A Grandmaster’s Guide to Good Guilding #2: Why I prefer Pathfinder RPG for teaching RPGs to kids

Yet another article on my musings while being the adult “Grandmaster” of a successful middle-school Pathfinder RPG club (now 18 students strong!) that the kids and I affectionately call “The Guild.” These posts likely will interest others who are introducing tabletop RPGs to young people. Read, comment, and enjoy!

(Please note that I am only comparing Pathfinder RPG to Basic D&D for teaching RPGs to kids, and have not spent much time with other RPG systems out there.)

Is Pathfinder RPG too complicated for kids?

Too many rules!?

That is a question asked over at the Paizo forums, where a parent who had played tabletop RPGs in the early 1980s had disliked the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) rules because it had many more rules than Basic D&D, which this parent felt got in the way of creativity and roleplaying. This parent wondered whether it made sense to introduce his or her kids to RPGs via the Pathfinder Beginner Box (for which I give a positive review here). After all, didn’t the Pathfinder Beginner Box eventually lead to the full Pathfinder RPG, which traced its lineage back to Advanced D&D and not Basic AD&D?

I thought that my own experience using the Pathfinder Beginner Box for my middle-school kids would be useful in answering this question.

Based on my experience, I have found the Pathfinder Beginner Box not to be too complicated and that it is better for getting young people (at least those between maybe 8 and 15 years old) introduced to RPGs, at least compared to Basic D&D. And I have been able to successfully transition the kids to full Pathfinder RPG.

Minimum ability scores in Pathfinder? They’re still there… if you look hard enough

A sublimated holdover from “old school play.”

There are no actual minimum ability scores in Pathfinder/D&D 3.x. There is nothing akin to First Edition AD&D’s requirement that you have a Charisma of 17 to become a Paladin, or a Strength of 15, Wisdom of 15, Dexterity of 15, and Constitution of 11 to become a monk.

BUT… minimum ability scores are still there, if you look hard enough. It is still true that you must roll high — from an optimizing standpoint — in order for certain Pathfinder classes to be viable.

The reason boils down to how some some classes rely on a single high ability score (“SAD” – Single Ability Dependent, like Fighters and Wizards), while others rely on more than one (“MAD” – Multiple Ability Dependent, like Paladins and Monks).

So, imagine you roll your scores and get the following array:

16, 13, 12, 12, 10, and 8

Well, you would make a strong fighter — if you chose to be a Human, you could bump your Strength up to 18. However, you would be a far-from-effective Monk — even if you were to assign your 16 roll to Strength, the highest your 1st-level (medium-sized) monk’s Armor Class could be would be a measly 14 (before factoring in feats). As a paladin, you would have either a low Strength stat or a low Charisma (needed for smite evil, channeling energy, and spellcasting).

So… it is still true, even in the player-empowering world of Pathfinder/D&D 3.5, that some classes are hard to “qualify” for, just as in First Edition AD&D. In fact, among the core 11 classes the Paladin and the Monk — the hardest to qualify for in First Edition AD&D — remain the hardest to roll good scores for. You can still play those classes, but you can’t necessarily be a powerful example of that class.

So, to optimizing power gamers at least, Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 still makes certain classes less attainable, while still technically allowing you to choose any class you want… A nice balance, if you ask me.

A Grandmaster’s Guide to Good Guilding #1: The Sales Pitch

This is the first of what likely will be many more posts on my musings while being the adult “Grandmaster” of a successful middle-school Pathfinder RPG club (now 18 students strong!) that the kids and I affectionately call “The Guild.” These posts likely will interest others who are introducing tabletop RPGs to young people. Read, comment, and enjoy!

I was inspired to start writing about my middle-school Pathfinder RPG club by posters at the Paizo forums who wanted to know how I managed to make it succeed. It would seem that a good place to start is how I was able to find the group’s members. But first it behooves me to give a little background as to how I got in this insanely lucky predicament in the first place.

I am a lawyer. My other job is teaching kids to play tabletop roleplaying games.

The kind of law I do does not pay the bills. Literally. I know of others who are buried in law-school debt and who work for nonprofits, but I differ from them in that I work for a civil rights organization that is highly rewarding, but where I often do not get paid at all.

