The Pathfinder game that I'm working on will be no exception... but it will take some serious work on my part to bring back some of my favorite characters into a fantasy setting.
Since about 1997, I've primarily focused of playing or storytelling White Wolf's World of Darkness games. Most of these games have been in a modern setting. While many of the character concepts can be easily translated to a fantasy realm, there are those that will just not do like the hacker character that I've re-envisioned from a ghoul in a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP to a house-bound Glass Walker for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Although it could be done with some serious tweaking of the concept, I'm just going to let it go as there are a plethora of other characters I can use.
I'm planning on spreading these NPC's out across the land, but I'm sure that there will possibly be 1 of them that will travel with the players depending on if there's a major gap in the parties needs.
So that got me thinking about character creation. I'm actually considering the first session of the game to bring everyone together to create their characters at one time. This way, we could try and strategically craft each character to fill the roles for the party. I've done this a couple of times before with the mortal campaign, and it seemed to work well.
For those ST/DM/GM's that allow players to have technology at the game table, how do you regulate players from being distracted by going online? I'm torn on technology at game for a number of reasons:
- It's a distraction to players and they frequently lose track of their place in the game.
- Not all players have the necessary books for the game, and I would like to be able to share my digital copies as well as other specific online resources.
- Sending players an IM for secret communication is easier than slipping them a written note.
- Allowing players to use computers or similar tech for character creation will allow me a chance to gather copies of everyone's character sheets easier.
For the books I have digitally, it's easy enough for me to have them available to download from a thumb drive. Certain online resources, such as d20PFSRD.com, are invaluable to have access to. If only I could find an offline program that had the same functionality of that site, with all the information included. (You'll have to take a look for yourself to know its usefulness.)