Pathfinder Character Creation

Well, not many of my group were interested in playing an OSR game.

However, one of the players has been secretly planning a Pathfinder campaign world for lord knows how long (there were lots of player handouts) and offered to run it! I've never been a player in a Pathfinder game (although I have in 3.5) so I joined.

Last night we made characters. Hours of reading and choosing and I'm still not done I'm afraid. The DM had us roll 3d6, one swap, so the options were limited slightly by our stats, but still just way too many options. I had never read much of the player stuff in detail so a lot of it was new. I think I really like the character I wound up, but I'm not sure all of that agonizing was worth it.

The short version:

1. On the way over to the game, I thought to myself, gee, I haven't played a cleric or a rogue in a long time.
2. I roll up stats, cleric or rogue are very possible.
3. I start really looking at the rogue and remember I don't find rogues very appealing in Pathfinder.
4. So I look at the gunslinger. Guns are cool right? Wow that's a lot of rules. Workable, (I did read them all) but kind of fiddly. Not sure if I have a character concept here or if I just like guns.
5. So I look at the cleric a bit, but then I remember how lame channeling feels compared to turning, and I also don't want to be the heal-monkey especially - and that seems to be the expectation of clerics as their melee has been downpowered compared to fighters, monks, etc.
6. Shoot, I still haven't even chosen a  race. Well, I'm thinking sort of an outsider-wanderer (even though we are all going to be nobles in this game, but maybe I'm a bastard, heretic, or whatever). Sounds like a good opportunity for a half-elf! I don't think I have ever been a half-elf.
7. Back to class. I look at the inquisitor. Here we go! Strong melee abilities, cool divine powers, cool powers for roleplaying with. Lots and lots of powers. Sigh. Also having some difficulty with my character concept. Hmmmm, the other players are an evil monk and an evil rogue. Better be something with a bit more flexibility.
8. I like wizards, but wizards are kind of weird in this game. Hey! This is cool, Elves have an archetype called spellbinder. That just sounds cool. What does it do? Wait, I can swap out memorize spells for a favored spell? And it gets rid of arcane bond (familiar)? Familiars are very fiddly. I think we have a race and a class! I had become very dissatisfied with elves but DCC has renewed my enthusiasm for them.
9. So I want to be a elven wizard searching for arcane secrets, ooh, there is a perfect subrace! I will be a dusk elf. Some of the other players scoff because I am trading off racial abilities in a non-optimal way ("you know you can just take the traits you want") but I like the description of the race, it fits for my concept, so fuck that.
10. Now I need to choose a school . . . there are so many . . . shadow-illusionist! Love it.
11. Okay, so I've chosen a race and a class. Crap. I still have to do skills, traits, languages, favored class bonuses, feats (as an aside, of all the feats that I hate, I hate metamagic the most), record everything, buy equipment, roll for hit points, figure out starting spells. And did I mention we are starting at level 3?
12. Needless to say, I did not accomplish all of that last night.

Pathfinder character creation is way too complex. As I said, I like my character. I think it will be fun to play. I would rather have just rolled up an elf for a simpler game though and roleplayed the rest in.

When ghouls attack! (and players do nothing?)

Something very interesting happened in our last Pathfinder session. Only 3 players showed up and carefully finished clearing out pretty much the rest of the first dungeon level that they had been working on. The only thing left was the earth elemental that had previously wiped out most of the party. So this time they approached with a plan and were prepared to fight it carefully. They went back to town to rest and make final preparations.

On their way back to fight the elemental they encountered 3 ghouls in the graveyard above the dungeon. They saw them a long way off and were not surprised. They did . . . nothing? To be fair the ranger attacked them with arrows, but the two spellcasters basically passed. These are 3rd and 4th level Pathfinder characters so the ghouls really should not have been a serious threat.

But here is basically what happened:

[I am leaving out the fiddly 3e maneuvering around crap, this is the essence of the fight]
 
Ranger shoots and kills a ghoul.
Remaining ghouls charge and paralyze the ranger.
Witch and summoner frantically begin casting summoning spells.
Ghouls kill the ranger.
Summoned monsters kill the ghouls.

Whoops.

If the spellcasters had taken their second round actions in the first round of combat the Ranger would have lived. Is this sort of thing common in other people's experience?

Parallels in video game RPGs

Haven't posted in a while due to some unfortunate events on the home front but we are back!

It seems that video games are sometimes a taboo subject among RPG players - that tabletop games are "serious" and video games are not. I am at peace with saying I enjoy both. I just started playing the latest Wizardry game available in the US - The Labyrinth of Lost Souls which was largely panned in the professional video game review world as being antiquated, boring, and unplayable. Basically, why play this when you can play the infinitely more awesome Skyrim? Or if you insist on playing something challenge, at least go with Dark Souls (I realize that I am playing a little fast and loose with release dates here, but you get my drift). You know, something modern.

