kiggidykay's page

Yay! Congratulations, you two!

Congratulations, Thursty!

Hey! I'm a teacher in a grade 9-12 school, and last month my students expressed an interest in starting a tabletop role-playing group. To see how many students were serious about it and whether or not we'd even have enough to make a group, we put a sign-up sheet in the classroom; it was a pleasant surprise to see nearly 20 names on it after the first week! Most of them haven't played any sort of tabletop RPG before, but are familiar with fantasy games like Skyrim, Final Fantasy, Magic: The Gathering, and other fun stuff. A few have played variations of D&D at home with their parents and were super keen to start. None have GMing experience, but some have expressed an interest in being the one in charge of the story and monsters, so that's positive!

Thankfully, there is a Pathfinder Society branch here in Winnipeg and I've been lucky enough to participate in their games for the past year, meeting some great people and learning a lot about the game myself. I've been thinking about ways to adapt PFS style of play to a classroom setting. PFS is great model in that it allows players to drop in for shorter adventures rather than one consistent group, and that's mainly what our situation is at school with students having other activities, being out of town, being sick, or whatever.

I'm hoping to write about some of our club's experiences here and get some advice from the Pathfinder online community in order to make things run more smoothly! It would be great to get recommendations as far as materials or hear stories from other people who have been involved with tabletop clubs in schools to hear how things were run there: what went well and what challenges they faced.

Here are some of the challenges I've found with running a school group so far:

1. Time limits: Many of our students who are interested in Pathfinder have other commitments. We sometimes run a quick adventure during our lunch break (which works out to 45 minutes once everyone settles in), and had some longer two-hour games after school. As a result, it's sometimes difficult to find an adventure that can be completed from start to finish in that time. Would anyone have recommendations for stories from PFS that could fit our two-hour after-school time limit? I'm open to suggestions.

2. Group limits: As I mentioned before, we had an almost overwhelming number of students show up to our first meeting when we went over the basics of character creation. While it's REALLY awesome to see such enthusiasm, it has been difficult to maintain group sizing. We have been sticking to 4-6 players per table, and thankfully, some students have expressed an interest GMing, and it will open up more playable tables once we have enough students willing to run them.

3. Character progression: This is a tricky subject, because I want to be fair to the students who participate the most and put in the effort to attending games by having them level up, but how do to decide what is fair in terms of leveling-up speed, and assigning loot after completing a mission? I don't want it to be that one player gets the awesome sword in a quest and the rest are disappointed that they didn't get anything as cool.

4. Resources: At home, I have a decent number of Pathfinder guidebooks and other supplies like minis, but it's a real pain to bring that stuff to and from school consistently. We started out with a few printed copies of the Hero's Handbook that came with the Beginner Box, and that was fantastic for teaching the basics of building a Cleric/Fighter/Rogue/Wizard. However, my students wasted no time in going online to read about other classes such as rangers and barbarians, and were eager to start making characters of those classes. Thank goodness no one's shown an interest in summoners or gunslingers... yet. What are essential guidebooks for a beginning group? Should I bring in a few Core Rulebooks as a start?

I'm really looking forward to sharing some anecdotes about our group thus far, especially concerning the positive reactions from parents and administration, but I'll save those for later posts. For right now, I just wanted to get a thread started for this.

If I've posted in the wrong section, I'm sorry for that and hope that a moderator would be able to place this in the right section for me. Thanks!

Yay Myron! Congratulations!

I love waking up to a Bill & Ted reference. This blog made my morning. :)

For both consoles, the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games are pretty good for co-op.

I spent a lot of time playing Daggerdale and found it to be a frustrating game, especially when I tried playing with another person. Maybe try the demo before you buy.

If that Ifrit had steampunk goggles, she'd be Chandra Nalaar from Magic, haha.

Yeah, Berlin will be pretty awesome. I can't wait for this game to come out!

*Shakes fist* I'll get you next time Kiggidkev!!!!!

But but but TRIADS

I'm surprised it's taken this long for DLC to be announced for the game, but I'll get back into the game when it is released. My character was so uberstrong when I stopped playing, I expected the DLC to be easy to get through. I haven't played since December when I completed the main story and eventually got all the achievements.

Anyone playing the 360 version and tried the Kinect support with the voice commands? I thought that looked pretty neat, actually.

Lots of lined paper. For keeping track of notes, tallying HP and initiative scores, and crumpling up into balls to distract the cat when he gets too close to the map board.

