kiggidykay's page

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!