Chris Mortika's page

Hello.

I'm writing from a copy shop, where I planned to prepare to GM Pathfinder Society adventures for a couple of upcoming conventions. I need to access the "additional resources" page, both for the current AR document, and for the Chronicle sheets for a couple of modules and novels.

The link from the main Pathfinder Society page doesn't take me to Additional Resources. It takes me to a page called "About Pathfinder Society", and that page is blank.

Please advise.

In another thread,

I want to see added to the guide a little paragraph that explains that in the rare instance where a piece of equipment that a player brings into a scenario is lost/stolen/sundered during the course of the scenario, that item is returned to the player at the conclusion of the scenario. “This system, while not necessarily realistic, ensures that all players have a fair and equitable chance” at maintaining “the items that best suit their characters’ specific needs.”

While I understand the reasoning behind this position, it would lead to many more TPKs.

Right now, let's say a gang of street toughs ambushes the low-level party, looking for coin. If the toughs win, they're left standing while the party is unconscious and at their mercy. So they steal the PCs' equipment and leave them to wake up, days later, thirsty and aching, in the alleys of Absalom. From a GM/player perspective, that's a suitable penalty.

If the party gets all of its equipment restored, then "the NPCs steal your stuff" isn't an effective penalty any more. Imagine you're in a party, fighting criminals. You're down to your last cure serious wounds potion, and your last couple of hit points. If you consume the potion, you might win the fight. But if you just throw the fight, you'll wake up with all your loot in place, including the expensive potion. So, there's a disincentive for winning those fights. That's not going to sit well with most GMs, so the thugs will be killing parties instead.

Good day, and well met.
I have an embarrassingly novice question.

I'm starting up a weekly PFS home campaign, and I'm not sure how to register it in the system in such a way that I don't have to register each session individually. How do I do that?

One of the "only 100 left" items in today's front page Paizo blog is the Haunted Mansion map pack. That's one of the map packs used in this adventure.

(Although that map pack isn't necessary for any other scenarios, it's durned useful here and again. For example, Tide of Twilight can profit from a hedge maze.)

Is anything being organized for Platte-Con in Wisconsin?

Mike Brock:

In the thread about the PFS exclusive scenarios, you invited Dragnmoon, and presumably the rest of us, to brainstorm ideas for cool goodies that Paizo could give its most active GMs.

My suggestion:
Every two-month period, Paizo could put PDFs in the accounts of people who have GMed some threshhold of scenarios over the past period.

For sake of argument, let's say the threshhold is 3 scenarios. So, if I GM (and report) 3 scenarios in the months of January and February, Paizo would drop some PDFs in my downloads at the end of February.

Which PDFs? I would be giddy if they were full-scale maps from some upcoming scenario. So, at the end of February, I could download a map, which would come from either one of the scenarios on sale that last week of February or else one of the March scenarios, as sort of a teaser.

Right now, we have to either hand-draw, or else print out enlargements of the maps in the scenarios, using Acrobat to strip out the labels. Doug Miles enjoys the hand-drawing. I think Thea does, too. I'd rather spend my time studying NPC stat blocks and preparing hand-outs.

Notice that this incentive doesn't have anything to do with the star-rating of the GM involved. If I, at 3 stars, don't report any sessions during that period, I don't get the download. If a newbie GM does, he gets the reward for doing so. It keeps people consistently active.

You could offer more PDFs for more reported sessions, but that's way too complicated.

I'm running a game tonight, and the party will be exploring an abandoned public library in the swamps. I'm not too worried about the swamps, but is there a good map pack that has a largish room that might pass for a library?

There are already two hellknight miniatures. How is this one different?

So there's that other thread, that's turned toxic. I'm not talking about the main issue there.

But Mike commented that pre-gen credit for modules would work like GM credit for scenarios currently works: when you GM, you immediately assign the credit to a character, who receives the credit as soon as possible. Sometimes that's immediately, and at other times it happens when the character reaches the bottom of the scenario's tier.

Okay, but is that how people are using GM credit?