Enter the Berkeley Unified School District. They have an excellent afterschool enrichment program that pays members of the community to engage kids in rewarding activities of all kinds (sports, music, art, etc.). It is funded by a combination of California’s state-afterschool-programs fund and the contribution of parents who participate in the program. Although the program offers a sliding scale for low-income parents, the relatively affluent and liberal community of Berkeley is able to contribute a good deal and is highly supportive of educational programs that foster young people’s inherent leadership ability and imagination.

What I’ve Been Doing

Life is an ebb and flow… just like the frequency of my posts on this blog.

At the moment, much of my creative energies are being directed toward the middle-school Pathfinder club I am running. I started a thread about it on the Paizo forums, and I’ve been maintaining a blog that the kids themselves have added posts to.

Make sure to pay the blog a visit and say hi!

Opposed skill checks… entirely unnecessary?

I have noticed that a lot of published adventure materials (as well as the Core Rulebook) instruct that opposed rolls be made:

Perception vs. Stealth
Sense Motive vs. Bluff
etc., etc…

But aren’t they actually unnecessary? Can’t we just treat one of the “rolls” as a flat DC?

Let’s take a Sense Motive roll as an example. An NPC tries to lie to a PC. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the NPC has a +0 Bluff modifier, and the PC has a +0 Sense Motive modifier.

If you treat it as simply a DC 10 skill check (DC 10 + opposed skill modifier), then the PC has a 55 percent chance of succeeding. I don’t think this changes with opposed rolls.

To illustrate further, let’s say we want to invent a dice-rolling game in which I have a 50% chance of winning. Either you and I can each roll a d20, and I win if my roll higher than yours and we re-roll if we tie. But what’s the point? I might as well roll a single d20 and win if I roll 11 or higher. (Or flip a coin!)

Basically, rolling two d20s seems like doing double duty. And since skill checks are not automatic successes on a 20 or automatic failures on a 1, nothing is added or subtracted to the possibility of success by rolling d20 twice.

I see this also applying to Perception vs. Stealth rolls. HOWEVER, it doesn’t necessarily work when the skill you are trying to “beat” is being practiced by multiple creatures. I suppose the rules intend the party to detect the LEAST stealthy individual among a group of hiding creatures, thus adjusting all the probabilities. However, as a GM I skip all this because it’s too much work for little payoff (and it makes Stealth checks too easy to defeat) — and so I just have the PCs do Perception checks against a flat DC.

Conversely, if an NPC is trying to detect whether a PC is bluffing, I don’t see why the PC should just try to do a Bluff check against a flat DC based on the NPC’s Sense Motive modifier.

So I don’t see where opposed rolls are necessary. Or am I missing something?

Early D&D: Baking-In the “Sweet Spot”

The amount of XP a Thief needed to advance to each new level in Basic D&D. (chart borrowed from Jeff’s Gameblog)

There is a very interesting thread on the Paizo forums right now, about how to give more of an “old-school feel” to the Pathfinder RPG ruleset. The discussion has been widely varied — not in small part due to the fact that “old school” means different things to different people — from suggested houserules that emulate AD&D 1e and 2e, to use of battle grids, to adventure and encounter design.

Several people in the thread have said that old-school play involved more real-world time passing between gaining new levels of experience.

Sure, I can see that being true once you got to higher levels of play in 1e and 2e, but that wasn’t true at the earliest levels: to take the most extreme example, the Thief in AD&D 1e achieved 2nd level at 1,251 XP, then 3rd level at 2,501 XP. And advancement speed also depended on the GM, who could drop a big treasure hoard in 1e, where gold equaled XP, and level up the characters as he or she saw fit. Heck, Gary Gygax even introduced a rule that no character can advance more than 1 level of experience at a time from a single play session — something unheard of in D&D in later editions.

One thing I like about the older rulesets was that the “sweet spot” of mid-range levels — at which the players no longer were common pushovers, and still had not maxed-out the limits of the game system and able to overpower all monsters and obstacles in their paths — was baked-in to the XP progression charts. Sure, the first few levels were obtained fairly quickly, but because advancing to the next level involved a doubling of the previous level’s XP requirement, each subsequent level involved a much longer effort than the previous one.

