Fictions & Fragments

The Pathfinder Playtest is going on now. I am really enjoying everything about it! Unexpectedly so, as well. http://paizo.com/pathfinderplaytest I played D&D 3 and 3.5 in their time. When I first heard about Pathfinder several years later, it seemed like a great way to preserve what I knew of D&D at a time when 4th Edition seemed like something different than I wanted.I ended up with a couple of Pathfinder books, then later a digital bundle of supplements. I don't think I ever used them once. By the time I got over my gaming hiatus, D&D 5th Edition was out and I liked it a lot. There was the influence of Critical Role and lots of local opportunities to run and play games, so I dived into D&D5e. I recently got a copy of Starfinder. I love the art but I ran the game for about 3 hours total and have no desire to go back. Starfinder has some interesting ideas but ends up very complicated; as a GM, it's more effort than I want to put in when prepping and r...

This week I've started preparing for an online streamed Starfinder game. Because I've been looking through so many resources, this seems like a good time to outline what steps I've taken. It can be hard to figure out how to start streaming a game. First, I needed players! Last week on Twitter I put out an open call for players. That worked well for me because I have a certain amount of reach on Twitter now. I set up a Discord server to plan the game and coordinate the pre-play items, like sharing safety tools we would use and the rules for Stafinder. I invited each potential player to the server. The benefit was allowing open discussion of the game on a private service. This could have been a Twitter or Facebook Messenger group message but I wanted to use Discord for voice during the game, so it seemed like a good time to learn Discord. An additional benefit of Discord is having multiple channels, which allowed me to use one for General Chat, one for Character Creatio...