"It was a dark and stormy night...."

Patrick. Write a novel.

Superstar competition coming up. Give it large, Pat (as they say up north).

What is this place coming to? A thread on the Bestiary had to be locked as it all turned nasty and what were they arguing about? Whether the Bestiary had long enough descriptive text. It's interesting that F2K and many others of the old guard have either gone or become semi-detatched from the Paizo website. And a bit sad. This really isn't the place it used to be. Bring back Dungeon and Dragon, when the stakes in playing D&D were so much lower.

With a few exceptions, I don't even look at the stuff on the top 60% or so on the website, and I don't think have since the RPG Superstar competitions started; it all looks like ill-conceived whining and esoteric complaints to me.

PS: This is something that has annoyed me for a while. What is the Stormwind Fallacy, or whatever the young 'uns call it?

The Stormwind Fallacy is that you can either build an optimised PC or one with a personality and plenty of roleplaying opportunities. Not both. Some guy called Stormwind put it forward on...ENWorld I believe.

Bit like you Vattnisse, I look at the Paizo Community 90% of the time and dip into the rest if I have time but even then the heavy stuff leaves me cold. The ones that argue are usually the ones that don't last in my experience at Cons, their flame burns brightest but then it burns out.

Cheers

Nobody likes change besides a baby with a dirty diaper.
Even bums expect a dollar.

Wow Heathy, that was,...

So shallow, it was deep! ;P (JK!) :)

Heck, how do you all even have TIME to find these threads I never hear of until their closed?!? It's all I can do to keep up with all the PbP's I'm in! I gave up trying to keep up with my 20+ webcomics over 3 months ago! :)

And, do people REALLY have so much time on their hands that they can afford to waste a (seems to be to me) large amount of it on, quite frankly, pointless arguments? I'm fairly immature for my advanced age, and even I know that sometimes, it's ok to agree to disagree! ;P

You are so full of fail.

I just find it a bit sad that there are so many bits of the website I need to close for my sanity. On the plus side, I guess those bits didn't actually exist back in the day.

your level of fail

I don't want to get all "cancer that is killing Paizo" on nobody, but there's a few times I close everything but the pbp and pbp discussion just to keep myself out of it.
If I feel compelled to respond, and I know it will lead to a long drawn out deal, sometimes I walk away and try to think about the imminent response, how I can perhaps turn it into an ambush or riposte, or mainly, if I really wouldn't be better off wasting that two hours of my life on something either more constructive or hedonistic.

Yeah, I know. Paizo is, of course, a different sort of company to what it used to be when we were nippers. Ultimately, it seems to be pretty successful and that is probably a good thing. But some of the guys who are now here, compared with some of the people who have lost heart, meh... It's just a shame that Paizo inadvertently became a beacon for the edition wars and all those who want to argue to toss about obscure rules, or even argue about arguing about obscure rules.

Yeah....the "friendly little neighborhood" is perhaps in danger of fading.
I think things can calm down after an initial excitement phase.

It's part of the reason I try really hard to stay out of the 4e section entirely.
If I ever buy a 4e book, maybe that's an admission price.

It's all the internet's fault! *shakes fist*

But seriously, messageboarding leads to this sort of crap. Back in the good old days, you'd have to write a letter to the editor in Dragon in order to voice your displeasure with the system changes ("What?! No THAC0!!?? You have destroyed the greatest game ever!"), which ended to put a damper on things. Now, any schmuck with a keyboard can crank on endlessly on why people he disagrees with are n00bs and full of epic fail.

Sounds like a warzone outside. Guy Fawkes has alot to answer for. My son has just got to sleep and we are going to pay for that tomorrow.

Cheers

We went to a nice firework disply tonight (Warwick Racecourse, for those that might care) and we set off a box of fireworks on the 5th itself at home. My wife loves fireworks so I really had no choice. The school in Rugby (the posh public school) has its own firework display and it looks pretty fantastic, but they don't invite any of the common folk in the town.

Sorry to hear about your job Pat. Good luck.

Ah Paizo, what has it come to? But yeah, I think a lot of it is just the internet - it gives jerks, losers and whiners a place to voice their opinion and feel important (the second best thing about the internet, after all the porn).

At least we still have each other. [/cheesy]

your level of fail

Yeah, I've never really understood the appeal of the chatrooms, or of arguing with people whom you will (most likely) never meet, over something that doesn't matter if you agree on or not.

I mean, is it REALLY that hard to find someone to argue with face-to-face?
Not for me, at least. (It's part of my natural charm, I can tick people off at 10 paces without trying, apparently) ;)

And, not TRYING to change topics, but as long as we're close to it, (you can go ahead and kick me out now) I STILL prefer good old fashioned play-by-yourself pc and video games to playing with strangers over the internet! ("The shame! The horror! BLASPHEMER!" Yeah, whatever.)

