Last week was a pretty active week for me, in terms of tabletop gaming. Three of four possible games happened and I enjoyed each of them in incredibly different ways. While I’ll save my ruminations about my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath for Friday, I have plenty to write about from the Elden Ring themed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e I played last Thursday and the game of Pathfinder 2e I played two days later. As I’ve mentioned before, the Thursday game is one that has been going on for a while and meets at least somewhat regularly. I’m still fairly new to Pathfinder 2e and the group I play with every other Saturday, but I’ve been settling in well despite our scheduling issues and enjoying the somewhat more intense roleplaying that game provides compared to the encounter-heavy Dungeons and Dragons game I play. The two of them make for a lot of fun experiences since I’m very comfortable with D&D’s rules, so I can just relax and enjoy some silly combat stuff, and I’m always happy to do a bunch of roleplaying, so I’ve got a fairly easy environment in which to learn Pathfinder 2e a little better. I’ll admit that some of my knowledge gains in that game feel a little futile given that the remastered version of the game is coming out soon and I’ll have to unlearn and relearn a lot of stuff when that happens. Especially since some of that stuff is what I’ve been very focused on previously since my character, a rogue who dabbles in alchemy and tons of crafting, apparently lands in a lot of areas being reworked from one edition to the next.

The latest Thursday session was another combat-focused encounter, as they all are, but this one had a fair amount of puzzle-solving built in since our main foe could turn invisible (in a way that meant they could still attack us and cast spells) and fly, which mean it was incredibly difficult to pin down their location. I wound up wasting several of my limited-use abilities trying to locate them, none of which worked out for me. We had some luck with our limited-area area of effect spells, but we have only a small number of those and the areas they effect are fairly small, compared to other types of spellcasters. It was a frustrating fight, for a while, though it was frustrating in a fun way, since it required us to be lucky, to attempt to problem-solve, and to think outside the box. Eventually, we managed to find the creature by a combination of luck and my character’s high movement speed. I had managed to track it down to a specific area and then, by running around and throwing weapons, my barbarian was able to locate it, grapple it, and then drag it to the ground. We both had a fly speed, you see, so I was the only one who could get it while it was in the air with the manual dexterity to actually do something once I’d found it.

After dragging it to the ground, a temporary ally was able to hit it several times in a row and break its concentration, forcing it to become visible again. Thanks to good encounter balancing on the GM’s part, the enemy had a fairly low hit point pool so we were able to get it to about half health right then. Unfortunately, it revealed the range of its personal teleport and was able to temporarily get away from us. I managed to run it down, however, use my special ability to attack it five times, and leave it almost dead. Moments later, it was finished by an ally and our long-running, largely aimless battle had finished. It was an odd session, to be sure, since it took us the first two hours of play to find it and just over half an hour to murder it immediately after that. A lot of us were forced to work without our main abilities, since I wasted mine on trying and failing to locate it while my allies were forced to expend theirs as a part of their effort to deal damage in a wide-enough area that they might hit it. Some of our strategic choices were sub-optimal, unfortunately (mine included), but we all had fun while the fight went on. No one seemed to mind this odd encounter, though I think we’re all looking forward to a straight-forward fight next time. Though, of course, the GM might be planning yet another weird fight since this one actually took real work on our part to deal with since we couldn’t just power our way through whatever foes he placed in front of us like we usually do. Either way, I’m excited to play again.

In my Pathfinder game, we didn’t do any fighting. We had ended our previous session right at the conclusion of combat, since the GM wasn’t feeling very well, so we picked up right from there. Dead body on the ground, pointed silence in the Fae Market we’d just killed a shopkeeper in the middle of, and all our wounds still fresh. It was a weird place to pick up, especially given that we’d skipped three sessions and were kind of fuzzy on the details from that long ago. We managed to get back into the swing of things quickly enough, each of taking a few moments to add a little characterization to our end-of-fight moments. Since I’m playing a professional suspicious bastard who is incredibly clever, I spend my time cleaning up my allies’ spilled blood and working to respectfully arrange the corpse of the manipulative, extorting fae we’d killed in her market stall. The other players mostly healed themselves, dealt with the head of the market complaining about our actions, and talked to the person we’d rescued–the brother of one of the player characters. After that, we went back to our inn, rested up a bit, caught up with the rescued brother, and then went to attend a town hall meeting.

The town hall meeting had a lot of fun characterization moments for my largely unknown character. Since my clever alchemist rogue is has Social Anxiety, is awkward as hell, and not even a little neurotypical, I got to show off a more relaxed version of my character when they spotted someone they’d known for a while and gotten comfortable around. I also got to dial up the awkwardness during the town hall when they pushed themselves to speak because it seamed like the people leading the meeting weren’t sufficiently prepared to deal with the trickery of the fae when it came to negotiating terms (since my character has motivations behind their actions that drive them to push through their dislike for attention). It was a lot of fun to have those very different moments right next to each other. It was also fun to have my character duck out of the rest of the night’s events by saying they were going to go to bed immediately since they get up before sunrise and had some early errands to run with a couple of their local contacts. That’s the upside to playing a character who earns their keep by crafting various magic items, potions, and alchemical supplies. I have contacts in all the fun shops who are willing to see my character outside of normal shop hours.

I wasn’t the only one who got to have some fun scenes, either. Two of the characters got to continue their awkward, flirtatiuos dance. One of those two got to have a one-on-one chat with the GM and to describe their normally lazy character as being almost manically excited about a project. A third player got to describe the creature comforts and indulgences their character invested their time and money in, to further add to his characterization as a stranger to this land, and the last player got to have a very fun, cute rolepalying segment with a local NPC friend of his, which several us noted was the cutest thing to happen all night. It was a very rewarding session and barely any dice were rolled. Hell, I think we players forced our characters to roll for things in order to unnecessarily complicate our characters’ lives more than the GM requested that we roll for things. It was really a fun session.

I really hope both games get to happen during their next scheduled sessions [the weekly one did not, but there’s still hope for next week]. Both of them look like they’re going to be fun and I really do enjoy playing tabletop games of any kind. I wish I had more of them, to be honest, but I’m pretty much at my limit right now so I don’t think it is time yet to add anything else. Soon, though. Soon. Maybe I’ll even break my self-imposed silence in the chat for the defunct Friday game to see if those folks are interested in eventually returning to our game or if we’re officially calling it quits. A significant part of me wants to leave my Friday nights open just in case that game comes back, so it would really be good for me to get an answer one way or another.