The Awesome Silliness of Fantasy RPGs

Originally published on Sidekickcast.com

If you’re a fan of role-playing games, you probably got introduced to the game through a little thing called Dungeons & Dragons. It may have come by a different name back then, such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but the general gist remains the same. In my unscientific study, about 99% of gamers were found to have come into the hobby via some iteration of D&D.

I’ve hopped around a lot in the RPG hobby, and while I got off the D&D train, my current game of choice, Pathfinder, is an extremely close cousin of the world’s first role-playing game. While there are a lot of reasons I tend to stick close to the D&D tradition, one of the major ones is the oddball humor that the game’s history is steeped in.

I like a good beer and pretzels game, where the play is fairly casual and the jokes are frequent. And when it comes to D&D-style fantasy, the jokes have been baked into the game for decades now.

The Pathfinder Playtest: Changes to Come

We’re less than five months away from the release of Pathfinder 2^nd edition. Folks who participated in the playtest saw a notably changed system, and those who kept up on the regular updates saw the game change even more due to player feedback. After all that, what will the final version look like?

Only the designers know for sure, although fans can expect previews as the hype for the new edition builds. But interviews during and after the playtest, not to mention the update documents themselves, already provide some hints as to what’s coming. Here’s a breakdown of the changes we can definitely expect from 2nd edition.

Weird Magic Items I Wish I’d Used

Originally posted on Sidekickcast.com

Thanks to whatever weirdness inhabited the heads of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, fantasy gaming has some really bizarre stuff baked into its history. I’ve gamed long enough to use a lot of that weirdness (including my personal favorite, the deck of many things), but there’s still so much more out there. Here’s a quick list of some of the fun items in Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder that I’ve always wanted to slip into an adventure but have never quite been able to make fit.

Super Mario Pathfinder

I have a son who is getting interested in role-playing games. He is also extremely interested in the Mario franchise, to the point where he refers to himself as Mario. His sister gets to be Princess Peach, his mother gets to be Princess Daisy, and I’m stuck as Luigi.

Recently, I decided to fuse these two interests together, resulting in a Super Mario Brothers edition of Pathfinder.

Delving into the Book of Erotic Fantasy: Wear Protection

Originally posted on Sidekickcast.com

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition introduced the Open Gaming License, which made huge chunks of the D&D rules open to third parties. It created thriving adventure lines, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics and even allowed the creation of competing games, such as Pathfinder. But by far one of the most simultaneously awesome and horrible products that emerged as a result of this license is the Book of Erotic Fantasy.

The Pathfinder Playtest: Where Did These Changes Come From?

Parts of the Pathfinder Playtest seem like a jarring change to the system to me. That’s mostly because I spent 10 years running a game that used very few rules beyond the Core Rulebook or the Beginner Box. The major change to the action economy and the removal of old multiclassing, for example, feels weird.

That said, I did stay on top of new rules releases as part of my whole freelance writing thing, so I can see that many of these major changes still have Pathfinder DNA. If you’re wondering where all these changes came from, it mostly boils down to a decade of optional rules expansions.

The Pathfinder Playtest: Character Creation

Paizo Publishing released their first look at the next edition of Pathfinder last week, offering a free playtest rulebook that people can use to put the new system through its paces. Character customization remains a large part of Pathfinder’s appeal, but the process by which you create your hero has changed.

Has it changed for the better? That depends on what you want out of the Pathfinder RPG.

Gaming Stories: Hubris and the Deck of Many Things

One of my main GMing strategies when I run a D&D or Pathfinder campaign goes something like this:

1. Give the PCs the deck of many things.
2. Wait for them to draw from it.
3. Have fun with the results.

If I ever doubt this strategy in the future, I just need to think back to a Pathfinder game in 2017 which cemented this as a terrific strategy.

The Setup: The PCs, a group of high-level mythic characters, ventured into the Abyss to rescue an entire city that got sucked through a hole in reality.