Excuse my ignorance but...What is Pathfinder society? what makes it different from an adventure path? can anyone help me with this?
http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety
in short, they are short encounters, done in a different format.
Its the organized* play for the game , as well as the in universe justification for this weeks adventu... ermm... organization of gentleman explorers dedicated to knowledge.
In a nut shell, they are a series of 4 hour scenarios of various levels. You could be excivating an osirion tomb 1 week, attending a high society dinner party the next, and navigating the vast mawangi expense the week after.
Play 1 with a character, get a chronicle sheet that shows you played the game, some gold, and some XP. Get 3 xp. level up, wash rinse repeat. The games get reported to Paizo.
The nice thing about it is you can play your character(s) anywhere. I can go to a friendly local gaming store, play Grognack the barbarian, go to a con meet some new people and still be Grognack, then go on vacation and find somewhere to play.. still as grognack. You meet new gamers, and you don't have the same DM all the time. You can swap out players/dms every week so one person doesn't get stuck dm..erm.. everyone can experience the joy of DMing.
Its 20 point buy (so someone's little brother doesn't show up with the strait 18s they rolled "fair and square")
No magic item creation (because downtime is hard to track and doubling your WBL is just nuts)
A few things are banned. Synthesist summoners, undead lords, master summoners, and vivisectionists come to mind but on the whole the campaign is amazingly inclusive.
*disorganized? :)
Oh, vivisectionists are banned? That's kind of weird.
Oh, vivisectionists are banned? That's kind of weird.
There are lots of different reasons things get banned, and they are usually pretty good at explaining why. For example:
Some things are banned because evil alignments as a whole are banned: items/spells/abilities that require an evil act or can shift your alignment towards evil are also banned.
Some things are banned because of game balance issues. Since GMs don't have as much freedom to reign in overpowered characters and since they can't alter scenarios much, they banned abilities that can lead to rules abuse.
Some things are restricted because we have limited time to play scenarios. Flooding the battle map with an army of pets greatly expands the length of combats.
Some things are banned because it's a shared-world setting, and things have to fit into the setting.
Oh, vivisectionists are banned? That's kind of weird.
Their flavor text is a little nasty, and they completely eclipse the rogue at the rogues own job.