Cintra Bristol's page

I think it's interesting that they've decided not to change Eberron, and not to advance the timeline, and they've even made a decision that events from Eberron novels will never mandate changes to the published Eberron setting.

Yet somehow, they seem incapable of realizing that this same approach could be applied to the Forgotten Realms.

I like the idea of a Points of Light campaign setting, but I think it should be its own, stand-alone entity, not something forced upon an existing setting. On the other hand, if they wanted to produce an optional POL setting adaptation for an existing setting, I imagine that would be a fascinating product and a big seller. For example, if they sold an Eberron book that hypothesized:
(1) On the Day of Mourning, Cyre was thrown into its own demiplane, or even into one of the remote planes (Xoriat, or a stable pocket within Dal Quor).
(2) Beyond the borders of Cyre is a nightmare-scape of the rest of Khorvaire, duplicated as it existed on the Day of Mourning, but everyone is dead and massive devastation has occurred (basically, an intact Cyre surrounded by a world of Mournland).
(3) Here are the maps of Cyre, and what things were like up to the Day of Mourning, including some enemy armies that were in the area.

Now that would be a scary POL campaign, and very cool. Particularly if it exists as its own entity, separate from the "main" Eberron campaign setting material.

I see a big difference between limiting what NDA-restricted beta-testers could say prior to a final version, and limiting what reviewers can say (whether or not what you give the reviewer is a final version).

I'm in the automotive industry, and to my knowledge, the corporation doesn't put those kinds of silly restrictions on reviewers of our cars (although I'm certain that some marketing folks would love to be able to). Reviewers have to be perceived as independent, or what's the point? And most car reviewers are independent.

Yeah, it's a problem that the video game industry does this. And if I were considering buying a soon-to-be-released video game, I'd rather get info from a friend who buys it on day 1, rather that personally buying it on day 1.

But that's completely different from folks who signed an NDA and provide beta-feedback to help develop the product. Now, if the people who attend D&D Experience this month are told they can't say anything negative about 4E, on pain of never being allowed to attend a D&D Experience convention again, then you'd have something comparable...

...to make it asymmetrical just for the sake of doing it is stupid.

Actually, they're doing just the opposite. They're refusing to make the game symmetrical just for the sake of symmetry.

Stephen - Thanks so much for posting this explanation. It's really good to know that we'll be able to convert 3.5 Pathfinder to 4th Edition so smoothly.

I'm in the pro-4E camp, and as much as I love the Paizo adventures, I'll admit I've been feeling some guilt for buying 3.5 adventure paths when I know I'll be converting soon, and might never get to use them. It's extremely good to hear that nothing will be wasted...

So if I understand correctly, converting adventures is pretty easy, but converting PCs is harder - although both are easier if you keep a concept/tone in mind, rather than specific ability benchmarks, when converting? This leads to pure speculation on my part, but it sounds as if adventure design and world design are staying very open-ended, but player character abilities are more hard-coded and may even seem somewhat inflexible?

Of course, D&D's level-based system has always been inflexible compared to point-based systems like Hero or GURPS. And I, personally, don't want D&D to go point-based. I'm just curious if 4E feels to you like it's more, or less, flexible in PC design than 3E?

How about a demon gnome with a magic staff?

All those gnome guys claim to have "magic staffs."

Overcompensation, much? They should just go buy little red sports-cars or something. Or maybe a Hummer.

Are you trying to sound like you've been brainwashed, or did it just sort of happen?

I think he's expressing how painful it has been for him, sitting by and watching a few people make undeserved personal attacks on someone he considers a friend.

Isn't the login issue actually a necessity, given that there will be a monthly charge in the future?

The content has been poor enough that I, too, stopped paying attention a while back, except for an occasional (less than once a month peek) visit to see if they've fixed the layout. Speaking of which - the layout of their site seriously detracts from my ability to appreciate anything they post, as I have found no way of knowing what is new without clicking through every little button and link. Sometimes someone will mention there's something there I should read, and it takes me far too long to figure out where on their site I can find the article in question.

I expect that they'll have to pay more attention (read: assign more resources) to the site when they're ready to start charging money. But I really hope they realize they also need to extend the "free" period through the end of the year, to win back (read: get a second change at) those of us who are already turned off by their lack of support so far.

Summary: I'm very pro-4E, but extremely dissatisfied with the web site/DI, and unlikely to subscribe unless they (1) make massive improvements soon, (2) assign people whose primary responsibility is to the DI so it stays up to date, and (3) continue the "free" period long enough to give me a chance to see the improvements.

To set the stage: my husband and I have been sufficiently disappointed with FR products during 3E that we stopped even looking at them, and he has stated he has no intention of starting up with the FR again in 4E. I read this article, and found myself wondering if we should buy 4E FR after all.

I like bits of what they're doing, although I have some serious qualms about the execution.

