Exploring Pathfinder, Part I

Finally some good-looking ghouls

I was about 8 years old when I discovered roleplaying games in 1996. The first manual I bought was the second edition revised Dungeon Master's Guide (black cover), I think in 1998 or so. Then I had the two Monster Manuals (vol. I & II) from my mother the following year for christmas, and the Player's Handbook only in 2002 or so by my fellow gamers for my birthday (still one of the best gifts of my life.) Had I started buying manuals a few years later, I wouldn't be a pariah in the gaming community in the following decade, I guess. I think I'm kind of an exception in the edition flow: the youngest people who started with second edition I know are, I think, about 28 years old, while most of my peers started with and extensively played 3rd edition. I think that is the reason why I played Call of Cthulhu for the most part of the 2000's (this and the fact it's a really awesome game, indeed.)

I never played 3rd edition until I had to DM it using Pathfinder, less than a year ago. And I'll be honest: that first impact was tragic. Too much time to set up PCs, let alone learning the rules! And the fucking 6 seconds round (I mean, 6 fucking seconds?! What about the abstract combat dudes?!) And the hours spent trying to find out how the hell to build up an encounter. In the end, I just moved back to Labyrinth Lord and had fun with that (for a while.) Nowadays, I'm a player in a weekly Pathfinder campaign, and I have to say that the game just isn't as shitty as I thought it was – perhaps I was just a little biased with the whole 3rd edition thing. So this evening, after 4 hours spent programming in java for a test I have tomorrow (and a aspirin so as not to have my head explode), I turned off my mac, grabbed a sheet of paper, my Pathfinder rulebook and my 1st edition DMG for a little "dungeon planning experiment". In short, I wanted to see if the whole encounter scaling story could really be useful for simplify dungeon design. I still don't have an answer, since I'm just half a way through completing this work.

The point is: in any edition of D&D, you should be able to explore dungeon levels equal to your level. So, you should be of second level before venturing down to the second level, and that means each level should reward you with enough XP to reach the following. Ok, I'm definitely going to go hardcore on this very point. So let's take a look to the "Encounter Scaling" table in PF: in it, we know that an average (i.e. 4-5 players) first level party can face encounters of CR 1/2 to 4 (easy to epic.) But how many encounters? Reading the simplified individual column, I came out with this table:

CR N°. Enc. XP each (Individual XP each)
1/2     5                 200 (50)
1        8                 400 (100)
2        4                 600 (150)
3        2                 800 (200)
4        1                 1.200 (300)

This makes for a total of 9.400 XP (or 2.350 XP for each character in a party of 4 characters, or 1880 XP for each character in a party of 5 characters.) The total is 20 encounters, divided between monsters and traps. How? Let's ask the DMG. First edition requires for more "empty space" than original edition, in that in AD&D the ratio between encounters and rooms is about 1/3 (one encounter each three rooms), while in OD&D it's almost 1/2 (one encounter each two rooms). That means with 20 encounters, a dungeon designed with AD&D has a total of 60 rooms, while a dungeon designed with OD&D has a total of 40 rooms (to be a little more precise, 66 and 44). Knowing that empty space is just as important as occupied space, I will go with first edition. Ok so, from the Room Contents table in Appendix A, we get this:

• 60% of rooms are empty
• 10% of rooms contain monsters only
• 15% of rooms contain monsters and treasure
• 5% of rooms are special or have stairs
• 5% of rooms contain traps and tricks
• 5% of rooms contain only treasure

Thus, 20/6 encounters are traps (about 3 traps), 40/6 are monsters (6 monsters) and the remaining 60/6 are monsters with treasure (exactly 10). 3+6+10 = 19, so I assign the remaining encounters to traps (I love traps.) So it's now 4 traps, 6 monsters, 10 monsters + treasure. Now let's talk about treasure. From the appropriate table in PF, I learn that a character should find 1.000 gp before reaching second level, thus the level should contain 4.000 to 5.000 gp. I guess (and you should correct me if I'm getting this wrong) that magic items and equipment can be thrown into treasure, so that we could say of the 5.000 gp, 2.500 are for magic items (a minor weapon/armor plus some other cheap goodies, such like potions, scrolls and so on – I'm not letting the players find them in cities of course, I know that by now, so there should be plenty of them in treasure.) (I mean, I'm not playing this stuff anytime soon, but I know I'm hardly going to change my mind about buying magic items: if you want the big loot, go and get it!) From the table above, we know that 3/4 of said treasure are with monsters, and the remaining 1/4 is all alone, perhaps protected by very simple traps (CR 1/3?) or simply hidden.

I'll be honest with you: I really had a great time doing this! I know it sounds weird, but I felt like I was playing a managerial game. You know, I was pretending to be Pinko The Sorcerer, building his dungeon, and I only had 9.400 credits for monsters and traps, spending 1.200 for the Big Boss and the remaining for the other stuff and so on. Well, it definitely sounds worse once written...