I'm looking into DMing a Pathfinder campaign for my wife, brother in law and his girlfriend. Problem is, none of us have ever played any TTRPG before afaik. We're all familiar with RPG video game stuff and I'm into Critical Role so everyone should have a solid foundation of basic terms etc. So I was thinking we could use the first session to make characters and have a little one shot of what would basically be a fetch quest with a few puzzles that requite the players to cooperate and use their abilities so we can do some dungeon crawling and everyone can get a feel for their characters and figure out if they'd like to continue to play that character for the campaign after. I'm also still kinda sadflks about figuring out the campaign's story and stuff ._. This is going to be so much work. Also I was thinking about making a player character as well since otherwise it'd just be three players and I was thinking about making a character that can guide them a bit at lower levels but isn't really plot relevant (don't wanna steal player's spotlight of course), is that a thing I could go or is that a stupid idea from the get go? My reasoning is that a three player group can't really cover all bases so I'd just pitch in as whatever class would be useful. Do you guys think that would be a good start for new people? Also, if anyone has any useful links for new DMs (I'm obvs mostly looking for stuff that's either Pathfinder only or works for any system) I'd appreciate that. I've found some basics (Matt Mercer's DM Tips on youtube, Matt Colville's stuff, subreddits for Pathfinder and general TTRPG stuff, the donjon site which looks like it's going to be a lifesaver...)
@Panda - first, congrats on getting started with tabletop and with DMing! I've never done Pathfinder, so I don't have a lot of specific advice, but as a long time player and DM for various other systems, reading your thoughts is encouraging; you sound like you're really trying to consider how to best balance the experience for everyone. Having a character yourself (I've heard it referred to as a "DMPC" before) is sometimes a hard line to walk, but it can be done well. Let your players know that you're really really open to feedback for how your character impacts their play experience, and keep an eye on the natural human tendency to try to tailor the story to your character, and you'll probably be okay. (On the note of story - it is totally normal to make up broader story arcs as you go! My one word of advice for that is to please, please limit the amount of world/story retcon you do, or it can get really frustrating and even unsettling for players to have history change behind them.) My regular tabletop game got cancelled due to weather, and when I asked my wife and sister what they wanted to do this evening, they said they still wanted to game anyway... so I'm whipping up a randomly generated dungeon, they're splashing some characters together real fast, and I am laying down the bare bones of a fantasy Ireland setting as quick as I can. (Insert the gif of laying rail tracks right before the cart here.) Hopefully this will be fun!
That is exactly what our group is doing, it's a good plan! We took a while to set up our characters so idk if you'd want to meet beforehand to get everyone ready to go, and then start a module another day? Our DM made a backup character in case we weren't up to fighting goblins etc. After 2 out of 4 characters almost died in the first encounter, he went "yep ok i'm gonna introduce Ebik to give y'all some backup" and he just sort of handwaved that lo and behold, this dwarf crusader was travelling this way and wanted to join us! Ta dah, we have a tank now. He doesn't really do much plotwise, although he has some skills that have let us uncover some stuff and I assume the DM planned that. He's helpful as heck though because 3/4 of us are using bows and uh, w e a k at 1st level
Yeah, having a DMPC can be useful-- the one my current DM is using exists pretty much for us to ask lore questions to now that we've levelled some, he's a squishy bard who occasionally will provide buffs to counteract Bad Dice Nights.
Tonight's adventures are going well so far! My wife and sister rolled two characters each, for a four-person party. Everyone has very Gaeilge (Irish) names or nicknames bc that's the local version of Common, which is fun to call out in battle. Sláine is a dwarven arcane trickster whose response to basically everything is "well ok then." Saraid is a human cleric of Lugh who wears a piece of lightning glass shaped into a spearhead as a holy symbol and has a javelin that turns into a lightning bolt when thrown, then back into a javelin when it pierces the intended target. Ceallach is a dragonborn archfey pact of the blade warlock who originally hailed from Iceland (although with the amount of pulling him in and out of the fey realms for storytime his master does, it might not have been this world's Iceland.) And Dealg is a half-elf druid with an urchin background who's a fairly thin reskin of the Tamora Pierce character Briar Moss. They're about a quarter of the way through exploring a fortress that just, like, appeared on a hilltop in the last storm. So far, hallway traps, grimlocks, a giant spider, a drider, and a mindflayer have all been vanquished. Huzzah! I forget how much fun I have with semi-spontaneous game sessions.
