Captain Marsh's page

Conversationally, it's interesting to me to register just how far from this style of Pathfinder I've shifted in the last couple of years. I'm not being critical. I loved the strategic-resource-wargame aspect of the game for a long time and both played and GM'ed this kind of game, often using mini's.

These days, my interest on both sides of the DM screen is much, much more in story and narrative tension than in simulation and game mechanics. I'd rather spend time with players working out back stories to their PCs and interesting "soft rule" advantages and disadvantages than have them grapple with questions of "viability."

It's a virtue of Pathfinder that it allows for but doesn't require this kind of simulation-calculation to be a blast.

Captain Marsh

Fantasy has always suffered a dangerous flirtation with the ugliest form of racism. The earliest voices of the genre – Tolkien, Lovecraft, and many others – lived in a time and place where ugly racial theories of supremacy and degeneracy were mainstream. We inherit imaginary worlds where dark-skinned people tend to be evil and malignant (drow, orcs, etc.) and light-skinned people tend to be good and virtuous.

For several decades now, the RPG world has worked to dismantle that part of our heritage, working toward new stories and new mythologies that are racially and culturally complex. I remember reading through the Eberron setting for the first time and thinking, cool, we’re finally getting there. Goblins were complex and often heroic. They had motivation, history. Orcs, too.

Now along comes Myfarog, an indie game produced by Varg Vikernes, a white supremacist from Norway who was convicted in the 1990s of murder and arson (he was found guilty of burning Christian churches).

In Myfarog, Vikernes doesn’t reject or downplay fantasy’s ugly history, nor does he distance himself from his own racist and violent past. Instead, he embraces those things. Indeed, he explicitly uses the racist elements hard-wired into many of our favorite fantasy games and novels to justify his own bitterly ugly RPG.

Myfarog by all accounts is a pretty crap game. But I don’t care if it reads or plays brilliantly. What matters is that Vikernes is transparent about the fact that it’s an PRG “based on European values, geography, (pre-) history, mythology, traditions, and morals.”

What does that mean? In his game, the white, Viking-like race is proud and strong and virtuous. The Koparmen (men with copper-colored skin) are “subhuman” and they aim to ruin the “lifestyle and culture” of their clean, northern lands.

One quick aside. Vikernes’ version of “pre-historic” Europe really is a fantasy. It’s a sick and childish dream-world of a time when white people were pure and strong, when the uncorrupted nobles were “almost always honorable men and women, good, just and hard working.” It’s pathetic, really.

But when he begins to contrast this make-believe race with the conniving and dishonorable darkies, it’s worse than pathetic. It’s creepy and disgusting.

Here’s my point. I don’t think silence about Myfarog is enough. Given our troubled history, I think it’s important for the key game companies, RPG writers and fans to explicitly condemn Myfarog. We need to make it clear that we reject this slime firmly and fully. We won’t have Jim Crow- or white-supremacist-flavored games in our hobby, period, full stop.

In part, this gesture is symbolic. The game industry has gotten better about speaking up about our need to be welcoming and inclusive. The art has grown less sexist. Attitudes toward LGBT gamers have improved. I love this trend and I want us to keep laying down markers that we’re going to keep moving in the right direction.

But there’s also a practical side to this. I’ve found a lot of chatter on-line about Myfarog, particularly from young white men who don’t appear to understand or grasp the game Vikerness is playing. Either they are just unaware of the racist foundations of Myfarog or they buy his argument that game is no more racially skewed than D&D or Pathfinder.

I’ve found reviews of the game that don’t treat the hatred and exclusion at the core of the game and instead view it as a cool Viking-themed RPG with awesome cover art. We need to spread the word that this game is toxic.

So here’s my shout-out. There’s a lot to debate and discuss when it comes to tolerance in gaming. But Myfarog lies outside the healthy bounds of that conversation. Myfarog is a game that should be condemned by all of us. Help send that message. This game has no place in the modern world of fantasy, RPGs or at any decent game table.

Captain Marsh

Taliesen -

I get the 'free' argument. Honestly, I think MCGames relies on that argument a bit too much for muddled bits of design, but I get it. And if forced to choose between overwrought and byzantine on the one hand and free and creative on the other, I choose free.

I'm also fine modding things to match my taste and sensibilities and those of my gaming group. That's what I'll certainly do with TS. But that's made unnecessarily difficult by the fact that the different foci aren't balanced. That lack of integration is compounded by the lack of guidance for cross-recursion multi-classing.

But I concede that some of my criticism is completely subjective. The idea that players arrive in new recursions knowing a lot about them and possessing powers appropriate to them which they get to choose strikes me as funky storytelling.

-Marsh

I don't think this situation actually has a huge amount to do with alignment (at our table we use alignment as a fairly soft parameter) but it does have a lot to say about reading your table and your players and making sure that the situations involved remain fun.

I long ago stopped including certain situations in my Pathfinder games because they are just not fun for me or my group of players.

In my games violence is described cinematically but only in an Indiana Jones-Star Wars way, not a Quentin Tarantino or Raging Bull sort of way. We don't kill children, even the children of monsters. (My world has a mysterious lack of younglings...) I regularly GM-fiat situations where fun action might turn into creepy weirdness or animal cruelty or whatever. ("After his master dies, the ape seems to fade away into the shadows...")

I also don't allow creepy sexual or sexist behavior at my table - an occasional double entendre or flirty joke, fine, but my Pathfinder game is not the place to act out fantasies of sexual prowess or control. Why? Because for most of my players it's not fun.

Finally, I don't allow PC-on-PC violence or aggression ("No, rogue, you can't steal the fighter's stuff...) except in very rare situations where a PC is controlled by an NPC somehow. Again, why? Because in my experience at the game table it winds up never, ever being fun.

I mention all these examples not because I think they're worth adopting, but because I think every GM should learn pretty quickly to read his or her own comfort level and the mood of the table.

If some of your players think killing mountain gorillas or apes is disgusting, find a way to leave that out of your game.

BTW, enforcing this kind of "standards and practices" at the table is the one area where I very comfortably "railroad" players. Just because you have a particular alignment or class doesn't mean you can creep everybody out, disrupt the story, or kill the fun.

But the same also goes for the GM. Even if I think a situation might be cool or edgy, if I think it's wrong for a particular group of players, I rewrite it or soften the edges a bit.

-Marsh

I want to point out something general to all campaigns - a mistake that after decades of GMing I realized I was making.

Here it is: Focus on making each individual moment cool. You have to keep the bigger story arc in mind, but the moment is the thing.

Especially on Adventure Paths, but also in the homebrew campaign I'm running, I found that I sort of was always leaning toward the future, the next thing, kind of always urging things forward.

Again, a bit of that is fine. You don't want to stall out. But definitely the bigger priority needs to be making each gaming session, each scene as cinematic and cool as possible.

-Marsh

Responding to Kirth's comment. This is such a weird thing in gaming. Why would anyone do that to a DM? I mean, I get not wanting to be railroaded. And I get that it's a DM's job to help players come up with some degree of motivation for their PCs. But really. 99% of Pathfinder adventures are ones that most sane people - even highly lethal people - would simply walk away from.

When I hear about players who derail adventures or campaigns in this way, I'm just sort of flummoxed. I will also say that it's never actually happened to me as a DM. I've had players who wanted a little side adventure for their PC, which is totally cool - I actually love that.

But to come to the table and just say, "Dude, no. We're heading south." Wow. That's cold.

-Captain Marsh

So....strong opinions follow. This isn't a personal attack, just strong opinions about your choices as a player and your DM's choices as lead storyteller.

I have to say that this is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen shared on the boards. Really. I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish as a player or as a member of your gaming community, but I think you should think hard about your choices.

First, I do actually believe that except in rare circumstances, role-playing a 'serial killer' over time and spending part of your gaming imagination thinking about identifying good NPCs you can 'hunt' as 'easy targets' is questionable.

I know that conversations of this kind -- about morality and values in gaming -- are often really ugly on the Paizo boards, but I want to raise it...gently...as something you should ponder.

Bluntly, the answer to your question is pretty simple:

Runelords is full of good, innocent and largely defenseless NPCs that you can murder if you think that's a fun thing to do. 'Easy targets' are everywhere. The only drama to that activity is the drama of your very high risk of getting caught and blowing up your party.

Which brings me to my second point. I think you should think about the fact that you (and the DM who allowed you to make run this PC) are endangering an entire campaign and the shared story-telling experience of a group of players.

At our table, we long ago banned 'rogue' players - by which I don't mean the rogue class, but players who want to run PCs who are fundamentally at odds with the nature of the story and the motivations of the party as a whole.

Having a maverick PC with some color or textures that are outliers - that's fine. But the Runelords story involves a long, desperate quest to stop precisely the kind of psychopathic villains that you are attempting portray.

I've seen so many fun campaigns implode over entirely unnecessary choices like this. After weeks (or months) of gaming, suddenly the party feels called upon to kill one of the PCs, or banish a PC, or take some similar action. The spirit of that player-on-player conflict inevitably spills over to the players themselves.

And boom, you're done.

And really...why? Why not trust your DM and your other players and the writing of the adventure to give you a good, compelling experience? Why put a bomb under the whole affair and light the fuse?

Why not put your obviously cool imagination to the task of creating a complex, weirdly motivated PC who actually serves (rather than threatens) the campaign and its narrative arc?

