Play Pathfinder Every Day ...
Play Pathfinder every day, one in-character Discord post at a time!
When I got out of bed the other morning I tripped on the hail of razor stone trap and by mistake I dropped my +1 vorpal bastard sword off a cliff while the chimera of Lost Mammoth Valley was bearing down on me and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
Seriously though, I was having a lousy morning. It’s 2022. We’ve all been there. So I decided to pull over my car and open up the Discord app on my phone and play a quick moment of Pathfinder, hoping it might improve my mood: my Level 6 barbarian Artemis Tamaru would roll a Trip attack against Mafika Ayuwari, the sparring instructor at the Magaambya magic school where Artemis and the other PCs in our Strength of Thousands AP are currently studying.
I’ll get into the details of how one actually plays Pathfinder at 9:25am on a Wednesday morning in just a sec. But what you need to know right now is that Teacher Ayuwari is a super-high-level NPC with commensurate stats. So my Trip attack had a near-zero chance of succeeding. It was meant to be a moment of dumb fun, with my character failing yet again to put one over on her masterful combat mentor.
Instead, I rolled a Natural 20:
The total roll of 34 on my Trip attack was actually a failure — our GM informed me in the out-of-character chat channel that Mafika Ayuwari has a Reflex DC of 39 (!!!) — but the Nat 20 bumped this result up one level to a success.
This entire interaction between two strangers on the internet — me, sitting in my car parked on the side of a mountain road in Northern California; and our GM who goes by the username EAGLEKING64, sitting at his computer somewhere in Tennessee — took a grand total of 10 minutes. But the mental image of my half-elf barbarian psyching out the Phys Ed teacher and putting him down on his butt had be beaming so hard that I instantly forgot what a lousy day I was having.
Seriously. I felt so deliriously happy.
I first tried play-by-post gaming in the Spring of 2021: in-person gaming was still verboten, playing Pathfinder over Zoom/Roll20 had lost its novelty, and I needed something new to sustain me.
I found a game advertised through that year’s online-only PaizoCon: Bounty 10 aka the adorable baby dinosaur rodeo, run via Discord by the author of the adventure, Nicole Heits. So I created a Discord account (username: AmbushRakshasa) and uploaded a character sheet for my tengu warpriest, Kash Nobu.
This particular game — normally, an in-person bounty can be run in an hour — faced extenuating circumstances and ended up taking more than four months to complete. But by this time, I’d discovered the world of play-by-Discord adventuring and found my way to the Find the Path server, run by Jess of the eponymous actual-play podcast.
This was quickly to become my happy place: today, I’ve completed enough play-by-post PFS scenarios on Find the Path as a GM to earn a coveted glyph!
What, you may ask, is the draw of playing a tabletop roleplaying game in short bursts of text? After all, isn’t the entire point of a RPG to get together around an actual table with your pals and roll actual dice and eat snacks and crack jokes?
For me, play-by-post is a supplement to in-person play, not a replacement. And it has features that make it better in many circumstances: a big one for me is the asynchronous posting schedule, which allows someone with a busy schedule to play outside of typical evening-around-the-table hours and/or without coordinating via Doodle polls to schedule a gaming night.
Here’s another cool thing about pbp gaming: the slowness of the game turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Combat unfolds over the course of days, not minutes, which is great for looking up rules interactions and considering tactical options. Think of it as mail chess: in a game as complex as Pathfinder Second Edition, I’ve learned so much more about strategy at the drip-drip-drip pace of play.
And as a writer, the character-building possibilities of pbp format are equally attractive: often there’s so much going on in an irl game that it’s tough to dig into what makes your PC tick. Taking the time to write and rewrite an in-character post has led to some of the richest story moments I’ve experienced in nearly a decade of Pathfinder play.
Clearly, play-by-post isn’t for everyone. Over the past year, I’ve recruited 10 people from my in-person circles to play games on Find the Path’s Discord server. Everyone had a decently fun time, but only two of the 10 have stuck with it. Today, they’re players in a Quest for the Frozen Flame AP I’m running, where we’ve reached Chapter 5 of the story after eight months of gaming. That’s a pretty robust pace, comparable to a weekly in-person game. We’re having a good time.
