Pathfinder Pirates (Malaysia Edition)
Today I got to play in +Jeromy French ‘s +Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Pirates campaign.
My character is a third (now fourth after today’s session) level Rogue-based piratey type. My background for him was that he was a fairly neglected half-elf, whose father was a wandering Sea Elf (or some such). He fell to no good fairly early. He’s a bowman, rapier specialist, and does fairly well with a dagger, thrown or stabbity.
Important skill levels include Stealth +13, Perception +12, Disable Device +9, Appraise +8, and Sense Motive and Professional Skill: Sailor both at +7. He’s also got 6 ranks in Merchant, Slight of Hand, Acrobatics, Bluff, and Escape Artist. Plus some onesy-twosies here and there.
I thought of him as going ashore in advance of his crew, locating departing ships, appraising whether their goods were worth stealing, maybe sneaking aboard or bluffing his way on as a passenger, and then helping to disable the target from the inside. Fouling sails at the last minute, cutting cords on ballistae and crossbows . . . that sort of unwholesome behavior.
He’s turned into the bowman of the group (duh, elf-kin) and while not exactly a front-line fighter, he holds his own. Well, when the dice don’t hate him. Which they do. A lot.
Anyway, Pelagiyel (he goes by “Pel”) got coshed on the head and stuck aboard a ship with a Big Important Pirate Captain, and a bunch of lesser thugs. We captured another ship, and were part of the caretaker crew with some really sadistic officers from the original ship.
Naturally, we mutinied, killed our former tormentors, and are now budding pirates. Arrr!
*****
The game is played over Google Hangouts, using webcams for telepresence. The game aid is +Tabletop Forge , and it seems to do a credible job, though I’ll admit I like +RPTools ‘ MapTools better for the game interface.
I really enjoy the face-to-face (or electron-to-electron) aspect of it, combined with the computer interface where everyone has access to the Evil Die Roller From Hell, we can all throw up links and jokes in the Chat window without disturbing the flow of the game directly, and it’s VERY hard for the GM’s cat (notional cat; I’m not sure if Jeromy has a cat) to jump up on the table and disrupt the tokens.
I do miss the beer and pizza sharing.
It’s a fun game, and a great group.
******
If only the game engine were more polished.
I’m a relative novice at Pathfinder. I’ll admit my last real experience with Dungeons and Dragon was a single session (maybe two?) of DnD 3ed from 2000-2005 or so (yes, it’s likely been that long), before that was probably a single game in 1997 before I finished grad school, and then before that I was a teenager or even a pre-teen.
Anyone who thinks GURPS complicated really needs to do a bit of a reality check. 🙂 Coming from decades of GURPSiness to Pathfinder, I find it a fairly bewildering set of special cases. The class/level system is off-putting, and the characters are pretty low-powered. The tendency to metagame is large (“What level is our pirate captain, approximately? Level 10? So basically he can wipe the floor with all of us and not break a sweat, even if we can sneak up on him? OK. New plan.”) though I’ll admit it’s a great shorthand for relative power level. Since combat skills go up level by level, it’s useful for understanding threat in a way that GURPS points usually are not.
The thing that really gets me, though, is the 1d20+X skill test system. The flat-distribution system is not my friend, and I don’t ever really feel that I have a good notion for what Pel can accomplish. It doesn’t help that the dice have been wickedly not my friend in this campaign. (No, really. In today’s game, it actually became perhaps the first group in-joke.)
That being said, if you treat the dice as a narrative rather than simulation aid, (though again, the old WEG d6 system is better for this than Pathfinder or GURPS) it helps a bit. I find rolling for initiative quite fun, and there is inherent satisfaction to leveling up.
******
I don’t think I’d choose to RUN a Pathfinder game, though I’m sure I’d have an easier time finding players than for GURPS. But my experience here has reinforced an old bias:
It’s who you play with, not what you play, that drives the level of fun.
I take it you're running through the Skull & Shackles adventure path?
Yep! I haven't made up my mind about adventure paths yet. They seem like they can tend to the railroady, but thus far, in the right hands, we only really felt constrained when we tried out the Organized Play style rules, which didn't work for us very well.
Personally, I'm not a fan, but I'm tending more and more toward player agency as the holy grail of gaming (a strictly personal taste, I know).
That said, I've had a lot of fun with Skull & Shackles. The module is fairly poorly written (e.g.,you can do ten things, but five of them don't actually do anything and four more are clearly inferior), and the GM running it is downright terrible, in no small part because it's his first time running something. However, the group is fun to be around, so it's a good time – proving the moral at the end of your post.
It sounds like a fun character and campaign.
I've had a similar experience with the systems, though, and agree with you: It's the number of special case rules that get to me. It also makes it harder to write for them.
I'm interested in your Google Plus experience. I've tried it, but only with voice chat, not with webcams or various virtual tabletop systems.
The short version is that Hangouts rocked. We had the map/Tabletop Forge Beta going, plus sub-windows for me plus five or six others. One player, who has to use dial-up, needs to turn his video feeds off. The rest, on broadband, did not.
Even through a company firewall the video came in just fine. It really worked very well, and I recommend it strongly.
However (!), I had a problem quickly hooking up my wife to Hangouts using a little-used Google account on her laptop from home. I suspect if you're a regular user of Chrome and Google/Google+, it works great (and I use all three).