Go Play Outside, Kids ...
Go play Pathfinder outside, the kids are in school!
First things first: Ambush Tactics is not a dad blog.
If you’re here looking for parenting advice, you’ve come to the wrong place. Maybe check out The New Fatherhood? Kevin Maguire knows his dad beat inside and out. However, I’ve yet to read Kevin’s breakdown of the new thaumaturge class from the Dark Archive playtest. (Gotta go chalice implement, magical drinking horns are the coolest.) So maybe stick with me for Pathfinder stuff.
Speaking of: I played actual IRL Pathfinder last month, with actual friends rolling actual dice. And we played during daylight hours, so it didn’t cost me any sleep!
Once upon another lifetime, I traded sleep for in-person Pathfinder all the time. My home games routinely played sessions that ran past midnight, jonesing for just “one … more … combat …” and doing our best to complete both the dungeon level and the bottle of brown liquor.
During my family’s early pandemic exodus to the Eastern Time Zone, I even gave away three additional hours so I could GM weekly Zoom sessions for my “Extinction Curse” crew back in the Pacific Time Zone.
In short, I felt about Pathfinder the way Uncle Tupelo–era Jeff Tweedy felt about his honey:
I miss you / More than / I need sleep
But a funny thing happened to me this spring — and, I suspect, to other dads and moms who suffered through a brutal omicron winter spent parenting the only people too young to get vaccinated against Covid-19: I started to trade my late-night hobbies for sleep.
I know, I know. The horror! But I’m telling you, it helped. Turns out eight hours of rest has benefits beyond just restoring hit points and spell slots.
Still, I like rolling dice. So what’s a guy to do when Pathfinder begins to lose battles against the need for REM sleep? Wrangle quorum during daylight hours! Especially when the other underemployed dads in your gaming group also have childcare coverage aka kids in school.
Now, four of the five players who joined this little escapade are dads to kids still too young to be vaccinated, so in service of our ongoing mission to keep their schools open, we decided to play in a well-ventilated space. And what better outdoor setup than to gather in a parking lot around the trunk of my Subaru Outback. Fresh air FTW.
Here are my hard-earned tips for outdoor daytime gaming:
Keep it short. Teachers don’t like it when you show up late for pickup. For us, that meant playing a Bounty aka an hour-long one-shot designed for pregens and/or PFS characters. I chose to run Bounty #2 Blood of the Beautiful by Thurson “Thursty” Hillman. Highly recommended.
Prep ahead. For me, this meant not only drawing combat maps and selecting bestiary pawns but also setting out a cooler and lawn chairs the night before. Also, to keep the gaming space looking fresh, I splurged on an inside-out cleaning at the local car wash.
Gear up. Beyond the maps and minis and cooler and lawn chairs, I also packed a Bluetooth speaker for combat music, an oversized dice tray, extra dice, physical Hero Point tokens to hand out, and my compact laptop to run the adventure.
Let strangers cook. Our parking lot had a sweet view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but the true selling point was the Cochinita food truck that parks here on weekdays. You’ll have more time to roll dice if someone else makes the Yucatan-style breakfast burritos.
Manage the ABV. Sure, I brought along a growler of Pliny the Elder from Russian River Brewery for everyone’s first sip, just to take the edge off. But after that we switched to non-alcoholic beer, so that everyone got to their school pickup safely. Try Best Day Brewing’s Kölsch.
Use digital tools. Playing in a parking lot — especially one located in the perpetual wind tunnel known as San Francisco Bay — you don’t want to be chasing around your sheet or trying to find a flat surface to pen notes. Laptops for the GM’s pdfs, phones for players’ stats.
As for the session itself? By the time the pregame meal and parenting gripes and pregen searches had run their course, we only had 52 minutes left until our hard stop. Time to go!
At first it was a bit awkward to role-play fantasy character in broad daylight and with total strangers occasionally wandering past — “Honey, did that man in the track suit just say he was an elf magus?!” — but it didn’t take us long to commit to the bit, like when the dwarf fighter rolled Deception to attempt an Impersonate check, hoping to disguise himself as a handsome alpaca in hopes of luring a killer out of hiding.
Yes, things got weird fast. It was glorious.
And standing up to roll actual dice in the trunk of an Outback, after far too many months spent trying to find joy in the 3D digital dice animation on Roll20?
Bliss. Especially when the dwarf fighter (the other one — yes, our party had a pair of dwarf fighters, which I highly recommend) rolled a Seek check to notice a trap and I, the GM, got to feel that physical rush of adrenaline from seeing the dice come up woefully short of the trap’s DC.
Never mind that Rakdrol Coldrock of the Horizon Hunters faction used his Reaction to Grab an Edge and avoid falling in the sinkhole. Traps don’t need to do damage to be fun. They just need to make the players’ jaws drop and pulses quicken.
And in the end, that was my favorite part of being outside with my pals: having tons of physical space to celebrate (or bemoan) those crucial dice rolls. You’d better believe I punched the sky when the dwarf stepped on the hidden sinkhole.
But that was nothing compared to when Summer Steelbranch, an apprentice to the Pure Legion of Rahadoum — he of the Natural 1 when trying to disguise himself as a sexy alpaca — lined up an attack against the wounded enemy, with the party’s lives hanging in the balance …
Natural 20 with the dwarven waraxe. And a 12 on the damage die.
Cue the victory lap!
After the last cheer had rung out across the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay — clocking in at a brisk 49 minutes to complete our Bounty adventure — we all packed up our dice and got in our cars to go pick up our kids from school.
Helping my toddler into her car seat, I asked her how her day at school had been. Good, she said, in her characteristic deadpan. Then she asked me: How was your day, dada?
“Well, honey … dada’s chupacabra didn’t get to use its Chupar special ability a single bloody time … but other than that? It was perfect.”
Adventure!