We're Putting Together a Team... (PF/PF2E)


Good morning. I've had an idea for a game for a while, where the players are part of a cohesive team with strong, shared motivations, but who aren't necessarily just out to save the world. I see two main directions we could go.
Monster of the Week: The players are a skilled team, backed by the Crown (or local equivalent), dispatched to solve issues arising when settlements are threatened by more insidious monsters that are hard to find and/or kill. Dopplegangers, lycanthropes, "contagious" undead. We are there to hunt monsters, but the task isn't as easy as showing up and kicking the door down. We need to have the skills to garner trust from locals, investigate clues, piece together esoteric knowledge, and navigate unfamiliar environments. For optimal player fun, the monsters should have additional quirks and abilities that not all of their kind have, so we must research not just that type of monster in general, but how this specific monster has been acting.
One Last Job: The players are all connected through their background, and due to their various circumstances, find themselves coming back to work on a particular heist. However, what they find leads them on a journey where they must continue using their skills as they are pursued by those who would silence them. There's lots of room for the GM to be creative with this, but some leads of "what they find" could be evidence of return of powerful enemies to the land, rulers planning terrible things for the populace, or simply a long-laid plan of evil coming to fruition. For optimal immersion, it would be great if all the characters had some archetypes or levels in classes relating to criminal/stealth/deception skills. No paladins tramping around with a -10 to Stealth, raining on everyone's parade. As the GM, you might go so far as to say everyone has at least 1 free rank in certain skills, like Stealth, so that skill-starved builds can still do the basics.
Gotta Haves: These things are necessary for me to get on board with the game.
The characters should all respect each other. That doesn't mean we have to like each other, but I'm tired of games where there's a loner who is constantly stealing from the group, insulting PCs, or needing to be convinced to play the game because it's what their character would do. It might well be what their character would do. My character would choose to not journey with them.
I feel like for either of these concepts, we should be level 6-9. High enough that the GM can throw many varied challenges at us, but low enough that we aren't blasting through everything.
Because both of these games focus on being part of an established team, it would be good to have adequate time before jumping into the game for players to discuss their characters' relationship with everyone else, and come up with a few memorable incidents they recall about each other, as well as how they met.
Wishlist: These things would be nice.
Part of team cohesion again is coordinating our roles. It would be real nice if we as a group could navigate specialties - this person is the expert on aberrations, and is great at sussing out lies. That person is the resident demolitionist. This doesn't mean there can't be overlap, but part of these team based stories is having a go-to person for challenges.
Ideally we would each have multiple roles, emphasizing versatility over min-maxing.
This might seem like a weird last note, but I can see how the One Last Job idea could entice players who focus a lot on wealth. It's totally fine if folks want to do that. I just really encourage people to have something they want that wealth for. Is it to retire in a manor? Paying for a resurrection spell for a sibling? Are they in debt to a crime boss? I just encourage folks to think beyond the number of GP, to consider why they care about that.
This message was last edited by the user at 20:56, Sat 25 Jan.