Saintly Saturday: St. Andrew the Commander

Today is the feast of St. Andrew the Commander. He was a roman soldier during the reign of Maximian. About the year A.D. 289 he was sent by Antiochus, the Commander-in-Chief of the Roman forces, to fight off a large Persian army that had invaded the Syrian territories. Interestingly, St. Andrew had not yet been baptized a Christian, but still persuaded his men that the pagan gods were merely stone carved by human hands and were of no help in the upcoming battle. In contrast, all things were brought into being through Jesus Christ the omnipotent God of heaven and earth. Therefore, all his men, believing that Christ would give aid to all who believe in him, called upon the help of Christ. Though greatly outnumbered, St. Andrew’s men routed the Persians.

When it was discovered that this victory was done in the name of Jesus Christ, St. Andrew and his men were put on trial by Antiochus. When they confessed Christ they were tortured: St. Andrew was placed on a bed of hot iron and the hands of his men were nailed to block of wood. They were then chased through the streets by soldiers. In the end, these men, too, came to believe in Christ because they saw the strength of St. Andrew’s faith and listened to his teachings.

After seeing the folly of these tortures, Antiochus had them all beheaded: St. Andrew and 2,593 soldiers. At the spot of their martyrdom, one of the passes of Mt. Tauros in Cilicia, a spring come forth from the ground. It was soon discovered by the local Christians to have healing properties.

As a player, one of the things I enjoy most in an RPG is being surprised by my character. I allow the events of a campaign to shape them and inform their decisions as they advance in levels and/or power. For example, I was playing in a campaign that had a desecrated temple of St. Cuthbert sitting atop the Caverns of Thracia. I joined the campaign late and ended up playing an NPC turned PC.

Over the course of the campaign, the group managed to finally (and unknowingly) cleanse the temple of St. Cuthbert. Ironically, my character had failed a saving through and therefore was fleeing. Therefore, my character was the only PC to witness a divine light bathe the temple leaving behind a set of Bracers of Defense.

The fear left my character and he took up the bracers in awe. I decided that my character would see this event as a command to wear the bracers for the rest of his career and that he would become a devout follower of St. Cuthbert. Thus, by a random event, my fighter-type character ended up religiously wearing a magic item primarily designed for magic-users. This event reminds me very much of the story of St. Andrew and his soldiers. They allowed a single event to radically change their lives.

Fortunately, it was a 1e D&D campaign, therefore I had the freedom to choose this path for my character without crippling him.

In the wake of Paizo’s release of Starfinder, I am getting buried under a bunch of promotional material about various companies releasing support material for the game. I have to be honest, here: I have zero interest, despite the fact that my Gamer ADD is now focused on producing a 4-page ruleset for a sci-fi RPG. The reason I don’t have any interest is, again, related to the story of St. Andrew.

The 3.5 engine that drives Pathfinder and Starfinder gives off the aura of having a plethora of options for its players. Unfortunately, this is largely an illusion. The game assumes a certain amount of min/maxing and optimization by its players as their characters advance in levels. This cam be seen in the way monsters are handled at higher levels. Thus, the game itself punishes players who do not follow a pre-determined set of paths for advancement. Without optimization, a character can very quickly become unplayable and even a danger to the rest of the party. Thus, a character is expected to advance and develop in a particular fashion despite what happens in a campaign. Paizo even has The Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a book entirely dedicated to strategies of planning out how to optimally advance a character. Everything is planned out. There are not supposed to be any surprises.

I have experienced this on more than one occasion, where I chose to follow the logic of the events in a campaign rather than The Strategy Guide optimization. My characters would end up being less and less effective in play compared to those who had panned out their characters and the campaign became less and less interesting to me and I became more and more frustrated. While I understand and appreciate the min/max impulse in games, it best belongs in the realm of war-games, not RPGs.

