Funny how "why Trump won" always lines up with the political and personal views, preferences, and prejudices of the person saying it. It's a lot like how whatever somebody says makes God angry lines up with whatever they personally don't like. I'm guilty of this too, of course.
Numbers remain the same. Your first core character will be whatever the next number is for you. For example, I currently have six characters, my first Core characte will be -7. Today I found out I have more characters than Michael Brock... I like this idea, I have a lot of people in my home group (where we occasionally run PFS scenarios for credit at our home table) who would like to play but worry about all the complicated rules. This will be a big help both for new GMs, and for players like myself who don't want to keep track of all the pieces of a complicated multi-source character. Will also cut down on stinky cheese.
My first character in PFS is based on Kyra, as I had no idea how to play PFS and everybody needs a cleric. Since then, I've also played a lot of Kyra pregens in different games, and the joke locally is that there are hundreds or even thousands of clones of Kyra that get thawed out in the form of a pregen whenever a table of three needs a 4th and cleric. The avatar was one that wasn't widely used (6 instead of dozens), and I figure it represents the errors in the genetic code that appear after so many thousands of clone copies. So far I've been well pleased with it.
For the Protestants, I have always viewed them as late-to-the-party, historically, so consider a Musket or other firearm. I assume they will be commonplace in the setting, considering its time frame.You know, I like that idea. Let it be so! I'm a bit late to the party as well here, but a musket is in fact fantastically appropriate for Protestants, particularly in that time period. One of the earliest Protestant movements, predating Luther by over a hundred years, were the Hussites, who followed the teachings of reformer Jan Hus. The wars fought between the Hussites and Catholic leaders attempting to stamp out the fledgling religion were called the Hussite Wars. Some background on them:
One of the favorite tactics of the Hussites during those wars is the Wagenburg, or "wagon fort". Firearms played a key role in it: The crew of each wagon consisted of 18 to 21 soldiers: 4 to 8 crossbowmen, 2 handgunners, 6 to 8 soldiers equipped with pikes or flails, 2 shield carriers and 2 drivers. The wagons would normally form a square, and inside the square would usually be the cavalry. There were two principal stages of the battle using the wagon fort: defensive and counterattack. The defensive part would be a pounding of the enemy with artillery. The Hussite artillery was a primitive form of a howitzer, called in Czech a houfnice, the word the English word howitzer comes from. Also, they called their guns the Czech word píšťala, meaning that they were shaped like a pipe or a fife, from which the English word pistol is possibly derived. When the enemy would come close to the wagon fort, crossbowmen and hand-gunners would come from inside the wagons and inflict more casualties on the enemy at close range. There would even be stones stored in a pouch inside the wagons for throwing whenever the soldiers were out of ammunition. After this huge barrage, the enemy would be demoralized. The armies of the anti-Hussite crusaders were usually heavily armored knights, and Hussite tactics were to disable the knight's horses so that the dismounted (and slow) knights would be easier targets for the ranged men. Once the commander saw it fit, the second stage of battle would begin. Men with swords, flails, and polearms would come out and attack the weary enemy. Together with the infantry, the cavalry in the square would come out and attack. At this point, the enemy would be eliminated, or very close to it. That's a battle straight out of Pathfinder/D&D right there. Don't listen to the naysayers, I think you can make it work. Plus it only has to work for your game.
Humans are mechanically better than many of the "exotic" races, and if you look at optimized character builds, they often use humans because no negatives and the bonus feat. I was in a game where the DM wanted us to make custom races using the Advanced Races Guide and 20 race points. We came up with some very interesting things. I had a race loosely based off the tengu, it's a race of vultures that were given humanoid bodies and intelligence by Pharasma for the purpose of hunting undead. I called it the Tuiju. For my wife's character, I made an enhanced race of Grippli called "Bull Grippli". Uses swim speed, climb speed, camouflage, natural poison, and it's amphibious. Neither races are particularly game-breaking, and I'm fairly proud of both.
I play in both PFS chronicles and homebrew games. If the game is interesting, I'm not even going to look at my phone. If the game is boring, or somebody is taking forever on their combat turns, or the GM has to look up an ability for an NPC we're fighting, or two people are resolving a rules question that doesn't apply to me, or I have a combat-oriented character and there's a long conversation going on about regional politics, or I have a non-combat character and we're in combat and I've already buffed everyone and I'm just tossing a magic missile every round, then yes, I will check my phone, or play a low-thought game on my kindle fire. I'm good at multi-tasking and can divide my attention quite well. Additionally, I have PDF resources on my kindle fire and on my laptop, hero lab with a crapload of extra RPG modules on my laptop, and a fairly complete Pathfinder app on my phone. I'm of the opinion, as both a player and sometime GM, that if people are looking at electronic devices during the game, it's either a time where they don't need to pay attention, or the game session is not exciting and dynamic and it's not interesting to them, or they don't really want to be there anyway. EDIT: And if I was in a group that had a cell phone basket and IP bans, I wouldn't be in that group. I also would not be in a group that required us to arrive at the game in horsedrawn carriage or Model T.
My PFS characters right now are a human cleric, a gnome druid, a human bard, and a tiefling wizard. When I pick a race, it's for both RP and mechanical reasons. If I was to pick something for entirely mechanical reasons, it'd be a human, although a lot of mechanical thought went into my tiefling wizard. I have two non-PFS pathfinder games I'm in, one is a Skull & Shackles game and the other is a campaign in a world the GM created and has used as a setting for years. In the Skull & Shackles game I play a hobgoblin. A human would have been slightly better combat wise for the combat style I use, but a hobgoblin is more interesting. His background, the reasons he left his hobgoblin community (exile), why he turned to piracy, why he's chaotic neutral instead of lawful evil, these are things that inform how I play him and how he interacts with other people. And it's much more interesting than playing a regular human. For example, when our new fledgling pirates were punished, he scoffed and said he'd had worse when he was 4. Hobgoblin training starts early and stays brutal. This gives him the experience and perspective to laugh off anything anyone else tries to do to him. In the homebrew game, we went into it with the intention of having it be a bizarre races game. We had copies of the Advanced Races Guide, and the GM told us to make 20 RP races for our characters. I made a race I called the Tuiju, they are basically vulture versions of Tengu (which are closer to crows) and their backstory is that they were magically uplifted from regular vultures, by Pharasma, to serve as her undead hunters in a desert full of ancient tombs where ghouls and skeletons walk the lonely sands at night. He eats anything, he's utterly appalling to most civilized people, and he has a fiercely pragmatic outlook on both life and death. I also made, for my wife, a enhanced version of Grippli called a Bull Grippli, who were magically mutated to be bigger and stronger by exposure to an ancient arcane temple in the depths of a swamp. You can make exotic races interesting. You can also make humans interesting. |
