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Why I don't run Pathfinder anymore, and some salt about a Defective GM

Started by Don Coyote, October 15, 2015, 04:29:02 AM

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Don Coyote

 As some of you may know, my first exposure to RPGs was in the 90s with a combination of the Holmes bluebook and the AD&D DMG. My brother and I didn't play a whole lot of it, but we played some. I played some with a friend in middle school.
We also didn't the same access to console games, unlike other children of the 90s.
The two of us, my brother and I, did play a possibly excessive amount of Risk, and when Magic: the Gathering came out, 1993, we weren't playing it yet. We started playing it around the time Ice Age came out, 1995, but for our household it wasn't until 1996 when Mirage came out, that we started playing in more heavily, when the Tempest block came out, 1997, we dove into it.
As brothers, we were extremely competitive towards each other, which is great when playing a competitive game. For a fair amount of time my brother was better than me, but over all we were evenly matched.
By this time, we had both had more exposure to console games, we even had a play station, and were playing the final fantasy series.
I started playing D&D more heavily when 3rd edition came out. I was in high school. I played it at school. Like a nerd. Back then I never ran into the weird problems I have run into running and playing Pathfinder. I still didn't run into these problems when 3.5 came out and I ran a brief campaign during college.
I had started playing MTG again with the Mirrodin block, 2001, with my friends, different friends from my school based D&D ones. I didn't play at school because the school MTG culture was one of "oh noes I'm drawing the cards I want I must look through my deck" and other gross disregards for the rules of the game. Games have rules. I like to follow the rules of the game, that way when I change them I can explain why. In any case, I never found it satisfying to play MTG with people who don't know, understand, or flat-out ignore the rules.
While this makes me sound like an insufferable rules-lawyering prick, I actually wasn't. I simply chose not to play with people who didn't play the way I wanted to. This carried over into playing with my friends. I had over the course of that period of time, made several decks that used once or twice and then never again, because my friends didn't enjoy playing against them. I find fun to push the game, and figure out why certain design choices were made, which is one of the reasons I still to this day have a huge amount of scorn for the "stop the game I'm mana hosed let me dig through my deck some land," and the "nuh uh, all lands gives you mana" type of players. The game did, and does, have cards that do that, on top of the fact that part of the game is luck and chance, and that those kinds of players strike me as poor losers, and probably winners.
So, how does this relate to Pathfinder?
I am not a charoper, one of those people who do theorycrafting and other such things to optimize their characters for Pathfinder, or other table-top games. I used to be fairly into the theorycrating of paladin tanking and hunter dps in World of Warcraft. Not because I really wanted to, but because in order to do the stuff that was fun, raiding for me, you sort of needed to do some minimal research and experimentation. Even then, I did it to the point that I gained enough of an understanding that allowed m e do things that weren't 100% optimal, in the eyes of the poorly informed or just plain stupid. Things like tanking heroic instances in DPS gear. Because ultimate, games are about fun. This is why I would lambaste assholes with illusions of eliteness, especially when they were wrong.
I don't play table-top rpgs to scratch that itch. I could play WoW, or MTG, or find some other game. When I sit down to play an rpg, I want to things other than exclusively or heavily combat.
But with that being said, when playing, or running, a game like Pathfinder, which has an emphasis on combat, it really pisses me off when tactical, strategic, or logistical thinking is not rewarded or outright shunned. This is something that seems to plague portions of the Pathfinder community. They expect a "balanced" and "level appropriate" encounter, which means, they want to win, and even if they win if they didn't win with the kind of ease they wanted, they complain. Those are actual complaints I have had from players when I was running.
Naturally, this is a problem with the people, not the game; I've had this same problem running ACKS and B/X. However, Pathfinder requires a lot investment of everyone involved to get it to work. Retuning encounters, rebalancing loot, repopulating dungeons, all of that demands more time.
The point of this rambling is more of a reminder to myself why I don't run it. If I don't this, I'll try to run it again. I enjoyed running PF when I first picked it, and I was enjoying running PF until have to scuttle my participation in that group, even with the one major problem player who was the root of all the complaints. I enjoy playing it, my wife is an excellent PF GM. I really enjoy making monsters and NPCs for it, just browse through the Pathfinder tag.
But, it's a game built on certain assumptions: you will have X plusses worth of bonuses to certain rolls at certain levels, a balanced encounter is one that won't generally kill a player, and your character is a special hero. As such, without magical items, saving throw based attacks favor the caster, not the target, which is the opposite of everything prior to 3e. I did some math, and baring a huge disparity in caster stat to saving throw, at equal levels as levels go higher, casters will dominate because of save or suck.
While I could houserule, or use some of the other variants, either published by Paizo or on the internet, the amount of work it requires me to alter PF counter these inbuilt assumptions is not worth it because I can take other games and add to them the parts I like about PF.

