Pathfinder and me: A chance first date.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Apr 09, 2012 1:51 pm

So I was at Pax-east over the weekend and the time was pretty rushed because of my wife wasn't feeling very well and so we didn't get to hang around too much.

Sunday was the last day and near the final hours and we decided to try out the Pathfinder startup box. It was a disappointing experience on many levels.

I decided to play the pre-made fighter. I easily noticed the fact that the human fighter had only one feat. Confused, I wanted to know where the other two feats were. The idiotic dm was adamant to the point to pointing out that the sheets were very correct and the startup box was inherently different from the actual game. he also mentioned as 3.5x, there had been some significant improved changes made to the system (GOD DAMN PF FANBOIS!) I wanted to walk out but since both the wife and I hadn't really had a rpg experience in ages, I decided to stick it out at least for her sake.

She also played the same fighter. We also had a metagaming Cleric who openly stated that he had read the module already but wasn't metagaming but his faith would keep him safe. Safe as in letting him bypass some of the traps. This while the rest of us were trying to be careful and using ropes and grappling hooks to cross the suspect rune-trapped bridge. The cleric was also an open sexist and racist as he kept on referring to each of the mooks and the bbeg as brown fucks or insolent bitch. Over and over and over again.

The rogue was the fourth player who was also new to PF. He played a typical rogue who used a decent amount of strategy.

A few bad rolls kinda made the game a little difficult but this was further made difficult by the cleric who decided to "trust in his faith" and kept on identifying the quest item to figure it out rather than helping us out against an evil Cleric who was kicking our asses. We had no way to get to her and we just couldn't hit her with our bows because of bad rolls. In the end, the "good" cleric decided to threaten us with death if we didn't agree with him to hand over the quest item to the bbeg so she would leave us alone. We didn't know that he was handing her a fake. But still.

The rogue came through in the end by ignoring the cleric and just backstabbing the bbeg.

The dm was totally not helpful in expaining to the noobs (which included the wife, the rogue, and me.) I had only vaguely read the rules a long time ago.

So, overall, I wasn't surprised at the disappointment that both of us felt at our experience. But the idea of having a wrongly built character sheet and the stupid dm and the stupid non-communicative, insulting, and asshole of a character totally skewed the impression.

Looking at the PF ogl, I can see that a human fighter does get three feats. But the game would still have been fubared. But even with the changes, a level 1 game is hard to fubar. But this was easily done by this dm.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sat Apr 14, 2012 4:42 pm

Wow.

Slightly off topic, did you get to try D&D Next?

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sun Apr 15, 2012 5:15 am

Of course. Then I went and played pretend...

Edit: I took the above to be sarcasm. I didn't notice the capitalized Next. Sorry. I actually didn't get to try it out. Any of the other D&D play lines were too long and my wife really wasn't in the mood to wait in line that long.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Tue Apr 24, 2012 2:16 am

Ah.

Well bad DM is bad.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Tue Apr 24, 2012 4:52 pm

You should've had "faith" guide your backhand upside that Cleric player's head because Jesus Christ fuck that guy.

Morzas · Post by **Morzas** » Mon May 07, 2012 2:41 am

Wait, rune-trapped bridge? Did that module also have a pre-generated Ninja and Samurai character sheet? I think I played that one at PAX Prime 2011.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon May 07, 2012 4:11 am

I wish it had a ninja or samurai

. Just the standard fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard, sheets.