I know there are some people out there thinking of being a GM (that's gamesmaster to those who don't know the lingo, the person that creates and runs a ropeplaying game campaign). But it can be a scary thing to do. So here are ten lessons I have learnt during my first campaign (which I am still running) called Pathfinders of Zendikar. Hopefully they will be useful, and maybe encourage you to take the leap into running your own.
Here are my players:
Sir Elessar - human cavalier (Richard)
Gwahir - loyal apex hawk
Ler Mimir - merfolk cleric of Ula (Dhamiran)
Tic-Tac - goblin rogue (Andrew)
Atlas - mul-daya elf sorcerer (George)
Lithios - human paladin (Matt)
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| Illustration by Tim Kings-Lynne |
1. The players never do what they are supposed to.
It became incredibly apparent in the very first session that my players were not going to follow the carefully laid out progress in the adventure book I was using. They were supposed to hang around in the town of Stoneforge and help the residents with a number of annoying problems, from goblin raids to giant crab attacks. Instead, they immediately rushed off to Emeria (which was pointless) and wanted to go raid the main goblin base (which would have gotten them killed). They ignored every in-game attempt on my part to get them to stay in the town, until I had to out-of-game say 'please stay in the town guys'. Which is not the best way to GM.
I am hopefully a lot better at dealing with this now than I was at the beginning, because they have continued to do everything 'wrong' at every available opportunity. The worst part is that have successfully skipped a lot of things that would have explained stuff, so they have very little idea what is actually going on. I think there will have to be a lengthy villain monologue explaining it all in the near future.
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| Illustration by Xia Tapara |
2. You are not prepared.
This is a byproduct of the first point. It doesn't matter how well you think you have prepared, the PCs will do something you're not expecting, and you will have to ad-lib things. You can't prepare for every eventuality, but you can get into the right mindset. Go in knowing you will likely have to make stuff up suddenly. Don't be stubborn and insist that what is in the book has to happen, because, sometimes the actions of the PCs can lead to a cooler story. Plus, it will seem like their actions are actually having an effect on how things unfold. If you force them to follow the book it can feel like you are railroading them.
The best example of this is the attack on the goblin base, Thistletop. For some reason, my players decided that goblins are not inherently evil and they, therefore, were not going to kill them all. They successfully captured a digruntled goblin druid, and forced him to lead them to the goblin chieftain. Now, technically, the druid had been exiled for dissent, and the goblin guards should have just attacked him and the party. But I felt like I should reward their attempt to create an alternative solution.
So on the spur of the moment, I threw out the book, and drastically expanded the scope of goblin dissent, to the point that when the party killed the chieftain, the rest of the goblins applauded them and made a treaty with Stoneforge. Later, a goblin alchemist opened a shop in Stoneforge, giving the players access to goblin items that would ordinarily not be available to them.
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| Illustration by Wayne Reynolds |
3. Make sure the party is balanced.
When playing Pathfinder, you do need to have the trinity of tank, healer, and damage dealer. There is also a fourth thing a party needs - someone who can deal with traps, which means, you need a rogue. When the campaign started out, there were only three players. It was going to be ok though, because we had a be a paladin (tank/heal), rogue (physical damage/traps) and sorcerer (spell damage). But at the last moment, Dhamiran switched from paladin to cleric, leaving the party without a tank to absorb damage. I thought it would be ok, because, you know, this isn't World of Warcraft, you don't really need a player who can absorb massive amounts of damage and be ok.
Turns out, I was wrong. Having only squishes is a good way to die. Fortunately Richard came to our rescue by joining the party with his seriously tanky cavalier. Sir Elessar has taken blows that would have straight-up killed any other member of the party. (Later Matt also joined as a paladin giving a second person who can take a bit of damage.)
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| Illustration by Wayne Reynolds |
I think Richard will be alright with me saying that he doesn't handle complicated games very well. When he offered to join us, we were all pretty skeptical about it. But, we really needed a tank, so I sat down and tried to work out how to make Pathfinder something he can enjoy. Firstly it meant that I would have to create his character, and level it up for him. That is a bit of work, but I've created enough characters that I can do it pretty quickly.
Secondly, it would have to be something he would enjoy roleplaying as. This meant some sort of heavily armoured knight. The obvious choice is paladin, but paladin is a fairly complicated class, with a lot of abilities. Plus paladins have to be lawful, and I thought Richard would want some leeway to let him bend the rules when needed. Pathfinder does have a knightly class that can do this - the cavalier. The problem is that they are heavily focused on mounted combat, which is pointless in most campaigns.
Fortunately I discovered that there was an alternate version of the class recently published, which swapped out the mount and riding skills for a falcon companion and skills in siege warfare - both of which have proven very useful. I also made a simplified version of the character sheet which hides most of the math and makes it easy to see what you have to add to your dice rolls in order to do stuff.
And so I have discovered that Pathfinder can be simplified to the point that a person who enjoys the roleplay but doesn't want to deal with too many mechanics can enjoy the game - and Richard has become a vauled member of the group. It requires extra work on the part of the GM, so I wouldn't do it very often, but it is something useful to keep in mind.
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| Illustration by Wayne Reynolds |
There have been a bunch of points in the game where I've been reading through the adventure path and gone, 'Wow, I don't think they can all survive this'. But so far, they have.
