Playin’ Pathfinder

Ok so instead of carrying on manically playing Crypts and Things or even driving OpenQuest into the ground earlier in the year me and my group invested in Pathfinder and since late year as time allows have been running a mini-campaign.

1. The adventure style is very AD&D 1st ed Dungeon crawl with a setting that is a love letter to a certain “grim and perilous” setting 😉  If I do get round to writing it up I’m highly likely to be doing a Labyrinth Lord write up as well as a PFRG version.

2. The players, all jaded 3.5ers, are loving it as I’m I. Every rules tweak seems to have been made in the name of FUN and COOL 🙂

3. Even though I’m a very low crunch GM I’m not feeling too out of my depth. The books are very clearly written reference books, and during play I’ve been using my Netbook to access the Pathfinder PRD.  Overall it feels like I’ve got a big friendly beardy DM called Bob on hand at all times, who patiently explains without being judgemental how to do stuff.

4. Even though I’m not using miniatures the game is running just fine.

5. I ran the first couple of sessions completely feat-less for the monsters, which you can get away with at low levels, but I’m now into the swing of it.  In away this makes the game a little bit predictable, or push button gaming as my players call it, as both sides of a combat run through their feats to get an advantage.

Overall its a fun departure from our usual style of gaming, short focused story driven, where we’ve been kicking back and just Dungeon Crawling the heck out of the adventures.

OpenQuest 2 Mega Gaming Fun edition :)

Its spring bank holiday this weekend here in the UK, and the long weekend affords me time to sit in my Ivory Tower of Doom and finally nail what I’m including in OpenQuest 2.

Over the last week or so I’ve been working on Battle Magic. I’ve already got 50 or so new spells + another batch from Nathan Baron ( author of the upcoming Empires Rising ) + spells from the Legend SRD which aren’t already in OQ.  That’s before I even start looking at ‘classic’ RQ sources for inspiration. My overall objective with the magic system is to make it less ‘whiffy’ and more fun. My players have picked up on the fact that there’s spells in there like Fanaticism that don’t do a great deal, and are in fact superseded by their Divine/Sorcery counterparts (Berserk in this example).  This isn’t new to OQ, in the previous example the players said “magic has always been a bit crap in RQ”.  In OQ1 I did a partial job of ‘fixing’ the magic system, but I was sensitive that I wanted backwards compatibility. This time round I’m less concerned.   Sorcery and Divine are getting similar overhauls and extra spells.

As well as finally making my mind up on the contents/scope of OQ2, which I’ll post here when I’m done, I’ll also be considering whether or not I do a IndieGoGo preorder. Would that be something folks would be into?