Their description makes the Spellplague seem more like an atmospheric event that sometimes blasted people, rather than any sort of "plague." You can go into areas that are affected, and also be affected; but it really doesn't read like a disease. And I'd be okay with that, if they called it a plague but explained it isn't, really. Yet they seem to insist on talking about it as if it is a disease. Weird.

The idea of a world-shaking cataclysm and its aftereffects is actually pretty compelling to me. For that reason alone, I'm a bit tempted by this product. In brainstorming a possible Points of Light campaign for 4E, I've been thinking of how to create evidence of past cataclysms, and some of what they're creating would probably be pretty darn useful.

On the other hand, leaving "some places completely untouched" and having that include Cormyr and the Swordcoast - that just seems wrong, somehow. NOT that I want those areas to be destroyed, or that I hate the Realms or anything - but because a world-shaking cataclysm is more interesting if it affects the whole world, moderately, rather than just cut-and-pasting areas they found boring but leaving perfectly intact the areas they liked. It just seems way too artificial. And if Waterdeep is really untouched the way this implies, that's a shame - imagine how they could have refreshed the city if they'd let it be damaged, and then described how it recovered and what changes were wrought.

I think there are some strong story possibilities for the new Underchasm. I'm kind of "meh" on the Spellscarred, although not opposed to the idea - it certainly sounds more workable than Spellfire was, but it does sound a bit too much like an attempt to add Eberron-style Dragonmarks to the FR.

Ultimately, though, I guess my impression is that this should have been offered as an "alternate-" FR. If they'd come out with this as a post-apocolyptic FR, but said they were also publishing a book on how to run 4E with a Forgotten Realms that has had minimal changes since 3.5, I can imagine a lot of people being willing to look at both. They'd even be able to publish novels set in both versions... As it is, though, they're alienating a lot of people with their broad brush of change, yet not really eliminating the elements I thought would need to go (e.g. leaving Cormyr and Waterdeep intact; leaving Elminster out there pontificating away).

At the moment, it's more of a non-existent thing. It doesn't seem to be getting any support from WotC yet, and a lot of what they have posted so far has been fairly poorly done pre-4E hype rather than useful material. Plus, in my opinion, the web design is incredibly poor (as far as I can tell, it's impossible to figure out if anything new has been added without clicking through the whole site, plus it's so busy-looking that it's a turn-off).

After 4th Edition launches in June, it's supposed to have a bunch of new options, including PDFs of any 4th Ed. books you may buy, a digital game table for playing over the internet with distant friends, and more. If their past statements are accurate, there will be a monthly charge (somewhere in the $10 to $12 range?) plus a "nominal fee" ($2 to $3) per PDF of the books you've bought. Right now, it's in "free preview" mode, but of course, all the 4th Edition stuff isn't there yet.

Hopefully they'll extend the "free preview" to let us see what it can do when it actually can do something, as what they've shown so far has been so badly supported as to be, again, a turn-off. I guess at this moment it's more of a "wait-and-see" than anything useful...

Again, this is not part of the NDA. This is about an email after the fact that releases the playtester from prior NDA restrictions, but only with their hands tied.

I agree with Sebastian (and GregH, and DMcCoy1693)...

First, if the email "releases the playtester from prior NDA restrictions, but only" with additional restrictions, then that would clearly be a modification of the NDA/permission within the NDA, not something completely unrelated to the NDA.

Second, I imagine that communicating with a friend about the contents of the NDA or subsequent communications about it would be a violation of the NDA, given that Paizo can't share with us the general outline of what restrictions the NDA puts on them. (Or so I infer from the facts that the OGL announcement didn't include the full details of the NDA, and no one has shared it since.)

So Lou, my personal impression of this is that your friend's alleged action (showing you the email NDA-related communication) would very likely be a violation, and wouldn't reflect well on his personal ethics.

(Sorry, DMcCoy1693, I guess I do question his friend's integrity - but that's just my personal inference based on what Lou has shared. It's entirely possible his friend has complete integrity, and Lou is just misrepresenting, or completely misunderstanding, what his friend shared with him. One or the other appears to be true, to me at least.)

But even if the email were exactly as you described it, I'd have no problem with it. Any company is going to restrict the sorts of things that can be said about products, prior to their release, by employees and related folks. If they sent copies out to reviewers and had a restriction like the one you claim, that would be out of line. But to apply restrictions to someone who signed the NDA and has been helping with feedback to let them develop the product - it seems entirely reasonable to me.

Flyby Attack doesn't let you avoid the attack of opportunity, it just lets you attack in the middle of your movement.

Our group has allowed Tumbling as part of flight, as with the Fly spell. You move at half speed while tumbling, but there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to perform acrobatics as part of that move. (You can't tumble as part of a charge, or any other movement that requires straight-line movement.) Since the Fly spell allows you to Hover, we felt that "jinking about" (aka Tumbling) was permissible.

