Crimson Throne: Four Sessions In

I'm not one of those gamers that sweats the small stuff. In truth I am much more of a "storyteller" style DM than I am a tactical one. I enjoy the big combats and the tactical nature of the game, but the story is why I play. When I started this new campaign I had in my mind to do a very laid back sort of experiment. Essentially I would run the Crimson Throne AP as written, with no more conversion work than I would normally do for game prep, using the new Pathfinder Core Rulebook. So far it has been a success. The games have run smoothly, and only a few times have we really needed to look up a changed rule. The most common thing for me to alter in the course of the game has been adding Combat Maneuver Bonus and Defense to the stat block of enemies, but in each case this has taken only a moment.

We've made some mistakes, usually because we assumed the Beta rule had not changed. The largest mistake so far has been assuming that Turning Undead was still a function of the cleric's Channel Positive Energy feature. This completely altered a battle, but was not really game breaking. We've adjusted and the player has bought the Turn Undead feat at third level to grant the ability. The player rightly guesses that undead will feature prominently in the game.

If anything surprises me it is that the rogue player's NPC bodygaurd she bought with Background Points (see my earlier blog post on this) has been one of the more effective characters so far in combat. I expect that eventually she will end up using this character to get combat advantage whenever possible. The problem with this background option so far has been that aside from the Status that the cleric bought the NPC is by far the most useful and powerful. I may have to adjust him to a NPC class with low stats rather than a normal fantasy array with a pc class. Since it is possible he may just die I am not too worried about it though, at this level death means rolling a new character and NPC's don't have the advantage of being replaced just because he gets himself killed. I won't go out of my way to murder him, but sometimes things just don't go well.

Cue evil wringing hands.