Playing and Actual Play

Well, I ran the next session of my game, which it looks like is gradually turning into an actual campaign. I feel like after a few sessions, I'm starting to hit my stride. Which is unusual given the situation; last night we were missing two of my regular players, one of the "new" players (that I actually have not ever had yet) and another new player, along with two regulars. A bit of a sketchy attendance. After several sessions that were really quite action packed, I had one last night with no combat and only a handful of skill checks required any dice rolls at all. I do felt like I really got into my stride with roleplaying and pacing, though. I had a good time last night. 

Sadly, the new player, and I didn't say anything, so I kind of expected that this would happen, brought basically a character that I'd run for her in a one-shot before, a dragonborn druid. I wouldn't have had any dragonborn at all in my setting, but this isn't really my setting; it's kind of a strange D&D 5e reflection of my setting. So, y'know. Like my setting, but with superheroes, Muppets and My Little Pony. In fact, a lot of the characters I have with this group are recycled, essentially. I have a "variant human" celestial patron warlock...who apparently is a concept he's played before. The dragonborn druid is recycled. The shadow elf/shadar-kai sorceress is recycled. Then again, my campaign is being somewhat recycled, so I don't fault the players for picking up something already made. When we started this, we had no idea of this necessarily being a long term campaign or not, although now it looks like it probably will be.

Anyway, I had a good time last night and I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out. I still have one character to add, and I have no idea what he'll be. I like the guy who will play this new character well enough, although his attendance seems to be kind of flaky, but I'm thinking that I've only ever seen him play Muppets before. His kenku characters literally come across to me like Gonzo.

—(  †  )—

I've been listening to the Hideous Laughter Podcast's playthrough of Carrion Crown. They're about to finish book 2, and it's early 2000 as of the time of recording, which I heard them mention offhand just an episode or two ago. While I mostly like it, and they're charismatic voice actors, if you will, and have good chemistry with each other, there are a few things that routinely bug me. First, some of the pronunciations start to drive me crazy. Gorillon is not a Spanish word, so it's not "goriyon"; it's like gorilla with an -on instead of a -a at end. "Larry" isn't a "flesh gollum", he's a flesh golem. The game and modules themselves are also a little silly. They've been doing the "finale" in the Schloss Cromarch or whatever it's called for at least half a dozen hour-long episodes. It's starting to get tedious to run through this dungeon fighting relatively random monsters.

Golem is not pronounced Gollum

Otherwise, it's a good podcast, and I do like it. But it's a little on the long side. That's what we need to do to make adventure paths workable; trim them a bit, downgrade the level requirements, and make the entire procedure more streamlined.

—(  †  )—

Lastly, I wonder if, for my D&D 3.5 and PFRPG hybrid, if it's actually worthwhile to limit levels of spellcasters to keep the magic level low (i.e., force them not to start spellcasters at level one, to make sure that none of them get access to 3rd level spells), or if it would be better to just line item veto certain spells and let people take whatever class levels they want. If I'm doing E6, 3rd level spells for fullcasters are available at the top end, but I'd eliminate:

• Goodberry
• Create Food and Water
• Fly
• Levitate (maybe)
• Speak with Dead
• (Leomund's) Tiny Hut (maybe)
• Mount (maybe)
• Rope trick
• Detect thoughts
• Zone of truth

There's more spells that are probably a problem in terms of invalidating challenges in additional books, if they shortcut common challenges that I'd much rather have replicated via the skill system (which is what it is for); those are just the Core Rules spells, but again, they'll be line item veto. I can keep the low magic without it being that low, and I can do it much more simply by not creating such a complicated way of accessing spellcasting classes.

As long as I keep characters capped at 6th level, and manually treat any higher level spells, if needed, as Incantations or Rituals, I think it's low enough. Again, with some judicious line item vetos on specific spells. 

It hadn't really occurred to me; I was going to not migrate magic to PFRPG vs D&D 3.5, but if I'm going Pathfinder classes, then I probably need to have Pathfinder spells, since they will coincide with each other much better without causing mismatches that I'd have to paper over. This is particularly true if I'm using an unusual Pathfinder class, like any of the psychic magic classes, for instance.