I actually assumed from the OP that the Monk was trying to do this on his next round's actions, not the same one in which he approached the bad guy. (In other words, that we're responding to the legality of Tumble-while-Flying, not of the player's move sequence.)

What do you mean by eliminate stacking? Stacking is eliminated already in 3rd Edition if the bonuses have the same name. Hence, wearing an amulet and bracers that both provide a +X enhancement bonus to natural armor won't stack.

Right, but all the differently-named bonuses to the same number do stack. So your AC in 3.5 can include any or all of the following named bonuses: Armor Bonus, Shield Bonus, Size Bonus, Dexterity Bonus, Armor Enhancement, Shield Enhancement, Deflection, Natural Armor, Natural Armor Enhancement, Luck, Dodge, Insight, Morale, Competence, Profane, Sacred, and probably more that I can't remember.

Okay, some of these aren't magical (size, competence). But a bunch of these are. And several of them are provided by some of the magic items that they're getting rid of. They'll still have the Armor Enhancement, but not Shield Enhancement, Deflection, Natural Armor Enhancement, and you won't have a Dex-boosting item to increase your Dex bonus. Your magic-item boost to AC will come from just one item, not a bunch of different ones.

Likewise, you only get a magical enhancement to your attack and damage rolls from the item in your implement slot, and you can't stack on additional bonuses with other names from gauntlets, headbands, etc; items in those secondary slots can't affect it.

Although they haven't suggested it, I wouldn't be surprised, from this, if they also eliminate some of the other named bonuses (profane and sacred are completely unncessary as they exist only to allow stacking of same effects; you could probably function just fine with only one out of Luck, Morale, and Insight). But that's pure speculation.

I thought of reassigning the haunts to the others players but decided this would say to the paladin :

'Since you have an advantage , the others characters suffer instead of YOU '

Actually, I disagree with this conclusion.

Haunts that are assigned to a specific PC are only visible to, and only affect, that PC. The rest of the PCs can't even see what the affected PC is reacting to.

So, the whole issue is solved by doubling up on the other PCs and not including the paladin. And to apply this, you have 2 choices:

1) Don't even assign a haunt set to the paladin, and distribute all the other categories across the other PCs. The paladin can't trigger any haunts (so others have to enter rooms and trigger them), but is able to participate to try to help the others as they are affected by them. In this case, he may not even know that "no haunts" were assigned to him; after all, if he can't see the effects and no one else can either, who's to say his haunts weren't in there somewhere, in one of the rooms/halls/stairwells that doesn't actually have a haunt?

2) Assign one haunt set to the Paladin. Don't let him trigger universal haunts at all (so others have to enter rooms and trigger them), but let him trigger the one set that is assigned to him. Since that's only going to be 2 haunts, the player probably won't be sure he's immune at first, when something actually reacts to his presence for once. But he'll get the coolness, twice, of being immune to an effect that he can describe to the others.

NOTE: I don't personally like the statement in the adventure that if there are fewer than 6 PCs, the extra haunt categories should be Universal. If one PC suddenly tries to commit suicide, the others can stop him; if the whole party has to make that save, and more than half the party is suddenly trying to throw themselves out of the window, that encounter has just become much more dangerous than intended. So I'd recommend assigning all non-universal haunts to specific PCs in any case.

Nick, I'm confused.

If I read your initial post right, you're upset because we didn't get into a furor regarding your characterizations of Vaughan and Pett.

But if we as an internet community agree with your characterizations of them, why would we have felt the need to comment???

I guess my assumption is that we all agreed with you...

(P.S. You had me convinced through the first half of your post. Don't scare people like that!)

The Free City of Haven, parts 1 and 2.

I actually have 2 copies of part 1. One is a boxed set I found years later. The other is the original version, which came as hole-punched loose-leaf paper in a big ziploc-style bag.

It still upsets me that they never got around to completing the city by publishing part 3.

This thread got me thinking - what is Paizo doing to make its adventures appeal to more female players?

- Female characters on the covers of Pathfinder (and not a chainmail bikini in sight).

- Major plot elements that are most applicable and fun if there is at least one female in the group (e.g. Aldern Foxglove).

- Female NPCs filling a wide variety of roles, including competent heroes/allies (Shalelu, Ameiko), notable villains (Mammy Graul, Xanesha, Nualia), and a variety of other roles (Shayliss Vinder); basically, including the whole range of roles, not just the positive ones, so that all of them are that much more believable.

- Providing a large number of named NPCs (male and female) with complex and interesting back-stories; and doing the same for locations and communities. (E.g. the "late unpleasantness" in the intro to Sandpoint - very useful in describing the game to a prospective new player). (Story depth instead of stereotypes carries over into how the players perceive everything else in the game.)

- And in general, treating men and women matter-of-factly as part of the setting, as equally likely to be in postitions of authority, rather than having women clearly be second class citizens (Calimshan) or rarely mentioned (my general impression of Greyhawk), or having powerful women always mentioned as sex-symbols in addition to being whatever else they might be (Seven Sisters)

Y'know, I see something completely different in that article than most of the subsequent posters have seen.

