Knightingale's page

Chris,

I know this post is like 4 years old, but if you are still living around Durango and looking for a game, feel free to let me know. I've been here for about a year and our Pathfinder game is going along well enough, but could use some more players.

Knightingale

Does anyone have any recommendations on what APs might combine well into one double (or even triple) sized result?

Richard

I'm about to start a campaign in which I want to combine the 3 original Varisia Adventure Paths. I'm doing CotCT, RoRL, and SD. I like to use the system where the entire party levels as one, and I have no problem delaying that as we go through the game so that everyone is more or less an appropriate level for the adventure we are currently on.

Anyone have any ideas on how to combine those 3 plots and hop back and forth between the various modules?

Knightingale

In some ways going to the ER will get you bad care. This isn't meant as an insult to ER physicians.

You'll get wonderful urgent care. What you won't get is maintenance and follow-up. You'll get the immediate crisis taken care of. You won't get help managing a chronic condition. You won't get the drugs you need to keep it from recurring. You might get a referral or a prescription, but if you're going to the ER because you can't pay and they have to treat you, you won't be able to afford the prescription or a visit to a specialist.

The ER is great at what it does, but it's not a health care system by itself.

Exactly. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who either think it is a healthcare system or have no other choice.

Knightingale wrote:

But saying, that people can just go to the emergency room is ABSOLUTELY NOT the same thing as the US having universal healthcare.

You are actually "ranting" about what I wrote... despite the fact that we are in complete agreement on this.

What I wrote was that the requirement for emergency rooms to treat people provided 'universal health care' (note the scare quotes) "in a sense". I also then said that it was comparatively BAD care... because of all the reasons you list.

The implication you apparently took, that 'ER health care' is just wonderful and a great way to handle things, was not my intent at all.

1: Sorry for not officially quoting you in my post...despite the fact that forums are a common part of the internet, I'm actually not very experienced with them, and how the quote system works, and I messed it up.

2: I understand that you and I agree, though looking through my post, it does sound like I was trying to pick a fight. I'm not. Obviously I'm fairly close to this issue and I tend to be fairly passionate about it because I want to help my patients as best I can. I meant no offense.

3: Slight change in topic: One thing that I think people have a misunderstanding of is why going to the emergency room is a bad system of healthcare. When you say it's a "comparatively BAD care", I think you mean that it's a bad idea for the system as a whole if that's the only way that people can get their care. I agree with you. I think there is a misunderstanding that some people think going to the emergency room means you are going to get bad care (as in, actual poor medical choices being made), which is demonstrably false, and which I don't think is what you were implying in your post. The emergency department has vastly more medical resources than pretty much any other part of the hospital. We can manage large traumas, devastating illness, get cat scans and MRIs and blood tests and have the results within a couple of hours, which if it was in a clinic somewhere, could literally take weeks. We can pull in specialists in nearly every department of healthcare and have them come to the bedside in minutes if we need to. That's one of the reasons that we are so back logged and busy all the time, people just want everything done all at once instead of trying to wade through a system that has them taking weeks to get tests back and months to see a specialist. It's just easier for people to go to the ER and have it all done at once in one visit. The problem is, that's not what the ER is designed for. It's designed to rule out and manage emergency lethal illnesses, not diagnose every little ache and pain. If I had a dollar for every patient I've seen who got pissed off at me because I didn't order a STAT MRI for their back pain, I'd finally be able to pay off my absurd student loans. I have to explain to them that just because I CAN order a test and have it done immediately doesn't mean that I SHOULD do it. As an ED physician it's my job to order tests to help me rule out an emergency, and if I don't think (in this example) someone is having a condition that will lead to the loss of life or limb within 24 hours, then a very expensive emergency test is not indicated.

"Hospital emergency rooms are legally required to treat patients. They can't say 'you do not have insurance so please go sit in the corner while you bleed to death' (or, 'we have been unable to determine whether you have insurance because you are unconscious, if you come too before you bleed to death we'll ask'). Ergo, in a sense the United States already has 'universal health care'."

Sorry, I have to step in on this one. When I'm not playing Pathfinder, I'm an Emergency Physician. One of the things I love about my job is that I never have to ask anyone what health insurance they have. I just try to treat my patients and help people as best I can. But saying, that people can just go to the emergency room is ABSOLUTELY NOT the same thing as the US having universal healthcare. If it was the same thing, then emergency departments around the country would have the resources they need to handle the influx of patients that come to them. Throughout the entire country the emergency departments are always backed up and what we call "bed blocked" because there are far more patients coming in on a daily basis than the system is designed to hold. And it's true that many of them are coming in when they don't actually have an emergency, and yes, that's annoying (very...trust me), but at the same time, where the hell else are most people going to go? They don't have health insurance, or enough health insurance to cover what they need. There aren't enough primary care physicians out there to see them all, so even if they can find one that'll see them for cheap/free, it's going to take months before you get an appointment. George Bush famously made the stupid comment "Just go to the ER", and it lead to a wave of patients just adding to the line in the waiting room without actually doing anything to help people.