Thanks everyone for the encouragement, it does ease some of the concerns I've had. So DMPC it is then, I'm thinking a bard or if no one else picks one a cleric. I'd love to roll a ranger but I have a feeling one of my players is going to roll one. I think I'll take Everett's advice and have a session 0 for figuring out characters and clarifying rules etc. But I'm really really excited, DMing seems like a daunting task but also so much fun. @Kit Thank you for your advice especially, it's nice to hear that I'm going in the right direction from the start, I'll try my best to keep it that way. I just want everyone to have a blast. And I'll keep the advice about retconning stuff in mind, I'm not a big fan of that myself. Also, your impromptu game sounds like a lot of fun!
Apparently sadomasochism is a divine spell in Pathfinder. I. This is the best thing since Poisoned Egg
me at 11:30 PM: I'm going to do a little brainstorming on that scrap of a homebrew setting I had a couple of months ago me at 2 AM: EMPIRE OF BARDS. EXILED TENGU PRINTERS. WIZARD WARS. ONI SORCERER-KINGS. TRITON CITIES GUARDING PLANAR RIFTS.
My fiancee's brother will be living with us for two months this summer so we're starting a temporary campaign so he can play with us. He's 14 now and hasn't played before so we're designing the campaign to be pretty low-stakes, starting at level 10, and making sure that he can be the hero if he wants to be. To me, 'let him be the big hero' means 'I can play a bard.' So I'm in the process of making a half-elf bard. Half elf, half French. Her name is Jeanette. She's an opera bard, that is, she learned her barding in the opera. As an opera star. She's now middle-aged and retired because the opera got so Mean Girls that people died and she had to flee. Anyway the character concept is INSANE but I mostly wanted to talk about how I built up her spellbook because I'm proud of it. Before this my fiancee (also my DM) has just let me use the entire class spellbook for my characters instead of making me choose a list of spells but I wanted to do that this time because I really want to personalize Jeanette. I don't have to painfully min/max anything if there's no real danger inherent to the campaign. As such, I limited the amount of spells I can use by the book, neglected spells that sounded more useful in favor of spells I think Jeanette would want, and tried to tell a story with the whole thing. I've always been frustratingly character-focused and into telling a story and playing the character as they would want instead of, like, doing useful things or helping my party members, but I am fucking outdoing myself here. Her life was a lot more viscous when she was younger and learning magic and espionage was pretty central to her survival. As such, the zero and first level spells she knows are largely about tricking, sneaking around, and self-preservation. She knows prestidigitation and ghost sound but nothing that would help a party member because she didn't have any. Her first level spells are charm person, detect secret doors, sleep, and unseen servant, but her life starts shifting directions when she's on the run from a crime she committed by accident (murder) for her second-level spells, so she learns some more self-preservation things but also chose silence and darkness over suggestion or misdirection--they're more considerate, less devious. As she finally escapes her life of crime, grows older, and spends more time working with people instead of against them, she learns crushing despair AND good hope, illusory script but also dispel magic, which is straight up meant to help people. Finally, her fourth-level spells, because she gets to know two, are entirely benign--break enchantment and legend lore. Technically I'm bending lore a little bit because she should have learned those lower level spells as she went along too but shhhhhhhh. Shh. Now for feats.
For dice, I really love "Chessex" brand dice. They are rugged and the ink in the numbers doesn't chip out over time like some other brands, and I have yet to chip the plastic on one, even after having them fall from a height onto a concrete floor. Some of my cheaper dice didn't survive that one.
Seconding Chessex for dice, they are great. (Aaaaa, someone get me off their website, I don't need more dice but they are So Pretty...)
I have Chessex too (although I didn't know the brand name until now, lol). I don't see my colors on the website (they seem to have a lot of color turnover), but I have one set (d4, d8, d10, d12, d20, and a percentage die) in this beautiful metallic blue/purple swirl with gold numbering, and I just bought another set (same dice, although note that both also came with a d6, which I don't like because d6s with numbers instead of pips are Weird) in this beautiful nephrite jade color (the opacity varies a little so it actually looks like stone, they're amazing), also with gold numbering. I think those are gonna be my DM dice! >:] the rest of my dice are just random-ass ones from idfk where. I think the d6s came out of a Yahtzee game?? in terms of numbers, before I bought this latest jade set I found that the blue/purple dice plus a d8, d10, d12, and 4d6 worked well, since I'm lazy and would rather roll identical dice all together instead of one die multiple times. :P the size of that set was also inspired by my traveling die container, which is this beautiful engraved... circular case thing? for jewelry, maybe??... that was my aunt's. it's silver, I think. I prrrrobably shouldn't be using it to transport dice but. it's a really convenient size. :P
So, while bopping around YouTube I ran across MrRhexx. His latest videos are all about D&D monster lore. They are really good and inspire all kinds of ideas. Here is the link to the one he did about the Succubus: Link. He does not stick to the current 5th edition canon but good ideas are good ideas, besides I could write a multipage screed on how silly I think an overarching canon is, in a game all about creative freedom.
