Jun 27, 2019 5:36 pm
Don't worry, it's not bad!
I've been contemplating next steps and moving forward with the game, and there are a few things I want to bring up and get everyone's opinion on.
1. I will be going on vacation from July 12th-20th to various points of the Canadian Rockies (Banff and Jasper National Parks, mostly). I'll have access to GP and to Discord, but I won't be posting much. As some of you know from other games, I say that often, but this time I mean it. :)
As a result, I'm anticipating a significant slow down in the game around that time.
We'll see where we are in the story when we get to that point, but I'm anticipating that we're going to be reaching the end of a chapter sometime soon, so it seems a good time and place to take stock of how things are going and where we'll be going from there.
2. I've expressed some frustration on the Discord recently with the Pathfinder system and how it fits with the game world I've envisioned. Chances are, had I known more game systems when I first opened the game, I probably wouldn't have chosen Pathfinder. However, I only had familiarity with Pathfinder and D&D 5E (and that just barely), so Pathfinder it was.
I saw it expressed somewhere recently that a system like Pathfinder is more geared toward optimizing character builds to be able to defeat enemies, and I realized that this was a large part of my dissatisfaction. One, that's not the game I wanted to build, and two, while I've played some Pathfinder over the years, my rules knowledge is limited to only those things I've directly used or experienced with my own characters... of which there have been two in the six years I've been playing Pathfinder (long campaigns, no character death). So I often find myself not really knowing what rule I should apply, or worrying that I'm missing something I should have thought of.
The kind of game I want to run is, as we've established several times, is more freeform and improvisational. Do you want to do something you think is cool? I'll probably go for that. But how do we fit that into the PF rules? Hm... well, there isn't a spell for that, there's no rule for it, how do we work it into the framework?
So I've been kicking around the idea of possibly changing the system the game runs under to one that is simpler mechanically and more openly embraces improvisation and flexibility in tying narrative to rules. I've recently joined a couple of games here that run under the Cypher System (Numenera is probably the more well-known Cypher-based setting) and in reading the rulebook, it feels like a much better fit.
My question to you all is this: would changing the game system be a deal-breaker for you? Would you be so opposed to such a move that you would leave the game?
If we did change, I would work with everyone to adapt their character (and their plans for their character, if any) to the new system as much as possible. I would also rework the character creation documents to reflect the new system.
Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Sunshine and butterflies? This would also be a good thread to comment on anything about the game you'd like to see discussed. I'm doing it here rather than Discord so that the commentary doesn't get lost amid the usual channel chatterspam. :)
I've been contemplating next steps and moving forward with the game, and there are a few things I want to bring up and get everyone's opinion on.
1. I will be going on vacation from July 12th-20th to various points of the Canadian Rockies (Banff and Jasper National Parks, mostly). I'll have access to GP and to Discord, but I won't be posting much. As some of you know from other games, I say that often, but this time I mean it. :)
As a result, I'm anticipating a significant slow down in the game around that time.
We'll see where we are in the story when we get to that point, but I'm anticipating that we're going to be reaching the end of a chapter sometime soon, so it seems a good time and place to take stock of how things are going and where we'll be going from there.
2. I've expressed some frustration on the Discord recently with the Pathfinder system and how it fits with the game world I've envisioned. Chances are, had I known more game systems when I first opened the game, I probably wouldn't have chosen Pathfinder. However, I only had familiarity with Pathfinder and D&D 5E (and that just barely), so Pathfinder it was.
I saw it expressed somewhere recently that a system like Pathfinder is more geared toward optimizing character builds to be able to defeat enemies, and I realized that this was a large part of my dissatisfaction. One, that's not the game I wanted to build, and two, while I've played some Pathfinder over the years, my rules knowledge is limited to only those things I've directly used or experienced with my own characters... of which there have been two in the six years I've been playing Pathfinder (long campaigns, no character death). So I often find myself not really knowing what rule I should apply, or worrying that I'm missing something I should have thought of.
The kind of game I want to run is, as we've established several times, is more freeform and improvisational. Do you want to do something you think is cool? I'll probably go for that. But how do we fit that into the PF rules? Hm... well, there isn't a spell for that, there's no rule for it, how do we work it into the framework?
So I've been kicking around the idea of possibly changing the system the game runs under to one that is simpler mechanically and more openly embraces improvisation and flexibility in tying narrative to rules. I've recently joined a couple of games here that run under the Cypher System (Numenera is probably the more well-known Cypher-based setting) and in reading the rulebook, it feels like a much better fit.
My question to you all is this: would changing the game system be a deal-breaker for you? Would you be so opposed to such a move that you would leave the game?
If we did change, I would work with everyone to adapt their character (and their plans for their character, if any) to the new system as much as possible. I would also rework the character creation documents to reflect the new system.
Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Sunshine and butterflies? This would also be a good thread to comment on anything about the game you'd like to see discussed. I'm doing it here rather than Discord so that the commentary doesn't get lost amid the usual channel chatterspam. :)