Campaign for New Players

[Frotchie92]

Hey everyone,

So I am going to be writing a new campaign over the summer, and I am having a friend play once she comes back from summer break. She has never played before, and really wants to play. I was going to do a pathfinder campaign, but am not really sure what exactly. I usually DM for people who have been playing this for a while, so they know the rules as well, if not better than me. So our campaigns start out epically, and end kinda silly with every party member being ridiculously overpowered.

Basically, I need ideas for something that would make a good campaign for people who don't know what they're doing, and just want to start out slow and learn how the game works. Thoughts?

[Gerrtt]

I'm doing this right now too. All four of my players are starting from scratch and I have them making characters from concepts right now that I will then help them crunch out the rules slowly.

We did a 1-shot event a few weeks ago and that showed them combat and basic rules slowly (IE...when an opportunity for the rogue to try flanking came up I explained the rules, when an opportunity to make a charge came up I explained the rules, etc) and that seemed to help them a lot. By the end of the 3 hour game they were coming up with strategies and figuring things out.

I'm also restricting the game to core because I want them to get the idea before they start to branch out, I know that means there's not many options for them, but that's where you need to start honestly. I began my gaming career not knowing about incantatrix or planar shepherd and I think I was honestly better for it. Once they get the basics down, then we'll talk.

My best advice is that you should do what you can to make sure all the people in the party can participate. It's pretty easy for casters to overshadow melee...we all know that...but give the melee guys a chance to do something so that they can have fun playing the character they want to play. Just because the game can be played at high optimization levels doesn't mean that it necessarily has to. One of my players is currently planning a dwarf paladin who uses an urgrosh...and I say more power to him because it's what he wants.