@PrinzVyper emphatically agreed re: the canon thing. it appeases me somewhat to think of it as a canon, not the canon—having read more about the Forgotten Realms setting, almost everything "canonical" in the 5e core books is from there. I appreciate having such a thorough setting available, especially since it's classic D&D, and a bunch of people have obviously put a lot of effort into it. for DMs who either don't want or can't handle complex worlds of their own, its strong framework and extensive (if, I'm afraid, tropical) worldbuilding takes care of that for them so they can focus on other aspects of the game. but for DMs who are interested in worldbuilding, it's limiting as all hell, especially because the core books present it as The Canon, like you said. I'm running a Forgotten Realms packaged adventure right now for my DM maiden voyage, and although I am really interested in worldbuilding, such a detailed setting feels... stifling? like, it's so complete that I don't want to mess with it in case that screws something else up. ugh. THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT BUG ME ABOUT IT THOUGH like the fuckin. racial stereotypes? the Players' Handbook is like "oh, elves are like [less than a page of description] and dwarves are like [another almost-page]," and eXCUSE YOU, those are large groups of people?? even if you accept that each non-human race has one culture (which, fuck you, okay, NO), there are individuals??? who do not all have the same personalities??? what the fuck are you doing, PHB???? also the Monster Manual. "all hags are evil" NO FUCK YOU WHERE ARE MY DISCWORLD WITCHES. I WANT DISCWORLD WITCHES, DAMMIT. also their fey are wrong. (for one thing, they spell it like that, and "Feywild"?? excuse me?? I think you meant "Faerie," which is obviously the superior term??? and where are the dangerous fae, I want fairies who don't understand good and evil and dance people to death because it makes them laugh, fairies who live in barrow mounds among the rotten finery of ancient kings, fairies you put iron and salt out for. don't give me this pixies-and-unicorns bullshit. "Unseelie Court" yeah sure.) and so are their succubi (they can't?? kiss their victims??? that's not weird when you're seducing someone, oh no), and their vampires, why are they all evil, aaaaaand I could go on, I'm sure. also I like your title! well, I like anything that's Latin, but it's suitably... metal, I wanna say? "When others fall, it's death to play." very grim, and much better in Latin than in English. where's it from?
@esotericPrognosticator, and anyone else willing to listen to a long meandering screed: I became a DM in the early 80's. I became a DM because the DM we had slavishly followed prewritten modules, and he was very heavy handed about it, forcing us to play the way he wanted us to. We all hated it but no one else wanted to DM. I started by buying the "Red Box AD&D Set." I quickly realized this would be enough. So I took on extra chores, and any work I could get, and saved my money. I lived in a rural enclave in southern California at the time. My regular, uncompensated chores were farm work, milking goats and a cow, feeding goats, the cow, sheep, and chickens, mucking stalls, and collecting eggs. I did this twice a day, once at 5am, and again at 5pm. every single day, rain or shine. I mention this because getting those $15 books was a lot of hard work on my part. But I got them, first the DMG, then the PHB, MM1, Fiend Folio, MM2, Unearthed Arcana, and finally, Deities and Demi-Gods. I read them all, cover to cover. I also bought every issue of Dragon magazine, as soon as it hit my comic book store. I then thought about the kind of games "I" would like to run. The only pre-made world at the time was Gygax's "Greyhawk." and I didn't like it much. The best part of this game was that there were no rules, only guidelines, it said so in every book! This inspired me, I could do things the ways "I" wanted to. If I didn't like the way a rule worked, "I" could change it. I didn't want to run a mindless series unconnected adventures, oh no, I wanted a world. So I built one. I decided to do this scientifically. I started with a list of questions, and an idea of what the finished world would be like. I very first rule I chucked was: "Spell Casters have to memorize spells, every day, and they forget them when they are cast." I hated that rule. In my world mages would always remember their spells, but could only cast so many spells per day, *see the table in the book. Priests, on the other hand, they had to pray to cast a spell, that was gonna be the only prep they had to do, *see table in the