I DO like the appeal (whatever it was for you) of Paizo in it's infancy. It's what pulled me out of my anti-internet-chatting shell. And I don't think, (but I don't read as many threads as everyone else it seems) that it's glory days are gone, or it's becoming (yet) some terrible beast that I shall have to lock out of my children's web-browsers. BUT, it ain't the Paizo I fell in love with either. But I do not blame Paizo. I DO blame the cheese-heads with more time than brains who post deliberately flammable posts. To them I say,....

Sic 'em Heathy!

:)

While I do not want to endorse to the idiotic view that "it is profitable, so it must be good" (see the Transformers 2 thread for a particularly pathetic example of this), I guess that we could have one of two possible Paizos.

* We could have the Paizo of the Dungeon and Dragon glory days, with a relatively small revenue base and limited abilty to publish widely. This Paizo was small, cozy and almost unfailingly polite.

* Alternatively, we can have the Paizo of today, with an expanded internet presence and a bigger range of in-house products. While this makes Paizo more financially secure, it also attracts a number of [insert derogatory term here] and is thus less polite or even interesting.

While it is a shame that we have to suffer through the likes of Frank Trollman and suchlike in order to keep Paizo churning out high quality products, it is a price I'm willing to pay - especially as it is easy for us to ignore the trolls. The guy I feel sorry for is Gary, as he has to moderate all the crap being flung around.

Yeah, that's pretty much my view - plus, the stuff people like to argue about (with the possible exception of 4e) I tend not to be interested in.

The only thing that has got to me recently was the way that Wizards yanked their pdfs of old stuff. I loved looking through the back catalogue and picking out another oldie for a couple of quid.

Life's too short to bother with the arguing, after all this is a game.

And thinking on the 4e subject, Aubrey are there any 4e products that a 3e/PF guy may find useful? Much in the same way that I still use my Complete Elves Handbook.

Probably not - the stuff they have done 4e conversions of to date all have 3e versions. That might change when 4e Dark Sun comes out as there is very little official 3e stuff for it (though I understand there is fan stuff at athas.org). So far a lot of what they have been producing is very crunchy, and so really aimed at the 4e mechanics. However, they are bringing out short softback "Races of" -type books in the relatively near future, but have only heard rumours (there is, funnily enough, an argument about them on the 4e board here - sheesh).

While I do not want to endorse to the idiotic view that "it is profitable, so it must be good" (see the Transformers 2 thread for a particularly pathetic example of this), I guess that we could have one of two possible Paizos.

* We could have the Paizo of the Dungeon and Dragon glory days, with a relatively small revenue base and limited abilty to publish widely. This Paizo was small, cozy and almost unfailingly polite.

* Alternatively, we can have the Paizo of today, with an expanded internet presence and a bigger range of in-house products. While this makes Paizo more financially secure, it also attracts a number of [insert derogatory term here] and is thus less polite or even interesting.

While it is a shame that we have to suffer through the likes of Frank Trollman and suchlike in order to keep Paizo churning out high quality products, it is a price I'm willing to pay - especially as it is easy for us to ignore the trolls. The guy I feel sorry for is Gary, as he has to moderate all the crap being flung around.

I am one of the folks drawn to this site by the cancellation of the magazines, so I guess I can't pine for the 'good old days', but since arriving I have found ths site fairly polite, contrasting to the other RPG sites I have perused.

Our hobby has unfortunately drawn many intellegent, opinionated, socially awkward people for most of its history. The Internet is like a geek Renaissance, allowing these folks who might have just dominated a single gaming group back in the Eighties to spread their particular form of jackassery around the world.

But I have to say, there are a lot of folks who have shown up since I have who are excellent posters, and the true jerkwads seem to fade away as time goes on.

And thanks for the kind thoughts everyone vis-a-vis the unemployment, I'm sure I'll be OK..

Hey, Aub; I saw your thing about the Paizo/AP's on the "you've got to be kidding me" thread;
I can't really speak for James Jacobs or anything, but I think what they were getting at was more an issue of licensure/freedom of control than one of game mechanics; i.e.--you're using 4e, so guess what: NOW you need to make a place for dragonborn, eladrin, and what-have-you in Golarion.....I full on could be wrong, and I know my statement reeks of the pamby spoilt milk stench of the apologist.

Just wasn't sure if I wanted to wade into a morass to say something about it over there.

Very wise.

From my (doubtless hazy) memory, the GSL hadn't even been finalised - WotC were doing the "It'll be out really really soon" routine and basically made it very difficult to make a nuanced decision. And, yeah, a lot of the races and classes weren't out in the open at the outset. That said, it doesn't actually cramp your style as a designer in 4e since NPCs are designed like monsters. I think it was a desire for certainty that drove a lot of the decision is my take, but then I don't really know what they meant either.