Upon actually starting to play Wizardry: TLoLS you find that if you happen to have grown up in the era of games like Ultima, Dragon Warrior, or the old Wizardry games, this game is both familiar and fun. Like with pen and paper games, video game RPGs seem to have added a lot of modern features - see the entire genre of action RPGs - but leave you with basically the same game with a lot of window dressing. The game may be "real time" instead of turn based, and it may rely more on muscle memory, but good video game RPGs rely on a lot of the same things as traditional D&D: game knowledge, good planning, good spot decision making. This is true of high quality games of both the old and the new school. Games like Skyrim just dress it up a whole lot and give beginning players who aren't interested in learning the nuances a lot more assistance. Dark Souls is all the window dressing with none of the help.

This is basically the same as how I feel about modern D&D. Feats, skills, grid based combat - all of this is just a distraction from the core game you are actually playing. Modern combat and skill resolution (the most important mechanical distinctions from traditional D&D) don't actually change anything if you ask me. You roll to hit, you roll for damage, you cast a spell, you roll to jump the pit. The core things all work in pretty much the same way when you boil it down. The calculations have just gotten more complex. Some people think those calculations are the game. I happen to think the game is what happens in between the calculations.

The similarities don't end there though. In Skyrim, you wade through endless bits of tedious dialogue interesting only to the writers to get to the actual game (Paizo modules?) and then go out and play what is basically a pretty traditional RPG game with a lot of help for new players, robust auto-mapping, way-point markers, quest logs, autosaving. Not to mention the assumption that the characters are singled out for a special destiny and quickly rise to levels of tremendous power. That whole thing.

Wizardry isn't like that. You are plopped into a town with no guidance as to how anything works and with a minimal bit of explanation about the dungeon. If you head into the dungeon without hiring a robust complement of retainers you will die to the first kobold run into. Even if you hire 5 retainers you will probably die to the first group of goblins you run into. Through trial and error you learn things. You die a lot. You figure out how to make a map of the dungeon. You realize that you really need both a bishop and a cleric in your party but after that it is up to you. The game makes you think about the game instead of just loading every time you die (I guess that is technically possible, but it is not how the game is intended to be played, death is pretty forgiving). Seems an awful lot like traditional D&D.

For the record, I think Skyrim is fun, I think Pathfinder is fun. There is just a lot about them that is included in them that I think adds nothing, and often detracts from the core things that are fun about them.

Pathfinder Frustration

We had a frustrating game session. Some of my group seems to be stuck in the "if we see it, we must be able to kill it" mentality of later D&D. This led to disaster. After trouncing everything they had seen so far they ran into a large earth elemental. I tried to give as much warning as possible and had constructed things such that fleeing was very possible. They didn't. While it is possible they could have killed it with some sustained luck they were pretty out matched. Only one survived.

Now a near-TPK in old-school D&D is normal, expected, and easily remedied it comes as a bit of a shock to 3e players who expect to win every fight. Also it takes forever to make characters. SO half the session was spent making new characters. One player failed to even come up with a character concept.

Solution: I am suggesting to players to make at least one backup character. Additionally, I am going to make a pool of backup characters to draw upon. I do not want to have to sit and watch four out of five people agonizing over character options again any time soon.

The Special Problem of Knowledge Skills

As I alluded to in my last post, knowledge skills present special challenges. It seems like a perfectly reasonable way to allocate skill points ("my character knows stuff!") particularly when you think about the academic wizardly types. However, knowledge skills present a problem for D&D. For me, D&D is at its best when it is the players up against the unknown and the game is about discovery and exploration. Knowledge skills inevitably undermine this. If a player has invested a lot of points in say, knowledge dungeoneering or knowledge nature, it is pretty unfair of me to say they know nothing at all about a new monster. Likewise, knowledge geography or knowledge history can be a real bugaboo in terms of hex crawling and exploration. 

Obviously a good DM can work with these to skills to create interesting bits of knowledge, but I find that they tend to be a mystery killer. Instead of investigating in character, the player simply asks, "what do I know about the [monster, mountain range, ancient city]?"

Possible solutions:

Take them out of the game completely.

Water them down in some way.

Replace them with more general knowledge sets: for example, world, culture, and academic.

Why am I playing Pathfinder? (Part 2)

More thoughts on 3e and then an explanation of why I actually am running  a Pathfinder game.

Combat - Takes forever. In some ways I love playing on a battlemat, in some ways I don't. I like the visual representation (although a white board works just fine if you need something to track things on) - especially for complex combats, but this is where all the rules monkeying tends to crop up.

I had a player (in a different game than the one I am running now) once try to leap through the air and punch a flying griffin that was about 10 feet up and 20 feet away. I said "no way" and this devolved into a big discussion of the jumping rules and the player saying my favorite line: "but this is what my character does."

I thought that all of this rules minutiae was defended on the grounds of realism?

The same goes for movement and attacks of opportunity, so yes, it is realistic that someone will try to strike you if you try to pass by or cast a spell, but they won't take one step to do so? Not realistic, (not that I care), but let's not try to pretend that these rules are based on anything closer to reality than AD&D was.

