Straying From the Path

I have been surprised with how much I've been enjoying Pathfinder. As I may have mentioned before, I've never really been a D&D player -- because, you know, Call of Cthulhu is better -- and I'd parted ways with the gaming hobby during D&D3's lifespan, so all I had to go on was stories of how popular the third edition was, how annoyed people were by the seemingly-opportunistic move from D&D3 to D&D3.5, and how the whole thing got a bit unwieldy under the increasing pile of rules supplements.

So when our group made the decision to move from D&D4 -- hereafter referred to as The Unmentionable -- to Pathfinder, I was wary, but I thought it was only fair to give it a try and see what it was like for myself.

The Pathfinder core book is a massive thing -- bigger than Rogue Trader, which was intimidating enough -- and the rules have a lot of working parts, and yet it remains quite fun to play. I suspect that this is because I've been playing as a monk, a relatively simple class; the two players who chose spellcasters are often wrangling with specialist rules and long periods of spell list preparation, all of which would be beyond my feeble mind. It's also perhaps significant that we've been playing for a while now -- we must be coming up for a year -- and we're still getting rules wrong, so it's fair to say we haven't mastered the game. Even so it has been fun, and I have no complaints, whereas by now I was ready to mutiny in our The Unmentionable game.

Paizo have just begun publishing a new Pathfinder campaign -- sorry "Adventure Path" -- called Carrion Crown -- I feel there should be a definite article there -- which owes more than a little to the old TSR Ravenloft setting, and as a horror fan, it did pique my interest just a tad. It was suggested that once we finish the Kingmaker cam... Adventure Path, we move on to this new one, and furthermore that I run it. This seemed like a fair idea.

Then I ran Carrion Hill.

What I discovered was that while I enjoy playing the game, I do not like running it in the slightest, as there's far too much stuff in there. Now, one might say that you don't have to know or use all that stuff, and that's true to an extent, but there is an undeniable feeling of obligation when you know that the rules are there, just waiting; what you get as a result is a tendency -- despite the best of intentions -- to pore through the massive four-billion-page Pathfinder rulebook to discover the correct procedure for applying fire damage to pickled gherkins, and then the game falls over dead. In other words, you could concentrate on getting the core mechanics of fighting, skills and magic right and just handwave the rest, but you'd know you were doing something wrong.

As such, while I would like to run (The) Carrion Crown, I would rather run it with something simpler like Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord -- the difference between them and D&D3/Pathfinder is more one of detail than mechanics -- but alas I know my group would never go for it, not in a month of Sundays. Not that I would use S&W -- for example -- as is; I'm quite fond of the options Pathfinder characters have, so my ideal situation would be to use the simpler game as a frame for all the major mechanics -- gherkins burn on a d6 roll of 5+ -- but front-load the complexity into the characters, perhaps even use the Pathfinder classes as they are, with minor tweaks for compatibility. I've even entertained the possibility of completely bespoke characters, so while there's no dhampir race or rogue class in S&W, I could build a one-off dhampir rogue for the player who wants one.

This would be the best of both worlds for me: lots of options for the players to mess around with, but the minimum of fiddly bits for me to wrestle with as a GM, so I can get on with the plotting and the silly voices. At the end of the day though, it's all theory and wishful thinking, as I don't think it'll fly with my lot. On the plus side, it means I get to play in (The) Carrion Crown; I'm considering a wererat barbarian or -- if I can get away with it -- some sort of zombie.

What a Carrion

Last night, we wrapped up the Pathfinder one-off we started last week, with the player-characters successful in rooting out the cult activities in Carrion Hill and defeating the eldritch abomination the cult had summoned.

As I mentioned before, I found the Pathfinder ruleset to be far less intimidating to run than I had anticipated, but even so I think it's too bitty -- in the sense that it has a lot of working parts -- for my liking, and if I were to run a D&D variant again in the future, I think it is likely to be something a bit more loose and interpretative like Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord. The move in D&D3 -- and thus Pathfinder -- to codify everything has I think led to a situation where exploitation of the rules has become more possible, rather than less; a good example of this is the idea of an optimum character build, something which is almost unknown in earlier editions. I don't begrudge the playing of the system in this way -- indeed my monk in Ben's game is an example, with his five attacks a round and his inability to be hit -- but I do wonder if the game as a whole is unbalanced in loading all this on the players' side. Much as I hate to admit it, but the Unmentionable Edition is perhaps more robust in this regard.

I'm sure it is possible to head off the exploits and level the playing field, but I suspect it takes a familiarity with the game that I am never likely to have, and that it would be easier to achieve in a simpler system. We shall see, as I have already been asked to run something under Swords & Wizardry.

I also wonder if these issues would have been as prevalent if the adventure had been better. I was quite impressed by Carrion Hill as I read through it, as it has a clever time-sensitive element as well as a neat modular structure reminiscent -- perhaps deliberately -- of the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep. The players are thrown into a situation, but can tackle the next sections in any order they please, which in turn can affect the climax of the scenario. The problems arose in the details, and these only became apparent in play.

