All In On Pathfinder

In 1994, I was introduced to Vampire the Masquerade (2nd Edition) and loved the game. The group that I played with played weekly, then multiple times per week, then almost nightly for 3 solid years before slowly that pace down until I left the Navy. After leaving the Navy, I ran only Vampire games from 1997 to 2015 before finally branching out into other games (due to finding a group willing to branch out with me).

As you could read in my previous article, You Can’t Protest Against D&D and Continue to Play It, I outline that I refuse to play Dungeons and Dragons due to the company that owns the property. I won’t rehash that article here but it comes down to wanting to dip back into fantasy and my options for “big name” fantasy titles really boiled down to Fantasy AGE and Pathfinder. When I mentioned this to my current group and they heard the word Pathfinder, that became the defacto option.

After a bit of reading I went all in on Pathfinder.

First and foremost, I wanted to prevent myself from running into a conflict with my DnD protest, so Pathfinder 2e was the obvious choice. The OGL connects Pathfinder to DnD and while the initial release of 2e to Dnd, the Remaster project is removing all traces of the OGL from the system. While my group initially started with the base 2e system, we are migrating towards the Remastered materials at a pace that I consider acceptable.

Knowing this, let’s not linger on the bad stuff, let’s talk about the greatness that is Pathfinder.

Building the Never Ending Campaign

The first thing that I did that I have never done with my groups before was announce that I am not building in an ending to this campaign. With all of the actual plays this website has released and all of the games we have played in the past, I have built in “seasons” of limited runs to give us breaks to play other games to get a rotation of different systems going on so we can get some variety going. My changing this coincides with my attempt to turn my Discord server into a full blown RPG server AND to get more games running on the server at once.

Currently on the server, we have one of my Pathfinder players running Exalted 2e and I am running Pathfinder 2e (Remaster). Ideally, there would be many, many more games being run on the server. But back to Pathfinder.

I launched the idea of running a never ending campaign. The first move was to pick a place to work from, an origin point from where the players could work from for at least the earliest part of the game. This was the city of Ardport, which we chose a location using the globe on the Pathfinder Wiki and then I bought Inkarnate to make the actual map of the city. We are in Andorran, at the delta of two rivers joining.

Having to build a city from scratch was a lot more fun than I initially thought, especially since Inkarnate helped with their pregenerated building options. Even for Ardport being my very first map, I think the whole city turned out really well.

Once I had a city for the players to operate out of I needed a “tutorial” for the combat for them to interact with, so I created a mini-dungeon for them to be able to fight a bunch of monsters and find some loot. This was intended to be a one night affair and little did I realize this would turn out to take 4 full weeks of fighting their way through this place.

FOUR FULL WEEKS.

Learning that combat is a slower affair than what I am used to was something that I needed to learn as well as the players. I am also new at Pathfinder and that was a big eye opener. Everyone loves the 3 move economy but man does it tend to slow things down quite a bit.

I am developing my own RPG as well and while I want to have a multiple action economy as well, I am trying to prevent having such a lag as Pathfinder has.

Having everyone’s character sheets in one place was also something I really wanted, too. That task fell on this wonderful website I discovered (and purchased full access to immediately) called Pathbuilder2e. This sheet does everything for you, except make the choices you need to make for character creation. All the math is done for you, all the clues that you need to make choices you might have forgotten on a pen & paper sheet are prompted, and you are able to roll right off of the website because it gives you everything you need to make the rolls! As a GM, I am also able to put on buffs, conditions, see their damage taken, and know what is going on with the characters just by having their sheets open on my computer!

While I intended to have some experience points handed out after each session, after the 4 weeks in the tutorial dungeon, we collectively decided that milestone leveling was probably the way to go. The amount of combat in the dungeon they incurred leveled them up to 2 and their encounters since have had them level to 3. Sure, this seems like quick leveling but I have been slowing it down and I have a plan for their continued progress forward.

Structuring the Campaign

Now that we have established the characters and have established Ardport, there have been several questable things that can be done for small gains that can be made if the group doesn’t want anything too heavy hitting. These include ideas I have found online, such as a Magical Text Recovery system from all the libraries in the world (that will pay for the retrieval of magical texts that are lost, stolen, or missing), as well as the Adventurer’s Guild hosting wanted posters for some villains or monsters in the area.

The idea behind these things is that they can get used to seeing wanted posters in every Adventurer’s Guild so that they can always make a “quick” buck or two if they need some action, or they can snoop around in their adventuring and happen across some strange text that might be available for some coin to the libraries.

