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For just getting into ttrpgs without any idea of how they work? Yeah this approach you did was good, in my opinion. It's improve with paper rules and there's a lot of people who need to relearn how to essentially play pretend, so giving them an example to work as a primer that's straight to the point is good. "Improv with paper rules," love that description.
Sounds like a fun time! It was, thank you!
Oh, hey! Thanks for this!
Thanks RedOrca! I looked around and I had stored more stuff digitally than I'd thought. I have all ten of his Chronicle sheets (plus three for a Wayfinder, a Radiant Oath Protective Mentor boon, and boon from PFS2E #1-11) AND, wonder of wonder, pdfs of his HeroLab character sheets at 8, 12, 20 and 24 XP. I'm going to throw all that stuff up on a Google Drive and write Jesse Davis, who I see is in charge of online venture officer stuff (all these were online) an explanatory--not to say pleading--note. Thanks all! --c\/r
Huh, when I saw the thread title I thought of the Fantasy Fiction Formula by Deborah Chester. Interesting! I'm not familiar with that. I know it from descriptions of improvisational techniques, I think.
Thank you, Quentin. I'll track down my Venture-person (who I guess is the online venture-person in this case?). Cheers!
I was waiting for "I put on my robe and wizard hat" Hmmm... She does wear hats a lot!
I just posted this on Facebook and thought folks here would get a kick out of it: So, yesterday, on one of our epic 12-hour dates, my lady friend evinced interest in TTRPGs (tabletop roleplaying games, D&D being the most famous) by way of asking how the Pathfinder game I played Tuesday night went. She had no idea whatsoever what they are, how they work, etc. So I pulled this move I saw online in a video of that red-headed lady from Daredevil pull on a radio interview, where she basically taught the interviewer what it’s all about by running a very free-form encounter for him—walking along a trail at night and being approached by an owlbear (if you don’t know what an owlbear is, I bet you can figure it out.) I asked Chioma if she wanted to be a wizard or a fighter and she said, “Babe, I AM a wizard.” So the owlbear attacks and I ask her what she wants to do. And she said, “Can I stop time?” I sort of spluttered and said, “Well, that would number you among the four or five most powerful wizards on the planet. But I guess, sure.” Then, departing from the script as written by Daredevil lady—is her name Karen something?—I had Chi hear some music up the trail. So instead of stopping time, she turned into a tree, to the owlbear’s confusion, so she could avoid being attacked and see what was going down. I had a handful of gnomes, goblins, and halflings pushing and pulling along a 1/8th scale replica of a caravel, painted in gaudy colors and hung with fetishes, just scraping it along the trail. They were singing a sea chanty. The owlbear went after them and I asked Chi what next. And she said (you have to imagine her Caribbean accent): “I will turn back into my true form and save the little men.” Good instincts, eh?
Good on you.
I received mine some time ago and they look great. Instead of the dry erase tablets inside the back cover, would it be possible for future versions to have the inside front and back covers coated with the dry erase material? That way there is no way for them to become lost and they do not cause the book to be any bulkier. That would be...an interesting challenge from a book binder's point of view (it would take a LOT of glue). And, I suspect, a very expensive prospect for the end user.
I'm so excited about this book!
I'm sure there are other pieces of hardware that can do the same job and do it well, but I've sure liked having an iPad Pro for Pathfinder. I've got pretty much all the Pathfinder PDFs, HeroLab, and my Chronicle sheets and Inventory Tracking sheets camera app-scanned onboard. As it happens, I prefer to game from paper, but it sure is nice to be able to carry around absolutely everything I need to play on a device the approximate size and weight of a fashion magazine. The only book I carry these days is the paperback CRB and that's mainly from some atavistic instinct, I think.
Last night at the weekly PFS game down at the local game shop, our characters had to climb into a contraption resembling the evil god Rovagug as part of a sort of mystery play at a religious festival. Once we were inside, the GM asked, "What do you do now?" I said, "We sing the Rovagug song." Did I then extemporize a fantasy role-playing version of the hit 1964 country song "Chug-a-Lug" by the great Roger Miller? Friends, I did.
I can, quite literally, relate. We have different strategies, though. On the days that the 110 mg of methylphenidate I take daily along with various coping strategies and techniques I've learned from my therapists and doctors just don't do it--on those days, to use your words, that I know the "ADD will win," and so I know I'm likely to spend time fiddling with something or etc, then, well, on those days, I don't sit down at the gaming table. To paraphrase the poet Wendell Berry, it's not the only way or the easiest way. It's one way.
I'm curious about the notion (not explicitly expressed in this thread thus far, to be sure, but hinted at) that it's in any way cool to check out of a game when your character happens to not be in the spotlight. By checking out I mean reading something or playing a video game or whatever. I don't guess it always rises to the level of disruption (though I think it can), but it certainly always rises to the level of rudeness. These games are collaborative and social, after all. All the players (including the GM) share the responsibility of creating a good time for the whole table. That responsibility isn't curtailed just because you don't happen to be rolling dice or talking at any given moment, in my view. Give everyone the courtesy of your actively engaged attention and they're much more likely to return the favor than not.
