Asgetrion's page

You already got me flowers from Pike Place last week. I think you might be up to jewelry, my dear. :-)

And he failed to mention that we are the same age until mid June.

VERY cool cover!

I love forums, but eventually most of them leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I have to leave. I have to hand it to Paizo and the moderators: these are some of the most pleasant forums I've used. Great job keeping the troll away. I've known from day one that I liked these boards because people treat each other like human beings here.

I just realized a second big reason I love these forums:

No signatures!!! Thank you, thank you Paizo! I just wanted to say something because I'm sure you get the occasional request to add signatures. All you have to do is go to any forum that allows them and see how and why they'll ruin these beautiful boards as you do. Even on forums that limit the size of the signatures, it's amazing how obnoxious people can still be with them.

Kudos guys!

Suddenly, being a companion seems like a legitimate career choice.

The forum in which Baron posts is ALWAYS the right forum.

Keep in mind that we've inherited a system that's essentially compiled from decades of material by countless authors and editors, and when we created the Pathfinder RPG, there was definitely a big question in our minds about how much we could change without driving people away. (And I'm not just talking about rules, but about the presentation of those rules—decisions like italicizing spell names, and not capitalizing all game terms—these are decisions that were made before us, and we decided not to mess with them.*) Hindsight indicates to me that we chose wisely, but I also believe that we could go further in some future iteration.

However, that's what it's going to take to make the types of changes you're asking for—a future iteration.

*Personally, I happen to think that both of those were very good decisions, and I wouldn't change either of them given the chance. However, applying very consistent game terminology would definitely be high on my own wish list.

Since its in the Campaign Setting line, i suspect a mix of PC and NPC targetted PrC's.

This.

As an adventure writer and developer, one of the things that frustrates me most about the game as it currently stands is the fact that if I want to give a monster prestige classes... there's not a lot of choices. There will be some classes in here that, while they're built for specific groups... will also work pretty well for some monsters. Like putting assassin levels on a succubus, for example, or loremaster levels on a guardian naga.

Sample cateogories to help explain what I meant in the post above

Equipment
Goods and Services

• Animals & Animal-Related Gear
  
• Books, Paper, Art & Writing Supplies
  
• Camping, Hunting, Fishing & Wilderness Survival Equipment
  
• Ceramic Materials
  
• Containers
  
• Cosmetics, Jewelry & Wearable Items
  
• Devices, Tools & Kits
  
• Food, Drink & Lodging
  
• Hirelings, Servants, Fees & Services
  
• Illuminations & Lighting Supplies
  
• Musical Instruments & Noise-Makers
  
• Powders, Oils, Greases & Alchemical Supplies
  
• Religious Items
  
• Toys, Games & Entertainment
  

Artifacts of the Inner Sea? :D

Brandon Hodge wrote:

Adam has very feminine ankles...I suggest the shackles be TIGHT!

I plan on adhering him to his desk by applying large quantities of chewing gum to his hair.

We tried that with Sean himself—I'd call the results "mixed."

Asgetrion wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

Not yet. But I do have one more to assign...

C'mon James, you know you can't do an AP called 'Shattered Shar' without the mad geniosity of the Pett, right? ;)

This question is now resolved.

Not quite ready for the reveal of who's writing what in this AP, but all 6 parts are assigned now.

*fingers crossed for the Pett*

I only have one expectation of my fellow players. I expect that you'll try to have a good time, and respect me desires to have a good time too. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you play a sorcerer (with only core) i highly suggest the arcane bloodline, it's one of the best bloodlines in the core and it actually helps you with the arcane magic user thing.
Also don't try to blast with any character, blasting isn't going to do anything without at least the APG.

The spell eagle's splendor only gives you a temporary increase to your channeling DC, it does not give you extra channelings. For that you need to have a bonus for more than one day, e.g. from a headband worn for one day or longer.

I really like this. A lot of the city/town square maps tend to look... well... too square. This looks more the way I imagine a town square to look. The side with the wall could be handy for a few different scenarios as well.

Cool.

