Browsing Archive: January, 2021

A Helpful Bard

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 28, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been making up some NPC stat blocks for Pathfinder Second Edition, and I kind of kept running with it and made up an extra one. Here's a bard you can use as an ally for your low-level heroes, or as a foe to bolster the enemies they face.

Note that in Pathfinder Second Edition, as in Starfinder, NPCs aren't built the same way that player characters are. They look and act more like monsters, and have some impossible-for-normal characters-to-replicate statistics. Frankly, we try to avoid cal...
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Building Fun Scavenger Hunts

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 22, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
A very common type of quest in RPGs is a scavenger hunt: go get these three (or four, or five, or ten) things. For example, the heroes might have to go get four kinds of herbs for a poultice, or bring back the heads of five different monsters. I'm developing an adventure right now that has the heroes collecting bugs; in an adventure I recently developed, they need to get parts of a magical key. There are lots of things to go look for, but the general trend is "go get these things then come ba...
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Okay to Screw It Up a Little

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, January 11, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I was talking to my friend John Godek yesterday for our biweekly chat about Starfinder and our lives, Digital Divination (which you can listen to here). There, we sometimes talk about our Starfinder actual-play podcast, Intrepid Heroes (which you can listen to here). One of the key elements of our podcast that we wanted to include was mistakes. Not that we wanted to screw things up on purpose, but we wanted to keep in the mistakes in math or rules that we make, instead of editing them out to ...
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I Want to Help!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 8, 2021, In : Paizo 
Aiding other characters in what they do is an important part of any roleplaying game--it's a team game, after all. The basic rule in Starfinder and Pathfinder First Edition is this: if you want to help someone do X, roll X as though you were doing it yourself, and if you succeed at a DC 10 (no matter what the actual difficulty is; 10 is the DC for the helper check), you give them a +2 to what they're doing. There's no risk to aiding. That lets the GM limit the potential bonus by limiting the ...
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Why Easy Encounters Matter

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 5, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm deep in the development of Paizo's sixth Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition, but in some ways we're still learning what works and what doesn't. We've carried over a lot of lessons from First Edition, but we're learning that some of them aren't as true in this edition. An example is encounter difficulty: people are finding Moderate encounters in PF2 to be a little more challenging than Average encounters in PF1. We used to put a lot of Average encounters in our PF1 Adventure Path...
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About Me


I'm Ron Lundeen, game designer for Wizards of the Coast. Before that, I worked as a development manager for Paizo, Inc. and as an RPG freelancer. I've recently had products in print for Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Petersen Games, and Ulisses Spiele. My opinions here are my own and do not reflect those of Wizards of the Coast.

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