Designing Encounters

For the novice Game Master, you will find suggestions on how to begin a game and make it as fantastical as you can imagine, recommendations on how to find players and keep them coming back, tips on dealing with player- and adventure-related problems, and details on creating everything your game needs, from characters, to settings, to entire campaigns.

Defining the Game Master

You might already know what a Game Master is. The likely definition, if you’re reading this, is “you.” But if you don’t know, a Game Master (or GM) is the Pathfinder RPG player who arbitrates the rules of the game and controls the actions of every game element that isn’t explicitly controlled by the other players. But as any experienced Game Master knows, being a GM is also much, much more.

Regardless of skill or experience as a Game Master, it’s likely that every GM can identify one of these roles as an area in which she lacks experience or confidence. This GameMastery Guide seeks to address such needs, counseling on challenging aspects of campaigns, contributing new options and inspirations, and refreshing the game’s classic elements. Most importantly, the countless tools herein are designed not to change games or tell GMs how they should play, but rather to inspire new stories and save effort, leaving GMs with more time to run exactly the adventures they and their groups want to play—or have been playing for years.

Gamemastery Guide on Resting in a Dungeon

It happens to every adventuring party—you power through half dozen or so encounters and suddenly the prospect of facing the tougher encounters at the end of the dungeon with your depleted resources seems foolish. Often, the party has progressed far enough into the dungeon that merely leaving the dungeon and coming back isn’t an option—especially if there are a lot of deadly hazards or traps along the way, or if the dungeon’s denizens are likely to repopulate rooms with reinforcements.

In such situations, a group of adventurers often chooses to rest inside of a dungeon. Don’t let this rattle you! In fact, you should consider putting a few rooms in your dungeon (especially if it’s a large complex) that can be easily defended or work well as campsites. When a group of PCs decides to rest in a dungeon, decide if the threats that remain will challenge the adventurers—if you know that they need to recover their strength, you should let them rest (but only after instilling a little bit of paranoia by getting a schedule of watches and details on how they fortify their campsite). But if you know that the group still has the resources to forge ahead, feel free to have wandering monsters come by to harass the characters while they relax.

If your PCs are habitual dungeon relaxers who rest after every encounter, the dungeon’s inhabitants should catch on after a few naps and set up some ambushes or assaults on the characters’ campsite. The goal is to keep the PCs challenged without making things hopelessly difficult, and to allow them time to recover when you feel they really need it—don’t let them dictate when they’ll have the luxury of a full night’s sleep!

Customizing Your Game

Roleplaying games are, at their cores, simulations, with most rules focusing on how to perform epic feats and participate in the fantastic adventures of legendary heroes.

When to Design?

Part of a GM’s fun is not just coming up with exciting adventures, but devising new ways to present his adventures. While Chapter 2 discusses many techniques a GM might use to make his campaign more captivating, good organization, tracking tools, handouts, and the like aren’t always enough. Sometimes, a GM might find that there’s no perfect fit within the existing rules for an encounter, creature, or other element he’d like to include. Yet rather than being deterred and having to reimagine his adventure, it’s completely within the GM’s purview to get creative with the rules to make what he wants or a campaign needs. Ultimately, while the Pathfinder RPG’s rules are designed for ease of use and to promote fairness in a game, they exist to help a GM tell his story, and should never be a hindrance to play. If revising the rules or reworking them to better suit a situation improves an adventure, the GM is within his rights to make any adjustments he sees fit. At the simplest level, such changes might be purely cosmetic—using the stats of an existing monster while describing some new threat, or describing a magic item differently from its typical interpretation, for example. In other cases, actual rules might be altered as the GM chooses, though the balance and fairness of the game should always remain a consideration. There’s nothing wrong with increasing the hit points of a major villain or monster if the PCs risk breezing through a campaign’s climax, or increasing the DC of a disease meant to be especially virulent. In such cases, though, the GM should consider if not making a change is actually bad for a game. Sometimes real heroes slay a dragon in a single round or shrug off the world-ravaging plague, and such things make the players feel special and remain memorable long after the adventure ends.

Occasionally, though, an adventure might call for a change that a cosmetic alteration or a random adjustment won’t satisfy. In such cases, GMs have the option of creating their own simple subsystems to handle exactly the circumstance they desire. Aside from what a GM determines, there’s no other authority that a rule or subsystem must appease for use in a game. While published rules typically have the benefit of professional design and extensive playtesting, there’s nothing preventing any GM from designing his own components. This could be basic, like using existing rules to create magic items or monsters; more complex, like using existing spells as guidelines to create new ones; or wholly new, like many of the subsystems in this chapter. While GMs uncomfortable with the details of a game may want to keep things simple or mimic existing rules, those more experienced might attempt to design any element they feel could improve their game.

Designing new elements for one’s game doesn’t need to be daunting, and taking cues from existing examples serves as a fantastic departure point. A GM might design wandering monster tables for his specific adventure, customize a new kind of staff for a villain, or create a new kind of flaming tornado hazard for a side trek onto the Plane of Fire. In each of these cases, templates or components exist for such elements, requiring just a bit of customizing on the part of the GM, yet feeling completely unique to the players—which is all the matters. On the other side of the spectrum, should the GM have need of complex rules for arguing in court, climbing on titanic beasts, or firing a laser canon, he might be forced to rely on his own ingenuity. In such cases, simple, flexible systems tend to work best, especially when they rely upon established rules. In the case of courtly arguments, one might devise a scale for a king’s opinion, and have the actions and urgings of PCs and NPCs affect the scale in one way or another, creating a more nuanced system for argument than a mere Diplomacy check. GMs should try to test their rules systems before games begin, compare them to existing rules, and then let the players know that they’re trying rules the GM has created himself. If things go poorly, the GM can adjust elements on the fly or even abandon the system in favor of more standard rules—and go back to the drawing board after the game. If things go well, though, the GM might solicit feedback and make additional adjustments, tinkering until he’s devised a useful new tool.

When to Disguise?

Often the appearance of a rule works just as well as a rule. For a GM faced with a situation for which there seems to be no obvious reference in the game’s rules, yet who also lacks the time or interest needed to create a new subsystem, good storytelling, even-handed arbitration, and a bit of deception can typically solve the problem and keep a game moving along. When need for a new rules element unexpectedly comes up mid-game, that’s rarely the time to stop and begin designing new rules. While you can easily make a few cosmetic changes to existing rules and stat blocks if you know of elements that might serve as good stand-ins, sometimes players come up with plans no rules system could account for. Say a PC wishes to run, leap off a cliff, and attack a dragon soaring past, digging in his axe to maintain a hold on the soaring beast. While rules exist for elements of the action, sticking and hanging onto a weapon embedded in another creature is not part of the game system. Yet rather than denying a character the opportunity to attempt a heroic feat, you could easily rely on the results of the rules you do know to arbitrate those you don’t. For example, if the same character rolls high on his Acrobatics skill check and significantly exceeds his target’s AC with his attack, you could declare that her plan works and she’s now being dragged along by the dragon. Alternatively, if the PC botches either roll, she might be in for a long fall. Either way, interpreting existing rules in an unconventional way, or even just calling for an ability check to suggest either a good or poor result, can save you from paging through volumes of rules trying to find a nonexistent perfect fit. And with some shuffling of notes and hidden dice roles, no player should be the wiser to such an improvised ruling.

Source: Gamemastery Guide