Rule completeness - Its a myth. No rule set is entirely complete or coherent. Example from last session:

Group of 3rd level characters (we picked up where a campaign I ran last summer left off) has been exploring the dungeon and generally kicking ass in true 3e manner. There is no rogue so the barbarian is hacking through doors. Each time he does this I take the opportunity to roll for a random encounter). Finally one hits and . . . swarm of bats! Well this a melee heavy group so they all say "uh oh, swarm". They have exactly one AoE spell among the five of them. Burning hands goes off . . . and doesn't kill them. So the witch cleverly pulls out a vial of acid and throws it amidst the swarming bats. Well, apparently grenade-like weapons use the touch AC of the opponent. Bats have a very high touch AC. It is very tough to touch a bat. Of course that isn't what he is doing. He is not trying to touch one and cast shocking grasp. He is merely trying to throw a glass vial onto the floor and have it splash on them. So he misses. This is a ridiculous result to the action he is attempting to take. So . . . house rule, he hits automatically! Unfortunately this doesn't kill the bats either and they have to flee . . . but at least things are making sense now.

So don't claim that the rules cover everything or always coherent. Just as much a need for adjudication as ever, just now we have to look a lot of things up first.

So why DO I play Pathfinder?

Because I have found a good group of players who like to play it and I like DMing. They know the rules well and are good sports so I don't need to memorize things. Generally they tell me the rules, we look it up if it is very important or there is disagreement, and I adjudicate. I don't mind DMing (sorry WotC, GMing) Pathfinder because I like designing adventures, dungeons, and monsters. The rules system is pretty irrelevant to all of that.

Would I rather play a different rules system? Sure. Would I be a better DM if we played something I was more familiar with? Probably. But I think that with a good group rules adjudication is the smallest part of the DM's job. Will they start seeing monsters from the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book that arrived last night? Absolutely.

Basically, rule systems are pretty irrelevant to the kind of stories we tell. That's just the details. That's why I think simple rules are good, but if my players would rather get all bogged down in that stuff I'm okay with that. They just need to understand that I think CR is a laughable concept, and that yes I am going to kill them with the cave giant waiting by the stairs.

Why am I playing Pathfinder?

Because my game group likes 3e and its children (I'm going to refer to them all as 3e because that is easier).

That's basically the only reason. Other than that I would rather play any version of D&D - possibly excepting 4e, which I have never played but does not seem particularly appealing by all accounts. In fact I don't even own any 3e books, all my Pathfinder books are borrowed from one of my players. I own the rules of course to four other editions, and I find lots of uses for them nonetheless.

I don't like 3e. From the first time I saw it when it came out, to actually playing in a few campaigns (of 3.5) to running now my third Pathfinder game I think it is less fun than old-school D&D.

Reasons:

Skills - for all the reasons brilliantly explained by -C here, I think skills basically reduce fun.

Example from my last game session: unknown monster appears in the dungeon (fungal crawler), player rolls knowledge dungeoneering and rolls well. I am faced with a choice: deny them information to preserve the mystery of the dungeon, and punish them for taking "soft skills", or give them information. Well I approve of developing characters with aims other than maximum damage output, so I tell them some tidbits about the fungal crawler, I try to couch it in terms of "you can tell by its grasshopper legs that it is probably quite a jumper" but wouldn't it be more fun to find out first hand?

In theory skills seem great, but in my last days of playing 2e (the rule set I cut my teeth on and played the most of) I dropped nonweapon proficiencies (yes, they are an optional rule!) in favor of secondary skills (which I think are dandy).

Where I like skills is Stars Without Number, but that is a different game and a topic for a different day.

Feats - Unlike almost everyone I know, I hated feats from the moment I saw them. Feats are the reason I never adopted 3e in its heyday.

My feelings towards them have soften somewhat since, but I looked at them at the time and thought: wow, this is terrible. What do feats give us theoretically? Control, character customization, options. But the raise a couple of big problems: first of all, people no longer feel that they need to distinguish their character through roleplaying, now they are distinguished largely by their class powers and feats. ("What are you playing?" [class and list of feats]).

Second, they heavily reward power gamers. In pre-3e D&D power gaming was only marginally rewarded, now player skill at character building leads to great discrepancies in power. The characters of players played by more experienced (or more power game focused) players are mechanically more powerful than those of other players. This is very different than a difference in player skill as thought of in the OSR. In old school D&D you don't know what you are doing, so you kill your character, roll up a new one and learn. In new school D&D you don't know what you are doing so your character sucks and does not get to participate at the same level as other player's characters. This of course can only be remedied by making a new more powerful character. So if you want to have the same amount of fun as the rest of the group, you need to make sure you are carefully optimized as well. One could easily say this is a metagame problem with particular groups, but the root problem is that 3e rewards powergaming so heavily. You tend to get what the game rewards.

More to come.

New Pathfinder Campaign

Getting prepped for our new Pathfinder campaign I find it remarkable how useful the Rules Cyclopedia and Swords & Wizardry core rules are to me. So much solid advice and useful tables - like the random dungeon stocking tables. I have yet to actually reference any of the Pathfinder books (not that they are bad, but like all later D&D they are just lacking in actual utility). I wish we were playing a different system . . . but we have to keep the players happy I suppose.