At Origins, I had a fellow sit down at my "Dalsine Affair" table with a 6th-level PC, with a 4th-level and four 1st-level colleagues. I suggested that he didn't want to play a character so high that it would force the new guys to play up. So he took 9 scenarios worth of GM credit and whipped up a 4th-level PC witch. Nobody at the table thought that the least bit odd.

At Stuffed COWS last month, I was playing in a 5-9 scenario, and one of the players had a 7th-level character that didn't fit well with the party, and a 4th-level Witch (11 XP). He decided to take out one of his GM-credit sheets, apply it to the witch, and join us as a 5th-level character. Nobody raised an objection.

According to the rules, I should have forbidden the first gentleman from assembling a PC out of loose GM Credit, and my GM should not have allowed the player at the table to play his witch.

Yes?

Now, by "broken", I mean "damaged and hard to play" rather than "very powerful".

There's currently a hot thread about sanctioned module play in PFS, which has been hijacked by an even hotter discussion about who can modify what when it comes to hosting module-play sessions.

This has nothing to do with that.

But Mike Brock has announced that he's planning on releasing a new set of guidelines for module play later this week or next, and I wanted to mention something they're very good at.

Mike, whatever you decide, please bear in mind that sanctioned module play is currently the only means through which we have to repair a broken character.

There are always going to be characters that are crippled by misfortune. I have seen with my own eyes:

• the 2nd-level witch with a dead familiar, who can't afford to get a new one.
  
• the 5th-level ranger with 4 permanent negative levels. (money and prestige went to buy the two raise dead spells.)
  
• the sorcerer who made a poor choice when selecting spells, and now can't participate effectively.
  
• the 8th-level barbarian stripped of all money and gear, but not killed.
  
• at least two druids caught by the changing rules, with animal companions but no ranks in Handle Animal.

I'm sure everybody has seen some character like that. In a home game, the GM can compensate and throw in something that can help that PC, or other party members could work together to buy the witch a new familiar, buy scrolls for the sorcerer, buy a +1 sword for the barbarian. Not in Pathfinder Society. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to join a party with one of these down-on-her-luck PCs; for at least one scenario, and maybe more, she'll be almost useless in the party.

The best solution right now is module-play. The player can assign the rewards of the module to that PC, giving her the money or experience to fix her problem and rejoin the active campaign. From my perspective, allowing people to repair their favorite PCs and continue play is much better than requiring them to start up a new 1st-level PC.

Mike, however you decide to alter the rules for module play, please keep this in mind. Thanks for your time.

This is a semi-hypothetical situation, an amalgam of a few sessions I've GMed and played in.

A party of levels 4, 4, 5, 5, and 7 are playing a Tier 3-7 scenario. The APL is (25 divided by 5) 5, and so the players decide to "play up" to sub-tier 6-7. So far, all is in working order.

Within an hour, real time, the 7th-level cleric is killed dead. There's probably enough resources to have her raised at the end of the scenario, but the party is suddenly down most of its healing (even if she were raised in the middle of the adventure, only one of the negative levels could be removed this week.) The players realize their characters are out of their weight class.

They can (a) turn around and report to the Venture Captain back in Absalom that they were unable to complete the mission. Or they can (b) ... ?

The nice people of Chicago were generous enough to let me come and GM at their "Stuffed Cows" convention this weekend. As always, the Sunday morning slot brought something interesting to the table.

One of the players handed me a sheet with the game mechanics for schizophrenia (-4 to WIS and CHA skills, never be able to Take 10, when you go into combat or some other stressful sutiation, make a Will save to avoid being confused for 1-6 rounds). He explained that one of his earlier GMs had imposed that as a permanent penalty for taking enough INT damage to drop his attribute to 0. The GM hadn't mentioned this on the Chronicle sheet, and the player was a little unsure about it.

So, if you're that GM, I'm sorry for ignoring the PC's permanent mental disability, but I need some guidance on the Chronicle sheet as to why you imposed that penalty (See the rules for insanity).

I thought it would be useful to have a thread where we can post the times and locations of any demos we're doing for the Beginner Box.

I'll start.