I usually print out watermarked pages from my .pdf library and keep them in a folder with my character sheet and Chronicles and so on. One of them has pages from 27 additional resources. Now, admittedly, it’s a bit of a cheat because the character I’m talking about is a 3rd level brawler and all those books are sources for feats he might use with his Martial Flexibility class feature. I went through every combat feat he was eligible for and made a list of those I could imagine he might make use of in a published scenario. The list has 80 items and 54 of them are from additional resources.
My wife, who doesn’t like my board avatar, wants to know when the image in this post will be available to replace it with.
But given Avistan’s and Garund’s deep, deep, lengthy, lengthy history, it “makes sense” more often than the opposite in this setting.
What if I were to tell you there were substantial numbers of free black Africans on every continent except Australia and Antarctica by the year 1530 CE? What if were to tell you that there were substantively ethnically diverse communities in the British Isles before the time of Christ? What if I were to tell you that the historical record on Golarion demonstrates an even longer history of economic, cultural, religious, and social exchange than the historical record here on Earth?
I’m a bit hesitant to bring this up because the novel is set in a different world, but there’s a very creepy beardless dwarf who may interest readers of this thread in Erik Scott De Bie’s 2010 novel Downshadow.
I have turned this house upside down and cannot locate the folder for Mister Rook, my 3rd level tengu brawler, and wonder what I can do about it. I keep careful and complete records, but that doesn't help me when a whole folder goes missing. I think it might have gotten tossed in a cleaning frenzy. Here's what I have. (1) An up to date character sheet in Hero Lab.
What I'm missing: (1) Physical character sheet with attendant notes of purchases, etc.
So, what can I do? Is he gone for good or can I print out blank copies of the three missing chronicle sheets and try to recreate his career so that it all adds up to what's on his current electronic character sheet? Obviously I'm available to sign the GM credit one, and one of the other GMs lives one town over and I see him once in awhile and I don't think he'd have any problem signing a replacement sheet, but the GM who ran #5-01 has left the scene. Anyway, any advice is appreciated. I'd kind of like to play this character this coming Tuesday night if I can find a legal way to do it.
This morning, my dear wife, who has played, I think, four Society games, revealed that she believes the campaign's primary antagonists to be...dockworkers. "It's all about sneaking into warehouses down by the docks or onto tied up ships. Fighting on wharves and stuff. It's like Season Two of The Wire but in medieval times." Now I'm trying to remember which particular scenarios she's played.
We should all go in and rent a place on the Carolina shore in the off-season, borrow some earthmoving equipment, pit roast a titanboar. Good times.
Hey Bob, I don’t see anything on the Winter War website about the venue or accommodations beyond a note on the front page to the effect that the usual facilities won’t be used. Do you have any idea what the room rates will be? More importantly—and I’m pretty sure I’m going to feel dumb for asking this because it has to be there someplace obvious but I’m just not seeing it—I don’t see a place on the convention website to actually register for the convention. How much is a badge, in other words, and how do I buy one? Cheers, Christopher
And I hope you're exaggerating. Ahem, I'd say that's a pretty safe bet. ;) Unless you're talking about that Wolverine guy. Because I've totally played with that guy.
There are no orders in the same way as cavaliers if that is what you mean. Ah! I see now that I may have been erroneously interpreting Dryder's post. I was thinking of in-world Golarion-specific (Varisia-specific, even, Korvosa-specific) backgrounds and of how those might spark an idea for integration of this new monk character into an existing band of heroes in the city. For "orders," then, I was thinking of Iroran and other Vudran monk traditions, techniques and philosophies from Tian Xia, and closer-to-Korvosa schools of thought on hitting things really hard and falling off buildings, not of game mechanics.
I'd like put in a word for the Jester, which first appeared in Dragon Magazine #3 (Aug 1976), and which was revised five or six years later in issue #60. But seriously, I will go way back and say that my base line character class (not necessarily in its Pathfinder implementation, mind) is the cleric, as an exemplar of the spiritual, magical, scholarly, and martial arts. As servants of higher powers and (the way I play 'em, anyway) of their communities, they seem the most heroic of all the classes to me. My answer also reflects my biases, naturally. I always want to play the character that has the most background to read up on, and the designers of RPG worlds can usually be counted on to provide a lot more detail about religions and deities than they do about schools of swordplay or, really, even "lore" driven material about how magic works. (Exceptions abound, of course.)
Okay, one more, but this one is a little obscure and unclear. Roughly contemporary with his work on the original AP Player's Guide and on the Guide to Korvosa, Mike McArtor wrote "Children of the Void," the adventure in the second installment of the Second Darkness AP. Therein, there's an NPC/adversary who receives a fairly robust background write-up, an ex-monk named Akron Erix. Erix is from Korvosa and travels there from Riddleport quite frequently still, and is secretly in the employ of the Sable Company. When that last bit is revealed, the text tells us that the Company was paying Erix not only in gold, but with a promise "that they'd put in a good word with the Order of the Fire Ghost, a sect of monks to which Erix once belonged." Now, it's been suggested on these boards and elsewhere that that line means the Order of the Fire Ghost is a monastic order located in Korvosa, but that doesn't seem to me to be necessarily guaranteed by the wording of the background. Since there's nothing about the Order (I'm 95% sure, anyway) in any other source published by Paizo, most notably in the two sources you'd think most likely would include such (the first two works mentioned in this post), those sources themselves having been written or co-written by Mike McArtor as well, I think it's equally likely that the Order is somewhere else and the Sable Company just has influence with them for some other reason besides shared locality. Now, all that said, there's no reason you couldn't have the Order (or some completely other Order, from whatever monastic tradition) located in your Korvosa, if your player wants to play a hometown character.
