Cloud

Had another session of my pathfinder game Saturday night. I picked up a module to run that was supposed to be a oneshot, but we were taking it kinda slow, which is fine. Something I do think is interesting is that many official events such as Pathfinder Society ban evil characters. It makes sense; if you don't know who you're playing with, people tend to use evil characters as an excuse to break the story or just generally use the game as their own personal power trip. But everyone in my game has known each other for years, we all trust each other, and we've taken the time to establish boundaries... so even though one of the characters is a literal demon, it hasn't been a problem. In fact, it's been really fun to have an evil character in the party! I guess maybe where the conflict comes from is that TTRPGs are at their best when everyone is on the same page, collaboratively telling a story. It's the same issue behind "railroading" GMs, or players completely ignoring the story the GM wants to tell. Ultimately, banning evil characters is just a bandaid for a deeper problem... but in a situation like PFS, or Adventurer's League, that might be the best solution available.

As an aside, the cover art for this module really looked like it was AI generated, but the module was from 2016, so it couldn't have been. The game got derailed for about 15 minutes while we just discussed all the little details about it that made it look AI generated. Really weird.

pathfinder game today went well despite literally everything that could go wrong going wrong (technical problems in the server and BOTH bots, players having to leave or having their mics stop working, etc). however, not much happened character-wise. it was mostly to introduce the concept of manifest zones and give the party the definitely not plot-relevant evil dragonshard. i think for next session i'll want to work with the players to make some NPCs for them to interact with. and now that the introductory stuff is over i can start working with designated arcs/arc villains.