u/MexicanWarMachine

I have been DMing PF1 since it was published, and I go back to AD&D2. I’ve played a little 5e and don’t really care for it, and lots of other games. But I’m not deep into mechanics like some people on this sub, so I’ve got a question for you:

What, really, is it about D&D 3.5/PF1 that necessitates players amassing an arsenal of magical items? The system doesn’t really work great for low magic, because I understand the assumption is that every class is augmented with magic bonuses as they level, and players expect that they’ll have access to more or less whatever they want, as long as they have the money, no matter how little sense a magical emporium makes in the game world.

This doesn’t really seem to be the case in D&D 5e, where magical items are a fun bonus that players might come across. It doesn’t seem nearly as essential that they be able to buy them with gold, and the DM seems to have more freedom to sprinkle them around as quest rewards or a way to add color and lore, and players might reasonably be less impatient about not finding a magic shop in every village.

Am I way off here, and if not, what is it about the game, specifically, that causes this?

So here’s my thing- I see prestidigitation as a supremely versatile cantrip that pretty much exists for flavor only. It can do no damage to opponents, nor can it by itself inflict any kind of condition. I see it as great for roleplay, useful for demonstrating to someone that you are a spellcaster, maybe impressing a particularly easily astonished NPC. I’ve had players come up with creative applications for it, and never overruled anything if it’s not trying to do something that would ordinarily require a real spell slot to do.

My thing is cleaning. The description says the spell lasts an hour and can “clean” a cubic foot of material each round. My interpretation of that effect is something like “We’ve been on the road for five days, we just got into town, and we need to appear before the Countess in 20 minutes. I cast prestidigitation and do my best to make us look presentable”. That’s perfectly fine.

But last session, while clearing out a dungeon, the party killed a huge mimic posing as a doorway. They chopped off its giant sticky tongue, which I told them weighed 150 pounds, and there was gore everywhere. Like, blood on the stone floor and walls basically covering the room. Since their goal was to make the dungeon appear untouched when some pursuers arrived, they wanted to clean up this mess. To me, cleaning any number of cubic feet of material does not equate to disposing of a body and all its fluids.

How do you guys see this?

I’m wondering if anyone knows if there are any rules relevant to this scenario-

The party is on the run from an army led by one of the big bads. They’re hurt and the casters are virtually tapped out on spells. They managed to steal some horses and get in front of their pursuers under cover of darkness, but the enemy’s scouts followed their trail to an old hill fort the party cleared out months ago. The plan is to rest there (the wizard only needs four hours) while the party rotates on watch, then the wizard memorizes spells and teleports them, finally, to safety.

MY plan is a pressure cooker. The scouts catch up, verify that they’re in the fort, and disengage. They use Sending to alert the big bad and his entourage, who arrive a couple of hours later. Everything will be timed such that the wizard is almost done memorizing her spells just as everything comes to a head- the rest of the party, ideally, will be defending the stairs or doing a Home Alone on the lower floors or something, but a couple of flying bad guys will come in from above.

The whole point is that I want the party to have to make a choice- try to hold off the bad guys for the x rounds it takes for the wizard to memorize her spells, OR panic and use their one Hail Mary- a scroll of Plane Shift, which may pull them out of the pot and into a fire.

My question: the one hour it takes to prepare spells- is there anything in the rules that says I can’t treat the last minute of that hour as exactly ten rounds, where she has no spells on round nine, and all of them on round ten? The whole race against the clock thing hinges on that mechanic.

OR, what if I were to homebrew a mechanic where she can maybe accelerate the spell preparation by a few rounds with some difficult spellcraft checks, at the risk of extending it if she fails?

I’ve barely begun to think it through, but it seems like maybe a neat way to kick off the campaign. Four players, eight classes. I’m thinking probably everyone will pick one lane as they start to level up, but we all know how nice it can be to have a one-level dip into fighter or rogue or whatever. And the RP and flavor benefits seem like fun.

Does anybody think this is obviously stupid? (I usually try to end campaigns before level 15 or so, when everything starts to break down, so I’m not concerned with capstone abilities or anything like that)

I’m 18 months into a homebrew campaign, and my players are level 12. The wizard dominates most fights these days, as is obviously expected- that’s how full casters work in PF1. The issue is a minor one- everybody is having fun. But I know a component that’s largely missing from our campaign is that the party should be dealing with several encounters per day, and even a high level wizard should be running low on good stuff by the third or fourth one. But the party usually finds it possible to choose the rules of engagement- “let’s rest at the inn and teleport to that haunted tower in the morning.”

Now obviously I know I can attack them in their sleep, have the thieves guild attack them while they’re eating their lunch, have a manticore come grab one of their horses in camp, etc. But most of the encounters in this campaign tend to be plot-related, moving things forward, and the group generally takes pains to throttle things.

I’m not so much looking for what I’m doing wrong as wondering what you guys do right to try to manage this sort of thing.

Dangerous combat, tribal politics, mostly human vs. human combat, but with rare, scary, very dangerous monsters in bogs or haunted forests. Magic exists, but is rare and amazing. Cultures are diverse, and there are hints of the larger world. (I.e. Roman settlements)

Does anyone know of a good system that’s already built for this, or would fit it well? I’ve been told Mythras might be a candidate.