Chef's Slaad's page

try these :)

Some of these may only be available through ebay though.

Al belate congratulations Dragonmoon.

You sure know how to make a guy jealous :)

great job! congrats.

It could also be the previous lord-mayor Navalant who pardons Maavu directly after Demonscar Legacy.
Maybe the events in Demonscar Legacy leads Lord Navalant to suspect Lord Vhalantru of manipulating the tax riots and other events. This, in turn leads Lord Vhalantru to make the Lord-mayor to disappear. Because this was an unexpected move, Vhalantru can't afford to recind some of the Lord-mayor's unfavorable decisions. Maavu, in other words is no-go... for now.

Summon Earth Elemental spell-like ability. There's no usage limit listed for this ability in the class description in the hard cover. Is this really intended to be an at will ability? Being able to spam a 6th-level spell seems kind of powerful...

I think it was intended as a once a day ability.

My party figured it out after about 20 minutes. The puzzle contains plenty of clues. A propper discription, as well as the handout so thoughfully provided should get your players to solve it.

Anyhow, I do have a question. While reading the Pathfinder beta rules, I've come across phrases like "take 10" or "take 20" in regard to DCs. What does this mean, to "take (#)"? My best guess is that it means that the character or NPC uses 10 or 20 as their DC, but sometimes it seems to refer to a modifier or to an oppositional DC... so I'm confused about it.

I think the take 10 and take 20 rules will be added to the book. Remember that what you have now is 'just' a beta, and is missing some information.

There are some skill checks you can perform as often as you like if time and other resources are not an issue. Searching a room is an example. Rather than rolling a d20 untill a 20 comes up, you 'take 20', and spend 20 times as much times as normal to perform the action. you then treat your check as if you rolled 20. You can only take 20 when there are no adverse effects to failing a skill check (you can't take 20 on a check to search for a trap or jump a pit

Taking 10 works a bit differently. If you have enough ranks that you would usually be able to make the check, and you are not rushed (being chased or attacked by enemies for example), you can take 10 on a check.
Taking 10 means you spend a single action to perform the skill, using an average result (as if you rolled a 10)

I loved Dragon Magazine and have bought every issue since 1986.

I will never bye WotC's online magazine though. I like real magazines.

Has there been any talk about Paizo doing a monthly, bimonthly or quarterly magazine with contents similar to the old Dragon Magazine?

Paizo where after all by any standards the best publishers either Dragon or Dungeon magazines ever had.

Check out Wolfgang Baur's Cobolt Quarterly, which has some excellent D&D related articles.

Paizo staff have frequently said they do not want to get back into the periodical business. Apparently it's a very difficult business to get into and it's even worse to get advertisers and distribution, let alone turn a profit without a good track record and a decent readership base. James Jacobs said it much better in a post a while back. I'm looking for it right now but I'm having trouble finding it.

Hi Sean,

I'm not sure what role Zarn has in Cauldron now that his mercenaries have been ousted. Perhaps you could work it from there?

Zarn Kyass heads the invasion force for Redwall. The Blue Duke is a prominent figure in the mercenary army. Either he's the mysterious leader or he's the force's champion (like Achilles). Either way, no-one has seen him, and all accounts of him are second hand. A grizzeld old mercenaries tells of stories he heard in his youth, that sort of thing. Only during the battle between the PCs and Zarn Kyass does he reveal his true self.

Give the players an opertunity to spy on Zarn Kyass. Either as he leaves the camp to confer with some of the demonic forces he's trying to recruit or in some other capacity. If you mention the cagewrights there the players should be able to pick up on the link.

Charles, you're of course assuming Paizo isn't going to b@34! slap me for making the atlas. :P

I would take the initiative and email them if I were you :)

Paizo has to take steps to protect their IP. Well intentioned fan-sites could lead them to losing the IP on certain aspects of the pathfinder setting, opening up opportunities for less scrupulous publishers to create Golarion based products.

SCAP made a huge transition from the original magazine based AP to the hardcover. James did a lot of tweaking and smothing over in order to make the adventures fit together better. He also did a great job adding more background info and removing some of the more glaring inconsistencies. A lot of that was, I believe, based on feedback he got from the boards.

I think all APs benefit from a revisit. I would have loved to see what a hardcover would have done to STAP or Curse of the Crimson Throne.

I couldn't really rank this AP. It's definitely one of my favorites. After having run it well over 3 years, I must say I was glad it was over. I'm glad the pathfinder APs are a bit shorter, which should make them less of a burden to run to the end. I'm running STAP at the moment and love that too. However, almost 6 months into the game we're just starting Bullywug Gambit. This may be a long one too...