book for how many. And yes I am aware that the "Sorcerer" class came later and used similar rules. Okay, but this was gonna make magic an awfully potent force, how am I gonna deal with that? See, lots of questions. The first big question I had was: How did all these sentient creatures come to inhabit my world .The should have killed each other off, the way we did with all the other hominids, and what about all the monsters? Answer: They didn't evolve naturally, they were created! But why? And, by whom? This was a big problem. Then I had it, the world is in a star system, most worlds are. So what about the other planets? I started with a star system, for fun, I made it binary, a middle-aged yellow dwarf., and an older red dwarf, red dwarves being one of the most common kinds of stars in our universe, and our sun is a yellow dwarf. I then postulated that there were two planets smack in the "Goldilocks" zone. One Venus-like hell-world and one like our own. On the nice world there was a sentient race, they were both brilliant and, eventually peaceful. They were also tragically short-lived. dying of old age in say three decades. They had three Gods, Chaos, Balance, and Law, this is important later. They were brilliant, and discovered the laws of genetics early, by the time we had radio, they know to begin to do direct genetic manipulation. They could not, however, extend their own brief lives. To them, life was a very precious thing, and simply destroying their failed creations was unthinkable. Fortunately, they had learned to think in very long terms, that's an important thing when building a civilization, thinking in terms beyond your lifetime. The decision was made to make the Hell-World into a paradise, for their creations. It took a very long time, but advanced genetics helped shorten the process. A strange thing happened with their creations though, some of them were able to see, and manipulate energies that baffled their creators, the birth of magic. They conserved that, and incorporated it into all of their future creatures. Okay, where are the creators now? Destroyed, in a genocidal war with an invading alien race. I envisioned a hive-minded, insect-like race, this was way before I read "Starship Troopers," and a hell of a long time before the "Zerg" of "Starcraft" fame. Now I had an explanation for almost everything in my world. I made lore for the races. Dragons, for example, were the battleships in that great war. I always though standard D&D dragons were pipsqueaks. My dragons were bred for battle and brains, not creatures some mid-level party could casually dispatch while yawning. In my world I wanted every race with sentience to be able to do magic, now there was a reason why. Over time I added to my world and my lore, when I saw a good idea I incorporated it. I liked tinker-gnomes, kender, and gully dwarves from "Dragonlance." So, I added them. I kept the three Gods, named them, and developed their priesthoods. Created notable NPCs. The nine immortals, for example, the final product of the genetic tinkering. They are absolutely immortal, they cannot be killed permanently, at all, period. Mind you a high-level party did neutralize one by burning her to ash and encasing the ashes sealed metal vials, and spreading her remains across the planet. If those vials ever come together though, she'll be back. I made continents, countries, and cities. Over time players have affected my world, some destroyed a mountain. One made an entirely new race from cell samples collected after a huge magical accident. The player had to retire the character, as she in now a minor goddess to the race she created, and constantly hears their prayers. Having my own world is good for me, but also for my players. Some of my best games have come from my players wandering away from my preplanned game, and me improvising on the spot. Finally, something that is very gratifying to me personally. My son, now in his mid-twenties, so loves the lore and characters of my world, a world he has been a player in since his tweens, that he wants to continue my work and my world. Now I afraid that he will run into players who will say to him "Those aren't the Rules, you're playing the game wrong!" That thought makes me sad. Is it too early to mourn for the game I used to love?
@esotericPrognosticator The Latin in my title was actually the best translation I could find to "If all else fails, play dead." There used to be a show called "The Red Green Show." In the show the member's of "'possum Lodge", would spout the psudeo-Latin motto"Quando Omni Flunkis Moritaty." I like the sentiment, but though it was better in actual Latin.