There will be a Beginner Box demo every Tuesday evening in Iowa City, Iowa, at the Hobby Corner Store in Sycamore Mall. We'll be there from 6:00 till 8:00 every week. The first four weeks, we'll be running the Beginner Box Bash quests, as well as helping new players understand the game and character-building rules. After that, the Bash officially closes, but we'll still be running the short quests, or maybe running people through something else. We'll see what folks want and make plans accordingly.

If you're already a Pathfinder afficianado, you're more than welcome to come by and take a look at the Beginner Box or sit in on a session, but I want to give priority to new players and folks not familiar with Pathfinder. If you're in the Pathfinder Society, and you want to play all four quests to qualify for the exclusive boon, please come on over.

So, who else is running Beginner Box demos?

Purchasing the vanity "mercantile store" gives the following benefit: "In the city where you have your store, you may treat the gold limit for buying items as 5% greater than normal, because of the many inside connections you have within the region’s markets and trade organizations."

In a city like Absalom, the only practical gold limit for buying items is the limit imposed by the PC's Fame score. So, do I understand correctly that the inside connections would allow a PC with Fame of 13 to buy an item worth 3,150 gp, instead of 3,000?

Or is this vanity only useful if the PC spends his downtime between adventures outside of large cities?

I'm hoping that this is a short thread, without much rancor.

At GenCon this year, I lucked out and won a half-dozen racial boons. So, at the end of one session, I gave one of them (Ifrit) away to a new player, who'd had a lot of fun playing Frostfur Captives with his pre-gen, and was looking to make his first PC.

Recently, in a home game, another player and I wanted to build two PCs who were brothers. I used the Tiefling boon, and I game him the Aasimar boon.

This past weekend, I won an "extra loot" boon and, not having any poor PCs, immediately turned around and handed it to a player whose PC needed to pay for some costly spells to make it through the session, to help her get her character back on her feet.

In some of the threads recently, there are suggestions that I should not have done these things.

What are the guidelines here? If my buddy and I win boons that fit each other's characters very well, can we swap?

Mike, you asked:

Past blogs from other staff members—whether they be developers, designers, authors, etc—are not going to be official and affect Pathfinder Society until they are printed in a book, appear in the FAQ, or appear in the Additional Resources list. This includes past blogs and posts by Hyrum or Josh. All this printing out of blogs with replies and bringing them a game to show a GM is cumbersome and I'm not going to require players to bring a ton of extra printed pages with them. If it isn't in a book, the Additional Resources list, or FAQ, then it doesn't apply to Pathfinder Society Organized Play. If it is an issue that needs to be addressed from a past blog or messageboard ruling, please bring it up again as a new topic.

So, this is a new thread.

I have an inquisitor PC, a worshipper of Sinashakti, one of the Empyreal Lords, with the Exploration subdomain. Since subdomains for the Empyreal Lords were in a blog post (February 17, 2010), that character is no longer legal. I fancy that I am not alone in this predicament.

What should we do?

During GenCon this year, each table was asked to nominate a winning PC. I didn't like it, at all, but I figured it was a one-time thing. Since then, I've participated in a couple conventions, and boons were given out to the table winners. So, maybe this is a change in Pathfinder Society.

I don't like it.

Until now, there's never been a reason for the party to work as anything other than a team, with odd faction missions and personal side-tasks. Now, the players are competing against one another for a limited resource.

Maybe I'm biased because I remember the RPGA in the 90's. There was serious prize support at major conventions, and things like PFS boons available at smaller cons. And people seriously gamed the system to win them. One guy named Russel sat me down once and explained what he did: he always sat at the DM's left, so that he could always hear the DM and vice versa, and so that the DM would see him first when sweeping over the table left to right. He would be deliberately and obviously helpful to each of the other player characters once, and he would record (with a highlighter) every time he role-played one of his PC's personality schticks, so he could explain them after the session.
Russel was pretty good at it, and won a lot of TSR product.

(There was also a family that went around, always playing together, and deciding ahead of time which of them they would vote for, to be the table winner. Any other players at the same table were out of the running.)

I'm waiting for the PFS player who will sit at my table and ask how the table winner will be chosen: by my personal fiat, or by vote of the players. Just so he knows how to adjust his play.

