There is very little about gaming as a GM that I enjoy more than finding a system, reading about the system, then hacking the system open like some ancient soothsayer and sniffing its guts for portents and universal truths. I've done it pretty extensively with GURPS (one month and two days and we hit the one year anniversary of Jeremy and I sitting like little kids with eyes glued to the screen as we read about Bunnies and Burrows and skills like Accounting and Erotic Art), which is why I can read Powers and honestly say, "Oh, I thought of that. Neat."
Anyway, I've kind of got my teeth up to my gums in Pathfinder at the moment and I am liking what I see. Quite a bit actually. I just cannot get over how they have made the classes awesome compared to their 3.5 Edition counterparts. I would play a barbarian happily now, and I never would have considered doing that in 3.5 Edition (except for my halfling barbarian slinger, he rocked). I'm picking apart the classes and races at the moment, and I find very little to be irritated with. As my previous post indicated, Pathfinder doesn't really differentiate between cultural abilities and genetic abilities, but that is irrelevant because I'm not using Pathfinder's races. More on that in a bit though.
I've got to a point where I'm confident I can make Pathfinder and my campaign work together, so that is cool. The guns thing might be a bit more difficult, but I can make it work I think. When I say stuff like make my campaign work with Pathfinder, I don't mean it in a pretentious fashion or that my campaign is more evolved than Pathfinder's rules or something like that. I have an image of my campaign world, and I really enjoy that image and I want to be true to it. I get a lot more joy out of things if I am true to the nature of the material I've created. Its why I wrote a story about a gay Cenn the Reaver when I had no real reason to, other than as a means to expose Jeremy and Eric to campaign spoilers so that they could know what was coming.
What I've learned, last night actually, is that I need to relax and not worry so much about the rules. My biggest concern is always "If I go off the rails and just make my own shit up, will it be balanced?" I don't like the idea that the game isn't fair for everyone, I don't like random hit points or ability scores, there's too much of an imbalance between players when someone gets lucky and the other person gets unlucky. It bugs me. I want to make sure no one is the cursed player that lags behind with his nine hit points and four eights for his stats. This concern for balance is part of what made me hammer 4th Edition races into a shape that resembled the races in my campaign. It worked ok for the most part, but it still bothered me.
I was working on some notes for my campaign in the event that we choose Pathfinder as our next system and I found myself trying to hammer races into shape again. I cursed myself for a moment, took a deep breath, and deleted all the stupid shit I had written. I need to go off the rails in a few spots and I need to be ok with that. That's part of being a GM, stepping away from the rules and making a decision for yourself. I know enough about the d20 system and my races to be able to make them do what I want, and I can come up with new stuff if I have to. Nothing I create will ever be guaranteed to be balanced. I am one dude with a group of six people that game six or seven times a year, we do not have the resources to playtest. Heh. I just have to be ok with stuff not being balanced and my players need to be aware of the fact that I can and will change stuff if it becomes a problem. I think if I keep that in mind, I'll be ok. This is a game and the rules are there to provide a framework. I'm the GM, I don't need the rules if they don't work for me.
Music: Levitation - Hawkwind
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