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Recently I've been thinking about running a game set in the Star Trek universe, but using Luke Crane's Burning Empires rules. That got me wondering - would we be playing Star Trek or Burning Wheel at that point?

My instinct would be that we would be playing Star Trek, though I'm not sure I can articulate why that is. Basically, with a game like Star Trek, I feel like if you strip away the rules and replace them, you still have the core of what you set out to play. If you took out the phasers and the Klingons, you'd be playing a different game, like Traveller. On the other hand, with a game like (generic) D&D, the system seems to be at least as important as the setting. If you take out the D20, classes, etc., you could basically be playing Burning Wheel or Fantasy HERO.

So what's the difference? Is it just the focus of the company's IP? Would anyone say that my friends and I would definitely be playing Burning Empires rather than Star Trek in my above example? Why?

EDIT: A similar question came up for me a few months ago - a friend of mine ran a game set in Freedom City (Mutants and Masterminds) but using a variant of the Marvel Super Heroes Game for his ruleset. So which was it?

I'll be heading up to Gen Con for the first time this summer, and I have a few questions for some of you who've made the trip before.

For the most part, I'm curious about what the con is like outside the events list. Do many people run "pickup" RPG games? How difficult is it to find them? How about board gaming? Are any Paizonians planning on running anything on or off of the events list?

Basically, how much should I fill up my schedule with tickets purchased in advance?

Hope to see some of you there!

This is inspired by the "Best Movies You've Never Seen" thread, and one post there in particular.

What are the films that are generally considered to be masterpieces of cinema that just make you want to scream, and why?

For me, it would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. I tried to like it. I really did. But once you get to the third or fourth five-minute shot of a spaceship floating along in real time, you've lost me. The whole thing was incredibly pretentious and annoying, and the pacing was so slow that I couldn't care about anything that happened. And don't even get me started on the Space Baby.

So our party is going through Drakthar's Way, and I had my first PC kill. Feeling bad about knocking one of the characters off (especially since it's my girlfriend's character, and she wasn't even there for the session), I decided to allow them to bring him back. However, since there is no high priest of St. Cuthbert in town, they had to go ask the Church of Wee Jas for help.

To make a long story short, the clergy of Wee Jas agreed to resurrect the PC so long as each member of the group agreed to perform one service for the church at some point in the future. They all agreed, with the caveat that the act can't be evil in nature (though nothing was said about a neutral act that serves evil ends...).

So what should I have them do for the Church? At this point, I'm thinking of having the clergy make them turn themselves over to the town guard after the Siege of Redgorge and/or turn Maavu in for treason. Any particularly sinister ideas?

I'm starting up a new SCAP campaign in the very near future, but I actually have very little 3.5 DM'ing experience. The last time I tried this, I allowed a Warblade and a Swordsage into the party, and I felt that they were having very little difficulty with most of the encounters (in fact, I think the Warblade could have handled a lot of the adventure solo with enough breaks to heal). In an effort to prevent that from happening again, I'm trying to get some feedback on other nonstandard classes presented to me.

So, what are your overall impressions of the Warlock? I have access to the class write-up; I'm more concerned with how it plays in practice. Is there anything I need to watch out for as a DM? Any situations the class tends to breeze through with ease? Any huge gaps it leaves in party makeup if it's the only arcane caster around?

Thanks in advance for your comments!

Bump.

Any ideas when Pathfinder #1 will be available on Amazon? It said the release date was going to be August 15, but it's still listed as available for pre-order.

The "There must be one in every group" and "This is a weird one" threads have me thinking about the all time worst adventure and campaign I've ever played in. I'll provide mine; I'd love to hear the sad/maddening tales some of you have to offer, because Lord knows there is some bad gaming going on out there.

The absolute worst session I ever played in was called "Crystal Must Live." Crystal was a PC in our group infamous for the number of times she had been killed, so a guy in the group decided to base a set of adventures on this. He had us walk into some town where the people worship a god called "The Great Couatl," where Crystal was promptly possessed by an evil wizard/worshiper of the Great Couatl's evil counterpart deity. So we recruited a priest of the GC and headed off to the evil god's temple. The first adventure (called "Crystal Must Die") ended with the party killing Crystal's body, but not before it managed to whack the GC's priest. So after that, the Great Couatl himself appeared and told us that since Crystal was a good person, we were going to get the chance to rescue her from the afterlife. So far, so good.

The second adventure began with the party being sent into the afterlife to rescue Crystal. We were split up, and each of us were told by a different demon that we would have to navigate a maze to reach Crystal, containing a number of monsters equal to the amount of remaining party members minus one. I caught on and rolled a 20 to disbelieve the illusion, but the DM told me that everything was legit.

