Additional Conversion Rates (Among Other Things)

I effing hate me some Derf the Swordmage. The Swordmage concept is so hard to fit into anything other than 4th Edition DnD. Derf is expensive in GURPS, but impossible to fit into 3.5 Edition or Pathfinder. Psychic warriors have some elemental attacks, but Derf is magic, not psionic. Swordsage would work, they're kind of mystical warriors that master pseudo-magical blade arts. Both of those classes lack teleportation effects similar to the Swordmage. There is a third option of a Fighter/Wizard multiclass with the appropriate feats and prestige classes to alter it. That might work, but I don't have much knowledge about spells and whether or not they are any that can lightning-ify swords and whatnot, or if Fred would have to settle for fireballs and lightning bolts and whatnot, heh.

I've been toying with both GURPS and Pathfinder conversion stuff, and it has been getting to me. I would really like us to settle on what system we will eventually be using, but I don't want to bring up the issue before it needs to be addressed. I don't want to focus too much on what is to come and distract myself from what is going on at the moment.

I've been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender lately. I actually just started the third season. Jeremy and Laura recommended it to me a while ago, and I kind of added it to my Netflix Instant Watch on a whim. It is surprisingly enjoyable for being a cartoon based on a manga. I have watch a fair amount of anime and cartoons in my life, I was a big Naruto fan for many years in fact. Eventually I get sick of the comical faces and goofy crap though. Anyway, Avatar is a pretty decent show with some surprisingly mature themes scattered throughout it. I mean, a lot of the plot is just blatantly obvious, but it is after all a kids cartoon on Nickelodeon. Or it was at least. I find myself really wanting to reach the final conclusion of the show. Appa is also amusing. I really enjoy the animals of the world, boarcupines, sabertooth moose cats, turtleducks. I find them cute and entertaining.

More DnD. In an email a while ago, John told me he would like more battles that have consequences based on the actions of the party. I have a hard time dealing with this question because I feel like the consequences are fairly obvious. I think I understand what John is saying now, but the players so rarely come near to failure that it feels like any sort of consequence for their actions would be wasted effort on my part, and deliberately causing them to fail feels like hardcore railroading. I mean, you can't win every battle, and you are bound to come up against something that whoops you at some point, but the players are so underpowered already that actually making them fight a difficult battle feels like picking on them. John still doesn't really understand the way attacks per round work (one, always one, unless your powers say otherwise), or saving throws. Does anyone know what a bull rush is? Charge? The benefits to each action? I have to tailor the fights to their capabilities, because this is a learning the ropes campaign. What is the sense in making a bunch of tactical options for combat, if they're just going to use their at-wills the entire fight? Is this a chicken and the egg situation though? Are my fairly straight forward fights the result of their less then rock hard understanding of their options, or is it the other way around? I'm guessing the former, rather than the latter, but I eagerly hope to be wrong.

The question remains, should I be more proactive and frequently tell them their options? No. I am an adult, just like they are adults. If they have a rules question, I will answer it, or if they ask "can I do this?" I will tell them how, but I will not hand hold more than I already am. They have all the information at their fingertips and in the books that they have. Their understanding of the rules, or complete lack thereof, is on them. Kind of like whether the scenario sucks or not is on me. Maybe that makes me a grognard, or a hardass, or just a bad GM. It is my stance though and I stand by it. On the ground. In an earth bending stance. With a rock ready to be flip kicked into someone's face or some such.

The handholding will however cease once we get to the next campaign. Heh.

Edit After The Fact: Completely got sidetracked about combat. I mention John's email because I think I may make a post about how the player's have affected the world around them with their choices and actions during game time, just to kind of show that they are affecting the world around them and shaping it as they pass through it.

Cuhrazy!

I've been taking a good hard look at my story with Shawn's notes in hand for the past few days, kind of taking it slow and mulling things over. There are actually fewer notations in Shawn's notes than I had thought there would be, so that is a good thing.

One of the things he pointed out was that there is nothing to the non-Keroen characters. They only exist when Keroen is around to look at them and demand exposition and whatnot. That was intentional. The story is about Keroen, who gives a fuck about everyone else? I added in Nostathon's bits and pieces for a very specific purpose, and Shawn has suggested that there are other spots where I could do similar things with other characters, and I've given that quite a bit of thought as I progress through my re-writes and additions and whatnot.

I think that I've got some spots where I can add some tidbits in centering around Contuck and Aubernach and Merobel. These pieces will work pretty nicely with some stuff I've had rolling around in my head for a while now, and they should give a better picture of the Nel and some of the characters from the story. So good deal there.

Shawn also mentioned that most of the battles in the story are underwhelming because it is a foregone conclusion as to who will win. Keroen Skathos is war, if it breathes, he can change that. Easily. This is an issue that has crossed my mind before, and I think I can perhaps put some effort forth in this department as I proceed through the book and Shawn's notes. Maybe. We'll see.

Some things to think and muse about I guess. I'm enjoying this, I'm in that mode where I get writing and I cannot physically stop myself from writing. It makes me feel like a real writer when I get all twitchy and fervent about it.

