Why my campaigns suck.

Happy Thanksgiving to any readers here in the USA.  My apologies for the late post; this was written last week, but it was on my work computer, and didn't have access to it until today.

Why my campaigns suck.

They all start out with such promise.  Intrepid first level adventurers, starting out on an epic journey, so fragile…a bad die roll and Poof!  New character time!  Each encounter is fraught with potential danger.  Each trap or hazard raises the tension because the possibility of death is very real.

But something happens in my games as the characters advance in level.  At first, it’s not even noticeable.  Levels 1-3 deliver challenging obstacles and opponents commensurate with the power level of the group.  Fights are tough.  Outcomes are not guaranteed.  The heroes normally win, but occasionally something goes wrong.  Like, ‘someone dies’ wrong.

But then we start entering in to the level 4-10 range.  It starts out innocently enough: The characters seem to find their groove.  They’ve got some cool weapons and armor now, some interesting class abilities, a few feats, maybe a magical ring or cloak.  Combat starts to seem a little less dangerous; foes just don’t seem to threaten the characters as much as they used to.  By 7^th level, combat is pretty routine.  The wizard has some very effective battlefield control spells, the melee characters are dishing out pretty impressive damage, and the healer has enough spells and powers to keep the characters in tip-top shape all the live-long day.  I start needing to adjust some of the adversaries, giving them an extra hit die here and an extra use of an ability there, but the result is the same.  By 10^th level, I’m wondering if the adventure writer screwed up the Challenge Rating for their monsters because my group is mowing them down like dandelions.

My Giantslayer group is now all 12^th level characters.  In our last session, I found myself wondering why we were going through the exercise of playing the combats out.  It was clear that the characters would win in spectacular fashion.  Just to be sure, I double-checked the Challenge Ratings for the four encounters the group faced:   Four stone giants (CR 12), a CR 11 haunt, a group of 2 fire giants and 4 rock trolls (CR 12) and an iron golem (CR 13).  With an APL of 12, these should have been easy (CR 11), average (CR 12) and challenging (CR 13).  They ripped through all encounters like shit through a goose.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in my campaigns either.  In Carrion Crown, the group took down the end-boss in less than 3 rounds.  He was a lich, CR 18.  My Savage Tide campaign ended at 14^th level because the opponents were just too weak to challenge the PCs any more.

I started doubting my skill as a GM.  Was I terrible at tactics?  Was I forgetting some key ability a monster possessed to make them a viable opponent?  Was the Pathfinder RPG broken at higher levels?  I needed to find out why the character power levels gradually outpaced the strength of the encounters they faced!

I started digging in to see if I could determine root causes for this issue, and if there were any solutions to the causes identified.  I’ll spare you the investigation narrative and just skip to my findings.

There is no substitute for experience

As a GM, I used experience points through all the iterations of the game, from 1^st edition right on up through 3.5.  Then along came the Pathfinder RPG Adventure Path, which quite conveniently told me what level the characters should be when starting and ending each chapter of the Adventure Path.  I leaped for joy!  One less thing I had to keep track of!  Out the door went XP, and I just told the players when to level based on the Adventure Path’s recommendations.  Easy peasy, right?

Wrong.  Stupidly, idiotically wrong.  In a classic example of ‘seeing only what I want to see’, I completely failed to notice the statement that appears in every Advancement Track section of every chapter of every adventure path:

“Anvil of Fire” is designed for four characters.

My group has six characters.  I don’t get all six in attendance every game, but I normally have all six about half the time, and at least five players about 90% of the time.  My adventure, designed for four characters, has five to six characters, all of whom are told to level at the place indicated in the adventure.  This looked like a very viable suspect, so I threw some numbers into a spreadsheet to see how badly this affected the power curve.  And to my surprise, it only had a minor effect.  A group of six characters who receive equivalent XP for a group of four characters, remains at the same effective level until 7^th level.  After that, their effective level is only 1 higher than that of a group of four characters, right up to 20^th level.  

