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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
Chapter 1: Running the Game / Running Exploration / Exploration Activities

Follow the Expert

Source GM Core pg. 41 2.0
Follow the Expert is a truly versatile activity that lets a PC who's lacking at a skill or exploration activity have a better chance to succeed. It provides a good way to help a character with a low Stealth modifier sneak around, to get a character with poor Athletics up a steep cliff, and so on. Usually, a character who is Following the Expert can't perform other exploration activities or follow more than one person at a time.

It's important that this doesn't become too rote. Let the players decide how one of them is helping out the other. The description can give you more to work with and add fun color to the exploration beyond just the mechanics. Also, if one PC helps another in the same way over and over, that could be a sign of the character being helped growing in a particular way. If the rogue has been helping the fighter Avoid Notice over and over, the fighter is essentially receiving training in Stealth at that point and might want to consider taking or retraining a skill increase to make that true. Connections like these can breathe life into the characters and their relationships, and it can help promote camaraderie and interactions between characters.

Adventure Research

In addition to the advice and adventure recipes detailed here, reading other adventures is a great way to get ideas, whether they're published adventures or ones your friends have written. You can borrow ideas and structures if they work for your game and tweak as needed.

You don't need to go into the same level of detail you'd see in a published adventure. You might be able to get by with just an outline, some bullet points for each NPC, a breakdown of encounters, and a few rough maps. Or maybe for your style of running games, you prefer to have some text written about each scene, or even particular lines of dialogue. If you're creating your first adventure, it can be good to write out a little more than you need. Just keep in mind that things might change in play. If you prepared more than you actually used, that's normal! Detailing NPCs or locations in particular can be useful, especially if they're going to appear again. But in many of these cases, you'll add details at the table and can jot down those notes for later.

Running Your Own Adventure

It's often easier to run an adventure you made yourself, but that's not true for everybody. If you notice as you run your adventure that your notes don't have enough for you to go on, you can be more thorough next time. And if something ended up inconsistent, there's nothing wrong with telling your players you want to revise something you previously said.

Because this is your own creation, it's closer to your heart. If the adventure doesn't go well, it can sting. Sometimes this is because of random chance, sometimes due to unforeseen decisions, and occasionally because you made a mistake. Those are all normal parts of the game! One of the things you'll internalize the more you run games is that you're a part of the creative process and don't need to be perfect.