The First Salvo

Shawn just dropped off his critique of my story (Eric won last round, Shawn wins this round and gets extra credit for precise and well thought out commentary). He points out a lot of things I am already aware of, or that have already been pointed out to me and I have slowly been trying to work on. It confirms a lot of what I've believed about the story for some time. Mainly, that is a decent read, but my understanding of the basics of writing are flawed and need work. Once I finish the current book I'm reading, I think I'll start to focus more on some of the books on writing that I have on my shelf. I suppose that it is about time that I did that.

One of the things Shawn and I discussed was "what exactly is Keroen Skathos?" and that is hard question to answer. He is the creator of the Nel, but that just turns into "what are the Nel?" and I have no answer for that. They are what they are, a race of creatures. Keroen isn't a god or anything like that, he's not an elf or a sorcerer or a god-king or something like that. He just is. He exists. Shawn did not accept that answer and said even I didn't know what he was.

I do, and I told Shawn and Heather. I told Eric as well, but that was years and years ago. I'm not sure if it made anything better, but I've known what Keroen Skathos is and where he came from for a long time. The problem with what Keroen Skathos is and why his sword is what it is and why there is gash on his brow is that this story builds on knowledge presented in a story that does not exist.

Whoa. Paradox.

The whole thing starts with The Death of a Universe, then there is a story that I never got past four chapters of writing, then there is The Nel, The Last Blade (the working title for the Keroen Skathos story), then we move into my campaign world and The One-Eyed Man farce. Keroen Skathos has a part to play in all of that. He is something, its just that what he is, is irrelevant to the finished story Shawn read.

Shawn suggested that I use Nostathon as a means of showing what Keroen Skathos is, citing that Nostathon can see things that no other Nel can. I can see that as a plausible option, but there's no way I can show it that would mean anything to anyone. I can't condense an unwritten story into a paragraph of Nostathon musing about stuff. Nostathon wouldn't even understand it clearly, as it is data from a time before the Nel existed and before Keroen Skathos was what he is in the story. He doesn't even recall his origins, other than as opening his eyes to find himself in a mist-choked forest holding his staff and his sword.

I'm not even trying to be cryptic and mysterious. I'm not trying to create artificial mystery in this stuff. It is what it is.

Regardless, Shawn's comments are much appreciated and give me a strong picture of what I need to work on. Hopefully in the next few months I can put them to good use and shore up some weak points of the story.

The Mountain

Somewhere in Hekinoe there is a mountain, mighty and black, its peak piercing the sky like a titan's upraised blade. Storms scorch this peak as bleak, bruise colored clouds swirl around it in a vortex of lightning and winds. Atop this peak is a throne, and that throne is built upon the accumulated knowledge of a lost age of Hekinoe's past. The seat of this throne is a tome so weighty that it possesses the knowledge to sear the sky to ash. The armrests are bound scrolls that could be wielded as talismans to drain the seas and shatter the earth. The head rest is a collection of bound maps of ancient Kaleshmar. The mountain rumbles as the ancient engine within it stirs as the creature brooding upon this throne shifts upon its seat and destroys six thousand years of knowledge as a tome beneath its foot breaks apart and is lashed into nothingness by the wind. Ruling from this throne is a bearded king whose eyes gleam with madness, tendrils of sorcerous might curl from the embers of power that are its eyes. Hail and rain slap against its flesh and its dirty ruined robes or torn and tattered by the wind. It does not blink or acknowledge the storm that surrounds it, for it is the eye of the storm and the storm is the turmoil within its mind. This king of storms and dusty knowledge sits upon its throne and gazes into the distance with a vacant stare, unmoved by its surroundings.

At the foot of this mountain is a small figure, this figure is a creature known as D'alton and he knows fear.

I Need An Adult

Given what is going on lately, there are two things I'm going to be posting about a lot at the moment. They are Pathfinder and Shawn's campaign. I'll say again that I'm really excited about Shawn's campaign and playing DnD. It will be nice to roll some dice and not be in charge of what the results mean. I've spoken of that before though, so there's no need to go ever it again. At some point I want to get a feel for my bard's background. If I'm going to have a bonus stemming from his background, I feel I should at the very least come up with something of one for him. I'm thinking that he was an eladrin orphan raised by a traveling circus. No eladrin, but he was handed over to the family of elf acrobats and knife throwers. He was found to be lacking in the talents of swinging from the trapeze and throwing blades, but he had a good voice and could handle a crowd fairly well, so he became an announcer and singer during half-time acts or whatever. Anyway, as a young eladrin he was found by other eladrin that had come to the circus and they spurred his interest in his people and the Feywild. So he has left the confines of the tents to venture out into the world to learn of his people and their god Corellon. Maybe is Shawn decides that his circus family got murdered he can take some multi-class feats for avenger and be all moody and goth. Heh.