XP explained part of the problem, but really didn’t account for how easily my band of adventurers were tearing through the adventure path.  I made a quick note to start tracking XP, but I still lacked a satisfying root cause for the problem.  I continued to dig.

WizMart

I came across the section in the Core Rulebook that discussed Wealth by Level.  “Aha!” I said to myself (startling my cats in the process).  “My characters probably have too much gear!  This is why they are so overpowered!  Those bastards!”  Feeling like I was hot on the trail of my perpetrator, I carefully examined each player’s character sheet, adding up the value of their gear, and comparing it to the Wealth by Level chart.

No dice.  Without exception, every character was within the recommended value for their level.  This was not the culprit.  But somewhere in the red haze of my frustration, an observation bubbled to the surface of my frontal cortex.  Every character in the game had a +something cloak of resistance.  Everyone had a ring of protection.  They all had amulets of natural armor.  They all had belts of physical ability boost, and headbands of mental ability boost.  They all had magic armor and magic weapons that were the most expensive bonus they could afford, most of them around +3 or +4.  In short, they all had the most optimal gear loadout that money could buy.  Any item found that was sub-optimal was sold, and the earnings used to upgrade their gear to optimized status.

Well that’s what they’re supposed to do, I thought to myself.  Why wouldn’t you want to make your character as effective as they can be?  The game expects it, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does.  Why would I wear a Cloak of the Flail Snail if I can instead wear a cloak of resistance +2.  It just makes sense.  As a player, I want my character to be awesome.  In Pathfinder, gear makes you awesome.  Where is the disconnect here?  Does the game actually cause itself to be unbalanced at higher levels?

Unfortunately, the fault lies not in our game, but in ourselves.  Continuing my investigation, I turned to the Game Mastery Guide, hoping for some sage advise on what was going wrong in my games.  And lo!  I found what I believe to be the true root cause of my troubles:  WizMart.

The Game Mastery Guide has a neat little section about settlements, and offers a system where you can create a stat block for any settlement.  Each settlement is also assigned a Base Value (any magic item of lower value than the Base Value has a 75% chance of being available in the settlement), and a Purchase Limit (which is the most money a shop in the settlement can spend to purchase any single item from the PCs).  Lastly, each settlement stat block lists the number of minor, medium and major magic items that are available in the settlement at any given time.

Here was my smoking gun.  You see, I never really paid much attention to settlement stat blocks.  I really didn’t see any particular use for them.  When my characters had the opportunity, they would teleport to the nearest metropolis, and visit a conceptual shop which I shall call “WizMart”.  WizMart isn’t exactly a Magic Store.  Magic Stores are silly concepts that I eliminated years ago.  WizMart is more of a collective offering of all possible shops in a given settlement.  The thinking here is that somewhere in this massive city, the character will be able to find the item they are looking for.  Maybe it takes a day or two of searching, but they do eventually find someone that can sell them the +3 Ring of Protection they need to keep their character’s gear optimized.

Seeing the settlement section of the Game Mastery Guide opened my eyes to the real problem.  There should not be a WizMart.  Anywhere.  The GMG gives a baseline for how many and which magical items are available in any given settlement.  If the characters teleport to Janderhoff, instead of finding the exact item that optimizes their character to the n^th degree, they find a pre-selected list of magic items as dictated by settlement size. 

Let’s create some available items as an example, using Janderhoff as our settlement.  The Inner Sea World Guide p. 194 lists Janderhoff’s population as 10,230 souls.  Going with that number, that classifies the settlement as a Large City according to p. 203 of the Game Mastery Guide.  Table 7-36: Settlement Statistics tells us that a Large City has a base value of 8,000 gp, meaning that any item worth that value or lower has a 75% chance of being available at any given time.  A Large City also has a Purchase Limit of 50,000 gp, so the players can sell items for that value or lower with little effort.  So far, that’s a pretty good deal for the characters.  Many of the Big 6 items in Pathfinder cost 8,000 gp or less: +2 armor and weapons, all possible potions, a ring of protection +2, any scroll up to level 7 spells, wands of up to 2^nd level spells, an amulet of mighty fists +1, Type III bags of holding, +2 belts and headbands of ability bumps, +2 cloaks of resistance and amulets of natural armor +2 would all be available for purchase in Janderhoff.  Now let’s use the rules in the GMG to generate the rest of the items.

