Embracing the Chaos!

We had one of the GMs miss yesterday's meeting and he asked me to fill in for him, which I gladly did. It was kind of enlightening on a couple of counts.

First I really thought the players were doing pretty good. They were being much more cautious and working together well. It was still a little crazy in combat, but the group is doing better overall. I really had to wonder if this was because they were all playing PCs they really love. What I mean is that with all the PF rules opened up for exploitation they have created some odd ball, unconventional PCs; but have built PCs they really think are cool. True we have one goblin PC, two orc PCs and one Ifrit, but they really love those guys. And for me this is a wide stretch of allowances--I usually don't allow those sorts of PCs in my campaigns. But since I was just filling in I decided to simply embrace the chaos. I enforced a little bit of racial prejudice between the Elves and the Orcs and Goblin, but they talked through it. I also have made the Paladin's ability use a little "spotty" since he is actively adventuring with 2 Neutral Evil Orcs. But I haven't outright prohibited anything.

Which brings me to the second thing I noticed, that embracing the chaos can be a good thing. We all had fun. I was kind of dropping in natural consequences for their lack of staying true to racial prejudices or alignments without really good reasons, but I wasn't saying no all the time. I gladly delved into rules when we needed adjudications, and they just had to wait for a minute or two while I looked things up. We only had one complaint from a kid who's Dad played 1e and finds reasons to dis Pathfinder. While I was looking up spellcaster DC modifiers, he complained this was why PF was worse--b/c you had to look everything up. Noone responded, and I just thought--if you used all the rules in 1e you might have to look stuff up too. But other than that one incident everyone had a blast. I was less concerned about trying to enforce my personal view of fantasy, and just playing the game as it came. So lots of my "hang-ups" weren't near as problematic for me as they usually are. Which made me wonder if I shouldn't just relax, play the game and have fun more often.

Good advice, eh?