For the record, I love the idea of having a national healthcare system. I like the idea of socialized medicine. The United States is the only 1st world nation on earth without some sort of an intelligent healthcare system. It must change and it will change. If we continued going in the direction that we were, the national average per family of healthcare was going to be THE SAME as the national average income per family by 2025. Obviously that's not going to happen, the system will collapse before then. Obama wanted to change things and give free healthcare to everyone in the country while at the same time decreasing the overall healthcare cost for the country and elevating the level of care for everyone. And in response, the Tea Party pulled a "Godwin" and put up signs of him with a Hitler mustache. They wouldn't let him change things for the better because they truly would rather see this country fail than this president succeed at something.

Sorry...enough ranting.

After finally moving out of DC and into the midwest after graduate school, I found myself in a smallish town, a new job where I'm legally only allowed to work 80 hours a week (though I often wind up having to work more), and knowing absolutely nobody. So after a few months of never having any time for a social life outside of work and sleep, I decided to look back into gaming again for the first time in a decade or so. I had played was the dungeon master A LOT in high school and for a year or so afterwards, but when that group of friends dissolved (as they always do after high school), I never got back into it again.

So I looked into it, and D&D had moved on to 4th edition in my absence. I knew nothing about it, and was hoping to find a game where I could at least somewhat remember the rules. So I found a meetup that was about 30 minutes or so from my new house in the ghetto that was playing 2nd edition, and they were open to new players.

I showed up, slightly nervous, with a bag containing some pencils and a pouch of old plastic dice. I didn't even have my old PHB anymore. But the people in the group were incredibly welcoming and friendly. I was surprised to find that most of them were actually my age, and that a few of them also had just started gaming again after a several year hiatus. I thought that since it had been a while, I'd roll up a character that was easy to build, and probably easy to play. A basic human fighter.

It was a homebrew world, which the DM had been building for several years and he apparently knew the entire planet in and out, and some of the players that had known him a while were pretty happy in it. So I pulled out my fighter, and asked the DM if there was an easy way to get my character into the storyline. I was flexible, whatever would work for the story.

The party was in a small keep in the wilderness of some sort, having just arrived there from an apparently disastrous mission gone wrong where everyone nearly died trying to get a MacGuffin of some sort. They had returned to the keep to heal up if they could, and get some more information about the evil doer they were up against from the local nobility. The DM and I agreed that an easy way for me to be in the town was that I was a town guard, but that the guarding business was getting old, and I was interested in looking for other employment, hopefully with a band of heroes out to do good in the world. That way it was going to be really easy, all he'd have to do is give the party and I a chance to run into each other and we'd quickly role-play a reason for me to join the group.

The DM proceeded to spend the next 8 HOURS having the party meddle around the keep and village and always just missing where my character was, and never giving us an opportunity to meet. He wasn't doing it to be an a**hole, he was actually a rather nice guy, he was just an incredibly inefficient and useless DM. He had no idea how to guide a storyline, or give a group of players a reason to perform a task.

After 4 hours of literally not ever meeting a single member of the team, just watching the players wander around the village buying rations and having discussions among themselves about the mission they were on, and even trying to push the plot forward by role-playing things on their own between themselves, I was going mad. I wanted to grab the DM by the lapels and start screaming "You don't know what you are doing! I haven't been a DM in 10 years, but if you hand this game over to me, I will have this party together and on the road in 20 minutes! We all know how this works, we are all at an inn, and my character approaches the table and we spend 4 minutes role-playing a conversation that gets the new guy into the game, and then we move on with the story!"

At the end of 8 hours of gaming, the only thing that managed to happen was my character was finally introduced to the group (by passing by the guard (me) posted at the front gate). Absolutely nothing else happened for the entire session that pushed the plot forward. The other players seemed to be pretty annoyed that things moved slowly in that game too, but I think they were so desperate for a game that they were willing to live with it.

I tried with that group another couple times over a couple of months, but again, nothing ever happened. It was a waste of an evening each time. And when I wasn't playing there, I was getting annoyed that the hosts (not the DM) were always bickering with each other about their marriage in front of all the other players. I don't need to hear people having a marital fight, I'm there to imagine a martial one.

So I walked away, amiably enough, as it wasn't as though anyone there was a real dick or anything. It was just a miserable way to play the game. I then found a game shop north of my little house in the ghetto where they ran LFR in 4E. I started going there for a few months, and the "one shot adventure" method really worked well for my constantly shifting schedule, and the guys in the shop were great. I made some friends with some of them, but eventually found that 4E was not filling the gap for me that I wanted an RPG to fill. For me, at least in the store, it was all about the combat, like a table top version of an online game like WoW or something. And while there inherently isn't anything wrong with that, it wasn't as fun as the RPGs that I had played years before. After talking about this with a couple of guys at the shop, I found there were others who agreed with me, and we started putting together a Pathfinder game. Now I"m hooked, I still work crazy hours, but I've got a group of friends outside of work again, and I'm having a hell of a lot of fun both as a player and as a DM with the pathfinder system.