Pathfinder Again

First Published: 2023 November 7

As I alluded to yesterday, I’m currently playing a Pathfinder 2E campaign with some friends. It’s an interesting concept, where we groundhog’s day¹ back to the start of the dungeon every time that we die. Due in large part to that being the agreed upon mechanic, the game is primarily combat focused.

Our GM had the stated goal of getting better at creating and executing combats during the course of the campaign. He is one of my alleged cousins,² and the party consists of me, my brother³, the GM’s brother⁴, and the GM’s former roommate.⁵ It’s been a fun experience, in large part because of the lack of consequences. Often when I play DnD or an equivalent game, I try very hard to both focus on the specific combat and having a good time there and also on the broader story arc. That can be a little exhausting, because fighting optimally is fun for me, but is not necessarily reflective of the characters I enjoy roleplaying outside of combat.⁶ In this game, however, I’ve decided to play a character who is concerned about the fact that he hasn’t died yet.

More than that, the DM has given us free reign to rewrite our character sheets between attempted delves, which adds a layer of dehumanization as an RP’er. My character no longer really knows what is real, since he truly remembers being born of Black Dragons, but now seems to be born of Blue Dragon.⁷ It’s been really fun, and I’m excited to play again. The rest of the post will be written tonight, when we’re finished with the session. It may be a first person log, from my character, depending on how I feel.

Well, this time I was the only fatality. The issue with playing a game where everyone⁸ has an undergraduate degree in chemistry, and the majority of us are getting degrees in something at least vaguely related to chemistry is that you run into some dangerously real world interactions. In PF2e, there’s a Class⁹ that allows you to create metal structures. There are a number of monsters which create acid, which our GM ruled can erode metal structures, because metal, as we know, dissolves in acid.

One of our group members, being a chemist, recognized the redox reaction that implies. Iron, when dissolved in acid, converts to Iron Oxide. The oxygen, obviously, comes from somewhere. In the case of dissolving in acid, that tends to come from water.

Now, water, as we all know, is made of two hydrogens and an oxygen. When you pull the oxygen out of water, you are left with hydrogen. Through potentially relevant situations, the monster we were fighting ended up on fire.¹⁰ When the monster then ate away what the GM decided was 60 pounds of iron, that meant that we had reacted away approximately 550 moles of iron.

That ended up making something around 1200 liters of hydrogen gas.¹¹ The GM ruled that was worth 40 d6 fire damage. I, stupidly, had just jumped next to the monster, and so was caught in the blast as well. Had I been at full health, it would have almost killed me at once. Since I was doing my job as a bartender and tanking the hit, I completely died at once. I’m excited to be revived next week, and to have learned absolutely no lessons from the experience.

Update a few minutes later: I apparently got to come back to life.¹² Now we’re going sailing, for some reason.¹³ Thankfully, I have taken the nicest feat in pathfinder¹⁴ We found a river drake, and through situations completely outside of our control¹⁵ it tried to fight us. It’s very fun being a barbarian, because my strategy is very simple. If I am close enough to punch, I use a war flail and smash it. If not, I either throw a bomb or a javelin, depending on how much of a threat the object appears.

In the case of the water drake, it was very easy to dispatch, likely due to the fact that we are all fifth level and got a turn off before it did. With a couple of lucky criticals, we dispatched it before it had a chance to fight. A part of me feels bad, but that voice is a small one. I realized the group did not know that I dislike dragons, which is the only part I feel bad about.

We then encountered some other creatures that also do not speak Draconic. As a result, we were able to tell them that the river drake had attacked us for no reason. Unfortunately, they also wanted the eggs, so we had a bit of a disagreement over how to make that happen. After offering them other foods, they tried to fight us.¹⁶

Annoyingly enough, I failed my single attack roll, which meant that I mostly just stood around as the rest of the party killed the monsters. I did my job, however, and soaked up the damage that they wanted to output. In such a regard, I really do a great job of playing damage sponge for the group.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? Once again, it was a successful day of writing for NaNo. I still don’t love the story, and I don’t think that I’m going to at any point, but that’s fine. It’s good for me to do something I only kind of enjoy sometimes.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? So, I did not end up finishing last night’s chapter. It ended up being exactly six hundred words shy, which I wrote this morning during my hour of writing time with a friend.¹⁷ I have not yet finished today’s chapter of Jeb, but I have hope that I will do so before I go to sleep. If not, I’ll have to finish it tomorrow as well, or accept that a long chapter of a book a day may be too optimistic of a goal for me to take on in addition to everything else I’ve done. I did, semi-relatedly, write a 1200 word draft of a methods section for a manuscript my PI has asked me to start writing. Maybe that explains some of my lack of desire to keep writing right now. For all that my creative writing total is about 5200 words today, my total wordcount is apparently closer to 7000¹⁸

  Update as I kept working on this blog post: I’m now much closer to 6000 creative words today, and I’m almost positive that I’ll finish the chapter tonight, if only because I still have like a hundred words left to write and I have nothing to write here.

• Did I blog? Did I ever! Look at me, continuing to send out content into the void that is the website I have.

• Did I stretch? I ended up falling asleep midstretch last night, which isn’t great. After this post posts, I’ll start.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? Not really, honestly. My rosary last night was done while half asleep. I did the Angelus today, and I tried to focus on it, though.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? Not today! I got another friend’s address, which is a form of progress, I suppose. In terms of putting ink¹⁹ on paper, though, I did not make any progress. There’s always tomorrow.