I’ve been chronicling an experiment I ran over the summer with my gaming group to play a different RPG every week, and try to keep a contiguous story line going. While the experiment itself is over, I’m a little behind on the articles. If you want to read from the beginning, the first article is here.
This week, we made an unscheduled detour into a Pathfinder one-shot. At the end of our Shadowrun adventure, one of the players requested we play it, as he had a friend who wanted to find out what RPGs were all about. I was more than happy to go along with this, especially since it meant I got to play instead of DM, but how to fit this into the overarching story that we’d been loosely holding together over the summer?
My first thought was to create a situation where the PCs would need to go back into the “Island World Biodome,” where the setting was fantasy. However, if you read Ping Time (the Shadowrun adventure I ran), you’d know that the clients were a group of high school students. One of the players conjectured that, when they returned the victim to his friends, perhaps they were all in the basement playing an RPG. And maybe the PCs were invited to play along with the high school students. Super meta, I know, but it was a cool idea, and we went along with it. So the Pathfinder one-shot was what the Shadowrun PCs played with the high school kids; when the one-shot was over, we “zoomed back out” into the Shadowrun world for a little Leverage action. But that’s next week’s post.
Of course, we all know that Pathfinder is the “spiritual successor” to D&D 3.5, or maybe “built on the 3.5 engine” – however you want to say it. I’m going to assume you’ve played it. No need to rehash the mechanics here.
The session started with each of the players coming up with a reason to dodge the king’s mandatory draft, as there was an army camped outside the gates. After that, we were thrown into the secret basement of a church with other draft dodgers. When some soldiers showed up to search the chapel for fugitives, we escaped out the back door into the city.
From there (I felt) there was no other story hook to help us choose a course of action. Instead of just fumbling around, I decided to take the bull by the horns and act. The cause of the war was a fugitive that the city was harboring, and my character conjectured that if the fugitive was turned over to the invading army, the war would be called off. I know for a fact that the DM had entirely something else planned (though I still can’t figure out what), but he did an excellent job of rolling with our choices and improvising something very fun. The rest of the adventure was us devising a caper, and failing miserably. Only half of us survived (the half of us that were smart enough to retreat when the dice started going south).
What I Learned
I learned a couple of things from this session. First, I learned that if I were to do this “one RPG a week” experiment again, I would mandate that the DM duties be divided up among the group. While some of the players don’t feel comfortable DMing a system they know, let alone one they don’t, I realized that learning and running a new system every week is stressful. Even with lots of tools at your fingertips like free premade adventures and quickstart rules. I would have been a lot more relaxed over the summer if I had had more chances to be a player.
Second, I learned that I’m not actually a fan of 3.5, and that 4.0 was a vast improvement on the D&D system. And this is coming from someone whose first edition was D&D 3.5. I was the party’s cleric, and it struck me as boring that I had to choose whether to heal or do something else on my turn. I remembered why players used to bemoan the fact that they were just a “heal monkey.” And the problems weren’t just with cleric … however, I’m not here to start an edition war, so I’ll leave it at that. I realized that it isn’t my cup of tea.
Finally, it’s great to help new players learn the game. Regardless of your favorite RPG or edition, bringing new players into the fold is fun. Showing them that anything is possible is fun. And watching them finally catch on and jump into the action is the most fun of all.
Next week, I’ll be writing about my first foray into Leverage, the heist RPG based on the TV show by the same name. Stay tuned!
Benoit
Benoit is the editor in chief of Roving Band of Misfits. He also does most of the writing. When he's not writing for the game, he's usually building something with his Hirst Arts molds or painting minis. He's been playing and running D&D for, oh, about 10 years now. But who's counting?