I'm joining a group that is starting a new Pathfinder game this weekend. The extent of my DND/RPG experience consists of a week playing the video game Baldur's Gate, about tweive years ago. What do I need to read up on before then?
Alternatively, if this would be an acceptable question for the site, I'll just ask there.
I guess in terms of mechanics, really. I know how a role-playing game is played, but I don't want to be the noob who doesn't know any of the rules and stuff, I suppose.
It often is, but first-time players and new groups are more likely to be expected to do it together. A group often has "house rules" like banning certain options or allowing unusual options.
The foundational mechanic of Pathfinder is this: when you want to do something, you roll a twenty-sided die (d20) and add a number to it based on how good your character is at doing that thing. The goal is to get a total number that is equal to or higher than a target number set by the GM (game master, also DM: dungeon master).
@Brant If you don't have the books on-hand, it's good to know about the System Reference Document as a resource. It's not organized for easy learning, but you can at least look up stuff between sessions if you have a specific thing you want to know a bit more about.
Your character sheet exists largely as a formalized method of determining what number you're adding to the d20 roll depending on the situation.
Beyond that I won't be a lot of help, as I'm more experienced with D&D 3.5. Pathfinder is heavily based on 3.5, but they've made enough changes that I'd be a poor choice for explaining it.
My general advice is not to try to "play against type" too much. Your character's personality can be quite varied, but don't try to build, say, a weak warrior unless you really know the mechanics.
Actually, I lied a bit… I did play a few sessions of 2E with some friends a long, long time ago. The whole group was brand new to RPGs and had no outside experience, so we basically played it like a video game. It…didn't end well.
Of note was the thief in the group who insisted on breaking into and looting every house in town while the rest of the party was asleep at the inn, and the DM who spent 40 minutes letting him do it while we sat around bored
Because if you can do it in a computer game, why not here?
I figured it would be better if I forgot the whole thing ever happened.
Also, when you're coming up with a character, keep in mind: you probably want your characters to work together as a group. So a personality that lends itself well to that -- shared goals with the other PCs, a sense of camraderie, maybe some pre-existing connections with the other characters -- is a good idea.
Oh, that reminds me! Same Page Tool. Most of the chat regulars swear by this. It's basically a little worksheet to go and help you figure out what you want out of the game, as a group.
Seconding the Same Page Tool recommendation for your group.
@Brant That is unfortunately a common symptom of moving from computer games to tabletop RPGs. Some groups enjoy it, but it's best when they've all got characters who can do it together.
(Character wealth is intended to be roughly a factor of character level anyway, so a GM who's trying to keep things on an even keel is just going to reduce the wealth gains for a while until it evens out again.)
In my personal experience and based on what I've seen in this site and chat, the single most important element of a successful RPG group is a healthy social dynamic. If everyone feels comfortable and safe and there's space for discussion of what's working and what isn't, everything else will work out.
More specifically: You don't need to know anyone's class except your own, especially at first, so just get enough of a feeling for them that you can make a choice. Talk to the other players about the feats and items you're choosing, and ask them about their choices.
When the group is in doubt about how to do something according to the specific mechanics, a common rule of thumb is for the GM to call for a d20 roll modified as seems appropriate, and look up the exact rules after the session so you can do it "right" next time. Keeps the game moving.
Other groups assign a Designate Rules Looker-Upper, usually the guy who spends the most time out of the game reading them anyway so he can find it fast.
But there's a relatively common idea that the GM should also be the rules expert. Personally, I love GMing when there's a player I can turn to and say "Jim, what does Bartimous the Intransigent have to roll in order to grab the Orb of Exposition from the Prolix?"
The main take-away is that one of the primary differences between a computer game and a tabletop RPG is that a tabletop RPG consists of people, which means the rules, the setting, the story, everything can change as the group needs or wants it to.
Yeah, that's why I'm so interested in trying RPGs again. If I wanted to systematically bend a collection of game mechanics to my will, I'd play Skyrim, you know?
If a rule isn't working, or you need a new rule to bring to bear on a situation, you can make those changes and the game probably won't mind. If the party runs off to explore the Mountains of Miscibility instead of sticking around the save the village, the GM may need to take a ten-minute "let me figure this out break," but he can roll with it.
That said, there is also a subset of gamers that fetishize the manuals. If some of your players are in that category, that's not bad... unless the group is unable to reconcile the playstyles.
This is where the Same Page Tool comes into its own; it's not an individual preference survey, it's a "the group sits down and arrives at a playstyle that'll make everyone happy" tool.
