GMing my first Pathfinder campaign.

[Antisuperman]

Howdy folks...
Just started GMing my first campaign last night and I'm wildly optimistic that it's going to be awesome. Of course, the players will probably crush my hopes and dreams, but whatever.

It's a relatively free form, non-linear, sort of campaign. General premise is the players are part of an expedition to found a settlement/colony on this new (presumably) uninhabited continent. Essentially I want to give my players a big sandbox and see what happens. I have many overarching stories in mind but the direction the players take will dictate what happens and when. Something else I'm trying out is keeping the campaign relatively open...Theoretically, as the colony grows, more people will be showing up. That'll let me cycle players and characters in and out, which will hopefully prevent the inevitable schedule change for one of the players that'll screw everyone else.

Since this is my first campaign GMing, I was just wondering if anyone had any tips/suggestions/etc...? While there'll be some combat, it'll be an RP heavy campaign. One thing I'd like to include is a lot of crafting and town building. I have the very basic crafting guide obviously but I was wondering if anyone knew of and/or could link me to something much more comprehensive, even if it's homebrew (as long as it's balanced).

[GenPol]

Very cool first game!

I don't know if you've heard of the Kingmaker Adventure Path, but it has rules for building, designing, and running towns and kingdoms. They're not perfect by any means, but they may be a place to start if you're looking to put numbers to the developing.

Good luck, happy GMing!

[Squirrel_Dude]

Make sure to look over the craft rules thoroughly. If you want your players to be making heavy use of the equipment, even with higher level equipment, then you may want to edit the crafting rules to allow for shorter craft times.

Alchemical items and weapons normally aren't so bad, but armor and basic magical items can sometimes have hilariously long crafting times.

[Antisuperman]

Thanks guys. Just checked out Kingmaker and it definitely seems like a good jumping off point. As far as crafting time and stuff, it's going to be a fairly low magic campaign so we won't have much magical crafting, but yeah... Some craft times are a little silly. That's why I was wondering if maybe somebody put out a rebalanced homebrew crafting guide or something.

[Dark.Revenant]

My running policy for craft times, as a DM, is to just tell the players how long it takes to craft the item. No systemized rules; just pure DM fiat.

[Squirrel_Dude]

In one of the more recent games I was able to play, I worked with the GM on armor rules. Instead of making it so that the DC was based off the price of the armor, we created Cumulative-DCs based on the materials that the armor was made of and the AC that it provided.

I don't have the numbers near me anymore, but I'll use this example to give the basic gist.

Full Plate Armor has a DC 19 check to craft.
Masterwork adds +20 to the DC
Mithral adds +15 to the Dc
For a cumulative-DC of 54.

- Player's can not take a 20 on a craft check, but can take 10.
- Each craft check is the equivalent of up to a week's worth of work (8 hours a day, 7 days a week).

So, when a player makes a craft check, they simply subtract their result from the cumulative DC, and repeat this every week until they are done.

So, crafting the example item with the above rules:
- Week 1, player rolls a 16 + 8 = 24: DC is now 30
- Week 2, player rolls a 7+8 = 15: DC is now 15
- Week 3, player takes a 10+8 = 18: Player completes the work on the armor
*And the player has "3 points of work" that they can expend on another project that week.