The adventure suffers from a lot of glaring bottlenecks in the plotting. For example, the vital clue which lets the players know what to do next and unlocks that modular structure is written in Aklo, a language most characters are unlikely to have, and which is not even represented among the included pre-generated characters; the party got around this by having the cleric spam Comprehend Languages for a whole day, but that led to them falling afoul -- if only a little -- of the time limit. On a similar note, there are far too many sections where high skill values in Knowledge (Arcana) and Disable Device are required to progress, which can end the scenario right there and then unless the GM fudges things. The scenario more or less demands that a wizard and a rogue are in the party, but nowhere is this mentioned, and again the pre-generated characters don't measure up and are unlikely to hit the numbers required.

Furthermore, nonsensical situations abound and only exacerbate the bottlenecks. A building with an epic-level lock on the front door is bad enough, but for the same building to be made of thick stone, to have no windows and for the doors to be made of the same thick stone stretches credibility. Is this a fortress, perhaps? Or a gold depository? No, it's a brick factory. The whole adventure seems to be designed in this negative, passive-aggressive fashion, where everything is there to hinder the players, as if this were not a game, as the whole point of it was not for people to have fun. That said, some faults lean in the players' favour, such as the villain who occupies a room too small for the whole party to enter, which would be fine if he were a close-quarters fighter rather than a magician. Or the big final monster of the scenario, which is so big that by the rules as written it should not be able to get out of the first location, let alone get close enough to the player-characters to menace them at the climax.

I have bought two of Paizo's adventures. One was so awful that I knew it from a read through, but Carrion Hill surprised me. If I am to use their scenario materials again, it will be as a source of ideas rather than something to be run as is, as the convenience of a pre-written adventure is outweighed by the poor writing.

Found

With our regular Pathfinder campaign paused in order to give GM Ben a bit of time to recharge, we've been taking the opportunity to try some new games. Last week Stuart blessed us with another excellent Cold City scenario -- it remains a brilliant game -- and last night I picked up the baton and ran a one-off Pathfinder scenario, as Ben had mentioned that he was keen on seeing what it was like to play the game from the other side of the GM screen. I picked Paizo's Carrion Hill, as all my games seem to turn into Call of Cthulhu at some point, and this gave me an excuse.

I think I ended up running the thing by default, as no one else was in a position to volunteer, and I have to admit I was a bit concerned. My tastes in game design are for more simple rulesets, not the five hundred page monster that is the Pathfinder rpg, but I think it turned out okay. While the game does seem to have a rule for everything, in most cases you can get away with picking a target number, and getting the players to roll a d20 and add the result to whatever ability you just decided on a fraction of a second before.

One might think that having a prepared scenario helped, but I've discovered that Carrion Hill, which seemed so strong on a read through, has some real problems. I won't go into them now, as we're only half way through and I don't want to spoil anything for next week, but suffice to say that it has some serious design flaws, some of which a half decent editor should have spotted.

All that said, my first attempt at running the game didn't seem to be as huge a disaster as I'd imagined it would be, but I'm still not sure it gave Ben the experience he wanted! He has been nudging me into running Swords and Wizardry or Runequest though, both of which are much more my kind of thing, so we'll see what, if anything, happens on that front.

On the Boil

I can't recall ever having so many gaming projects on the go at once. Back in my wayward youth, I'd concentrate on one game or setting for months, before moving on to the next game and doing the same, all of which often came to naught as the group decided to play something else anyway. I'm sure this is not uncommon within our hobby.

I am working on three unrelated projects at the moment, but on the plus side, much of the work is already done for two of them:

• Our Pathfinder GM has expressed a desire to experience the game as a player for once. In fairness, this situation has arisen because he's always so full of enthusiasm for running his latest idea for a D&D-variant game, so we let him get on with it. Even so, I've volunteered to run a scenario so he can try the game from the other side of the screen; I have chosen Paizo's Carrion Hill, which is rather appropriate, as whenever I run something it seems to end up as Call of Cthulhu, and now I have an excuse.
• In the summer, I finally got a chance to run an Eberron game, albeit using Savage Worlds as the ruleset. At some point in December, I'll be running the sequel to that: Savage Eberron II: The Jewel of Galifar. Most of the work is done, but I've taken Stephen King's advice and have put the scenario away so that I can come back to it with fresh eyes in a few weeks. My plan is to run these once or twice a year, as a series of linked adventures, but not quite a campaign.
• Most recently, I've been brainstorming ideas for a return to my Rogue Trader game. I now have a good outline for the plot of the next chunk of the campaign, which will be a bit more linear before returning to the sandbox of the first "season". Players being the special snowflakes that they are, I expect it to be nowhere as direct a journey as the word "linear" implies.

In other news, we hit seventh level in our ongoing Pathfinder campaign last night, although since I've been blessed by Nurgle I decided to stay away and play via Skype. Which was fine until the camera cut out at their end and the microphone cut out at mine -- so I could only hear them and they could only see me -- and communication consisted of me attempting to figure out what was going on from their discussion and holding up handwritten notes to the camera in response.



From what I could tell things got a bit hairy, with at least two characters into critical condition -- perhaps Stuart can provide a more detailed synopsis -- but the party emerged from the troll caverns victorious and with a sizeable haul of treasure, including a +2 thundering great sword for Stuart's barbarian Artemisia, further nudging her towards the Weapon of Mass Destruction prestige class.