So...there's my suggestion.

Rather than putting your imagination to work trying to sort out who you can kill on the margins of the story, I would try to find ways that you can commit to building and enhancing the story itself.

That means ret-conning your PC and getting with the spirit of the story that your fellow gamers are acting out. And then, when the moment is right, see if they're interested in running an evil-PC campaign.

Let me say, finally, that I get that Cheliax is a cool setting and it offers some fun, morally ambiguous flavor for GMs and PCs to work with. I don't think all PCs need to be paladins or motivated by 'good.'

There are even some campaigns (Crimson Throne, for example) where taking the Cheliax flavor to the extremes you're talking about might make some sense.

In Runelords, though, your PC is a ticking time-bomb that has huge potential to blow up a campaign and (again, I've seen this happen...) an entire gaming group.

-Marsh

So...this took a wrong turn because of the way I worded my question. My bad.

Briefly, I'm a big, big advocate of table communication and player-DM rapport. That's not my issue, and that's not what I need advice about.

I have a big group of players. Some of them are really, really pumped about this. We're just wrapping up a super high level, super powerful campaign (Slumbering Tsar) and those guys are eager for something stripped down and gritty.

Others aren't into this idea. So those guys are going to sit this one out -- and play cheerfully with another DM for awhile. But...some of the guys who are going to opt-out are good gamers and they raised some good points about how this could be frustrating and dull.

So, with the players who really want to try this with me, I'm looking for ideas for how to make it go well, maybe dodge some of the pitfalls people are mentioning here.

I heard some good ideas here: I like the idea of boosting skills a bit. That fits the story, too. I think the idea of making sure special limits (like fatigue) only happen in short bursts at dramatic moments is really good.

I also think it's important to constantly be giving players a pathway (maybe a challenging one) to solving their shortages.

Saying, "You just kind find a new familiar so your powers are dead" isn't my idea -- frankly that seems like pretty lame DMing. Saying, "Okay, so you need a new familiar. You know that there's an old woman called Widow Gray in the forest who keeps a mob of black cats" or "Two days after the battle where your familiar died you spot a red fox flitting along at the edge of the forest" seems like it could be fun.

This campaign will be fairly low level, beginning at first, continuing through 9th. I expect that some of the economy issues will fade away by third or fourth level, but we'll see. And I will be pushing CR levels down. I've told the guys who are interested in playing, "In this game, a band of orcs is a serious threat." They're down with it.

We'll see how it goes...and more ideas welcome...

Marsh

I've posted a few times on the message boards about my experience running Greg Vaughan's Slumbering Tsar.

My gaming group reached kind of a milestone two weeks ago when we "finished" the portion of the adventure that deals with the wasteland -- the infamous Desolation -- that surrounds the ruined, haunted city of Tsar.

A couple of people I've messaged with have asked for thoughts about the adventure (and for campaign journals, which I don't have time to do...) so here goes.

*****SPOILERS*****************

First, a reminder of what Slumbering Tsar is. It's a massive campaign published by Frog God Games that takes PCs from 7th level to around 20th. My group is currently 9th and 10th level.

Including maps, handouts, appendices, etc. the whole thing runs about 950 pages. In the quality of writing and conceptualization, it's on par with Rise of the Rune Lords. In scale it's much longer, much more detailed.

WHAT I LOVED

Really, ST is everything you've heard about. It's just that good. It's the perfect marriage of an old-fashioned D&D grinder, with lots of combat and deadly challenges, but also tons of role-playing opportunities, fun and nuanced NPCs, and great color.

I've come to believe that Pathfinder is mostly about big moments. Yes, people want plot and danger and all the other stuff that makes up a story. But what sticks out at the gaming table are those epic moments, the near-death experiences, the moments of breakthrough, that perfectly timed crit-roll.

Vaughan spices those opportunities in regularly. The weird, lush haunted garden in the middle of the Desolation. The insane Apocalypse-now dwarves who are trying to survive in the midst of all the chaos and death. The strange ruined characters who haunt the Camp at the edge of the desolation.

It's a meat-grinder, but it's not just a meat-grinder.

WHAT I CHANGED

That said, I did change quite a lot of small things in the adventure. ST is a 'sandbox' which means that it's possible for PCs to make a lot of their own decisions. That's good.

But it can also mean game sessions where everything the players encounter is far too deadly, or far too easy.

In particular, the rules of Pathfinder make it sort of complicated for a GM to deal with hordes of low-level enemies who, when played as Vaughan has written them, simply can't hurt your PCs.

Vaughan seems to love "Walking Dead" style undead surges. And those should be really cinematic and creepy. But in Pathfinder, for PCs at the level envisioned by ST, it's actually more of a nuisance after a while.

(Not always. It's a gas for players to occasionally get to buzz-saw through ranks of enemies, especially after one too many life-or-death battles...but that gets old pretty quick.)

So I rewrote more of those mob-scene encounters to include fewer minions and more slightly tougher and more menacing bosses.

THE FOUR QUADRANTS

The Desolation is basically four different Desolations. In his amazing imaginative deep-dive, Vaughan wasn't happy with one Ashen Waste or one Chaos Rift. He wanted to throw everything into one adventure, from bubbling tar pits to charnel valleys full of undead.

It's awesome and epic. My one suggestion is to read through everything carefully and start teasing out foreshadowing and plot elements that will keep players wanting to explore the whole thing.

The challenge here is to keep it fresh, to keep the motivation strong. I managed a good solid B on this front, I think, by developing a much stronger set of explanations for why the PCs are in the Desolation than the ones that Vaughan suggests.

I think GMs should really talk about this in advance with the players. Make sure they understand the scope of this adventure and the need to keep helping you find reasons that their characters would care enough to keep diving into this insane, deadly madness.

LITTLE STUFF

It's also important to move some things around in Slumbering Tsar. The really awesome troll brothers who should offer the introduction to the Chaos Rift are located on the map in a place where the PCs might never encounter them -- or might encounter them at the end of the adventure.

Also, the Boiling Lands offer, in many ways, the least deadly set of encounters -- and encounters which in many instances don't move the plot forward much. There are some great set pieces there, not to be missed. But find a way as a GM to get your players there early. And find some ways to tie it in more deeply to the adventure.

There are other little things that I felt were just weirdly placed or sort of tucked away in odd corners. Again, read carefully and see what elements you want to pull forward.

POWER CREEP

My next big point is power creep. ST as written was meant to be really, really deadly. That's part of the fun. There is a long section in the back of the book for PC obituaries. Sounds corny, but my players have had fun writing in the names of their characters when they died.

But the truth is that PF has seen so much power creep that a lot of ST isn't that menacing. Some of it still is. But as a game master, you should really think about pacing and maybe tweaking the CR of your threats.

The biggest problem I've found is that ST was written as an "attrition-economy" threat. That is, it's supposed to wear PCs down and make them really think about their choices.

But PF now has so many characters with so many renewable or permanent abilities that this just doesn't come into play so much. I find that with PCs of this level, basically all damage (including ability damage, diseases, etc.) will be cured or healed after every combat encounter.

So that part of the menace, the sense of being worn down, is a bit harder to create. I found that this was easy to remedy by turning a few of the 'wandering monster' encounters into more deliberate, structured clashes which I wrote.

I also used those opportunities to help move the plot along and develop more foreshadowing and a sense that the overall story was going someplace.

THE STORY ITSELF

Which brings me to my final observation. In the end, ST actually has a pretty good story with a ton of amazing characters. But the truth is that a lot of it is pretty hidden.

This isn't unique to Vaughan's adventure. A lot of times in Adventure Paths or other big published campaigns, I find myself running NPCs who have huge back stories and really cool identities, which really the players have almost no way of knowing or interacting with.

The big bad guy (or woman) is dead before the PCs really grasped how big and bad he (or she) really was.

So my two-fold suggestion here is, first, read the whole adventure carefully. Mark out the big plot themes and the big, ominous NPCs and their schemes. Figure out how the threads knot together.

Start peppering those ideas into the players' experience early. Vaughan hints at some of this but more is needed. I'm not saying railroad PCs. But as written, it's possible for players to go a really long time without really grasping what's going on or what the danger is beyond the next encounter.

Some of this can happen in color. PCs can have haunted dreams or be visited by visions. You can use existing NPCs like the Peddler and the Usurer to drop hints about what's to come.

Secondly, I would suggest that GMs playing this huge tome be careful to...slow down. I found that at times I was sort of rushing players through different chapters, knowing that there was (and is) so much goodness to come.

And the truth is that my players have gotten kind of impatient. This story is, after all, about Slumbering Tsar, the haunted city. They've looked from afar on the Black Gates for months (in real time and in game time). They want to get in there.

Fair enough. But remember to treat each section of Tsar and each gaming session as a prime moment to explore really beautifully crafted chapters of a larger adventure. If you run this thing, remember that it's main strength is that it offers you a chance to create those incredible, memorable gaming moments.

I'll end with a little story from our last session.

My players ended their main sojourn in the Desolation by taking on the tar dragon Malerix. They lured him inside a ruined structure, hoping to trap him and limit his mobility -- which worked. It was great ploy and Malerix in his arrogance fell for it.

But they also set his tarry hide on fire, and it turned out he wasn't bothered at all by fire...which meant that 9 PCs (we had a big group that weekend) were trapped in a burning building with a writhing, vicious, deadly dragon.