And future games and campaigns will always need more ogres!

MOAR SUTTUH!!!

I can't wait to find out more about this new format.

Adam and I have been getting into trouble together at shows and rolling dice at the gaming table since we were too young to buy beer legally. Some of the best times of my life have been had with Daigle at my side, and I wouldn't even be writing in the biz if it wasn't for his relentless insistence that I get into the freelance game. Going to be tough not having him a mile up the road or next to me at our weekly game sessions, but I'm unbelievably excited that he's going to be doing what we love as a full-time job.

Here's to you, Adam. Wind in your sails and all that. Paizo's getting the best of us, and it is good to know that my future work will be in the hands of my best friend. Don't you dare change a word of it! Hahaha.

Sail away, and find your way to Mariana, my friend.

The assumption that a GM runs APs because they are "lazy" is patently ridiculous. Feel free to look up my Kingmaker Expansions some time, and that's just the work I can share, there's a bunch of stuff specific to my group that I won't be putting up online. I put plenty of prep time into my game to customize it and make it my own.

The idea that APs are shorter to run than homebrews is almost true: Except I've been running Kingmaker for 2 years and we've only just finished book 3.

Here's how I explain it: Running a weekly game means entertaining people for 4-6 hours. A weekly television show has a writers room of like 10 people and a cast and crew of hundreds and they only provide one hour of television. An AP takes some of the burden off the GM's shoulders every week by providing fantastic, well-written entertaining encounters and story. Leaving the GM's prep time to customizing, and adding content to wherever they see fit. If I was running a pure home-brew I can take months to perfect the first adventure, really knock it out of the park. But the next week, I might have 6 hours to put something together (an hour a night between working and living a life). The quality will drop, and the weekly model rapidly becomes unsustainable and breaks are called and then the game falls apart.

Also: The writers and developers of Paizo's APs are really the best there is at what they do. I learn to be a better GM reading and running games by these people. A GM who doesn't even read pre published adventures is doing a disservice to him/herself and his/her players. A writer should be a voracious reader, an artist should be hip to the art scene. A GM should know adventures and be unafraid to borrow, appropriate or steal ideas for their own games. Homebrew or otherwise.

It's not a trap, only people who want to cheese monkey their characters believe that. Like many feats, it has its uses. When only getting a single attack it is great...and too often heavy damagers will often only be getting a single attack several times in a combat, so it will be used often enough.

A guy who follows our company on Twitter listened to the Bulmahn interview and Tweeted that it changed his attitude about Pathfinder.

I can't tell—does that mean Bulmahn made or failed his diplomacy roll? (Or was it performance?) What was your friend's starting attitude, and how many steps was he swayed towards helpful or towards hostile?

Nothing worth fighting over. It's one guy's opinion based on nothing but limited personal experience.

No silly, it's going to be called "NexPF" or "TruePF" ;-)

But joking aside, I'm thinking more of something that will play to Paizo's strengths (adventure writing and design). A mega-adventure line?

If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is? :)

Also, I believe most people buy APs not because "they're unhappy with other companies' new stuff.", but because it is the best product on the market.

How about 'iteration skirmish', instead?

The thing I appreciate the most about the Beginner's Box (and by extension, Paizo and all the fine folks who worked on this), is that it brings me full circle. I started gaming with Basic D&D with one of the older boxes (i.e., the one with the color picture of a fighter and wizard looking in on a dragon lying atop a big pile of treasure). That year was a magical time for me and my brother. And it served as the entire crux for how and why we got into RPGs. Eventually, we "graduated" to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons...and, after passing through all its iterations...I now have the occasional opportunity to write for a hobby I've grown to really love, which has fired my imagination for more years than I can recount.

With the Beginner's Box, it's like everything is starting over again. Only now, I get to relive this experience through the eyes of my children. They're still a little young to introduce to Pathfinder right away (i.e., my oldest is 7 years old). But when we're all ready, I know our game nights will immediately include the Beginner's Box and it'll serve as their first RPG experience. After that, I'm certain it'll fire their imagination just as much as it did for me.