Has anyone tried to insert war of the wielded between Bullywug Gambit and Sea Wyvern's Wake? How did you tie in the adventures?

I was wondering once I get to level 5 I could cast Continual Flame on my weapon and have it permanently enhanced following each scenario?

<evil grinch smile>

Provided you're ok with your group singing that dreadfull bangles song every time you pull it out.

The element of coercion is very much a factor. Under US law, that is extortion.

I think what is important is that the Dutch Court recognized that Virtual Items are property. Consequently, all laws relative to property apply.

I think coorcion was the deciding factor. I've been following this story for a bit. The victim was threatened and beaten before signing over the virtual items. Without these facts, there would only be the theft of virtual items in a free online game. It would have been much harder to get a conviction based soly on those facts.

my players make a list of all their spells, with a short description and all the mechanical aspects of the spell. They refer to that when casting spells and use the book with infrequently used spells.

It's something they create in word and update themselves. it's a timesaver.

I would like to have something like that as a gm, but find that it's too much of a hassle for characters that won't survive for more than 3 or 4 rounds.

Krome wrote:

On the flip side are they going to develop the celestials at all?

Yes. *ubiquitous 'lothy grin*

ohhhh. please tell us more.

b.t.w. how are the iconic outsiders from the law/chaos axis coming along?

We use Class Max + full CON Score and the group LOVES it.

More HP = longer battles, more encounters, and more interesting enemies. It's one of the few things I really liked in 4Ed: it makes the heroes feel heroic, right off the bat.

I'm using this method for my savage tide campaign. It works really well and gives the pcs a lot more opertunity to shine.

He's going to be pissed when he finds out he's been carrying around the answer to the puzzle the entire time.

I love this campaign :)

So, DMs who've run this, how close to fresh was your party when they fought the Beholder? How much did the doors suck out the party's spells?

My party just tunneled around the doors, negating the need to figure out how the doors work. Still, they were down quite a few high-level spells by the time they hit Big V.

In my experience, Big V isn't as much of a threat as you'd think. The save DC for most of his rays are pretty low, so a clever party should be able to take him down in under 3 rounds.

If you want to leave the party a couple of hints, planting a partial map of Oblivion, including the spells needed to activate the doors Lady Rhiavadi's room should help the PC's quite a bit. She's been staying in Oblivion for several weeks before the start of LoO, so she should have had plenty of time to do some exploring.

You might be a Pathfinder addict if...

...You refer to your ex-wife as "just a beta."

or, you know, a "play test"

[Ducks and runs]

I just read the power attack thread

I would get quite sick of thread uppon thread dedicated to Uber roxxor swordslinging builds.

Sword and board is screwed anyways.

First of all, AC is not a numerical stat. It is a yes/no stat. In other words, you get hit 95% of the time, and hit 95% of the time regardless. Compare to hit scaling vs AC, and you can easily see why. Meanwhile, one handed weapon guy does less damage, and if he's TWFing he still does less damage, just with more attacks which means DR messes him up more for obvious reasons.

I can see where you're comming from. Still, this sounds more like a problem with the AC mechanic than with the way power attack works. And I'm not convinced two weapon fighters are allways screwed. In a combat that lasts only a few rounds hedging your damage output makes sense.

Same goes for AC. Not getting hit one extra round is pretty significant if combat only lasts a few rounds.

It needs to be altered so that sword 'n' board fighters don't get screwed.

Aside from this, yes, it should be reverted.

Would you care to elaborate? Why are single weapon fighters screwed by the 3.5 power attack rules?

Do any of the flip-mats or map-packs fit neatly into the gamesmastery/pathfinder modules or pathfinder adventure paths?

At the moment i've got so much paizo goodness to DM that i've not got time for homebrew, but if these maps can help me run paizo products then I might chase up a few.

You could use them for side-treks or you could modify an encounter area for it to resemble one of the maps, though.

I got a few myself and I use them occasionally if I want an on the fly encounter.
It's a fit, just not a perfect fit.

Hadn't ordered yet.

I may order from Paizo, if I can afford it. Budget is tight right now, but I want something big and meaty to take with me to read before I ship off to basic training.

In that case, why nog go with the campaign setting? The pagecount is a bit lower, but it's about the same value for money and it's available right now from both paizo and amazon.

Well Tell Amazon, they still insist it doesn't come out till next month.

Amazon expects to have them in stock by september 1st. In an earlier thread Lisa said they would ship to diamonds on august 14th (2 weeks ago). Asuming it takes a week to get there and another week to get to Amazon, September 1st seems about right.