Because they'd had glimpses of Malerix for months, and they knew that he was the last monster between themselves and the city, they stuck to the fight. It was one of those sessions that balanced perfectly on the edge of a TPK -- at various times three different PCs were below zero hit points -- but in the end everyone survived.

Next Saturday, they begin their assault on the city of Orcus itself, a well-earned next step. If the last year of gaming in Vaughan's campaign is any evidence, it should be epic.

--Captain Marsh

I DM'd the latest installment of my Slumbering Tsar campaign last Saturday and I found myself feeling sort of bummed that it didn't go super well. I mean, it was fine. But this was the big, climactic battle against Malerix outside the Black Gate. It should have been awesome. And it wasn't.

I mention this because the last two years, I've really been trying to get better. Not just better table prep and more conscious, fun-focused DMing. I've actually been scouring the web, looking for advice columns, Youtube videos and other resources.

I've actually gone back and read the "How to DM" sections in all my old rule books. What gems did I miss while rushing through to the "must know" stuff, while assuming that I had the "soft skills" of DMing down pat and just needed to know the rules before building my next adventure?

And all of that stuff helped. But I have to say, I still feel like the state of the art of DMing and the system for training and educating new (and improving DMs) around the world is still remarkably primitive, or at least underdeveloped.

The bottom line is that you can have the best rule system, the most awesome setting, a brilliantly designed adventure (thanks, Greg Vaughan) and a group of willing, engaged players -- but if your DM is muddled or lackluster or just plain unskilled, it's all going to fall flat.

A lot has been written recently about the need to recruit and retain more players. New boxed sets are produced. Comic books are issued. On-line versions of games are experimented with. But it seems to me that, unless I'm missing something, the most obvious next step is being ignored.

If Paizo wants Pathfinder to be THE premier fantasy RPG on the market, it needs to have the best stable of DMs. These gals and guys would be the evangelizers for the game all over the world. As much as people are drawn to the system and the adventures produced by Paizo, they would be drawn to the local, grassroots entertainers (dungeon masters) cultivated with help from the company.

In this comment I don't want to try to specify how a campaign like this should work or what specific skills and concepts it should try to impart. But I will say that the precedents exist already for this kind of global campaign to improve the game.

By using some of the ideas buried in organized play systems and in the Superstar design competition, you could develop a truly awesome, fun and constructively competitive approach to having DMs at various levels sharing their best ideas for how to run a table.

Just by searching around the web, I've found clues and tips and strategies that have made my games 20% better. I bet with a more structured approach, Paizo could boost the overall standards of DMing in the PF community by a bigger margin.

Especially if you structured the program for different levels of experience -- one section for starting DMs, another for veterans trying to freshen their approach -- I think there'd be a lot of buy-in.

The bottom line is that DMing is a blast and a really vital part of gaming, but it's also far less easy and intuitive than a lot of people think. A lot of tables are winding up with a sub-par experience because this one pivotal player in our shared experience just hasn't been exposed to the best ideas and resources.

I think Paizo should spend some of its growing gaming heft to change that.

--Captain Marsh

Sorry to spam, but one last thought: One of the things I love about core Pathfinder is that every build had significant strengths and weaknesses, at least at early and mid levels.

These days, power gamers can optimize PCs in ways that they're often pretty flawless. The contrast between these designs and the more average, common, "I made up a character" has grown dramatically.

Bluntly, it's much more common now to have one player show up with a 1st level VW bug and another player show up with a 1st level porsche. Neither player has cheated and neither player has done anything blatantly stupid.

It's just that players who really scrutinize the growing number of books can mix and match in ways that are dramatically superior. In my gaming group, this divergence in character-creation experience has become a significant issue.

--Marsh

I think it's fair to say that DMs need to exercise far more control over Pathfinder now than they did five years ago. It's kind of a dramatic change.

You can't take a light touch unless you want an anything goes, post-genre, super-hero-fantasy-sci-fi-lovecraftian-power-skewed pot of weirdness. Which can be fun, but let's be honest, it's kind of a mess.

And I think by basically saying that all of that stuff fits into Golarion, Paizo has encouraged the sense that PF is verging more toward a kind of GURPS-like game where DMs (hopefully in collaboration with their players) need put bright lines around what's in and what's out.

I think Paizo is kind of acknowledging this by introducing some stripped down versions of the game that harken back to a more straight fantasy, early edition feel. I don't think any of this is necessarily bad, but it does require some reasonably sophisticated editorial decision-making on the part of gaming groups which (in many instances) just don't know the game well enough or don't know genre fiction well enough to think all that through.

Throw on top of that complexity the weird power spikes of some PC classes and abilities and I think PF has become a significantly more meta-complicated system.

To be clear, this is my primary game system and I love it (I also DM a bit of Numenera and a bit of Traveller). But despite my long experience as a DM, the increasing everything-ness of PF has caught me off guard in big ways a few times and forced me to really negotiate delicately with some players. Sometimes this has been a power-gaming issue, sometimes a narrative/texture/doesn't really fit the story issue.

All of this is made even more complex by the healthy but muddled ecology of 3rd party publishers. Some of that stuff is really, really good, but it can also blow the bottom out from under your game.

Finally, I do think it is fun to occasionally force players to get creative and interesting within tighter boundaries. Show me an interesting PC that you've made out of the core book, with cool color and personality traits -- not always relying on the crutch of some arcane feat or weird power-boost combo.

The last couple of years I've seen more and more PCs at my table that look and feel more like video game builds and less like, you know, characters.

I don't think any of this argues for not churning out more books and options. But I do think Paizo is wise to keep creating islands of (relative) simplicity and genre-sanity. I have a feeling that this new 'against the giants' adventure path will serve as a tentpole for that kind of 'give us some old-school D&D' crowd.

--Marsh

I ran several long and more or less successful campaigns using maps and minis. But I struggled at times with various logistical issues and I often felt that the games were reduced to something far closer to a board game.

Recently, I've been running a Slumbering Tsar campaign (using the Pathfinder rules) and I've done it mostly without minis or detailed maps. It felt far more creative, flexible, narrative, and (frankly) big and dramatic.

Interestingly, I had one big set-piece battle in mind (a zombie horde battle) where I thought minis would enhance the experience and give a sense of claustrophobia and overwhelming numbers. I was wrong. It felt mechanical and sort of toy-y.

One of the biggest problems, I find, is that minis make it far harder for a DM to (for this DM, at least) to do cinematic acceleration. When doing a narrative PF adventure, I can dilate the time and events, even in a battle, in ways that enhance the adventure.

I can, for example, simply narrate with a few sentences all the things that a bunch of NPCs are doing off to the side. "Off to the east, you see Argos beset by at least a dozen zombies, one of them clinging to his armored back, while an undead troll lumbers forward."

But with minis, it feels far more necessary to follow the mechanics. (I still accelerated some, but I found my players sort of watching as I shifted minis around and asking, "Wait, what just happened there?")

None of this is a firm "No" to minis. I still plan to use them in some instances and as my mood shifts and as the tastes of my player group evolves...but I do think it's a good idea for DMs to regularly experiment with both options and see what's working and what's not.

And I guess I have to admit, looking back on some of those past campaigns, I find that I have a mental picture of lots of tiny plastic figures, rather than a mental picture of an army of stone giants advancing on a town wall...

-Marsh

Here's how I handled the motivation thing - I recount this just for fun, not because it's particularly great.

My ST campaign began in Bard's Gate with the party being exiled for one full year to the Camp for various petty crimes, social offenses, etc.

According to tradition, those exiled to the Camp are part of the New Army of Light. Anyone who behaves in particularly good ways, helping advance the interests of Bard's Gate, gets time off for good behavior.

That was the initial motivation. Kill some bad guys, get home sooner.

But in truth, this ritual of exile has been going on for decades and no one takes it very seriously. Few of the exiles ever return. And the folks of Bard's Gate mostly don't take the Desolation as a grave menace.

It's a threat, but a minor concern, and also a useful foil for the elites of the city when they want to raise taxes or blame an outside enemy for Bard's Gates' troubles.

The wrinkle, of course, is that this particular New Army of Light discovers that something has begun to stir in the Desolation. It's not just a sullen badland. Something new and menacing is brewing.

So my PCs have slowly transitioned from being exiles to being partially assimilated into Bard's Gate's growing military and espionage build-up against the Desolation. They, of course, grasp more viscerally than the city's nobles just how big and ugly the threat is.

With that much meta-plot, my players have totally embraced the motivation. They still have tons of sand-boxy flexibility.

Now when they're, say, rescuing members of the lost Bard's Gate caravan, it's not just for gold -- it's because the members of that caravan almost certainly know something more about the Orcus cult's growing conspiracy.

One thing that I plan to add is a section of urban adventure/intrigue back in Bard's Gate as the PCs struggle against the machinations of the nobility who are bungling their response to Orcus's menace so badly.

I think this will be a good counterpoint to the Desolation story, and it will help my PCs catch up a bit in level. (Their progression has been pretty slow so far...after ten sessions, they're mostly 8th level, with some verging on 9th level...)

--Marsh

Reacting to various ideas here:

Distance: I'm with Majuba about making the squares a mile rather than 2,000 feet in Slumbering Tsar. Frankly, the Desolation just seemed too small to me. I wanted the party to have a sense of crossing a pretty big expanse.

