what am i doing now, feb 2024 edition

dungeon23

I did finish Dungeon23 - I have a room or a system or a thing for every day in 2023. I haven't scanned them all because it's a lot of effort and I'm tired all the time. I do plan to but there's no rush, I don't think anyone is hanging on my dungeon23 output.

In 2024 I'm doing...

hex24/Pathfinder 2e

Hex24 is an equivalent challenge to Dungeon23 which involves making one hex per day instead of one dungeon room per day. A hex is more work than a room, but on the other hand you don't also have to come up with a theme for a dungeon, which makes it feel easier to me.

I started a Pathfinder 2e game at the end of last year based around HOME, which is a great toolkit for just simply getting started with a sandbox. I see a lot of GMs saying "you know I like the idea of sandbox but I just don't know where to start, how to set it up, what people are going to do" - well, HOME has straightforward procedures for that, goals, populating hexes, all of that. With minimal effort you can produce a sandhexboxcrawl with enough plot behind it to satisfy players not used to that style. You can then play it straight or tailor it how you like (being me, I have messed with it extensively, but it gave me a place to start).

One doesn't have to fill in all the hexes on the map for HOME by any means, but after I started, I thought "well why not do this hex24 thing and fill the rest of them in?" So I'm doing that.

are you really running a hexcrawl in Pathfinder 2e

yes

My players like the "build minigame" and they like detailed spatial/tactical combat, both of which PF2e does very well. I personally don't give a monkey's for either of those, and would much rather run OSE or Cypher or whatever as it's less prep work on my part, but think that I can run pretty much any style in any game if I want to, and so far PF2e doesn't have the killer flaw of say Starfinder 1e (or 5e, though I've never run 5e) of having complex rules which still have plenty of ambiguity, meaning that it's just as much work to use them as just make everything up yourself. More, in fact, since instead of just making GM calls, you're making GM calls in the context of some existing but insufficient rules.

If you don't like that situation, and I don't, and a lot of people don't, you can use rules with reduced scope that intrinsically have more space for improvising, or you can use rules which are more complete and less ambiguous. It's been quite educational reading and playing PF2e as the rules really are the most complete and unambiguous I've ever seen. Sometimes they are complex but I can get my head round complex rules fine as long as they make sense.

Also, the game is perfectly possible to run in an OSR style (even while still technically RAW, not that I would be bothered if it weren't). For a lot of action outside of combat it just says "roll a skill vs a DC which the GM makes up, if you want to make a roll at all". I am fine with that, I let people try all the stuff that they would in an OSR game. It has detailed encounter balancing rules (which are not actually as precise as is claimed, but they're not bad for what they are) but that doesn't mean you have to use them to create encounters, it means you can use them to judge how lethal an encounter might be. People on reddit have told me that I can't possibly be running PF2e in an OSR style because it's impossible, and those people are just basically both wrong and rude.