Recent content by kigmatzomat

I agree with all of this in general but would like to add some nuance from my experience. Another way to think of encounter tactics is to think of them as a cultural or regional. They can be used repeatedly in specific locals. I.e. slippery, sliding shale that threatens to send PCs over...

As players get more tactics, GMs need to do the same. There are things you should never do at lower tiers because it's a guaranteed TPK. But these are heroes that can survive those threats. In general: Action economy - More is better. be willing to use numbers of enemies. It requires some...

I would suggest you make your modern GM map for your own sanity with points of interest and their connecting roads Then make yourself a grid with travel times between adjacent points along the common path; whether that is boat, path or road. Redraw the map using 1 day=1 unit but keeping things...

Keep in mind, Forcecage won't work on many winged Large creatures while in flight (or with their wings extended to make slam attacks), many Huge creatures can be more than 20ft tall (some giants) or long (tyrannosaurus) and Gargantuan critters just ain't going in there ever. And if they don't...

If you don't want the PCs to face a dragon in a terrain of the dragon's choosing that has the maximum preparations (aka the dragon's lair), simply don't let the lair be located (scrying returns blurry images, divinations report "uncertain", etc) and force them to ambush the dragon in the open.

Forbiddance is a permanent spell that the dragon could have made a deal to acquire, or taken a lair belonging to another dragon that already had it. If you go Forbiddance, it took a month to cast so there's no reason there wouldn't also be an array of Glyphs of Warding cast by the cleric...

Not sure if this is visible to all or because a friend shared it on DDB, but Draconomicon has an adult/ancient red dragon lair and it is a volcanic caldera several hundred feet across, probably a hundred feet deep, with a number lava pools and caverns carved into the pumice. I would say more...

No lie. This isn't a mindless beast or an ignorant wyrmling. We're talking about a powerful creature that has been around for close to a millenia.(it's been alive for half again longer than Europeans knew about the Americas) It's survived territorial battles with other dragons, probably come...

I'm not sure I like a single role being assigned in the MM. A cr6 creature can be anything from a solo to a mook depending on the PC level. If anything there should be like a role per tier (i.e. the cr6 gets tier 1:solo, tier 2 elite, tier 3 soldier, tier 4 minion)

I don't have fizban so I pulled the biggest evil dragon out of the MM, which is a cr24 ancient red dragon.

Depends on how smart or stupid you play the dragon. I am confident I could make a cr24 ancient red dragon out of the MM challenge a group of 5 level 20 PCs.

Solo creatures can be hard to balance. The encounter math says 5x PC20s is looking at a Hard encounter and 5x PC19 is Deadly. IMO boss battles should be at a minimum Hard, with the possible exception that you already threw several waves of minions to exhaust the party. Consider the realities...

Eleventh...sesssion..in...this...dungeon....

Not wanting to derail the conversation further beyond pointing out that it would be a strange thing for someone to spend a nest egg equivalent to a life of leisure at the income level of a scribe or well-trained hireling (~40 years at ~1gp/day =12,000gp) just to become an inn keeper that...

I haven't played PF outside of a few one shots so I don't have context for some of this. Is it intended to be a giant money sink? Or some weird way for PCs to buy magic items without buying magic items? One of the examples is a house and inn requiring more than 50,000gp equivalent.given that...