No, seriously! That’s what I’m doing right now, and this is a blog post about how I’m doing it. This can also be useful if you’re trying to run a game with very little in the way of supplies, helping you organize your thinking and what few resources you have.
Oddly in a homeless shelter you actually have a lot of free time. I have an assigned bed, a storage box under the bed, and a locker (with a lock) that’s considered “mine,” so I don’t have a lot of space to spread out or keep a lot of resources. I do have that time, however, and since running RPGs is one of my favorite hobbies then I decided to start a RPG game while I’m here.
I needed a way to run said game - thankfully, I have my trusty iPad Pro with keyboard cover, which is what I’m typing on right now, so essentially a laptop. It’s not super comfortable to use in bed, so I sit at a table in the shelter’s TV/meeting lounge and do most anything requiring more than a few sentences of typing that way.
It’s not like I discovered some secret group of players here. People come and go far too often for me to set up a consistent group, and there’s a lot of little crises or things that often upset schedules. Instead I’m running a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) style asynchronous game on the Purple/Queer OSR Discord server (link: https://discord.gg/6vqF25E). The channels I use for the game on that server are #under-illefarn-ic and #under-illefarn-ooc; and even if you’re seeing this post years later you can likely find them archived on that server if you want to look at the actual game.
For people who don’t know how running D&D or other RPGs as a CYOA works, the “players” as a collective group take control over one or a group of characters and collectively vote on what the characters do. You often don’t get quite as granular as actual RPGs themselves do - for example, the first combat I asked the players which salvaged weapon they wanted to use, then ran the combat myself and wrote out the results for their entertainment. Like a CYOA book, choices should always be meaningful and usually interesting: the second combat I began by asking the players which direction they wanted to approach from, which affected which combat actions they had access to. The important factors are those distinguishing choices the players make as a group (making it a group activity as opposed to a CYOA, and also making it faster than infamously laboriously-slow play-by-post gaming) and the asynchronous messages you send as DM to update the game, which makes it suitable for my life at the shelter.
The other thing a CYOA allows that’s really beneficial is that it provides a lot of space and time to dig into the specific details of the game, the setting, or the narrative. I’m running a prepared adventure (more on that below), and because the players are reading the game text at their own pace, I’m comfortable cutting and pasting entire read-aloud text boxes right into the game channel. (Note that formatting is very important - running this on Discord, I use bold and italic formatting to note when an actual Choice is available at the end of an update, and emoji responses are the ways players vote for what choices they want to make.) For me, I’ve repeated my reputation of being a DM with a lot of passion about the Forgotten Realms and a lot of knowledge to share about the setting, so this is a very fertile way for me to play the game at a manageable pace with however many players are interested, and show them what interests me about the setting/how I think it should be played. I think they’re enjoying it so far — I hope they are!
The Forgotten Realms dovetails into my first big suggestion about what to do when running a game in this situation — run what you’re familiar with. Seriously, don’t think about projects or ideas you’ve been long-germinating, or criticisms you’ve had of the systems or settings or adventures that you’re the most familiar with. Just run whatever you know and are interested in, and that’s enough. For me, the CYOA is actually taking place in Pathfinder 1e, because I know 3e/PF well enough to run up through many uncommon scenarios without any referencing and can explain it to any players with questions. While Pathfinder is an unusual choice for an OSR Discord, and it doesn’t work very well for solo play, it’s something I can very simply run the entire game of and confidently make rulings/report gameplay results about, and that makes it far and away the best choice for such things for me.
That’s also why I chose to run a Forgotten Realms game - again, I’m familiar with it, I know a lot of it and can meaningfully represent it well with little referencing, and I’m confident in my ability to make it interesting to the players. But why did I pick a prepared adventure?
Well that brings us to my second suggestion — consider the resources you do have access to. Many games have free System Resource Documents, artless varieties, or preview versions available online these days. You might be able to grab online PDFs that you have already bought on DTRPG, Bundle of Holding, or elsewhere. If you have your own personal computer or other storage device and can do it without risking other people’s legal status, computers, or privacy you can sail the seven seas of course - but don’t hurt others doing it. The adventure I was thinking of running, N5 Under Illefarn, is a classic for introducing new players to the Forgotten Realms - and it is available for sale as a PDF on DTRPG. But I didn’t even need that - there’s a revised, updated and expanded version by longtime Forgotten Realms designer, Eric Boyd, available for free on candlekeep.com, called Under Illefarn Anew. (Boyd has a lot of experience writing adventures for Dungeon and as official D&D products prior to 2008, so I was confident in his version being a good experience to share with others.)
While the original Under Illefarn is written for 1e, Under Illefarn Anew is updated to 3.5 D&D, which then makes Pathfinder 1e an easy choice as a system to run the game in. Pathfinder 1e has its entire rules available legally and for free online at Aonprd.com, and characters and adventures from 3.5 can be done in Pathfinder 1e quite easily. (Pathfinder 1e characters are very slightly stronger, but not enough to invalidate the challenge of an adventure, maybe enough to get an extra normal-difficulty encounter in in one adventuring day.) There would be material from the 3.5 supplements included in the adventure, but anything I couldn’t remember (which is a lot) I could probably search for.
And then I chose the path less traveled by. Well, I didn’t, my players did. See, N5 Under Illefarn does have an optional previous adventure - N4 Treasure Hunt, which is a 1e adventure that was retrofit into the Forgotten Realms after publication. Treasure Hunt is a bit interesting - it’s one of (maybe the only?) published 0-level D&D adventure, with the PCs starting off as enslaved captives kidnapped to be sold to pirates and using their wiles and wits to escape after the slave galley crashes on a forbidden island being scoured for the treasures of the legendary Sea King.