If you spend much time at all in the RPG sections of the Internet, you'll run into the abbreviation "RAW." That's "Rules As Written," and is often contrasted by RAI, "Rules As Intended." It's a deep, dark hole to fall into, as the first fetishizes literalism and the second the intentional fallacy. Use the rules as a baseline, have friendly squabbles over how to interpret them, and change them as soon as they become an impediment to fun instead of a tool for encouraging it.
If you wind up changing the rules too much, consider whether a different RPG system might be a better fit for your group's playstyle.
I suggest that you tell your game master about Rule of Cool Games (or is it Gaming?), ruleofcool.com which has created a simpler system to pick up that's similar enough to D&D-type games like Pathfinder for an experienced GM to pick up.
Blurgh.
The Monster Guide and Magic Book are in the works.
The group has been playing for years and just finished a 4E campaign. They've played 3.5E before but not Pathfinder. I'm going to be the clueless n00b.
a couple of the players ended up deciding they were doctors and one was an internet humor writer. I decided that the setting had to be a modern day hospital, and from there...malpractice ensued
It's not so much a per-system thing as a per-game thing. I.e. if you feel like this isn't the case, take another look at what's on your character sheets.
E.g. our most successful BW game is definitely based on pretty much everything about the focus and direction of the game being enclosed in a character sheet (if you know how to read it).
d20 System character sheets don't usually say much about the way the character interacts with the rest of the world, and so have little to say about the game.
@BESW I'd agree with that, but it tends to take place in firmer settings. But I'd have to argue that it doesn't want to. Narrative control is not the domain of the PCs in typical D&D
It's not intended as an indictment. d20 System character sheets are usually more interested in describing the character in isolation, leaving the character's surroundings as an exercise for the GM.
That's not good or bad, it's just there.
As @AlexP says, narrative control is not the domain of PCs in typical D&D. The sheets reflect that.
Look at @Magician's blog entry from last night; it's all about the idea that PCs exist to run through the choices the GM lays before them.
The player that does not want to play from level 1 again made an unsatisfied smirk when I told him I wanted to start from level 2. I guess I'm gonna start halfways 2 and 3 to let the new players tinker a little bit with fewer options
The player likes building complex characters, coming from a 3.5 environment. Another player wants to build a non-paladin Defender (since he already played a Paladin). The wanna-be-leveled guy said he doesn't care about class because complexity is the same but he does not want the new essential classes because he wants to personalize as much as he can (he's probably being a cleric or a wizard). The fourth one...
...I think he could benefit from the easier to build essential choices because he is usually bad at recognizing good choices (or at caring - he knew the 3.x druid was good, played it in 3.0 and ended up being less useful than the barbarian, except in one (critical) situation)
He could as well play bard or druid just to get his share of usefulness with the class
@Magician speaking of headcannons, there was some japanese videogame where the characters were two gay strongmen in swimming suit with a hole in the top of their head... shooting energy waves from there. o_o Fits the definition.
@waxeagle is the distinction "has more than two key modifiers listed"?
Gives you BIG numbers, a handful of encounters to introduce you to the power system, some surprisingly fun and useful utility options, and no headaches to track.
(And at higher levels, slayer can do some pretty astonishing stuff despite its simple chassis.)
yep, slayer is one of the e-classes centered around MBAs w/powerstrike as a damage feature so you can cheese it up feat wise for anything MBA based like charges
@BESW I know there are Essential classes that go by the old model. Maybe it's easier to ask if there are more than the aforementioned Warpriest and Mage
@besw I dont feel taking githzerai and taking the blade master feat (expertise and damage feat rolled into one) so you can use a fullblade with prof at a +2 feat damage bonus at lvl 1 is too complex
I feel like the The Gamers movies are moving more and more out of what was their original intent. Now they have the focus on things like women acceptance between ne(ckbea)rds, the motives that shouldn't lead you to become a gamer and so on. It's less and less mocking over bad rules and rulings (The Gamers) or over social dynamics (The Gamers: Dorkness Rising). Which is strange. Is this what sponsors do to home productions?
And now for something completely different: the guy who wanted to start from more than level 2 also had some qualms against KotS - save later declaring "it's that one with the evil druid in the end, right?"
which includes playing a class you've played before in another edition.
hah
@besw I feel that you can start lvl 10 in a new class, but you need to be on your a game all the time for all the features and quirks that you normally would have learned over time by playing the game
But the goblins hid on the wrong side of the bushes, the villain was as boring a typical evil-power-summoning cultist as you could ever hope to see (and dumb as chipped paint, with stupider minions), and every time they got an encounter gimmick they liked, they did it twice.