So, this is a heartfelt thank you to Paizo. This is another example of how you guys have become the true custodians of what roleplaying has always personally meant to me. And it's awesome to see you embrace the traditions of the game's origins, all while making it fresh and exciting for a whole new generation. Now, it's up to the rest of us "gamers" to go out and introduce that generation to the hobby. And you've given us the perfect tool to do it.

Just my two cents,
--Neil

Ross: "Every now and then I wonder: 'Why is it so dark in here?' Then I remember that I can fix that. I am in a building and there is a light switch."

How can I tell that this spell functions differently with respect to the duration of the effect than Awaken?

Why would you think that soaring, which lasts 1 minute/level, would somehow last forever and be undispellable if combined with an instantaneous cure spell?

It's clear to you that if you cast a regular soaring spell, that its duration will eventually run out and you won't be able to fly anymore. Yes?
It's clear to you that if you cast a regular soaring spell, that if dispelled before that duration, you won't be able to fly any more. Yes?
So why, if you link soaring to another spell that happens to have an instantaneous duration, would you think that the soaring spell suddenly becomes forever and nondispellable, even though *nothing* in soaring's description would indicate that and none of the component words of selected soaring lesser cure spells say anything about *increasing* its duration?

Are you a robot? No. Then stop trying to parse this with robot-logic and admit that combining a flash-bang consequences-are-forever spell with a duration-based buff spell DOES NOT result in a consequences-are-forever buff spell, and that trying to interpret it that way is being dishonest.

Sigh... here we go again.

I don't play 4th edition. This is my choice. However I don't disparage anyone who plays that system. No-one here has the right to tell anyone what system they should play or how they should have fun. If it works for you then awesome, knock yourself out.

It all comes down to this. 4th ed is a good thing, even if you hate it. Just like World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Mutants and Masterminds, Dark Heresy and Warhammer are all good things. Put simply the more games that are out there the more the gaming sector grows and that can only be a good thing.

If a 4th Ed. player comes onto the Paizo site and buys a flip mat then they are directly contributing to the success of Pathfinder. Conversely, when I buy a D&D minatures pack I am directly supporting WotC. Both businesses grow and by extension reach out to new players and new GM's.

Without the huge amount of support that WotC gives the gaming community, roleplaying in general would suffer. WotC's sponsorship of events like Gen Con promotes and develops gaming in general. I for one support that fully.

Whining that you don't like 4th ed is old; very, very old. Just remember that without D&D roleplaying in general would suffer. You may not like the game in it's current incarnation but whining about it just makes the board look elitist, petty, negative and childish. Not a good advert for Pathfinder players frankly. Pack it in. Seriously.

We want more games to play not less. More games equals more players equals more cool stuff for us to buy. Long live 4th Ed I say, because it brings more people and more money into gaming and that helps everybody, Paizo included.

To answer the OP I usually call it Pathfinder but occasionally I'll slip back into calling it D&D. Old grognard habits die hard.

For those of you who are disappointed in the random aspect of the miniatures, please read the following taken from the FAQ attached to the press release. You still may not agree, but at least you will understand why we are doing what we are doing.

-Lisa

Q: Why prepainted plastic miniatures in randomized packs?
A: Prepainted plastic miniatures are expensive to make. Sculpting and painting are costly, and making molds for plastic figures is costlier still. To make all these costs work, you need to spread them out over a large number of miniatures. If these figures were released individually, some would sell better than others, and some--or even many--of them would lose money. Randomizing the miniatures ensures that you sell predictable quantities of each figure, and it also allows you to price them reasonably without losing your shirt. Another benefit of averaging out costs over a large number of figures is that it allows you to spend more money on some miniatures--you can make them larger or more detailed, or add more complicated (and thus more expensive) paint operations than you could otherwise justify. In short, selling more of the common minis allows you to spend more money on the rarer figures.