The Usurer: My party is increasingly comfortable with the idea that the Usurer is a tenuous ally, especially now that they killed King Kroma for him. In my campaign, the adventurers' campaign is set against a slow military build-up in the Camp, as Bard's Gate prepares for a more traditional (and almost certainly ill-fated) incursion into the Desolation. Set against that naive political ambition, the Usurer seems to them like a realist and a survivor.

One note about the Chaos Rift: This is probably standard for a lot of DMs, but I moved the rock troll brothers and their elevator to a much more logical and accessible location near the main road. It's such a great encounter, a logical gateway to that section of the adventure -- and as positioned it's just too easy for PCs to miss, or to come to far too late to make much sense.

I'm enjoying everybody's stories and getting good ideas for our campaign...

--Marsh

Couple of additional notes following my group's latest session this past week:

First, the group I'm playing with is being really cool about essentially negotiating meta-problems. The new magic item restrictions - people got that.

I also have one way over-powered PC. When I raised it with the player as an issue, he was incredibly cool about it. He's working to downscale some of the build that included crazy 3rd part publishing stuff.

I mention this because I do think Slumbering Tsar is the kind of adventure where you want players who know how to collaborate at the table. I feel lucky to have a group like that.

Second, I want to mention that while Slumbering Tsar can be grindy and needs the kind of GM involvement that Greg talks about, the writing and NPC character development is so strong that it really does ease a ton of that.

My group just entered the Chaos Rift and their encounter with Otis and Lortis was really a highlight of the game. I role-played those guys to the hilt and my players kept asking me, "Is all that in there?" -- meaning in the book-as-written.

And I was like, yeah, it really is. The scene of them being lowered down into darkness on the log lift, and then the lift creaking away upward and leaving them down there.

There are so many great scenes like that -- not all combat-oriented -- that it really does sustain...

I'm getting the feedback about using minis later. Thanks for that advice. I'll definitely try another battle-map structured session once we get into the dungeons.

--Marsh

The gaming group I'm part of is about ten four-hour sessions into the Slumbering Tsar mega-campaign from Frog God games. This is, I think, the largest single adventure/campaign ever written, and when it arrives in the mail it looks like a brilliant behemoth of highly detailed encounters, amazing NPCs, weird cool ideas, etc.

So how does it actually play? Well, broadly speaking, amazingly well. It's famously sand-boxy, meaning PCs explore, encounter, stumble into encounters, and have to be really flexible to stay alive. That means running away sometimes. That means character death is a reality. If your players aren't into dying sometimes and rolling up new PCs, this isn't for you.

But my players have really committed to the sense that this is an apocalyptic place where things can go really wrong fast. (Three of five PCs died in our last game and while there was a bit of TPK shellshock at the table, guys were really cool about it.) They love the deviant plot ideas that Greg Vaughan cooked up. Basically, I've never had characters get so deeply invested in a campaign.

This is also an awesome opportunity for players to do a bit of power-gaming. DMs should exercise some caution about this (more on this note later) but with some caveats, and some cautions about way over-powered third-party publishers material, Slumbering Tsar is a great place to battle-test awesome PC builds.

It's also truly epic in length. After roughly forty hours of play, the party has explored perhaps 1/20th of the death zone that Vaughan created, and hasn't even dared to go near the actual city of Tsar that lies at the heart of darkness.

That said, here are some thoughts about things I had to sort out at my game table.

First, the 'sand box' ideal only takes a story so far. After allowing my players to drift and explore a bit, I found that it was necessary to introduce a kind of meta-plot that would pull them forward. They still get to make all the decisions, and can chase squirrels whenever they want. But in my DMing experience, players will eventually need some motivation to keep going.

This turned out to be fairly easy to fix. I pulled forward some of the NPCs and gave them a stronger tie to Orcus's larger conspiracy -- and, frankly, I made it clear much earlier in the adventure that there is indeed a scheme by Orcus underway. Not that all the denizens of the adventure are involved...so there's still just a lot of random weirdness.

The second thing I needed to do was keep refreshing the Camp. This jumping-off point for the adventure and home base is a really iconic setting with colorful, ominous NPCs and a kind of cool ecology of stuff going on. But that gets disrupted pretty quickly as the PCs move in. So I found that I needed to cook up new weird NPCs and new weird denizens that could keep it fresh. This was fun, pretty easy...I mention it only because it's one of the few "must-do" fixes I've found.

Thirdly, the power creep in Pathfinder has somewhat surpassed Slumbering Tsar's infamous lethality. So I've had to carefully, subtly boost the adventure's risk factors. I've also tweaked encounters where Vaughan has created enemies that almost literally can't touch the PCs because of an unbalanced attack-vs.-armor class situation.

I think this largely reflects a new reality in Pathfinder. One BBEG and a lot of super-weak minions just isn't much challenge. Instead, you need a BBEG with a handful of reasonably powerful minions to make an interesting encounter.

I've also somewhat slowed level-advancement progression, using various means, to keep the PCs from outpacing the story's dangers. All in all, the power balance stuff is easily handled.

Finally, a very personal opinion. This is the first adventure I've run in the post 3.0 D&D/Pathfinder era where I felt like miniatures actually got in the way.

Vaughan's encounters and settings are so cinematic, so varied and cool and (sometimes) complex that I just feel like the mechanical fixity of little tabletop figures get in the way and sort of reduces the epic-ness.

Obviously, this is extremely subjective. Some DMs will have a ton of fun creating some of these magnificent set-piece encounters (dwarven patriots battling desperately against waves of undead, mutated spiders swarming up out of a crevasse in the earth).

But I'd at least urge you to experiment with it both ways, trying out your minis, but also trying some sessions without them.

Above all else, I'd encourage you to get this book. It's pricey. But if nothing else, it's an encyclopedic collection of encounters, new monsters, awesomely detailed NPCs and captivating one-off adventures that could drop into any world, any adventure. Played as structured, there is a vast saga here for players to act out and attempt to survive.

--Marsh

I think Pathfinder has actually achieved a critical mass of rules where some serious level of selective editing is needed adventure to adventure.

I'm attempting a game right now where almost everything is allowed and while we're having a lot of fun, it's a bit of a mess rules- and mood-wise.

As written, Pathfinder is now an all-things-to-all-people rule-set, with everything from laser guns to ancient priests to gunslingers to World War I soldiers.

So...if you're going for a specific genre or feel, you'll probably have to draw some clear lines around what's in and what's out. Is it still, at the end of the day, Pathfinder? Sure.

Even Paizo has said, while introducing science fiction and World War I era elements into some of their APs, "We won't use or allow this stuff very often in our stories going forward, but it's fun occasionally..." (I'm paraphrasing...)

So, I'd say at this point rules-modding isn't controversial -- it's essential to the system.

-Marsh

Seems to me that saying you like "Pathfinder" is kind of a moving target. The game is evolving all the time. New rules, new player options, new everything.

--Marsh

Hi folks -

A couple of thoughts.

First, yes - I could have "my" version of PF by "slicing away" stuff I don't like. The same can be said for people who want sci-fi or Egypt or guns or psionics or epic level play. Anyone can home-mod anything.

I want a variant that Paizo brings to the entire gaming community that makes us all cross-compatible. I like the idea of a store or a DM or a convention saying, "Come play PF. We'll be using the Lite-Narrative rules at some tables, we'll be playing card games at some tables and we'll be using the Core Rules at most tables."

Second, the problem isn't that Pathfinder has grown to have a big math component. This isn't eggheads vs. math-illiterates. The problem is that the math (and the endless book referencing) is slowing down the action to a near-crawl that a lot of us are really chafing at.

The latest Adventure Path basically demands that you have a couple of additional books (or PDFs) open at all times to explain what a crapload of new material does. Check out how many superscript letters pointing to various books there are in any given stat block.

Want an illustration of how this looks in real-time?

I just watched a video of some really great gamers (Dice Stormers - check them out) play through one room in ROTRL where they took down a handful of goblins, including Rip Nugget. With four players and a DM it took 30 minutes to get through a few fairly unexciting rounds of play with low level characters. And before you dismiss them as inexperienced or as having bad table discipline, watch their video on Youtube. It really is worth thinking about -- check out all that book juggling on the part of a really experienced DM. I've been there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWl28lKSsPo

Finally, it's worth pointing out that Paizo will now be competing with at least one extremely well marketed and distributed game (D&D 5) that has the potential to be more streamlined, more narrative, more intuitive and less crunchy than full-iteration PF.

(I'm not sure Numenera will ever achieve wide enough distribution to be a meaningful competitor.)

So...it's just true that gaming climate has now changed. We're not in the 4.0 era anymore when WOTC had basically left the field to Paizo. Going forward, it's not a terrible idea from a community OR a business perspective for Paizo to have a variant product that competes with that kind of product.

-Marsh

Sorry everyone - yes. 10 New classes. My mistake.

Most of the responses here make sense and fall into the "I like Pathfinder the way it is, thank you very much."

Which is great. I probably would have made the same argument last year.

And it may be that this is how the game world will shake out, with some of us gravitating toward more rules-light/story heavy games.

But again, I don't want to gravitate away. I love Paizo and yes, actually, I do want my playstyle to be catered to. (Duh.)

I'll check out Pathfinder Unchained -- first I've heard of it. Thanks.

