This past weekend, I had the opportunity to play (as a player!) in a tabletop roleplaying game for the first time in a long while (long enough that I can’t remember when that previous time was, but that might be the general fog of the last year more than a measure of a long time). It was a one-shot that a frequent player and friend of mine put together that was a sci-fi, star wars/trek game run in Dungeons and Dragons 5e–because that was the system that everyone was familiar with–but everything was given a sci-fi twist rather than a fantasy one. The GM herself admitted later on, as we talked at the end of the session, that this particular game was basically the rough draft of a concept she had for something that she’d like to run in the Star Wars 5e ruleset, but it had been a long time since she’d looked at the rules and none of us were terribly familiar with them either, so simple and straight-forward with a system we all knew already was the order of the day. I had a decent amount of fun, even if it was a bit of an RP-light session (it kinda had to be, since it was a one-shot), but I definitely oveprepared in ways that were both incredibly useful for the group and a little personally frustrating. I have a tendency to do this sort of thing since, as a forever GM, I’m always offering to fill-in wherever I’m needed and while I got to chase my preferred idea for this game, I wound up doing it in a way that was technically interesting to build and run, but not particularly satisfying or fun.
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Playing A Shipshape Support Character In A Birthday One-Shot
Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to our trip to Spain in 2023 and our desire to run a D&D game in a castle while we were there, but this was my first time playing along side one of the players and my first time to play under this GM since early 2023. It was nice to be back at his table, to be able to play a silly, goofy character, and to enjoy some light-hearted fun. And then talk with one of the other players for an hour and a half after that, which included discussions of creating a book club for the two of us to use as motivation for getting through interesting-to-talk-about-but-difficult-to-read books like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which we’ve both bounced off before). But I digress. This post is about the one-shot, my fun little character, and how I incorporated both my desire to create an interesting thematic character while still making one that will be an effective part of the mechanical side of the game. They were built as a nod to the limitations of a one-shot and as a means of maintaining a high degree of effectiveness that would, if used well, make my allies look good instead of me.
Continue readingPathfinder 2e Finally Clicked For Me, Thanks To A Friend’s Game
After many months of discussion via the comments on Facebook posts and, eventually, in Facebook chat itself, I got to play a game with the person who convinced me to give Pathfinder 2nd Edition a shot beyond the unfortunate group I’d begun playing it with. Which isn’t to minimize the work another friend did, but they just fell short of a fully compelling argument. The other friend, though, managed to convince me that I should keep trying by absolutely nailing why I was struggling to understand the game system without me even knowing that I was having one specific problem (well, one problem that functioned as the root of all my other problems). So, when she offered to run a game for me, to help show me why she loved Pathfinder 2e as much as she did, I made a promise to myself that I’d find a way to make the scheduling side of it work. Plus, I’d never gotten to play a game with her before this and tabletop games was most of what we talked about online. I wanted to meet some new people, play some new games, and try to expand my horizons a bit.
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