So Aubrey, you’re probably the only one of us playing much (if any) 4e at the moment. A year on (or however long its been out) what’s your experience been? Easier to run than previous editions? Quicker game play? Have you had a chance to be at the other side of the table, or have you only DM’d so far?

In an alternate reality (where the GSL was out and user friendly, and Wizards released a years worth of 4e material at the get-go) do you think the stories that Paizo has been telling with the APs would work as well in 4e as 3.x?

For me, the biggest benefit is the ease of preparation. My players seem very happy with the rules set - they don't seem to hanker after 3.5 or feel that they have lost out. The big thing about 3.5 (both a benefit and a curse) was its immense flexibility and the option available, both in terms of multiclassing, spell selection, feat selection and so on. With 4e, a PC is defined by the powers it has, and the feats and so on have a bearing but only around the margins (feats more or less only give numerical bonuses to existing abilities, they don't grant powers like Cleave). Most feats which provided added abilities have now been folded into class powers instead (again, like Cleave, which is a Fighter power). They have also simplified skills in a similar way to PFRPG (or rather, PFRPG has done it in a similar way to 4e - PFRPG very much comes across as stealing a lot of ideas from 4e, which possibly some of the anti-4e types don't immediately realise).

Sorry to come on like such a fanboy but 4e has really transformed by ability to prepare for sessions, which used to take a massive amount of time (a weekend for a single session), and that for me is the big gain. I haven't really been on the other side of screen much at all, except for a PbP here which hasn't really got into it's stride yet (just beginning the first combat encounter now). But as a rule of thumb, we tend to get through three to four encounters per session (about five hours) as opposed to two in 3.5.

I think, if the GSL had been reasonable and the PHB and PHB2 had been out together, there would have been absolutely no problem at all for Paizo to do its APs in 4e. With just the PHB, maybe it would have been harder as all of the classes and races in 3.5 (with the exception of the monk - that'll be in the PHB3) took until then to come out - it might have felt wrong, although all character races were available as monsters already. I haven't noticed any problems in plotting stuff - in fact, in terms of magical stuff the fact that most powerful magic has been turned into a ritual (i.e. a non-combat process) it may have made things easier (powerful spells are all set out in detail in 3e, in 4e you can more or less make up stuff and it has little game balance implications since it won't happen in combat).

Paizo may have had contractual worries about 4e but in terms of actual adventure design I really don't see where the problems would be. 4e is predicated more around being attacked by lots of assailants at once, whereas the CR system worked off single monsters. This might necessitate some changes to boss fights (or maybe not - you can create Elite and Solo monsters) and may have meant more mass combat. (For example, a fight with a single goblin in RotRL was transformed by Scott Betts into three goblins in his conversion, otherwise there simply would not have been much of a fight to have.) However, it is also pretty easy to bespoke monsters in 4e, as the rules for their creation are pretty transparent. Apart from that, I'm racking my brains as to how 4e changes the narrative of a story and I can't really think of any.

Cool.....new playtest classes available starting this Friday.

Gah! You know not of what you speak. I'll just get the book when it is finished.

mwahahahaha!
whelp, don't see how to sick a bunch of cavaliers on you in the jungle, so.....

Thanks for the insight Aubrey.

I hear you on the 3.5 game prep time thing, although its not really that much of an issue for me – or rather, its so much of an issue that I rarely contemplate writing original adventures anymore. Since I’ve started running 3.5 I’ve pretty much exclusively used canned games, adventure paths etc. If I want to create or add encounters I tend to use ‘standard’ monsters straight from the book or steal NPCs from other published sources (treasure and all). So prep time is usually no more than reading and understanding the adventure and taking a few notes for myself, maybe drawing out a couple of battlemaps.

The increased number of encounters per session seems good, although I’ve heard some contradictory feedback on that. I haven’t followed any recent conversations on the matter, maybe now that people are getting more familiar with the new rules it is generally proving faster.

Getting through only one or two combat encounters in a session (in 3.x) is certainly a frustration in a lot of the games I’ve run, but I tend to find a lot of that seems to be down to players spending a lot of time planning, discussing options and just generally dithering, rather than the combats taking excessively long to run (though of course all of that can happen in the midst of the combat encounter too).

What is it, do you think, that speeds up combat in 4e?

In my experience, I would say that my players are not the best organised and one in particular takes his time deciding what to do. The relatively restricted attack power options means that there aren't literally dozens of spells and whatnot to go through, so they can decide much quicker. WotC have also make things quite user-friendly - I subscribe to DDI and a lot of the tools, especially character-builder, make this much easier - for example, you can print out your character sheet with all of your character's powers fully described on it, so you don't have search through the books to work out what will happen. Also, they have restricted the number of conditions (e.g. dazed, stunned, and so on) and their impact, while increasing the number of times they might happen to provide tactical options. And the dreaded iterative attack doesn't happen anymore - one attack roll and it is someone else's turn.