A question arose this past weekend, when I was playing my summoner character at a convention-level Pathfinder Society game.

But this isn't a PFS-specific question.
And it doesn't have to do with Summoners or Eidolons, specificially.

It has to do with the Reposition maneuver.

My PC's eidolon is a Large creature, which he often makes Huge. It's designed to be very good at grappling (claws, grab, improved grapple, greater grapple). It has wings and can fly. It has a Strength score of 28 before buffs. (That gives the Eidolon a sufficient carrying capacity to lift 400 lbs and still consider that a light load.)

So, the Eidolon landed next to an NPC and grappled and pinned. And it would fly off with the pinned NPC. But the GM noted that it needed to roll a Reposition maneuver check to do so. And while a grappled character could be repositioned, a pinned character could not. And, even if the Eidolon could Reposition the NPC, it could only move the guy a multiple of 5 feet, based on how well it succeeded at the check.

Really?

There are all sorts of tropes within the medieval fantasy genre that don't work under these rules. The villain comes galloping in on his jet-black mare, grabs the hostage princess, and rides away ... at maybe 15 feet per round, repositioning her with maneuver checks. The giant roc occudes the sun as it stoops and carries off an entire cow ... repositioning it 5' at a time.

I am looking to run a Tiefling fighter (archetype: Aldori swordlord) / duelist for my next Pathfinder Society character.

Has anyone run a swordlord, or a Rondello duelist, or some other fighting style fighter? How well does it work in Pathfinder Society? Is it worth switching to the Duelist prestige class?

I am considering dropping a level in something like Ninja or Magus, to give him some dirty tricks, ah, versatility, in combat. Does anyone care to offer an opinion?

I couldn't see how you could rap the story up so fast, and keep it elegant. Nice work!!

This isn't a hardcover. It's a smallish boxed set.

A general question:

In character, how many of your characters reveal their secret faction alegiance to the other player characters? How many have revealed it to their Venture Captain superiors?

If the answer to the first question is "no", then do other members of the same faction know of your character's secret allegiance?

If you're secretly a member of the Scarzi faction, how do you reveal your allegiance to Cheliax faction characters, when the two of you are on the same secret mission?

Yeah, I was at GenCon, and yeah, I was lucky enough to get the Gravetouched boon, and I wanted to (a) test-drive the race, and (b) show it off to some of the locals at our game day, to garner interest in the Advanced Races Guide. With GM-credit, he's coming in at 3rd level.

So, a couple of comments and questions:

C1) Designing a dhampyr PC is certainly doable, but the lack of racial traits, racial alternative class options, and alternative racial traits (from APG) make me feel like I'm back in Season 1.

C2) I'm probably not catching the trick to the Oracle class. I tried building the character as an Oracle of Bones, but it never gelled into an effective character.

Q1) Is a dhampyr's skin pale, like vampires, or coal-black, like the illustration in Bestiary II? I swear, that illustration looks like Drizzt.

Q2) I've never gotten around to playing a cleric in 3rd Edition, let alone Pathfinder, although I've certainly run my share of them as Pathfinder Society villains. (It seemed for a while there that every final encounter was with a cleric of some evil outsider or another.) I'll take all the advice you can muster on how to play the character (a) to the benefit of the party as a whole, and (b) so that I have fun.

Why is there a little number, way at the bottom of the page when I look for threads on the website? Earlier today it was "20". Now it is "17".

What's the woman second from the left doing?

Excellent. Congratulations. Who won?

This morning was the last slot at GenCon. A nice couple came and sat at my table, where I was running Frostfur Captives. The lady introduced her character as being a 2nd-level halfling cavalier with a pig mount.

I asked her where she had found justification for a Small cavalier having a pig mount, since the APG requires a character to be 4th level before taking a boar. She was flustered and the gentleman besides her said, "It's a pig, but use the stats for a war dog."

I apologized, but I said we don't re-skin creatures in Pathfinder Society play. She can call her mount a pig, if she wants, and her character can think it's a pig, but everyone else will know it's a war dog.

They were notably unhappy. She spent the next several minutes with her iPad, looking through d20pfsrd.com

Then I asked her what tricks the dog knew. She was flustered, and told me that her mount didn't know any tricks; it was her mount.