I see the elimination of problematic stacking of magic effects. In 3.5, I have to get items of attribute enhancement (STR+6, etc.) to be effective. If I am a melee person with one weapon, I get a magic shield in addition to my magic armor, and they stack.

In 4E, there are primary slots that are dedicated to the specific items that are supposed to stack with your abilities. Implements for attacks and damage, armor for AC (but NOT shields, also, because then you'd be stacking), neck slot for your saves.

And other slots that CAN'T do those sorts of effects, both to eliminate stacking and to let you have some slots that you are able to devote to additional cool things you want to do, rather than continuing a narrow focus.

It sounds pretty wonderful to me...

The idea of "Vault of the Drow"-esque drow is pretty exciting. I'm all in favor of this.

But I do prefer that there be some spider connection for at least a subset of the drow, if only because so many of the drow minis (esp. a couple of the really nice Reaper ones) have strong spider themes.

The Eberron drow are a real problem because there are no minis to use for them. Using the wild-elf for them instead would make finding minis much easier - why didn't I ever think of that? <yoink>

Ooooh, web enhancement... (drool)

Nick Logue wrote in another thread:

The "corruption overcomes efforts on behalf of the good to change a society for the better" is a theme of Falcon's Hollow.

So my question is, does the entire region described in this product push toward stories in which the PCs can't win? Or is that more the theme/mood for that specific adventure set, or for that one town only?

Some of my players have had some very, very negative experiences with adversarial gamemasters who liked to pull that kind of thing. You know, finding ways to make the PC's intended heroics turn out to be the very thing that dooms the community. And I don't like those sorts of stories myself, as a player, so I'm likewise unwilling to run them as a DM.

So I'm not sure if I want this product, but I'm also not sure if my reluctance ends up having nothing to do with the actual substance of this product, which after all is more setting than adventure.

FWIW, I love the idea of fey that aren't fluffy-bunny, sweet-friendly-nature-spirit fey, so that part of this product attracts me. It's the idea that the GM might be encouraged to play screw-the-PCs that has me worried here.

Any clarification on mood and prevalent themes that you're willing to share would be greatly appreciated.

I like the idea, particularly with the restriction that the spell can only be used in this temple.

I'd caution you to reconsider letting the PCs actually learn the spell itself. There are a number of NPCs later in the path that have secrets which shouldn't be revealed too early. And some of those NPCs have numerous servants/minions who may know their secrets, and will not have high Will saves. Therefore, I'd recommend that you either eliminate the potential to re-discover the spell, or if you must include it, at least make it a ritual with a long casting time (which should let you manipulate things more easily to avoid its use at inconvenient points later in the path).

I'm curious what your thoughts are on my concerns with the Wrathful. I just keep getting caught on the 10,000 years timeline. That means it's a tiny society that's been in cultural statis for 5 times as long as it's been since Christ died. It's such an inconceivably long time that I can't imagine what they've been doing all that time.

I've only read part of the adventure, so far, but I did notice that the first paragraph of the adventure mentions:

...the "Runeforge was cut off from the world. For ten thousand years, it has remained isolated within a timeless pocket of its own reality"

I wonder if time passes differently in there. Maybe it's still been a long time, but only 1000 years instead of 10,000. And if this is the case, maybe time passes equally oddly for the PCs whilethey're in there - for each day they spend within, 10 days pass outside.

I don't know if anything later in the adventure contradicts this, or encourages it - I just figured I'd put the idea out here now in case someone sees some possibilities in it.

Yeah, I know that these ideas haven't panned out - yet. But if someone re-examines this issue every once in a while, maybe something can be done eventually.

I think WotC said their method was that the code allowed the book-buyer access to purchase the PDF, for a nomimal fee (a couple of dollars). The idea being that in order to buy the reduced-price PDF online, you have to provide real information about who you are (in order to make a credit card payment), so people would be less likely to steal the codes.

No idea yet if their idea would work to reduce copying of the codes, particularly since it sounds like their codes are not going to be hidden/sealed, at least the way they initially described it. Hopefully they're re-think that and seal/cover the codes somehow.

Another option would be to seal the code into a sealed plastic sleeve (rather than sealing the entire book).

And in either case, I think a "nomimal fee" of several dollars to purchase the item's PDF would be completely reasonable. If you think about it, the fee offsets the fact that buying from the local store carries no shipping cost.

Paizo - Once we see what WotC ends up doing as their method (assuming they live up to this promise), and how well it works, I expect we'll end up bringing this up again to see if their method would also work for Paizo. Fair enough?

I, too, wish there was some way to accomplish this. My FLGS is having a pretty bad year, with WotC not publishing anything substantive. Plus, they've started carrying a few Pathfinder and Gamemastery products, but not very many, and I think those products would move better if I were buying them locally, and showing them off thereafter.

