Alright, so! With schedules shifting and players dropping in and out, I've come to realize there's not a reliable enough party to do a full campaign. Right now Leatra and Naryar are the only ones who've stuck with it for any length of time. Anyone coming in to fill vacant spots would be ignorant to the overall plot and not as likely to get as big an impact from certain events as they should have, along with general "wait what country is this" stupidity.
So! I'm gonna close the campaign
Then I'm gonna open something similar to Pathfinder Society. For those unaware, to break it down into simple terms Society play is essentially 'The Adventurer's Guild' where characters are sent
somewhere each week to do
something that's generally nothing to do with whatever happened last week. There are some chain events, but for the most part they're all just random encounters. Characters are signed off by the DM, and are valid at any Society table, so you could go to Florida with one character, then go to California and play the same character perfectly well because it's Society Legal.
However, Society also makes a lot of arbitrary rules. For instance, you're not allowed to do any crafting. Crafting has the potential to let characters 'be rich past their wealth' and while 2 characters might each have 2,000gp, one might have bought a suit of +1 Full Plate and weapon, and another may have crafted a suit of +2 full plate and +1 weapon. The math is wrong, but that's the idea. Characters shouldn't be allowed to progress themselves unnaturally fast by crafting. To that end, various spells are also hobbled, such as Masterwork Transformation, Fabricate, and Creation are all illegal.
To make things fair, no one loots weapons. Anything you 'loot' is 'sold to the Society and you receive money' and you have the option to buy it back. There's also an infinite stock of individual items - if you find a single scroll in a session, then everyone at the table could buy 5 of them, despite looting only 1. This is to prevent 'the loudest person at the table takes all the loot' and other quirks. There's also rules about being evil - namely, if your character becomes evil, then you have to stop playing that character. To that end, poison is illegal, so poisoner rogues are essentially limited to Drow Poison, because anything that causes ability damage or injury is considered inhumane, but apparently it's perfectly humane to put the enemy unconscious and then slit their throats. PVP is also strictly forbidden, including arbitrary rules to prevent it.
It is, in essence, "Dungeons and Dragons at its purest form." Which is to say, "You're in a dungeon, now kill the dragon" and nothing else is allowed and nothing else matters. It's also easy mode! I've been playing a grapple-focused character, a Fighter, despite all the attempts by others to make my grappler a Monk, I am instead wearing full plate and grabbing beasts. In one session, I grappled a reefclaw (which has a racial +8 to grapple, compared to my +9), got 6 points of poison damage, turned to stone by a basilisk, whipped myself with various torture flays for no apparent reason, attempted to grapple an iron golem, and then still did not die.
SO! I'll be starting something similar. At least so far as "you keep your characters and the encounters are non-sequential" but the rest? Well, it'll be Dwarven Roguelike Brutal. It'll also be shorter than most dungeon runs, because we're using online time and that takes longer, so it'll be fewer, harder fights where your character is liable to die harshly instead of being worn down.
I'm also very likely to make a character handler, in the form of a Python script that reads and edits text documents, which should help people get a hold of how to make a character, as well as putting it in a format that I can toss it into my computer and get all the info I want.
SO ANYWAYS! Bottom line: Gonna start non-plot dungeon runs. You can prepare characters, but don't submit them yet. Unless noted, anything on
www.d20pfsrd.com is legal, so long as it's published by Paizo and is not third party. Custom magic items would have to be approved individually, though, so don't go crazy.
Author
Topic: Pathfinder Non-Sequential - Girlinhat is your DM! (Read 91783 times)