Shortly theeafter, they made their excuses and left the table and the room. (Given the nature of "Frostfur Captives", I suspect that she would not have had much fun with her new war dog.)

So, a question, and a gripe:

Question: Was there a better way for me to handle things? Granted, time was tight with four other players at the table, and I could have been chattier with them if it'd been just the three of us.

Gripe: Her character was 2nd level. That means that she'd probably played at least 3 sessions with a halfling calavier on a pig mount that did whatever the player wanted. It would have been much easier if her first GM had corrected her choice in mounts and enforced the Animal Handling rules.

That's "Time TrApper".

My first professional sale.

Invaluable for those who want the 1st-edition DC Heroes game stats for the Wonder Twins (brought forward in time as part of the great armada of dinosaurs and robots and World War I flying aces set against the Legion of Super Heroes.)

This is the post-Crisis Superman. The book with the John Byrne cover is the pre-Crisis Superman sourcebook.

This is the pre-Crisis sourcebook. The Roger Stern book is the post-Crisis Superman.

The first review notes that the cover image (aboveground) is all you get. The product description notes that there's also an underground battlemap.

Could someone double-check the product description?

In the last couple of months, I've had the opportunity to run some Season 0 scenarios, and to play in a couple others. And I always catch myself reaching for the Bestiary instead of the 3.5 Monster Manual. (When I was at Origins, I was caught volunteering an extra slot and didn't bring a Monster Manual, so I *had* to use the Bestiary version of monsters. The world did not end.)

So, to the gamemasters out there, are you still using the 3.5 version of monsters when you run Season 0 scenarios?

To Mark and Hyrum: how is the conversion project going? Could you use some volunteer help?

A general question: which do you believe to be the strongest Season 0 adventures? Which do you consider to be the most problematic for using Pathfinder rules as they currently stand?

So, I just received a promotional email from Rite Publishing about a new spells supplement, and the tag-line "never cast the same spell twice" got me thinking.

What would it be like to cast spells with a sorcerer's daily spell slots, but with the entire sorcerer / wizard spell list available, with the caveat that the character could only cast each spell once? Not once per day, or once per level; once.

Cantrips are available forever, of course. And the character could use pearls of power, wands, or scrolls.

Let's say that a sorcerer-style spellcaster might throw 30 spells at 1st level, and maybe 40 spells at 2nd level, 45 at 3rd. How many 1st-level spells would such a character need on his spell list, to remain viable? (If he runs out of unused 1st-level spells before he's likely to leave them behind anyways, that's no good.) I'm estimating 150. The character might in fact need that spell supplement.

Aspis Hunter (Fame 20, 2 PP) You gain special training in foiling the efforts of the Society's largest external enemy, the Aspis Consortium. You gain a +1 bonus on attack rolls and on weapon damage rolls against Aspis agents who wear clearly visible insignia showing their affiliation and rank.

Maybe all Aspis Consortium agents receive distinctive combat training, which the Society allows only its most trusted field agents to learn and exploit. (After all, if Valsin told everybody in the Society, he'd be teling the Consortium double agents.) Othrwise, it seems odd to me to have training that works against a human rogue who's an Aspis agent, but not against his twin brother who's dressed as an Aspis agent.

And I assume that the bonus is in effect if you know somebody's an agent, even if she strips off the identifying insignia. (Most Aspis agents don't wear clearly-visible identifying insignia in the first place, do they?)

1) The spell force punch is delivered by touch attack, does damage, and pushes the target back up to 5 feet per two caster levels. If the target is bigger than Medium, the distance is decreased. A Fortitude save negates this. Should a dwarf's Stability racial trait (+4 racial bonus to CMD when resisting bull rushes or trip attempts) influence this? Better question: why doesn't the spell use the existing bull rush mechanics?

