The State of Pathfinder

Well, here’s another late post. I was up too late last night playing Pathfinder and exploring my characters. Here’s where they’re all at right now:

• Alex Lewis started as a pleasant geokineticist (moves rocks with his mind), and now he is a surrogate father figure to at least one other character, isn’t sure if he’s going to go on dangerous adventures, and has started to master water in addition to rock, so that he can heal the people he can’t always save.
• Peridan Twinklefoot and Per-Nog, two sides of the same person, started as eager adventurers with an axe to grind (literally), and now they are partially responsible for two people’s religious redemption, one of whom she might be in a relationship with, and she’s traded in the axe for grappling and suplexes. Oh, also she’s less than three feet tall.
• Akemi is just getting started, but she’s already gone from relying on her natural charm to realizing that sometimes, you have to just talk to people and be yourself.
• Angela was supposed to be a throwaway character, created to create peril for other characters, but through the course of a few hours, she changed from a field medic who had never experienced war before to the kind of woman who is smart enough to ask her allies to cut off her arm because it’s not salvageable. Also, her arm nearly got shot off.
• Ashley is the NPC (non-player character) who periodically gives quests to save animals around the town. She’s undergoing some changes, but I’m not going to talk about them right now. There’s a longterm plan, and I don’t want to give the plan away just yet.

So how did all these characters get to where they’re at right now? Maybe I’ll give full rundowns of each character later. For now, the basic explanation: I like longterm storytelling. I like seeing characters earn major changes by spending time developing. Peridan didn’t meet Geth and immediately start a relationship with her. It took weeks of being friends with her, hanging out, sparring, and finally working with her (across multiple days) to convince her to stop worshiping an evil deity. And only after all of that, after being there for her for weeks of real time (which could be months in the game), only then was I rewarded with…one kiss. But it was well earned. I’ll be continuing to put in more work to get the second one.