Table 7-37: Available Magic Items tells us that a Large City will have 4d4 minor items, 3d4 medium items and 2d4 major items.  Rolling the dice gets us 10 minor items, 11 medium items and 5 major items.  Now we refer to Table 15-2: Random Magic Item Generation in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (p. 461) to determine what kinds of items are available.  But after rolling the minor items, I realized that every one of them was worth less than 8,000 gp, and therefore are available 75% of the time.  No reason to detail these, so I move on to the medium items.  I roll Dwarven Plate armor, a +2 weapon, a potion of 2^nd level spell, a ring of evasion, a rod of negation, a rod of withering, 2 scrolls (all worth less than 8000 gp), a wand of 3^rd level spell and a Monk’s Robe.  Lastly, for major items I roll a level 3 potion (really, this is major?), a Staff of Abjuration, a Headband of Mental Prowess +4, a Darkskull, and an orange prism Ioun Stone.

In summary, Janderhoff has any magic item valued at 8000 gp or less (75% availability), plus the following:

·        Medium magic items:

1.      Dwarven plate armor

2.      +2 weapon (exact details to be determined)

3.      Ring of evasion

4.      Rod of negation

5.      Rod of withering

6.      Wand of 3^rd level spell (to be determined)

7.      Monk’s robe

·        Major magic items

1.      Staff of abjuration

2.      Headband of mental prowess +4

3.      Darkskull

4.      Orange prism Ioun stone

The GMG doesn’t offer guidance on how often the list changes, only that the GM can generate new items if the PCs visit the city again.  But in an urban campaign, we would probably want to know how often the list is updated, since the PCs live there.  After talking it over with the players in my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign, we agreed that the list should be updated weekly, and that 1d4 minor items, 1d3 medium items and 1d2 major items would be removed and replaced with new results. 

That takes care of characters interested in buying gear, but what about if they want to sell it?  What if no one in the group wants to use the Codpiece of the Undulating Bowel?  What effect does the sale of magic items have on the system above?

My thinking here is that the merchant that purchases the Codpiece of the Undulating Bowel wants to resell it at a profit.  Provided that the sold item is valued at higher than the Base Value for the settlement, that item should now be recorded into the available magic items in the settlement.  If the item is a medium item, it will be added to the list of medium magical items available.  In our example, Janderhoff would now have 7 total medium items, out of a maximum of 12 (3d4).  Each time the PCs sell an item in a settlement, that item gets added to the inventory, even if it surpasses the listed maximum number of items for that settlement. 

But once the inventory of items has surpassed its maximum, new items don’t appear until the inventory is within its limits.  If Janderhoff currently has 15 medium items available (due to PC sales), new medium items don’t become available until the inventory reaches 12 items or fewer (in Janderhoff, items deplete at a rate of 1d3 items per week). 

Conclusion

I’m an idiot.

I spent eight years playing Pathfinder, blithely ignoring the settlement rules, and bemoaning how overpowered my PCs were.  I knew all along that something was wrong, but it took me this long to actually try and figure out what it is.  The rules for settlements and magic items are there to prevent characters from fully optimizing their gear, and also makes the use of less-than-optimal magic items more likely.  Your character might be more likely to hold onto that Periapt of Proof Against Poison if they can’t get their hands on a Headband of Alluring Charisma +4 at the local WizMart.

Don’t repeat my mistake!  Don’t watch your promising new campaign fall apart at higher levels due to WizMart!  Invest some game prep, and detail the items available in your local settlement.  Your players may grumble at first, but the game balance that ensues will more than compensate.  Don’t make your campaigns suck!