Finally, to folks here who reiterate the old "I've heard this thread before so shut up" argument or the old "quite whining about your playstyle not being catered to" saw, I say - pft.

If I had a quarter for every person on this message board who told me to shut up...

Bottom line?

This is my message board as much as yours, and Paizo is my gaming source and my addiction as much as yours.

They deserve to hear my (hopefully positive, constructive) feedback as much as yours.

And if I'm repeating a concern raised before, even better.

--Marsh

After quite a few years of happily playing in Paizo's awesome sandbox -- a huge fan of Pathfinder, Adventure Paths, and Golarion -- I suddenly realized this summer that I'm ready for a big change.

Paizo, I think, has followed the same company arc that we've seen so many RPG brands navigate. They started by publishing a great rule system and a great setting.

Then, to keep the cash flow going (which is a good thing, not a bad thing) and because they are creative people, they've elaborated upon that rule system to the point of near exhaustion.

The latest book offering TWENTY new core classes? That pretty much stopped me in my tracks. As a DM, my table and my game group were already creaking under too many options, too many complex mechanics.

I would prepare a story, or gear up to run one of Paizo's adventures, and I never knew what circus menagerie was going to wind up in the party of PCs.

I'm a decent DM. I know the core rules really well. But I was always one step behind my players when it comes to how all their powers and abilities work.

Meanwhile, to heighten my desire for something different, Numenera and D&D 5.0 arrived in the gaming world, both with far more math-and-fine-print light, far more story-heavy architectures.

I ran a Numenera game last weekend and I have to say, it was a liberation. Preparation was easy and focused almost entirely on story, not stat blocks. Battles took a quarter the time to run and were far more fun and dynamic and cinematic.

Players, meanwhile, had a ton of fun making up PCs using a far simpler, more story-based series of templates. Half the crunch and still far more unique. My sense of D&D 5.0 is that it moves in the same direction.

So why not just switch? Why not jump ship if I want something a little different? (A lot of you are probably already typing a reply telling me to get the hell out of the sandbox...)

The truth is that I want to stay with Paizo and Pathfinder, for much the same reason that I stayed with Pathfinder as 3.0 and 3.5 were dying out.

I like the continuity. I like having all my old adventures and campaigns still be somewhat forward engineer-able.

I'm also absolutely convinced that Paizo will continue to be the best adventure-writing company in the gaming world. I want to run their Adventure Paths.

So, as regular loyal customer, here's what I want from Paizo:

I want them to earn their next pile of bucks by producing a streamlined, narrative-rich version of Pathfinder.

Not just a "beginner's box," but an actual parallel rule structure that exists comfortably side-by-side with the more byzantine version of Pathfinder that's come into existence.

I get that one way to "solve" this is by simply banning (at my table) a lot of the material published after the Pathfinder core rulebooks were released.

But I bet there's a more exciting way for the game gurus at Paizo to do this -- one that would be a profitable way for Paizo to compete with and match the new innovations coming from Wizards and Monte Cook.

This next part is important: I don't want people to think that I'm hostile to products like the Advanced Class Guide.

They're not to my taste. But I know there are a lot of great DMs and super-fun players who completely love that stuff and will never get enough feats and spells and class abilities and races -- that's cool.

But I think Paizo can do that stuff and offer a kind of alternate, streamlined cross-compatible system.

So...here's my memo to Paizo: Put that version of Pathfinder in a hard-back book with a lot of fun art and charge $50 for it...and I'll be your first customer.

Captain Marsh

I've played Pathfinder from its inception, and D&D since the late 1970s. I'm a huge fan of what Paizo has done with the gaming community and with the d20 system in particular.

As I've written here before, I think Paizo is really the first major gaming company that wrote actual stories that players and DMs could bring to life -- full of character and tension and still blessed with a lot of open-ended "sandbox" play.

Yet here I am in 2014 wanting something new. I feel like my time in Golarion has pretty much run its course.

I also feel like the basic structure of the Adventure Paths - which redefined how I think of RPG narrative arcs -- is no longer producing the kind of stop-me-in-my-tracks work that I used to see.

Don't get me wrong, there are still brilliant moments, flashes of weird creative brilliance. But not as often.

Rather than finding new ways to wow me with absolutely crazy imaginary settings and conflicts, I feel like there's more and more rules-lawyer tomes, longer and longer lists of feats and spells and character classes and variants.

And again, I get it. I understand that the business model of RPGs requires some of this stuff. A lot of gamers want more and more of those rule clusters. Building characters using 12 different books is half the fun.

But as a certified Paizo junky-fanboy, I'm ready for the next thing that doesn't feel sort of middle-aged and typical and "this is where RPGs always go in their life-cycle."

Is it time for a new world? I know that's dangerous and has really hurt game systems in the past. Or how about a one-shot hardcover mega-adventure written entirely by one auteur-quality writer?

How about a series of "adult" adventures, by which I mean adventures which emphasize -- really dramatically -- things like role-playing and mystery solving and the "world inhabiting" experience, rather than combat?

Finally, I'll admit that I don't really know exactly what I want. Just like I don't know that I really want that next brilliant Quentin Tarantino film or Joe Abercrombie novel until it appears. That's the job of artists, after all, doing something so cool and engaging and new that it takes an audience into an entirely new place.

So this is a greed post, really. Paizo has done that for me in the past and I want them to do it again.

I know none of these ideas will ever be Paizo's bread and butter, but six years after Pathfinder was launched I think tilting at windmills and being experimental is a great idea for a creativity-based company.

--Captain Marsh

So I started an occasional review of Numenera a few weeks ago by posting some concerns about the engine at the heart of the game.

The mechanics of Monte Cook's much-heralded Kickstarter-funded RPG struck me as surprisingly clunky and math-heavy.

In part two of the review, I want to talk about my first time taking the game out of the garage.

I ran a game last weekend with four players at the table - two jacks, a glaive, and a nano, all fairly experienced gamers.

First, I'll say that the mechanics are, in fact, a bit awkward.

To recap, the GM sets a difficulty level (1-10), the players try to adjust the difficulty level of each task dowwnward using skills, special effort, and other tactics.

The final number is multiplied by 3 and the players roll a d20 to try to beat that amount.

(So a difficulty seven task knocked down to a difficulty four task would be multiplied by 3 to produce a challenge number of 12...)

There was some muddly confusion over all this, and a bit of exasperation, but it wasn't the end of the world.

Second, I'll say in as uncomplicated a way as possible that we had a really great time playing Numenera.

The general setting, which is sort of a mishmash of post-apocalypse-sci-fi-fantasy-horror genres with lots of "magical items" and tons of general "weirdness" was a big hit.

In my adventure, I adapted parts of Cook's "Vortex" module with my own home-brew adventure.

The session involved a group of PCs with amnesia trying to sort out their identities, first by escaping the clutches of a mind-controlling alien, then by infiltrating a mysterious temple to recover vials which contained their stolen memories.

Along the way, they battled margr goat-men, encountered a group of parasitic "Filthers" -- intelligent parasites who use captured humans as their digestive systems -- and fought their way past deadly claw-bots.

The players loved their mix of powers and abilities, and really enjoyed the throw-away "cypher" magical items that are a big part of the game's flavor.

So that was all good.

Finally, I'll say that, sadly, parts of Cook's goal in creating Numenera remained unfulfilled -- at least so far -- at our table.

The game as written is supposed to encourage really innovative, colorful, in-character role-playing and storytelling.

Players are rewarded with experience points largely for coming up with cool narrative events and bits of drama.

Similarly, GMs are encouraged to regularly throw cool plot twists -- intrusions -- at the PCs that add spice and color.

I really like the idea of a mechanics-driven, constantly-reenforced story element boost in a game's design.

It nudges you not to just fall into a combat-round-after-combat-round rhythm...

But the simple truth is that this "live theater" stuff is hard.

A lot of the time, despite my nudging, my players fell back on saying, "I stab him with my spear" or "I shoot him with my buzzer."

Meanwhile, on the fly, I found it pretty difficult to come up with cool, colorful intrusions as often as the game suggested.

(I succeeded maybe 25% of the time in brainstorming something cool...)

Still...the bottom line is that I took a head-count at the end of the first session and everyone wanted to try another Numenera session.

So maybe we'll get better at upping our game in the way that Cook envisions?

Still to come in my series of reviews:

I'll look at the published adventures that have appeared so far and finally at the 9th World setting itself.

In the weeks to come, I plan to write a series of essays about Monte Cook's Numenera.

Before this first installment, I want to make a couple of points. First, I love Cook's work and I think he should be taken seriously.

He is as close to an auteur game-maker as the RPG world has produced, and he hits a lot more than he misses.

So when I'm critical (and this first essay will be) it should be taken in that light.

A tough review of a Woody Allen movie doesn't mean the reviewer thinks Woody Allen is a hack. Same goes here.

Secondly, some of my later essays -- about elements of the 9th world, the use of magic items in the game, etc. -- will be mostly glowing.

I want to spend some more time with those elements before writing about them.

Thirdly, this first installment is a read-through review only. I haven't DM'd Numenera yet and I'll plan to revise my thoughts after a few sessions at the game table.

As we all know, rules and adventures sometimes play a lot different than they read. In this case, I hope that's true.

Those caveats aside, I think there is a startlingly broken series of mechanics at the heart of Numenera.

