Taking 10... on Everything

The d20 family of games, 3rd edition D&D and now Pathfinder, introduced a couple of dice rolling shortcuts in the interest of managing and pacing the game.

For skill tests that can be retried without significant penalty (other than successive failures), a player can take a 20 on the die roll. They do the best they possibly can and take 20 times the normal amount of time (usually 2 minutes or so). This works pretty well for thoroughly searching rooms, for example. You can search quickly (about 6 seconds per 5' x 5' space) with a die roll and take whatever the die comes up with, or really toss the room in 2 minutes (also per 5' x 5' space) and perform your best search. Pretty sweet option. And it takes the place of repeatedly rolling the same check until you feel satisfied you've performed your best at the task (in other words, until you roll high enough that you feel you can't do better without wasting everyone's time).

But there's a potentially more useful option as well... And that's taking 10. Initially, that seems a lot lamer. Instead of rolling, which gets you a result at least as good as 10 55% of the time and better for most of that, you settle for a mediocre result. But one nice thing is that you can do this as long as you are not immediately threatened (largely meaning under direct attack) so it can make certain kinds of frequent, routine skill tests very fast. For example, the scout in the last campaign I ran took 10 searching for traps as he advanced down dungeon corridors. He had invested a lot of ranks in his Search skill so his modifier was pretty high. He still had an excellent chance of finding most traps. Anything over his Search+10, he couldn't find and most likely triggered. This saved us a RIDICULOUS amount of time in the game. I knew what his Search result was and we didn't have to roll and roll and roll some more to find the traps in the corridors.We still do this with the rogue in the current campaign, though the nature of the campaign differs in that there are a lot fewer dungeons being explored.

I also use the Take 10 mechanic for my NPCs on a routine basis. In fact, I set any skills they may use for opposed checks (Perception, Sense Motive, Bluff, Stealth) to 10+their skill modifier. This means I don't have to make any opposed rolls, I just use their skills to set the difficulty number. Faster and easy.

More Tools of the Trade

I like some kinds of manipulatable accessories in my RPGs as long as they don't become too cumbersome nor are absolutely necessary. I like them simple and helpful but dispensable for times when I don't feel like using them. 4e power cards are a bit too indispensable for me to like them much. I bristle at them because I can't avoid the encumbrance.

But there are currently two sets of accessory cards I use when running Pathfinder - critical cards and condition cards, both of which are available from Paizo.

We've been using the critical cards longer of the two sets. When a PC or significant NPC confirms a critical hit, they can draw one or more crit cards from the deck. Each card lists an effect for slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, and spell-based weapons. Most do at least double damage, some do more including imposing penalties on the target or inflicting minor ability damage. Characters wielding heavy crit weapons (x3 or better) get to draw an extra card for each multiple higher than 2. Then they get to pick the one they like best.

The system for the cards is easy to use and not too outlandish in effects, however, not everybody likes critical hit systems in principle. If you don't mind them, this could be a worthwhile product for the extra little effects that critical hits can generate.

The condition cards are a lot newer so I haven't used them much yet. They can come in pretty handy though. Pathfinder, like D&D 3.5 before it, has a lot of conditions that can affect a character in specific ways. Some are fairly complicated like grappled, others simple like shaken. These cards summarize the condition's rules. I can hand the card to the player whose PC is affected and we then have an easy reference to remember the effect the condition has on the PC.

The deck includes 2-sided cards, illustrated with goblins, describing the conditions - one to a side. Most are related and mutually exclusive. Shaken appears on one side, frightened (the next step up from shaken) on the other, for example. And there are 4 copies of each card for when multiple PCs are affected by conditions.

To make matters even better, on the horizon (estimated in May), Paizo will be coming out with buff cards that detail the various enhancements a PC (or NPC) might temporarily have on them so that I don't have to whip out the rulebook to summarize it every time. That's going to be a useful accessory that I will buy and use.
 

Tools of the Trade

Pathfinder, and the D&D edition it's based on, makes a lot of use of a grid and figures to represent characters, particularly in combat. It's really helpful, given the way certain combat rules work, to have some decent representation of the characters, their opponents, and the surrounding terrain. For some players, this means miniatures - sometimes made of metal, sometimes plastic - ideally painted to represent the characters and monsters.

Back in earlier days of the hobby, particularly when D&D was just growing out of its wargaming roots, miniatures were fairly common. The 1st edition of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules used miniature scale measurements for movement, attacking ranges, and so on (10 feet = 1" of scale). But the use of miniatures fell out of vogue with the second edition of the game when most miniature scale measurements were removed in favor of unscaled, descriptive ones (100 feet was listed as 100 feet, not 10").

Then with more detailed combat tactical elements in late 2nd edition materials and 3rd edition, emphasis was put back on using some form of grid and representative tokens to manage the detail. Miniatures were back in style. Sometimes we used dice to represent out characters because we didn't have personalized miniature figures or monsters. They were kind of expensive and a hassle to cart around. Then came another solution, one I was already familiar with... the chit.
Chits have been around a long time too. Cardboard chits are a staple among certain types of wargames or other strategic board games like Civilization or Advanced Squad Leader. But there was at least one RPG I played a lot in middle and high schools that regularly incorporated them... Villains and Vigilantes, the superhero RPG.
Fantasy Games Unlimited, publisher of V&V and its adventure scenarios back in the day, included a couple sheets of cardstock chits in most of its adventures. They'd be drawn in comic book style, often by Jeff Dee - game creator and comic book illustrator, sometimes by Patrick Zircher (also a comic book illustrator). We'd use them again and again. They'd pick up sweat on a hot summer day and stick to our fingers as we played in the non-air conditioned kitchen of our friend's trailer. They weren't as cool as actual miniatures, but they were cheaper to produce and they did the job.

The chit made a comeback for D&D with the products from Fiery Dragon. They sold cardstock packs of chits drawn mostly by Claudio Pozas, Brazilian RPG illustrator and author. And thanks to the game licensing by a friendly Wizards of the Coast, they could base their illustrations on D&D intellectual properties. I bought a bunch of them (they even had some for Call of Cthulhu). Then they took another great step forward and released graphics files for the chits on CD. Suddenly, I could produce my own, in any number I wanted. I could even resize them (useful for some variations on creatures like dragons or especially large specimens of common monsters). And they look fantastic.

Now, when I'm running an adventure and plan on using a battle grid to manage fights, I make up a set of chits, print them on a color printer (they look best from a color laser printer), cut them out and away we go. Since I'm making them out of regular paper, they're pretty cheap (and recyclable). I don't mind writing on them as well, jotting down how much damage a figure has taken or if there are any hampering conditions put on them like fear or some other weakness. They're super handy. And using them as inspiration, I can also make up my own graphic files, a few hundred pixels per side, with screen shots of anything I want. I sometimes cull my Pathfinder PDFs for chits based on their own illustrations for NPCs and new monster types. And I can tote them all around in a zipper sandwich bag rather than a big tacklebox full of miniatures (which saves wear and tear on me, I ain't getting any younger).