Supposedly, once WotC's (annoying) DI gets launched, and assuming they've been telling the truth, they'll be providing us with codes to get e-versions of the 4E books we buy. And hopefully, whatever mechanism they use is something that Paizo could also use.

'Cause this is still my biggest problem with throwing a large portion of my gaming dollars Paizo's way - that the extra value of the free PDF in the subscription means I can't justify buying the products from my FLGS. Anything that "fixes" this would be wonderful.

As a female, I don't know that the questions are all that insulting. I've played with a lot of other female gamers (esp. in college), but can't find any these days (living in middle Tennessee). I'd be interested to know what WotC plans to try to bring more females into gaming.

The answers weren't so much insulting as they were pointless (assuming the statements above are correct, I'm at work so I can't view their cutesy videos, and if I were at home I probably wouldn't bother to do so anyway). If you aren't going to provide a well-thought-out answer to these sorts of questions, it's better not to post them at all.

Now, the "Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress" column - that's insulting. If that's what they think about female gamers, wow. There are no words for how insulting that is.

In my experience, low-level spellcasters run out of spells constantly. But once they reach about 8th level or so, it becomes extremely rare, and by high level, you just can't make them burn through all their spells.

So "fixing" this only seems to change the way that low-level play feels.

Personally (as a 4E enthusiast), this is one of the changes I'm least happy about. I like to run sequences where eave after wave of combat comes (whether it's successive rooms in a dungeon complex, or repeated attacks during the city battles in Red Hand of Doom), with players feeling the pressure as their resources run low. I find it really focuses the group's attention, and they feel the victory even better when they know how close they had gotten to the end of their resources.

Started playing in 1979.

I still have my AD&D books, and my husband still has his, too.

(Coincidentally, my husband also started playing in 1979. I was 10 years old and in Georgia, he was 11 and in Michigan. I was taught by a formall, approved group at my church. He got a lot of flak from the old biddies at his church who thought it was "eeeevil." Yet I was the one who lived in the Bible Belt - go figure.)

He's got the Monster Compendium in the notebook, so you could add all the hole-punched loose pages from different supplements.

I've got a collection of at least fifty boxed sets (although a few are other games, such as Star Frontiers, most are D&D). I've got two copies of the first two parts of Free City of Haven, but the third part never got published.

But I don't think I qualify as a grognard. I must have some weird genetic mutation or something.

Skeld - Yeah, I see exactly what you mean. I withdraw the suggestion.

I'm in the map folio cancellation group, too. I'm glad there are discussions here about it, I'd just discovered it was cancelled and I didn't know what was going on.

I don't know if this would cause more problems than it solves, but...

Would it be possible for the mailing groups to be defined on a list (e.g. U.S. Pathfinder + GameMastery, U.S. Pathfinder + Chronicles, etc.) and then a web page that shows where Paizo is on the list (as one group's PDFs are all available, next to that group on the list, it says "Have access to PDFs" and once theirs are all in the mail, it changes to e.g. "All have been mailed 1/15/08")?

On the up side, when we're wondering if we should contact customer service, we'd be able to get a better idea of if it's likely to be necessary, or if we just need to be more patient. On the minus side, it would be an extra task to coordinate with all the other tasks involved in shipping, and might be a lot more coding/trouble than it's worth.

I just wanted to brag about my crit.

I just came here to congratulate you on your crit.

4E: YES

We had one gnome PC in our most recent campaign. He wasn't a spectacularly effective PC, but that has more to do with his class (bard) than his race.

I can't think of any other gnome PCs in any prior 3E/3.5 campaigns we ran... interesting.

I had one gnome character that I loved back in the 2nd edition days - she was a cleric/thief, said combination being available only to gnomes. Her name was Nana Maria, and she was this tiny, round, motherly figure. She described herself as an "Aquirer for the Faith." But I never bothered to re-create her in 3rd edition - probably because I wouldn't have to be stuck with a gnome in 3rd edition. (grin)

I've altered the races to give them a few more interesting options.

What did you change for the gnomes, if you don't mind my asking?

Why is 4e support an example of open mindedness?

CAVEAT - What follows isn't meant to say that "everyone who prefers 3.5 is wrong/bad/closed-minded" - it is merely meant to give a possible answer of why someone who is optimistic about 4E might see "open-mindedness" as important to their reason for optimism.

---

A few years back, I was in a "future leaders" course at work (corporate America training classes, you gotta love 'em). There were about a dozen students, I think.

One of the upper managers in our area came to one session, and said he wanted to give us a chance to provide input about something he was considering as a future initiative.

He then proceded to lay out the bare bones of a plan that was truly awful. Something that would make all our jobs hideously complicated, and would pretty much guarantee we'd be dealing with some angry customers.

He then let us all talk for about five or ten minutes - and we all started shooting holes in his grand idea, trying to make him understand why it wouldn't work.