I believe that if St. Andrew were a 3.5/Pathfinder character he and his men would never have chosen the path of Christ, because it wan’t optimal to their career choice; however, it makes sense in context of the events they actually experienced. Allowing PCs to freely make similar choices without systemically punishing them for doing so is not only more realistic, it’s also more fun: we get to be surprised by how the campaign world affects our characters as much as our characters affect the campaign world.

Meditating on ACKS and Averoigne

One who has read this blog over the years may have noticed that I haven’t posted a Lost Colonies Session report in a long time. This is not because the campaign has ended, but rather that the sessions are few and far between and nothing has really happened that I was inspired enough to write about. This is due to the fact that I am not inspired enough by the campaign in its current state to do much more and none of the guys I play with have championed more sessions than the few that we have done.

In the meantime, my group has been primarily playing AD&D with a few forays into Pathfinder. At the moment, the guys I play with are enamored by AD&D’s fiddliness — to them it represent more “choice” than other older editions of the game. I could argue that I could accomplish much of the same feel and choices with a much cleaner and simpler ruleset such as S&W or LL + AEC, but I would be missing the point.

One has to understand that the group I play with were virtually all introduced to the game with 3rd edition. As such, character builds are very important to them — it is a part of the gaming experience that they really enjoy. I have meditated on this before. I have, in contrast, scratched that itch with various war games which these guys never had as part of their gaming experience.

Every couple of months, someone at the table suggests that we play Pathfinder for a while (it being the 3ed emulation of choice). We play awhile until everyone remembers why we don’t like playing 3ed/Pathfinder. I don’t mind terribly much because I have learned to enjoy the game at lower levels and I know we will sooner rather than later go back to an older ruleset or its emulation.

What this all means, in the long run, is that I am not ever going to be able to run an Averoigne campaign with the guys I play with the way I want to — with a Holmes/Cook mash-up using either LL or S&W as a jumping off point. While it is incredibly interesting to me and something I would really like to play-test one day, it isn’t something that is going to interest my group. Thus, I am having to re-think about my approach so that I can start play-testing Averoigne and the Chateau des Faussesflammes as concepts.

Enter, of all things, Dwimmermount. My faith in that project and my patience have born fruit. One of the things that has come out of all the complications of the project is the generosity of the guys at Autarch. Via a promise made to backers, I have gotten my hands on .pdfs of ACKS and the ACKS Player Companion and done some serious reading and fiddling.

I have to say that both are excellent products, if lacking in a few tables & examples here and there which would have made my understanding and use of the products easier. I really like the fact that at its root, ACKS is B/X. I also really appreciate their interpretation of its mechanics extrapolated into the concept of proficiencies/feats, world building and the end-game.

In the end, however, I find it too fiddly. I prefer a far more organic/random interaction with world creation than these rules imply and I have never much cared for proficiencies, especially when they really emulate skills and feats that imply more roll playing than role playing. There are aspects that I think will prove very useful in the long run, but won’t really know until I actually use them at the table.

This is where I insert the however of this blog post. Even though I don’t care for the fiddliness of ACKS, I do think the guys who I play with will. It scratches the character build itch in a way that AD&D can’t but without all the stuff we don’t like about Pathfinder (I hope). For my own taste, I prefer the fiddliness of ACKS over the fiddliness of AD&D because it represents true player choice and is mechanically cleaner (and did I mention that it is basically B/X — my favorite edition of the game — with a bunch of stuff added on?).

Thus, the best chance I have of playing in my version of Averoigne with the guys I play with may very well be ACKS. As such, in the coming days I will be converting some of the work I have done on Averoigne to the ACKS system to see if what emerges is something I am still interested in playing.

Meditating on Pathfinder

Since the Big News of the day is the advent of 5e D&D, I thought I’d buck the trend and speak about one of the reasons why Hasbro has been forced in this particular direction in the first place — Pathfinder. (Besides which, Jeff Rients pretty much sums up everything I might say on the subject with his open letter to WotC).

