The second day of my Pathfinder course had a couple of hiccups due to some poor coordination that left the kids half an hour late, meaning that both of my hour-long sessions became 45-minute sessions. Despite the delay, the two groups began to show their separate personalities on day two. Group One was much more violent and more prone to infighting, while Group Two ran like a well-oiled machine.
Continue reading “Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures: Day Two”
Ten years ago this summer, I got to teach a class of middle-schoolers. In my first such endeavor, I thankfully have an experienced teacher, as my wife Sarah helped me out. It also helped that the subject was something I was familiar with: role-playing games. Specifically, Pathfinder.
Continue reading “Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures: Day One”
Well, that was certainly unexpected.
Last fall, my players greased up a rowboat and sent it hurtling down a waterslide of doom. They wound up in an entirely different world that used a version of the classic AD&D module Dungeonland, tweaked to fit with Pathfinder 2nd edition. And, well…they found a way out of Dungeonland. And now they have a bigger boat.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Pirates of the Astral Sea”
Over the course of several years, I ran Night Below: An Underdark Campaign in a multi-year game that spanned the gap between Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1st edition. As we entered the endgame, the PCs learned that a group of aboleths had been kidnapping spellcasters in a bid to power a mighty structure that will extend their natural psychic domination abilities across the globe, effectively taking over the world.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: A Contract with Mind Flayers”
Recurring villains are one of those storytelling elements that just seems next to impossible to translate into a role-playing game. A villain needs to make the players want to hate him, but he also needs to survive contact with the group. It’s easy to do one, but not both; if the players really hate a villain, they’ll often go all out to defeat him, plot be damned. There are only a handful of ways to keep a villain in live in that case: keep him behind a glass wall, illusory projection, or similar device to bestow plot armor, make him powerful enough to take the whole group on and win (in which case you run the risk of the players not knowing when to retreat), or use cheap GM fiat tricks to guarantee his survival…in which case you’re taking the “game” out of “role-playing game.”
I’ve been on both sides of the table on the matter. As a GM, I’ve watched guys I expected to be major villains gunned down, stabbed, or tossed out of windows. As a player, I’ve gone on murderous rampages to take down bad guys, sometimes sacrificing my own characters and sometimes ignoring the positive aspects of a villain’s personality because of my seething hatred of them. (In particular, my friend Nick once ran a game with a very good samurai villain who was not actually a bad guy but rather honor-bound into serving the big villain. He eventually tried joining the group, but I was so sick of getting my ass kicked by him at that point that I was quite hostile in the role-playing interaction, much to the detriment of the game.)
I’ve played RPGs for about twenty years, but I’ve only had a handful of really good villains. One of them is a decade old now and still going strong, much to my delight and the anguish of the players. Hailing from various Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder games, his name is Derrezen, but he is best known in my games as the Red Mage. This is a look at how he got introduced, what worked for him and what didn’t on his rise to villainy, and why he became a character my players loved to hate.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Rise and Fall of the Red Mage”
The beauty of role-playing games lies in the stupidity of the PCs. Sometimes they will act with tactical precision and annihilate their foes, but often they will come up with the most ridiculous harebrained schemes imaginable. Those moments of glorious foolishness are where RPGs shine the brightest. Such was the case when the players in my Pathfinder game created the SS Stupid and set it off on its maiden voyage.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Ride of the SS Stupid”
Folks who read this blog or who know me in person probably realize that I’m a pretty big shill for the Pathfinder RPG. While I love a lot of different role-playing games, Pathfinder has won my heart due to a combination of rules, art, and creative worldbuilding. On the other hand, while I have always appreciated the work Paizo Publishing has done in creating both Pathfinder and its sister game Starfinder, I’ve never particularly idolized the company. This week is a good example of why.
Paizo is currently embroiled in a major controversy of its own making, due largely to poor decisions by management and atrocious actions taken by some of its most influential members. The company has had some serious issues for a number of years, and many of those problems are now on display for the world to see. This has all raised questions in my mind about ethical consumption, especially when it comes to luxury products like RPGs. By continuing to buy Pathfinder products, am I condoning Paizo’s bad behavior?
The answer is…well, complicated.
Continue reading “Paizo’s Controversy, Bad Behavior, and the Dilemma of Ethical Consumption”
I’m a Forgotten Realms player from my 2nd edition AD&D days, which means I got exposed to the setting right around the time that Elminster the Sage was crammed down players’ throats everywhere. He showed up in a great deal of Realms fiction, bothered PCs during official adventure modules, and even pestered the protagonist in the Baldur’s Gate videogames.
In most of his appearances, Elminster either served as an annoyance or suggested with his mere presence that the PCs were wholly unnecessary. After all, if a 29th-level wizard with multiple deities as his allies has his eye on something, mere mortals, no matter how well-intentioned, become redundant.
D&D‘s 4th edition tried to reverse course by stripping Elminster down to become less powerful, but he returned to his mighty stature with the transition to 5th edition. Yet despite his might, Elminster doesn’t have to be a nuisance to the PCs; there are many ways to present a massively powerful wizard without having him overshadow everything else. Here are a few optional takes on Elminster that jive with his official stats in most versions of D&D while giving him a twist to make his presence in a game less domineering.
Continue reading “The Many Faces of Elminster”
The RPG hobby got its start in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin with a tiny company known as TSR. That company will go down in history as the original owner of Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, it is also notable for horrendous mismanagement that caused it to struggle through the late 1980s and ultimately go broke in 1997, where it was ultimately purchased by Wizards of the Coast. But the mismanagement of many years doesn’t hold a candle to the series of PR disasters that struck an ill-fated attempt to revive the TSR trademark in the summer of 2021.
Continue reading “The Return of TSR: What the Hell Just Happened?!”
The approaching full release of Baldur’s Gate III has a lot of gamers very hyped, and for good reason. It’s a high-end video game utilizing the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons system…and it feels like it’s been forever. While fans got an expansion to an old classic with Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear in 2016, there hasn’t been an actual proper stand-alone D&D cRPG since Sword Coast Legends in 2015…and you have to go all the way back to Neverwinter Nights 2 to find one that was well-received.
Why the long layoff in titles and the difficulty in creating a solid game bearing the D&D trademark? With excellent cRPGS like Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity out there, why can’t the grandparent of all role-playing games follow suit? The answer, in my opinion, boils down to resources, creative restrictions forced by the property, and good old-fashioned corporate politics.
Continue reading “Why Don’t We Have More Good D&D Video Games?”
Babbling Brooks 