So that was actually our first CYOA choice - did people want to skip right to the Forgotten Realms content in Under Illefarn, or play the 0-level experience in Treasure Hunt? Being OSR players with a death drive so large it demands its own stroad, they picked Treasure Hunt, and that’s what we’re playing through now. Since it’s happening in a CYOA, I’ve restructured the adventure a little bit - the original has multiple players teaming up to escape together, but we’re playing it like a DCC funnel. The players get one captive, take them as far as they can, if that captive dies we roll up the next, repeat until they run out of their seven captives or until they escape from the island. (Ironically, their very first captive died in the very first combat — the second is being quite a bit more successful.)
This posed an interesting problem. There are no rules for 0-level characters in Pathfinder 1e. In fact there can’t be due to a fundamental underpinning of the 3e/PF rules: all creatures/characters have at least 1 HD, although this HD can be fractional for very small and very weak characters (like a cat or a sprite). Indeed, if you’re only familiar with pre-3e D&D, this is a significant change; non-adventuring characters prior to 2000 in D&D were 0-level characters with maybe 1 hit point and no to few other stats. In 3e/PF, they’re written up as their own 1st level characters using specific “NPC classes” such as commoner.
But there’s actually a step before that, and it’s a weird quirk of how the 3e system works. If all characters are supposed to have a Hit Die, what about babies or children? Is there some prelapsarian character state? Actually, yes! Page 13 of Savage Species has a sidebar on “1 HD Creatures” that is probably the best explanation of this - everyone starts with a single Hit Die of their creature type (for most ancestries, humanoid [if you’re not familiar with 3e/PF, hit dice of a specific creature type are essentially classes unto themselves]), and then gives up that Hit Die when they take their first level in a class. So by starting our captive for Treasure Hunt with their 1 humanoid Hit Die, which is significantly weaker and less featureful than an actual class level, we can replicate the 0-level experience in 3e/PF. But no one’s really written the rules for doing this down anywhere, so here you go.
From the top, this post’s Joesky Tax: Rules for 0-level characters in Pathfinder 1e
(This is written in Pathfinder rebuild template format. If you don’t know how to interpret this, look at a non-simple template in a Pathfinder bestiary.)
Note: This entry assumes the ancestry of any character you’re making is humanoid. If you don’t know how to tell, the racial entry for the ancestry and/or the monster entry for that creature should tell you. If the creature is not humanoid (for example, you’re making a warforged or a leshy) look up the details of that creature type in a Bestiary and apply those stats in place of anything that conflicts here, especially HD size, base attack bonus/save bonuses, and skill points.
Your base entry for using this template is a racial entry from any Pathfinder book.
CR 0-level characters are weaker than 1st level characters in terms of abilities and very likely have lower statistical values. I’d count them as being half-level for encounter calculations needing their character level.
Type The character’s type is humanoid. Apply any subtypes from their racial entry. Calculate BAB, saves, and skill ranks as shown below.
Hit Dice The character’s hit die is a D8. Because they do not have a level in a PC class, they do not gain maximum HP at first level. You can provide half the D8 (4) or roll as you see fit, but don’t forget to apply Con modifier and that they must have at least 1 hp.
Saves The character receives a +2 class bonus to Reflex.
Base Attack Bonus The character’s base attack bonus is 0.
Attacks Unless their racial entry gives them a natural attack, they have the standard unarmed strike by default. This is a bludgeoning attack with 20/x2 crit that only deals nonlethal damage: 1d2 if the character is Small, 1d3 if they are Medium. For having a humanoid Hit Die, they are proficient in all simple weapons.
Defensive Abilities The character is proficient with any armor they wear, including shields.
Feats The character receives 1 feat of their choosing. I strongly recommend choosing a passive feat that helps with combat that fits the character. In particular, if the character will benefit from Weapon Finesse, take it (and don’t forget the standard unarmed strike can be finessed). Other possible options are Toughness, Combat Reflexes, or Improved Unarmed Strike.
Abilities Technically, if you want to play by the rules exactly, the character should have either 3d6 rolled six times arranged in an order of their choosing for ability scores, or the basic array of 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 (again arranged as choice.) However, if you want the characters to actually survive you may wish to use the elite array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) or 4d6 drop lowest arrange to choice as if they already had class levels. For a “funnel-type” play, using random ability score rolls and rolling in order without rearranging can be fun. (To give my PC in my game an extra edge, I gave them 5d6 drop lowest two in order, which was the extraordinary good starting option in 3e and I believe is equivalent to 25 point buy on average in Pathfinder 1e.) Don’t forget to apply bonuses and penalties from their racial entry.
Special Qualities Be sure to apply all possible abilities from their racial entry. Some special qualities (for example, a half-elf’s multitalented) may not make any sense to use now; I recommend letting the quality or choice be “saved” until the character reaches 1st level in a character class.
Advancement The character must gain 500 XP to reach level 1. I recommend being generous with goal/quest XP to aid in reaching this number. Smart players of 0-level characters will avoid combat as much as possible, and that’s often a fun part of 0-level adventures.
When the character reaches 500 XP, they level up to 1st level and lose their humanoid hit die. Treat this as if retraining a class level (Ultimate Campaign), but the PC needs neither a trainer nor downtime to complete this process. Additionally, they may retrain their first level feat choice for free as part of this. Remember that they gain maximum hit points from their first class level Hit Die.
Optionally, if it fits your campaign, the PC may spend 3 days with a trainer (of their new class) in downtime later (ie: after the 0-level adventure is complete) to completely finish off their advancement. This costs 30 gp in training costs. You might want to restrict some class features until this training is complete (but don’t be a jerk about it. For example, a 0-level character becoming a wizard may have a very limited spell selection at first and only acquire more spells after they’ve undergone training and learned how to manage their spellbook. Choose things that fit well narratively.)
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