If you have a full well developed world with the capacity to handle a wide variety of character concepts, then it is the player's responsibility to create a character that fits in the world.

I think this is pretty solid advice overall, at least with how my group plays. It's a matter of etiquette that a player is joining a game/world in progress should have some understanding that they need to adapt their character to fit the game and not vice versa.

Another factor is just explaining to that player how their expectations may not fit in with the game. From the PC's point of view, I'd hate to be told my idea is unreasonable or that I'm restricted to being something more normal. With my group, I just recently had to explain to a new player that no, he could not be a Lawful Good Hezrou Demon cleric because that would be ludicrously unbalanced in a group of human characters, and thankfully we worked toward something with which he was comfortable.

When my current group was just starting out, I always took the GM role because everyone else was learning how to play and uncomfortable with the notion of running all the behind-the-scenes work.

Eventually one of the group offered to run a session and came up with a one-night story all on his own. I was super excited because it was FINALLY my chance to play as a PC.

The session was a bit of a disaster. The GM railroaded us the entire game and wasn't prepared for handling anything unexpected, there were no battles, and he split the party into individual jail cells and forced one person at a time. At that time, we had to solve "Monkey Island puzzles" by looking around our cells and finding items to combine into what he expected us to use as a means of escape, and didn't allow us to use anything we came up with on our own. I think I rolled a dice one time that night for initiative and went home very crabby.

It's gotten much, MUCH better since then and we look back on that session and chuckle about it now.

I love that there's a thread for this! It will take me some time to catch up on all the posts.

As for myself, I identify as transgender. I'm not a big fan of labels but the one I identify with the most is crossdresser, as I like to go back and forth with which gender I present myself, though I most often present as a guy. The past few years have been very liberating for me as I've come out to my wife, family and friends. I could talk for hours about it but I'll keep it brief for now, heh.

Anyway, it's so nice to see a thread like this here and feel represented.

Alpha Protocol was a complete trainwreck of a game and it's interesting to read about how that happened. Thanks for that.

I went for Hong Kong... which is apparently winning at the moment! Woo!

Ooh, I love Magic! Started playing in high school (waaay back when Unlimited was the main set), but then sold off all my cards when I graduated.

More recently, I just got back into the game last year. My wife brought home a huge tub of cards that were going to be thrown out, most of which from Kamigawa block, and she wanted to learn how to play. So now I'm back into it after 10+ years of a break, and damn there were a lot of new rules to learn (I was especially surprised to see that Mana burn was removed!).

I wasn't overly impressed with the recent Innistrad or Dark Ascension sets, but I'm really digging Avacyn so far. I have a soft spot for angels. :)

I didn't get all the hate for the ending. Loved the game all the way through to the bittersweet conclusion.

The closest thing to an MMO that I've really got into was Phantasy Star Online back on the Dreamcast. I spent so many late nights doing loot runs and level grinding, but then stopped playing when Episode 2 came out and I think the big change was going from free-play to requiring a monthly subscription. Suddenly it wasn't a priority and I went back to single-player RPGs.

I didn't know this project was going on until a friend mentioned it to me the night before it was ending. Thankfully, I got in on the donations a couple hours before it closed!

I'm super excited to play a legit Shadowrun RPG after the 360 game turned out to be a generic shooter. The SNES game was a personal fave of mine in high school, and my wife loved the Genesis version, and I've read that both of them are going to tie into the story of this new game! WEE!

I always thought a male witch was called a Warlock, but I grew up watching Sabrina the Teenaged Witch so that probably wasn't the definitive source.

On the other hand, EVERYONE was a witch back in the Crucible.

Absolutely loved Avengers. I was worried it wouldn't be up to my expectations since I've been burned out on comic book movies for the longest time, but it was cool, funny, and respectful enough to the original comic I grew up reading, so I was happy.

We'll probably go see it a second time once the crowds die down some.

I've always liked Elder Scrolls as a single-player game and I'll have a hard time seeing it transition to an MMO. I guess if it's not on Xbox I likely won't ever play it though.

I was so excited to read about this last night! So happy to be involved in some way with Pathfinder Online before it actually comes out, and I want the hardcover book to add to my collection. I'm also using it as an incentive to start using messageboards more frequently to add some feedback.

Kickstarter projects are taking up so much of my money and attention lately. I've spent way more on Kickstarter in the past couple months than retail games, haha.