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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!
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Such a coincidence that I happened to log-in now! I've been running a middle-school Pathfinder club and have started to post about the experience. Here are some links:
Discussion thread here at Paizo (Warning: my initial ideas were very different from what I do now!)
The 1st of two posts I've written on my RPG gaming blog
The blog I've set up for the class
As to your questions...
TIME LIMITS: For hour-long encounters, look at the Beginner Box Bash Demos. As for PFS scenarios, I would be surprised if there were any that fit easily into a 2-hour time frame. But to be honest, my initial concern about continuity was not shared by the kids -- they basically were ready to jump into anything at any point, including into the middle of an adventure. Also consider adapting from books that contain short mini adventures. Here is a discussion thread that I've used to find resources.
Also, I've found that my kids really love to create their own adventures, based on simple encounters or battle setups. But they're middle school students -- perhaps because your students are older they'd be more interested in moving beyond that?
GROUP LIMITS: If you have an overly-high proportion of students who want to play vs. GM, there kind of isn't much to do -- either have some overly-large groups, or allow some players to "wing it" and improvise an adventure. As for what I've done in my class, I have created an XP system by which STUDENTS (not their PCs) earn XP for adventuring and doing various other things. For GMing, they get a clear bonus. Just something to consider.
CHARACTER PROGRESSION: There is now a wide range of levels in my class -- characters from Level 1 to Level 9. I try to avoid level spreads greater than three in any one given adventure. If there is a big disparity, I've had the high-level students create "apprentices" -- level 3 characters -- to adventure with characters who are between Level 1 and Level 5.
As for treasure, I have basically seized the reins and decided who myself gets wait based on a notion of fairness and drawing a balance between what makes sense for the group and not letting any one character get too powerful relative to their peers. So perhaps that one student gets the magical sword -- but the rest of the coins and gems go to the other characters, and next time there is a dispute over who should get wait, the student with the magical sword will lose out.
RESOURCES: Haha, Paizo knew what they were doing by limiting the classes to four in a product that is geared toward children. They soon want to try out EVERYTHING!! Yes, the Core Rulebook is the next purchase. The other thing they will really want to see is the Bestiary (which besides includes important core rules within its appendices.) Also, see the Beginner Box "Transitions" document from Paizo which functions as sort of a reading guide to the Core Rulebook.
Also, feel free to point them to my class's website, where under "Character Creation, Game Rules" I have set up pages with info on all the various classes and races in the Core Rulebook, Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat.
Consider using EdoWar's excellent Beginner Box class conversions, which simplify and make adjustments to the classes so as to be compatible with the Beginner Box rules. I also include links to those on my website as well.
Basically, they will want to jump on top of the new options and learn what is important to THEIR character before trying to get an overall grasp of the system. At some point, they will want to start trying out the full Core Rules. At that point, make sure to explain to them about attacks of opportunity (if you decide to use them), and about the various kinds of action types (standard, move, full-round, swift, free). They won't get everything right, but that's okay.
You could actually run the PFS adventures as PFS adventures, you would just need to span them over multiple days. You would need to make sure you have a commitment from every player, and, the best things would be to take a picture with a smart phone of any battlemat layout at the end of a play period.
PFS scenarios are designed to play in 1 4-hour time slot. 5 45 minute sessions is 3:45 hours. The benefit of running PFS is additional Society goals, and NO PVP, No evil alignments. In addition easily controlled rewards are generated.
That's my 2 coppers.
A fellow Canuck, eh? I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops. Also- I was watching TRG's thread too, but lost track of it- nice to see it's still going strong!
PFS scenarios would be a good choice, and encounters can be broken apart pretty easily.
It also solves your problem with player levels. The students who play a lot will end up with more, low-level characters, but you should be able to get everyone involved most of the time.
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Since your at a school, you have some options for speeding up you setup and tear down to maximize your play time.
Most white boards are magnetic, so use a overhead projector or if the room has a projector use that to project the map and use magnetic tokens from walmart or the Dollar store, there an inch across and come in several colors, your students could draw or download and print a image and stick glue it onto the token, takes less space than a mini and more durable when thrown into a big bag. Using the whiteboard or projector still allows you to use fog of war and have a initative table and buffs written in a side bar to keep it quick and viewable to all.
If you are even a little computer savy, use excel as your vtt software, its simple to use and easily available. I use paint.net to sanitize maps of all markings and cut/crop out all the secret doors, traps, etc. Then just import each map of a scenario into a excel sheet, add all the secret doors and traps ontop, then I add block shapes ontop of that to hide the map (fog of war). The selection pane feature lets you view/hide areas as needed. I keep a set of semi transparent circles off side incase someone throws down a darkness or other spell effect and just drag it onto the map and size to spec. If your on a network you can lock the sheet and share it, and the players can move themselves around. Or just manually move the magnetic tokens on the whiteboard. Takes me about an hour to setup a scenario or module once, but then its good to go anytime. But if its all onscreen I can just save it and open it later when I run out of time, even in mid imitative order. Otherwise a quick camera pic from a phone remembers where everyone was standing.