The Beginning.

I’m going to go back to how it all started.  I think that’s a good place to start.

About 3 years ago, give or take, my local gaming shop was running 4^th edition Dungeons and Dragons Delve Night every Tuesday.  For those unfamiliar with Delve Night, at the time (and I’m not sure if it continues to be this under it’s current Encounters format) Wizards of the Coast put out a monthly dungeon designed to be four or five encounters for groups to play through.  It was designed to be a quick bit of Dungeons and Dragons every week, specifically aimed at new players.

And at the local shop (yeah, I’m not saying their name intentionally), it was very popular.  We were getting 20-30 people every Tuesday.

But it was also just an hour of combat that only had continuity to, at most, the previous three combats.  There was no story, character development, or really anything that made Dungeons and Dragons what I wanted to spend my time doing.

And I wasn’t alone.

There was some drama with the establishment of this gaming group.  The person running the Delve Night stuff felt insulted that we seemed to be setting ourselves up as “too good” for his event, and I totally understand where he was coming from.  Two of us were his go-to backup DMs for the groups of 20-30 that were showing up.  We’d be leaving him in a pretty huge lurch.  Additionally, or first DM and the player really responsible for organizing the whole thing didn’t do a great job of communicating intent, and it all sort of came across as the (initially) 6 of us being huge elitist dicks.

But that’s neither here nor there.  Things smoothed over pretty quick on that front.  Maybe three weeks of drama at most.

After figuring out who the DM was going to be (the game group was started on the assumption that I would be running, but no one had bothered to ask me if I wanted to run, which, at the time, I didn’t), we started playing.

We played 4^th edition for a long time.  Probably a year and a half.  The campaign started and stopped, and we have always (and to be honest, we do still) had a problem with actually getting together.  A lot of that was my fault.  I do stats keeping for two different colleges, and there are stretches of time between November and March, I simply disappear socially.

But after that year and a half, it became clear that 4^th edition was simply not the game for us.  We gave up dungeons and dragons for quite a while and switched to Deadlands.

But about six months ago, I got the bug to run again, and it all started with one idea that can be written in one paragraph.  But that paragraph is too important to the first session to post apart from it, so I’ll save it.

We started the game, and played it twice, as a 4^th edition game.  Again, I couldn’t get my head into the 4^th ed game, so a switch was made.  Without so much as a dissenting voice, we decided to adapt to Pathfinder.  I made some rules changes to the core Pathfinder game, and those will be the entirety of my second post.