I made sure to make ALL libraries part of this because that way, like a video game, they can turn these texts into any of them and get paid rather than just Ardport’s library. The idea is that I want Ardport to be a place they can always come back to but not some place they should feel tethered to unnecessarily.

On a side note, I was initially worried about coming up with titles for these magical texts, but I happened across a random magical text name generator (which is for DnD but it’s really just a fantasy magical text title generator, really). The website is DnDSpeak and is specifically their Random Book Generator part of the site. Serendipitously, the site also gives a gold piece amount for each book (which I’m only using as a sort of guide) and a page count, as well as what the book has for contents. Far more than I could have asked for, which was just the name of the book.

Google and the Internet is a wonderful place for resources for TTRPG resources. If you embark on something like this, make sure you are Googling for the resources you need and make sure you check out more than one source because sometimes what you need isn’t the first one.

I have every book for Pathfinder 2e Remastered to run the game, and to organize things for campaign needs I have been using Obsidian, which is a resource I have been using for notes and other things for years now. If you are a Game Master and you aren’t using Obsidian, you need to start looking into it. Specifically in this case, I have been using Josh Plunkett’s Vault (available for purchase or free if you subscribe to his Patreon). This vault is designed for DnD campaigns, but if you know what you are doing, you can convert it to being used for Pathfinder with some tweaking. I have tweaked it to work for Pathfinder and have been organizing things so that I can start keeping track of what has been going on… as of session 7, which is the next session as of this writing.

The Golarion that we are playing on is not the canon planet. I have chosen that because there is other stuff going on that will alter Pathfinder canon in ways I can’t recover from if I try to weave it into my larger story, so I decided right off the bat to just ignore canon. None of the players are interested in the cosmology (at least yet), so there is no interest in the solar system, the galaxy, or some such other points of interest. They literally are concerned with power gaining and what’s right in front of them, which sometimes is sad but also easy to plan for in the long run.

What Comes Next

I’ve been all in on this since we decided to play Pathfinder. I have immersed myself in the world, the lore, and I look forward every week to running the game. There hasn’t been a game I’ve run where I’ve been THIS excited on a weekly basis to run a game. With no end in sight, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

The plan is now to start working the campaign into a 3 plot system: an A plot, B plot, and C plot. The A plot will be the campaign’s BIG arc, meaning the largest goal to solve for the group before the major phase of play can end and we can begin a new phase. The B plot is a smaller arc that is designed to interfere with the A plot periodically but can end whenever the players decide to end that plot. Once plot B ends, it’s over. The C plot is the session plot, or the smallest of the plots. The C plot is the “get the macguffin” and return to home base plot so that we can do the next C plot next session. Sometimes that C plot might be 2 or 3 sessions but it will always be the short term goals.

I am in the midst of setting up the 3 plots, obviously starting with the first A plot, for the biggest arc of our first real campaign arc. Once I get the A and B plots set up, I can start just running C plots at them and see where things go from there.

On the side, though, I started pre-planning on a new Vampire the Masquerade campaign idea that has been stewing in the background. It is an epic idea that infuses elements of games I have run before into one (games like the archaeological/mystery game Weird AGE) and will challenge the idea of what the players think about what is established Vampire canon (as Vampire canon will be tossed out if the players end up making changes that alter the present). This game is, in movie terms, in pre-production at the moment so there is nothing to detail at the moment… plus my excitement for Pathfinder has my full attention at the moment, so Vampire is truly not he back burner.

Thanks for reading and see you soon.

We Have An RPG Discord Server

Were you aware that we have an RPG Discord Server?

If you’re interested in playing role playing games, running them, just click that link and you’ll be joining a group of folks who are also interested in the same things! We’ve got at least a couple of games running every week but we could have more! We need GMs as well as players. The more the merrier!

Why not come and join in?

You Can’t Protest Against D&D And Continue To Play It

If you are reading this, then you are probably aware of the mismanagement of the Dungeons and Dragons brand by Wizards of the Coast (and by extension, Hasbro). There isn’t going to be a lot of going over what happened but I do need to set the stage for this article by stating that everything discussed here is because of that horrible mismanagement.

Role playing game fans all know that Dungeons and Dragons started the whole industry, for all intents and purposes. We all also know that Wizards of the Coast has done some pretty heinous things with their stewardship of the intellectual property, too, which has led to many organizing boycotts of certain aspects of the IP or other such organized protests.

I argue that the only way to effectively protest is to not play.

DnD is arguably the most popular RPG in the world. I would argue that there are other games that would be well within that conversation at this point, but for the purposes of this article we’re just going to stop at DnD being the top. Since they are the number one in the world, there is a responsibility to maintain a certain level of understanding towards the fanbase regarding how they treat the IP in general.