After we'd all had a chance to speak up, he said, "I'm going to give you some advice here, and it's probably the most important advice you'll ever get if you want to get ahead in corporate America. Whenever someone in a meeting puts forward a new idea, before you point out any negatives, first try to come up with ways to make that idea work."

It really was the best career advice I've gotten, over the years. It doesn't mean that you have to blindly accept change for change's sake. It doesn't mean that you have to go along with stupidity, Bay-of-Pigs-style.

What it does mean is that if you're too busy shooting holes in something to really stop and think about it, you'll miss out on something good that might have come of it - and you'll certainly earn a reputation as someone who isn't open-minded. In most major coporations, act (negatively) this way, just once, with someone who is above you in the chain of command, and you'll be very likely to see your career growth severely restricted for the next several years.

And the attitude I've tried to instill in myself of avoiding knee-jerk negativity is definitely part of why I was able to read positive things into some of the earlier (and only minimally informative) bits of information about 4E that we received in the fall.

I assume that when your writers create adventures, they are creating the initial drafts of their own maps - therefore, I'd like to see maps of the encounter areas as part of this contest. However, I am afraid that if one contestant is a really great artist, that would give them an unfair advantage.

I would prefer that the maps be re-done by someone into the same style, if at all possible, possibly by taking Callum and/or Samuel Kisko up on their offers (above).

If that isn't practical for some reason, at the very least, I assume the judges will be making special commentary about the maps regarding ease-of-use. Personally, I'd prefer that maps be "judged" primarily on ease of translation into "real" maps, and clarity of what they are supposed to show. I'd prefer to see less emphasis on the creativity of the site map - that just encourages/rewards people who have enough artistic talent to translate a crazy concept (like the amazing vertical structure of the lower section in Age of Worms' "A Gathering of Winds") into a good image.

Actually, what would be really interesting (to me, at least) is if one of your "regular" cartographers were to come in as a "guest" judge for this round - their feedback relating specifically to how easy they would find it to translate the provided maps and so forth into a finished product. (Not actually doing the work, just writing a paragraph telling us about any problems they see with creating final versions of the provided draft maps.)

For D&D, my husband and I were bringing (for the Red Hand of Doom campaign):

2x Player's Handbook (one each)
DMG
Monster Manual
Monster Manual IV
often the MM II, III, and/or V (for supplemental encounters)
Spell Compendium
Magic Item Compendium
Red Hand of Doom adventure
several Complete books (depending on current PCs in the group)
Book of Nine Swords (until the Warblade died and I banned it)
Rules Compendium

Plus:
A large tackle box (about 2 feet tall) with a wide assortment of minis
A single clear tackle holder full of dice for me
A large bag of (more than a pound of) dice for my husband
A pencil case with pens, wet-erase pens, item cards, and a calculator
A folder of handouts and maps
A large (easel-style) pad of graph paper
and TWO wheeled-luggage-style sewing-machine cases (because they have metal frames) for transporting all the books.

-----

Currently, my husband is running a Hero game, so instead we bring:

Hero 5th Edition, Revised
Ultimate Martial Artist
My laptop computer (has Hero Designer, plus PDFs of Hero 5Th Ed Rev. and Hero Sidekick on it, plus a phase-tracking spreadsheet)
Scott Bennie's Gestalt setting book
One folder of printed NPCs
And maybe three other books that have sample characters in them.

Oh, plus small bags for each of us with just 6-sided dice in them.
And one calculator.
And NO minis.

Actually, I think that I am in the target market for 4E, and I'm closing in on 40 years of age. Yes, a lot of the design ideas are intended to bring in younger folks; but a lot of the emphasis is also on things that help out us older (umm, less-young?) people who have busy lives.

I know that when I was in high school and college, I had tons of free time to devote to gaming. I could afford to play a game that required a lot of work; and in my experience, a lot of people actually preferred their games that way - people who want the buy-in to their activity to be high, because that lets them be the "experts" over all the newbies. As role-playing games got more complex in the 80s and 90s, they really seemed to me to be marketing themselves to those sorts of people.

These days, I don't have anything remotely like the same kind of free time, and in my opinion, the design changes intended to make the game easier to run are aimed squarely at folks like me, with full-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities that leave us with relatively minimal free time.

Ummm - I have the same question, I guess. (I missed out on a book, should I have heard something by now?)

My group isn't really too interested yet, but I attribute that chiefly to the fact that the release is still so far off.

Since my husband and I are the DMs, so whatever game we decide to run is what they play. We game inside our FLGS, and supporting the store is one of our goals (a goal we decided on ourselves, by the way, not one required by the store owners), so we intend to switch to the new edition if at all possible. We're taking a break from D&D right now - my husband is running a Hero game, which is good since that company is currently selling game books (which, sadly, WotC is not). That way, we can still try to support the store.