At the same time, each character class could only obtain so many Hit Dice; after 9th level or so, you could only get +1 hit points or +2 hit points per level, and regardless of your Constitution score.

Together, these rules presumed a “training period” during which adventurers strove toward a heroic ideal, with progress being quick at first but eventually slowing-down and plateauing. This was definitely true of the Fighter and Thief classes, but then there were the spellcasters who continued to uncover new secrets of the universe, who at the very-highest levels continued to obtain new tiers of power. Still, for them the XP requirements were so large that every “unlocking” of a new tier of power entailed a significant amount of play. This led to increasing imbalance among the classes, but at the same time it was consistent with the concept of magic being all-encompassing and powerful and was seen (for the Magic-User at least) as the reward for being extremely weak at the lowest levels.

Starting with D&D 3rd Edition, there was assumed to be a standard number of encounters to advance to each new level — about 13 encounters — and this remained at each level, all the way up to 20th. So the new norm of what every Level 1 adventurer was potentially capable, if they “simply worked hard and tried,” was to the 20th level adventurer. Gaming-time-wise, you skidded past the “sweet spot” at the same rate as you did the earliest levels. At the same time, the Fighter-type and Thief-type classes also continued to obtain abilities that kept them power at a closer pace with the spellcasters.

The end result is the opposite of a plateau in the “sweet spot”: a geometric curve upward in power that parallels the progression between levels of spellcasting power. And these new tiers of power are achieved at the same, unchanging rate. This is figured into the math of D&D 3rd Edition and its derivatives (including Pathfinder): the XP rewarded for defeating a creature is doubled for every 2 Challenge Rating (CR) levels one goes up. And CR by definition is equivalent to PC levels. So therefore one 5th-level PC “packs the same punch” as two 3rd-level PCs, just as one 13th-level PC packs the same punch as eight 5th-level PCs. And so on, and so on.

This, combined with the flat rate at which one obtained experience levels, has two effects: (1) the “sweet spot” is truncated and supplanted sooner by high-level play, and (2) gone is any sense of any an ideal to what mortals can achieve. To clarify this second point, there no longer is an in-world “elite club” of the mortal world’s movers and shakers — in 1e, there wasn’t much of a difference between a 14th level Fighter and an 18th Level Fighter. But in 3rd Edition forward, the difference is immense. The legends of your community are not nearly as legendary, when viewed in light of their higher-level neighbors, or in light of what they eventually could be if they went on, say, two more adventures. (Incidentally, this also compounds the difficulty of creating a believable “sandbox” setting with widely-varied encounter levels, and makes the escalation of monsters’ power over the course of a campaign more extreme and conveniently-coincidental.)

And so, in 3rd Edition D&D and its derivatives, the “pinnacle,” that achievement of legendary status, lies at 20th level. Instead of savoring the taste and feel of the “sweet spot,” the players during middle levels of play are still hurtling toward ever greater levels of power, with the expectation of attaining that greater power baked-in to the XP and rewards system.

This is my long-winded way of saying that, when Pathfinder RPG goes through its next iteration years from now, I would like the “sweet spot” to stay sweet much longer. In the time, I am wondering how maybe I could “fix” the recipe to make it better suit my tastes.

Here is a very rough idea I’m thinking about to expand the “sweet spot” in Pathfinder RPG. (Keep in mind that Pathfinder’s Medium XP progression assumes a 20-encounters-per-level progression.)

Levels 1 and 2 – 13 encounters
Levels 3 through 5 – 20 encounters
Levels 6 through 12 – 40 encounters
Levels 13 and up – 60 encounters

Suggestions, comments?

Inspiration

Sketch by cooey2ph

Endeavoring to lead a game
Of Pathfinder, I am ashamed
To say I’ve never read (but seen)
The work of J. R. R. Tolkien.

For if I am to weave a tale
As skilled as those in Rivendell,
I must immerse in lofty prose
Until my thought to tongue smooth flows.

All for eleven twelve-year-olds
Hungry for a tale well told,
In which they go where evil lies
To find their glory, prepared to die!

And so today’s to Inspiration!
From heroes, and from those who to tell,
From those of high and lowest station,
From those who strain to listen well.