There have been some narrow escapes though. The party was all on single digit hitpoints when George managed to drop a flaming sphere on the goblin chieftain and kill him. Sir Elessar was hit by a massive falling bell, which also knocked him off a staircase while halfway up said belltower. Ler nearly slit his own throat with an evil dagger. An evil surrakar knocked out both Elessar and Tik-Tak before finally succumbing to the magic of the two very squishy casters.
In fact, the only person who has actually died was George's original character, Dragor. Remember people, never allow yourself to be seduced by a vampire, no matter how pretty and rich they are.
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| Illustration by Tomasz Chistowski |
6. Where we're going, you don't need maps.
The thing that stopped me from running a campaign before now was the fact that I would have to draw a lot of combat grids, and I didn't have cool miniatures to use as monsters. Then one day I watched Will Wheaton's Titansgrave RPG, in which he didn't use combat grids or minitures at all.
Apparently there is this thing called the 'Power of Imagination'. It is really cool to play without any maps getting drawn out, as long as you (as GM) have the ability to remember whereabouts everyone in the part would be standing. Plus you get to say to the rogue 'No, you can't flank it' whenever you feel like it. There are some problems that crop up, with people misunderstanding your descriptions, so it is not something I have perfected yet, and you do need the group to be on board with you.
7. Actually you do need maps.
You still need some maps. Maps of cities and towns, of landscapes, all things that help give the players a sense of where in the world things are, and how they relate to each other. The Pathfinder adventures generally come with really cool-looking maps of these sorts of things, so you can print them out and put them in the middle of the table. It also helps the players to connect to important places - like Stoneforge - by understanding where they are staying, where useful shops are, making it feel a bit more like a home.
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| Illustation by Wayne Reynolds |
8. Give the players what they want.
It became apparent very early on that Dhamiran, despite being a cleric and the party's healer, wanted to impale things with his trident. Clerics built for healing are, however, not particularly good at hitting stuff with weapons. Thus did I ask myself - is there a way to add wisdom (the clerics main stat) to your attack rolls? I came across a special ability for magic weapons called 'guided', which not only adds wisdom to your attack rolls, but also to your damage rolls.
Guided is, however, one of those strange artifacts that comes from the days Paizo was publisihing adventures for 3.5, and has never been reprinted in anything newer, leaving it unclear as to whether this is something one can actually use in Pathfinder or not. However, I am the GM, so I can do what I want, and Ler found a guided trident early on in the campaign.
Ordinarily I would say that guided is way too overpowered (due to it letting you ignore mechanics that balance the game) and refuse to let people use it, but in the context of this adventure, it turns out to be actually really cool. Ler Mimir charging in to attack an enemy on low heath, successfully impale it, and cheer wildly, has become a thing that the whole party enjoys.
9. Don't give them everything they want.
In my enjoyment of giving the players cool items, and a desire to make them level slower and fight mosnters more powerful than ones they should be taking on at their level, I went a bit overboard. They have too much good magic stuff. It is, I have found, something very hard to balance when you are not actually sticking to the recommendations of the adventure path. On the flip side someone recently pointed out to me that the GM can always take items away from the party if needed. There are tools available such as making them fight rust monsters. Be afraid.
And sometimes what the players want is not actually what they need. See, George and his desire to be undead. Dragor getting bitten by a vampire would have turned him into a mindless null zombie (because Zendikar vampire rules), but I allowed him instead to come back to life as a lesser vampire (more strange Zendikar vampire rules). Unfortunately, it turned out that having very little health and having the cleric's healing not work on you is quite a nasty combination. So Dragor eventually went off to Malakir and a new sorcerer joined the group.
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| Illustration by Wayne Reynolds |
10. Don't force NPCs on the players.
NPCs are an important part of adventures. There is a temptation to make them really cool, and swoop in to save the day. But, you must remember that the players are the heroes here. Having too many powerful NPCs saving them is no fun for them. This is why, as cool as he is, Gideon can't show up in this adventure. All he would do is rock up, kill a bunch of baddies and say 'Come with me if you want to live.' Nissa, on the other hand, shows up a lot. As this adventure takes place before Battle for Zendikar, Nissa can be a mostly useless ally. Because she was pretty useless in the story. The only thing she was remotely good at was scouting and tracking. That's actually useful to the players, so she shows up when they need ranger-type help.
That is not to say you can't give the players powerful allies. Lady Sabyl Sorn (she who saved Dragor from his terrible fate as slave to an evil vampire) is actually powerful enough to swoop in and save the day. But that would be counter to her attempts to keep a low profile. In this case she did get to have a few cool moments. She saved Dragor and then forced him to change the way he acted. Later, the players found out she was in danger and rushed off to save her, only to find that she had easily dispatched her attackers, and was slightly confused as to why the players thought she needed help.
Sometimes, however, players just don't like your NPC. Like Victor, the lawful-aligned ogre I spent a lot of time creating and giving important information to, and making him have reasons to help the players against the other ogres. The players didn't trust him, and didn't want to ask him for any help at all, even suggesting to the sheriff that he was dodgy and should be watched. I tried really hard to convince them that he was actually a good ally, but without much success. In his case I had to let him go, mostly. He's still around if the players need advice on certain things, but I don't think they'll go back to his house.
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