroth-level characters existed in 2nd edition, but there was never the expectation that anyone would actually play them. A first-level character was assumed to have already served a few campaigns in the military, or attended wizard school, or whatnot, where they learned how to swing a sword or cast spells or whatever they do. A zeroth-level character was the peasant on the farm who never learned any of those things, and was presumably an NPC. Personally, I like this system a lot better than the separate commoner class, as presented in 3rd edition (what exactly is a 20th-level commoner, anyway? And what was your wizard before he went to wizard school?).
Unless your encounters are designed to be significantly more damaging to the party than the default, it doesn’t really harm the rest of the party at all to have one member skip their turn. (Especially since they’re still valid targets to eat damage.) The enemy might get another initiative or two, but that’s not likely to cause any real problems, IME.
A similar system is in the group I play in (not the one I run, though - it’s small, so it would hurt them) - I’ve been caught by it a few times while looking up the ability I intended to use.
