The Pathfinder Society

[Quiver]

The Pathfinder Society is a globe-spanning organisation based out of Absalom, the largest city in the world. At least, it is if you live on Golarion.

I don't think they have internet access though, so if you're seeing this thread, you probably live on Earth, in which case the Pathfinder Society is the name used by Paizo Publishing for the Pathfinder RPG Organised play. I like the name though, and it fit with the guilds and society theme, so I'm stealing it for my own use.

So, what is the 17th Shard's Pathfinder Society? It's a place for people to talk, share stories and fish for parties for role-playing games, whether that's Dungeons & Dragons, FATE Core, World of Darkness, Legend of the Five Rings, Pathfinder, or anything else you can imagine. There are a lot of tabletop RPG's by this point.

Which goes to the keypoint: this is not a roleplay thread in itself. Think of it as a hobby chatpoint, or an OOC thread at most. If people talk stuff and decide they have a cool idea for an RPG to play - either here or on Discord - then cool; I'd be lying if I said that wasn't what I was sort of hoping would happen But this in itself is a discussion place, and not an actual roleplay in itself.

...

So anyway, with that part out of the way, welcome to the Pathfinder Society! As my bias in the title probably gave away, I'm a fan of Paizo's Pathfinder RPG system; I had just started collecting a few of the books when the world more-or-less shut down. Aside from that, I've read the FATE Core, Legend of the Five Rings and Adeptus Evangelion rulesets, but I never got a chance to play an actual play of any of them.

I did play a couple sessions of Exalted back in university, though, which were fun.. even if the gaming group dissolved far too quickly for me to get a proper handling on the rules. On the side, I also like trying to find rule sets for franchises I'm a fan of. Right now, I'm trying to find some kind of system to replicate the Nasuverse, and I've starting work on building a setting for a potential Sailor Moon-themed RPG (probably running in Fate Core).

Also, I've never DM'd, so the above plans are almost certainly doomed to failure.

[Eluvianii]

This is a great idea, though for some reason threads about tabletop RPGs in the Shard rarely take off from what I've seen. Hopefully this one will.

I have little to no experience with this, meaning I get to participate like in two oneshots a year or so but I've loved every second of it.

I'm looking for a way to replicate the Nasuverse too, and the best I've found is World of Darkness. My current plan is to try and get a bit of experience mastering with a simpler system and then try out the World of Darkness games to in the end be able to adapt them to the Nasuverse. Kind of ambitious for someone who hasn't even tried to master in his life but hey, trying won't kill me.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Eluvianii

[Voidus]

I'm something of an eternal GM who rarely gets to play, mostly in the D&D 5e space though I've done some Pathfinder and had several Vampire games start and then immediately fall.
I'm an enthusiastic worldbuilder and homebrewer as well so always happy to discuss anything related to those particularly, I have an unreasonably massive library of homebrews for 5e.

[Quiver]

8 hours ago, Eluvianii said:

This is a great idea, though for some reason threads about tabletop RPGs in the Shard rarely take off from what I've seen. Hopefully this one will.

I have little to no experience with this, meaning I get to participate like in two oneshots a year or so but I've loved every second of it.

I'm looking for a way to replicate the Nasuverse too, and the best I've found is World of Darkness. My current plan is to try and get a bit of experience mastering with a simpler system and then try out the World of Darkness games to in the end be able to adapt them to the Nasuverse. Kind of ambitious for someone who hasn't even tried to master in his life but hey, trying won't kill me.

Yeah, I'm hoping this maybe goes a little differently, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained and all that.

I remember seeing someone pitch World of Darkness as a good system for the Nasuverse; the specific one I had heard of was using Mummy to replicate Servants. I admit, when it comes to sheer potential breadth of the setting, I am a little more inclined to maybe just settle for running it in FATE Core or just freeforming things.. but that rather takes away from the fun of throwing some dice around.

If you ever do figure out a cool way to do a Nasu game though, please let me know. I've been on a Nasu-kick for a while now, and it would be all kinds of crazy fun to get to play an actual game in that 'verse.

(to be completely honest, though, I haven't looked much into World of Darkness, and when I have, it's been because of an idle curiosity to give Princes:The Hopeful a try )

7 hours ago, Voidus said:

I'm something of an eternal GM who rarely gets to play, mostly in the D&D 5e space though I've done some Pathfinder and had several Vampire games start and then immediately fall.
I'm an enthusiastic worldbuilder and homebrewer as well so always happy to discuss anything related to those particularly, I have an unreasonably massive library of homebrews for 5e.

I've never GM'd, but it something I want to try to do, so, if you don't mind me asking, do you have any advice on how to do that? Or how to build a campaign, for that matter? I've had an idea for a Pathfinder campaign I've been trying to work on, but honestly I keep running into little plot problems that keep stalling me.

On a related note, any advice for worldbuilding? The only advice I've seen on creating worlds in an RPG came from the Order of the Stick's article section (very useful, if unfinished), and some of the PF 2nd edition Game Mastery book which is obviously trying to be as broad as possible in it's approach.

[Voidus]

Honestly the best piece of advice I can give is to just run something to get your confidence up, choose a prebuilt adventure (Ideally something shortish) and just run it for a small group of friends. I would advise against making a sprawling campaign your first attempt at DMing, get a bit of confidence and familiarity with how the dynamic would work first. Planning a campaign becomes a lot easier once you have a little experience but there's only so much advice I can give to help, the main thing is to know what kind of campaign you want to run and who you're running it for and talk to them about it, if you have a party that just wants to explore and come up with their own stories but you've planned a somewhat railroady epic quest where you expect the party to hit specific plots and do specific things then it can all unravel fast. Make a session 0 and talk to people about what kind of game they want to play. I tend to run somewhat sandboxy games, there are plenty of things happening in the world but try not to plan for specific ways that those things will happen to or with the party. I just plan for what would happen if the party wasn't present and then sometimes they interfere with things and it just becomes a matter of figuring out how that would change what was going to happen.