If you’re reading this and finding yourself intrigued by the possibilities — although, let’s be honest, if you’re reading this there’s a decent chance you already play Pathfinder on Discord, which is where we know each other from — then consider joining the Find the Path server, or any of the other Discord servers that host pbp games like Cayden’s Keg or Roll for Combat or Organized Play Online. The people I’ve met in these communities are great at explaining the ins-and-outs of online play to noobs: Find the Path has even published a terrific beginner’s guide called So You Want to Play by Discord.
One word of warning: the Rollem random-number-generator bot that’s used to roll digital dice on Discord is a fickle b!tch. For every Nat 20 Trip attempt against Teacher Ayuwari, expect plenty of Nat 1s to completely ruin your morning. Trust me, I’ve been there. Hey, there’s always tomorrow … or ten minutes from now. Whenever you’re ready.
And now, as promised in my summer dispatch, let’s check in (right after the “PLEASE SUBSCRIBE” jump) on a few of this newsletter’s new recurring features!
THE MINI AND THE DICE
Those black Q Workshop beauties you’re seeing up top are my first ever set of RPG dice! I bought them for my first Pathfinder character, a tengu rogue named Saimei aka Sam who joined a Jade Regent campaign halfway through Book 4. The rest, as they say, is history. I ended up buying a second set of the same dice, which is why you see two d20s there — I’ve rolled so many Nat 20s with those dice, and they’re still my go-to in a big moment.
The mini is a cardboard pawn of the rakshasa from the original Pathfinder First Edition bestiary, aka my spirit-animal-slash-fiend.
LISTEN TO THIS
With a 3-year-old and multiple Discord games demanding my attention, I have limited TV time at my disposal. So I could only choose one: “Rings of Power” or “House of the Dragon”? I decided to opt for, as the New York Times review of the former described it, “unembarrassed earnestness” over “good-guys-get-decapitated.” Sue me.
Anyways, Howard Shore’s original “Lord of the Rings” soundtracks have always been auditory catnip for my gaming groups, so I slapped together my own re-tracking of the “Rings of Power” OST (minus one sweetly sung harfoot ballad that interrupts the all-instrumental mood), with a sweeping new theme by Shore and incidental music by Bear McCreary.
Check out the new playlist here: Ambush Rings of Power
TODAY I LEARNED
The “Detecting Creatures” section of the Second Edition Core Rulebook is a big improvement on the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine Stealth rules from First Edition. Still, there are moments when I remain uncertain whether an unseen creature is hidden or undetected.
I had to dig into this topic twice this week: in one game, the party was tracking my aforementioned chimera into a dark cave, and nobody wanted to light a torch … until I attacked them from the darkness with my breath weapon, because chimeras have darkvision. In the other game, my aforementioned barbarian, bravely scouting ahead, opened the door of a hut and found herself face-to-face with four enemies, one of whom immediately cast Blindness on her … and she failed the Fortitude save.
Now, in both of these combats, are the enemies hidden (know what square they’re in, need a DC 11 flat check to target) or undetected (need to guess what square they’re in, plus a Secret DC 11 flat check and Secret attack roll to target) to the creatures who can’t see them?
It turns out they are hidden as long as the creature who can’t see can still hear, thanks to several rules interactions laid out in this Paizo Forums thread but especially this line from the Imprecise Senses entry on page 464 of the CRB:
Hearing is an imprecise sense—it cannot detect the full range of detail that a precise sense can. You can usually sense a creature automatically with an imprecise sense, but it has the hidden condition instead of the observed condition.
Note the hidden creatures could become undetected with a successful Stealth check to Sneak.
Speaking of my blinded barbarian …
SCREENSHOT PRESENTED WITHOUT CONTEXT
That’s it. And so, as I tell my players at the conclusion of every Pathfinder module I run: this has been Ambush Tactics. I’ve been your Game Master. I hope you had a fun time.
Adventure!