Some basic questions about running a Pathfinder / 3.5 game

[RyanRMC]

I have been looking over the effects overviews, and I think I understand better how those work. I found Trenloe's description of how to add effects to spells:

right-click on the spell entry in the Actions tab on the character sheet, select "Add Spell Action" -> "Add Effect" - enter the effect (either the status name or the actual results of the effect) and click the down-arrows on the right which then allows you to enter how the duration is calculated

This is a big help! I need to test it out once my players are around again, but I think this solves our Mage Armor problem.

Some other questions that I do have, and have yet to solve:

As some of my players are totally new to PnP gaming, I am locking token movement until I approve. This is not only forcing them to plan moves (and therefore hopefully lean about tactical movement) but also let me see all the steps before it happens, so I can stop them if they are doing something wrong (moving through a hostile space, hard corners, etc.) I see there is the option to 'Accept Move', but is there no 'Reject Move' option? Or better yet, a way to accept the move up to a given point (IE when the players hits a trap, gets an OoO, or uncovers a new enemy)?

I love the /lighting option to make custom colors on top of the pre defined ones. At some point I will go through photoshop and document a bunch of useful hex values as a note to use on the fly, but I did have one question - can the color of chat text be changed as well? Darker colors (dark blues especially, will make all chat text unreadable. Can I use any commands to make text becoming white / black / etc?

Last, I am having some trouble identifying mobs from the CT when I have multiple of the same mob. For instance, I ran a test game last night of the classic MMO variety - I made my players kill 10 rats and bring back their tails as proof to an NPC. This meant I had 10 identical tokens on the screen, and 10 identical entries in the CT. Normal combat worked fine, as you could click on a mob on the map to target it for an attack, but I ran into trouble when, say, provoking an attack of opportunity. A player would be attempting to pass a mob, and I wanted that mob to roll an AoO on the player. It is not that mobs turn, and just clicking his token does nothing to let me know which of the mobs in the CT should be making the roll. The only way to locate of specific mob was to move the current actor marker up and down until the one I needed got denoted, then move it back to the current PC. Should I make numbered versions of token for similar mobs that there will be more than one of?

Thanks again for all the help.

[Skellan]

Locking teh tokens is dead handy as it stops the players running all over the show I sometimes take it off when they are out of initiative but mostly I like them to be locked

I don't think you can change text colours, I may be wrong though...

There is an option in the options tab which is auto npc numbering and auto npc initiative. If you drop your npcs into the encounter tab, then drop the tokens on the map, when you shut it back down you can click on the bottom of the encounter box and it will drop all your npcs onto the map, number them and roll their initiatives

I have been looking over the effects overviews, and I think I understand better how those work. I found Trenloe's description of how to add effects to spells:



This is a big help! I need to test it out once my players are around again, but I think this solves our Mage Armor problem.

Some other questions that I do have, and have yet to solve:

As some of my players are totally new to PnP gaming, I am locking token movement until I approve. This is not only forcing them to plan moves (and therefore hopefully lean about tactical movement) but also let me see all the steps before it happens, so I can stop them if they are doing something wrong (moving through a hostile space, hard corners, etc.) I see there is the option to 'Accept Move', but is there no 'Reject Move' option? Or better yet, a way to accept the move up to a given point (IE when the players hits a trap, gets an OoO, or uncovers a new enemy)?

I love the /lighting option to make custom colors on top of the pre defined ones. At some point I will go through photoshop and document a bunch of useful hex values as a note to use on the fly, but I did have one question - can the color of chat text be changed as well? Darker colors (dark blues especially, will make all chat text unreadable. Can I use any commands to make text becoming white / black / etc?

Last, I am having some trouble identifying mobs from the CT when I have multiple of the same mob. For instance, I ran a test game last night of the classic MMO variety - I made my players kill 10 rats and bring back their tails as proof to an NPC. This meant I had 10 identical tokens on the screen, and 10 identical entries in the CT. Normal combat worked fine, as you could click on a mob on the map to target it for an attack, but I ran into trouble when, say, provoking an attack of opportunity. A player would be attempting to pass a mob, and I wanted that mob to roll an AoO on the player. It is not that mobs turn, and just clicking his token does nothing to let me know which of the mobs in the CT should be making the roll. The only way to locate of specific mob was to move the current actor marker up and down until the one I needed got denoted, then move it back to the current PC. Should I make numbered versions of token for similar mobs that there will be more than one of?

Thanks again for all the help.

[JohnD]

If you're doing the auto numbering (highly suggested), also consider selecting the random option. This way you get instead of Rat 1-10 you get Rat 2, 6, 11, 14, 52 etc... handy when you don't want the players to know there's 10.

[Moon Wizard]

Just added a quick delete button to dying NPCs in the v2.9.3 beta in the Laboratory forum.

Cheers,
JPG