Randomized miniatures also allow you to provide more variety. Not only can you introduce more figures at once, but the fact that you make make some of them rarer than others means you can produce plenty of the figures that everyone needs, like goblins or skeletons, and fewer of the figures that have narrower appeal, like strange monsters or iconic figures.

Another factor to think about is the brick-and-mortar retailer. It's much easier for a retailer to stock single booster packs than individual packaged minis. Our first set, Heroes & Monsters, contains 40 miniatures. Selling them individually would require a lot of retailer effort to keep them all in stock--and it would also require a lot of space to display those miniatures. And if next year's 60-figure Rise of the Runelords set were released as individual minis, the retailer would then have to track and display 100 individual items. As the line continued, individual minis would soon become impossible for most retailers to keep up with. Because randomized miniatures are distributed to retailers by the case, there's usually only one item for them to order for each set, so it's easy to maintain stock. And since it doesn't take much space to display a handful of booster packs, retailers can easily continue to stock and display the entire line of miniatures as long as they're available.

Retailers who have a greater inclination toward managing more complicated inventories, or who have more space to display miniatures, will almost certainly break open random boxes to sell singles, groups of individual figures they can tailor to their customers' needs, and even complete sets.

A lot of thought has been done on the topic of the best way to produce prepainted plastic miniatures, and the random packaging method, supplemented with the occasional small boxed set of non-random figures, has proven to be the most successful. Paizo is committed to working with WizKids to ensure that customers will be able to purchase the miniatures they want at a fair price.

Absalom Afternoons.

Erik is the big picture, vision guy. A publisher decides what is going to get published. He sets the direction for the company. Like James Jacobs decides who gets what writing projects, and makes sure that everything published for Golarion fits the themes and tones of the line, and James Sutter oversees the writers and editors for the fiction line, but both of them would report to Erik, who decides what direction all the product lines are going. Meanwhile Lisa is the one making sure everyone gets paid (whether that be the paizo employees, the printers they contract with, or the company itself).

So, if things work at paizo like they do most places, it would have been Erik who decided that 2011 was the year that paizo does its take on Oriental Adventures, deciding that Ultimate Combat is going to have Ninjas and Samurais, Bestiary 3 is going to have eastern critters, the AP is going to be eastern themed, and they're going to release an eastern sourcebook for the campaign setting. Meanwhile James Jacobs job would be to make sure all of that stuff actually gets written.

Or at least that's what is implied by their titles. I get the sense that things over at paizo are a bit more fluid than all that.

While fairly close, this is actually a common misconception. If Erik were a normal publisher in the publishing business sense of the word, then you would be right on. However, the entity currently designated "Erik Mona" is actually an early draft of the program that would eventually become Microsoft Publisher.

In late 1990, an unnamed Microsoft programmer was working on creating a new entry level desktop publishing program. Going against all laws of Nature, Gods, and Man, this unfortunate genius attempted to fuse artificial intelligence into the program by combining it at a base level with both "Clippy", and the accumulated rock knowledge of Ronnie James Dio. Due to an unfortunately timed lightning strike at the moment of compiling, the fledgling program gained an evil sentience and immediately ripped the mind from the programmer, taking over his body completely. Since this time, The Publisher has jumped bodies three times (six, if you count the unfortunate incident at the Bodies Exibit in Seattle last year, but this incident is best not mentioned). The current body, designated "Erik Mona" in an arbitrary name draw, is the one with which you are familiar.

The ultimate goal of The Publisher is completely unknown, but it seems happy (and therefore less lethal) when we give it an office and let it play out it's "bigwig at Paizo" act as much as it wants.

We live in fear at all times of The Publisher.

Thanks,
cos

Jiggy: Anyone offended by Seoni's dress or Alhandra's outfit should probably steer clear of beaches, swimming pools, the Internet, formal ballrooms, James Bond movies, beauty pageants, the magazine covers in the check-out aisle as the super market, prime-time television...

]I don't want to break your heart, but it looks like a typical commercial office space, complete with Herman Miller cubicles, just with way more geek toys and books...oh, and a warehouse. :)

I live in fear of the day that our geek toys rise up against us. >.>