Maryanne Powderburn's page

Hey all!
Something rather funny happened in my home session today that I thought I would share.

I have hosted a home Pathfinder session for several years, but in the last two months we have finally started to run Society sessions. (as an aside, I wish we had discovered this years ago for a variety of reasons...) Our group is big enough that when everyone shows up, we have to break off into two tables and today was one of those occasions. So today we ran a table of four players and one of three + an NPC pre-gen. I DM'd one table and my wife ran the other. She's fairly inexperienced at running games, so the night before she and I sat down and went over the various encounters, how we expected our various players to react, and which fights might give the party problems, etc. The scenario we were both running was #1-35 "Voice in the Void".

Anyway, my group finished the scenario first due to my players being more agressive as well as my being more experienced as a DM. While my players were startig to fill out their chronicle sheets I stepped into the other room to see how my wife's game was going. Looking at the position of the figures and room drawn on the mat, I recognized that her group was in the middle of the final fight of the scenario. Remembering that the encounter before this one had been one we epected to cause issues with one of our players I asked her:

My wife gave me a horrified look, and Mike's face lit up as he said:

It turns out that her group had bypassed the

in the previous room with the intention of checking it out on the way out. Needless to say that got a laugh out of everyone in the room. Fortunately, the players were good sports about it and played out the bypassed encounter as if they had not had it spoiled by me! But all's well that ends well, and my wife was not too irritated at my stepping on her game! ;-)

Anyone have a similar story to share?

Getting back to the question posed by the OP, no you are certainly not alone. I too despise the monk class, although I would never take the extreme step of banning it from my games. (that being said, I support the right of the GM to run his/her game that they choose) But when someone does make noises about running a monk in one of my games, I do tend to roll my eyes, gnash my teeth, and generally express my displeasure at the idea. So far no one has done so...thankfully.

I dislike the the monk for two reasons:
-It is alot harder for me to do the suspension of disbelief thing in regards to the monk. I just cannot imagine a situation were anyone would willing enter combat unarmed and with no armour...let alone as the OP put it "punch a dragon to death". If you look historically at were these unarmed martial arts developed, it was usually in response to conditions were the lower classes could not be armed. Thus no one would actually make the choice to go out into an enviorment of edged weapons and armoured opponents unarmed if another option existed. Yes, others in the thread have previously pointed out how silly it might seem to have issues with a suspension of disbelief about the monk, yet be able to buy into magic, monsters, etc. But that's how I feel about it.
-A lot of my bias against monks is based upon the contempt I have in the real world for most asian style dojo martial arts as a realistic fighting style/self defense tactic. I freely admit that. In the competition ring, under controlled circumstances, they are fine and make for a good show. But in real world confrontations they are less than ideal, and over-confidence in them as a way to keep yourself safe in a real incident can and will get you hurt or worse. Likewise repeated exposure to folks who got into martial arts for the wrong reasons and who were also swaggering over-confident punks has left a bad taste in my mouth about martial arts and their practitioners. (yes, I'm stereotyping there...but once again it's how I feel)

So no. You are not alone in disliking the monk class.

Thanks for the imput, all. This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. I was also pleasantly suprised that no one griped at me for "meta gaming" in asking such a thing.

My final decision, based upon this thread, is to go ahead with the cavalier. It will be a human as that's the concept I was wanting, (not to mention the figures I had in mind) and I'm going to make an effort to use a build that will not be completely dependant on being on my horse.

Thanks again.

Greetings all. I'm a long time RPGer and my group has been playing Pathfinder for several years. Last month we decided to take the plunge and start playing Pathfinder Society games in place of our normal campaign. As of now, we've only played home games, but some of the gang have plans to branch out and play occasionally with either of the two local PFS groups that meet at local games shops. To this end, I'm planning on building a new character or two.

My question is this: how suitable are the PFS adventures for a horse mounted character like a Cavalier or Samurai? Do outdoor encounters occur on a regular enough basis to make such a build worthwhile? I've only played in the three introductory scenarios and a single season zero module, so I do not have much reference as to how they generally run.

I have my heart set on a "knight" type character, is a mounted cavalier build going to be usable in a decent percentage of the scenarios or should I just roll a Paladin instead?