In theory, Cook's goal is to lessen the math and erase a lot of the crunchy "look-it-up-in-the-rulebook" muddle, while pushing gamers more toward story and mystery and weirdness.

I personally love that idea. I want Cook to keep looking for experimental ways to make tabletop games into vivid stories.

But I don't think he succeeded here.

The core of Numenera is a system called Task Difficulty. Once a Player announces an action or goal, the DM sets a difficulty level of 1-10.

So far so good. Sounds more or less the same, but maybe a bit simpler than the DC (Difficulty Class) system in Pathfinder, which can run (in theory) from 1 up to infinity.

But now things get a bit gooey. Once the DM has set the Task Difficulty level, the Player then offers up various skills, levels of effort, magical effects, etc., that might lower that number.

(A person trained in a skill, for example, automatically has the Task Difficulty dropped by one. A person specialized in a skill drops the Task Difficulty by two.)

So with the right effort, skills and assets, a nearly impossible difficulty level of 10 might be negotiated down to a 6 or a 5.

Then -- and this is the part that gets a bit rough -- the final number is multiplied by 3.

The product of that random process (in effect, 0-30) is the "DC" that the Player then has to match on a d20 roll.

So...why all that up-down rigamarole? Why not just go with a d20 DC system and institute a two-tiered numeric skill level system?

It's not clear.

There's nothing inherent in the process that I can see that pushes more "story" into the game. There are still skills, magical effects, and so on.

There are a couple of cool innovations tacked on.

In Cook's imagining, once the player finally rolls the d20, interesting "interventions" are supposed to happen for both high rolls and low rolls.

These are build-in nudges, where the DM is supposed to complicate the story or add narrative detail and color.

But that idea, lovely as it is, could easily be added to the much simpler and straight-forward d20 system.

Another idea that Cook offers is that Players always do the dice rolling. They roll to hit, for example, but they also roll to avoid being hit.

Kind of clever, in theory. It frees up the DM to focus on storytelling, and it keeps players engaged and tossing dice.

But the truth is that a lot of DMs (myself included) like rolling dice.

And it's also arguably less fun for a specific monster or NPC to always have the same static "beat this number" challenge level.

Dodging a critter's attack can be more fun and tense if the critter's danger-level and fortunes shift from round to round.

But again, the big problem here isn't the new, interesting ideas. I'm guessing some of those will be house-ruled into a lot of Pathfinder campaigns.

Really, it's that clumsy "1-10-up-down-multiply-by-three-then-roll-d20" engine at the heart of the game that strikes me as squidgy.

A bit of a throwback to the complexities of THAC0, actually.

My hope is that the secret goodness of this reveals itself to me and my players when we sit to the table.

But I'm skeptical. The gameplay example included in the book is startlingly static and mathy - not very promising.

To be honest, I'd like for Cook to explain all this a bit. I found one essay where he suggests that he moved away from d20 just to "do something new."

http://www.montecookgames.com/why-not-d20/

Fair enough, but something new -- when you are Monte Cook and you're rolling out something as ambitious as Numenera -- should be something better.

So again, I'm starting with my biggest beef so far. There will be some more skeptical essays, but also some glowing, overjoyed ones.

And let me wrap with a statement of principle here. This isn't flamewar, snarky stuff. I love Cook and plan to DM Numenera.

I take his work seriously and hope I've begun to review it in that respectful spirit.

-Capt. Marsh

I know this is low-brow, but my main problem with the Aboleth is its goofy, catfish whisker appearance. Maybe it's really more an art problem.

Some Lovecraftian aberrations -- great old ones, for example -- are wonderfully alien in description, but when you try to draw, paint or sculpt them they begin to look like winged eggplants.

So maybe the idea of an aboleth coursing through the depths of an ancient ocean, working its ancient plots, is cool and creepy -- but a picture of that?

Just looks like the big lunker that got away.

:) Marsh

I haven't played (or read) this AP, or this particular chapter, but I want to make a point about the OP.

I get that lots of AP's won't be to everyone's taste. Some people won't be interested in Asian-themed adventures, or adventures that are primarily urban.

Some players and DMs might be weary of the horror or Lovecraft based narratives.

There are times when the "earth shattering" nature of the AP plots gets a little old to my taste.

And my own particular taste has never run to pirate-themed tales.

But the idea that Paizo shouldn't (ever) introduce weird, complicated, genre-busting new elements into their story-telling? No.

The thing that has set Paizo apart from competitors from the beginning has been a willingness to take narrative risks.

Does Mammy Graul style horror have a place in Tolkien's genre? Probably not, but it turns out a Hills Have Eyes adventure really worked.

None of which is to say that everyone has to play every AP, or adopt every idea or rule. That's what a DM is for, after all.

But suggesting that Paizo is "stupid" for introducing strange, nontraditional elements into their fantasy isn't just wrong.

It misses the whole genius of Paizo's creative process.

--Capt. Marsh

I think the OP makes two more or less patently wrong assumptions.

First, of course, is the idea that Pathfinder - and the post-3.0 versions of D&D - can or should be viewed in isolation, out of the context of the game's evolution.

When you put Pathfinder in that bigger frame, it's impossible to avoid the reality that the game has moved steadily toward greater balance and a more gracefully integrated system of rules.

Complaining about 'balance' in Pathfinder is like complaining about the speed of travel in a 747 airliner.

Yes, there are problems and discontents.

But if you compare the experience to, say, traveling in a covered wagon (or playing 1st edition D&D) there's just no comparison.

And things wouldn't have gotten better if designers didn't care about things like balance and fun playability.

The second assumption that doesn't hold up is one that skews a lot of these conversations -- and that's the idea that Pathfinder is an abstract or "pure" system of rules logic.

The idea, in other words, that you can reduce the various classes to a mathematical chart of damage output, utility, etc., and come up with a numerical assessment of "balance."

In my experience, most of the problems people talk about here in the abstract simply don't materialize around the game table.

I've never played a Pathfinder game in which martial characters (and rogues, for that matter) become irrelevant or "underpowered" at higher levels - even when paired with high-level wizards or clerics.

It just doesn't happen. The players running those PCs continue to find plenty of effective ways to involve themselves in the story.

Obviously, in a game system this complex, with so many variants, problems do arise.

Certain classes and combinations (summoners and alchemists, in my personal experience) just don't work right as written - they are wildly, demonstrably overpowered at lower levels.

But that's easily fixed. And those, in my view, are the exceptional cases of imbalance that prove the general rule.

-- Marsh

Yeah, no. No homophobic stuff, no mean stuff, no racial stuff. No bullying, no nothing that will send anyone away from the table unhappy.

It's just full stop not ok.

I know this sounds a little melodramatic, but from my gaming experience I think RPGs are a refuge for a lot of people.

Anyone who messes up that safe-base, who takes away the moment of fun and community for people who sometimes don't have many other options - they need to knock it off.

I see it as part of the GM's job to help make that happen...

-Marsh

A couple of thoughts.

1. I generally agree with the rules analysts who see fundamental imbalance here. I think it's real and they're right. Weirdly, though, it just doesn't manifest as an issue at my game table. My players all seem to have a good time, the martial class players don't grumble about feeling underpowered -- by the time the night is over, just about everyone has made fun, meaningful contributions. Not sure why, but at my table at least, this is a problem in the abstract, but not at the actual game table.

2. That doesn't mean that some PC classes aren't prone to being wildly overpowered, but weirdly for me it hasn't been wizards or clerics. It's been summoner and alchemist builds. Even at relatively low levels, there are certain builds that just tip my table, throwing off encounters and overshadowing the rest of the party.

3. I know this is old hat, but it's worth pointing out again that part of this problem resolves itself by sticking to lower-level play. It's not a reasonable solution for many groups, playing at 1st-10th level, because they like big-time power-gaming. But my group tends to enjoy narratives that are closer to true fantasy rather than "superhero" fantasy that occurs at 10-20th level. As a fringe benefit, this is also the spectrum of the game where the classes tend to be more balanced.

-Marsh

So after DMing Pathfinder, 3.5 and 3.0 over the last decade or so, I've come to think that my next big challenge is to improve the 'negative space' in my games.

What I mean by this is that too much of the time spent by players between "their" turns is dissolving into distractions, non-game related muddle, and energy-sucking behavior.

I'm not blaming my players. The truth is that I haven't found a great way to "involve" them when they're not actively rolling dice or attacking or defending or role-playing.

I've created a kind of binary on-off switch in my games. It's either 'your turn' or you're not really playing - you're on the sidelines.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer here is. But here are some ideas I'm playing with.

One thing is to encourage players to be better audience members. When it's not your turn, enjoy the show - don't look for other entertainment outside the game.

Another suggestion is for players to do better prep between turns. You know you're up soon, so dig in and really think about the situation and what you can do, how your spells will work, etc.

I can also do better as a DM to share around the interaction with the world when it's 'my turn.' Try to involve as many PCs as I can when the NPCs are doing their thing.

But maybe there are other good ideas out there?

My goal here isn't to eliminate out-of-game distractions. Joking and side-chatter is fine up to a point.

But the truth is that even with a small four-person player group, it'll only be your turn about 20 percent of the time.

If we can improve and deepen the other 80 percent of the table experience for players, that could really transform game night.

So - mostly this is a bid for fresh ideas. How do you, as a player, improve your fun when it's not your turn?