...huh. Mistranslations From The Guy In His Sixth Year Of Latin strike again! :P I'd translate that English a lot differently than you did: Si cetera dēficiunt, simulā mortuus esse. buuut that's just me, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Spoiler: LONG EXPLANATION OF TRANSLATION IF ANYONE CARES, WHICH THEY PROBABLY DON'T yours is pretty good too! but I read it the way I did (and changed mine somewhat) because: cum is either a preposition meaning "with" or a subordinating conjunction that can mean "because" or "although" but usually means "when," depending. (on what, you ask? on fuckall. Latin.) because I saw neither ablative noun(s) (the preposition takes the ablative) or subjunctive verb(s) (clauses in which cum means "because," "although," or one sort of "when" are in the subjunctive), I translated it as "when." no problem with cetera. it's the right word for "all" (or "the others," or "others," or "everything") in this sense, even. omnia also means "all," but cetera specifically means "the other things aside from the one I just mentioned," which certainly applies to "all else." fallunt can mean "they fail," but that's, like, the fifth definition, i.e., I don't see it used much in that sense; usually it means "to trick/cheat/deceive." I totally translated it wrong the first go 'round! I have a tendency to be over-literal with cognates. I figured lūdere was the present active infinitive (or nominative gerund, if you'd like to think of it that way) and translated accordingly. to say what you want to say here, though, you need an imperative. having looked it up, I see that lūdere can also be the singular present passive imperative (Latin!), but idk why you'd need the passive here? or how to translate that into English??? contrary to appearances, I did not pull "it's death" out of my ass! quite literally that ought to be mors est, but 1) straight-up omitting esse despite meaning esse is all the rage with the authors I've been reading lately (and, like, most Roman writers) and 2) I figured mortuus was a substantive adjective standing in for "dead guy" or, if you're sloppy like me, "death." SO that's why I read yours like that, and if you're interested in why mine differs: si means "if." thank fucking god that this conditional is a nice straightforward factual one and I don't have to fuck around with subjunctives and future-less-vivid and ugh. (present-contrary-to-fact conditionals and their ilk are high up on my list of Latin Grammatical Concepts Which Are Badly Named And Also Terrible.) my use of dēficiunt here is a bit nitpicky, but it very straightforwardly means "to fail," fallunt less so, as I explained above. also it's the Word My Brain Goes For, idk. sort of same deal with simulã: aside from it being the correct imperative form (well, I didn't have to opt for the singular, but it's conventional and everything agrees), it means "to simulate, pretend to be, fake," which I figure is what the idiom "play dead" is getting at. (Latin doesn't have a comparable idiom afaik.) lūdere literally means "to play," but it's playing in the sense of a game or sport, not pretending to be dead. it's also the word you use for actors playing a part, though? so maybe that would work. but generally speaking I don't fucks with translating idioms if I can help it. oh, also I used simulā instead of the alternate form similā because I like it better. unlike the English there is no nicely packaged idiomatic phrase, as I said, so literally I had to say "pretend to be dead" or "pretend that you are dead" (the former being the straightforward translation of the infinitive, the latter being the actual meaning of the indirect statement here). with my luck simulāre is one of those weird fuckin' verbs that takes a case or whatever, but I don't have the big dictionary and can't be bothered to get it. :P my apologies if you already know all this and I'm 'splaining to you, but I get... kind of evangelical about Latin? in that I want to SHARE MY EXPLANATIONS SO EVERYONE CAN LEARN BECAUSE AS MUCH AS I COMPLAIN ABOUT IT I REALLY LIKE LATIN.
Tonight's Pathfinder session: Our party is tracking an influx of giants who are making their way to a volcano in order to meet up with a military leader. We're in a nearby city stocking up on supplies. We've lost a party member, so were in the market for a hireling (preferably a healer). We found one: an aasmir oracle called Aarg. We discussed terms and hired him. Then we went on to see if we could glean any knowledge from people in the local taverns as to the giants' recent movements. In the second tavern we entered, upon asking the bartender if any of his patrons had had run ins with said giants, I (Atticus) was pointed towards a human fighter sitting at a table in the corner. The fighter was female, muscular, viking in appearance, and carried a sword and shield. Atticus was instantly smitten. His exact words were: 'She is mighty and I wish to climb her.' He rolled a natural 20 on his flirtation attempt. Her name was Hilda. We hired her. Our other two party members were directed towards a table of rather skinny humans. Turns out they were former slaves of the giants, and we'd freed them by destroying the last giant military training ground we came across. (When I say 'destroyed' I mean that we caused an avalanche that crushed half the camp, poisoned several members of the camp guard by chucking frog glands in to their beer kegs, set fire to the other half of the camp, and massacred any giants that were left). Vex (ifrit oracle) and Grit (dwarven barbarian) chatted to them. Their names are Steve, Trevor, Gary and Fred. They're useless. We hired them. Matters proceeded. Drinks were drunk. Shots were slammed. At one point Vex asked the bartender if he could serve up a bowl of cocktails in a brass goose*. Bartender motioned over a halfling man. He told the halfling what we wanted. Some time later the halfling showed back up, a live goose under one arm and a vial in the other hand. He set the goose down, and emptied the contents of the vial over it. Blam! Instant hollowed out brass goose. The halfling's name was Gary. We hired him. So now we have Aarg and Hilda, who will be assisting us in combat. The humans will be tasked with carrying the brass goose on their shoulders. Gary will ride in the brass goose, and will be protected with our dying breaths. Three of us (four if you count my eidolon) entered the city. Nine of us, plus two horses and a dire bat, will be leaving. About the dire bat: we bought it for Grit to ride on. The bat's name is Fink. It's wearing a little fez emblazoned with the logo of the shop we bought him from. (* The brass goose has precedent. Last weekend me, the player that controls Vex and another friend went to a speakeasy in London. We did literally drink cocktails out of a large brass goose. It was great.)