So after some pointless wandering around this maze and battling these monsters, our party thief (the DM's character) pulled us out of the illusion and told us that the monsters in the maze were actually one another. The party gets collected back together, where the demons we met up front all merge into one being...the evil deity! As we prepare to try to fight him with our 7th-level PCs, he for some reason turns into...the Great Couatl!

The Great Couatl goes on to explain to us that he had known that his priest was going to die, so he had set this whole thing up as a way to give that guy a noble death. Crystal is returned, and we all go back to the land of the living. The end.

This raised a number of questions, none of which the DM was able to answer:
1. If the whole point was to give the priest a noble death, why force us to run around that maze? Once he died, Crystal should just have returned immediately, right?
2. Why was the priest going to die? Was it cancer? If so, why not just cure him? Even if the point was to give this guy a noble death, the Great Couatl basically failed, as the priest was summarily murdered by a wand of some kind without really doing anything heroic.
3. Was the evil god created millennia ago just so that one follower of the Great Couatl's years down the line could die nobly? There didn't seem to be any evidence that there ever was an evil god, which indicates that this actually is what happened.

We pretty much concluded that the DM wrote the first adventure without having the slightest idea how he was going to wrap things up, and then I think he tried to improvise something at the last minute. The result was "Crystal Must Live."

So I'm going to be a first-time attendee at this year's GenCon, but there's one thing I haven't been able to determine based on their website. How much do event tickets typically cost? Are there free RPG events? Also, do you generally need to sign up for these in advance, or can you sign up on-site? Okay, so that was three things.

I just finished running Mad God's Key as a prequel to the SCAP, with four of my five players for the upcoming campaign using pregenerated characters.

Storywise, I introduced Shebeleth as Veltargo's boss, and the book will have contained information about contacting Nerull to free Adimarchus in case the soulcage plan fails. The PCs won't notice anything when these elements reappear, but the players should have a nice revelation, tying things together.

My biggest concern is that the players found the adventure EXTREMELY difficult - I had to fudge things several times to avoid a TPK, and even so Veltargo managed to kill the party bard and take everyone else into the negatives except the cleric. For the SCAP, we'll have another player and they'll have characters that they built personally, but should I work on scaling Life's Bazaar down to help them out?

I just received the replacement copy of Dungeon #143. Thanks to everyone at the office for your rapid response - kudos to the Paizo staff once again!

As several people on the boards have brought up, Drakthar and Tongueeater have the same weakness. Because of this, smart parties should be prepared for Tongueeater when they come up against him after fighting Drakthar, making what was once a feared encounter much easier. Was the intent to take some of the sting out of Tongueeater, or is there something you can recommend to keep him the terrifying opponent he once was?

Since there are a lot of Shadowrun afficionados on the boards, I figured this would be as good a place to ask this question as any. I'm looking to start running a Shadowrun game, but I don't have a lot of time to write up original material - are there any published modules anyone could recommend?

I've had some great times playing this game - I remember thinking that the character creation process was extensive enough to allow pretty much any kind of hero you wanted. However, I also remember absolutely HATING the system for it, specifically combat. I'm much, much more focused on story than rules when I game, so for me to notice how terrible a system is says something. If I remember correctly, it was basically just 2nd Edition D&D with hundreds more hit points in the form of SDC, meaning that even the most meaningless fights would wind up taking hours to play out. I remember that you could put five bullets into a thug before he'd go down for good.

Does anyone else remember frustrations with this system (or positive memories, for that matter)? My friends and I enjoyed the game, but I think it was more for the excitement of having a superhero RPG of any kind than for the game itself. Are there other superhero games that work better?

Hey everyone,

Based on a concern raised by Aubrey the Malformed in the "Enough with the comic book references already" thread, I started thinking about references to classic adventures in Dungeon and recent WotC products. On the one hand, they're fascinating and extremely cool for people who've been playing the game since 1e. On the other hand, they could make newer players feel a bit left out. So I was thinking that it might be a good idea to centralize information on where those references arise and exactly what they're referencing. That way, newer players will have the opportunity to go back and catch up if they so choose. I'll start off with an easy example of what I'm talking about.

3.5 Adventure: Expedition to Castle Ravenloft
Source Material: Castle Ravenloft (1e)
References: This 3.5 adventure is essentially a remake of the classic first edition adventure; the setting and primary antagonist, Strahd von Zarovich, are the same.

That one was really obvious and stated in the adventure's description, but I'm both woefully behind on my Dungeon reading and a relative newcomer to D&D in general.