And as DM, what do you do to make sure that your players are as engaged as possible in the session even when you're interacting with someone else's PC?

--Marsh

Again, one of the things that I think Golarion does REALLY WELL is give DMs the tools to build incredible, specific campaign arcs.

I think Eberron did this too and yes - the crazy multiple-threat reality of Eberron was, without a little DM work, overwhelming.

In fact, maybe even MORE overwhelming.

The adventures that Wizards wrote often tried to shoe-horn in way too many different evil cults and factions and end-time schemers into one scenario.

Paizo has, for the most part, avoided this trap. Their Adventure Paths tend to narrow the focus beautifully, creating one big threat at a time.

It also helps, I think, that Paizo has stuck with their decision to have most of the adventures take place simultaneously, in sort of a permanent year-zero.

The way I imagine it (this is just my own little narrative tic) is that Golarion a mysterious world with a lot of superstitions and legends and rumors and fears.

In any given campaign, one of those awful things turns out to be real and present. The others remain as rumors in the dark.

But in a parrallel Golarion, it's one of the other threats that turns out to be active.

That said, I have found that some of the APs interlock in cool ways.

My ROTRL campaign involves a political effort to create a new Varisia.

So one side-plot, for a different set of PCs, is the effort to keep Korvosa out of the hands of an evil queen who wants to ally herself with Cheliax rather than the new Varisia.

In this context, Crimson Throne has taken on a cool, added texture. So it's fun to mix and match...

--Marsh

Someone above mentioned the cool modular nature of Golarion. I'm right there with this idea.

The truth is that, like all other successful RPG settings, Golarion has too many plots, too many villains, too many "end of the world" scenarios.

It's designed that way, to give DMs and gaming groups almost infinite options.

Obviously, there really isn't a viable political or cultural ecology here, even when you factor in magic.

Which is fine because as a DM you are invited (encouraged? required?) to just suspend about 90% of it at any given time.

I've been running a massive ROTRL campaign for about the last two years. It has folded in quite a lot of Golarion.

There is political intrigue between the evolving nation of Varisia -- rivalries between Magnimar, Korvosa, Riddleport and even Kaer Maga.

Cheliax is making ominous military gestures on the border, and so on.

It's enough to give players the sense that there is much, much more "out there" than the immediate dungeon or challenge.

But for the purposes of my campaign, there is no "World Wound" except as maybe a distant rumor.

There is no imminent threat from Tar-Baphon or looming Second Darkness or creeping Reign of Winter.

Karzoug is plenty enough for us, so the rest just kind of fades into the (very distant) background.

As an aside, one thing I really do like a lot are the adventure paths that don't have "world ending global doom" plot-lines.

Kingmaker, Crimson Throne, Council of Thieves - I like their most localized, intimate, deep immersion storylines.

In other words, I think small chunks of Golarion work much, much better than the setting as a whole.

Which is perfect for an RPG setting that you want to endure over lots of different stories...

--Marsh

I have two thoughts about this.

First, I think everybody playing PF should consider navigating well clear of clumsy talk about Down syndrome, village idiots, mental retardation, and people working at McDonalds.

When sitting down to role play PCs who have lower IQs, the LAST thing anyone should be doing at a gaming table is adopting those kinds of stereotypes.

I know this sounds scoldy. But fantasy gaming operates in risky territory on a lot of issues, race, violence, sexism, etc. It's possible to have a crap-load of fun while also avoiding trip-wires.

I guarantee you, there is someone at your gaming table who has someone in their world with intellectual limitations or developmental disabilities.

Second, as a DM, I've mostly outlawed dump-stats.

For one thing, the kind of games I run don't function well without fairly bright, alert and (reasonably) charismatic PCs.

As a result, I was finding a lot of Int 8/Cha 8 characters trying to get away with acting like Sherlock Holmes.

But I also just don't like the way these characters start to look on paper, far too attenuated and meta-gamed.

So my house rule is that you have to come to me first with a story reason or a role-playing strategy that makes a lot of sense.

Only then can you dump-stat.

--Marsh

I honestly think Paizo should produce a book that deals with the real-world etiquette of gaming, with strategies for making this kind of thing work.

I say that because when I first started gaming back in the late Seventies this sort of conflict gobbled up a huge amount of our time and energy.

And disputes like this affect game-play. It's just not as fun sitting at a table when these personality-table-politics issues get in the way.

And it's fixable. I know from experience because we just don't have tensions like this at our gaming table any more.

Here are a couple of the fixes that work for us:

1. The social contract is that people come whenever they can and when it will be fun for them. Period. No pressure, no arm-twisting, no do-or-die. If a PC isn't there one session he/she magically vanishes. If the PC is back the next session -- poof, she/he is back in. (I subtract hit points, spells, etc. to balance game-play.) This dings the continuity a bit, sure. But the pay-off in lack of stress and funkiness is HUGE. In my experience, once things relax and get really fun, people start coming more often. That said, though, especially at particular times of life, other things are going to take priority. New relationships, jobs, classes, parents - don't try to get in the way of that stuff with your Runelords campaign. By running our table this way we literally have more players than we know what to do with on any given week.

2. Out-of-game rivalries are FORBIDDEN in game. People come to the table with baggage. Some of that is unavoidable. But we absolutely forbid any back-stabby, gang-uppy, odd-man-outism at our table. At first, I had to say this a couple of times a game. "We're here to have fun - and that means absolute coolness player-to-player. Your only enemies here are my BBGs." But after a couple of months of that, guys just got it and knocked that crap off. We still have two brothers who sometimes snipe at each other instinctively, but then they'll glance sheepishly around the table and say, "Sorry, sorry" and get back to rolling dice.

3. Recruit more players. In my experience, the way to build a thriving game table isn't to try to hold onto players. You should be looking for new ones and putting on games that make all kinds of folks want to come. I'm not sure why, but it seems like problem players can smell a fragile gaming table. They know that their $*(W* will be tolerated. But if you've got a big group of eager gamers committed to the game, that kind of dopiness just begins to feel more and more marginal.

4. Be firm. This isn't easy, but it's necessary. Once you figure out what you're comfortable with and what you're not comfortable with, draw some firm lines in the sand. But be darn sure that they are lines you really care about and you aren't just engaging in some kind of rivalry. In my game, I'm firm about computers and book-reading at the table. I don't allow it, don't tolerate it. I don't allow PC on PC violence. I don't tolerate overt plot-destruction. Sandboxing? Fine. But if I see that you're out to fudge the basic narrative, for some reason, I step into meta-game mode and say "Knock it off."

I know this sounds lecturey. But the truth is that I played a lot of really weird, tense, unfun D&D before we figured out that it just doesn't have to go like that.

--Marsh

These social contract things can really mess up a game. In this case, I'd just say bluntly, "New house rule, everyone rolls everything in the open and lets everyone see how the dice fall. Only the DM gets to make secret rolls, when necessary."

If people ask why, just say, "I feel like to run the game fairly and well I need to see what people are rolling. It adds to the fun to see the numbers clearly on the table -- crits, fails and everything in between. And helps me as a DM."

If anyone refuses or makes a big issue out of it, then it's probably time for a private side conversation.

--Marsh

When I first started gaming, in middle school, we had no idea about social contracts. It was disastrous usually.

We killed each others' characters, we derailed each others' adventures, we were obnoxious in real life and in character.

When my current group revived after 3.0 came out, we were much more conscious of the need for some accord at the table.

It's a pretty constant negotiation, but the rules are generally a) no killing other characters, b) no deliberately scotching the plot of the adventure, and c) no chronic distracting behaviors at the table.

That means no cell phones, but it also means no neurotic "testing" of dice -- rattle, rattle -- no cross-talk about Skyrim, and so on.

On the other hand, it's important to allow the table to just sort of gaggle for a while occasionally -- over a good joke, a funny moment in the game, or whatever.

I've definitely made the mistake as a DM of clamping down too hard on extra-curricular socializing...

The bottom line is that I try to have our players be roughly as focused as a good group of poker players -- which is pretty darned focused.

Honestly, I think more of this kind of advice would be a worthy addition to the core rulebook.

Explaining to people that group story telling requires a little bit of deliberate buy-in up front might help new groups avoid our awful stumbles.

--Marsh

I love the Adventure Path series and generally like the slow, evolutionary tweaks that have happened over time since the first ROTRL series.

Yes, a few AP's have sputtered and stuttered, but all have been interesting, worthy efforts that captured the imagination of at least some gamer groups.

One element, though, that seems worthy of a major overhaul -- to my eye -- is the fiction that takes up a chunk of each installment.

I love reading fantasy. I even occasionally enjoy short fantastic fiction.

But there's something about the style and the episodic nature of the Pathfinder Journal that just doesn't work for me.

This is no disrespect to the authors. I often recognize some good, solid writing.

And I get the idea that fiction is a way to flesh out the atmosphere of Golarion.

But I just don't ever find myself engaging the stories or the characters in ways that get me to the end.

I wonder if other regular purchasers and players agree that this is real estate that could be better used in other ways?

One MUCH more useful element for my gaming table would be a series of pages devoted to 1" grid maps usable for key battles in each AP installment.

If Paizo printed 3-5 pages of miniature-scaled maps per episode, I'd be over the moon as a DM...and that also seems like an element that would be fairly easy to produce.

-Capt Marsh

I generally really like the multi-author approach to the APs. But I think the OP gets at something real.