But I think restricting powers and the power hierarchy (daily, encounter, at-will) makes it much easier for the players to decide what to do. The system is probably a significant improvement in terms of options for non-casters (a fighter basically doesn't have powers in previous editions, and only sort-of in 3e based on feat choice) but a restriction for caster types. That said, we have one caster in the party (a cleric) and he hasn't complained. He still heals, fights and buffs.

I was surprised by the "takes ages to take down the monsters" comments, but I think it might be if you are using "soldier" monsters (high AC, indifferent attacks) then you don't hit much and they don't do much to you. The PCs in my party seem to do a ruck of damage so it hasn't been a problem for me.

About a month ago, I spent about an hour and a half building a troll chieftain, Oohlgrist, for a PF version of the Temple of Elemental Evil. My guys aren't great at tactics, or dithering, they jump in with both feet usually but this time they planned a concerted attack.

The troll was blinded, greased and hit with a ray of enfeeblement before his first initiative came round. So that was the end of the fight.

I know what you mean about time consuming so I'm resorting to nicking NPCs from lots of other sources like the Expedition books/APs so that I can save time. But that seems to be part and parcel of 9th level play and beyond. Luckily I only run that once every five weeks or so.

When I ran a weekend of gaming at my place, I used Pathfinder Society adventures. They are a doddle to prep but it's a bit like eating a Pot Noodle (if you have them outside the UK). Ultimately you are left hungry.

Long term I would like someone else to run an AP, probably Kingmaker, so that I can play for a change.

Cheers

I think the other big point with 4e is the implicit balance between the classes. They get the same number of powers each - so you don't have a fighter who just gets his attack roll and a wizard with dozens of spells that can warp reality at a whim. I think this is what has impacted most in terms of the difference between 3e and 4e, and what has caused the furore (as in "Has balance killed D&D?" and similar threads). But, again, it makes life much easier for a DM since he can much more easily callibrate encounters.

About a month ago, I spent about an hour and a half building a troll chieftain, Oohlgrist, for a PF version of the Temple of Elemental Evil. My guys aren't great at tactics, or dithering, they jump in with both feet usually but this time they planned a concerted attack.

The troll was blinded, greased and hit with a ray of enfeeblement before his first initiative came round. So that was the end of the fight.

Apologies for my lack of posting recently. A much busier than normal week or two at work, combined with real life dramas and computer problems at home have conspired to keep me away from Paizo for the most part for the last week or so. I’m not sure when things will calm down at work (and in life) but at least the computer at home is fixed, so hopefully my posting rate will get back to something approaching normal.

It must be catching.
I somehow managed to fry two Diferent hard drives on two PC's (Macs) at work in less than a week! I'm still playing catch up with my data, AND waiting for a permanent replacement!

Hey all, just throwing this shout out to the folks I game with. My Gamma World game >Appalachee Jihad< has been stuttering for a while. I am looking for some fresh mutants to torture. Gaming engine is D20 Modern/Future with elements of D20 Apocalypse and the D20 Gamma World tossed in. If you have any interest, post up in the discussion thread: >here<

Sounds like a fun game Pat, but I've been finding lately that I'm struggling to keep up with the games I'm in. I'll pass, but good luck with recruiting.

Sounds like a fun game Pat, but I've been finding lately that I'm struggling to keep up with the games I'm in. I'll pass, but good luck with recruiting.

Mothman wrote:

Sounds like a fun game Pat, but I've been finding lately that I'm struggling to keep up with the games I'm in. I'll pass, but good luck with recruiting.

Thanks man. Hope life gives you a bit of a break soon! :)

Hey, are you still job hunting? How's it going?

Hey, are you still job hunting? How's it going?

Mothman wrote:

Hey, are you still job hunting? How's it going?

I had a good (I think) interview yesterday.

Good luck with that Pat!
<crosses fingers>

;)

Looks like the offers are flooding in. I am stacked with games and to be fair Patrick, I'm not much into the more modern stuff.

Last night I was re-reading old Dragon magazines and I came across a letter from Patrick Curtin in issue 268. Was that you? The letter came from TX which I guess is Texas. It was all about how the guy DM's.

Cheers

Last night I was re-reading old Dragon magazines and I came across a letter from Patrick Curtin in issue 268. Was that you? The letter came from TX which I guess is Texas. It was all about how the guy DM's.

Cheers

Cool!

A claim to fame, no less.

Well done mate.

Cheers