Okay, when James Jacobs and Mike McArtor put together the Player's Guide for the original AP almost ten years ago now, they wrote this: Few monks dwell in Korvosa, although many have heard tales of Vudran mystics or martial artists from distant Tian Xia, and of the incredible feats they can accomplish with their bare hands. Although no monastic order is based in Korvosa, there is much to attract a monk's interest in her libraries and churches. The only mention of monks or monasticism in McArtor's Guide to Korvosa is in the stat-line of a single NPC (one of the Arkonas). Further afield, there's the School of the Four Winds in Magnimar, said to be "a monastic academy dedicated to the natural world." And, depending on what your player's concept is, you might want to look at wild and crazy Kaer Maga, which is not only a lot closer than Magnimar but offers two different options: the more traditional Temple of the Endless Step and the brawling Brothers of the Seal. I'd think a non-core race monk would be more likely to be from Kaer Maga if that's the case here. Oh, and the one I was actually thinking of when I wrote "at least one in wider Varisia" is the House of the Blue Stones, a small Iroran monastery and library in good old Sandpoint.
Do you know if the player has any ideas about his character's background? Do you know the character's race? Is he using any archetypes? I'm trying to remember if there's an actual monastic training center of some kind in Korvosa itself but not coming up with anything off the top of my head. There's at least one in wider Varisia, though.
I've never had players so versed in the world lore that they'd notice. Oh yeah, that's been my experience for as long as I've played RPGs. It's been a source of some frustration, to be honest, but I've made my peace with exchanges like this: Me: I have carefully coordinated the lore created by hundreds of writers, artists, cartographers, developers, and editors to provide an enriched and robust play experience complete with religious, historical, economic, social, and cultural components interacting in a nuanced shared storytelling environment. Player: My guy's like Wolverine but with armor. Who's hiring us? I just rolled a 20 can I save it for the first fight? Me: Erm, no. As for who-- Player 2: Is it a duke? Knowledge Nobility check, I rolled a 20. Me: Wait, before we get started we need to establish the bloodlines of your horses with the tables in this eleven-year-old campaign supplement and-- Player 3: Which one of these wifi networks is yours? I bet you're Candlekeep, right? What's the password?
Yeah, I think constructs (other than golems, which enslave elemental spirits) are the way to go here if you want to avoid ethical issues. Or just pay a fair wage and ensure good working conditions and enjoy the superior fruits of an engaged and involved labor force.
Can you set up the link to vote for the finalists? I think what you need to do is go to this page and then click on the SECOND mention of voting--you're looking for the poll that's below the main blog entry, not the link at the bottom of the blog entry itself.
I'll be most likely running the gallows of madness module for my players this Thursday and will be the first time I use a module. How do you guys recreate some of these maps? They're very detailed and while we do have access to a relatively big chessex map, they maps are also kind of on the big side regardless....POSSIBLY bigger than our chessex map (though not sure, our chessex map is thankfully pretty big). The module in particular has one place with two floors, how would one go about preparing for THAT? Two floors, you say? Here's what I did last time that came up. In all seriousness, it entirely depends on what kind of time you want to spend and what kind of, I guess, "production values" you and your group enjoy (hopefully collectively) creating. One solution is for everyone to chip in on a second reusable battlemap and predraw everything you're going to need on a session-by-session basis. For the published modules and APs and so on, when I don't build terrain, I tend to use various programs to blow up the map images, digitally edit out the bits the players don't need to see if such editing needs doing, then tile/poster print the results and mount them on foam core. Of course, I buy everything digitally these days, so this suggestion might be glossing over a whole bothersome intermediary step where you have to scan the maps. That said, doing all that stuff is, like painting miniatures, kind of a whole separate hobby that I happen to enjoy, and if you don't, then yeah, have the players pony up for another map, get out the dry erase markers, and don't sweat the details.
Or, you know, walk the worlds--doing good, learning stuff, meeting new people and seeing wondrous new sights. The Old-Mage Jatembe route, if you're into Golarion stuff.
There are a number of Golarion specific games of chance detailed in Pathfinder #13—Second Darkness Chapter 1: "Shadow in the Sky." Which you can get for five bucks as of this writing, looks like.
A literally flavorful magic item, I love it. My favorite items are those that suggest that there was a story behind their invention. |
Pathfinder Society GM. 951 posts (1,602 including aliases). 2 reviews. 1 list. 2 wishlists. 14 Organized Play characters. 8 aliases. 