I think the APs do need slightly greater cohesion - someone in a kind of show-runner role who can tighten the narrative threads.

I'm sure someone already does something like this for each AP - just wouldn't work otherwise -- but my sense is that this kind of continuity focus needs to be dialed up a bit.

It's just not cool that so many of the modules in each AP now include disclaimers like "this chapter doesn't really contribute much to the overall narrative arc."

And it's not great that fascinating NPCs so often appear just in time to be killed off.

It strikes me that each draft of each chapter of an AP should include specific requirements, like foreshadowing, meta-plot development, and NPC cultivation.

Again, I'm certain that a lot of this happens already, but this is one of the rare areas IMO where there's real room for AP growth.

--Marsh

From a creative point of view -- in terms of Paizo continuing to push the envelope on writing, storytelling, and tabletop gaming -- this feels fun and risky.

It feels like a kind of Mike Mignola moment. It bends the genre, forces everybody to blink once, and that's really really good.

Also, the fact that Paizo is still comfortable saying "this isn't for everyone" but it's going to be incredibly cool for the right set of players with the right DM?

Priceless.

--Marsh

I think the rules as written do box in the Paladin in unfortunate ways. The heroic knight of romantic literature -- a legitimate part of the fantasy canon -- behaved nothing like the Paladin that has evolved in D&D mythology.

Knights were gritty, worldly and flawed. In romantic poetry and literature, they sought to fulfill various ideals, but they were also ribald, flawed and capable of acts of cunning and malice.

I understand why the rules were written. It's a huge role-playing challenge to square the ethics of "adventuring" with the ethics of saving the world for goodness. But they still kind of stink.

In my games, I just house rule it. I make it clear to my paladins that they can be as gritty and earthy and clever and Machiavellian as necessary, as long as they can always make a strong argument for the fundamental rightness of their crusade.

--Marsh

I've been running the hardcover reissue of Rise of the Rune Lords -- and it's been a fantastic ride.

One of the things I really took to heart was the advice in the new edition to slow the time frame down significantly and allow the PCs to sandbox Varisia.

That's worked out beautifully.

While working through the first section of the AP, I started buying Shattered Star and realized that this wasn't/isn't a campaign for my group.

Too many dungeon crawls. To be clear, they're GREAT dungeon crawls. But still, just not right for my group.

Also, we're not big fans of the "Pathfinder Society" as a plot motivator.

But what I've found is that there is a TON of great material in SS that really fleshes out the whole Thassilonian adventure.

Everything from monsters to settings to side trek adventures.

To cite just one example: My players are leaving Sandpoint for a time to lead a trading expedition from Magnimar to Kaer Maga.

SS has a huge amount of material to flesh out that journey. I plan to cannibalize big chunks of book one, Shards of Sin, including small chunks of the dungeon.

Also, one of my PCs is fascinated by the Sczarni -- and he's now bound up in side-plot involving the Tower Girls.

I also suspect that I'll trade out the long side mission in ROTRL to energize weapons -- and replace it with the cleaner quest mechanic of rebuilding the star.

(By the way, the first person who turns out to have a piece of the shattered star in my narrative is Aldern Foxglove - cursed with the pride sin...)

They'll use the star against Karzoug, and inadvertently trigger the apocalyptic events in Dead Heart of Xin.

By incorporating Shattered Star, I'll also be able to flesh out significantly the role of the Denizens of Leng, which is a very cool but underdeveloped aspect of ROTRL.

So...I'll let you know how it goes.

My guess is that by the end of January, we'll have finished most of the plot elements in Shards of Sin and Burnt Offerings.

--Marsh

In some of my campaigns, I haven't worried overmuch about this sort of power gaming.

But in my current campaign arc, which has a lot of social role-playing and political intrigue, having PCs with CHA 7 or INT 8 would have broken the game.

So I just banned dump stats. In trade I gave players an extra trait apiece. It worked fine.

-Marsh

Tetrix -

Merry Christmas to you, too.

- Marsh

Kryzbyn -

In my business -- which I admit is not running a RPG company -- whenever someone demands your silence it's a marker.

It's a warning sign. It means that more conversation, not less, is warranted.

This is a company's website. But part of the business model is that it's also a community.

So quit hectoring and demanding that people respect your agenda. Converse, talk, listen.

If other members of your community are worried by something -- even if it's something that doesn't worry you -- respect that.

Again, this isn't small stuff.

You guys are part of an effort to encourage lots of our fellow community members to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a start-up venture.

Take that responsibility seriously. Be a little more patient.

And if you're burned out on trying to communicate about this, maybe you should step away.

Finally, I'll answer your question: I'm one of Paizo's best customers.

I buy hundreds of dollars worth of books and other products from the company every year.

It's good for them to hear that what they're doing is making some of their core, loyal customers anxious.

Doesn't mean they have to do what I want. But it's healthy for them to have that feedback.

--Marsh

V'Rel -

Okay, now I know I'm going to sound territorial, but PLEASE.

You're suggesting that we TT players are suddenly the ones who need to beg patience and indulgence from MMO fans here?

No way.

My question wasn't "Is Paizo there yet?"

My question is "Is Paizo going in the right direction?"

This is important, at least in the limited sense of I love D&D and don't want to see another of my favorite gaming companies and communities implode.

I'm glad that you're excited. But I'm going to keep asking (polite, civil, supportive, friendly) skeptical questions.

If I'm nagging questioner #184, I hope there will be 185 after me, and 186 after that person.

Questions like these can only help Paizo think more carefully about how this will affect their core product, and customers like myself.

And it's more than a little off-putting to have MMO supporters demanding silence, or trying to play gatekeeper.

I can't imagine that's a message that is coming down from Paizo or Goblinworks.

They're far too smart (and cool) for that.

--Marsh

Kastarr -

Fair enough. I really do admire the business model and the talent that Paizo's management has shown.

I've expressed my misgivings. But the folks at Paizo know the history of our hobby much better than I do.

If anyone can avoid the pitfalls of this sort of destructive muddle, it will be them.

And Ryan Dancey is certainly a hardened veteran. He's seen people making these mistakes, so hopefully he will help Paizo avoid them this time.

--Marsh

It does sound like you were pretty rude.

But it also sounds like you weren't engaging the game. All the stuff about how bored you were -- dude, you know that attitude came through loud and clear.

I know that the DM is 55% of a game's fun quotient. But that leaves players with 45% of the responsibility to help craft a cool and meaningful story.

That's a lot.

So next time you're finding yourself drifting toward the fridge, or texting, or whatever -- stop.

Try to get into character and get your game on. And if that still doesn't work, think about what's going on.

Are the other players having a great time, and you're the only one not digging the story? Is everyone looking a little bored?

Once you assess the situation, speak up. Or politely drop out.

Bottom line? I would have cut you some slack for being rude. But I wouldn't have cut you slack for being a drag on my gaming table.

--Marsh

There is a sort of unceasing debate on the message boards here about myriad "broken" aspects of Pathfinder.

Classes are unbalanced at various levels. Abilities that are cool in the early game are irrelevant later. Some classes are particularly vulnerable and unfun in the early going.

Buried in all that complexity is the fact -- confirmed through countless hours of game-table play-testing -- that Pathfinder is actually a very nearly perfectly balanced, synchronized and ridiculously fun RPG through the middle levels.

If I were writing Pathfinder Next, I would essentially canonize the rules with PCs running from roughly 3rd through 12th level.

I would maintain a set of variant rules for "low magic" campaigns that include 1st and 2nd level options.

And I would include two high level variants, one for "superhero" play in the 12th-18th level range and another for "diety" style play in the 18th level and higher range.

This adjustment of the game's scope accomplishes a couple of things.

First, it brings the Pathfinder experience into the range of rules where everything works incredibly well.

You can play a rogue or a wizard or maybe even a bard and feel like you've got a vivid, balanced and effective range of powers and abilities.

Secondly, it focuses Pathfinder on what most genre fans think of as "real fantasy".

Characters much higher than 12th level have powers and abilities that just don't fit the feel of most fantasy narratives.

Obviously, anyone can just "house rule" this sort of change.

But if Paizo were to lead the charge it might also reshape things like the Adventure Paths.

It would be really cool to see what an AP story arc would look like that ran from 3rd through 12th levels.

PCs could really start with a bang -- no puttering around in the first couple of encounters -- and move more deliberately through the campaign.

(The leveling up sequence for this kind of AP would look something like this: Book 1 3-4, Book 2 5-6, Book 4 7-8, Book 5 9-10, Book 6 11-12)

I'll end with a question: How many playing groups actually spend much time playing in the levels that I'm spurning?

Would Pathfinder lose a lot of its interest if the range of play occurred between levels 3-12?

--Captain Marsh

I know I'm a broken record on this, but I think focusing entirely on game mechanics of 5.0 misses at least half of the equation.

What Pathfinder covers, through their modules and Adventure Paths, is a really high caliber of story-telling and support material.

From Rise of the Runelord to Kingmaker, there were great, pushy experiments in RPG storytelling.

I was a loyal WOTC product buyer, but their modules and series were often really abysmal, and always a big step behind Paizo.

I'd be interested to hear from 4.0 fans whether this improved after they moved on from 3.5.

If not, then they need to do more than just create a good system.

They need to reinvigorate their capacity for helping create shared stories and shared worlds.

--Marsh