I expect that when 4E comes out, the group'll get a lot more interested. We (husband and I) will buy the core books, run a sample adventure or two, and at that point, I expect everyone will be willing to play the new game and will start ordering their own books. If they don't like it, we can keep going with Hero or look for some other game that's currently in print. But I'm already quite enthusiastic based on what I've seen in the recent previews, and don't expect any problems "selling" the group on 4E being a good move for us.

There are a handful of vestiges in additional products. I'm at work right now so can't look it up, but if you Search on WotC's discussion boards (in the Character Optimization section, most likely) for "Binder Handbook," you'll find some good advice plus a list of vestiges, including those published in Dragon magazine issues etc.

EDIT: Bill Lumberg beat me to the main info, but regardless, the Binder Handbook thread was pretty darn useful, I still recommend it.

I'm thinking that they wanted to make the female dragonborn more visually appealing to players and really didn't give the idea of eggs vs. mammary glands and real thought. Nobody has been questioning the male dragonborn at this point thought, I think that is scheduled to happen next week.

Next week on Maury Povich: Our guests will include a number of dragonborn, both males and females, who are on both sides of the Dragonborn Breast debate.

(voice of a male dragonborn): Once you've had a girl with boobs, there's no turning back. Any drago-gal who wants to hang out with me had better get herself a good rack!

(voice of a female dragonborn): I just couldn't stand the way that all the guys kept assuming I was male. All they wanted to talk about was Football! I found a great surgeon, and I think my new boobs look terrific!

(voice of a male dragonborn): Ain't no way I'm letting my sisters get "augmented." If some dragonborn dude wants a female with breasts, let him go paw over some human girl. If he were a real man, smooth scales and a nice frill would be good enough for him.

(voice of Maury): We'll also talk with some trans-gendered dragonborn, including several breasted males who have been accused of egg-theft; and we'll try to determine who the actual mothers of those eggs are!

Don't forget the Gargantuan Orcus either. Looks like 18 March.

I thought the Gargantuan Orcus was cancelled months ago. Anyone know if that changed and it's really still coming out, or if Amazon just hasn't removed the listing?

I can imagine that if I weren't a subscriber, being able to read this sort of synopsis would be essential to determining if I wanted to become a subscriber as a new path started. So I think that posting this as a download is a very good idea.

If there were a way to create a non-spoiler preview instead/also, that would be even better. Something like that would be much more useful for a group to read, and decide if they want to buy and play through the path.

For example, for Rise of the Runelords, it wouldn't explain the full metaplot, but it could mention specific towns/cities that will be detailed, and mention a couple of key sites and critters of interest in vague terms ("on the way, the PCs will explore a haunted house, rescue a town from a flash flood, and learn far more than they want to know about Golarion's goblins and ogres"). It could also give some info about the general themes of the adventure path ("discover ancient secrets of the Runelords, powerful specialist wizards from Golarion's mostly-forgotten past") and maybe, or maybe not, the intended mood that the path tries to evoke.

Unfortunately, this kind of preview requires that the path be fairly fully detailed before the write-up can be created (the synopsis is pretty much the basics given to the writers; knowing which elements those writers actually end up fleshing out, or what mood they go for, might be part of the directions to the writers, but it might not). I believe this kind of pre-detailing was the norm by the time of the Savage Tide path, and was not really possible, given schedule constraints, for the RotRL path. I'm not sure if it's possible now for the next path?

I've never played at conventions - everything has been home games (well, currently, we run at a gaming store, but that's pretty much the same thing since we have very little turnover in players). And I've experienced the same sort of issues.

It's not so much a problem of adjusting the encounter to what the group can handle - we've been doing that with no problems. No, it's adjusting for the one player whose PC is significantly above OR below the rest in combat effectiveness. When the majority of the group can participate in combats of a certain level, but one PC is a poor fit (e.g. uber half-orc barbarian who isn't challenged, or gnome bard that has to "waste" the first two rounds of combat starting bardic music and then casting Haste on the party before he can participate), it makes for frustration that spills over onto the whole group.

What 4E seems to promise is a more accurate, consistent level of ability for characters of the same level, so that the DM can challenge the group (and each of that group's members) more effectively. Bards and clerics don't "waste their actions" on buffs and healing that only serve to let other players have all the fun. And with this article, characters of any type get to be effective in combat, plus have abilities to do other cool stuff outside of combat. You're not choosing between combat effectiveness and role-playing goodness, you're getting combat effectiveness as a necessary baseline, and then getting to add on the role-playing goodness separately.

Actually, this sounds extremely promising to me.

