I should probably be tired of blogging about Pathfinder by now, but apparently I’m not. I spent about an hour this morning (or maybe two) working on my character sheet. I’m still figuring things out, like skills and feats and whatnot. It’s kind of frustrating, trying to figure out all the rules, but I guess it’s fun.
I finished reading the Strategy Guide last night. I found it to be very useful. (I posted a short review on Goodreads here.) In my linear read-through of the Core Rulebook, I’m just starting the “feats” chapter, so that puts me about 100 pages in (out of almost 600). I’ll be skimming large parts of the rulebook, but I do want to try to get all the way through it.
My brother hasn’t posted anything to WhatsApp or Discord this week about when we might have our next session (which I guess will be our first actual gaming session), so I guess it’s not happening today. Maybe next Sunday.
I’m a little worried that I’m going to pour a bunch of time and a bit of money into this, and then the actual game is going to fizzle out, and it’ll all have been a waste. This ties into a general theme I’ve been noticing with myself over the last few years, where I spend a bunch of time learning something new (usually programming-related), then never actually put it into practice. It’s usually because I thought I was going to work on a project, then the project fizzles out. Or I just do a bit of setup work on it, then someone else takes it over. Or something like that. I guess there’s something to be said for “learning for learning’s sake,” but there’s a point where I’d like to actually get out there are start tossing fireball spells at orcs, or whatever.
I’ve also been seeking out various tools and resources associated with Pathfinder, as is my wont. (This is another theme: spending too much time making a list of resources, and not much time actually using them…) Here’s a few fun things I’ve stumbled across recently:
- StartPlaying – This is a platform for bringing players together with “professional GMs.” Prior to finding this, I didn’t know that a “professional GM” was a thing, but I guess I’m not surprised. Putting together an RPG campaign can be a lot of work. And the work of actually GM’ing the sessions can be fun, but it’s generally less fun that being a player. So it’s cool that folks who are good at it can get paid for doing it. If my brother’s Pathfinder campaign fizzles out, maybe I’ll try this, and sink a few bucks into playing a campaign GM’ed by a pro.
- Dyslexic Character Sheets – I’ve been looking at various alternate character sheets for Pathfinder, some of them web-based and some done as iOS apps. Some include a lot of helpful automation and some include very little. This site was recommended by a couple of folks on Mastodon. It spits out some nice-looking character sheets, but they’re just plain PDFs, not fillable forms. And they’re designed for A4 paper, so that’s also a problem. So I guess I’m still sticking with the official fillable PDFs from Paizo for now.
- The Pathfinder Humble Bundle that I mentioned in a previous post has been extended by a week. Apparently, it’s been very successful. It’s all second edition stuff, so it doesn’t help me much right now, since my brother is playing first edition. I don’t regret paying for the $5 level though, since the 2E books may come in handy some day. (And I had made my peace with only getting the $5 level, but, now that it’s been extended, I’m thinking about getting the whole $25 bundle, even though I know I don’t need all that extra stuff, and will probably never use any of it…)