As I have said several time before, I play with a bunch of guys who were introduced to the hobby via 3e. I have split time running campaigns with other guys, depending on who has an itch to run a game. When I first began doing this, the other campaigns we played were 3.5 games. More recently, these games have been 1st ed AD&D. Well, a couple of the guys from our group have been getting the urge to go back to their roots and play a little 3.5.

For the most part, the group wasn’t all that interested. Our table very much likes the fast-paced combat achievable with earlier editions. The amount of stuff that can be accomplished in an evening of gaming using LL or AD&D far outstrips what we did while using 3.5. Thus, the whole discussion was a bit of a non-starter. That is, until someone brought up the possibility of playing Pathfinder using the Kingmaker Adventure Path.

I happen to really like Paizo, their attitude and their relationship they have with the community. I even gave my two cents during the open play test of Pathfinder. Thus, though I have never had occasion to purchase any of their products, I have rooted for them. The closest I ever came to actually forking over part of my limited gaming budget to them was when they published the Kingmaker Adventure Path. It intrigued me to no end — I wanted to see how one would go about doing a sandbox with a complex ruleset like Pathfinder.

So, when one of our guys volunteered to run it, I was actually very interested to see what would happen. Due to life issues, we decided to take a short break from my own campaign to take advantage of my own relatively busy schedule in December and his own relatively light schedule to go all in for the last month with Pathfinder.

The campaign has been relatively successful. Pathfinder does all the things 3.5 does well better. I say this with one caveat. Having had experienced the abstract combat style of LL, our GM has adopted several of the conventions that we use while playing LL. This speeds things up considerably and still allows for some crunch for those that want it (and who needs to pull out maps and figures for most wilderness encounters anyway?) In addition, our GM adjudicates all skill rolls — he either rolls them himself or simply arbitrarily declares success. This has had the wonderful side affect of encouraging more role playing than roll playing.

Unfortunately, Pathfinder still suffers from many of the flaws that 3.5 does. Personally, I would not wish to invest the kind of time necessary to ever run a Pathfinder campaign. In addition, we have averaged one character death per session (something we have grown accustomed to with older editions). The problem is that even when a player knows what they are doing, creating a new character takes forever. We have alleviated this a bit by having NPCs available to play. This strategy, while fine with old-school guys like myself, defeats one of the reasons why some of our group (and a whole segment of gamers) like to play 3.5 & Pathfinder— testing character builds against game conditions.

If I am honest, I can greatly sympathize with this particular mindset because I have spent many an hour doing various kinds of builds to test in game play. The major difference between my own gaming experience and those who enjoy this aspect of 3.5/Pathfinder play is that the major outlet I have had over my gaming life has been through various war games.

Car Wars, Starmada, ARES and Renegade Legion (Interceptor) among others are all games that I spent lots of time making builds and then testing them in game play. I did the same with two what are ostensibly RPGs but more often than not my friends and I used with arena combat scenarios to test character builds — Champions and GURPS. The most common scenario my friends and I ran with Champions was the Danger Room — which is, in essence, a war game. The only original version of GURPS I still own is its precursor Man to Man — an arena-type war game that uses what would become the GURPS combat system.

Thus, that occasional itch to make what in 3.5/Pathfinder are character builds I scratch with war games or RPGs that can be played as war games. It makes me wonder if the cultural divide between 3.5/4th ed players and earlier edition players is in part a generational thing. Guys my age grew up with war games — I had certainly played several different war games prior to ever hearing about D&D. The guys I now play with are all young enough that what I had readily available as board and mini-games had all been displaced by video games. With no real outlet other than RPGs to scratch that character-build itch, is 3+ D&D for many gamers today what war games are/were for me?

In the end, I very much enjoy the campaign; however, if your goal is to play Pathfinder in an old-school style, old school rules do a much better job without all the negatives the complex rules bring with it. Kingmaker is fun, but if I ever ran it myself, I would convert it to LL + AEC in a heart beat.