Amazon will fullfill the pre-orders placed before august 14th and will fullfill the rest according to some archaic ritual I have no knowledge of. So if you pre-ordered before the 14th with Amazon, you should be OK. If not, you're better off ordering from Paizo.

Just checked the site. Seems to work OK

check your URL.

http://www.fantasygrounds.com/

Well, we're talking about rational numbers, so in that context you're right, but order of operation still applies when you can't commute elements in multiplication, (2x2 matrices and quaternions, for example).

I should have stayed away from this mess (I mean discussion) But yeah thanks chris

By the way, what do you folks consider the order of operations for exponentiation? Would 2^3^3 simplify to 2^27 = 134,217,728 or 8^3 = 512 ?

Against my better judgement I am going to try to answer this one.

I think it should evaluate to 2^27

Evaluate the arguments in the exponent before evaluating the exponent itself In other words, 2^SQR(9) = 8

For example, if you have 9/3*5. If you try and do them in any order and try and do 3*5 first, you end up with 9/15 which equals 3/5 or 0.6. If you do it in the correct order you end up with 15. There are other examples that fairly easily show that multiplication and division have the same weight and must be done from left to right.

we mean exactly the same thing.

A*B*C == A*C*B for any value of A,B and C

and in your example,

A=9
B=1/3
C=5

She expressed the opinion that in a calculation division must be performed before multiplication, and that addition must be performed before subtraction. To back this up she refered to a mnemonic she'd been taught at school -- PEDMAS -- (expand) parentheses, exponentiation, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction -- describing the order in which things should be done. A quick google suggested that indeed this mnemonic (or slight variants of it) are indeed common and popular.

I disagreed, saying that the order of resolving multiplication and division (and similarly, addition and subtraction) dosn't matter as they're essentially the same operation, and instead both multiplication and division are resolved, left-to-right, at the same time (and also suggesting that a mnemonic aimed at school children probably wasn't the most reliable source).

Thoughts? Is her position common? Correct? Am I missing something fundamental?

the left-to-right part of your post (bolding mine) threw me off a bit but other than that you are right. The order of multiplications and divisions does not matter, as long as the structure of the equation remains the same.

In order to simplify the equation as much as possible, I would generally argue for multiplcation before division rather than the other way around, as it reduces the number of operations in which you have to account for fractures.

I have the statblocks for most of the latter chapters (everything but Strike on Shatterhorn) in word format.

Drop me an email at Wagner dot Marc at gmail dot com

I see your problem. Especially because in 3.5, having the apropriate gear is an essential part of the PC's power level.

Still, this should only really come into play a few times per adventure, when the party is streached for resources and encounters a major adversary. Other than that, there shouldn't be any reason why your party can't survive with less gear. Especially if they are prepared to share it more evenly.

My party lagged behind the wealth by level curve about halfway through the AP and never caught up. It wasn't really that big of a problem, though. Firstly because they compensated with good tactics and secondly because they bought gear that played on their strength.

I see a couple of ways out:

1) Give them the level apropriate treasure, no matter what they do. This is not a route I would take myself, as finding hidden or unsual treasure is part of the reward for exploring. I can see it happening on a few occasions, though. For example finding Alacast or a few of the special weapons give the party a significant boost in battles in that or next adventures. Generally, though, it would probably be better to hint the players to the options of searching an area.

2) Boost your party's level. If you need to increase your party's power level, but don't want to give them gear for free, you could give them an extra level instead. The advantage is that the result is the same, but you aren't seen handing out treasure and generally rewarding 'lazy' behaviour.

3) Pull punches. It's only really a problem a couple of encounters per adventure, and even then it could be overcome with some creative tactics. During these encounters, make sure your party is doing an apropriate amount of damage each round (about 1/4 of all the oponent's hp should be enough). If they aren't, either increase the damage, or have the oponent's attacks or spells fail. This way, you still have exiting combat without risking a TPK every other encounter.

I see order 999691 ( 3 copies of the beta) have no shipping cost. Are you going to ship it to me for free, or did something go wrong while ordering?

p.s. I would like to use the cheapest USPS method.

I am wondering if I have been making a mistake in running things. For those creatures that do not list treasure in the HC, but instead just list a pg # in the MM, should I be rolling and including random treasure or is the total treasure in the adventure complete for all the challenges found in the adventure?

Sean Mahoney

You should be fine with the treasure listed in the adventure.

Are you worried your PC's aren't 'getting enough'?