I've had a "mixed bag" of players in 3.0 and 3.5 campaigns over the past few years, and I can see what this design philosophy is intended to "fix." I've seen:
- the player of the barbarian who keeps announcing his new high score for damage dealt in a single round (so that other players start "competing" with him, neglecting their own character concepts in the process).
- the party of three players who understand the rules fairly well, and one player who doesn't understand the rules and doesn't think he should have to, because he's "role-playing" his concept and therefore anything he does should be effective - and if the rules say otherwise, it's the DM's fault for following the rules instead of being more creative.
- the group I was most recently running, where getting players to focus on interaction skills was nearly impossible, because "we've got a bard, that's his job, we can't do nearly as well as he does anyway" - and who therefore got bored whenever we reached a scene where they needed to talk to people.

Yeah, I'm sure some of you will say these are all things the DM could fix. Personally, it seemed to us that the 3.5 rules did encourage these issues, in many cases.

Something that reduces the vast disparities between different builds, and frees up certain character choices to devote to character-concept rather than combat effectiveness, sounds really good to me. Being able to take minimal combat effectiveness as a given, and spend more energy focusing on the rest of the package, makes for a much better game experience. I'm looking forward to seeing how well they can implement this.

I never paid much attention to them until I was running Savage Tide for my husband. It might as well have been a new invention, as far as I was concerned. (I couldn't afford many published adventures when I was in school, so I never read Tsojcanth or some of the other classics.)

I run the first encounter where they get to see a bar-lgura (with an L), and my husband yelps, "It's a bar-lgura!" (with an L), and I was just amazed that he could not only recognize these things from that quick description, and actually put a name on them.

But it makes me wonder - do the bar-iguras owe allegience to a different demon-lord than the bar-lguras?

Warning - Speculation to Follow:

We know that in 4E, "Elves" are the woods-dwelling, nature-connected aspects of prior editions' elves, and "Eladrin" are the arcane-magic, ancient-empires variety, or at least that's how I understand it? (Also could be read as, "Elves" = wood elves, "Eladrin" = high elves.)

So maybe in 4E, the "default" is that "elves" mature as fast as humans, but "eladrin" take much longer to develop.

If this turns out to be true, Pathfinder could end up referring to both races as "elves" and could retain the concept of the Forlorn even if it fully embraces the new fluff. In fact, elves and eladrin could both be the same race, with "eladrin" traits as a recessive-gene sort of thing, where normal "elf" families sometimes produce a slower-to-develop child with the "eladrin" traits. Personally, I think this could allow for some really interesting character concepts...

I liked the book when I first read through it. But I think it's something you either implement completely, or not at all - you can't mix it with the "normal" martial classes.

In our last campaign, I encouraged one player to run a Warblade because we all wanted to see how the class actually worked in action. His character totally out-classed everyone else in melee. He was highly mobile, did massive damage - and still had decent skill points to be able to do some other stuff outside of combat. The final strike came when another player (playing a Fighter with mobility/spiked chain) finally achieved Whirlwind Attack, and the Warblade said "hey, that's cool, and here's this maneuver that lets me do that too, except I do it as a standard action so I can move too." (The Warblade and the fighter both died at the claws of a fiendish behir soon after, and I banned the ToB immediately.)

If you think (as many people do) that fighter-types are outclassed by spellcasters, you can replace the Fighter, Ranger, and Paladin with the classes in ToB. The ToB classes will do a much better job of staying competent compared to spellcasters as the PCs increase in levels. But my opinion is that you can't combine the two, or players of the "old" fighter-type classes will feel hopelessly outclassed.

I remember fifth and sixth grade. "Let's hate her today!" I didn't like it then. I made a conscious decision not to participate in it then. In fact, I founded a gaming group with a "no ostracisms" rule for all us social rejects, and completely rejected the possibility of any social interactions with all the other folks who acted like that back then.

Probably because of that, I've always thought of "gamers" as people who've been there. The one-time-social-outcasts who know better than to treat people like that. I've seen plenty of evidence that this model doesn't hold true; I've gamed with people who were athletic and who possessed social skills, and who were probably always "popular" - who never experienced the social pressures that I'm talking about. But I still have that as part of my mental concept of what gamers are all about. People who can be expected to understand the consequence of obnoxious social ostracism, and who are more tolerant of others as a result. People who don't engage in bullying because they know better.

And I think that's why I'm so unhappy here, recently. I've mentioned it before, said that I feel like just going away and not coming back. Said that I'm afraid the level of vitriol on this site is going to drive away potential customers. People responded, and some of them might even have understood.

But now it's come into focus for me, thanks to the Any Non-Complaint Based Threads On 4E thread.

In the first mere handful of posts, several people felt it necessary to express their dislike of 4E by coming in and "vomiting" all over the thread. One of them did this because that's his MO. Okay. But two of the others, in following his lead, felt the need to create new identities in order to join this so-called joke, and thus to share in the solidarity that comes from ganging up on, and verbally abusing, others.

SO fifth grade. I'm sorry, I can't see it any other way. Obnoxious, purely for the sake of joining a group of others who are being obnoxious.

So, feel free to abuse me in turn for my evaluation here. It won't make this any less true. This is bullying, and I'm calling you on it.

Go South.

Go North