I used to really like games that had long, in-depth character creation systems. My theory was that if you were going to spend an hour or more making your PC, you were really going to treasure that character.
Then I went and killed one of those PCs in less than half an hour.
Paizo Publishing released their first look at the next edition of Pathfinder last week, offering a free playtest rulebook that people can use to put the new system through its paces. Character customization remains a large part of Pathfinder’s appeal, but the process by which you create your hero has changed.
Has it changed for the better? That depends on what you want out of the Pathfinder RPG.
In 1992, after months of poring over my mom’s old character sheets and marveling at her hand-drawn maps, I saved up a whopping $20 and bought my first D&D boxed set, billed as “The New, Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game.” In the depths of Zanzer Tem’s dungeon, my foray into the world of RPGs began.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Escape from Zanzer’s Dungeon”
Anybody who got into Dungeons & Dragons through the 1991 beginner’s set probably remembers Kamro the white dragon. While not the first villain introduced in that boxed set, he was the first dragon, hiding in the central room of Stonefast. For many new gamers, he was essentially Baby’s First Dragon Fight.
One of my main GMing strategies when I run a D&D or Pathfinder campaign goes something like this:
If I ever doubt this strategy in the future, I just need to think back to a Pathfinder game in 2017 which cemented this as a terrific strategy.
The Setup: The PCs, a group of high-level mythic characters, ventured into the Abyss to rescue an entire city that got sucked through a hole in reality. Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Hubris and the Deck of Many Things”
Babbling Brooks 