2) What are the rules on targeting unseen people (thanks to invisibility or darkness) with spells? The necromancy spell howling agony affects one living creature per level, if they're clumped up. It either disables them with agony, or forces them to spend a move action screaming in pain, every round. That would be great to keep track of enemies in the dark. But can it target them? And, by the way, why doesn't that earn the [Evil] descriptor? Can you imagine an inquisitor of a good-aligned god casting that and not needing to atone afterwards? (Oh, and I assume that undead would not be susceptible to a threnodic version of this spell?)

I just got off of an e-mail chat with a friend who's pretty upset.

He's been playing a Ranger / Hellknight in Pathfinder Society. Back in October, he lost his job, so he's been on a tight budget, and he appreciates PFS OP for the low maintenance cost.

You all see where this is going, yes?

He just found out today that his Hellknight PC no longer needs to bring pages from Pathfinder #27, but he now needs to buy the Inner Sea World Guide and update his character to the new PrC. He says that purchase is out of reach for him these days, and I believe it.

I suggested that starting another character at first level is not the end of the world.

But I thought I would ask here: is thee any chance that the Inner Sea World Guide might be one of those resources which GMs are required to have handy, so that players can assume they can access the material therein? Is there any clever work-around anybody can suggest, so that he doesn't have to retire his character?

So, I purchased one of the Pathfinder Tales books, and it appeared in My Downloads. I downloaded it.

What do I need to do, in order to open the .epub file and read it, on either my Mac computer or my iPad?

This has a nice "Against the Giants" feel to the title. Presumably, though, the Venture Captains won't be sending their 1st and 2nd-Level operatives against frost giants...

This subject came up this morning, after a session at Gamicon in Iowa City, and I got some insight on the situation from some GMs, but I'd like to (a) solicit a wider swath of opinions, and possibly (b) get an official ruling.

I'm playing a Neutral Inquisitor of Abadar. Over the last several play sessions, I've been feeling the character as coming across more and more sympathetic to NPCs and trying to save as many as possible. In other words, he's striking me more and more as Good-aligned.

Abadar won't allow a Neutral Good Inquisitor, and I don't particular feel that the character is Lawful Good. What should I do?

One GM suggested that I have the character commit a series of evil acts, to balance his alignment. Another suggestion was that I could just announce that the character had changed alignments between sessions, switched gods, possibly switched domain powers, and everything was handled in down time. Or that I play for a time with a character denied all of his Inquisitor powers as he's on a quest for his new deity. (I replied that I'm sure people in the PFS would be irritated, coming to sit down at a table and finding that I'd decided the "inquisitor" would be unable to contribute.)

One possible wrinkle: at first level, I chose to take the Judgement abilities as profane, rather than sacred, bonuses. According to the write-up in the APG, there's absolutely no way those can be changed, so I'd be a Good-aligned Inquisitor with profane bonuses.

Suggestions?

Note, for the reference, that I'm posting this in 2011.

Next month, we here in eastern Iowa are having a local convention with a lot of PFS scenarios. A friend called me up and asked for help with her 4th Level character, because she wanted to make sure it was street legal for the convention.

We met, and I found out that (a) her character was still based on the 3.5 D&D rule-set, but (b) other GMs had been letting her play it, and (c) had even tweaked it a little (giving her an additional 12 hit points, using Spot for Perception, etc.) So, they had to know that it wasn't a legal character, even though they kept assuring her it was. She called me because she wasn't sure what the rules are -- she doesn't have ready Internet access -- but she was suspicious that things weren't on the up-and-up.

I wish I could say I was surprised.

So, we converted the character to a 4th level Pathfinder-legal character, using only the options available in the materials we can assume she can use: the core rulebook, the traits document, "Seekers in Secret" and the Guide to PFS OP.

What do I do about the recent scenarios she's played? Are we allowed to count them as legal play and legitimate experience? (If not, then the tables weren't of legal size.) How should we adjust her Faction Prestige total, since she has indeed received 2 Prestige points for some of the adventures?

Over on his LiveJournal, a fellow announced an auction of Expert D&D / 2nd Edition AD&D / 3.5 Edition gaming stuff, all proceeds going to charity.

There's some schlocky stuff there, but also some gems, like a couple of copies of "Isle of Dread".

