D&D and Me: Part 7 (The Next Generation)

[This is the seventh post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about my longest-running character, a monk in D&D’s third edition.  This was also one of the last characters I played with my long-time gaming group.]

In 2005, I moved to Southern Maryland, and in 2007 I moved again, this time to Southern California.  I didn’t find a new gaming group in either location, so, after roughly 15 years of weekly gaming with very few breaks, I began a long hiatus away from TTRPGs.  From actually playing, in any event.  I still kept up with the news, and I would buy a book occasionally, just to read for myself.  In many ways, this period harkened back to my original experiences with D&D: just reading new rules, messing around with creating characters or storylines, but not really playing.

In 2008, D&D released its fourth edition (referred to, of course, as “4e”).  I was actually quite excited about this in all the hype leading up to the release, but once the product was in hand ... I was disappointed.  Not sure if it would have really made that much difference, seeing as how I had no one to play it with anyway, but for some reason I was really quite irked at how bad the new version was.  Luckily, that was about to change.

I don’t need to go into a long explanation about what Pathfinder is, because I’ve already done that, if you care to read it.  The short version is, Pathfinder updates the D&D 3e ruleset with major improvements, but little structural change.  I’m not opposed to structural change, mind you: the jump from 2e to 3e was huge, and I loved it, because things got better.  But this change—from 3e to 4e, that is—felt different, and definintely not better.  Pathfinder, on the other hand, was somehow both amazing in how much was changed and in how much remained the same.  By the time it was officially released in 2009, I had already been avidly following the public playtest, and I was ready to try it out.  If only I had someone to play with ...

But, of course, by that time my eldest was 11 years old, and that’s plenty old enough to learn TTRPGs.  I was back to being solely a GM, of course, but that was okay.  In many ways, those early days of Pathfinder were eerily similar to my early days of D&D: after a long period of just reading rules, I had a young child to teach, I had to constantly invent new rules because you can’t stifle a kid’s creativity, and I was generating settings from scratch with way more emphasis on fun adventuring than rational worldbuilding.  That the young child was son instead of brother made little difference; that the game was Pathfinder instead of D&D pre-1e was only different in that it was much easier to teach.  The big contrast was that, now with about a decade of GM experience under my belt, I mostly knew what I was doing.  I also knew enough to play around with other games: we spent quite a bit of time experimenting with post-apocalyptic RPGs, for instance.  In Pathfinder, my kid played a half-wood-elf-half-drow named Krad Demonshield who started out as a custom class I made called “witchblade” (that ever-elusive search for the perfect blend of fighter and magic-user) and then multiclassed into another custom class I made which reused my favorite alt-classname “nightblade,”^* this time cast more as a shadow-magic-wielding assassin (but, you know, the good kind of assassin).  There was also another fantasy character, a minotaur named Foghnar, but I don’t believe we used Pathfinder for that one.

Pathfinder was really fun for me.  I spent a lot of time developing classes, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I also enjoyed a lot of the supplemental classes that were released for it.  Their witch was so good I abandoned my attempt at building one, and their oracle was so close to something I’d been working on (which I called a “hermit,” after the tarot card, which was its inspiration) that I completely reworked mine to be a slight tweak of it.  Their magus gave me major tips for reworking my witchblade, and their hybrid class the hunter may be a better ranger than the ranger.^**  I loved the rules, which were still way more complex than they should have been, but I was comparing to the previous editions of D&D, and in that light they look delightfully slim.  The combat was still a major pain, especially from the GM point of view, but character creation was a joy, with ever-so-many options, and fairly easy (at least for a long-time 3e player) to add even more of your own.

Eventually my child went off to teach Pathfinder to their friend group, and became a GM in their own right.  This led to less tabletop gaming for me, but that was okay.  I had other things to do, and GMing is a pretty big time commitment, so as long as the kid was having fun and carrying on the family traditions, I was fine.  The GMing I had done up to then was still pretty satisfying.

Of course, the only downside was that I didn’t really get to play a character.  I had NPCs, sure—Krad Demonshield, for instance, was almost always accompanied by his paladin friend Alcinor—but they weren’t really my characters in the same way that my PCs had been.  They were sort of GMPCs, although I didn’t really treat them as such.  But it’s a gray area when you’re playing one-on-one campaigns.

Of course, I had another child as well.  He was far too young to play with us during our Pathfinder heydey, but, then, children have a tendency of getting older.  By the time we’d burned out on Pathfinder, my middle child was now 11, and it was time for him to get in on the action.  He first played a Dungeon World one-shot^*** for the eldest’s sixteenth birthday, and we moved on from there to a new campaign where I got to create the first paladin character I actually enjoyed, Arkan Kupriveryx.  Because, you see, by that point, fifth edition was out.

Next time we’ll talk 5e and the rise of actual play D&D games.

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* See part 5 for further discussion on the origin of that term.

** Although probably still not as good as 3.5e’s scout.

*** For those not familiar, Dungeon World is sort of like D&D crossed with Apocalypse World, and if you don’t know what that is, probably just best to think of it as a “modern” TTRPG designed to focus more on narrative than rules.