Wizards of the Coast have failed in that stewardship at almost every turn.

When boycotts of products or services are organized, there is always an understanding that some will not participate. Having 100% participation in a boycott would be phenomenal in sending a message but there are always some who think they have no chance at affecting change, believe their part will be too small to make a difference, or just don’t care enough to participate to make things better. Wizards of the Coast want to make as much money as possible at the expense of the consumer, regardless of the quality of the product and that is why boycott talk started appearing. As soon as the small capitulation of Wizards giving in to the OGL controversy and making them walk back a terrible decision, most of that protest talk stopped. It shouldn’t have, though.

Protesting Properly

The last time I played Dungeons and Dragons was in 1996 in Okinawa, Japan with some friends in the Navy about three months before I detached from Naval service. I wasn’t pleased with the situation way back then but the only game I could get anyone to organize to play was DnD, so I joined their game. My participation ended about 3 sessions in, when the group and I made the mutual decision to part ways. The DM ran the game like a payroll department and I couldn’t have hated it more than I did, so I stopped playing.

I haven’t even looked at a DnD book since.

There are innumerable game companies that took the OGL license and built games off of what DnD originally established, which personally boggles my mind. Why would you build an entire role playing game off of someone else’s work? There are far more companies, however, that went out and built brand new systems and created so many more new ways to role play that the “crunch heavy” DnD looks cumbersome by comparison. I personally branched out along with these new companies and left DnD behind, expanding my RPG experiences 100-fold while others I asked to play with me often sat in their DnD rut and refused to leave.

All the while complaining about the same problems.

On this website, I have been trying to build a place for people to come and role play. Just like websites like the Glass Cannon Network, Happy Jacks RPG Network, and other places that host actual plays, I would love to host a variety of actual play podcasts done in a style that is befitting a professional gameplay style. The one game that I won’t participate in, nor allow on this website in an actual play, is DnD… at least until the stewardship of the IP changes hands to a much better steward.

I am against participating in Dungeons in Dragons, personally. I am also against participating in Dungeons and Dragons for others who have the same problems I do, as well. Their arguments usually end up being “but I’m not buying any new books” or “I’m pirating anything new I need.” That doesn’t send a message to Wizards of the Coast, though, because you are still participating in their intellectual property.

You and your normal game group get together to play DnD, even though all of you hate Wizards of the Coast. One of your friends brings along their girlfriend to lurk for the night because she’s curious about how the game is played. The game is played and the girlfriend loves what is going on and is into joining the group for the future. She doesn’t understand the hate for Wizards (she doesn’t even know who Wizards are) and goes out and buys her own copy of the DnD core book.

Protest failed.

Not only has your group produced a new follower of a game that has problematic stewardship, not only has that new follower purchased the products that are overpriced and ruining the brand, and not only has that group gotten someone new excited about their favorite game without the proper context surrounding the property but now she’s going to tell others about this and get more new followers into the hobby.

I do not play DnD. I do not purchase their books. I do not encourage others to play. I do not encourage others to pirate their books. I do not encourage others to encourage others to do anything I would not do. I do this because I want to affect change. I do this because not doing it is being a “rebel without a cause,” meaning I would be complaining about something that I actively participate in. If you like to box but you don’t like getting punched in the face, yet you still box, then you have no right to complain. Nothing is going to change that way.

If you want to make change, you have to do something different.

What Else You Can Do

If I’m not playing DnD, what else is there?

This is the one question I get after my argument that makes me the most angry. What else is there? Are you joking?

Without leaving the fantasy genre, I can name FantasyAGE, Pathfinder, GURPs, and Savage Worlds. If we expand to other genres we can expand to FATE, Genesys, and Burning Wheel. How about specific IP games like the Expanse RPG, Doctor Who RPG, Alien RPG, Dragon AGE, or the Marvel Universe RPG? There’s different genres like Legend of the Five Rings, Vampire the Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, and Traveler. These are just the games that I could think of off of the top of my head!

So, if I say to stand up and stop playing DnD and you respond by asking what else is there? It’s time to read a book because you’ve been living in a bubble. There are so many different systems out there to try, ones that are worlds easier than DnD to learn, ones that range from fantasy all the way through futuristic space operas, and ones that tell stories in entirely unique ways from DnD… so why would you want to limit yourself to only playing one system?

I do not play DnD. I do not purchase their books. I do not encourage others to play or purchase their books. I have taken a stand and now you understand what that actually means.

DJ