Chef's Slaad wrote:

It tells us our movement thorugh 3-dimensional space, not our position.

Correction: It tells us our acceleration and orientation in a 3-dimensional space. Once you are moving at a constant velocity without resistance, you cannot tell if you are moving anymore.

This is due to the fluid in our inner ears. We do, however, constantly know our orientation (upside down, flat on back, etc) assuming gravity is constant in a single direction.

I stand corrected Sir

I'm certainly not qualified to answer your question. My gut reaction, however, is that it's extremely plausible.
I would change your definition of balance a bit, though. It tells us our movement thorugh 3-dimensional space, not our position.

I don't know where you want to go with this. I'm not even sure there's a listing of the 'official' 5 senses, other than in school science textbooks. It might be a good place to start.

edit:

just read the wiki on senses.

seems to be at least 11. The first 5 are just the ones Aristotle came up with. That's what you get for putting all your faith in dead greek people.

:)

A true and funny story. There was a time around 3 or 4 years ago when it seemed that we were screwing something or another up on a daily basis with the magazines. It probably wasn't anything that most subscribers even knew about, but we had a bad spell for a while. During that time, we came up with a slogan for the company, "Paizo Publishing, we suck less every day!" It was a bit of a poke at ourselves, was always good for a laugh, and actually mirrored our resolve to get better at what we do so we don't make the same mistakes again and again. You know what? It worked and I haven't said that phrase in years. :)

-Lisa

Yah, I remember Cosmo using that once in a while on the customer service board. It had something to do with overseas shipping if I recall corectly. I'm glad you've got that sorted out!

I was the one to inform my FLGS about pathfinder. I even lent the owner my first copy of burnt offerings. Since then he has been selling pathfinder products to other gamers and getting players enthusiastic about pathfinder (and the pathfinder RPG) as an alternative to switching to 4.0

I recieved the email. Thank you

Shemeska, all right!

I am really looking forward to your twisted ideas on the multiverse. Just a few questions, to get you in the teaser mood:

Will it have wars between the different fiendish races?
Will it have the struggle for the 'right' philosophy?
Will it have a city at the center?
Will it have an Orroloth?

I usually have the shipping option standard postal delivery for my pathfinder adventures and chronicles subscription. However, for the august delivery, it seems to have changed to USPS priority.

Could you change it back to the more reasonably priced standard postal delivery option?

Thanks!

note to self:

098h534 r8ht34w t9 9h 5h3 Y qhe 5h3 R.

what now?

Note to self: Get back to work

How is a "Shackles Pirate" different than any other pirate?

They have no shack.

Hence Shackles

Seems pretty obvious if you ask me.

<ducks for cover>

Hey, does anyone know where one could purchase a whiteboard for drawing D&D rooms, or are they just a figment of my imagination? I could have sworm I heard about them somewhere

don't you mean a flip mat?

I WAS going to write a reply.

But instead I'm going home to my kid :)

Time does fly!

Just finished Shackled City last night, and I'm finally allowed on these forums!

I don't have an answer to the OP; I just wanted to share.

:)

Congratuations Snorter.

Tell us all about it!

Adimarchus and Cagewrights' plot seems more devilish that demonic...

Really I'm rambling with the new 4e background as for "Wizard presents" and the manuals; but the basic idea of demons=destroyers and devils=scheming/power hungry/souls bargainers/humanoid in shape is older than the 4e.
Asmodeus may replace Grazz't as Adimarchus nemesis.
Devils may replace demons.
Any opinion is welcome.
Ciao
Mario

If you're asking could the cagewright plot work if Adimarchus was a devil rather that a demon the answer is yes. But if you're asking if it would fit better.... I'm not so sure.

Tanar'ri can be very subtle and manipulative if they want to. Look at Grazz't and Malcathnet for example. Or look at Succubi and Nalfashnee. Both cater to base emotions, and both are indirect in their approach to corrupting mortals.

But the real beauty of the plot is how mad it truely is. Open a gate out of Carceri create a distraction and free a demon prince? It's completely insane!

it sounded like such an obvious solution I never even realised it wasn't possible under the RAW. Of course, with no monk at my gaming table for the last 5 years, I wasn't really aware of the problem.

Is there a button to opt out of some of the pathfinder chronicles stuff? I will not need the Curse of the Crimson Throne Map folio but want everything else.

I'm having the same problem. I think the only option is to cancel before the map pack is sent and then resubscribe right after.

Note to Self:

Never email the Colonel *or any officer really* when I am angry.

make that ANYONE - been there. It sucks, but an apology usually does marvels.