Suggested Read - Gibbering Mouth

 A brief post, but I really enjoyed the blog post at Gibbering Mouth by Alex Augunas (here). He reviews his recent experiences with Pathfinder 1 E and 2E, D&D 5E and Starfinder and talks about his experience with their strengths and weaknesses. He does a better job of expressing some of the issues, particularly with Starfinder (and its enormous setting strengths) than I have, and I find his discussion on PF2E a cogent analysis, one I have not quite seen as well as a GM, but which my players feel and likely would agree with from his analysis.

When I consider my time with Pathfinder 1E, for example, I am in total agreement....PF1E broke me in many ways as a GM, which is why I like PF2E so much more. I haven't yet reconciled my current new obsession with D&D 3.5 (and that game is still going strong!) beyond that D&D 3rd is a known quantity and that I am running it with careful consideration for all of its mechanical expectations at present. When that campaign hits level 12 I do sort of expect it to go off the rails....but also I recall how that was not really a thing I noticed (except for once when I experienced a CoDzilla first hand) until 3.5 was retired and Pathfinder 1E had risen to carry the torch. 

Still, PF2E is a lot of fun to play. I think my players are more in sync with it overall now, but I'd also suggest it's a hard game to play on autopilot....despite some trimming of the rules a bit, the game still is pervasive with the philosophy of system mastery and a casual player can easily find themselves spamming the quick and easy to understand stuff and miss out on interesting synergies and hidden options.

D&D 5E, meanwhile, is most definitely as Alex characterizes it: so easy it almost feels like you're missing something. I disagree on the skills, though. The complaint about definitions and their absence only makes sense if you are overly used to the rigor applied from 3rd edition onward to tightly defining what skills can do. If you are used to more holistic systems such as BRP/Call of Cthulhu and most other skill based RPGs of prior decades (GURPS excluded), a more generalized "eyeball and guesstimate the best approach" sort of attitude toward skills makes more sense.

His enthusiasm for Starfinder is infectious, though. It makes me really want to dive back in. His analysis on the problem with the game economy is intriguing, as I hadn't thought of the issue in this manner before (that the game drives players to spend their currency on constant upgrades at the expense of more tangential and fun rewards) but makes total sense. Still, just reading it makes me want to dive back in. I've had one really good Starfinder campaign two fun but failed ones, and a medley of one-offs that should have gone somewhere but didn't. I am thinking that the next time I try, everyone starts at level 5 to begin with to bypass the excruciating low level experience and I work on envisioning a stronger and more coherent space fantasy setting that I can riff from in a manner similar to the fantasy setting I find so easy.

The Top Articles on Realms of Chirak

Every now and then I like to look at the Google metrics and see what's getting the most attention. Here then is the Top Ten Posts of All Time currently on Realms of Chirak along with my comments on why each article garners so much attention:

1. The 5E Minotaur as a Character Race (3,429 hits)
--I continue to be amazed this sits at the top. It's a write-up of the MM minotaur as a character option, which means you can best use it for class-stated minotaur foes, or if you're not too worried about how OP the minotaur is you can open it up to players. That said, there's an official minotaur option out there, so I can't see much need for this variant now.

2. Shifting From Pathfinder to D&D 5th Edition in 2014? (2,334 hits)
--A lot of people made this leap, around this time, and I find it telling that two of my top ten articles relate to the conversion from Pathfinder to 5E. Makes me wonder about how well Pathfinder 2.0 will do later this summer....I plan on buying all the books, so I guess I'll get to let you know!

3. Ages of Lingusia: The Death Gods (2,224 hits)
--Either people need lots of death gods, or the enigmatic illustration I linked to is highly prized (it's a great illustration).

4. The Many Days of Horror: Return of the Living Dead (NSFW) (2,153 hits)
--The doubling in hits is totally due to my engaging commentary on this zombie classic, and totally not about the nude zombie Linnea Quigley pics in the article.

5. The Super Quick and Dirty Pathfinder Monster Conversion for 5E (1,436 hits)
--Back in 2015 we were still waiting for monster manuals, so converting Pathfinder monsters was often our only option for some beasts not yet documented in 5E. Today...we're drowning in good monster manuals!

6. Tales of the Cannadad Dei: Sabiri Tattoos (1,317 hits)
--I'd like to think there's a compelling interest in Sabiri and their skin-etched tattoo magic, but I think it's really just the linked Luis Royo image. I picked that image because it was the inspiration for my first games set in the Sabiri lands.

7. Halloween Countdown Finale: Dooooooooom! (1,287 hits)
--Just pictures in this post, so presumably more than a few hits from people looking for certain artists or images.

8. Five Things I'm Not Going to Miss About Pathfinder (1,260 hits)
--I think back in 2013-2014 I was not alone among gamers who decided that it was time to take a more or less permanent break from Pathfinder and embrace D&D 5E. I may be having fun with Pathfinder (and Starfinder) these days, but it is with a much more casual and limited approach; 5E made it hard for a lot of us to go back to needlessly more complicated iterations of D20.

9. D&D 5E Updates: The Mohrg (1,170 hits)
--At the time I posted this article no published tome (neither 3PP nor WotC) had stats for the Mohrg, a creature I think is quite popular (or maybe it's just me).

10. Resident Evil 6: The Leon Kennedy Campaign (1,144 hits)
--I'd like to believe it was my entertaining and witty description of this preposterous game's campaign but if the above observations have validity then let's be honest, it's probably Deborah's image.

Bonus: My most accessed Index Page is the Realms or Chirak 5E Index Page which is not surprising, I suppose. The least accessed is my Fantasy AGE Resource page, which is also not surprising, given my mixed feelings about that system and repeated attempts to get in to it, followed by hard crash and burn events.

The Moral of the Story: Use more evocative art, post more NSFW content and wax philosophical on the cons of Pathfinder vs. the Pros of D&D 5E! Or maybe not....I'll just keep doing whatever I feel like instead... ;-)

The top ten list is always interesting because, on average, I may have around 200-300 active browsers who frequent this site regularly, people who maybe have book-marked RoC and like to visit every now and then (and yes, it used to be higher, but as is true with all internet content, when the content slows down people go away). That means that this top ten list shows a lot less about what active blog readers are looking at and what Google's search engine refers people to. Or, put another way, it is likelier showing what people are interested in that by accident coincides with some of the content on my site.

There are probably secondary sources...I run into occasional links to Reddit threads addressing something on my site,* for example (I don't frequent Reddit, have an account, or even try to go there except when a link takes me to one of the threads). There may be other links I am unaware of. But most of these top ten are definitely because people:

...need minotaur PC stats fast, are having a breakup with Pathfinder, need mohrg stats fast, like Luis Royo, like Linnea Quigley, like Return of the Living Dead, like that cool death god image, maybe like death gods, like apocalyptic images, and maybe, just maybe, liked my rip on Resident Evil 6!








*Example: when I started looking for 5E-powered SF RPGs recently I first looked in to Hyperlanes again, to see if issues I had with it had been addressed ever, or if new content was out. I found precious little, and wondering if I was the only one who had been bothered by the way the classes in Hyperlanes (but not the monsters, I will note) dropped iterative attacks and escalating damage as a core design feature of 5E, I did some searching....and ironically that searching brought me back to a Reddit article discussing this and using my own RoC blog post as a reference for the discussion point. Oroborous of the internet!