"Hey gang,

"I am clearing out my closet and selling off a lot of my gaming and book collection with the majority of the money going to charity. The charities I am supporting are the American Cancer Society, Canine Assistance (a group that trains dogs for disabled people) and a local animal shelter which rescues animals from other shelters before they are put down.

"Please check out my auctions and bid if you see something you like. They are all starting at a penny and I have some rare out of print items up for auction. Tell a friend."

http://shop.ebay.com/garagefree4all/m.html

Last year, the issue of Superstar contestants adding to their entries, or clarifying points, became a problem. The one disqualification made the most noise, but the contestants who wrote posts that had to be suppressed by Paizo, or who received warnings, had already forced Vic to send out a stern reminder before that. The issue left a sour taste in the mouth of many people.

My advice: from the time you submit your entry until the hour that voting closes, don't mention it at all. Don't refer to it within your posts on other topics, in unrelated fora. Don't try to be clever, or skirt the issue obliquely, or game the system. Avoid saying things like "Thank you, jarjar4president, for understanding just what I was trying to do with the death knell ability." I probably wouldn't even post explanations on your LiveJournal, or EN World.

Because even if you do something that stays on the right side of the hard-bright line, that doesn't get you disqualified, you'll still come across as someone who doesn't quite play by the spirit of the rules. From the time you find out you're in the contest, you should behave like a professional, and we don't see professionals acting like weasels.

On a related topic, there were a number of voters last year who were viewing "vote for me" posts as pandering and self-aggrandizing. There's a difference between the honest "Thank you for your comments and concerns" versus the strong-arm and desperate-sounding "I hope I can count on your vote".

Situation Qalaus the summoner is investigating an area when he steps in front of a mirror of opposition. Suddenly, an opposite-aligned black-hearted duplicate of Qalaus steps out of the mirror next to him, and gains initiative.

Qalaus, who is no longer in front of the mirror, would like to summon his Eidolon.

Question What happens?

a) The Eidolon is considered part of Qalaus and not a separate creature, so both Qalaus and the evil Qalaus can summon independent, identical Eidolons.

b) The Eidolon is a separate entity, which was not reflected in the mirror of opposition. Just as the two summoners couldn't both gate in the same unique outsider, Qalaus can summon his critter, and the duplicate cannot.

c) The duplicate acts first, so has the option of summoning the Eidolon. If he does so, Qalaus cannot.

d) The two casters summon different aspects of the same mysterious outsider. The duplicate's Eidolon has the same base form, but different evolutions.

A real-time visual translator.

If you fix the caster/melee balance issues you end up with 4e. Magic is no longer magical, it's just fluff that exists to make Wizard powers different from Fighter powers.

I know I'm rather late quoting this, and someone beyond me has probably already addressed it, but that's not the only way to do this.

The inherent problem is people tend to try to think of their favorite fantasy heroes as being high level characters, when they're not. Beowulf (the guy who ripped off a trolls arm and beat him to death with it) was probably a level 5 or 6 barbarian. I HIGHLY doubt Herakles himself was over level 10-ish.

I think the claims that literary heroes like Conan or Elric, Aragorn or the Grey Mouser, are best represented in the game (D&D 3rd Edition on through Pathfinder) as being "between 4th and 8th level" has merit. That's the kind of fantasy that the game designers had in mind to simulate, and that's likely why those level are "the sweet spot" in the game, why the heavy predominance of adventures are written for that level.

If that's the case, if the demigod Herakles is best represented at "level 10-ish", then what kind of fantasy trope is best represented by levels 17-19?

This isn't a slam at all. This is an honest question. Who's that much tougher than Herakles?

I can't say as I've ever played in a convention-legal Munchkin tournament, and I'm not likely to do so in the foreseeable future. So whether these are legal for such tournaments or not doesn't factor into my purchasing decisions.

(It seems odd for the mysterious reviewer to urge us not to buy this product on that basis alone. It seems akin to urging people not to buy any third-party products for Pathfinder, because they wouldn't be legal for PFS Organized Play.)

So, my question is: do they make the Munchkin game more fun?

(grin) I had to smile when I read the "review" of this product. It reads like simple advertising boilerplate.

ThreadingFate, might I presume that you work for Blackwyrm?