The Adventures of The Humble GM

The Beginning

I'll begin at the beginning. When I first got the game pathfinder, the man in the gaming store told me that the beginner's box was the easiest way to begin, so I bought that. I was only getting started as a GM, so the only adventure I ever really played was Black Fang's Dungeon, a bad attempt at an easy adventure, involving a mayor who is willing to give a bunch of 1st level noobs 1,000 gp in addition to the treasure they found in the dungeon (HINT: completely unbalanced scroll of resurrection only usable by the character with the least combat ability, multiple magic items such as a +1 Dragonbane sword to combat the dragon, and whiny goblins whose greatest treasure is a wooden dragon toy, but the only goblin who happens to own this gets herself killed)

The beginners box gave me no alternative to this madness, so in order to instruct my friends on the inner workings of the game, I was forced to play this same adventure over and over and over.

In one instance, two of my friends were playing as Kyra (the pregenerated cleric) and Merisiel (the pregenerated rogue). Both of them had the worst stats imaginable. For example, Kyra had a dexterity of 8. All in all, not a bad score. However, to make this worse, she had a strength of 13, making her easily the worst combat character. So she should make an ideal healer, right? It was not so. The only spells she was capable of casting were bless and protection from evil. The friend playing Kyra made the wise decision and decided not to use these spells, as the buffs were negligible, considering that the main foe was goblin mooks. There was one encounter (and only one) with undead skeletons where channel energy may have come in handy, due to its annoying quality of affecting ALL living creatures. This can be modified with feats, but Kyra didn't have the insight to get the required Selective Channeling. Instead, she got Extra Channel and Improved Initiative. Pathetic.

The game began in its most standard form, with a goblin attack, negligible treasure, and a locked chest. My friends were getting bored, so they decided to attempt to kill each other. In spite of my warnings not to, they went ahead and made attack rolls. Both of them missed, due to their unnaturally low scores. I had Sarenrae (Kyra's deity) pop in for a visit to try to convince her to stop the violence. No such luck. Kyra rolled again to cleave Merisiel in half with her scimitar, but missed again.

The adventure culminated with Merisiel trying to climb a cliff to the skeleton encounter. Upon seeing that there were two horrendous choices: Kyra below or the skeletons in front, Merisiel leaped to her death off of the cliff. She was reduced to -3 hp (rendered unconscious), and was killed when Kyra ran forward and mindlessly hacked away at her unconscious form below. However, because of her low attack bonus, Kyra had to roll 8 times, missing and dealing low damage before finally killing Merisiel. Kyra insisted that it was a mercy killing, putting Merisiel out of her misery. It was the first time a player had ever died in one of my games, and I rewarded them with a colorful description of the afterlife. It involved a Valhalla-esque setting where millions of rogues and bandits were training for the battle to end all days. I then wrapped up the setting, concluding what had been a unique evening of gameplay.