JSollars's page

One of my worst experiences was also one of my first.

We travel in the wayback machine to my junior high days, when I first got into fantasy lit via the Dragonlance novels. Met a guy who mentioned he and his friends were playing in a Dragonlance D&D game and invited me to join. I happily accept and bring along another friend of mine.

Turns out they are playing the modules based on the Chronicles line of novels, and the are playing the pre-gens (Tanis, Raistlin, etc.).

What made it so utterly boring was that all the other players and the DM were absolutely determined to make the game turn out EXACTLY like the novels did.

DM: You encounter a group of gully dwarves...

Group (to my friend): You are playing Raistlin. You need to cast Charm Person now.

My friend: I didn't memorize that spell. Can't I just put them to sleep with my Sleep spell and we can just ignore them?

DM: Actually, you did remember that you might need to cast Charm Person so you memorized that spell instead.

Group: OK, there you go. Now cast it.

My friend: Um, sure. I cast Charm Person.

DM: You meet a friendly female gully dwarf named Bupu....

and so on. No room to improvise or do anything original really. The DM fudged all the dice rolls or sometime didn't even bother to roll any dice at all if they would result in even the slightest deviation from that occured in the novels.

Luckily I stuck it out with the group and as we all got older we all became much better roleplayers and gamers. I am still friends with some of these same guys to this day, 20+ years later.

I am relatively new to PFS, but I have vast amounts of experience in multiple other organized play groups and running convention games, some with 100+ players.

So I can say with some certainly the following facts:

1. Good GMing is an aquired skill with certain requirements
2. Good GMing in an organized play environment is an aquired skill with often very different requirements
3. Good GMing at a large convention is an aquired skill with often (yet again) very different requirements

I think that is something that everyone should keep in mind. I good home GM does not a good PFS GM make (and vice versa), though of course there are core elements to all good GMing that does apply across the board.

A general GM 101 would likely be little more than review for me, but should I ever step into GMing PFS scenarios, then a GM 101 tailored specifically to the Society would be a godsend.

Since this just happened to me, I thought I would post it for others.

I apparently just dodged a bullet, as I had my item all ready to go (properly formatted, spells researched, price calculated, etc.)

I was perusing some of the older superstar final 32 item submissions, when I noticed a previous item that was dabbling in the same area my item was supposed to (incorporeal creatures, in this case). Then I noticed a second one. There was a third submission in the critique my item threads that also dealt with incorporeal creatueres and one of the points against it was that the writer had not done their research and seen that this an area already explored by previous contestants.

So, it is back to the drawing board for me. And I urge all prospective item creators to look back over the previous years of the contest at what the actual items were to avoid a lack of originality ding.

Also, look over the Judges Critique My Item threads. I often find the judges comments on the items that did not win to be more informative than the winning entries.

I picked up my set tonight at my FLGS. Awesome set, looks great.

I was actually there to play in my weekly Encounters game but all the DND players (including myself) kept getting distracted by these Pathfinder mini's. And this was during the final chapter of the current encounters season, mind you, a battle with a Dragon. Several came over to ask to borrow my set for closer inspection and then rushed to purchase their own copy before the store ran out!

Bravo to Paizo and Wizkids **cue applause** .