Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 001: Greetings And Salutations.
We thought it might be fun to have a little post-episode blogging as a means of sparking some conversation and diving into issues that came up during the episode in a little more detail. Think of it like Talking Dead, but without Chris Hardwick’s fascination with skinny jeans.
The first thing I noticed is that I forgot to share my personal background with gaming, though if we’re being honest, it’s not that different from the other guys. My fascination with high fantasy started with the Rankin-Bass production of The Hobbit and my dad reading the Lord of the Rings books to my older brother and I as kids (mercifully, he did not try to sing along with the elf songs). From there, my brother and I (along with a group of neighborhood friends) discovered D&D and other TSR games somewhere in the late 70s or early 80s. We liked Top Secret quite a bit, were kind of indifferent toward Gamma World, and our one session of Boot Hill degenerated into absurdist farce because our GM decided to have an entire bar pick a fight with my one friend Chris (not RFC Chris) because he refused to buy a cowboy hat. Since then, I’ve been a lifelong gamer, and yes, I’m even attempting to convert my 13-year-old son – I have a fathers-and-sons game with a couple local friends and their kids.
So… Thirsty! That was a really pleasant surprise. I did look over the Starfinder rules before we started, but I have to admit a good chunk of the lore sailed over my head on first viewing. The one thing that “stuck” was the disappearance of Golarion, and my first reaction to that reveal was “apparently we’d better stick the landing in our Iron Gods campaign”. But it was really great having Thirsty drop in and give us the background (and the sneak peeks at where Starfinder is going). Having said that, from a gameplay perspective, it seemed a little cold-hearted to give him an NPC that gets shot after delivering two lines. Hey… there are no small parts…
It was actually one of the last things Thirsty said that really resonated with me – the notion that this is all going to be new to us. I love playing Pathfinder, but there are times where you’ve played so much that it’s a little bit “paint-by-numbers” – oh, it’s undead, so break out the fire and holy water; oh, he has Spell X, that must mean he’s Class Y, and at least level Z. Even if you don’t verbalize it out loud, you start to meta-game whether you mean to or not. It’ll be really nice – if a little bit intimidating at times – to play in an environment that’s comparatively tabula rasa.
Indeed, that was part of how I ended up creating Tuttle.
When I first got a hold of the rules, Solarian was the class that caught my eye. If you haven’t picked the rules up, Solarians are a melee class that harness light (star) and dark (black hole) powers to create additional effects. There’s no perfect Starfinder-to-Pathfinder translation, but a melee with spell powers like a magus or monk might be in the ballpark. I like casters and dual-wield rogues, and Solarian felt like it captured a lot of that. I’m pretty sure I called “dibs” on Solarian within 24 hours of reading the class description.
But I found I wasn’t really coming up with a compelling character concept; after about a week, I had a set of stats attached to a Sentient Haircut. At best, my “character arc” was changing my race between Lashunta and Android a few times.
So I decided to throw that character out and start from scratch with the notion that I was going to challenge myself to play something I hadn’t played before. The Mechanic class leapt out from that standpoint, as playing a tech expert is just about the definition of embracing what’s new about Starfinder, and the drone seemed like an interesting game mechanic. The personality started to gel next – as I said on the podcast, the “tech guy with limited people skills” is a bit of an amalgam of multiple people I’ve met over the years. On good days, it’ll be matter-of-fact conversations about dissecting your brain after you die without understanding why that would be upsetting to the other person; on bad days, it’ll manifest as calling people stupid to their faces. And somehow, it just amused me to have all of this coming out of a three-foot-tall rat, though ysoki do make a natural racial choice for a mechanic.
As far as calling the drone C.H.D.R.R. – that’s all me. I try to be genuinely clever (I grew up in a house where Monty Python was required viewing), but sometimes I take the low-hanging fruit of Dad Jokes, quotes from Anchorman, and dropping “that’s what she said” jokes into conversations. You’d better get used to it.
I realize the first episode is a bit heavy on the book-keeping, but I’d love to hear your feedback, whether it’s the topics I’ve been talking about here, or something else in the podcast that may have captured your interest. Feel free to jump in and join the conversation.