Pathfinder has a hold on me something fierce. I don't know if its that we haven't done anything with GURPS or that Pathfinder is familiar enough to be comforting, but I'm all fixated on it. I have no idea which side of the fence I'm going to come down on when we get to the point where I need to make an argument for one system or the other as the vehicle for my next campaign. I guess I like both systems almost equally. I like GURPS for its complexity that allows one to do so much with it and I like Pathfinder because it takes everything I loved about 3.5 Edition and makes it better. Maybe I'll write out another pro/con list. I did that when I was thinking about gaming again. I have this large Excel spreadsheet that compares d20 Modern/Past to 4th Edition, 3.5 Edition, and GURPS. Or maybe there was nothing about GURPS in there. I'd have to look at it.

(Several hours of work-related interlude.)

I tried a pro and con list and it is annoying. There's nothing in Pathfinder that I can't simply fix with a house rule and there is nothing I can complain about with GURPS. The fixes I need to make, I have. The things I can complain about are: players might find it daunting to pick through the GURPS advantages and might not be able to do exactly what they want when I slap down a lower points level for them to build characters with.

Fuck. I don't know what I want to do now. GURPS appeals to my brain, but Pathfinder appeals to my heart. Fuck it, my vote comes down on Pathfinder/3.5 Edition DnD.

So glad I spent all that time compiling that GURPS advantage/table wiki thing with ZuluPad. I kid, that was actually kind of fun to do, and now I can do it with Pathfinder! Feats and traits, here I come!

Music: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 - Coheed and Cambria

Music: Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow) Coheed and Cambria

Modern Viscera Reader

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

Synergy

I've finally settled on a character for Shawn's campaign, or whatever you'd like to call it. I'll be playing an Eladrin Bard with a few Rogue elements thrown in as well. I kind of like the character, his name is Erevan and he's kind of a get up in your face with swords and shit character. Most of his attack powers are weapon based and he's got a fairly decent AC. Because of his stats and a Bard feat, he's basically trained in every skill, which is handy. He was a circus performer, that is his background and I think I'm starting to get a good picture of who he is. If someone else ends up playing a Leader, I have an idea for a Seeker, which is a Controller class that is kind of neat. If Dark Sun drops and I find its data appealing, Thri-Kreen Monk, no question.

Lately I've begun walking for about an hour or so in the mornings after I get up. Heather joins me as well most days. On the days I take the walk alone I have a lot of time to think, walking is fairly simple and my mind can kind of wander around for a bit while I do so. I mean, there is the road you have to pay attention to, but other than that walking isn't terribly demanding.

Anyway, this simplistic exercise activity gives me the mental freedom to kind of process things through. It has allowed me to write out the tenth scenario of the campaign. I think I might actually be able to run it without everything written down, which would be cool, but I have time to write it all out, so maybe I should just do that. While I was on my walk today (which is actually Tuesday) I was able to figure out how to make Pathfinder/3.5 DnD work in my campaign setting.

One of the things I really love about 4th Edition DnD is that it separated innate racial traits that would stem from...genetics I guess, from cultural things. So your dwarves have a bonus to Constitution and they have the endurance innate to their species. Their tactics for fighting giants are still there, but you take a feat for them. It never made sense that a dwarf raised among humans or elves or whatever, would have his race's tactics for fighting giants. He would never have been taught those things or have trained with dwarven weaponry.

If we were to switch to Pathfinder or 3.5 Edition, that goofy problem would be back.

I am suddenly forced to laugh at myself. The problem that worried me is not actually a problem now that I think about it. None of the core races in 3.5 or Pathfinder work for my campaign, so I wouldn't even have to bother using the printed races. I tried to hammer elves and dwarves into my campaign once already, not doing that again, it is too confusing and moderately annoying for me. I would basically just need to get physical stats and the stuff that is core to the races.

I do have an idea for a system of traits available to each race, class, and country that characters can choose from at first level. Ideally, everyone would choose a trait based on their class, their race, and then their country, but I'd probably let them mix and match. Each trait would have about the power level of a feat, that way if characters wanted to they could spend feats to get more traits and whatnot.

So good, we can do Pathfinder if we want to. I have a lot of affection for 3.5/d20/etc DnD. It was the first edition in which the math made sense to me. I also loved the selection of classes and the joy of plugging in feats and skill points. Non-weapon proficiencies never appealed to me the way feats and skills do. They always seemed kind of vague or underwhelming.

The only problem with using Pathfinder is that everything is so much easier to get working in GURPS. I can do everything I want to do, and easily. Vyanth have longer appendages, there's an advantage for it. Dwenoren are eyeless and can sense their surroundings via sensory spines, advantage for that. Children of Volung have thick bony plates instead of a more conventional humanoid ribcage, advantage for it.

Also, magic would be way more hostile in Pathfinder than it could be in GURPS. I've found a system in GURPS that does pretty much what I want magic to do in my campaign world, but if we use Pathfinder, I'd go back to my spell misfire Excel spreadsheets I made years ago. A lot of janky things can happen, also, magic ends up coming in different flavors as well, and each of those flavors has specific ways in which it can unexpectedly eat your face off.

I guess the point of all this is that walking is fun and I am prepared for whichever way we go when we get to the conclusion of this campaign. Good times.