If you include the extra magazine encounters, the first four combat encounters in a ROW are "ambushed by kobolds," "ambushed by kobolds despite knowing they were there," "ambushed by kobolds despite being the ones sneaking up on THEM," and "maybe you got the jump on these kobolds, unless you didn't control runners from the last encounter, in which case you're bum-rushed by kobolds and have two encounters at once."
Oh, and the last one has a level-inappropriate goblin boss who is a notorious party-wiper despite 4e's encounter budget thinking that he's just going to be difficult.
The first goblin you fight is the level-inappropriate one, and the second fight with goblins gives them a terrain advantage that makes them seem clever and challenging. Even after a whole level of wiping the floor with them after that, goblins are still going to make your players be cautious because they got such a strong introduction.
The villain gives his henchmen letters, which they carry around on their person for days or weeks despite sometimes being undercover, the contents of which basically boil down to "I am an evil man with no motive! I do not appear in this adventure, so I have written this letter for the heroes to know about me because the authors can't think of anything better. Please hold this letter until the heroes kill you."
When his minions met up with a dungeon monster they couldn't beat while they were taking over, they boarded it up in the room with their source of well water and put "Do not disturb" on the door.
And it sat there for days, if not weeks, before the party comes along.
I took the opportunity to re-write all the notes and step up the timetable.
Made the villain smarter, but had his henchmen be dumb.
One of the henchmen had a letter saying "You idiot! Stop <engaging in the activity which caught the party's attention in the first place>! Somebody will notice!"
Hobbs and I talked at length about how 4e could've made kobolds pretty sweet. Their racial is a step in the right direction, but they didn't give the kobolds terrain advantage to use it.
@BESW My friends had a hilarious story of a fight with a bunch of kobolds. The DM kept rolling really bad for the kobolds so they practically killed themselves.
@Zachiel 1 is meant to be entrance but good point. I meant to move the trap to the middle of the room but fogot to move it.
Are you teaching them that each room is isolated, or that a dungeon is an interconnected environment? Does logic, motive, or history come into the game, or can they treat a dungeon as a randomly-generated combat-and-loot scenario?
"Find their character" implies role-playing and story. What's the dungeon's story? What can they interact with in a way that exposes their character's personality or motives?
Right, I think a lot of this has to do with tone... if you want to make this a simple "here's how some of the mechanics work" then you can get away with a gauntlet-style one-room-follows-another approach
but if you want to fit this into your game, such that this is the beginning of an adventure or campaign, then you need to really explain what @BESW is asking
KotS's first dungeon level is actually a pretty solid example of how each room can demonstrate a different kind of mechanic or tactic the system has to offer.
Keep on the Shadowfell (direct .pdf link) is 4e and has a number of problems, but the first level of the dungeon is a decent example of disciplined one-mechanic/tactic-per-room system training.
@Aaron So, you want to teach basic combat mechanics, rudimentary intraparty combat tactics, provide common non-combat environment interactions like disarming traps, and create opportunities for role-playing between party members and with NPCs. Correct?
Give 'em a quick "here's why you're going into this dungeon" motivation speech, and throw 'em into it. Give them a "save the NPC" mission.
Not an escort mission, though.
It's a clear goal, and when they get to the NPC having cleared the dungeon, the session ends.
Start with a simple combat piece without anything fancy. That's "room" one: guards at the front door before they enter. Largeish outdoor setpiece, probably.
Room two is the entranceway. Having gotten some combat under their belt, give them a breather with a trap (if they have the ability to disable it) or other non-combat obstacle. Don't ask them to roll to find it, make getting past it the challenge.
Room three is a tactics piece: alerted enemies ready to take you out from behind cover, or the like. Build it so that creative use of PC abilities will be rewarded. A friendly NPC is held prisoner here, and will join the party to "get back at" the boss man, or some such motive. Make him bard-like, a buffer who makes the PCs look awesome instead of being awesome himself.
Now, having showcased combat, traps, and tactics, and provided a subject for positive RP, fork the hallway. Room four is the boss, room five is the locked-up goal NPC. The tagalong NPC advocates gunning for the boss first, but the PCs might want to try busting out the goal NPC and leaving without engaging the boss.
Play up the boss.
Boss is a hard fight with good home advantage and a lot of trash-talking. Lockup room is difficult to get into without the boss's key.
