Pacing in Pathfinder

Hey Everyone,

Today I want to write about my theories on pacing in a Pathfinder game. For those of you who don't know pathfinder is a table top game similar to Dungeons and Dragons. The reason why I want to talk this out with you is because I created and ran a game this past weekend and it took my 3-6 players (some left early) around 12 hours to complete the chapter. The custom campaign we are running focuses around a twisted view of individual Disney movies in a long running story line, this week we were on the theme of Monsters, Inc. Because we do individual movies I try to give each movie a day. To tie the games together there is an overlapping main story line and re-occurring characters.

The issues as I see them were these:

• We had a returning player on game 6 who was only in one previous game.
• The maps we used had 18 rooms per 3 maps.
• The players split so half were in combat and half were exploring.
• (Player mentioned) A few felt that they were moving forward for the sake of moving forward.

First I would like to note that this is not our usual game type, previous games were a good 60% Story, 40% combat type games. This game was about 80% Combat, 20% Story, the reason being that during our last game (Pinnochio) the players encountered a normal combat challenge that only required minimal tactics to complete. (All the players except one have started playing pathfinder this game, with no prior table top gaming experience, so it was a normal challenge to break them in.) Sadly they failed the challenge miserably, giving up before the entire party was about to be killed.

The week before the Monsters, Inc game I went through with each player and helped them talk their way through rebuilding their character sheets now that they have played a few games, and helped them go over combat tactics for their chosen class. I tried not to be intrusive and to get the players to figure out what their play style was to help them build their characters. This process was not mandatory and it was said multiple times that they had full freedom over their choices.

2nd Level of Monsters, Inc.

1st Level of Monters, Inc. 

But I digress, the Monsters Inc game seemed to take way to long. Even with one returning player and one new experienced player in the group. Although the game took some time I was very proud of the players progress. Each player that could, took their turn tripping or performing combat maneuvers. Their understanding of combat speed the  
game up when combat started and fixed a party flaw that has been hurting our games until now.

Understanding these issues I've thought of some ways to correct them, from now on I intend to create environments with larger rooms and bigger blacked out areas. This should help players from splitting up as often and should help them enjoy the game a bit more. I also intend to give the movies a more defined goal so players will have more of a drive to accomplish the same task and work as a team. I also intend to force players who are entering the game after a long time away to do a short refresher game before re-entering the main story line with everyone. These precautions should help make the games better overall. If you're creating your own game I hope this helps.

Game on,

            Duane