Don Coyote

So here is part of the beginning of the end of my last PF campaign. An email I sent to Defective GM about the game he was running and I was playing in concurrent to the game I was running with him playing in.

QuoteHey Defective GM,

At this moment, I am strongly considering retiring Maximillian and Yames. I could give very valid in-character reasons for either of them to cease adventuring, but I have out of character reasons for thinking about doing so.

In the case of Maximillian, it is because of your ruling that inflicted the shaken condition on it. While I know that it was for only one round and it was not in combat, and therefore of no real importance, shaken is a fear effect, which per the writeup of the warforged race that you personally created, is a class of effects that warforged are immune to. This is the second time you have allowed me to play a character with explicit immunities only to later on ignore those immunities or, in the case of Avel, strip them from it. I am not saying I don't want bad things to happen to my characters; point in fact I rather enjoy having horrible conditions inflicted upon them so I can overcome them or simply fight through them. However, part of the warforged immunity to fear effects is an immunity to all emotion and morale effects, drawbacks I was, and still am, completely ok with having. By subjecting a character to an effect they are supposed to be immune to, you are indicating several things. Chiefly, that you are willing to bend your own rules to promote your story to the detriment of a player character without asking that player if that is acceptable to them in spite of the already implied statement regarding the kind of things that player is agreeable to have inflicted on their character. You are also doubly penalizing that character; they can't incur the detrimental effects but also can't benefit from positive effects of those classes. At this time, I'm basically just waiting until the next time you feel that for story purposes you will blithely ignore facets of one of my characters.

As for Yames, I am just not feeling like playing him. Neither he, nor Max, feel at all mythic. When everything we deal with is mythic, or on par with mythic, mythic is the baseline.

However, there are some other things that are bothering me.

Your sudden apparent reversal of your original statement that it was ok to point out what the pathfinder rules actually say. I did not appreciate your tone either when pointing out the number of rounds that can be ran before con checks, or when pointing the particulars about the climb skill and creatures with a climb speed. If you don't preface things that you are making a houserule, that I was under the assumption that you still wanted my input. But I guess now that I am running my own game, you no longer desire my input. If you had never said you wanted my rules input, I wouldn't be mentioning these things. I don't much like rules laywers, or being the rules lawyer.

I also feel that a great many of your rulings are to some extend arbitrary or serving to force encounters to happen, or happen the way that you want.

Because of that, I don't feel comfortable questioning your statements as I don't know when you are misremembering a rule or making up a brand new houserule.

Finally, I don't really much care for the mythic relic item thing. I had reservations regarding them from the beginning, and I at this point tired of playing the "I use mythic power to ask the GM if I can have thing do a really cool thing that is totally dependent on what he thinks is appropriate."  I can either continue to play in that campaign, with relics that much below everyone else, and essentially be a drag on the party in combat, or I can continue to play the guessing game.

Regardless of all of this, I will not be attending any games that PTSD Veteran will be attending. I found his presence to irritating, distracting, and overbearing.

If you have any questions, concerns, or wish to discuss about any of these topics, please hold off until after this Sunday, as I am still dealing with drill.  I hope to have a meaningful discussion via email before I make my decision on whether or not I continue playing as Maximillian and/or Yames, or even as a new character.

Coyote

Not even 10minutes after sending this, he calls my wife, who played in both games, to complain about this email. Unfortunately for him, I was next to her, and could hear him quite clearly being an unreasonable fuck-stick. So my, possibly unreasonable, reaction was to delete the further games I had scheduled on meetup, and then to leave the group he managed. I mean if someone is going to call my wife to complain about me instead of waiting some time to talk to me, or at the very least call me, and then claim that he wouldn't feel comfortable at his home, then well, fuck him and his issues. This was Mar 6.

