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”
A long-running campaign of mine transitioned from several weeks in a massive dungeon to a cross-country trek. The party featured a paladin with a celestial horse and a sorcerer who rode a phantom steed. The final PC didn’t have any mount. She wasn’t really interested in getting one, but the rest of the group twisted her arm and convinced her that she needed to buy a horse. She did, and she named it Claude Awesome the Awesome Clydesdale.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: The Evolution of Claude the Clydesdale”
Born in a basement in Wisconsin and spun together from a hodgepodge of borrowed rules, Dungeons & Dragons gave birth to an entire industry and remains a cultural icon almost half a century later. Other role-playing games have come along, but none have matched D&D‘s profile in the popular consciousness. In addition to a lesson on how creativity and innovation can create a hobby revolution, the history of D&D provides a very important lesson: what goes around comes around.
Continue reading “The History of Dungeons & Dragons”
Dungeons & Dragons is the 800-pound gorilla of the role-playing game industry, and Pathfinder is its younger, smaller, but still quite imposing cousin. These two games of heroic fantasy dominate the industry in terms of sales and profile. But what’s the difference between the two of them?
In many ways, they are extremely similar. Pathfinder began as a series of adventures for 3rd edition D&D, and then split into its own game when 4th edition proved to be less popular and third party friendly. Yet despite their similar roots, both games have also gone through new editions since that split. D&D went back to a more classic feel, while Pathfinder embraced mechanics and setting material that helped differentiate it from its ancestor.
Which game is better? I won’t answer that, because that boils down to a matter of opinion. What I will do here is compare the 5th edition of D&D to the 2nd edition of Pathfinder (the current version of each game as of this writing), noting the difference in their design goals. Both games provide a great heroic fantasy experience, but they do so in different ways. And here are the differences as I see them.
Continue reading “D&D and Pathfinder: What’s the Difference?”
Originally published on Sidekickcast.com
If you’re a fan of role-playing games, you probably got introduced to the game through a little thing called Dungeons & Dragons. It may have come by a different name back then, such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but the general gist remains the same. In my unscientific study, about 99% of gamers were found to have come into the hobby via some iteration of D&D.
I’ve hopped around a lot in the RPG hobby, and while I got off the D&D train, my current game of choice, Pathfinder, is an extremely close cousin of the world’s first role-playing game. While there are a lot of reasons I tend to stick close to the D&D tradition, one of the major ones is the oddball humor that the game’s history is steeped in.
I like a good beer and pretzels game, where the play is fairly casual and the jokes are frequent. And when it comes to D&D-style fantasy, the jokes have been baked into the game for decades now.
We’re less than five months away from the release of Pathfinder 2nd edition. Folks who participated in the playtest saw a notably changed system, and those who kept up on the regular updates saw the game change even more due to player feedback. After all that, what will the final version look like?
Only the designers know for sure, although fans can expect previews as the hype for the new edition builds. But interviews during and after the playtest, not to mention the update documents themselves, already provide some hints as to what’s coming. Here’s a breakdown of the changes we can definitely expect from 2nd edition.
Originally posted on Sidekickcast.com
Thanks to whatever weirdness inhabited the heads of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, fantasy gaming has some really bizarre stuff baked into its history. I’ve gamed long enough to use a lot of that weirdness (including my personal favorite, the deck of many things), but there’s still so much more out there. Here’s a quick list of some of the fun items in Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder that I’ve always wanted to slip into an adventure but have never quite been able to make fit.
I have a son who is getting interested in role-playing games. He is also extremely interested in the Mario franchise, to the point where he refers to himself as Mario. His sister gets to be Princess Peach, his mother gets to be Princess Daisy, and I’m stuck as Luigi.
Recently, I decided to fuse these two interests together, resulting in a Super Mario Brothers edition of Pathfinder.
Parts of the Pathfinder Playtest seem like a jarring change to the system to me. That’s mostly because I spent 10 years running a game that used very few rules beyond the Core Rulebook or the Beginner Box. The major change to the action economy and the removal of old multiclassing, for example, feels weird.
That said, I did stay on top of new rules releases as part of my whole freelance writing thing, so I can see that many of these major changes still have Pathfinder DNA. If you’re wondering where all these changes came from, it mostly boils down to a decade of optional rules expansions.