PaizoCon and other adventures
Jun. 9th, 2020 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellI've been doing mostly play-by-post for my online Pathfinder Society fix the past year or so, but when we all got sent home for a while and I had nowhere to go on weekends I figured I had enough time to go back to real-time virtual tabletop gaming. All I needed to do was finish up the play-by-post game my main PFS 2e character was in, which looked like it only had about a week to go. This was, of course, the moment when the play-by-post game slowed down massively. Eventually the GM disappeared altogether and we had to find a replacement. (This happens from time to time in online play, there are procedures for it, and I hope our original GM is okay out there somewhere.)
So I wasn't free of that game until early May, but that was still in time for PaizoCon! Which is usually Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, but moved online and took the entire week and weekend following Memorial Day instead. The way the schedule worked out, I was only able to make it to weekend games.
One of the great things about PaizoCon was it introduced a whole lot of people to VTT games who'd never played them before (including quite a few of the Paizo staff). This was also the downside. Of the three games I played, two started an hour late. One of these was the high-level game on Fantasy Grounds. The GM had been encouraging people to get their characters set up as soon as signups opened, and even helped me finish importing mine two weeks before the game. And yet, when game time arrived, two of the people who'd signed up showed up to say, "I've only downloaded the app, what do I do next?"
This game was also a milestone for me in that it was the first time I've ever had a character killed. This isn't that big a deal in a sufficiently high-level game; characters at this point can use the reputation points they've accumulated to pay for being raised. The in-game explanation is that their Society factions will go and retrieve and resurrect prominent members if they get killed.
The two games on Roll20 were both PFS Quests, a quick adventure format where you get one-quarter the experience of a normal scenario but spend one-half the time doing it. The quests are already being phased out at the end of this PFS season, to be replaced by a different quick adventure format. The two I played were nice in that we got to visit lesser-used areas of the Pathfinder world, but both had almost exactly the same structure and this could get old very quickly.
Since then I've been trying to get in a game per weekend, when I don't have an online con to go to. I'm currently signed up for games into early July.
So I wasn't free of that game until early May, but that was still in time for PaizoCon! Which is usually Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, but moved online and took the entire week and weekend following Memorial Day instead. The way the schedule worked out, I was only able to make it to weekend games.
One of the great things about PaizoCon was it introduced a whole lot of people to VTT games who'd never played them before (including quite a few of the Paizo staff). This was also the downside. Of the three games I played, two started an hour late. One of these was the high-level game on Fantasy Grounds. The GM had been encouraging people to get their characters set up as soon as signups opened, and even helped me finish importing mine two weeks before the game. And yet, when game time arrived, two of the people who'd signed up showed up to say, "I've only downloaded the app, what do I do next?"
This game was also a milestone for me in that it was the first time I've ever had a character killed. This isn't that big a deal in a sufficiently high-level game; characters at this point can use the reputation points they've accumulated to pay for being raised. The in-game explanation is that their Society factions will go and retrieve and resurrect prominent members if they get killed.
The two games on Roll20 were both PFS Quests, a quick adventure format where you get one-quarter the experience of a normal scenario but spend one-half the time doing it. The quests are already being phased out at the end of this PFS season, to be replaced by a different quick adventure format. The two I played were nice in that we got to visit lesser-used areas of the Pathfinder world, but both had almost exactly the same structure and this could get old very quickly.
Since then I've been trying to get in a game per weekend, when I don't have an online con to go to. I'm currently signed up for games into early July.