He, and his wife, but not his brother-in-law or his bf, were my problem players. They complained about the lack of treasure, the difficulty of encounters, or the difficulty of buying magical gear, in the Emerald Spire, a module published by Paizo, and I was running it fairly closely to book rules, with all my rule changes shared out in writting.

Cainad (dec.)

RPGs are really near the top of the list for "When it's good it's great, when it's bad it fucking sucks donkey balls" hobbies.

I've spent most of my RPG energy on LARPs in the past few years. Four or five weekends a year translates to much more actual game time than I ever managed with a tabletop group. Of course, if the community was bad it would be a nightmare too.

Games would be great if it wasn't for all these damn gamers.

Doktor Howl

So, had a thing with someone on the FB PF page.

He was bragging that he built this lich whose phylactery will outright kill anyone who destroys it, so someone (12th level characters) will have to die for the campaign arc to end...Because "I like bittersweet endings".

I said that if I were a player in his group, and found out he scripted my character's death, I would be in someone else's group by the following week.

In the same thread, he attacks me for mentioning the fake phylactery/recurring villain gag.  Because it's clearly bullshit to leave a fake phylactery around, but clearly NOT bullshit to mandate a PC's death to make up for lack of story.

This all went very well, with me making fun of him and him getting madder and madder, but then I pushed it too far and he blocked me.  I think it was when I suggested he try BESM, as it was more his speed.

So yes, there really is nothing worse than a bad DM.
Molon Lube

Cain

If someone subjected my character to a scripted death, they'd get a D20 shoved somewhere very uncomfortable.

The only reason I'd even consider sticking around would be to Old Man Henderson the shit out of every single game from there on in.

Doktor Howl

Quote from: Cain on July 04, 2018, 08:29:08 AM
If someone subjected my character to a scripted death, they'd get a D20 shoved somewhere very uncomfortable.

The only reason I'd even consider sticking around would be to Old Man Henderson the shit out of every single game from there on in.

:lulz:
Molon Lube

Pergamos

Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 03, 2018, 11:07:47 PM
So, had a thing with someone on the FB PF page.

He was bragging that he built this lich whose phylactery will outright kill anyone who destroys it, so someone (12th level characters) will have to die for the campaign arc to end...Because "I like bittersweet endings".

I said that if I were a player in his group, and found out he scripted my character's death, I would be in someone else's group by the following week.

In the same thread, he attacks me for mentioning the fake phylactery/recurring villain gag.  Because it's clearly bullshit to leave a fake phylactery around, but clearly NOT bullshit to mandate a PC's death to make up for lack of story.

This all went very well, with me making fun of him and him getting madder and madder, but then I pushed it too far and he blocked me.  I think it was when I suggested he try BESM, as it was more his speed.

So yes, there really is nothing worse than a bad DM.

He also clearly has not factored in player creativity.  sure, a lich wont die unless his phyalctery is destroyed, but that wont do him much good if he's trapped in an anti magic field in a cage.

Doktor Howl

Quote from: Pergamos on July 09, 2018, 05:30:42 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 03, 2018, 11:07:47 PM
So, had a thing with someone on the FB PF page.

He was bragging that he built this lich whose phylactery will outright kill anyone who destroys it, so someone (12th level characters) will have to die for the campaign arc to end...Because "I like bittersweet endings".

I said that if I were a player in his group, and found out he scripted my character's death, I would be in someone else's group by the following week.

In the same thread, he attacks me for mentioning the fake phylactery/recurring villain gag.  Because it's clearly bullshit to leave a fake phylactery around, but clearly NOT bullshit to mandate a PC's death to make up for lack of story.

This all went very well, with me making fun of him and him getting madder and madder, but then I pushed it too far and he blocked me.  I think it was when I suggested he try BESM, as it was more his speed.

So yes, there really is nothing worse than a bad DM.

He also clearly has not factored in player creativity.  sure, a lich wont die unless his phyalctery is destroyed, but that wont do him much good if he's trapped in an anti magic field in a cage.

Or just hang it down a volcano.  So every ten days, he reforms and drops right in.  Sort of like Jesus Christ Super Cop.
Molon Lube


LMNO